"I'd recommend bed rest, but nobody has time for that."
BASICS
NAME: Baptiste
GENDER: Male
PRONOUNS: He/Him/His
ORIENTATION: Panromantic Demisexual
BIRTHDATE: Late Fall 2740
AGE: 35 as of Early Fall 2776
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION: Dragonrider
WING: Aurora Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES:Brown
HAIR: Black
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5' 10", strong and evenly built.
PLAY-BY: Jean-Baptiste Augustin (Overwatch)
FULL APPEARANCE:
Baptiste isn't particularly outstanding in regards to his appearance. He's a well built man that's just slightly shorter than average, with evenly distributed strength in his upper and lower body. He has tightly curled black hair that he keeps just a few inches long, though the way it curls makes it hard to distinguish any one strand from another. The sides of his head are shaved close to his scalp. He has a slightly sparse but well groomed goatee, full lips, and warm brown eyes. Baptiste also wears a necklace made from the tooth of a wild feline that was gifted to him.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Baptiste is, for the most part, a warm individual. He likes to flirt and joke and just be at ease around others. He enjoys making the people around him feel calm, and helping where he can. He has enough medical knowledge to be useful in the infirmary, though he much prefers the comfort of burning thread. In his youth, he proved to be too trusting, too easily convinced that the easiest path was the right one, or the proper one to chose. Now that he's older, he's much more cautious, overly so. He keeps people at arm's length where they can enjoy his warm facade, but won't ask questions. Efforts to get closer, if he's not comfortable with it, will result in him being blunt and somewhat flippant. Though, internally, he knows he does it to avoid having to talk about his time at High Reaches. He feels extreme guilt over his past, and is much more keen on burying it entirely than working through it. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Asefi (Mother, brownrider, deceased)
Jonal (Father, bronzerider, deceased)
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: N/A
BIRTHPLACE: High Reaches Weyr
HISTORY: TW: Death
Even before they were lost to the war, Baptiste's parents were fairly absent. He was raised by The Creche, simply because both his rider parents didn't have the time to raise him themselves. He grew up seeing them in passing, more often than not being told stories of their heroics. They were killed in the interval war, before Baptiste was thirteen turns old. Though he didn't particularly feel much loss for them, he was glad that armistice was declared right before he aged into candidacy.
He grew up considering Golre and Vizeth to be anything but the "Mad Golds" everyone called them. She had her reasons for what she did, reasons that Baptiste would later realize he fabricated himself to justify his opinion of her. He was a young, staunch traditionalist well into his late teens. It was easier than admitting that maybe the number of refugees fleeing from High Reaches had every right to be terrified.
The attacks on fort in 2761, however, he had no explanation for. There was retribution for an assassinated weyrleader, and then there was what Golre did instead. The initial attack, though not unprovoked, had terrible losses. But Golre's willingness to continue the 'war' she had declared on Fort, even after such a loss, was unforgivable. The web of lies Baptiste told himself had fallen apart with the final attack, the loss of the "Mad Golds" and the bronzes who had followed them into a hopeless battle. He found himself doubting everything he had come to believe, doubting High Reaches itself. It took less than another turn for him to transfer to Fort, maybe out of some sick sense of guilt, or the desire to want to help them rebuild after they had suffered so much.
In the end, it was a choice that made him happier than he ever thought it could. In 2763, before his twenty-third nameday, he impressed Rolth. Rolth, who was every bit the soldier he once thought Golre was. A massive blue that didn't seem to care about his past prejudices. It eased his guilt, if only a little. He still feared, so soon after everything had happened, that he would run into people who recognized him, who knew what he had believed. It was a closely guarded secret, one he wished he could forget about himself.
When the plague hit, he worried. He took his spare time trying to help the healers as much as he could. He was lucky enough to escape threadfall unscathed that time, when so many of his peers had lost their lives or their dragons due to the weakness the plague had caused in their wings. And in the same turn, the unfortunate events of Serapheth's flight, the cracked egg, the number of riders who disappeared to the summerlands. It was times like these he wondered if maybe he had been meant to stay at High Reaches. It didn't seem like his efforts to help were doing anyone any good.
The Trailblazers were just another tragedy in a long list of events that Baptsite had no power to help with. Not at the hatching nor their subsequent poisoning was he able to help, and it left him feeling powerless, despite it not being his job. Nornth's maiden flight seemed doomed to be a catastrophe, and it was. The loss of several dragons and the fall out of the flight wore thin on Baptiste, but he persisted. He was determined to continue being helpful to Fort.
When Z'osh was made weyrleader, he very nearly left Fort. He didn't trust anyone with such strict traditionalist values with a position of power so great. He feared, for a time, that things would end up like they had with Golre and High Reaches. Instead, a different tragedy befell Fort. The loss of Neozeoth's eggs. Though it was another spike of defeat in his heart, it did at least confirm to him that leaving High Reaches had been the right choice. He had no need to associate with people that would steal eggs. In fact, it only made him more wary. It was strange how he had gone from a gullible kid to an overly cautious thirty turn old bluerider. But, frankly, he thought things turned out for the best in his case.
