"You tell anyone I cried, I'll find a dead fish, put it in a sock, hide it in your room, and let it putrefy."
-- Servo au Barca, Morning Star by Pierce Brown
BASICS
NAME: Barca
GENDER: Cis
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ORIENTATION:
BIRTHDATE: Late Fall 2756
AGE: 19 as of Spring 2776
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Brownrider, dirt magnet
WING: Stormlight Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES: Light brown
HAIR: Blond, long with an undercut
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'9", scrawny
PLAY-BY: This picrew
EXPY SOURCE: Very loosely based on Servo au Barca (Red Rising by Pierce Brown)
FULL APPEARANCE:
Barca is pretty gross, honestly. She seems to take no pride in her personal grooming, and indeed will often brag about how long she's gone without bathing. Even when bullied into scrubbing away the grime, she rarely does much with her hair beyond cutting the undersides close and throwing the longer top hair up in a ponytail occasionally. Her hair is often uneven, as she'd rather cut out the mats as they form than brush it. She also often lets her nails (fingers and toes) grow to be rather long.
Even if she were always bathed and tidy, though, she wouldn't be much to look at. Fairly average in height but quite scrawny without many curves, though she has a wiry strength to her and she's quite fast. She has a slight widow's peak and a bit of a hook nose. She loves putting fur trim on her clothes, particularly herself and from animals she's hunted. It's easy to tell she's done it herself as she does not care how bad it looks. It's easy to tell when Barca is strapping in to fight thread or else to tackle a daunting physical task as she will howl like a wolf at the top of her lungs before doing so.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Barca's most redeeming quality is that she is devastatingly loyal. If she decides someone is on her side, she will stick like a burr to their side and fight like mad to make all their dreams and goals come true. She will not care that she's been lied to or tricked by them, at least not in the long run. She'll mostly be pissed that they didn't feel like they could trust her with the truth the first time around, but a few punches exchanged and she'll consider the matter settled.
Getting to that point, however, can be a struggle. At first, she is cold, sullen, closed off. She will openly laugh at the misfortune of others, and will keep any responses as short as possible. This is because she is a little oversensitive - she often has very outsized responses to slights and insults - and since she does give herself so fully to anyone she considers a friend, she does not make it easy to let people in. She will want people to prove multiple times that they have her back before she'll allow herself to open up to them. Her partiality to dirt and an apparent inability to be grossed out might've also started as a defense mechanism, since she was often assigned to cleaning duties for starting fights, but it has since morphed into a part of who she is. She would happily crawl through sewage for any of her friends if she had to. Heck, she might do it just for fun. It's hard to tell with her, sometimes. Barca is prone to taking reckless risks, being an impulsive person by nature.
Once past the brick wall that is her defense mechanisms, Barca is blunt, arrogant, unnecessarily rude, and with humor as crude as her sense of personal hygiene. She's also clever, when she can manage to stifle her impulsive urges, and is pretty ruthless. She has something of a dramatic streak, and likes put on a show. While she's not especially polished, she does know how to work a crowd. She knows how to make people feel like part of the whole. She's also not afraid to be the bad guy when necessary. She tends to assume most people hate her anyway, so what's one more? She does ultimately have the good of the whole in mind in anything she does, though, and she rarely sees anyone as wholly good or bad. After all, if she's willing to do horrible things to protect the ones she loves, why wouldn't other people? She's scrappy, resourceful, and in a fight she'll absolutely fight dirty. Both figuratively and literally.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Father: Fitchner, High Reaches Bronzerider
Mother: Cryssia, High Reaches Hold drudge
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: None currently
BIRTHPLACE: High Reaches Hold
HISTORY:
Barca was born in 2756 to Cryssia in High Reaches Hold. Fitchner had fallen in love with her many turns before, but the woman had no desire to move to the Weyr with him, though she did return his affections. The pair agreed that Barca should be raised in the creche, so Fitchner took the infant girl back with him soon after she was born. He tried to stay as involved in his daughter's life as he could, but Barca...well, she'd taken after her father very strongly, both in looks and temperament. The two of them fought nearly every time they spoke, neither apparently capable of having a civil familial conversation. Cryssia stayed hands-off, caring about Barca, but unwilling to pretend to be a mother when she'd never really had a part in raising Barca.
Barca had a largely unremarkable childhood, though because of her acerbic personality she wasn't exactly the most popular and ended up with a few more punishments than was average thanks to her tendency to punch first and talk it out later. She was loosely aware of the politics of High Reaches, but as it had no direct impact on her or anyone she was especially close to, she didn't seem to pay it much mind. In 2771, she was eligible to stand for the first time, so she did. She didn't especially expect any dragon to want her of all people, but she did want the status and respect that came with it should one happen to. And clearly she had no issues with fighting or putting her life on the line, so thread wasn't a deterrent.
She was a bit surprised when Brown Brynth actually chose her in 2774. He could've picked anyone else, after all, and most of their weyrling turns, she thought maybe he should've. They spent more time bickering and yelling at each other than anything else. Things have improved slightly with Barca learning to maintain her telepathic walls better, and now that Brynth isn't a baby anymore he can physically leave her proximity when she's getting on his nerves, but the pair are still trying to find some equilibrium. Since impressing, Barca has slowly been piecing together that her father stayed at High Reaches to try to use his status as a bronzerider to protect others as much as he could under Golre's reign. Knowing that he does care about people has helped her to try to get to know him better, and their relationship has improved slightly, although no one would know it to look at any of their interactions.
UPDATES
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