Saizenna Dego

Birthdate: 12-A-91

Physical Description:
Saizenna is tall and lanky, standing just over 5'9" tall and has a trim, boyish figure. While she has no feminine curves or any muscular strength to speak of, she moves gracefully and with purpose, her long legs, neck, and fingers giving her the look of a rather posh and dillettante scarecrow. Her face is striking if not beautiful: a long oval jawline, high cheek bones, thin but well-shaped lips, large brown eyes spaced perhaps just a little too far apart, and a long, aristocratic nose, all framed with a curtain of shoulder-blade length, bone-straight ash-blonde/pale-brown hair. She is very fair and has little natural color, but keeps herself impeccably groomed. She always dresses in the latest Chihallan fashions.

Biography:
Saizenna is the daughter of Ghana Lark, a successful businesswoman and a pioneer of the booming body art and tattoo industry in Chihalla. Ghana created the hot new iridescent body paint and rainbow tattoos that all of the young hipsters in Chihalla are wearing now, and her shop, The Gilded Lily (with its poetry library and omaku cafe), is one of the most popular artist-hipster hangouts in the city. Saizenna's father is Saizen Dego, an obscure, if not talented traveling musician from Sieta who stopped at Ghana's parents' tavern many years ago. Ghana had been an innocent, but nonetheless headstrong and imaginative seventeen-year-old who was immediately impressed by twenty-year-old Saizen's good looks, cool manner,
and poetic way of expressing himself. Saizen was equally impressed by Ghana's fresh-faced honesty and voracious appetite for life. The two quickly fell in love and ran away to Rin Caad where Saizenna was born
eight months later. It wasn't long, however, before the sense of adventure faded away.... Saizen began dreaming of traveling again, playing his music across Uen; Ghana missed her parents and though she loved Saizenna dearly, soon found herself too young and emotionally ill-equipt to properly raise a child. Saizen started going out more, met a female musician one day in one of the Rin Caadian bars, and the two ran off together to start a traveling musical group. Saizenna was only six months old.

Ghana, heartbroken, returned to Chihalla to raise Saizenna with her parents' blessing (the Larks were kind folk who had truly missed their daughter). She worked as a waitress and bartender at her family's tavern until she was twenty-six, then used the money she had saved to buy herself a small shop in what was to become the hippest part of Chihalla.  The rest, as they say, is history. Saizen and his musician girlfriend eventually separated, and he roams about Uen still, periodically visiting his daughter but never staying with her and her mother for long.

Saizenna grew up in her mother's shop amidst the hipsters, artists, and poets of Chihalla. One of the regulars, an old woman named Helene Empshire, was a retired Roug and master painter. She often brought her 'corn, a striking sky blue stallion named Cornflower, to the Gilded Lily with her, and it wasn't long before Saizenna was smitten. At thirteen she told her mother and Helene that she was determined to become a Uen Roug.  Her mother, not yet ready to give up her daughter but equally unwilling to stifle her daughter's dream, grudgingly gave Saizenna her consent and enlisted Helene, who had become fast friends with the girl, to escort her to the Academy.

Her past five years at the Academy have been good ones, though at times a bit frustrating for Saizenna (see below). Academically she has excelled, and though she has not been completely unhappy socially, she still feels somewhat alienated.

Saizenna has always kept in close contact with her mother and grandparents and receives regular messages from Helene and Cornflower through the unicorn grapevine.

Personality:

A creative intellectual with a flair for fashion and the arts, Saizenna is the Academy's resident hipster.  An accomplished seamstress, she makes regular trips to the store rooms and creates her own clothing based on
the latest Chihallan patterns (adding her own unique touch, of course!). She's also a natural philosopher and poet and secretly hopes to someday Bond with Vertigo, one of her best friends at the Academy.

While years entertaining guests at her mother's parlor made her adept at handling social situations, she prefers to spend most of her time alone in her room, in the unicorn meadow, or at the stable - reading or sketching her latest fashion designs.  She recognizes the importance of social interaction and finds people fascinating, but has always had trouble truly relating to others, especially when the conversation goes beyond small talk.  Like Vertigo, she sees the world through a poet's eyes and has trouble accepting life at face value.  She loves ideas, and thinks of herself as a "mortal vessel pointing towards enlightenment" (as she wrote in a poem of the same title her second year at the Academy).

Still, she is usually careful to hide these things from others, learning early that superficial eccentricity, while sometimes resented, is still more acceptable than eccentricity of the soul.  Others probably perceive her as both aloof and fascinating, if not somewhat mysterious.  She spends little time with the other students, but when she does she makes an honest attempt to talk to everyone, recognizing that there is a little piece of
herself which identifies with a little piece of everyone else.  In other words, she is well-liked and well-known, but most people know very little about her true self.  Some are intrigued, others resent her, most simply accept her as just another staple of Academy life.

When Saizenna does speak candidly, it is usually with her Academy teachers (she was especially fond of Astrafal and Daenara) or with Vertigo, Aurora, and the smattering of other unicorns she has befriended over the years. She is an unintentional teacher's pet in all of her academic courses, though she doesn't seem aware of it, and the other students usually don't fault her for it.  Sometimes, of course, there is resentment, but it is hard to resent someone who is so honestly unconcerned with her grades.  Often Saizenna will go through dreamy periods of creative activity during which no homework will get done; she will appear for class late or not at all, her usually attentive face turned toward windows or at the floor.  For a while, her grades slip, her teachers become angry and concerned... but then, without warning, things return to normal.  The homework appears completed on the teacher's desks, and like magic Saizenna is "there" again, her blank look replaced with one of alert and genuine interest.

Saizenna is terrified of love and of making herself emotionally vulnerable in any way, but would put her physical self on the line in a second for the Roug cause.  She may play the cynic, but in her heart she is a steadfast idealist and believes in everything that the Roug stand for.  As for Bonding, though she desperately wishes to Bond, part of her is also very afraid of giving up her "secret self" to another being.  She is equally terrified, however, that she will *not* be chosen, which will mean that deep down she isn't really good enough to serve the Light.  She hides this well, though, beneath a veneer of proud self-confidence - part of which is, indeed, sincere.  She believes in herself and her uniqueness, even if it does mean her own alienation.

She rarely smiles, but when she does, she means it.  Arguments with her are a serious matter.  If she feels she is right, she is cold, logical, and brutal.  She also hates dirtiness, disorderliness, and sloppiness in people, but can appreciate chaos in a strictly artistic and intellectual sense.

Saizenna is a talented archer and an adequate, if not spectacular fencer.

Her light build, however, makes it difficult to handle heavy weapons.  As it is, she detests Coul and battle practice.  She is a very proud girl and being heckled and ungracefully knocked on her bottom are not her ideas of a good time.  She hates to be embarrassed and some of those feelings have been transferred to Coul.

(Picture by Tallulah 'Darkhorse')
 

Wildfire

Wildfire has always felt he was a bit different.  His father, a renegade wildborn visiting the Academy to improve wildborn-Roug relations in 108, had a powerful fire talent and respected throughout the land for the command and power of his magic.  A Roug sympathizer, his sire nevertheless refused to live the "sedate, predestined life" of an Academy corn and returned to the wild soon after his only Academy foal was conceived with Shimmer.  As far as anyone knows, he still roams Uen with a ragtag herd of renegade wildborns.

As soon as he was born, it was apparent whose foal Wildfire was: he was an exact duplicate of his father.  Since Academy unicorns usually mate for life, Shimmer's affair with Wildfire's sire was frowned upon, and Wildfire was seen by the other Academy unicorns as not-quite-one-of-them, but was equally seen as an outsider by the wildborns who had been raised at the Academy.  Not that they treated him unkindly (a unicorn would never do that!), but as a foal he never formed any close relationships with any corn but his dam and perhaps his "big sis" Winter, though she seemed to like to tease him almost as much as she liked to coddle him.

Getting caught in the barnfire last year as a young yearling only increased his feelings of alienation as he withdrew into himself after the disaster, feeling ultimately unprotected and unsafe from the physical and emotional dangers of the world.  He is now in the "angry adolescent" phase, and is determined not to let the world beat him down.  While no troublemaker, the other young corns know him as a loner and a short fuse who is not to be trifled with.  His blossoming talent, fireball, is a dangerous one and one that he practices often to make sure others know that he means business. He can turn into a creature of pure, searing flame which can incinerate almost anything on contact.  He is precociously powerful and even the experienced Wyn have problems keeping his talent under control.  He has no friends, and the others stay away.

He is selfish and tempermental, but under it all he has a good heart and a desperate desire to be loved and to feel safe.  He is strong and steadfastly loyal, wickedly intelligent, and creative.  He has a soul capable of great kindness and beauty.  Inside, though, he still feels he has to prove himself to everyone, including himself.

He is a voracious and dangerous, uncontrolled (but powerful!) fighter.  The Elders are worried about him, much the same way they were worried about young Electra, though in this case they think a Bond might benefit. Wildfire, though is terrified of Bonding and stays away from the other students as much as possible.

STATS: 15h (still growing!), male, black w/ red-orange-yellow mane&tail, age 3 years, born @ Academy

NOTES

Wildfire was the foal pulled from the barnfire in Spring Thaw 110.
He was born in the Spring of 109.
 

Rainbow's End is the creation of Amber McNett
Page Designed and Maintained by player Rebecca Engelmann
~Set Found at: http://www.cgs-designs.com/borders/lightning.html~