"O loveliest of branches, please grant me your succor!"
BASICS
NAME: Duke, full name Dukemet
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Would very much like to date someone Impressed to a bronze or gold, not too picky on the details
BIRTHDATE: Summer 2755
AGE: 21 as of 2776
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Dragonrider
WING: Moonshot
APPEARANCE
EYES: Dark brown
HAIR: Black, slightly wavy, worn long
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'8, athletic
PLAY-BY: Jessie Mei Li
EXPY SOURCE: N/A
FULL APPEARANCE: Duke is a slender woman of around average height, with slightly wavy black hair and lively dark brown eyes. Even in the less-than-sunny High Reaches climate, her skin maintains a warm golden undertone. Like many riders, she is muscular and fit with calloused hands, although her musculature is of the leaner and subtler variety. Duke dresses in whatever the current most prevalent fashion of the weyr is, although she tends to wear an extra layer or two over High Reaches natives, due to not yet being fully accustomed to the mountain chill.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: Deep down, Duke is a deeply insecure woman who always feels acceptance and belonging hang just out of her reach. She is a hard worker and a perfectionist, not out of natural industriousness, but because she hopes if she achieves enough, she will feel like she is good enough. She values propriety and respectability highly- her definitions of said terms shaped by a combination of the views of her fairly conservative holder mother and bronzehandler father. Weyrs are the most proper place, weyrbred are superior to the holdbred and riders or handlers bonded to golds and bronzes are naturally better than their peers (no matter how many times Duke is told that wherhandlers do not follow the same hierarchy). Garnetriders like Duke are decidedly not respectable, which means they must do more to earn their place- a conclusion drawn from a mixture of Dukat's influence and Duke's own efforts to rationalize her deeply rooted impostor syndrome. Duke is extremely eager to please and often doesn't even realize when she should stick up for herself- although Legiath usually intervenes and asserts themself on Duke's behalf if anyone is truly upsetting her.
Even after several turns of weyr life, Duke has an extremely idealized view of the weyr and its people. She believes the weyrfolk are like the ones of her mother's stories- smarter, stronger and more talented than the lesser humans of the holds. Outside of drills, Duke can frequently be found trying to acquire some new knowledge or skill she believes riders ought to have and assumes everyone who "belongs" at the weyr already knows (which is frequently not true as said skills are rarely relevant to being a dragonrider). Legiath finds this game deeply amusing and often suggests new ideas and tries their own hand at the ones within a dragon's abilities. Duke is a surprisingly imaginative and skilled writer, although she rarely shares with anyone what she comes up with, her journals filled mostly with new and elaborate speeches to placate Legiath from their ire or unrealistic stories of distant lands that Duke has never seen but assumes are exciting.
Outside of Legiath, Duke struggles to connect. She looks down on holdbred candidates, weyrfolk and other improper dragonriders, believing they, like her, should be striving to master all the skills a rider should have and becoming useful to their "betters." Said "betters" are of course above her and Duke tries so hard to win their approval, she does not relate to them as fellow people. She cannot understand why, beyond her dragon, she often feels lonely, even as it is often self-inflicted.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Father: Dukat, bronzehandler, High Reaches Weyr
Mother: Emet, holder
Half siblings on her father's side
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: N/A
BIRTHPLACE: A small cothold beholden to Benden
HISTORY: Duke was born the illegitimate child of a cotholder mother who had engaged in a brief dalliance with one of the nearby weyr's bronzehandlers. Duke's mother, Emet, never bothered to hide her child's origins, being enamored with the weyr and everything it represented. Duke was told early and often that the weyr was a special place, full of special people, and that even though she didn't have two married parents like most of the other children of her small cothold, she was different from ordinary bastard children (who were of course NOT proper and with whom Duke was not to associate), due to her somewhat tenuous ties to Benden Weyr. Duke absorbed and parroted her mother's romanticized views of the weyr and of her father. She insisted the local harper teach her to read and write, no matter that literacy was not the norm in their hold, so she could write to her very important father. Duke poured over every letter with great care and dedication. Every message had to be perfect, every word correctly chosen, and if his own letters back came seldom and displayed decidedly less enthusiasm about her? Duke barely noticed and showed them off eagerly to her friends and neighbors.
When Duke turned 15, naturally, she wanted nothing more than to be taken to the weyr as a candidate. Dukat advised a searchrider of the presence of a likely candidate at Duke's small cothold, which lay outside the usual search targets. Not long after her birthday, Duke was Searched and brought to Benden Weyr as a candidate, where she met her father in person for the first time. Duke was instantly in awe of Benden and of Dukat. She took her father's every word and pronouncement to heart. To her surprise, she learned that she had many half-siblings she had never known about and was eager to forge ties with her weyrborn kin. She arrived at a Benden Weyr in flux, where the old regime was recently fallen and new ways were still being established. The weyr was split between those who still clung to tradition and those who embraced the reforms. Duke adopted her father's views, content to bow to the greater wisdom of the family patriarch who had lived at the weyr all his life. Duke always felt just a little out of place at the weyr. She was the daughter of a long and respectable line on her father's side, but she was not weyr raised and was conscious of every hole in her hold education. She was desperate to earn the right to feel she belonged in the place she had dreamed of all her life.
Duke's candidacy was a short one. Not even a turn after Duke arrived at Benden, at a small, undistinguished garnet clutch, an ethereally beautiful garnet hatchling marched up to Duke and declared Duke their "adorable sapling." Duke wasn't sure how to feel- honored to be a rider, disappointed she would never be the sort of proper rider her father expected, flattered to be chosen by a dragon who thought she was adorable...The garnet, Legiath, offended by Duke's reservations and implications they were not a "proper" dragon, accused Duke of being a heartless rider and refused to talk to Duke for several days until they forgot their disappointing first meeting. Duke, still new to dragons and dragonkind, learned at the pair's first healer appointment that Legiath's wings were unusual and might never allow them to fly. Between the prospect of a grounded future, her father's barely disguised pity and condescension and Legiath's own prickly temper, Duke spent her early weyrlinghood stressed and miserable. She was terrified she would never find her way as a rider and that the fact she wasn't a "proper" candidate had somehow led to Legiath being garnet, unconventionally formed and difficult to work with.
Duke, used to feeling somewhat inadequate, resolved to become the perfect rider, deciding that was the only course. The most virulent and open hostility of Benden towards garnets and other irregular dragons had been contained by the new regime and Duke pretended not to notice the murmured condemnations or subtler judgments from the still quite traditional weyr. She worked hard, obeyed her weyrlingmaster's every order and submitted to all the weyr's bronze and goldriders and handlers when their paths happened to cross (while apologizing for the very-much-not-deferential Legiath).
In time, things did in fact get better. Duke's weyrling lessons filled in some of the gaps of her knowledge. Time with Legiath taught her the right words to placate the garnet- and to appreciate Legiath's unconventional company. The pair even flew, only a few sevendays behind schedule, Legiath's unusual wings proving to work just fine. Duke entered the wings not entirely sure she would ever fully belong at Benden, but willing to do whatever it took to earn her way.
A few turns after her graduation, to Duke's surprise and disappointment, Dukat transferred to High Reaches Weyr, a weyr he had never before spoken fondly of. Without her bronzehandler father around to turn to, Duke felt even shakier in her right to belong at the weyr. When Legiath, insatiably curious about the world outside of Benden's borders, demanded they visit High Reaches too, Duke decided to transfer. If she could never be a proper rider- maybe an improper weyr was exactly where she belonged.
