"We make our own reality."
BASICS
NAME: Sharem
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/her/hers
ORIENTATION: She's not sharing
BIRTHDATE: Early Summer, 2752 (Claims to have been born in Early Summer, 2516)
AGE: 22 as of 2774
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Candidate, former apprentice scribe
WING: N/A
APPEARANCE
EYES: Grey
HAIR: Dark brown
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'7, slender
PLAY-BY: Inahime (Samurai Warriors)
FULL APPEARANCE: Sharem is a beautiful woman, with pale, smooth skin, delicate features and a composed expression. She keeps her hair long, worn in an old-fashioned updo popular in the middle of the 9th pass. Her clothes are similarly out of date, in cuts and fabrics gone out of style long ago. She will wear more generic clothes from the weyr storeroom when her own clothing is in unavailable, but she prefers to make her own clothes in the style of "her own time" or commission the weyr's tailors to make them for her. Sharem wears a necklace and bracelets and carries a knife of genuine Ninth Pass origin, carefully polished but a bit chipped and worn when viewed up close.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: Sharem claims to be from the turn 2538, in the Ninth Pass, the sole non-rider victim of being stranded in time. It's a lie, but she fakes it well. Sharem is intelligent and well-educated, with a quick mind and a memory for detail. Even after several turns of holdlessness, she remains well-informed about a variety of topics, especially the 9th Pass. She has an excellent poker face and doesn't seem to struggle to commit to living the lie. Her manners are well-polished and she is generally polite and amiable.
Sharem is fairly morally flexible. She does have her limits as to what she will and won't do, but those limits are looser than most people's. She's driven primarily by self-interest. Wherever she is, she wants to be somewhere better and she's willing to do what it takes to get there. She thinks she has a better strategic mind than she does and often wrongly believes she's the smartest person in the room. She's prone to overcomplicated schemes, without really considering whether or not they're a good idea. She is okay with taking advantage of people's goodwill when offered and it seems in her best interests to do so. It mostly doesn't bother her. She's pretty good at justifying her actions to herself, especially if the only people getting hurt are already pretty comfortable and well-off.
Sharem has occasional flickers of good intention, largely towards the group of holdless who helped her and do genuinely need her help in turn, but it is yet to be seen if she follows through with them.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Father: Haremi
Mother: Pitani
Older sibling: Harem
Younger sibling: Charem
Honorary holdless family
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: She definitely had one back in the Ninth Pass. They're dead now. She doesn't want to talk about it. *fake sniffles*
BIRTHPLACE: Cothold beholden to Fort
HISTORY: Sharem was born the middle child to a pair of cotholders with distinctly unimaginative taste in names. Her mother adored her father and her father adored himself more than good sense or propriety would allow. So Harem, Sharem and Charem they were named, their names frequently confused by their hold's harper and many of their neighbors.
As Sharem grew, she proved to have a sharp mind and an excellent memory. She didn't have a gift for music, but otherwise excelled in her Harper classes. When she was ten, her hold's Harper recommended her as an apprentice Scribe. Sharem, wanting more from life than being a common holder, apprenticed to a scribe in a slightly larger minor hold nearby.
Sharem advanced in her studies mostly without incident. Like her journeyman instructor, she chose to specialize in the history of the weyrs in the 9th pass. It was a time of great change, when the old traditions first started to fall and the trends began that would eventually lead to war. She didn't have any particular attachment to the era, but it was an interesting enough field of study and easier than seeking out another teacher.
When Sharem was 18, she received a curious message from a wealthy Lord Holder. The Lord was interested in acquiring some records and artifacts he had reason to believe were in her master's possession. He was willing to pay to get them- more marks than she could ever hope to spend and, when she was older, an arranged match to a lesser lord. The risks were high but the offer was too good to refuse.
Sharem didn't get very far. She was caught before she even left the hold, with the stolen scrolls and artifacts still in her bag. After a brief trial, where Sharem gave no good explanation because there was no good explanation, Sharem was exiled and condemned to holdlessness. She managed to sneak a knife and some jewelry that the Lord had requested out with her, partly because she still hoped to sell it and partially as a final "forsk you."
Life on the road was hard. Sharem wasn't accustomed to physical labor and had limited survival skills. Sharem was lucky enough to fall in with a small family group who'd been living in exile for many turns and were willing to take her in. She did her best to teach their children the things they would ordinarily have learned from their resident harper and the adults showed her how to hunt and gather and to take shelter when thread came near.
But holdless life was hard and dangerous, even for experienced travelers. Sharem heard their stories of others who'd died before their time. She saw one of her fellow travelers never make it home, after going out on a hunting trip not realizing thread would soon fall. Sharem never stopped searching for a way out.
Sharem kept in touch with one of her siblings, Harem, via Harem's firelizard. It was from her Sharem first learned of the time travelers, riders who claimed to have arrived from another pass. Sharem wasn't sure if she believed it, but so long as the riders believed, it didn't matter. She knew the Ninth Pass better than most. She could pull this off.
Sharem pressed for more details. Harem didn't know much- only that most of them were at Fort and only one was at High Reaches. High Reaches wasn't far from their current camp and Sharem liked her odds that the High Reaches rider wouldn't be claiming to be from the same time as she was, which left no one to verify anything. Sharem sent Harem a final message, saying she was going away for a while and not to worry, but not to try to write her either.
Promising to return to help the other members of her little group if she could, Sharem solicited their help with the plan. They helped her polish her stolen artifacts, to make them look as close to new as they could manage, and sew clothes in the style of the Ninth Pass.
Sharem came up with her story- She'd been recently Searched by bluerider M'hel of Blue Makith, a rider who had left the weyr in 2538 and never returned, whose fate remained unknown according to the records. He had Searched her and been taking her back to the weyr, when they were caught in a storm Sharem knew had flooded a minor hold. They went between and emerged in the wilds around High Reaches. M'hel and his dragon died in the crash, but Sharem survived and had been wandering in search of civilization for an unspecified period of time since.
The plan set, Sharem split up from the group with a sincere thanks and questionably genuine promises to do what she can for them and started wandering in the direction of High Reaches Weyr, waiting for someone to "rescue" her.
