Boy of gold Claresk

Name: Claren, known mostly as “Boy”
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Prisoner: No
Crime: Dust-running, horse theft, fraud, fixing races, murde—oh, did you only want this for criminals?
Craft/Rank: Journeyman beastcrafter

Appearance: Boy is five feet, three inches and a hundred twelve pounds of wiry muscle and bad attitude. Short, bowlegged, and whipcord-lean, he’s definitely not attractive. His face is narrow, with extremely sharp cheekbones, hooded olive-green eyes, and overly-prominent front teeth, and his expression is set in a permanent scowl, to the point where he has already developed frown lines in his brow and around his mouth. His hair is jet black, the shade that is sometimes poetically described as ‘raven’s wing.’ Boy calls it ‘black.’ It falls to the base of his neck, but it’s kept in a tight ponytail that he actually wraps, much the same as one would wrap a runner’s tail for travel. The rest of him is nondescript, normal for a jockey but strangely scrawny for anyone else.

He has a fair collection of scars and his index and middle fingers on his right hand are crooked—he broke them, never bothered to get them splinted, and they didn’t heal properly. The most prominent of his scars is a single long slash across his cheek, made when he bonded Claresk to prove his commitment to the wher.

Personality: Boy is a genuinely unpleasant person to be around. Edgy, slightly jumpy, and always ready to lash out, he resembles nothing in personality more than the edgy Katz Field runners he spends so much time with. He's terrible with people, forgoing manners and pleasantries in favour of dark glares and the occasional grunt. He's the sort who anticipates fights, and when he doesn't like you, surprise surprise, he'll anticipate a fight even quicker. And when he anticipates, well, in Boy's world, the best defense is a good offense. And a good offense is a thorough ass-whooping.

He might be small, but he fights dirty, until authorities get called in. At which point he'll bray verbal abuse and disrespect to everyone until someone gets brave enough to smack him across the face and shut him up—something that hasn’t happened since he Impressed to Claresk. Needless to say, he’s gotten a lot worse over the past five turns. He's got a loud voice—painfully loud—when he wants to, but usually it's just for crowing insults, and nowadays, occasionally orders. There are a few people he would regard as friends, or at least people he's friendly with, and in general he lets them be. He'll even beat up people who give his "friends" trouble. But he's not talkative about it. "What? Yeah, I slugged him. So what? Shardin' idiot deserved it. You still want somethin'?"

Around "the lovelies," however, he's a completely different person. Calm, collected, firm, and strong-willed, he doesn't take crap, but he's also surprisingly gentle with the great beasts. He has a soft spot for little ones, and tended to collect and foster ownerless foals and yearlings before he was banned from owning runners. Now he simply takes an obsessive interest in Claresk’s wherlings. It's a bit compulsive, but what can he say? He's sharding good with them! Katz Field runnerbeasts were known for their sensitive, often neurotic temperaments, and whers are known for being just plain nasty. And Boy has always been very, very good at keeping them calm. Usually. Sometimes, there's one he just can't—or perhaps just doesn't want to—control.

Unsurprisingly, Claresk is one of them. Boy insists that if he controls the frantic, vicious energy she espouses, he won't be able to use her at all. Strangely, it's always the meanest animals—runners in the past, and whers now—that boy allows to run nearly unchecked. He has a strange fondness for the worst of the worst, and he doesn't "rehabilitate" them. In fact, he often coaches the handler on techniques that make it worse, in a way that only he can switch on and off. But when it comes time for a handler to set off on their own or a runner to be sold, there has never been an animal whose violent rampages can be pinned on Boy. His are the best of the best. You must be thinking of some other trainer.

History: Boy was born and raised in Keroon, to parents who presumably gave him a real name and started training him in the business of breeding runnerbeasts when he was very young. By the time he could walk, he was helping his mother feed the livestock, and by the time he could run, he was in the saddle. He had the same affinity for runners that had marked his family for generations, and his parents gladly instructed him in their care and training. He got his first pony at age six, his first horse at ten.

Not originally a particularly petite child, when it came time for most boys to hit their first growth spurt, well, Boy didn't. So he was short, good with runners, and old enough for an apprenticeship. And his parents, being the enterprising creatures they were, saw a jockey in the making. And so they sent him off to Keroon to learn the fine art of racing runnerbeasts. And also how to get picked on because he was short...and then by proxy how to beat up kids who picked on him because he was short.

By the time he was fifteen, he had been thrown out of Beastcraft Hall and taken back numerous times, largely because every time he got thrown out, he'd hire himself out to some enterprising Lord Holder and race their runnerbeasts in exchange for pocket money. Since he tended to win against Beastcraft Hall's animals, this would become a problem, and promises of quality horseflesh would lure him back.

Eventually he got sick of it, took the pocket marks he had made, hopped a ship, and headed to a runnerbeast fair at Ista Hold. There, he picked up a five-year-old stallion with fantastic lines and a decent attitude, who he took with him to Katz Field Hold, where he showed up with a purse full of marks and some of the finest horseflesh outside of Katz itself. It wasn't long til he proved himself a capable jockey (and a vicious enough fighter that nobody wanted to call him out on his atrocious behaviour) and sold the runner in favour of working with other people's animals.

He was good at it, in demand with some of the more famous breeders in and around Katz, but he recognized a sweet deal when he saw it and eventually contracted with one of the most prestigious breeders on Pern. At age nineteen, he was introduced to Fly Easy, a filly whose fame in the racing circuit is now nearly legendary—as that of any runnerbeast capable of permanently laming an opposing runner and killing a rival jockey would be. It should come as no surprise that Boy had a heavy hand in her training. He was her exclusive jockey from her debut on the racing circuit to her retirement three turns later—around the time Boy was arrested on suspicion of fixing races.

Turned out it wasn’t just fixing races that the Watch wanted Claren investigated on. They were also investigating the death of the jockey and injury of the runnerbeast in Fly Easy’s race, a string of what appeared to be illegally-placed bets on races that shouldn’t have existed, the disappearance of a handful of runnerbeasts from stables where Boy and his posse had gone, and a few counts of fraud and impersonation. They couldn’t prove anything except the race-fixing, and that wasn’t exactly enough to pin on someone and send him to eternal punishment forever. But it was enough to get Boy banned from the racing circuit forever. He was sent from Katz Field to Big Bay Hold, where he was required to do community service in the form of tending herdbeasts.

Boy hated it. And before long he found himself venturing into other Beastcraft venues. He dabbled in beasthealing, only to discover that apparently it required actual smarts beyond street smarts, and anyways, nobody was going to let a cheating criminal around runnerbeasts (the only ones worth healing) ever again. So he gave that up. And he fell in with the wherhandlers. Big Bay had a fair handful more than most Holds, by virtue of not being attached to a particular Weyr and in the direct path of every major shipping route. Boy was a quick study with the animals, and before long he had earned the right (at least among the wherhandlers, which was all that mattered), to try his hand at Impressing a wher.

Big Bay’s Queen clutched, and when Boy came to meet her, she decided he was worthy enough for an egg. So, in Hold tradition, he was given one, instructed to keep it close and keep an eye on it for signs of hatching. And hatch it did, when Boy was least expecting it. In the middle of a routine afternoon of slaughter cleanup, the egg cracked, and out spilled the darkest wherling Boy had ever seen. It took him a minute to realize that the dark ochre colour was actually gold, but as soon as he did, he wasted no time in cutting himself and sealing Impression with a blood bond.

It was assumed that the presence of the gold wher, supremely conscious of her colour and rank, would make a point to the bitter, nasty beastcrafter. It was assumed he had been rehabilitated. The assumption couldn’t have been farther from the truth. With the newfound rank and freedom, Boy suddenly found himself in the thick of a group of people far from the “ideal” of Pernese society. Wherhandlers were nocturnal, harsh, people on the fringes of the reality of others. It allowed a great deal of freedom. Perhaps too much freedom. This time, when Boy fell in with criminals, it wasn’t just cheaters and frauds. This time around, it was Dust-runners.

He never became an addict himself; Claresk was too valuable to risk in that way. But he was a willing smuggler and a surprisingly creative mastermind behind runs, pickups, and drop-offs. He befriended a drug lord—perhaps unsurprising, considering Boy’s less-than-spotless record—and was on a quick downward spiral to the underworld. Perhaps his superiors noticed this. Perhaps not. But either way, shortly before Boy was prepared to request a transfer to better facilitate his newfound career, he was transferred to Warden’s. The claim was that they needed more goldhandlers and Boy was all that could be spared. The reality was that a prison was a much better place for a suspected criminal than a Hold where he could live unrestricted. Thus far at Warden’s, he doesn’t seem to have committed any crimes. Yet.

Other stuff: His criminal record is for OOC knowledge only.

Pets

Name:
Species:
Color: (if relevant)
Appearance:
Personality:


Name: Claresk
Color: Gold
Age: 5
Appearance: Claresk is…surprising, to say the least. Average-sized for a queen wher, she’s nonetheless large—and ugly, just like all whers tend to be. A Hold-wher until recently, she is appropriately modified as such—ears cropped short to offer fewer targets in a fight and wings neatly clipped. And while that in and of itself might be unusual among Warden’s whers, that’s not what makes Claresk stand out. It’s her colour that is striking. Where other gold whers are a vibrant, shining gold that makes no mistake what they are, Claresk’s back, shoulders, and face are so dark as to be almost black. It’s not black—her hide bears the overall sheen that makes metallic metallic—but it’s easy to mistake her for it. Nonetheless, her sides and wing membranes are brighter, a dark, oxidized gold and her stomach, throat, and jaw are pure, shining pale gold.

Personality: If Boy’s runnerbeasts were loose cannons out of personal preference, it can only be imagined what sort of creature Claresk would grow into. Unsurprisingly, she lives up to the expectations of anyone who has ever come in contact with the volatile jockey. Short-tempered, impatient, demanding, and spoiled, she has a nasty tendency to throw fits to get what she wants—and with Claresk, a fit is more than just whining and snapping her teeth. If whers in general lack traditional draconic disinclination to harm people, then Claresk has not only disregarded the idea, she has laughed at it. Even Boy is not free from the nasty teeth of this wher, and when she’s upset, she’s not afraid to bite, claw, or tackle to prove a point. She has never killed someone before, but don’t assume that just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t in the future.

But if Claresk is prone to spoiled hissy fits, it’s only because she is acutely conscious of her rank. This little (or…well, not-so-little) lady knows she’s a gold, and isn’t afraid to throw her considerable weight around to make a point. Bossy with other whers and terse with all humans who aren’t Boy (she generally won’t talk to other humans, but if she’s asked a question, she might make some sort of nonverbal response), there is a certain degree of aloofness about her that compliments her handler’s personality. She doesn’t make “friends,” but nor does she amass minions. She uses other whers when she needs to, and stays entirely isolated from other humans. In fact, she tends to be extremely mistrustful of strangers—human, wher, or anything else.

Unusually for a wher, she seems quite able to control her appetites and demonstrates surprising restraint when it comes to feeding and indulging of other sorts. She doesn’t need to be oiled, but on occasion she is fond of it, as well as similar luxuries—bathing in warm water (she loves the beach on summer evenings) is a peculiarity of her, as is a tendency to luxuriate in lush vegetation. There is a strange playfulness at work in a full, satisfied Claresk that is almost reminiscent of a cat, albeit a very large, very dangerous cat on the barest edge of flying off the handle once again. She won’t beg, but if it’s been a while since her handler has done something nice for her, she isn’t afraid to occasionally wheedle a reward out of him. Particularly if she’s been busting her tail so he can pull some idiotic stunt with the Dust-runners again.

While she might be near-flawlessly obedient to her handler, it doesn’t stop her from every now and again deciding to take Boy’s welfare into her own talons. Every now and again she will straight-up refuse an order, and she has occasionally grabbed him by the back of the tunic and carried him off elsewhere if a situation was getting ugly. It’s rare that she has to mother-hen him like that, though. And that’s the only thing she reserves her mother-hen tendencies for. Her clutches are interesting and she defends them like a demon (and is highly selective concerning Candidates), but once the eggs are hatched, she couldn’t care less. It becomes Boy’s job as soon as the babies are out in the world.