"lyrics or quotes here"
BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Retire
NAME: E'nai (formerly Elioenai)
GENDER: Male (assigned female at birth)
PRONOUNS: He/Him/His
ORIENTATION: Homoromantic asexual
BIRTHDATE: Early Winter 2739
AGE: 30 Turns as of Late Fall 2770
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Rider, Journeyman Tanner
WING: Moonshot Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES: Dark Brown
HAIR: Dark Brown
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'3", slender
PLAY-BY: Fo Porter
FULL APPEARANCE:
E'nai is short and slender, standing rather shorter than most women. He has straight, somewhat wispy, dark brown hair that he keeps short. His skin is rather tanned, and his freckles are probably his most striking feature; they're thick and scattered all across his cheeks and nose, and are quite prominent on his arms as well. His face is rather oval, and what he describes as "unfortunately feminine", with plump, dark lips and a somewhat small nose. He has a jagged scar running vertically from beside his right shoulderblade to almost his waist, and several smaller ones on his forearms.
His voice is a mid-range alto, and rather soft. He almost never sings where anyone can hear him, but when he does it's clear he can't carry a tune.
E'nai is ruthlessly practical in his manner of dress. Most of what he owns is extremely plain, and in neutral colors so that he never need work too hard to coordinate an outfit. Really, the only attention he tends to pay to what he wears is to binding his breasts, and that's only because he has no desire to let them show.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
E'nai is what he likes to call efficient, but most others will call lazy. If he's not personally motivated or invested in something, he's going to do the bare minimum. When he was young, those teaching him mostly had the same evaluation: bright, but lacks initiative. Still, when he gets into something, he really gets into it, and can easily dedicate several hours to a seemingly minor task. He's creative, and good at coming up with ideas for his work, but that can easily spiral into far too many ideas, and soon he has to spend time sorting through them all.
With other people, E'nai is at least initially soft-spoken and reserved. However, he's also as opinionated as can be, and it doesn't take long for him to overcome his initial shyness once he decides he needs to prove himself right. And he has an opinion on just about every topic, from politics to the right way to stretch a skin. Still, he isn't especially social, and is much more likely to be found working on his leatherwork than attending a feast he doesn't have to go to. He has few friends, but holds those he does have close.
He's very politically aware, and now that he doesn't fear for his life if he speaks out, he's rather outspoken on the idea of fairness. He wants everything to be even, for everyone, and gets frustrated when logistics make that difficult. He's the sort of person who will spend far too long cutting a cookie in half so that everyone gets equal pieces, and has no patience for those who try to tell him that something quicker will be close enough. He can hold a grudge for a long time, especially against those who contradict his ideas of fairness.
While he likes to present himself as someone who's utterly fearless, E'nai is actually quite fearful. He avoids doing anything that could bring injury to himself, flying Thread being the sole exception since that's duty, which he can hardly avoid. He fears failing, and will often avoid new things for fear of not being good at them. He also has an irrational fear of and revulsion to insects, though he works to try to keep that from people.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: None
BIRTHPLACE: High Reaches Weyr
HISTORY:
TW: Violence, Death
When Elioenai was born, he was his parents' eldest child, though they went on to have three more. He was raised as expected, as a girl, and a very quiet and well-behaved one at that. He rarely got into trouble, save for when he made a mess and failed to clean it up, or left his chores undone after procrastinating too long. In the creche, he didn't really have many friends, but was more than happy to do his own thing on his own. He was a tomboy, but not of the especially active type; mostly, what few friends he had just happened to be boys.
Eventually, he was old enough to apprentice to a craft, and spent some months leading up to that agonizing over which to choose. In the end, he chose to become a Tanner, because it didn't seem as strenuous as Smith work, as girly as becoming a Tailor, but still allowed him to make something concrete.
It was only a few Turns later that he was old enough to become a Candidate, an opportunity he leaped at because he, like every other child in the creche, had secretly dreamed of becoming a rider. Even if there were occasional rumors that it was a hard thing to do, that sometimes horrible things happened to riders, even if the war had just ended well... he'd have a dragon, and nothing was better than that, not even his work as a tanner! Even so, he wasn't an especially great example of a Candidate. He had grown into a tendency to be a bit of a know-it-all, and yet wasn't especially studious. He paid far more attention to his tanner duties, and it showed: his Candidate chores were done shoddily, and his attention in lessons usually wandered.
Perhaps because of his lack of motivation, or possibly just because that's how dragons worked, it was almost four and a half Turns before he Impressed. A blue, smoky save for the brighter ends of his wings, made his hesitant, stumbling way across the Sands and chose, sitting right down on the Candidate's feet. Elioenai? Yes, that is you. Good.
What Elioenai had been slow to consider was that, despite all the stories about the glory of being a rider, the good things only applied to those who rode metallic dragons. For a tomboy on a rather reticent blue, things were... less ideal. He and Hazeth might as well have walked around with targets on their backsides, and yet he shrugged most things off. His world dwindled down to his dragon and a few of the other chromatic riders in his class, but that was fine. He could ignore hurtful words. He wanted things to change, but speaking out would only have drawn things far worse than words, and so he stayed silent.
What he couldn't ignore was a call to war. He had only graduated to full wingrider a few months prior when Golre once more declared war on Fort, and sent most of the Weyr to battle. Even if the very idea terrified him, he found he couldn't ignore it—not least because Hazeth could no more ignore the compulsion than fly to the Red Star. Neither of them had ever been good at flagrantly disobeying orders anyway; Elioenai was more the type to just do something poorly than not do it at all.
Going was a mistake, but one that the pair couldn't have chosen to avoid. They fought as they had been commanded, with tooth and knife. Despite Elioenai taking a deep gash from a green's claw across his back early on, and Hazeth taking a bite to one foreleg, they had no choice but to continue, until something happened. Neither was sure what, but the compulsion to fight just... stopped. They surrendered there and then, with many of the other chromatic riders, and tried not to think about how many people they knew that they'd never see again. They were alive. They were lucky.
They were treated better than Elioenai expected. Not as prisoners, but as comrades. Equals. He wasn't subject to constant abuse. For weeks he spent most of his time looking over his shoulder, more paranoid than he'd ever been at High Reaches, because he couldn't believe that a chromatic rider could ever actually be treated that way, that Fort had to be plotting something, but nothing ever came. Still, Fort wasn't home, and he did miss home. And, more oddly to his mind, he realized that he didn't want to die as a woman. He quietly shortened his name to E'nai, and was quite prepared to pretend things had always been that way if anyone asked him.
His opportunity to return came just a couple of months later, when Golre's regime was toppled once and for all. He went with those who set out to rebuild, and see High Reaches made a place for everyone, not just the privileged few. He was going to make sure that things were done fairly. He knew as well as anyone what could happen otherwise. And so when a bronzerider attempted to seize control, he joined those who spoke out against him. He wasn't going to let the Weyr return to the past.
But history tends to repeat itself. High Reaches' golds all perished, and yet he worried: would such a void leave an opening for someone worse than even Golre to come and take the reigns?
UPDATES
- When a disastrous Threadfall all but destroyed Moonshot Wing, he transferred there from Starfall along with Tamara
