"You love to put your face up close to mine
Snuggle up and paw at my hairline
This is called love
This is all I need"
- Dreamy Little You, Kitty Kat Fan Club
BASICS
NAME: Latyana ("Chana")
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/Her/Hers
ORIENTATION: Lesbian
BIRTHDATE: Early Winter 2728
AGE: 44 as of Early Spring 2773
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION: Rider
WING: Aurora
APPEARANCE
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Brown
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'5", average
PLAY-BY: Tina Fey
FULL APPEARANCE:
Latyana is an often frumpy-looking woman of around average height. Her eyes are dark brown, and her skin is fair though she gets a slight tan with sun exposure. Her hair is a medium-dark brown, somewhat curly, and a bit longer than her shoulders. She takes few pains with it, and it's often frizzy or thrown into a messy bun or runner-tail. She takes few pains with her appearance in general; she doesn't go through the effort to have clothes tailored to fit her, so her clothing is often ill-fitting, usually on the loose side. Wrinkles are a constant on her blouses and dresses, and only her trousers are really free of them just due to the nature of the garment. She sticks to cool colors and earth tones, because she's pretty sure they clash less and that means she doesn't have to pay attention to the color of anything—she has as a result been known to think plum and olive green is a perfectly reasonable color combination. All of her clothing is usually covered in orange cat hair. She has a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles for reading that she's only recently started to need.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Latyana is a bit of an oddball, aware of this fact, and completely unbothered by it. She knows who she is, and she's content with herself. She prefers the company of her pet cat to that of other people, and she absolutely dotes on the feline. Honestly, she loves all felines to a rather unusual level; were it not for her responsibilities as a rider, she'd probably keep several around, and every now and then she entertains the notion of trying to visit Semaca to see their spotties (which surely can't be as bad as the stories have made them out to be). It's her pet that keeps her from trying to transfer permanently to a place so full of the certainly-delightful creatures, because with Rumplekin's long hair she knows he'd be uncomfortable in such a climate, and his needs come before all of her wants. She instead spends some of her free time knitting sweaters with cats on them instead, and giving them to anyone who seems like they might need or want one.
She's a rather generous person, both with her time and what she owns, even if she isn't the sort of person that makes a lot of friends. People don't need to be her friends to need help, after all. She doesn't even need to like them, though she does like most people on at least some level. She's just a bit of a loner.
She can be quite pushy when she thinks she's in the right. Her reputation is of little consequence to her, so she doesn't hesitate to tell people off when they've done something to annoy her. This can be anything from being louder than she'd like in the evenings (she does enjoy her peace and quiet) to someone simply stating that they're a dog person rather than a cat person--she's happy to argue on behalf of felines for any imagined slight, no matter the time or if there's more important things to do.
HISTORY
FAMILY: None she's close to
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: None
BIRTHPLACE: Fort Weyr
HISTORY:
Born at Fort Weyr and raised in the creche, Latyana has really only ever had one home, and she's fine with that. She's not the adventurous sort, wanting to go out and explore new lands; even as a child, she was always quite a bit of a homebody. She never had a great number of friends when she was young, but there were always a few here and there. Mostly she kept to herself, paying as little attention in lessons as she could get away with in favor of daydreaming. Even those dreams were simple though: thinking of sweets that she might have after dinner, or imagining being a grownup with her own pet feline. She also spent a fair bit of time trying to feed other people's pets, and a few that weren't particularly well-supervised by their owners got to be quite overweight as a result--bafflingly so, to their owners.
Becoming a Candidate wasn't an easy decision for her. She knew her parents were riders, and had even had occasional meetings with them, but they'd never been close. Unlike them though, she had no real desire for adventure and wonder. In the end, it was a desire simply to help the Weyr in more ways that led her to begin standing around the time she turned eighteen. If she failed to Impress, well, she was also a fairly proficient cook, and improving all the time; when others had become Candidates younger, she had instead chosen to spend her days in the kitchens. Becoming a Crafter had never appealed to her, but everyone needed food.
It was a few Turns before her efforts were rewarded. Amawith was not what she expected a dragon to be; the green was sweet, and kind, and almost unbelievably cheerful, and maybe a little overprotective which she did suppose made sense. Still, the pair got along fantastically from the get-go, even if they weren't the most skilled of their class. Graduating into the tail end of a war wasn't ideal for them though. Amawith may have been willing to do what she had to in order to protect those around her, and Latyana had known exactly what she had gotten herself into, but when the time came the young woman found that she had no taste at all for violence and bloodshed.
After an incident in which Latyana just completely froze, unable to order her dragon Between after defending a Hold, the pair were transferred to Healers Wing. The war ended entirely shortly after, and they returned to the fighting wings to prepare for the coming of Thread. After all: Thread didn't bleed.
She spend most of the next Turns doing her duty and remaining shockingly oblivious to the politics of the Weyr around her. Oh, she was aware of the existence of power struggles, of changes in leadership, but she didn't pay much heed to the reasons behind them. All she cared about was her work as a rider, her pet feline Guinevere, and the occasional brief relationships she had with other women.
While all the Weyr likely faced losses over time, the one that hit Latyana hardest was the loss of Guinevere, her companion since her earliest days after graduating. It was soon after that she took in a fluffy ginger kitten, one she named Rumplekins because she was sure she'd heard the name in a story as a child and it was an adorable name for an adorable creature.
Still, she continued ignoring politics until she simply couldn't any more; the impact became personal when Aurora Wing's leadership was forcibly changed, and the wing suffered disastrous consequences during Threadfall as a result. Even Latyana found herself with political opinions after that, though once Tuckal was reinstated as Weyrwoman, she returned to her usual blissful ignorance. Politics could do real harm, but she still didn't want to be involved.
