Aoe

Aoe is a female rider specializing in recordskeeping
Height: very tall, towering over their peers, Build: thin as a twig
Skin: ruddy, Hair: dishwater brown, Hairstyle: tightly curled, cut to the neck, Eyes: rich red-brown
Searched: a while ago, but it was kept a secret from them until Standing
Before riding, was a Commoner, House Born child
Age at Impression: 13, born on Pern
Siblings: 2
Born: last plus several half siblings on either side of their family over the years
Legitimacy: born to married parents
Literacy Level: can read and write but only with the basics
Politeness Level: on occasion they've been known to mutter an insult openly
Focus: as they look around them, their focus fades, but they are obsessed about something they do
Though some might find them ugly, most just call them plain
They are neither truly giving or selfish
Values and Goals
Enjoys deeply: their father
Likes: the light places
Average goal: protect something or someone
Moderate fear: horses
Extremely strong goal: 'get away from it all'

Aoe pushed her hair behind her ear, where it stayed all of a moment before dropping back in front of her bright eyes. The rider who stood in front of her looked surprised when he spotted her among the group of cotholders, but probably because she was almost as tall as he. And he wasn't short. Her dark skin showed that she enjoyed working outdoors, and the presence of a wax stylus in her pocket gave her away as being an intelligent girl. She was excited to be standing with her age-mates with the Search riders - but then who wouldn't be? This hold, small and out of the way, had been visited by dragon riders all too rarely. Perhaps two generations had gone by before anyone was actually Searched from it, and K'roohan knew that by the records he had checked up on before coming here.

"And you, what's your name?" The rider asked.

"Aoe," she said, (incidentally pronounced 'ayOHee') while pushing her curly hair yet again behind her ear with a futile yet well-practiced effort. "I'm thirteen, is that too young to be Searched?"

With a flicker of a smile and his eyebrow twitching up a bit, K'roohan chuckled and said, "no, not at all. When we search sometimes there are children quite a lot younger than you. But I would never take such a child away from their home."

"I'm not a child," Aoe said, somewhat stubbornly - this too was likely something practiced a lot around her cothold. K'roohan could tell by the wringing-hands and the worried-looks on the pair of older folks behind standing with the other parents, that they were indeed her mother and father. It looked as though the father was attempting to convince his wife that perhaps it would be for the best, whatever happened here...

It was ironic of course that she'd say such a thing. K'roohan knew from the Search records that she was one of the children he'd never have taken - though it was his predecessor who'd searched her as a very young girl. She'd clearly never been told this, that was somewhat of a constant around cotholds and larger full holds, because parents rarely wanted to instill an attitude in their child of superiority when they may never actually leave the hold.

K'roohan asked Aoe some further questions, all the while his dragon was sniffing at the air around the lineup of kids. The brown lingered over two in particular, Aoe and an extremly pale young man a bit older than she. Aoe noticed that, and leaned in a bit to the Search rider. "You don't want to talk to Tenevih, he's always so nasty to people."

"Is that so?" K'roohan looked down the way, saw the albino-pale boy glance back at him with a bit of a superior blink, then turned back. "Well, I hate to say it but you're going to have to get used to him, because you and he are the only ones that Takanath thinks would be good for Searching today." He waited a moment for that to register in the girl's mind, and he could see it in her eyes the moment when she did.

She let off a squeal, a long loud one, as she sped away from the line and toward her parents. She threw herself onto her father's slender form, nearly doubling him over. He'd return to them later in the afternoon, once the reality of their situation had sunk in better.

***

Aoe was a bit jumpy, as always, when she was around runners and large beasts of burden. But this time she had to be there as the family packed her things up and carted them off to the dragon flats. Their home was stacked among the many in the cothold, too hard to reach by a larger beast than a warhorse, so having the dragon just pick up something was out of the question. The ledges that they lived on in this canyon-wall community were well worn and reinforced, but even so Aoe always walked on the wall-side whenever she had to be near the horses.

She wasn't jumpy at all around the dragons. It was with tremendous relief that she and the driver arrived at the flats, and she could put some distance between her and the pair of old runners. Ever since the incident that left her older brother unable to walk with a crushed leg, and she'd been too young and unable to help out... It was clear that the girl cared deeply about certain things and people - and not so much about others. It was also clear that she disliked the boy who'd been searched, but she was willing to just ignore him. She loved to write and draw things on her wax pad, something that she'd insisted on carrying herself snugly in her backpack.

Aoe showed no fear climbing atop the brown dragon, and looked without fear at the people gathered below. She waved again to her family as they'd come to wish her farewell. "He said they have paper at the Weyr! I can write to you!" She called out, happily. Tenevih mounted up with the other, a blue rider, and the pair of dragons left the hold.

Aoe followed K'roohan's instructions well, but as anyone who had never traveled between before, she stiffened up and gasped for breath the moment they were where they intended to be. But shortly after that, though they were quite high over the ocean and had the wind at their faces, Aoe opened her eyes and brightly squealed again with joy. "This is the greatest day of my life!"

K'roohan chuckled again, "so far, girl, so far..."

***

"This is harder than I thought it would be," Aoe said, as she dipped the pen in its ink well again and continued her exersizes. The recordskeeping staff here at Dragonhope Weyr were all pretty nice and very talented, and since she had expressed interest and had a bit of talent for it, they enlisted her to help copy documents. However, since paper was in short supply everywhere outside the Weyr, she'd always had to use a stylus and tablet of wax or a sand board for her writing. Hardly as permanent as she ever liked - but that meant that her practice with the stylus gave her an extremely heavy hand with the pen. She outright broke two nibs in the first ten minutes, but within the next hour she was getting much better. Now, after three days of it, she was more at ease and could concentrate more on the words she was copying than the skill of holding a real pen over real paper.

She got to write out older hatching records, flights, unexpected clutches, and deaths. When she was finished with that, she was moved on to more modern things like the mundanities of supply buying and finances - which she really didn't much care for. Then at last she was given off to the real historian, greenrider Ilina. As her apprentice, a real apprentice, because she was higher up in the guild, Aoe was able to sort through old documents and decide which of them were in condition to be repaired or replaced. In the three months that Aoe spent in Dragonhope, she gained the respect of the recordskeepers - as well as a very good grasp on the history of the place.

She wrote home once a month, not wanting to waste any of the paper that the Weyr had (though they did have a huge amount, and she wondered often enough where it really came from... It was nice stuff, all pressed and firm, not like the primative stuff she'd seen from the Harpers...) but including everything that she got to do and who she had to meet. She had, like all the new Searched, met the Weyrleaders. She rather liked Kira because she was a very strong willed woman and seemed entirely confident. S'xon was even taller than K'roohan by a long shot, and though he was friendly and had a wicked sense of humor, Aoe was a little less comfortable around him than she liked. Perhaps it was his eerie yellow-green eyes.

Eventually though, came the day when a few of the new candidates were given information about where they might stand. In addition to their other training, of course, Aoe and the others had been in classes about dragon anatomy, flight skills, tactics and the like. There would be many more of these, they were told, once they were impressed.

"You'll be coming back here, after you impress wherever you go," Weyrling master R'vfen told the class, "but we expect you to learn as much as you can before coming back. You may be called home when your dragons are weyrlings, so you might learn a thing or two from me."

That said and done, Aoe decided to look at the information they had about other Weyrs. It always amazed her that they could travel around the world - the whole world! On dragon-back, she knew, anything was possible. It would be somewhere near Hoshi Dragon Den that she headed - and where the albino boy Tenevih chose she didn't know. But they'd both learned that cooperation was absoultely essential for dragonriding, and kept both their mouths shut on their trips.

There was never any doubt that the darkish snowy-winged green named Firrth would be Aoe's. While there were a lot of weirder things going on here, on this flat plain filled with snow that definitely was not a dragonry or Weyr, the one thing that Aoe knew for certain was that she had found her lifelong partner.

I am glad you think so... Can I see your writing sometime? I would like that! You spend a lot of time doing that.

"That is true, but I'd far rather spend time with you! And ... I suppose we're going to want to at least learn how to work with Threadfall, too. That would be exciting."

And a little dangerous, Firrth said, But there is nothing wrong with trying. I do not want you to worry, when we fly against that stuff, I promise I'll never let it touch me or you!