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Summary
A young survivor doing what she can to make it in the alleys of the Goldtouched City, Skyrunner lives in a perpetual state of loneliness. All she needs is someone she can depend on, but for now her best friend is the gold she steals.
(Thank you Comet for the infobox picture!)
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"I'm The Runner. At least, that's what they call me."
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Skyrunner stays very quiet, and tries to be forgettable when she's around strangers (the dragons at the bar do not count as strangers). Skyrunner has big opinions on nearly everything. She doesn't, however, share them with anyone. Most of her opinions would be unpopular if shared, and opinionated dragons are not forgettable. That's why she keeps most of her judgmental thoughts to herself. She enjoys reading scrolls in her free time, especially those about other tribes. She hopes to visit Possibility someday, because it's a village where all tribes live together in harmony. She likes the idea of peace, but her mental issues stop her from leaving her own kingdom - she feels obliged to bring down the DriftWing royals.
She spends a lot of her time in local pubs, and the regular customers call her "The Runner," because she prefers to walk or run instead of fly when she is visiting the Goldtouched City. She tells everyone she enjoys seeing the dozens of dragons around her, and that she loves the chaotic harmony that the city has. In truth, she walks because it's harder for the DriftWing authorities to track her when she's on the ground. Since the ground is crowded and full of people, it's harder to be spotted, and most witnesses see so many dragons that they forget her. With her generic, pale scales and completely standard wing/sail markings, she is easy to miss or forget. Skyrunner hides extreme intelligence. However, she feels as if she knows too much, and it troubles her. Sometimes she feels as if she's going insane. She hardly ever gets any sleep, and she thinks too much about every situation.
She's always insecure in large crowds and gets paranoid when dragons try to bring down her walls. She has ADHD, so she hates it when her talons are idle. She's always tapping a back leg on the ground, clicking her claws together, or folding and unfolding her wings.
One of the better sides to Skyrunner is her compassion and want for justice. The only reason she hates the royals so much is because she thinks they ordered the slaughter of one of her friends - without a fair trail. Sky doesn't steal from anyone who has little. She only plans her heists if they're somehow hurting the royals.
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Abilities
Skyrunner is hopeless in combat, but she is quite flexible and fast. Her agility doesn't improve her combat skills, however, it only increases her speed. She sharpens her claws every few days so they're handy for picking locks. They also come in useful while escaping, as they help her climb buildings when she is in alleys too narrow to fly in. This tactic is almost unheard of, so it always stumps the DriftWing authorities.
Sky doesn't use her tail as a defensive mechanism too often, unless it's a last resort. She has also learned to make her fire change color (only slightly) on command, so she can camouflage in different places. It also comes in handy at night. Dark fire is certainly hard to spot when the sky is black.
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"We may not be gorgeous, but this is the real world."
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Skyrunner was born to two DriftWing nobles. Her egg was stolen by Cassandra, a nomadic hybrid who had a bone to pick with Sky's parents. When visiting the RainWings as ambassadors, the two DriftWing nobles came up with the idea to tear down Cassandra's house to make a brand-new trading post. Because of this, Cassandra was enraged and took her anger out on the couple's egg.
Deep in a hidden hollow of the rainforest, Cassandra cursed the dragonet that would hatch from the egg to have the power of knowing. The dragonet would be able to think at top speed, but it would also be cursed with insecurity, paranoia, and nervousness. The curse would allow the dragonet to know what was going to happen in Pyrrhia (this was not planned as precognition, but as high intelligence), but it would be helpless to stop it. Cassandra left the egg at the outskirts of the DriftWing kingdom, and then was on her way.
Skyrunner's parents wore themselves out looking for her egg, mostly because she would be the one to carry their noble blood to the next generation. Skyrunner, in the meanwhile, learned to survive in the alleys of the Goldtouched City. The city may seem like paradise, but the low-class citizens see it as something else. Beyond the "great fortune" and the "fresh starts" that are described in history books, there are back roads and abandoned buildings where thieves and lowlifes deal with one another. Skyrunner grew up there, learning how to steal and manipulate others. She learned from many criminals, gaining knowledge from each of them as she went on. She was taken in by the crooks of the city because they could already tell she was tough and would fit right in as one of their own. At first, she only assisted in petty thefts, but with all of their help and training she was able to become the most wanted criminal of the DriftWing kingdom.
After one of the dragons who taught Skyrunner about stealing was killed by the royal guard, she began to harbor a hatred for DriftWing royals. Their guards had killed a dragon mercilessly without any sort of trial, and she was horrified by it. The death of that dragon made her realize that everything her "teachers" had been telling her about the high-class DriftWings was true - they didn't care at all about their subjects. Though Sky's loathing of the royals was misdirected, she thought that she was right - and still does. After this incident, she began plotting to steal as much as she could from the royals.
As Skyrunner grew older, she began to trust very few dragons. She had seen plenty of thieves backstab one another - literally - and she wasn't planning to get herself killed. There are a select few that know about her heists, but she rarely ever sees them. However, Wolfstep is one of her closest friends. He doesn't know her whole secret, but he knows that something happens in her free evenings and helps her out when he can.
Sky moves around often. One day her temporary home will be a run-down apartment penthouse, and another day it'll be the unused storage room of the most popular restaurant in the city. Sometimes she hides in plain sight, and sometimes she doesn't, but she'll always be able to evade the DriftWing guard.
Sky plans her heists during the day, and carries them out in the dead of night. She doesn't know who she gets her intelligence from (she thinks of her intelligence as a curse, and she believes magic may have something to do with it).
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The Curse of Knowing
This curse of Knowing was created by Cassandra and altered specifically for Skyrunner's egg. Skyrunner's egg never making it back to her parents was a part of the punishment, but the curse was even worse.
The curse does not gift Sky with precognition, but instead gives her high intelligence that comes with a deep insecurity. She's always paranoid about the dragons around her, and her already introverted personality is taken to the next level. She gets anxious often, and of course no medicine for that has been invented yet. However, she is able to hide her nervousness for most of the time, and her heists help her channel her intelligence and quick observation into something she enjoys. Reading scrolls does the same thing for her.
The curse multiplies the accuracy of her peripheral vision. Even a flicker of movement seen out of the corner of her eye will be registered. This comes in handy, as thieves need to make quick escapes often. The curse may or may not be the reason Skyrunner is terrible at combat. Her figure and muscles suggest she could be ferocious in battle, but perhaps as the curse strengthened her mind, it weakened her physically.
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"What are you talking about? I'm just your average, completely normal DriftWing."
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Skyrunner looks like an average DriftWing, though she is slightly more muscular and agile. Most who look at her don't think twice about her appearance. She's probably just a Taylor Drift fangirl who manages a couple dozen fan clubs, right? Wrong. She does look quite average, though, with her celeste-blue gradient scales and gray horns with a silvery sheen. Her eyes are a cyan color, which is one of the more unusual features about her. Her sail and wings are the same shade as her horns, and they have celeste-blue swirling markings on them. Sky has a naturally upturned snout, making her look permanently pleased, but she tries to look neutral and as normal as possible.
---------------Relationships/Behavior Around Other Dragons
Skyrunner's talent for convincing other dragons to do what she wants them to comes in quite handy, as her life is that of a criminal. She has a weakness for dragonets, but after they turn a year old she prefers to leave them alone. They get far too annoying after that age. Sky finds impertinent dragonets insufferable, and she doesn't mind getting angry and yelling at them.
Sky acts older than her age, and many often think she is a fully-grown dragoness. Sky absolutely hates conceited people, so if someone boasts about something in a bar, they'll usually end up with a scar on their snout if they cross her. Around strangers, she keeps her walls up. Being as quiet and antisocial as possible makes her forgettable. This is a useful trick, as she doesn't want to be remembered. However, if she doesn't want dragons to sell her out when the authorities come looking for her, she will befriend them. She will only talk to them sometimes, but will try her hardest to seem likable and trustworthy.
Some dragons are friends of Skyrunner, but they don't know her secret. Around them, she's usually a little louder and fun. She has to be very vague about where she goes during the evenings, however, and this usually makes her friends think she is pushing them away. This is why she doesn't have many acquaintances that don't know the truth about her.
With the select few that know about her "secret life", Sky can be herself - a sarcastic, introverted, opinionated dragoness who robs other dragons once in awhile. If she wisecracks or makes a joke around another dragon, it usually means she trusts them. Being annoying is her way of saying that she thinks of them as a friend and can be herself around them.
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Romances
Skyrunner is bisexual, with a slightly stronger preference to females. She'll usually only go for someone if she's had too much to drink. Once, she met a nice-looking DriftWing at a market stall, and she fell for him. Unfortunately, he never returned after that day, so she gave up on romance for the next few months. Another time, there was a ballsy middle-class dragoness named Fiercesong at the bar who never stopped talking. She was kind of cute, but she wasn't completely Sky's type.
There was a dragon, once, who she really liked, and the feeling was mutual. But there was a tragedy that split them apart and she tries not to think about him.
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"Oh, the royal family? I've heard great things about them..."
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A Day in the Life of Skyrunner
Skyrunner crept cautiously through the alley, on alert for any sound. Any soft footstep or even an inexplicable rustle would send her shooting back to her temporary living space, an empty apartment basement that dripped with unknown substances and smelled like metal and sulfur. Sky twisted her silver bracelet worriedly. It had a single blue stone set inside of it.
She wasn't sure what the stone was. It was too dull to be a sapphire, but perhaps it was a kind of rock she hadn't heard of. She remembered buying it at a shop outside the palace. The shop where she had met her closest friend, a bartender named Wolfstep. Wolfstep was one of Skyrunner's very favorite dragons, because he never asked questions. When she came to his bar with a sack of gold over her shoulder and a gash across her snout, he said nothing. He simply stored her gold in his back room and tended to her cut with some of his homemade rubbing ointment.
Skyrunner was heading to the bar again today. She didn't actually drink alcohol that often, but she enjoyed listening to the other dragons speak. Also, a coffee had never hurt anyone. Whenever they spoke about things they didn't know, clues they had found to an unsolved mystery, Sky thought, I know the answer. She didn't know why she could cook up an answer to any question in a matter of seconds. It was a gift and a curse.
Rubbing her eyes, hoping their redness would fade, Skyrunner slipped out of the alley and into a busier street. "Get your Tribe amulets here!" called a greenish-brown DriftWing selling strange brass and gold trinkets. Skyrunner wrinkled her nose at him when he held out one of his amulets to her, and he quieted until she passed.
Another dragon sat behind the counter of her stall while her two dragonets sold baked lizards. "Straight from the Blazing Crevice, caught fresh just earlier today!" the older dragonet called. Skyrunner ignored this product as well. Anyone could fly to the Crevice to get their own lizards. Only a lazy dragon would sit in their city and buy lizards. Honestly, who's going to buy that?
Skyrunner spotted the bar down near the end of the street. Dragons bustled past, some stopping to stare at the Taylor Drift poster plastered next to the door. "Three moons, I can't wait for her new album!" a dragonet squealed to her friend as they strolled past. Skyrunner rolled her eyes.
She opened the bar door and went inside. Wolfstep smiled at her over the counter, his plump form pressing against the table. "So, honey, anything to drink today?" he said in his false-sweet voice.
"Don't call me honey," Skyrunner answered. She reached into her neck pouch with one claw. She hesitated, and then decided it wasn't right to drink on the job. She only needed company. Tonight's heist was going to take some serious thinking. And what could help her think better? She grinned now, hoping that Wolfstep had something good for today's special. Otherwise the customers would only stay to chat, and not for the drinks. "I won't take anything, but I think I'll stay awhile."
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Trivia
- The Goldtouched City authorities prefer to not involve the royal family in the tracking of Skyrunner. They still think she is a petty thief who always gets lucky in evading them.
- Her name was going to be Skydancer, but Skyrunner fit in more with her history and the nickname Goldtouched City locals had given her.
- Skyrunner was going to be friends with Princess Lightspinner, but it was decided that she would see the royals as her enemy.
- Skyrunner has ADHD, which was probably caused by the curse. Since she is always anxious, she's always moving in some small way.
(This code was created and designed by Searing of the SandWings)