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Name: Efflis
Age: 44
Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Not interested. Go away.
Craft: Tanner; formerly an Apprentice Vintner many turns ago. (Though he never walked the tables and totally abandoned the craft, Efflis still ferments his own wine, dabbling in vintnercraft for his own entertainment.)
Rank: Journeyman; he imagines walking the tables at times and becoming a Master but relocation is complicated for Efflis. So a Journeyman he remains.
Location: High Reaches Weyr
Physical Description: Standing just under 6” (in Earth measurements), Efflis is still a stocky man. His broad shoulders add a shape to his frame – but so does his sagging stomach. He isn’t out of shape, but years of drinking have given him a bit of a gut. His forearms are sun-stained and covered in thick hair and freckles. His jaw is square, his lower lip puffy, and his dark blue eyes are sunken under a pronounced brow. He sports a full beard that is sometimes trimmed, sometimes not, and rounded ears poke out at attention from the sides of his head. His hair is chestnut brown, streaked with gray, and typically swept to one side in a messy comb-over. His hands are always stained darkly from his work, and he sports a series of cuts and drags from various difficult beasts and slips of the knife. If you tried to hold his hand, for some reason that he could not fathom, it might feel similar to touching unoiled dragon hide. Basically – he’s not a looker. He’s just an older chubby man who could not be bothered to care particularly much about his appearance. Who is he trying to impress? Certainly not the herdbeasts he is preparing to kill – and certainly not you.
Personality: I’m not interesting. Now go away.
Efflis is a crotchety old guy in training. He is easily annoyed, often frustrated, and emotionally detached. He prefers being alone to being with people, but he still has those individuals whose company he enjoys. Would he call them friends? Meh, probably not. But he will talk to them and hang around them and act vaguely interested in the uninteresting things that they say. Efflis views himself as utterly alone in this world, and there is very little that could ever change that. This does not translate to him avoiding human contact; it just means that relationships matter very little to him, and that he sees everyone as largely expendable. He is drawn to people who are docile and cause very little turmoil. On the reverse, he is absolutely disgusted by those who need to the center of attention, or who always seem to be going through some kind of dramatic escapade. Get out his face, please.
Efflis gets equally annoyed by people who talk too much and those who try to get him to talk more. If he wants to talk, then he will say something. Trying to force him into a conversation is akin to trying to make a dragon cuddle a herdbeast. He just won’t have any of it. The way to get his attention is to talk about something he cares about while not getting too personal on either end of the conversation. If you see him tanning and ask him to explain what he is doing, he will probably share. If you come up to him while he is eating and ask how his day is, he will stare at you until you go away. Those who he views as his equals – i.e. close to his age and rank – he will be much more open with, but an overenthusiastic teenage Candidate will make him want to claw his eyes out of his head.
Despite his annoyance with Pern and everything in it, Efflis is very rarely angry. Or sad. Or happy. Or nervous. He is not devoid of emotion, but from the outside, many people likely believe that he is. It’s apathy. And he has it in spades. There is a bonus to this – Efflis is incredibly objective. Because he places little value in people, he is very reliable when it comes to making a decision. He will look at just the facts and give his view based on them. Because of his background in trading, Efflis has traveled all over Pern and is well-versed in how life functions at all sorts of Weyrs and Holds. He is likely a good source of information for the higher-ups in the Weyr, and it would not be odd for many people to come seeking his opinion on a situation. Depending on who it is, he doesn’t mind.
Efflis is observant and tends to notice most things, even if he doesn’t care about them. It would not be strange for him to suddenly ask a complaining wife, “If you love him so much, then why are sleeping with his brother?” without having any firsthand information on the subject. He picks up on body language and hears a lot of things that most people are too busy talking to actually perceive. Efflis is not a gossip, but he does not protect secrets either. He dispenses information as he deems necessary with little consideration of the feelings of anyone involved. Though his cut-and-dry way of sharing information and asking questions may put some people off (or even be interpreted as mean-spirited), it is not the case. He just does not spare anyone’s – ANYONE’S – feelings ever because he does not need other people to spare his. (The Weyrwoman could ask him what he thought of the ominous planet looming near, and he would say, “I think we will have Threadfall and that you should have prepared us better for it.” These kind of comments would get him in serious trouble, but like everything, Efflis doesn't seem to care.) He communicates in the way that he would like to be communicated with: straight and to the point.
Efflis seems adverse to the presence of dragons. If someone approaches him with a dragon, he is quite likely to avoid interacting with them altogether. Why he would choose to live in a Weyr then is anybody’s guess. But if you read the secret!history, then you can probably figure it out!
Positive Trait List Observant, Practical, Reliable
Negative Trait List Detached, Blunt, Grumpy
History: It is none of your business.
Very little is known about Efflis’s past by those of the Weyr. The Weyrwoman and Weyrleader likely know for obvious reasons, and it is possible that some of the older inhabitants of the Weyr, especially older Journeymen/Masters, might have gleaned snippets of his story. However, this is rare. He is exceptionally private and dislikes young people. So get off his lawn already.
I would like for this character’s history to remain largely unknown – even by people OOCly! So I am going to white-out certain parts of his history. Try to resist the urge to read it (non-Managers); it will be more fun to learn it ICly!
His childhood is relatively unimportant, especially in his own mind. Efflis was born in Crom Hold. His mother was an apprentice vintner; he did not know his father. His mother went to her deathbed claiming it was the Lord of the Hold, a claim that eventually had her turned Holdless when she decided to try and attack the Lady. Efflis was taken in by his grandmother who told him she believed that it was a dragonrider who had driven his mother mad with lust, and that his mother was bound to go cause a scene eventually as she had always been an “addle-brained” child. Efflis doesn’t care either way; it would change nothing in his life to know the truth.
Efflis became an apprentice vintner shortly after he turned ten. All of the women in his family had been vintners, and since his mother had not birthed a daughter, Efflis was dragged into the craft in her place. However, when he turned fifteen, his grandmother fell ill. She had a younger sister who had moved to Fort Weyr with her husband several turns ago, and hoping to leave Efflis in the hands of a family member, the pair relocated to Fort Weyr. His grandmother died two turns later, and so his Great Aunt took over his teachings of vintnercraft.
Shortly after moving to the Weyr, Efflis was encouraged to become a Candidate. A diligent child, he went to the Sands every time, though he never showed a particular amount of excitement or even nerves. Hatchings were few and far between, and Efflis did not Impress the first time he stood. When he was 18 turns old, Efflis made the decision to walk the tables and become a Journeyman Vintner. However, a clutch had been laid and so, before he could do that, he stood one last time – and Impressed a docile brown dragon named Phellioth. Though most dragonriders in this time continued to pursue a secondary craft, Efflis found balancing his vintner training with his weyrling training a daunting task. So he put off his table-walking and focused on dragonriding instead. He was an average rider, but he and Phellioth were the most dependable pair in the entire Weyr. Once they joined a Wing, Efflis (now E’lis) decided to take some time off of his training and just spend his days with Phellioth. Phellioth was a very docile creature, but just like any other dragon, he could be incited to lust. One day, the Queen took to the air. Efflis never imagined that His would actually join the flight; he had never tried to fly any other dragon before. And yet, when the Queen rose, so did Phellioth. With Queenflights growing more and more rare, every bronze and most of the browns in the Weyr took to the skies. It was a terrible thing; the mass rush to catch her left many dragons injured. Fights broke out between riders.
Worst of all, Efflis knew that Phellioth had likely been stirred so deeply to fly because of his rider’s obsession with the Weyrwoman. Efflis was not a particularly passionate man, but he had loved her from a distance since he first met her. She was older than him, but had shown the boy more compassion in the turns he had known her than perhaps anyone else ever had. She was just… an amazing person. He never told her this, never voiced his desire to anyone, but it lit up so fiercely in his chest that Phellioth felt driven to help his rider win her. Efflis’s passion drove his dragon to push and fight more than the docile brown had ever done before.
And it was mild Phellioth who would suffer the most.
Outlasting many of the others, Phellioth managed to come within a winglength of the Queen. Both he and Efflis could feel how close she was, and the three bronzes who charged behind him let out wailing, furious keens. They would not be beaten. In the rush of anger and lust, two of the bronzes attacked Phellioth mid-air. All three dragons plummeted to the ground, unintentionally leaving the other bronze open to fly the Queen, but it was Phellioth who was injured the most. The bronzes had bitten at his wings, and unable to create the wind resistance needed to slow himself, he collided full-force with the ground. No healer could save him. Brown Phellioth died that day, and with him, so did part of Efflis’s soul. The broken rider could not bear to stay at the Weyr; or to even think of returning to vintnercraft. Worst of all, Efflis could never forgive himself for letting a ridiculous desire take away his Bonded; it had all been his fault. So he dehonorized his name, purchased a cart and a runnerbeast of his own, and began his life anew.
After his Great Aunt passed away, Efflis decided to leave Fort Weyr and become a trader. He was barely 21 at the time, but with no family left at Fort Weyr, there was no one to force him to stay. The nomadic lifestyle appealed to him, and he spent most of his time fighting off thieves and felines between Holds and Weyrs. He was a very reliable trader – always on time, always fair. Though he never walked the tables, he would still make his own wine, and he became well-known for it. “The Wine Trader” was a more commonly known title for him, certainly better known than his own name. After about eight turns of trading, Efflis ended up at High Reaches Weyr. He had come, he claimed, to sample an unusual strain of grapes found only in their mountains.
Every Sevenday, he would claim to be leaving any moment now – but he never did. Efflis never intended to linger in High Reaches, but he did… he stayed and stayed and stayed. In fact, he took up residence and began to study tannercraft. Years of disposing of canines and felines (typically with flamethrowers, but sometimes with a knife) had desensitized him to the blood and guts of a tanner’s life. (Efflis wanted to forget the life that he had once had, which made returning to vintnercraft out of the question.) The work came easily to him, and by age 34, he managed to become a Journeyman. Now, with over ten turns of continued study toward Master Tanner, Efflis remains firm that some time – soon, perhaps – he will leave the Weyr. He has not sold his cart or his runnerbeasts, and when pressed, he will give the same answer, “Any Sevenday now… and I’m gone.”
Other: If his Weyrwoman connection is too much, would I be able to say that she was much older/no longer Weyrwoman/retired elsewhere? I'd like to keep that element in, or something close to it, if it is possible.
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