BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Retire
NAME: El'ech
GENDER: Male
PRONOUNS: He/Him/His
ORIENTATION: Bisexual
BIRTHDATE: Early Fall 2725
AGE: 45 as of Late Fall 2770
LOCATION: Semaca Weyr
OCCUPATION: Rider, former Farmcrafter apprentice
WING: Chopin Squad
APPEARANCE
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Brown, graying
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 6'4", average
PLAY-BY: Emet-Selch (FFXIV)
FULL APPEARANCE:
El'ech is a rather tall man of a slightly broad-shouldered but otherwise mostly average build. He has a long, narrow face, with thin, messy, sharply angled eyebrows. His mouth is wide, with narrow lips. His eyes are a medium brown, deeply set with prominent eyelids, and he often has dark circles under his eyes. His hair he keeps cut fairly short, though it still manages to have a distinct wave to it. While it was originally a medium-dark brown, it's now streaked with gray, especially in the front and at his temples.
He prefers to wear fancier clothing than is really strictly practical. Though this usually means that they wear out sooner than they should, it's a sacrifice he's willing to make. The last thing he wants is to look shabby, after all.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
El'ech is a confident, relatively suave man. Perhaps too confident sometimes, bleeding over into arrogance; he's almost always extremely sure of himself, even if he's inclined toward pessimism in almost every other regard. He views the world as a mostly dreary place, one that his certainly improved by his presence in it. He considers most other people to be somehow less than him, regardless of what anyone else would say about their relative importance. He can be somewhat terrible at reading people, and is especially prone to assuming that compliments are simple statements of facts--after all, he is just that good.
That being said, he does care about select people, even if that list is rather short. He sees it as his duty to keep them safe and happy. He finds violence vulgar and distasteful, but when he believes it necessary he acts without warning or hesitation.
He's terrible at listening to directions, often just doing as he pleases regardless of the consequences. He's smart, but lacks a whole lot of common sense--able to come up with a plan but unable to consider its most likely outcomes other than the ones he wants.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Large but estranged
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Persephone
BIRTHPLACE: High Reaches Weyr
HISTORY:
Elsemech was one of a large gaggle of children born to a bluerider and his Farmcrafter weyrmate. He was raised in the creche, privileged to be the child of a weyr even during times of relative uncertainty. He had opportunities to learn, to try things, to dream of being whatever he chose. But war came when he was still young, and he has few enough memories left of the time before it.
He was expected to make himself useful. As a rider, if he was chosen, but if he were to fail at that he still had to contribute. He chose to follow in his mother's footsteps if he could, once he was old enough to know what such a choice meant; if a dragon did not choose him (and he dearly hoped that one would not), he could become a Farmcrafter like her. The life appealed to him, for he did not care for killing and though the weyr itself was insulated from the worst of it, he knew what riders had to go and do.
Like all weyr-born children (and many taken from other homes) who were deemed capable of doing so at the time, he became a Candidate at fifteen. And he waited. And waited. The relief he felt increased every time he was passed over. He apprenticed officially, the assumption being that the child of a bluerider was probably simply not good enough for a dragon, and certainly not a dragon of any worth. He tried to brush off the comments, but they stung despite the fact that he was getting what he wanted.
Happiness didn't last. He was nineteen when a large blue sat on his feet and refused to budge; Shedath had made his choice, his rider's opinion on the matter be damned.
Weyrlinghood as a bluerider under Golre's rule was not a pleasant time. El'ech knew he was better than everyone assumed that he was, but any attempt to openly assert that went poorly. A bluerider's place wasn't to question the status quo; it was to listen to his betters, to be useful and to know his rightful place. And when he graduated, that was exactly where the pair was expected to go: to the fighting wings, to stand in front of the dragons more deserving, so that they might be kept safe. The loss of a blue would be immaterial, after all, while the loss of a bronze would be a real tragedy.
Turns passed, and his resentment grew, but he learned to keep his head down. He hated it. He longed to be someone important, someone who might actually be considered to matter, but the only ones who saw him as that were his parents and some of his siblings. Others... well, they'd learned the same things that the rest of the Weyr had: that a bluerider was unworthy. The war dragged on, and on. He hated it, but despicable as some of the Weyr may have been, High Reaches was still home. His family was there, and that was enough of a reason to stay.
It was several Turns after he Impressed Shedath that a greenrider joined El'ech's wing. The two got along fairly quickly; she liked plants, and he knew more than most people would ever want to know about growing plants. However, he was definitely oblivious to her growing interest. The meaning of the increasing frequency of flowers showing up in his weyr was completely beyond him, and though the feeling was mutual, he believed that she did not reciprocate. It was quite a long while before she managed to get her point across, but the two became weyrmates shortly after she did.
The war continued a few more Turns. El'ech was convinced that there had been far too many lives lost to what amounted to a pissing match between Weyr leadership, but its end was not up to him. Still, an armistice was eventually reached, and High Reaches settled into some sort of peace. Things didn't really improve though; chromatic dragons were still disposable, but the enemy was simply Thread rather than other Weyrs.
Even with the beginning of the Pass though, Golre's ambitions would not be denied. For reasons El'ech never understood, she decided to declare High Reaches the Peacekeepers, and all but reignited the war. He was relieved when she was killed, and that he and Shedath emerged from the battles alive. Sometimes it seemed that was all he could really ask for: simply to live through it. It was getting to be exhausting though; even as Fort took over to rebuild and attitudes finally began to change, he was simply tired of just surviving.
And not everything changed. High Reaches politics were still a disaster, even as leadership was reformed into something that was barely recognizable to other Weyrs. Perhaps it was simply the instability of frequent elections, but they were every bit as messy as they'd ever been under Golre. The tipping point was the assassination of a Junior Weyrleader, and the attempted assassinatin of the Weyrleader; El'ech was done with High Reaches. Even if it was home, he wanted to go elsewhere. Somewhere that things wouldn't be so unstable. Perhaps Telgar would be a nice change. His family wasn't especially pleased that he was leaving, but he was determined to go.
Persephone had other ideas. Semaca at least wasn't High Reaches, but stability certainly wasn't the strong point of a newly-recognized Weyr founded by rebels. Still, it wasn't a political nightmare, at least not to start with. By the time the woes with Benden started, the two of them were already settled, and leaving again seemed to be out of the question.
Besides, at Semaca, El'ech was finally able to put his old Farmcrafter training to good use. He'd long since given up on that dream, but maybe he could have a piece of it back.
