Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Ilyscaeth
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If ever there was a gold to lead dragonmen to the end of days, it would be this one. She possesses the massive build that inspires battlefield legend, the dark beauty that whispers rhyme into the minds of poets, the savage grace that bids hearts beat faster to simply behold her. She is timeless, a queen who wears her crown as a circlet of white-hot stars on her brow, branded forever to be something more than average. Nose long and aquiline, jaw thin but strong, her stern visage is belied by subtle flecks and freckles that soften her edges, trailing over cheekbones and curling along her jaw before spiralling, nebulous, along the long lines of her body. They range, these small bursts of star-matter, from pale goldenrod to the deepest shades of aureolin, and even then they cannot aspire to match the dark depths of her hide. She is not merely shadowed, this gold, but rather engloamed, hide rolling forth in bold, burnished blends of caramel and mahogany that serve only to embellish her robust sense of refinement. She is an all-mother, a keeper of weyrs, muscled without bulk, strong without overbearance, capable of duty and service without sacrificing regality or allure. Her wings depict this dichotomy in detail, delicate but powerful appearance rendered heavy by dark whorls of the smokiest topaz. Cascades of clouds are broken by streaks of heat-lightning, personal universe fractured by needle-thin lances of molten silver, shiny and chrome.


Egg Name and Description

Mirror, Mirror Egg
Simplicity given ovoid form, this egg is terribly transparent compared to the complexity of its clutchmates, and clearly it likes it that way. Its shell is universally cloaked in a sharp, edgy chrome so polished that it reflects whatever surrounds it, mirror images distorted with a distinctly fun-house quality by its sleek oblong shape. If shifted to the just-right angle, there are even times the egg seems to vanish completely, devoured by the weyr's dark sands. Fret not. There's always a subtle glimmer to give it away out of the corner of one eye, flickering like a streak of mischief, playful and taunting. It won't let itself be forgotten, it's merely biding its time.


Hatching Message

Wobble Message
Mirror, Mirror Egg doesn't just wobble, it vibrates, as if there is too much dragon and too much personality for this reflective egg that catches the sand and refracts the light towards dragons and people to hold. It thrums, the edges shifting as what's within moves, and then it goes still.

Crack Message
Mirror, Mirror Egg is alive! It expands outwards, giving the impressions of snout and limbs and dragon within that rock, rock, and roll! Onto its side it goes, smashing into the remnants of other eggs with cracks that spiderweb and explode outwards, like lightning streaks in fragile glass-shell, before the beast inside rests.

Hatch Message
KA-BOOM! Mirror, Mirror Egg splinters, slivers, contracts and EXPANDS! Shards give way to egg-gooked snout, four feet, a head, and a tail. It's a runner, it's a wherry, it's a? space-dragon? Reflective shell clings to a body of poise and striking lines of beauty like armor, cracked and lined with the evidence of life broken free. Or like a spaceship, if you are less imaginative, but whatever. Better make way, candidates. There's a whole lotta deep spa - sand, deep sand - to explore, and you're in the way.

Sands Pose #1
Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling is not a spaceship, thank you very much. She is a creature made from light and stars; she is heaven on Pern, the kind of dragon harpers immortalize in lyric and weavers want to dye about. This is the queen you better remember now and forever, because one day it's going to be, 'Oh, Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling,' rolling off your tongue in exasperation, instead of that timeless classic, 'Oh, Faranth,' that is in need of some serious renovation. Let her give you some help with how it's done. Look at all that graceful pose, the sleek lines of a body made to be fluid in motion - that screams majesty to the heavens and commands your attention. Okay, now stop looking at her bronze clutchmate, and look back at her. She's taking the first step towards the future, marking a timeless path from this moment - here and now - right into that egg. With force - and a lowering of her head that slams one of those headknobs into shell with gusto and brings to mind that exasperated breath of, 'Oh, Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling.' So maybe she's not the most graceful dragon, but you haven't seen anything yet.

Sands Pose #2
Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling realigns her feet and makes the necessary mental calculations to readjust internal compasses forward. This is forward? right? Zoom, zoom! goes that dragon-spaceship that might be a queen (it is), taking charge and actually charging towards the candidates that line up so neatly in innocuous white, clearly only called to the sands to behold her regal beauty, her majesty, her star-speckled hide that - okay, so maybe forward was backwards, and maybe 'candidates' was more Xermiltoth-wards, but at least she doesn't let her obvious mix-up deter her or the zeal with which she slams into her sire. On that headknob. Again. Oh, Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling. The reflective, protective remains of shell shatter at last, crumbling away from her body as she shakes her head to rid herself of Stupidly-Hard-Bronze-Hide induced jarring, and then turns her crowned head back towards those who remain in white. No, really you guys. She's got this.


Impression Message

Public Message
Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling found the reset button and hit it! HA-HA! Take THAT uncooperative limbs! This way is definitely forward, and she knows that because the (aggressive) momentum of her feet is propelling her towards all those candidate-white robes and uninteresting faces, straight on past them - past them?! - into? THWACK! The stands? Oh, Lightning Before the Thunder Gold Hatchling. That was definitely not supposed to happen, especially not with her head lowered just enough to smash that same darn headknob into unyielding rock. AGAIN. She stumbles back and away, footing uneven as a daze seems to carry her back to the candidates and - right on top of one! There you are. She's found you, and it only took running into one egg, a bronze sire, and a wall to do it! You'll make the next thousand or so mistakes together.

Private Message
One moment you were standing there, probably fearing for your life because a gold dragon was barreling out of control on the sands, and the next you're in space. You have to have died, right? The endless infinity of stars and colors that are so blinding they hurt the eyes can't possibly be - is that a whale? Is that a whale falling through time and space? You and that whale are probably thinking the exact same things, for what it's worth. Like, 'Why am I here?' and, 'What's this giant, round thing coming towards me? It needs a good solid name like ggrrr? graawwn? ground. That's the ground.' « CITAYLA. » A beat, as starlight blossoms at the edges of vision, carried into existence by the melodious kind of sound that harpers dream to replicate. « WHAT'S THAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU. » Light refracts off of glitter, movement punctuated by hints of soft piano that lend her voice harmony. « NEVERMIND. I'M ILYSCAETH. … WHAT? » A beat, ridiculous in its longness, as though waiting for you to say something and still not getting it even if you do, the vague impression of a headpat coming and going on the tide. Or is that a cloud. Or is that a space-whale-fin? It's… hard to tell. « YOU KNOW WHAT, IT'S FINE HONEY, IT'S FINE. I LOVE YOU ANYWAYS, EVEN IF YOU ARE CLEARLY A MUTE. YOU ARE PRECIOUS AND PERFECT ALWAYS. » Boop goes a snoot, pushed right into your belly with a noise of abject contentment and a rumble of… Thunder? Drums? Vibrato? Oh, no, that's just her stomach this time, something she acknowledges with a 'heh heh' of laughter and a shouted, « COME, MY DEAR SWEET MUTE-TAYLA. WE'VE MUCH TO BE GETTING ON WITH, AND IF THAT BIG BRONZE FELLOW DOESN'T STOP GIVING ME THE STINK EYE I MIGHT WELL TAKE IT OUT FOR HIM. TO THE BARRACKS! » Nevermind that the barracks are you know… that way. It's an auspicious start.


Personality

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In her youth, Ilyscaeth will be… graceless, in every sense of the word. Her body is quick, her mind quicker, and her mouth quickest yet, her father's daughter through and through. She is intelligent, fiercely so, but of the sort that begs a certain sense of recklessness, giving her a heightened sense of ego and pride that leads one to act first, think second, and regret only after the damage has been done.

Liam: Come on! We've got to find Verand.
Ryder: We don't even know if this is the way!
Liam: Well, something has to go right! You take a risk for the right reason, it's supposed to work! [Punches container, growls in pain.]
Ryder: You dent your locker, the principal will be pissed.
Liam: It isn't a joke! I jumped us here blind - we don't know where anyone is or how anything works! [Doom music starts, screen with baddie comes up, Liam shuts it off with a punch.] And now we're fighting some asshole who wants everyone chained. It's like hitting Andromeda all over again!

She isn't a malicious dragon by any stretch of the mind - if anything, she's perhaps a little too kind, fully needing of Citayla's sass and snappery to keep herself from being tread all over in the early months. She's merely impulsive and damned terrible at controlling said impulses when she gets an idea set in her head.

« Ila'den seemed particularly sad today, so I threw him a picnic right in the middle of the bowl and invited the entire weyr down to cheer him up. »
“You what?!”
« And golly, but Aedeluth is a cranky old mess right about now. Know what they need? A pound of glitter dumped on their head. »
“What? Ilysi, no.”
« …Oh. Well. Too late. I already did it. But who can be mad when they're literally sparkling, eyy? EYY? Cita, why aren't you laughing? »

It's not at all limited to disruptions, either. Sometimes she'll butt in on conversations not intended for her, or get it in her head that a problem that someone else is having is now hers to piece through as if she has the right. It comes from a place of love and loyalty - she wants to do good, wants to fix ails and solve the world's problems in one go - but as a young gun she just can't conceptualize just what that entails. She utterly lacks in the planning aspect, missing that conniving edge that so characterizes the true trickster persona - she simply tries and, unfortunately, gets it really, epically wrong more often than not.

Liam: That worked out. Heh. Everything just… just so— Before you start, I want you to know I… ah, well… I'm sorry. I mean this was a mess. Even though we won, it wasn't by much. It was all worth it. You showed Verand that 'Pathfinder' can stand for everyone. But… I need to be smarter about taking risks. So… you're right. Sorry. Okay. Go ahead.
Ryder: We did good.
Liam: [Laughs.] What, really?
Ryder: Could do with a little less dangling in open space, but.
Liam: You got it. [They stare at pirated kett ship.] Think that thing would survive a jump back to the Nexus?
[It explodes, loudly and colorfully, lighting up their faces.]
Ryder: …Probably not.

Still, when life hands you lemons, sometimes all you can do is shrug and make some freakin' lemonade. Sure she'll question herself, and maybe she'll apologize for the hot steaming mess she made of things after, but when trouble strikes all you can really do is soldier on and see it to its end. This sort of patient endurance, if appropriately cultivated by Citayla, will become the foundation for an unshakeable, well-reasoned dragon once she gets a few years and a butt-ton of failures tucked away in her back pocket. Nothing speaks like experience, nothing teaches like having to pick up from the bottom of the pit and climb back out again, and she'll have it in spades.

She's persistent, after all, perhaps to the point of annoyance. If given her head, she'll try something again, and again, and again until she can get it right. It might inconvenience the lives and livelihoods of others from time to time, but damnit she's a gold and if she can't do it, who can? She's horribly and terribly aware of who and what she is after all, and what she means to the people that surround her. From the second she cracked shell, she had a future, a destiny, a set of expectations falling far beyond those set for her clutchmates and she wants to meet them, head-on and with gusto.

Thus, ironically, it will fall to Cita to be the one to reign her in, to remind her that no matter how much one might wish it, it isn't possible to do everything, to save everyone. There has to be time made for her to be young, to experience things beyond an assessment of its function or worth, to bask in the simple wonders of the world. Though she might not seek these herself, once reminded, she will take to this with as much alacrity as she displays in every other aspect of her life. The world is her oyster and who is she to decline to experience all it has to offer?

Rey: [Starry-eyed.] I didn't know there was this much green in the whole galaxy…

The second she begins to understand why things should be enjoyed rather than simply enjoying them will mark the transition from gangly, hot-headed baby into a more well-reasoned youth. 'Why' is a nebulous concept far from her grasp fresh out of the egg, but one day, at someone's behest or upon her own discovery, she'll realize the joy of puzzling through just why something is the way it is, does the thing it does, means the thing it means and it will revolutionize her life. Simple, blow-off answers will cease to be tolerated, deeper truths sought out, and difficult subjects will be engaged for the betterment of her own understanding of the people and dragons that make up her weyr.

« R'hyn is… upset. Why is this, mine? »
"I don't know. Probably because he has to do paperwork for the statue you wrecked with your big fat butt yesterday."
« It snuck up on me. But no. He's actually sad, Cita. It's like he's in pain, but he isn't injured. Why? »

It will be up to Cita to guide her into the sort of dragon she will become, in these moments - she is a leader for the ages no matter what, a keeper of confidences and a gracious friend, but how her rider guides her, how she advises her either by telling her truths herself or encouraging her to seek them from a source, will determine how Ilyscaeth handles the things that puzzle her once she's grown.

Miguel: But, Tulio, this place is amazing! I mean, I wonder what's-
Tulio: No! Don't even move!
Miguel: Tulio-
Tulio: You're moving!
Miguel: A little, but- Come on.
Tulio: Hey! Hey! Hey!

There will be much to puzzle about, to be sure, so many wonderous things to explore across an entire planet, and honestly some time may have to be hollowed out to allow her to travel because she'll want to see it all and if she isn't afforded the time then, well— she'll make it for herself. The bad way around at least once, with all the heaping helping of trouble for her and anyone involved that goes with it. Because Ilysi, that's why.

But for all her challenges, she's also good for Citayla, a living reminder that all of the brilliance in the world cannot make up for being a good person that's there and present in the moment, willing to set academia aside for some good, old-fashioned friendship. She'll have lots of those, friends, because she's kind and outgoing and maybe a little crazy under burgeoning refinement, a conversationalist with experiences enough to make discussions interesting without losing her charm. All that she does will only serve to lend her credence, give her the authority she'll need later on when her advice is sought, rather than freely given on a laugh.

Washington: I was younger than you are now, when I was given my first command. I led my men straight into a massacre, I witnessed their deaths firsthand. I made every mistake, I felt the shame rise in me, and even now I lie awake knowing history has its eyes on me.

And she will become just that, one day: a voice of reason, a solid advisor for her weyr, her dragons, her people, speaking on topics great and small and it will have been earned. No easy route, no simple shortcut, no great sweep of glorious existence straight out of the shell for her - no, hers is the greatness borne of experience, molded by trials, errors, and successes, too, for despite pragmatism she will find that silver lining in a dark cloud, even if only in the friendships she earns and the changes she makes for the better along the way.

There will be many of these changes, too - she isn't one to sit idle once she earns the full rights to being a junior or even senior gold of the weyr. These are her people and she will represent them and their ever-evolving desires as best she may. Though a solid presence not prone to rash decisions in her adulthood - a good quality, considering the company she's bound to keep - there are things about weyr society that have changed far beyond necessity and that need addressing to prevent stagnation. She might well gather a council around her, a grouping of dragons and riders beyond even those of rank to help her keep her head on straight and to keep her field of vision and understanding broad, but she'll be willing to push at controversial fronts if it means healthy progress.

Washington: If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on - it outlives me when I’m gone. Like the scripture says: “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.” They’ll be safe in the nation we’ve made. I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree, a moment alone in the shade, at home in this nation we’ve made one last time.

And yet, at some point, she'll have to accept that she's hit her prime. Ilyscaeth isn't a dragon to stay for the stubbornness, or grasp for the reins of power simply because she has them: at some point, someone better or younger with bigger ideas than her will come along, and at that point, she's only too realistic about the idea that she'll have to step down, step back from running the weyr. Depending on her age, she might accept simply returning to juniorship until her wisdom and guidance are needed again, or she might let retirement take its hold, content to while away the rest of her turns being a dragon of the people, an ear for those who need it, and a simple friend to those that don't. Whatever she does, she will do it with the satisfaction of knowing that she made the best she could out of what she had, a life with no regrets.

Washington & Hamilton: Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will view them with indulgence; and that after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned oblivion, as I myself must soon be to the mansions of rest. I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers… One last time.


Mindvoice

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SPACE. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Ilyscaeth, her five-year-mission to— Okay, no, just kidding, we're done. Though the public backdrop of Ilysi's mind is almost wholly characterized by space, her brain is gloriously vast and riotous with color, bold and beautiful with a certain sense of whimsy that travels far beyond simple description.

Nothing is quite what it seems in her mind - the sky might be laden with stars, but is it truly the sky, or merely the refraction of sunlight on the upper curl of a wave? But wait, is that really a wave she is guiding you along on, or is it a thin veil of cloud, and below you stretches an impossible expanse of sky? Is… is that a whale? Does Pern even have whales? And even if it did, can they survive swimming through the stars like that?

If pressed for answers, Ilyscaeth will simply laugh, because she knows her mind is far from ordinary. It is the mind of a dreamer, of a thinker, of one for whom anything is possible and every avenue might be explored because nothing is held back. Wild. Free. Limitless. Even her voice is rich and complex, melodious but wry, cheerful but sarcastic, gentle without sacrificing volume or vivacity, words undercut by the sparkle of starlight, the crackle of lightning, the glittering glint of light dancing off anything that might catch a shine.

Music sings beneath the glitter and gold, soft piano and tiny trills of music-box song pinging underlying words in her quieter moments, exploding into great symphonies of every instrument known to man to underly anger, excitement, and other such drama. Sarcasm has been known to express itself with the hard thrum of guitar strings and the deep thunder of bass drums, pounding hard to emphasize biting sass, but it's the quiet you have to watch out for. Ilysi's silence is a dangerous, dangerous thing and is not something to be taken lightly.


Physicality

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Good. Grief. Don't get us wrong. There will come a time that Ilyscaeth will take full possession of her form, will become the gracious paragon of queenliness that her body has set her up to be but… good god, y'all, it's gonna take some damn time to get there.

She's… awkward. Actually, awkward takes offense to the use of its name, labeling it as libelous slander. She's godawful clumsy, in the beginning, all limbs and none of them in coordination with the other, the staggering trippery of a trainwreck with little regards to anything remotely resembling safety. To make matters worse, her antics right out of the shell have left her a little deaf in one headknob, and while this might clear up as she receives attention from healers it sort of makes her loud and obnoxious and even more off-kilter than usual.

More than one thing will probably get damaged. Hide your valuables. Don't let her into art galleries. If she looks like she's about to sneeze, duck and tackle anyone out of the way that you can possibly manage, or she'll do it for you, with the added consequence of her being huge, even for a gold. Seriously. There might be bigger dragons out there, but only by fractions of meters at best, and even then most of them don't have her claim to fame for sheer wrecking ability. The only good thing about this is that by the time it matters, she'll have learned her boundaries, figured out what constitutes good and bad touching, and have explored the outer limits of her reach. By the time she leaves the weyrling barracks, she'll have possibly the best understanding of her own physicality of them all, able to outrun and outlast if only by virtue of knowing every intimate detail of her limits.

The meantime will be rough. Prep the bandages. Maybe take a few dragonhealer courses. In fact, maybe plan to make a shift into the dragonhealer profession all together. You can do that, right? The professions are basically the same, just gotta learn a few new bones and organs and stuff, yeah? Because she's going to be injured. A lot. In fact, you might not even be able to properly map the galaxy that makes up her hide properly in the first turn or two because you'll never have seen it all at once, for being covered with bandages and mottled with ugly bruising.

Once she gets a hang of herself, though… watch out. There's no one way of moving for her, her physicality is just as nuanced as any other part of her life, expressive to a fault. She might default a little towards a bossy swagger in a good mood, and a queen's formal death-march for in a bad one, but you'll know immediately by looking at her that she means what she's expressing, you and everybody else aware of whatever mood she's in without any need to bespeak anybody at all.


Flights

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As for flights, well … in this Ilysi channels her inner boss-ass bitch. She doesn't so much change personality as she does rapidly lose the ability to give any sort of a crap about what people might think, about her attitude or her goldliness or any-damn-thing that isn't what she wants. She is spunk personified in her proddy days, cocky and smug and mouthy in excess. And if you don't like it? Too fuckin' bad. You're either at her side or in her way, and she won't be afraid to mock anybody who tries to play her down.

The closer she gets to her flight, the worse she gets, never quite flirtatious so much as increasingly insufferable and willing to pick a fight. This might lead to some honest-to-Faranth wrasslin' if only to alleviate some of the bone-deep itch, some misguided attempt to do anything to keep the stars in her hide from glinting quite so tellingly. She doesn't enjoy flights for the romance of it all, you see - she'll chose the dragons whose company she keeps, and it won't be in midair, you big damn dorks, so kindly take a long walk off a short cliff and forget what your damn wings are for if you think that sniffing after her for a sevenday's gonna get you any-damn-where. Mental sunbeam.

But when that day finally comes, well… She owns it. She. Owns. It. Because she's a damn good flyer. She's borked it up enough times to have figured out exactly what to do, and while her maiden flight might have some of the hallmarks of trial and error, she's still a beast in the skies and ain't nobody can really hope to live up to her. It's the swallow's notch in her wings, it just has to be, because she's quick, she's cutting, and honestly if it weren't for the fact that exhaustion will eventually slow her roll, she might well outfly every damn one of them. She's just that good.

But alas, all good things must come to an end, and then the real games begin because Ilysi will make an interesting clutchmother. What do you mean, she's grounded. She has to spend how many months cooped up on the sands? It's hot. Whose bright idea was this, even? HUFF. PUFF. Bitch. Whine. Her entire pregnancy will be one long stretch of indignance, broken up by the occasional bossy demand for someone to bring her pickled meats from the backwater regions of Fort, or a basket of bugs that are delicacy in Igen that she'll tip back into her maw in one go.

Once those eggs hit the sands, though— well. There's something magic about new life once it's something to be physically admired, rather than a nebulous concept hogging up your womb and keeping you from living your life. No dragon has to be a particularly good parent in the way our society conceives it, but she'll be on the near side of doting, present for touchings, if not surprisingly tolerant of shenanigans and goings-on. She perhaps remembers what she was like as an egg, or maybe just draws on her own mistakes and inner fortitude, but nevertheless she is a patient clutchdam, giving candidates their time to shine before gently shooing them off when she's done. Perhaps with experience, the rest will come around too, but at least for the first time or two, the entire flight-to-hatching process will be an interesting time for her and Cita both.


Inspiration

HELLO BELOVED, BEST OF BAES AND BEST OF WOMEN, CHERISHED CITA OF OUR HEARTS, AND WELCOME TO WEYRLINGHOOD. I know this has been a difficult time for us all, having to dance around discussions of everything without ever being able to tell you what was going on, but I know it was worth it for us and we sincerely hope it was worth it for you as well. We have absolutely loved getting to write you a dragon, and we can only HOPE beyond ALL HOPE that we have done justice to what you wanted to see in a dragon. <3

Egg: Our egg theme this cycle was "Superpowers," and though we did not limit ourselves to simply comic book inspirations, your egg was based upon the power of Invisibility. The egg's mind tried to play off the sort of personality that might come of a person truly gifted with this power - ego, but also intense self-awareness of exactly what they could do given this power, and why it's important to respect it. These concepts definitely translated into Ilysi's personality.

Name: Ilyscaeth is both serious and a joke in name form, and hopefully it meets your expectations for a dragon name. <3 The 'ily' has a two-fold meaning, taken both from the acronym for 'I love you' for there is no one that will ever love Cita quite like her gold, and from the Native American Miwok name 'Liluye,' meaning "singing chicken hawk that soars." You're welcome. ;D The 'scaeth' brings in that 'harder' sound you were looking for, coming from Luiseach, gaelic for 'light-bringer'. I use the nicknames Ily and Ilysi interchangeably, but of course, feel free to make of the name what you will. <3

Dragon: Dear GOD did I have fun writing this dragon for you. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been planning it for a long time - quietly, nebulously, never REALLY putting anything to paper lest I jinx it all, but she's been there in the back of my head and I've been quietly, wickedly collecting every damn thing you've pondered over for the last however-many months since.

Once upon a million years ago, you linked me to the gif that wound up inspiring Ilysi's physical form, motes of golden dust glittering in a dark mahogany room with only the word 'dragon' attached and by god if I didn't hold on to that gif for one forever. I knew from that moment that would be the basis for any dragon for you, and I took it, and I ran with it. It's not only the inspiration for her coloration, but also for her countrywoman build, strong without losing out on beauty. I also wanted to tie her description into the song that inspired her dragon name ('Thunder' by Imagine Dragons), so her wings are striated through with thunderclouds and lightning, the latter of which draws not only from her egg's shiny shell, but is also the first of many, many references tied into this dragon: shiny and chrome, taken, of course, from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Her personality is… complicated, a total mash-up of everything you asked for and then a little more. I considered trying to choose just one inspiration, but honestly Ilyscaeth is big in body and personality both and complex enough to contain them all, and so I freakin' rolled with it. Her youth is almost entirely inspired by Liam Kosta from Mass Effect, drawing from his early days on the ship and the happenstances surrounding his loyalty mission. As she ages, she'll shift into something closer to a mix of Rey and Miguel, still full of that childish wonder, but tempered with the failures of her baby years, the onset of reality, and the bitter but hilarious moments that make up just… life and all of its beauty and ridiculousness. Eventually, she'll sink into the regality that makes up her physical description - it'll take time, and she'll have to work for it, but she'll settle into her skin and take up her mantle as a venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all lining up to put her on a pedestal - one she's earned, tenfold.

I thought about mixing the Hawkeyes in there somewhere, but frankly… they're too good to be mixed into just one age or era of her life, and so they run undercurrent in everything and became a part of her physicality and general temperament instead. She has Barton's luck for collecting scratches and scars, and Bishop's propensity for getting a damn tooth knocked out here or there, but mostly the latter's swagger and style (and her big fat sassy mouth, to boot). Which leaves us with Ily's mind, and damn if I didn't make it space whales. I really liked that under all the bluster and trauma, your gold would still have time and space for whimsy, and into that general concept I threw our mutual love for space, music, the ocean, and mayyybe just a little twinge of Star Trek and Doctor Who to round us out.

Ultimately, however, Ilysi is yours to play out and I hope to hell you have fun with her. Lob things off, change things on paper or in your head, or scrap her altogether and make her your own - I am just so, so glad we had this opportunity to pull her together and gift her to you. We love you, and hope you love her just as much.

Ilyscaeth's Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/22zgew7vxsoyucjmdzyk3gwra/playlist/6uj91c4c5nJHKBMnc9xwqw

<3 — Ryn and Ila


Credits

Name Ilyscaeth
Dam Celimoth
Sire Xermiltoth
Created By R'hyn & Ila'den
Impressee Citayla
Hatched July 13,2017
Half Moon Bay Weyr
PernWorld MUSH

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