Post by Preservation on Aug 10, 2011 0:26:42 GMT -6
(Wha'd'ya know, appearance was actually really easy. Probably because it's 4:13 in the morning and everything seems really easy because it's impossible to put any proper effort into it. I'm going to look at that section when I wake up later and flinch.)
Name:: Caoilinn [KEE-lihn]
Species:: Human
Class:: Skaa
Age:: 19 years
Gender:: Female
Primary Residence:: Luthadel
Occupation:: Horse Trainer
Sexual Orientation:: Doesn't know, doesn't care (probably asexual)
Marital Status:: Single
Allomancer
Type:: Aluminum Misting
Skill Level:: Does it matter?
Status:: Snapped and aware, but secret.
Saw it disappear into the dark
All the hope we put together falls apart
In a millisecond point of zero-one
It's even slower than forever could ever run
When you're a member of a race in which beauty can get you raped (and subsequently killed) and an ugly face is seen as a good enough reason to behead you on the street, the best thing to do is fly under the radar. Like many skaa, Caoilinn has taken this to heart. Blessed with relatively average features, she would make a passable noble heiress, but avoids drawing attention to herself by carefully accentuating her less desirable traits. Everything that a makeover artist would do to make her lovely, she does her best to reverse- but not to such an extreme that she's hideous enough to make the nobles she works for wish that they didn't have to look at her. Her clothing never sets off her figure, but it doesn't hang off her in rags; her hair is kept under control, but never allowed to be immaculate. If your eyes hit her as you glance through a room, you'll probably barely notice her, and that's just the way she likes it. Boring. Average. Invisible, even. Nobody tries to kill a ghost.
Standing at an even five feet and weighing in at eighty-seven pounds, Caoi is unremarkable among skaa in both height and weight. If anything, she's slightly better-fed than most, for all that she sits directly on the border between normality and unhealthy scrawniness. Li knows her dimensions well, and very rarely stumbles or knocks something over without meaning to. Though far from graceful, for she tends to move abruptly and with sharp motions, she has far too much control over her limbs to be described as clumsy.
Dark brown hair ends at Caoilinn's shoulders when left alone. It's frequently shorter, though, because braiding it keeps it out of her way- a must when working in the field, for horses are large enough to be dangerous even when they don't mean to be, and keeping an eye on what's doing on is difficult when messy hair is obscuring her vision. Slightly wavy and touched with a few lighter highlights from all the time spent outside, Caoi's hair could be a thing of beauty if she took proper care of it. However, it's rarely brushed (another thing braiding helps with- mats don't form as easily if hair is kept contained), and the chances of it being washed properly are even slimmer. When it comes to a choice between eating (or burning aluminum) and soap, the soap is not going to win- and given her meager salary, that's a decision Caoi has to make all too often.
Almost as if it's trying to be as obnoxious as its owner, Caoilinn's face does its utmost to defy description. The closest most people can get is oddly-proportioned. That's certainly true; her eyes seem too large for her small countenance, her ears tiny and too easily hid by hair, and her nose too long and slender to look normal on any face. Somehow, though, when you look at her, nothing seems wrong or out of place; none of the pieces look like they should fit together, but the whole puzzle looks almost painfully normal. The only distinguishing characteristic is the bizarre softness that hangs about her. Despite her sharp gaze and thin lips, there's something about the structure of Caoilinn's face that makes her look younger than she is, giving her a deceptively naive countenance.
Next to her hair, Caoi's eyes are probably her best feature. Approximately the color of coffee diluted with creamer, they are large enough to be arresting without quite crossing the line to unnerving. Considering the usual state of her hair, it's tempting to say that her eyes generally are the most attractive thing about her, but such a statement would be belied by the crinkles around them. Partly borne of stress and partly of squinting (Caoi is a tad farsighted, but glasses are out of her budget), the slender lines distract from her eyes themselves.
When properly clean (which is fairly rare, as mentioned above), Caoilinn is extremely fair-skinned. So pale that it manages to acquire sunburns even through the ash, her skin is a startling contrast to even her medium-toned eyes, let alone her dark hair. As such, bruises and scrapes show up very easily- and she has plenty to show, since her work involves a good deal of running, bumping, getting run into, and being pushed to the ground by animals much larger than herself. Most of the time, though, this spectral complexion is veiled by a thin layer of dirt, dust, and/or ash that accumulates on its own as Caoilinn goes about her daily activities.
Like most skaa, Caoilinn can only afford basic clothing, and much of what she owns has been patched numerous times. Luckily, she prefers simple, unstyled outfits. They suit her lifestyle; neither rolling around in the dirt nor cleaning stables are activities that keep fancy clothing clean, and between the skirts and the bodices, dresses are too hard to move in when you need to do anything other than dance. Almost her entire wardrobe is grey, either through choice (bright colors draw attention of the sort that Caoi doesn't particularly want) or simple age. Clothing is even more expensive to clean than skin, so once particles of ash and dirt get into the threads, there isn't much Caoi can do to stop the dulling or the discoloration. Not that she cares much; life in the Final Empire takes a lot of work, and Caoilinn isn't about to spend her time and effort on keeping some cloth clean when she can be working toward her next meal.
There's a billion pieces left behind to share
Not a single one of us has the guts to bear a cross
Or a switchblade
Nothing ever goes right, and nothing ever will.
At least, that's Caoilinn's worldview. Allow her to, and she'll quickly convince you that the world is headed straight down a prettily-paved path to Hell. In every situation, her automatic assumption is that whatever can go wrong will do so as destructively as possible. It doesn't matter if she's shown tests of all the failsafes, allowed to personally inspect all the tools involved, and given opportunities to drill every part of the plan- if the end result is a success, Caoilinn will be the first to collapse on the ground in relief and say she didn't think it would work.
It’s not all bad; Li’s complete lack of faith in everything makes her fantastic for not only finding problems with things, but also coming up with contingency plans. (Not that she puts much faith in those, either, but it is a skill that comes in handy sometimes.) Moreover, she’s an incredible person to have on your side in a crisis; since she expects things to go wrong, she never panics when they do. (Indeed, if you pay attention you’ll notice that Caoi actually seems happier when trouble is bursting down the door. Her eyes pick up a shine that’s absent in times of peace, and the adrenaline must do good things for her attitude, because she rarely snaps at people while running around in the midst of chaos.) All the same, it doesn't make her a lot of fun to be around. Sure, her surprise makes even the smallest victory all the sweeter, but these moments of unmitigated joy are brief for her. The rest of the time, she's just stressed- stressed about why things won't go right, how that will ruin later plans, why trying to figure out what will happen is useless anyway because her calculations will backfire anyway. It's one thing after another with Caoilinn, and though most of her anxiety stems from things that haven't happened yet (and may never even occur), it's worthless to try and point that out to her. Living in the moment has never done her any good, so Caoi spends all her time looking to the future- which is most likely a major part of her problem. When she sees a situation, she sees not just the present but also its consequences and the results of those consequences, all of which makes it hard to focus on the problem at hand. Life in the Final Empire isn't easy for a skaa, and Li has seen enough damage in her short years to permanently sear into her mind the consequences of not being careful- but she hasn't seen enough happiness to counter that with the idea that it's better to live for what one has than to worry about what can't be changed.
On the bright side, she’s practical. Nobody who spends all her time worrying about things going wrong is likely to act frivolously, now is she? Definitely not, and Caoilinn is no exception to that. Time is set aside in her schedule for play and other silly things only if everything she needs to do is dealt with. Aesthetics get barely a passing glance; she doesn’t care about how things look, she cares about them working- and working correctly- so that the desired outcome is achieved. Everything she does is taken care of as efficiently as possible; a master scheduler, she uses her time to the fullest and is always on the lookout for shortcuts that will decrease her workload without also decreasing the quality of that work. Unless something highly unusual interrupts her, Caoilinn is a remarkably reliable worker, certain to be an asset to any employer.
Until they try to put her in a group, that is. An all-encompassing dearth of trust keeps her from allowing herself to let others do their jobs in peace, meaning that anyone grouped with the trainer can expect her to constantly crop up and peer at their work, scowling at the vaguest hint of deficient skill. While the others are gone, she’ll run herself ragged redoing their assignments; most of the time her work isn’t any different from theirs, but she doesn’t care, because at least she knows what went into her own labour. Worse still are group jobs that involve everyone doing the same thing in the same place at the same time. When subjected to those, Caoilinn will spend the entire time either muttering to herself or snapping at her unfortunate colleagues. Whether they’re actually doing it right or not, she doesn’t care; she doesn’t trust them, she doesn’t like them, and being around them- worse, being interdependent with them- stresses her out enough so that she needs some kind of outlet. That her preferred outlet involves verbal lashings is their problem, not hers.
If it seems like Caoilinn hates everyone she meets on sight, then... well, okay, yes, she pretty much does. Introverted from the get-go, for though she was far from timid she was happier on her own than in groups, she only grew further into herself as she got older and was never particularly inclined to like others. Already primed by this attitude, she had no trouble accepting the lesson she found in her family’s experiences: that all people, whether they notice it or not, are evil. Everyone. Herself, you, me, her employer, that urchin wandering down the street, her dead sister, everyone. Some people realize it and try to work past it, and these are the ones that most of society considers good people, but no amount of good deeds or kind thoughts can blot out the basic darkness that our pessimistic friend assumes to lie embedded in the soul of every human. Watch them, she warns. Watch the thoughtful ones and the brave ones and the ones who claim to have your best interests at heart. Soon enough, they’ll prove that they are not what they purport themselves to be, or even seem to actually be.
Mind you, there are people that Caoilinn likes. Give her long enough to watch somebody, and she may well eventually allow herself, inch by inch, to develop a favorable opinion of them. In particular, hard work and obstinacy are good for gaining her respect. But she still doesn’t trust them, and she never will. Everyone has that same darkness, and everyone will eventually let it control them, because it’s really been in control the whole time.
That might not be such a bad position to take if Caoilinn would just forgive people now and again, or at least not fly off the handle every three seconds, but those are bygone hopes. Make her angry, and she will hold on to the memory of that anger until the ashmounts spray flowers. Caoi has a deeply-rooted (and quite understandable, given her environment) interest in self-preservation, and considers it necessary to remember people’s actions so that she knows how they’re likely to act in the future and, thus, how to protect herself from them. Such grudges form quite frequently, too. Making Linn angry is ridiculously simple; small things frustrate her easily, and that frustration builds into full-blown rage far more quickly than is probably reasonable.
Inflaming that quick temper is the last thing anyone needed to do, but some cruel twist of fate decided to anyway. Caoilinn is an aluminum gnat, and on top of hating her metal (of course she would end up with one of the only blasted metals that doesn’t actually do anything, of course!), she has managed to addict herself to the sensation that comes with burning it. While flaring aluminum is a convenient method for calming herself down, running out is also an easy way to cut her already-short fuse in half and wreak total havoc on her self-control. Most of the time Linn can keep hold of her emotions, but get her mad on a day when her aluminum is gone, and she usually can’t help herself from venting her anger both verbally and physically. Although her kicks and punches are typically directed at inanimate objects (bringing the Inquisitors down on her head because she assaulted someone isn’t exactly high on her bucket list), she more than makes up for it with the insults; tongue-lashings borne of stress are nothing compared to those she cooks up when truly furious.
Despite all this, Caoilinn can be surprisingly gentle. After all, she wasn't put in charge of the foals in her stable because she beats them to death; she was put in charge of them because has incredible amounts of empathy and adoration for young horses, and works well with them. Put her in a stable, and Caoilinn's entire manner changes. Her tense stance and the proud tilt of her head never waver, but she walks with a bit more enthusiasm, and her voice when she works with her youngsters (and even the older horses, many of whom she has helped raise) is almost unrecognizable when heard beside the biting, sarcastic tongue she turns on other humans. Although horses are the main recipients of this softer side, other animals receive similar treatment; Caoi will always be the first to toss scraps to a stray dog or shoo a mouse out the door without killing it. She's happier around animals, too; her muscles relax and her face sparkles, and she even laughs sometimes at a newborn foal trying to a walk or a dog rolling over for a treat. The laughter always ends sharply as she realizes what she's doing and kicks herself; Caoi doesn't like being happy, because it means letting her guard down, and an instant of not being careful can be the difference between life and death. But sometimes she just can't help herself. As used to anger and detachment as she's become, being happy is just so much easier...
At heart, this is the true Caoilinn. Her experiences have taught her to stay aloof and harsh, but at her core she wants to be kind, to love, to trust. In another life, one that didn’t do all it could to convince her that humans are lying, cowardly, self-absorbed creatures that would be better off dead, Caoilinn might have treated her own species the way she does others. She always would have been tempestuous and pessimistic, but they would have been tempered by a general affection for the world, not inflamed by fear and distrust.
But that's another life, and there's no use in dreaming because this is the only one she'll ever have. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't speculate, because Li doesn't really recognize that part of herself; it's buried deep, and her interactions with it are rare. So she'll go on resenting Allomancers who can actually use their powers, and snapping at everyone who offers her advice, and creating Plan Fs when all anyone needed was a halfway decent Plan B; and if a happy ending ever chases her down and shakes her by the shoulders while screaming in her ear, she'll probably punch it in the face before ever considering that maybe, just maybe, survival can actually be a good thing instead of simply being a little less scary than death.
We can't go through this again!
Plucking our eyes out, turning to stone
Give up on heaven, give up the throne
Chali was effervescent. There was no other way to describe her. In a world of constant beatings and frequent death, where the best thing to do was keep your head down and hope no one noticed you, she bubbled up through the cracks like gas drifting up from the bottom of a soda, bursting into the world through the surface tension. At any opportunity to not frown, she laughed. When she moved and spoke, there was a sense of wonder about her, as though she could never quite get over how astonishing the existence of her her hands and voice was. Nothing was ever taken for granted with Chali- not her meals, not life itself, not even the sensation of bruises forming after being shoved into a wall by a hurrying noble.
While none of her family could ever entirely understand this strange optimism, they all accepted it without question. A tightly-knit bunch, the four loved each other deeply despite being about as similar as a toaster, a carpet, a dog, and a blade of grass. One could argue that they had to, for solidarity can be a very effective survival tactic in times of hardship, but even in the best of situations they would have been a close family. The two siblings were particularly close; from the moment she could crawl, Caoilinn rarely stopped shadowing her big sister, but Chali never minded. Despite the five years between them, which is far from insignificant to the very young, they bonded quickly and well, without a hint of sibling rivalry. Once they were old enough to have a reasonable conversation, they balanced each other well, with Chali convincing her distrustful little sister to give other people a shot and Caoilinn keeping her dreamy sibling's mind firmly on the planet where it was supposed to live.
At that point, all the grief was still in the future. There was no such thing as death or cruelty or unhappiness. Hunger gnawed at their stomachs sometimes, yes, and illness was difficult to overcome, but nothing ever kept either child down for long. They had their family, and enough food to stay alive, and reasonable housing. Sometimes they even got to ride one of the horses in the stables where their parents worked. They weren't really supposed to, because the horses were for the Luthadel Garrison and skaa were most definitely not allowed in the Garrison, but they did anyway, and the sheer joy of it was worth all the risk. From the back of a horse, careening down the track with wind in her hair and her hands buried so deeply in a mane that she could not tell where her fingers stopped and the horse began, Caoilinn could almost understand the strange, elusive ecstasy that Chali managed to find just in being alive- the very contagious bliss that lasted right up until the night she died.
Don't worry about me, Caoi. Smile! See, look at me- I'm smiling! It's going to be all right, sis, I swear. Wherever they take me, I'll come back later tonight and tell you all about it, okay?
Except she never did, because young female skaa don't come back from the rooms of high-ranking nobles. Not later that night, or even the next morning. Not ever. No matter how long their little sisters wait up for them, trusting that everything will work out, they die.
Nariq and Nekane collapsed in on themselves, unable to handle their grief and anger in any way but avoidance. Tensions ran high in the family in those days; at ten years old, and with little experience in why staying quiet served skaa better than speaking out, Caoilinn had no such restrictions on her enraged grief and tended to explode at her parents, sparking viscious fights that left all three exhausted and strained. Desperate to not hurt her family more, she began to stay away so that she couldn't lash out at them- which left her spending more and more time at the stables, which the elder members of the family had begun avoiding whenever possible.
At only ten years old, Caoilinn was technically too young to work. But who cares about a skaa child, anyway? It hardly matters if they work their pathetic self to death; another will always be there to take their place, and it's not like skaa of any age actually matter. So she was allowed to do what she wanted, because it was useful and because no one cared if she tried to lift tack that was too heavy and broken a bone or three, or got herself kicked in the head by a horse because she didn't know how to approach them, or anything else of the sort.
She began taking risks: riding at breakneck speeds for prolonged periods, "forgetting" to be careful when when walked behind the horses, paying less attention while hauling heavy equipment. Probing received prompt and reasonable answers (testing stamina, training them to be less skittish, simple distraction), but anyone who paid attention could tell that these were only excuses. For someone who never gave any signs of being directly suicidal, Caoilinn had something remarkably close to a death wish.
It was almost granted. One afternoon, she was working with a feisty young gelding and got it into her head to "improve his balance" by standing in the saddle. Within the minute she was halfway across the training ring with one arm sticking out at an odd angle and shards of gleaming white sticking out from a leg. Someone told her parents—a lucky thing, or she probably would have been left to die on the ground and cleaned up later—and they rushed her to a local healer, who found a broken rib and punctured lung to go along with the dislocated and broken limbs.
The internal injuries actually healed quite well, but just as breathing started to come easily again, infection set into the leg. Caoi spent days unconscious, trapped in nightmares of fire while her parents waited and worried.
When she woke, her first complaint was of not her leg, but her stomach. Never mind the strange colours of bruising and infected discharge, she insisted as she clutched at the healer with weak fingers. There was this constant, raging burn in her abdomen; couldn't something be done? Perhaps fortunately, she fell asleep before she could elaborate, and the healer, used to the delusions of fevered patients, thought nothing more of it.
For a time, neither did Caoi. When she finally rejoined her parents, they were a different pair of people—hardened, determined. Getting her treated had cost every boxing they had, and both had gone back to full-time work for the first time in months. They weren't distant anymore, but they were preoccupied all the time, and sometimes one of the other would say something strange about metals or mention a name Caoilinn didn't know. Between recuperating, trying to help her parents restore the money she had cost them, and wondering what they whispered about behind closed doors, she had little time to wonder about the occasional ache in her stomach that only went away when she reflexively burned it away.
Eventually, her parents explained the rebellion and Nekane's status as a pewter misting. Seeing the rebellion in the same light as her parents (that is, as a way to avenge Chali and lash out at the people who had dealt her family such a horrid hand to begin with), Li begged to be allowed to join, but her parents were protective now and held her away. Eventually Caoilinn recognized the description of her mother's Allomancy as similar to what she could do, and badgered her parents into agreeing to let her help if she was a misting as well. However, testing revealed that the twelve-year-old Caoilinn was an aluminum gnat, and therefore useless to the rebellion after all.
That very year, Nekane's Smoker partner ran out of copper, resulting in both being tracked down by an Inquisitor and killed. Nariq and Caoilinn drew extremely close, finding enough comfort in each other to keep from going off the deep end. Unfortunately, that went out the window when Nariq tried to find a bit too much comfort in his daughter, an attempt which Caoi was having absolutely nothing to do with. The evening ended with thrown pots and Caoilinn storming out the door to spend the night in the stables.
When she slunk in the next morning, Nariq was gone. They never saw each other again. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the bad terms they parted on, Caoilinn mourned sharply for him and tried to find out what had happened, but nothing every turned up. To this day, her best guess is that he went out on rebellion business and, unintentionally or deliberately, ran out of luck.
Caoilinn tried everything she could think of to drown the pain, but every time it backfired. Both her relationships ended in abuse, drinking left her vulnerable to attempted rape, and bar fights were temporarily satisfying but ended in more trouble than she could afford. Desperate, she turned to aluminum, and soon was blowing half her salary on the stuff so that she could keep up the burning sensation. It wasn't that she wanted to prove to herself that she could feel something; the bruises from her continued riding were enough to prove that. She just wanted to feel something positive, and the warmth soothed her when nothing else, not even the horses, could.
Nowadays Caoilinn has settled down a little, but not much. She still works in the stables, because she has no other place to go. Despite the memories haunting it, she lives in her family's old home; as respected a trainer as she has become, she doesn't have the money to move, especially not to any better place. No longer does she run the gamut of spectacularly awful coping methods, but she remains firmly addicted to aluminum, and for a good five years or so she has failed to exercise any coping methods whatsoever, which has horribly arrested if not permanently damaged her ability to heal.
There's a billion pieces left behind to share
Not a single one of us with the guts to bear
A cross or a switchblade
[/i]Species:: Human
Class:: Skaa
Age:: 19 years
Gender:: Female
Primary Residence:: Luthadel
Occupation:: Horse Trainer
Sexual Orientation:: Doesn't know, doesn't care (probably asexual)
Marital Status:: Single
Allomancer
Type:: Aluminum Misting
Skill Level:: Does it matter?
Status:: Snapped and aware, but secret.
Saw it disappear into the dark
All the hope we put together falls apart
In a millisecond point of zero-one
It's even slower than forever could ever run
When you're a member of a race in which beauty can get you raped (and subsequently killed) and an ugly face is seen as a good enough reason to behead you on the street, the best thing to do is fly under the radar. Like many skaa, Caoilinn has taken this to heart. Blessed with relatively average features, she would make a passable noble heiress, but avoids drawing attention to herself by carefully accentuating her less desirable traits. Everything that a makeover artist would do to make her lovely, she does her best to reverse- but not to such an extreme that she's hideous enough to make the nobles she works for wish that they didn't have to look at her. Her clothing never sets off her figure, but it doesn't hang off her in rags; her hair is kept under control, but never allowed to be immaculate. If your eyes hit her as you glance through a room, you'll probably barely notice her, and that's just the way she likes it. Boring. Average. Invisible, even. Nobody tries to kill a ghost.
Standing at an even five feet and weighing in at eighty-seven pounds, Caoi is unremarkable among skaa in both height and weight. If anything, she's slightly better-fed than most, for all that she sits directly on the border between normality and unhealthy scrawniness. Li knows her dimensions well, and very rarely stumbles or knocks something over without meaning to. Though far from graceful, for she tends to move abruptly and with sharp motions, she has far too much control over her limbs to be described as clumsy.
Dark brown hair ends at Caoilinn's shoulders when left alone. It's frequently shorter, though, because braiding it keeps it out of her way- a must when working in the field, for horses are large enough to be dangerous even when they don't mean to be, and keeping an eye on what's doing on is difficult when messy hair is obscuring her vision. Slightly wavy and touched with a few lighter highlights from all the time spent outside, Caoi's hair could be a thing of beauty if she took proper care of it. However, it's rarely brushed (another thing braiding helps with- mats don't form as easily if hair is kept contained), and the chances of it being washed properly are even slimmer. When it comes to a choice between eating (or burning aluminum) and soap, the soap is not going to win- and given her meager salary, that's a decision Caoi has to make all too often.
Almost as if it's trying to be as obnoxious as its owner, Caoilinn's face does its utmost to defy description. The closest most people can get is oddly-proportioned. That's certainly true; her eyes seem too large for her small countenance, her ears tiny and too easily hid by hair, and her nose too long and slender to look normal on any face. Somehow, though, when you look at her, nothing seems wrong or out of place; none of the pieces look like they should fit together, but the whole puzzle looks almost painfully normal. The only distinguishing characteristic is the bizarre softness that hangs about her. Despite her sharp gaze and thin lips, there's something about the structure of Caoilinn's face that makes her look younger than she is, giving her a deceptively naive countenance.
Next to her hair, Caoi's eyes are probably her best feature. Approximately the color of coffee diluted with creamer, they are large enough to be arresting without quite crossing the line to unnerving. Considering the usual state of her hair, it's tempting to say that her eyes generally are the most attractive thing about her, but such a statement would be belied by the crinkles around them. Partly borne of stress and partly of squinting (Caoi is a tad farsighted, but glasses are out of her budget), the slender lines distract from her eyes themselves.
When properly clean (which is fairly rare, as mentioned above), Caoilinn is extremely fair-skinned. So pale that it manages to acquire sunburns even through the ash, her skin is a startling contrast to even her medium-toned eyes, let alone her dark hair. As such, bruises and scrapes show up very easily- and she has plenty to show, since her work involves a good deal of running, bumping, getting run into, and being pushed to the ground by animals much larger than herself. Most of the time, though, this spectral complexion is veiled by a thin layer of dirt, dust, and/or ash that accumulates on its own as Caoilinn goes about her daily activities.
Like most skaa, Caoilinn can only afford basic clothing, and much of what she owns has been patched numerous times. Luckily, she prefers simple, unstyled outfits. They suit her lifestyle; neither rolling around in the dirt nor cleaning stables are activities that keep fancy clothing clean, and between the skirts and the bodices, dresses are too hard to move in when you need to do anything other than dance. Almost her entire wardrobe is grey, either through choice (bright colors draw attention of the sort that Caoi doesn't particularly want) or simple age. Clothing is even more expensive to clean than skin, so once particles of ash and dirt get into the threads, there isn't much Caoi can do to stop the dulling or the discoloration. Not that she cares much; life in the Final Empire takes a lot of work, and Caoilinn isn't about to spend her time and effort on keeping some cloth clean when she can be working toward her next meal.
There's a billion pieces left behind to share
Not a single one of us has the guts to bear a cross
Or a switchblade
Nothing ever goes right, and nothing ever will.
At least, that's Caoilinn's worldview. Allow her to, and she'll quickly convince you that the world is headed straight down a prettily-paved path to Hell. In every situation, her automatic assumption is that whatever can go wrong will do so as destructively as possible. It doesn't matter if she's shown tests of all the failsafes, allowed to personally inspect all the tools involved, and given opportunities to drill every part of the plan- if the end result is a success, Caoilinn will be the first to collapse on the ground in relief and say she didn't think it would work.
It’s not all bad; Li’s complete lack of faith in everything makes her fantastic for not only finding problems with things, but also coming up with contingency plans. (Not that she puts much faith in those, either, but it is a skill that comes in handy sometimes.) Moreover, she’s an incredible person to have on your side in a crisis; since she expects things to go wrong, she never panics when they do. (Indeed, if you pay attention you’ll notice that Caoi actually seems happier when trouble is bursting down the door. Her eyes pick up a shine that’s absent in times of peace, and the adrenaline must do good things for her attitude, because she rarely snaps at people while running around in the midst of chaos.) All the same, it doesn't make her a lot of fun to be around. Sure, her surprise makes even the smallest victory all the sweeter, but these moments of unmitigated joy are brief for her. The rest of the time, she's just stressed- stressed about why things won't go right, how that will ruin later plans, why trying to figure out what will happen is useless anyway because her calculations will backfire anyway. It's one thing after another with Caoilinn, and though most of her anxiety stems from things that haven't happened yet (and may never even occur), it's worthless to try and point that out to her. Living in the moment has never done her any good, so Caoi spends all her time looking to the future- which is most likely a major part of her problem. When she sees a situation, she sees not just the present but also its consequences and the results of those consequences, all of which makes it hard to focus on the problem at hand. Life in the Final Empire isn't easy for a skaa, and Li has seen enough damage in her short years to permanently sear into her mind the consequences of not being careful- but she hasn't seen enough happiness to counter that with the idea that it's better to live for what one has than to worry about what can't be changed.
On the bright side, she’s practical. Nobody who spends all her time worrying about things going wrong is likely to act frivolously, now is she? Definitely not, and Caoilinn is no exception to that. Time is set aside in her schedule for play and other silly things only if everything she needs to do is dealt with. Aesthetics get barely a passing glance; she doesn’t care about how things look, she cares about them working- and working correctly- so that the desired outcome is achieved. Everything she does is taken care of as efficiently as possible; a master scheduler, she uses her time to the fullest and is always on the lookout for shortcuts that will decrease her workload without also decreasing the quality of that work. Unless something highly unusual interrupts her, Caoilinn is a remarkably reliable worker, certain to be an asset to any employer.
Until they try to put her in a group, that is. An all-encompassing dearth of trust keeps her from allowing herself to let others do their jobs in peace, meaning that anyone grouped with the trainer can expect her to constantly crop up and peer at their work, scowling at the vaguest hint of deficient skill. While the others are gone, she’ll run herself ragged redoing their assignments; most of the time her work isn’t any different from theirs, but she doesn’t care, because at least she knows what went into her own labour. Worse still are group jobs that involve everyone doing the same thing in the same place at the same time. When subjected to those, Caoilinn will spend the entire time either muttering to herself or snapping at her unfortunate colleagues. Whether they’re actually doing it right or not, she doesn’t care; she doesn’t trust them, she doesn’t like them, and being around them- worse, being interdependent with them- stresses her out enough so that she needs some kind of outlet. That her preferred outlet involves verbal lashings is their problem, not hers.
If it seems like Caoilinn hates everyone she meets on sight, then... well, okay, yes, she pretty much does. Introverted from the get-go, for though she was far from timid she was happier on her own than in groups, she only grew further into herself as she got older and was never particularly inclined to like others. Already primed by this attitude, she had no trouble accepting the lesson she found in her family’s experiences: that all people, whether they notice it or not, are evil. Everyone. Herself, you, me, her employer, that urchin wandering down the street, her dead sister, everyone. Some people realize it and try to work past it, and these are the ones that most of society considers good people, but no amount of good deeds or kind thoughts can blot out the basic darkness that our pessimistic friend assumes to lie embedded in the soul of every human. Watch them, she warns. Watch the thoughtful ones and the brave ones and the ones who claim to have your best interests at heart. Soon enough, they’ll prove that they are not what they purport themselves to be, or even seem to actually be.
Mind you, there are people that Caoilinn likes. Give her long enough to watch somebody, and she may well eventually allow herself, inch by inch, to develop a favorable opinion of them. In particular, hard work and obstinacy are good for gaining her respect. But she still doesn’t trust them, and she never will. Everyone has that same darkness, and everyone will eventually let it control them, because it’s really been in control the whole time.
That might not be such a bad position to take if Caoilinn would just forgive people now and again, or at least not fly off the handle every three seconds, but those are bygone hopes. Make her angry, and she will hold on to the memory of that anger until the ashmounts spray flowers. Caoi has a deeply-rooted (and quite understandable, given her environment) interest in self-preservation, and considers it necessary to remember people’s actions so that she knows how they’re likely to act in the future and, thus, how to protect herself from them. Such grudges form quite frequently, too. Making Linn angry is ridiculously simple; small things frustrate her easily, and that frustration builds into full-blown rage far more quickly than is probably reasonable.
Inflaming that quick temper is the last thing anyone needed to do, but some cruel twist of fate decided to anyway. Caoilinn is an aluminum gnat, and on top of hating her metal (of course she would end up with one of the only blasted metals that doesn’t actually do anything, of course!), she has managed to addict herself to the sensation that comes with burning it. While flaring aluminum is a convenient method for calming herself down, running out is also an easy way to cut her already-short fuse in half and wreak total havoc on her self-control. Most of the time Linn can keep hold of her emotions, but get her mad on a day when her aluminum is gone, and she usually can’t help herself from venting her anger both verbally and physically. Although her kicks and punches are typically directed at inanimate objects (bringing the Inquisitors down on her head because she assaulted someone isn’t exactly high on her bucket list), she more than makes up for it with the insults; tongue-lashings borne of stress are nothing compared to those she cooks up when truly furious.
Despite all this, Caoilinn can be surprisingly gentle. After all, she wasn't put in charge of the foals in her stable because she beats them to death; she was put in charge of them because has incredible amounts of empathy and adoration for young horses, and works well with them. Put her in a stable, and Caoilinn's entire manner changes. Her tense stance and the proud tilt of her head never waver, but she walks with a bit more enthusiasm, and her voice when she works with her youngsters (and even the older horses, many of whom she has helped raise) is almost unrecognizable when heard beside the biting, sarcastic tongue she turns on other humans. Although horses are the main recipients of this softer side, other animals receive similar treatment; Caoi will always be the first to toss scraps to a stray dog or shoo a mouse out the door without killing it. She's happier around animals, too; her muscles relax and her face sparkles, and she even laughs sometimes at a newborn foal trying to a walk or a dog rolling over for a treat. The laughter always ends sharply as she realizes what she's doing and kicks herself; Caoi doesn't like being happy, because it means letting her guard down, and an instant of not being careful can be the difference between life and death. But sometimes she just can't help herself. As used to anger and detachment as she's become, being happy is just so much easier...
At heart, this is the true Caoilinn. Her experiences have taught her to stay aloof and harsh, but at her core she wants to be kind, to love, to trust. In another life, one that didn’t do all it could to convince her that humans are lying, cowardly, self-absorbed creatures that would be better off dead, Caoilinn might have treated her own species the way she does others. She always would have been tempestuous and pessimistic, but they would have been tempered by a general affection for the world, not inflamed by fear and distrust.
But that's another life, and there's no use in dreaming because this is the only one she'll ever have. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't speculate, because Li doesn't really recognize that part of herself; it's buried deep, and her interactions with it are rare. So she'll go on resenting Allomancers who can actually use their powers, and snapping at everyone who offers her advice, and creating Plan Fs when all anyone needed was a halfway decent Plan B; and if a happy ending ever chases her down and shakes her by the shoulders while screaming in her ear, she'll probably punch it in the face before ever considering that maybe, just maybe, survival can actually be a good thing instead of simply being a little less scary than death.
We can't go through this again!
Plucking our eyes out, turning to stone
Give up on heaven, give up the throne
Chali was effervescent. There was no other way to describe her. In a world of constant beatings and frequent death, where the best thing to do was keep your head down and hope no one noticed you, she bubbled up through the cracks like gas drifting up from the bottom of a soda, bursting into the world through the surface tension. At any opportunity to not frown, she laughed. When she moved and spoke, there was a sense of wonder about her, as though she could never quite get over how astonishing the existence of her her hands and voice was. Nothing was ever taken for granted with Chali- not her meals, not life itself, not even the sensation of bruises forming after being shoved into a wall by a hurrying noble.
While none of her family could ever entirely understand this strange optimism, they all accepted it without question. A tightly-knit bunch, the four loved each other deeply despite being about as similar as a toaster, a carpet, a dog, and a blade of grass. One could argue that they had to, for solidarity can be a very effective survival tactic in times of hardship, but even in the best of situations they would have been a close family. The two siblings were particularly close; from the moment she could crawl, Caoilinn rarely stopped shadowing her big sister, but Chali never minded. Despite the five years between them, which is far from insignificant to the very young, they bonded quickly and well, without a hint of sibling rivalry. Once they were old enough to have a reasonable conversation, they balanced each other well, with Chali convincing her distrustful little sister to give other people a shot and Caoilinn keeping her dreamy sibling's mind firmly on the planet where it was supposed to live.
At that point, all the grief was still in the future. There was no such thing as death or cruelty or unhappiness. Hunger gnawed at their stomachs sometimes, yes, and illness was difficult to overcome, but nothing ever kept either child down for long. They had their family, and enough food to stay alive, and reasonable housing. Sometimes they even got to ride one of the horses in the stables where their parents worked. They weren't really supposed to, because the horses were for the Luthadel Garrison and skaa were most definitely not allowed in the Garrison, but they did anyway, and the sheer joy of it was worth all the risk. From the back of a horse, careening down the track with wind in her hair and her hands buried so deeply in a mane that she could not tell where her fingers stopped and the horse began, Caoilinn could almost understand the strange, elusive ecstasy that Chali managed to find just in being alive- the very contagious bliss that lasted right up until the night she died.
Don't worry about me, Caoi. Smile! See, look at me- I'm smiling! It's going to be all right, sis, I swear. Wherever they take me, I'll come back later tonight and tell you all about it, okay?
Except she never did, because young female skaa don't come back from the rooms of high-ranking nobles. Not later that night, or even the next morning. Not ever. No matter how long their little sisters wait up for them, trusting that everything will work out, they die.
Nariq and Nekane collapsed in on themselves, unable to handle their grief and anger in any way but avoidance. Tensions ran high in the family in those days; at ten years old, and with little experience in why staying quiet served skaa better than speaking out, Caoilinn had no such restrictions on her enraged grief and tended to explode at her parents, sparking viscious fights that left all three exhausted and strained. Desperate to not hurt her family more, she began to stay away so that she couldn't lash out at them- which left her spending more and more time at the stables, which the elder members of the family had begun avoiding whenever possible.
At only ten years old, Caoilinn was technically too young to work. But who cares about a skaa child, anyway? It hardly matters if they work their pathetic self to death; another will always be there to take their place, and it's not like skaa of any age actually matter. So she was allowed to do what she wanted, because it was useful and because no one cared if she tried to lift tack that was too heavy and broken a bone or three, or got herself kicked in the head by a horse because she didn't know how to approach them, or anything else of the sort.
She began taking risks: riding at breakneck speeds for prolonged periods, "forgetting" to be careful when when walked behind the horses, paying less attention while hauling heavy equipment. Probing received prompt and reasonable answers (testing stamina, training them to be less skittish, simple distraction), but anyone who paid attention could tell that these were only excuses. For someone who never gave any signs of being directly suicidal, Caoilinn had something remarkably close to a death wish.
It was almost granted. One afternoon, she was working with a feisty young gelding and got it into her head to "improve his balance" by standing in the saddle. Within the minute she was halfway across the training ring with one arm sticking out at an odd angle and shards of gleaming white sticking out from a leg. Someone told her parents—a lucky thing, or she probably would have been left to die on the ground and cleaned up later—and they rushed her to a local healer, who found a broken rib and punctured lung to go along with the dislocated and broken limbs.
The internal injuries actually healed quite well, but just as breathing started to come easily again, infection set into the leg. Caoi spent days unconscious, trapped in nightmares of fire while her parents waited and worried.
When she woke, her first complaint was of not her leg, but her stomach. Never mind the strange colours of bruising and infected discharge, she insisted as she clutched at the healer with weak fingers. There was this constant, raging burn in her abdomen; couldn't something be done? Perhaps fortunately, she fell asleep before she could elaborate, and the healer, used to the delusions of fevered patients, thought nothing more of it.
For a time, neither did Caoi. When she finally rejoined her parents, they were a different pair of people—hardened, determined. Getting her treated had cost every boxing they had, and both had gone back to full-time work for the first time in months. They weren't distant anymore, but they were preoccupied all the time, and sometimes one of the other would say something strange about metals or mention a name Caoilinn didn't know. Between recuperating, trying to help her parents restore the money she had cost them, and wondering what they whispered about behind closed doors, she had little time to wonder about the occasional ache in her stomach that only went away when she reflexively burned it away.
Eventually, her parents explained the rebellion and Nekane's status as a pewter misting. Seeing the rebellion in the same light as her parents (that is, as a way to avenge Chali and lash out at the people who had dealt her family such a horrid hand to begin with), Li begged to be allowed to join, but her parents were protective now and held her away. Eventually Caoilinn recognized the description of her mother's Allomancy as similar to what she could do, and badgered her parents into agreeing to let her help if she was a misting as well. However, testing revealed that the twelve-year-old Caoilinn was an aluminum gnat, and therefore useless to the rebellion after all.
That very year, Nekane's Smoker partner ran out of copper, resulting in both being tracked down by an Inquisitor and killed. Nariq and Caoilinn drew extremely close, finding enough comfort in each other to keep from going off the deep end. Unfortunately, that went out the window when Nariq tried to find a bit too much comfort in his daughter, an attempt which Caoi was having absolutely nothing to do with. The evening ended with thrown pots and Caoilinn storming out the door to spend the night in the stables.
When she slunk in the next morning, Nariq was gone. They never saw each other again. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the bad terms they parted on, Caoilinn mourned sharply for him and tried to find out what had happened, but nothing every turned up. To this day, her best guess is that he went out on rebellion business and, unintentionally or deliberately, ran out of luck.
Caoilinn tried everything she could think of to drown the pain, but every time it backfired. Both her relationships ended in abuse, drinking left her vulnerable to attempted rape, and bar fights were temporarily satisfying but ended in more trouble than she could afford. Desperate, she turned to aluminum, and soon was blowing half her salary on the stuff so that she could keep up the burning sensation. It wasn't that she wanted to prove to herself that she could feel something; the bruises from her continued riding were enough to prove that. She just wanted to feel something positive, and the warmth soothed her when nothing else, not even the horses, could.
Nowadays Caoilinn has settled down a little, but not much. She still works in the stables, because she has no other place to go. Despite the memories haunting it, she lives in her family's old home; as respected a trainer as she has become, she doesn't have the money to move, especially not to any better place. No longer does she run the gamut of spectacularly awful coping methods, but she remains firmly addicted to aluminum, and for a good five years or so she has failed to exercise any coping methods whatsoever, which has horribly arrested if not permanently damaged her ability to heal.
There's a billion pieces left behind to share
Not a single one of us with the guts to bear
A cross or a switchblade
The last in a long line of buckets hit the ground hard. The foot that had knocked it over followed closely and battered it repeatedly, heedless of the grain pellets that sprayed from the opening. Each kick was punctuated by a sharp word, but only the most astute listener could have discerned the content of the sentence. Most of the syllables were entirely lost in the general din of metal, wood, and flesh hitting each other.
After a good half-minute of this, Caoilinn put her arms against the wooden wall, pressed her forehead into them, and fell silent. Ilius, the hot-blooded yearling who occupied this stall, neighed tremulously and shoved his head against her shoulder blade. With a sigh she pushed away from the wall and turned to face her trainee, who eyed her cautiously. "Hey, Il. Sorry." She gave his neck a contrite scratch, then fell still and silent once more. Speaking to the horses when she was upset tended to be a bad idea; the older ones knew her well enough to be unsettled when she acted out of turn, and the youngsters were too easily spooked.
Come to think of it, she should have known better than to take off at the feeding bucket like that, but she hadn't considered that beforehand. It was hard to, given how sick she had gotten of the fool that she had been partnered with for the past three months. Avram Ceart wasn't the worst sort of noble—he had yet to kill or even strike any of the skaa workers, and usually a genuine effort to pull his own weight—but he was without a doubt the worst trainer Caoilinn had ever encountered. A minor family member in an already-trivial house, he had to have some experience working in the real world, but it obviously didn't involve horses His bad habits ranged from tightening bits until blood shone on the metal to trying to put foals through the yearlings' paces, and it was all compounded by the fact that he refused to take Caoilinn's advice. Seniority and experience apparently counted for nothing when you were a skaa; he was the noble, so he knew everything there was to know about horses.
Over time, she had gotten used to his ordinary antics. Putting her charges in the line of colic, however, was both new and intolerable. Getting one of the horses killed would certainly send him packing, but neither her sanity nor his pathetic job was worth equine lives.
As if on cue, a voice drifted in the doorway. "Caoilinn! I need to know where-"
She meant to be moderate, she honestly did, but every step between the stall and the training ring intensified her fury. By the time she was actually standing face-to-face (face-to-shoulder, more like), she was in no state to stop what wanted to come out of her mouth. "As much as I appreciate the confidence, you are severely overestimating my ability to give a damn about what you need."
They stared at each other for a few seconds, Avram with a confused stance and livid eyebrows and Caoilinn with a quavering uncertainty about whether she had gone too far. Weeks had passed since she last mouthed off to her so-called partner, and if he had looked displeased back when it was a regular occurrence, she couldn't guess how he might react now. Still, her mouth kept firing. "There was gravel in the feed this morning again. I understand that you've spent your entire life eating meals that are already diced up enough to shove 'em up that hole to your head, so I get why you don't have an ashmount-crisped clue about what to do with food, but I would think that learning to balance your ego on top of all that jewelry would teach you how to carry a few bags around without dropping them everywhere. If-"
Avram was definitely looking more incensed than perplexed now. Panting a little, Caoi dragged herself to a stop and sought her aluminum. As usual, the tiny cache waited somewhere at the back of her stomach. Desperation touched her flare, demolishing the small reserve in seconds. The effect was instantaneous; though she remained tense, Caoilinn's mouth stayed closed and the roar in her brain went down several decibels. Calm wasn't exactly in reach, but she was under control.
"I'm sorry, skaa."
Unsure whether to drop dead of shock or bristle at the diminutive ("skaa" had become an affectionate nickname for her in the same way that some people called their dogs "mutt"), Caoilinn eyed her fellow employee askance. "What?"
He offered a crooked grin and shrugged. "I'll watch out next time, promise. In the meantime, you want some advice?"
Bristling was definitely the correct action here. Though she tried to remind herself that her aluminum was gone and she couldn't get too worked up, Caoilinn could feel herself stiffening further. Exactly how did his mental logic run? A skaa girl is yelling at me! She must have done something wrong! "What."
Apparently oblivious to her lack of interest, Avram patted her shoulder. "Get drunk more often." He turned to go, leaving Caoilinn to stare, dumbfounded, at his retreating back. After a few steps he paused and turned around, one hand raised in a gesture that was probably designed to hold attention but only succeeded in making him look like an idiot. "Normally I'd suggest you get laid, but if you get pregnant you might not be able to ride and there's no way I'm doing this stuff a-"
"Avram."
Get out was right behind on her lips, but she didn't need to say it. For once, Avram's brain cells fired; he shut up, nodded weakly, and ducked behind a door. By the time Li's wordless scream of frustration made its way out, he was out of both sight and earshot.
---------------
Unfortunately, when it came down to it Caoilinn couldn't really argue with his advice. While something that left its drinkers confused and vulnerable was far from her go-to solution for anything, alcohol was significantly cheaper than aluminum and far easier to get to. So that evening, once the feed had been sifted and all the horses had turned in or been turned out, she set out on the streets of Luthadel to find the cheapest bar her fellow citizens could point her to.
The result was a tiny establishment even dingier than Li herself. Ash coated the walls, except for the occasional patch that had been banged into hard enough to clear a path to the white paint underneath. More importantly, a deluge of noise blew her headache out of proportion. There was no yelling, but the place was packed Stepping in immediately seemed like a mistake; scenario after scenario of bar fights, abductions, and beheadings flashed through her mind, each worse than he last. She was hardly going to back out now, though, so she forced herself to march up to the bar and plop herself in the least dusty chair.
No bartender could be seen, so Caoi sat drumming her fingers and glaring at everyone in the general vicinity, partly to keep people away and partly to express her general frustration with life. A grimy, crowded bar was not the image that came to mind when she thought about relaxation. Every second she stayed in this place, her muscles tensed a little more and she sunk a little further into her chair.
This was the last time she took Avram's advice on anything.
But you, you've got it down
Or do you?
Player Name:: Wolf Tears
Where you found Steel Ministry:: Telepathy.
Contract:: No. I helped make those rules because I disagree with them.
Other Characters::
Song:: "Thrones" by the Dears[/center][/size]
