Gabbro

Birthday
13th May (ages up 1 year every May and November)
Name origin
A type of igneous rock
Sexuality
Lesbian
Gender
Hen
Sex
AFAB
Plot death
Absolutely yes
Cause of death (if no plots available)
Catches a lethal illness from a patient she was tending to

Purchased traits
Abnormally large
Items/scars
- Several small ember scars across the front legs
Size class
Enormous
Weight class
Tank
Appearance
Gabbro is a huge hippus. Underneath her soft, smooth feathers are tough skin and solid flesh. Her hooves are a strange amalgam of a goose and a boar, giving her the benefits of both (limited) grasping and webbing for swimming. Her beak is much the same, with both the cartilage spikes of a goose and tusks and molars. Her ears are long, floppy, and tufted, and she has random patches of long white hairs (lovingly referred to as whiskers) across her body.
Colour wise, gabbro appears to be mostly gentle browns and whites, though she has several patches of orange and a flash of iridescent green on her wings that’s visible when they open.
For the most part, her demeanor is gentle and warm, but her eyes often dull when she thinks no one’s looking.

Nestling-Fledgling
Gabbro was born in the final, bloody years of the war to Stonefeather and Sunshower. While not the oldest, she was by far the biggest, and as such she was often expected to look out for her smaller brother, Gneiss, when they hid, cowering in whatever shelter they could find as battle broke out in the streets of the city again and again.
While Gneiss was quick to reach his full size, Gabbro didn’t seem to stop. Her parents watched with growing concern as she grew. She wasn’t going to be quick to fledge, and soon she wouldn’t even be able to hide.

Sub-adult
Growing up in the Salt Lake city, her childhood was short and brutal. Crammed up against the border of the Northern Kingdom and sitting on easy resources, the area took the brunt of the fighting as the northerners sought to expand their territory. Gabbro did decently in school, all things considered. It was hard to excel when the world kept ending around you every few months. While she could fight decently, she often held back, fearing that if she did too well, she would be sent onto the battlefield early like some of the other students. She’d grown to outsize even her mother and she didn’t like the way the generals eyed her when they visited the students.
So she threw herself into her studies of herbs and wound care, gaining an apprenticeship under the local physician before she was even two. It was hard work, spending all day at school and all evening with her mentor, but she chased after the notion of taking care of her family with grim determination. Every time Stonefeather returned from the front lines she had more wounds, and with more siblings on the way, she knew Gneiss would soon join her.

Adult
While her mentor was kind, and spared her much of the horror of the role, as soon as her schooling was done, Gabbro was thrown into triage. She quickly grew accustomed to the gore and death, always chasing the hope that she could help. Her first few years a blur, she quickly graduated into a physician in her own right. She helped raise her younger siblings, Chert and Galena, for a time, when Sunshower was gravely wounded defending a class of fledglings in a Northern raid. With her knowledge, and some luck, her mother was able to pull through.

For a while, life went on, blood and death and collapsing exhausted into bed each night. New soldiers from elsewhere in the kingdom would arrive on the frontline, and disappear just as quickly. Whether they died or were sent to battle the onslaught in the east, she rarely knew.
She saw a red hippus and her larger friend a few times, though she never remembered their names and most of the faces blurred together, she knew them by how close they were. The pair barely left each others' sides for a second. Until one day, the red hippus returned, battered and bloodied. She knew before she even saw the look in their eyes what had happened. She didn’t dare ask anything but their name as she patched them up. How soon would this be her parents? Her brother? Her baby siblings? It was a miracle they’d made it this far.
It was a miracle Atropa made it as well. Up until the final death throes of the war, the red hippus would return wounded. She knew it was sheer luck her reckless grief hadn’t wound up in her reckless death. When she had the time, she would take the hippus under her sole care, trying to at least get some conversation to the now reclusive hen.

It went like that until the end of the war.

It almost felt like a shock, when the wounded stopped coming. It was a relief, the rest, but it also felt unnatural. Like she should be doing something. She spent time with her family. She helped raise her younger siblings. She helped her family with mining salt to export for sale. There was still illness and injury to treat, but somehow, the peace almost made her more nervous than the war.

KIN:

OTHER:

Likes

• Pondweed and grass
• A well seasoned meal
• A good night's sleep

Dislikes

• Medical advice being ignored
• The dry season (her dark wings get awful hot under the sun)
• When there are too many patients to deal with at once

Trivia

• While it probably wouldn't kill you, a bite would definitely hurt
• Can often be found paddling about on the surface of the lake in the wet season

Songs

• Hurry, Hurry - Air Traffic Controller
• Pale White Horse - The Oh Hellos
• Rivers in the Dust - Radical Face
• Delilah - Florence + the Machine
• Let's Dance to Joy Division - The Wombats