[rider] T'of of blue Makhmilith [Approved]

[Princess_Feylin]

Name: T'of (former Tofir)
Age: 29 (3545.7.10)
Sex: male
Sexual Orientation: heterosexual
Weyr: High Reaches Weyr
Rider Rank: Searchrider
Previous Rank/Craft: Apprentice Mindhealer
Physical Description: T'of has dark brown hair that he wears short. He never allows his hair to get shaggy. Ever. He hates having it fall into his eyes and his work. It also makes it much easier to care for, and when it comes to his appearance, ease of care is of great importance to him. His eyes are dark brown and rimmed by dark lashes that are short, but thick, creating the illusion of length. His eyebrows are thick and dark. He can move the left one independently of its mate, and often does so to let others know how stupid he finds them. He has a remarkable scowl, but it's not his only expression. In general, his face is very animated, and his feelings are right there for anyone to see.

T'of is of an average height, but he projects such an air of confidence that he tends to seem taller than he is, and he has perfected the art of looming. It's all about the scowl and crossing the arms firmly over your chest with your feet planted no more than shoulder-width apart. Any farther and you start to lose height and begin to look comical, which is counter-productive to looming. He is reasonably well-built for someone who has only recently had to perform hard physical labor on a regular basis. Part of being a young man in Healer Hall was that he was expected to act as an orderly in the case of patients who required restraint. It was while doing this that he acquired a broken nose, though there's no visible evidence his nose was ever broken except that he snores now and he didn't before.
Personality: T'of's motto is, "It's better to be silent and appear stupid than to speak up and remove all doubt." His second favorite phrase is, "Everyone's entitled to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege." People who do or say thoughtless things really, really get on his nerves, and he's a real proponent of thinking before acting or speaking, even though he can be pretty sharp-tongued himself (particularly when pointing out to others when they are abusing their stupidity privileges). This was something he struggled with as a mindhealer-in-training, too: allowing people to make mistakes and learn from them rather than trying to head them off.

As a mindhealer T'of really strove to be an active listener, allowing the patients he practiced on to do the majority of the talking, even though his natural instinct (and secret desire) is to be a hero who can save people from themselves. It helps that he's comfortable sitting in companionable silence with people for as long as they need to. He is also capable of being tender and gentle with those who require it, although almost always at a physical distance of at least a meter. This is particularly easy to see in his dealings with women - he has a very strong urge to protect them that borders on chivalric, though he will deny it until he's blue in the face, insisting that he treats everyone the same. In fact, he's actually quite the sucker for a damsel in distress. Or anyone in distress, actually. T'of's tendency to think that he knows best makes him step in to render assistance (and advice) a lot more often than he thinks it does.

Naturally, it's important to mention that T'of is very uptight about cleanliness. He doesn't like to be exposed to sick people without taking every available precaution, and really doesn't like to touch people who have skin conditions that involve flaking or open, oozing sores. Dandruff and psoriasis freak him out. He hates the thought of have flakes of someone's skin coming off onto him (or something he's going to touch later; he does his own laundering whenever possible). He has similar problems with peeling sunburns, though it's a condition he can't catch through contact. Or at all, really, since his natural tendency is to tan. It should come as no surprise that T'of isn't a very tactile person. It's anyone's guess whether the real reason he always tends to have something in his hands is because it makes it impossible for people to greet him by shaking his hand.

Perhaps surprisingly, T'of isn't opposed to hard labor. He's done it before and he has no objections to doing it now, though he is firmly of the opinion that his education as a healer are wasted by using him for menial tasks. He would never admit that he finds a certain peace in the simplicity of work that involves pure brawn, but a person could probably make an educated guess to that effect based on his fondness for sport. He enjoys games of catch, and he's a strong swimmer.
Positive Trait List good listener; self-possessed; observant
Negative Trait List germophobic; arrogant; a snob about having an education and being intelligent
History: T'of's fascination with healing began early in his life, when his younger sister fell from a roof she'd been walking on a dare and broke her arm. An infection, and then fever set in and a healer was summoned to treat her. The healer, a pleasant young man who had only been a journeyman for a few turns, allowed T'of to help him in small ways. T'of loved the feeling of power that it gave him, to watch his sister sleeping and check her temperature and her wound, knowing that it was up to him to tell someone if anything changed. He was eight at the time, at a perfect age to find someone to worship as a hero, and Healer Niroj was a perfect candidate. The healer was young, good-looking, self-confident, and incredibly intelligent. He also indulged T'of and allowed him to follow him around, though he only allowed the young boy to help if his patients agreed and if T'of had finished all his chores.

T'of showed an aptitude for healer work and a determination that might have made a difference even if he'd been less apt. With his slightly-better-than-average memory for the written word, his ability to acquire information was limited only by his ability to acquire reading material and the amount of time his family allowed him to spend in study. T'of's parents were reluctant to send him to Healer Hall when Healer Niroj suggested it because they were average holdfolk who were accustomed to the idea that their children would grow up and live nearby, but they were proud that one of their offspring might be qualified to be a healer, which they considered a fine profession.

At Healer Hall, T'of found that his memory served him well, but he was by no means a prodigy. Especially after his classes in contagion and hygiene had left him basically phobic about cleanliness. He became an assiduous hand-washer and actually reluctant to deal with patients who presented with contagious conditions or who demonstrated a poor grasp of personal hygiene while under the care of their healer.

It seemed for a while that he would not be suited to healercraft at all, based on his difficulties with contamination and contagion, but when he was twelve, T'of took a required course in mindhealing and realized he had found his calling. With mindhealing, he would never be called upon to touch his patients. Instead he got to work on piecing together the most complicated puzzle he could imagine: the human mind. He became particularly interested in exceptional minds, especially those who were able to form bonds with whers and dragons, and was really looking forward to a future researching that topic.

Shortly after walking the tables, T'of begged permission to continue his studies at a Weyr - any Weyr. The masters debated for a while, weighing his general skill at healing with his difficulties with the day-to-day rigors of the job. No Weyr would accept a healer who would treat injuries or mental distress but refused to deal with the sick. T'of was obliged to undergo a thorough evaluation by a master of mindhealing to determine whether he would be able to carry out his oath as a healer and treat all those in need. He passed, but his answers were still suspect, since he was a student of mindhealing. In the end it was decided the he would be allowed to go, but he would be demoted to the rank of senior apprentice so that he could be ordered by the Weyr's healer to perform tasks he might otherwise avoid.

T'of accepted the condition and the demotion willingly and was shipped off to High Reaches as soon as arrangements could be made. His plans for study were quickly disrupted, however, when he Impressed a little blue dragon while standing by as a healer at his first hatching (Serenath x Dormith 3572.01.01). He struggled a little as a weyrling because of some of the more gory aspects of dragon care, but eventually he adapted by wearing gloves any time he has to deal with raw meat and making sure Makhmilith's hide never had a chance to get patchy with frequent oiling (there's actually a funny story about a time he over-oiled Makhmilith before drills and the entire harness slipped off when he was trying to mount up).

When he and Makhmilith graduated, he petitioned to be allowed to act as a searchrider, figuring that his training as a mindhealer would come in handy, and also not-so-secretly hoping that he'd be able to conduct a little research on the side. He's a much better searchrider than wingrider, although he and Makhmilith are generally in the right place, at the right time.
Other:

DRAGON
Name: Makhmilith
Age: 2 turns
Color: blue
Size: 28.5'
Physical Description: Deep blue with darker points and delicate swirls, Makhmilith is not too far off when he gets broody and makes pronouncements like I am the night. He's about average size for a blue, but he works hard on his physical fitness, always striving to be stronger and faster. He has a few more scars, perhaps, than a dragon of his age and (in)experience ought to have. He tries very hard to seem inscrutable. If he could stop his eyes changing color with his mood, he totally would.
Personality: When he Impressed on T'of, Makhmilith sensed his bond's deep desire to be a hero, and connected with that, because in his own clumsy way, Makhmilith does want to be a hero. Or a vigilante. Brooding and serious (think: Lego Batman dragon), Makhmilith can find the cloud to every silver lining. He sees his pessimism as realism, and thinks it is his duty to look after others who are blithely (or willfully) ignorant of all the bad in the world, usually by acting as the local Debbieth Downer. Sometimes he can go overboard when it comes to pointing out the bad in a situation, taking his interjections from negative to morbid or cruel. He does recognize, largely due to T'of's influence, that simply telling a person what can go wrong not only doesn't help, but can often make things worse by adding to their anxiety or a million other things. This is why Makhmilith developed a habit of lying: to protect people (and dragons) he deems too soft to handle the truth. He tends to do this in the most broody, dramatic way possible.

Makhmilith thinks of himself as a loner, but secretly he finds a sort of comfort in being part of a crowd (though he imagines himself as a dragon apart). Whenever there are difficulties during wing practice, it's usually because Makhmilith is doing his loner thing, not because T'of disagrees with the wingleader's course of action. Makhmilith is deeply suspicious of authority figures and keeps trying to convince T'of that they should strike out on their own, where they can do more good, but T'of won't go along with it. Instead, Makhmilith likes to imagine complicated scenarios where it turns out the Weyr's leadership is corrupt and he (and T'of) literally swoop in and save the day by foiling the plots in a grand reveal. He might actually think of his human as something of a sidekick sometimes, though he'd deny it if asked, insisting that first of all he's not a hero so he couldn't possibly have a sidekick.

With luck and careful guidance from T'of, Makhmilith will probably age into a valuable, useful part of the Weyr, because his penchant for conspiracy has made him pretty good at forming connections in his head, and even though he instinctively distrusts authority figures, he's otherwise a decent judge of character. Of course, he does currently think that everyone is naive (compared to him), unless they're part of the System, but T'of is working on that. Being a searchrider has actually been very helpful to him in that respect, as being introduced to so many people has given him the opportunity to realize that the average person is not a clueless dupe, as Makhmilith seems to believe. The fact that he's inclined to be suspicious means that he is very thorough in selecting candidates, but he also tends to favor candidates with rebellious streaks, which T'of encourages, since it means working to change the System from within rather than going rogue.

As a side note, for all that Makhmilith is scrupulous about eating well and remaining fit, he has almost no regard for his own physical safety. Sometimes his claws and his wings foul up because he's attempted something too complicated, or he's pushed himself too hard. He frequently over-exercises outside of practice unless T'of forces him to stop, and works on risky, dangerous stunts that he will almost certainly never need to perform. This is how he's racked up an impressive tally of injuries for a dragon of two turns, and earned T'of several reprimands for failing to take proper care of his dragon. It's an on-going argument between the pair, about how much is too much.
Dragon Art or Proof of Obtainment: Makhmilith