Quen disliked going out into the sun. It wasn't her skin, or her eyes, she just didn't care for the heat. She preferred the cool, darkness of the records room in the Hold. There, she could study, there she could write. There, she was mocked and told she'd grow to be an old maid if she never went out to woo the boys. Her two older brothers would beat up anyone that gave her grief in their presence... It was a shame that they were hardly in the records room.

In the sun, though, was where the search riders and their dragons stood. So she, like everyone else in the Hold, got in line and waited for any kind of results. Two others - both boys - were Searched and brought away almost immediately. She however was only eight turns old at that time, and could hardly be expected to stand with older teens. So they tucked that information away, and sent her back to her studies.

What exactly she studied depended on her mood or the time of day. If asked, she was 'working on a history of the Hold' - but had scattered notes about the Hold, two others nearby, families of those who lived in them, and two guild halls that had very little to do with it all. In reality she fancied herself a writer of tales - not of history. But she knew that having some sense about the real thing would be better than just making everything up from scratch. So she studied anything that was written. Weaving, tailoring, that led to fashion and that to the history of dances among the Holders. Like a bee she went from book to book, never quite settling on a true subject.

It didn't much matter, she learned enough about so many things that she even could make some of her own parchment, paper and inks. If she wasn't in the records room, she was out in the fields collecting what she considered to be the best of spare cotton blooms, reeds, and the like. All of which she would smush into a single messy tub and eventually flatten into square sheets. If a scribe had seen any of this, they might have promoted her to senior apprentice.

Eventually she would be - much later. When she was fifteen, however, her father was killed in a rock slide, along with several other hunters. And since she was quite pretty - and older than her youngest sister by almost a decade - one of the Lords nearby took interest in 'saving' her from a life of drudgery. There would never have been such a thing, except that he surely would have tried coersing her mother into a deal: lose the land, or lose a daughter.

It was never in question that her mother wanted the best for Quen, and knew that Quen's best interests were not with this greedy, lusty Lord. So on the night that Quen's mother was to discuss this further with the man, she sent Quen away in her father's small coach with everything she could spare in it. Quen would have gone for the deal, she knew it would be just as dead-end as any other relationship, but at least it would have spared her mother the difficult task of 'explaining' how her daughter had vanished.

Quen drove the runners all evening, and into the early morning. Exhausted, she slept in the coach under a pile of blankets with the runners tethered near a little stream. She was honestly amazed that she didn't get accosted the whole time she traveled, avoiding the day but therefore making every mile more dangerous through ever deeper woodlands into the hills. But she did make it, and with many of her supplies intact. But how she loathed the runners, how they smelled and made messes. She'd never been too hot on cleaning up after animals...

It happened that during a festival for some distant Lord's wedding (it wasn't the same one, thankfully, because that would have been too ironic for her to bear) that another search rider discovered her. She related that yes, she'd been Searched before and could she please be taken to a Weyr - not even to stand, just to be there, away from the roads and travel with these beasts... And he agreed. He took her to Blue Mountain Aurie, bringing her lifetime's work of papers and such with them. She sold the runners and coach, knowing full well that the men who bought them would have stolen it anyway had it been where they found it any longer than it was. They'd later be charged with a theft anyway, but she didn't know that.

What she did know was that within days of her arrival was to be a hatching. A massive one, by the looks of it. She gleefully began recording names and descriptions - as though she'd never done anything else. Her room mates, the boys across the hall, who had a flitter and who a canine, where people were from. This raised the eyebrows of the on-hand records keepers, she did a great job of it.

The paper-white dragon that approached Quen on the hot sands was a male, she knew that by his mental voice. He claimed he picked her out because she smelled good, her own dragon had searched her? They trained together and had spills and adventures, though Nohefeth wasn't too fond of his rider telling fanciful stories - he preferred the truth and little more.

Though he was quite small, among the smallest of the dragons that hatched from Samth's massive clutch, Nohefeth and Quen were ready to travel when they got their transfer papers. To Dragonhope, where a girl with paper and records experience would fit right in. She'd heard faintly of their squabble with the Harpers guild, and how their Weyr kept a queen-riding master scribe - who was a woman. It was to Aniz that Quen was apprenticed, happily making papers which were then distributed around the Weyr. In Dragonhope, paper was not as hard to come by as other places, and their records room was filled with it. Plus... to her delight, Quen realized that some of the tomes pressed up next to one another weren't even history texts - they were fantasy stories!

Nohefeth grumbled endlessly while she read those...

Nohefeth, White, Male

happy, lucky, narrow-minded

**
Status: Commoner, House Born child
Age: 17
Gender: female
Siblings: 2
Born: last plus two out of wedlock siblings on their father's side (younger)
Legitimacy: born into a healthy family
Childhood Health: very stocky
Adult Height: an average-height person
Adult Build: well muscled, but not burly
Skin Tone: creamy, freckled
Hair Color: strawberry blond
Hair Style: hardly wavy
Hair Length: to mid-back
Eye Color: rich red-brown
Literacy Level: are able to read and write fairly well
Politeness Level: they are very polite and proper at all times
Focus: as they look around them, their focus fades
This character is certainly one of the best looking folks around
They are neither truly giving or selfish

Values and Goals
Passionately hates: their wagon/fine horse tack
Passionately hates: the light places
Weak goal: ride a dragon or other creature
Weak fear: a lord holder
Odd Skill (learned outside of craft if any): paper making

Originally From: plainsland community
Location size: densely populated
Location climate: temperate
Searched: as a young child
**