Traits

Hobbies and Activities

Whenever Taavi isn't hard at work or travelling from port to port, he loves to spend his time tinkering with his own little robotics (he likes to make walking toys; they'll sometimes startle Nura by walking if she disturbs them) or baking. He's quite a good cook in general, but specializes in baking cookies; he loves making jams in the traditional Cupie way, too.

Taavi also enjoys watching video on the extranet - his favourite things to watch are self-help shows, cooking channels, and romantic comedies. He loves a few romantic comedies enough to have their movie posters up in his Cornucopia room's walls, and occasionally posts on boards discussing plot threads for them. He's always most satisfied by happy endings.

Beliefs and Motivations

Taavi's biggest motivation is happiness and a little bit of hedonism: whether it's his own pleasures or others, he always wants to make people feel good. Taavi believes everybody is basically good at heart, and just needs a little help to get there. His main desire is to experience whatever he can, brightening the world a little more along the way; he knows he can't always fix things, but he's determined to at least try to do something. He values spontaneity; he doesn't want things to be too stale or repetitive, and often seeks out novel things. He feels that if he ever stops learning, he'll basically stop living.

Taavi isn't especially religious, and generally isn't particularly prone to mysticism, but he does have a loose belief in the Great Sky, a Cupie deity-entity that embodies both the literal sky and the figurative idea of an afterlife. He's happy to try out different people's rituals and prayers if it pleases them, and he's picked up some of Nura's rituals from her. He especially likes the glass prism that makes rainbows for ritual light anointment. (Nura still can't get him to sit still for meditation, though.)

Assets and Flaws

Most people would say Taavi's biggest asset is how much he cares about them. He's full of empathy and respect, even when he doesn't understand why someone is different. Taavi tries very hard to help everyone and to be there for everyone when they need a helping nub. Sometimes, he tries much too hard, and that's when he starts getting obnoxious instead, but he usually means well. He's persistent, which sometimes reads as pushiness, stubbornness, or even stupidity when he keeps doing something that just doesn't work out. He's also easy to take advantage of because of this; that fact, and the fact he doesn't always read people's intentions well, often puts him in dangerous positions. He's lucky he has Nura around to help remind him of when he might be misplacing his trust. If she's not there, he gets very easy to manipulate.

Taavi's low tolerance for boredom means it's hard to keep him in one place for very long. Though this means he experiences a lot of things and has a surprising breadth of knowledge, he also doesn't tend to stick with things for as long as he should and he's relatively impatient when it comes to getting what he wants. He can be downright whiny if things aren't going his way... but he's at least not afraid to embarrass himself. Most of the time, anyway.

Appearance

Taavi is a pale lavender coloured Cupie with darker pink cheek markings, a bright green organic eye, and yellow-green feathers on his organic wing. He has two very noticeable prosthetics: one in place of his right eye, the other in place of his left wing. Both are made of roughly-machined gray metal pieces riveted in place and attached with cabling. His wing prosthetic has airblade "feathers" painted to match his other wing's feathers, while his eyepiece has a deep green background with a bright red, pixellated eye display. The pixellated display can animate to express emotions with his eye muscles, and can also flash both wholly red and wholly green.

Taavi stands at 7.2 inches/18.29 centimetres tall, and weighs a robust 2.6 pounds/1.18 kilograms - not a bad size for a Cupie, though a little short. (Assuming 8 inch tall average adult puffball standing height.) He doesn't have any obvious markings besides his cheek markings. He's left-nubbed, though he can do some things okay with his right. He used to favour his left wing too, but... well, now it's a prosthetic.

Taavi has quite a few scars, mostly hairline scars around his eyepiece and the stub of his left wing. (They're leftovers from his injuries and the subsequent surgeries to install his prosthetics.) His skin is mostly soft, but the bottoms of his feet tend to be calloused from all the walking he does. He often smells vaguely fruity-floral; if he's been working with machinery, that takes on a distinct metallic and oily tang.

Skills and Abilities

Sharpshooting

Taavi has shockingly good aim and precise control of his nubs. His eyepiece gives him unusual detail for his throws, but even without it, he's great at estimating distances and compensating for wind. Anything small enough for him to pick up is a potentially-scary projectile in his nubs, but he's especially proficient with his crossbow, which he likes practising with. In a pinch, he could probably fire a more traditional firearm, or an energy pistol, with decent accuracy.

Flight

Taavi's prosthetic wing lets him fly almost as well as he used to. He's not the most acrobatic of fliers; his flight has a lot of slow drifting and hovering, and he has to flap hard to stay aloft in stale air. Despite this, however, he can fly in most atmospheres he can breathe in. Side note: his wings are deceptively strong because of this. He can "punch" pretty hard with his organic wing if he has to, and he can even lift himself off the ground when he's on his back.

Eyepiece Functionality

Taavi's eyepiece has a few interesting functions he can access via buttons on the side. Besides a crude zoom function that basically acts like a magnifying glass, he also has the ability to shift his vision to infrared on that side. (He sees it as a weird shade of red.) Additionally, his eyepiece can't "close" unless he shuts it off manually. This means he can't be blinded on that side and he can keep watch easily... but he also can fall asleep with that eye open, which makes for some strange dreams.

Accessories and Weapons

If one counts Taavi's prosthetics as accessories, they're omnipresent. He can't exactly take them off, at least not with a lot of inconvenience and difficulty... and surgery. He can deattach the airblades of his wing prosthetic to refit them or make new ones, though, but the shoulder plate won't come off. Beyond that, he doesn't tend to wear any accessories outside of his job, where he occasionally wears heavy safety gloves, anti-static bracelets, or custom-fitted goggles.

Taavi's only weapon is a crossbow with a laser-guided sight line and a sturdy metal frame. It fires large bolts, which Taavi often decorates with hearts or other cute paraphernalia. The weapon has decent piercing power for being a relatively small and light crossbow, and in Taavi's nubs it has some scary accuracy. The laser for the sight is too weak to do any damage, but it could definitely blind someone in a pinch.

Fashion and Style

Whenever Taavi wears clothing, he prefers frilly and flouncy with bright colours and patterns - often clashing ones, to Nura's chagrin. His favourite accessories are bracelets, since those don't get in the way of his wings. He also likes ribbons, and has been known to occasionally decorate the antenna on his eyepiece with one. He's not much of a fan of anything that's too tight on his back, so he prefers open-back designs. Taavi hasn't really tried much makeup on his own, but he'd absolutely use glitter or stickers to decorate his skin or the metal parts of his prosthetic.

Backstory

Childhood

Taavi was born in Cushy Clouds' mountainous region, to a relatively small Cupie clan called West Breath. As far as most Cupies go, his childhood was pretty typical in a lot of ways, though West Breath's small size drove him to venture further from his village. He mostly grew up with Cupies, but the occasional curious tourist or shipworker of another species would show up to pique his interest. It's through shipworkers that Taavi learned of space travel, and as he grew older he desired to one day experience it himself.

Beginnings

Seeing Taavi's enthusiasm for space travel and meeting new people, his parents Kertu and Iisak enlisted the help of West Breath's clan leader, Margit, to collect funds to send the enterprising young Cupie to college. Though Taavi tried his best, his flightiness and his poor focus made him unsuited for classwork, and he was more overwhelmed by the sudden changes than he wanted to admit. After only a year, he flunked out - a fact that he's never divulged to his clan, and one of the only things he's truly ashamed of.

Unwilling to go home to admit his failure, Taavi went to space anyway, hitching a freighter to one of the few places that offered unskilled work for a young man: Halcandra's dangerous asteroid mining fields. He worked manual labour jobs in between, displaying aptitude in mechanics and electronics once he started getting his nubs on them, but was never formally recruited for any of these jobs at the time. He met Nura on one of these labour stints, though they wouldn't become good friends until much later. The two kept being hired for the same jobs, eventually ending up at the same mining site.

Disaster struck one day. Without proper safety equipment, one of the Halcandran Dees on the mining team was caught in an earthmover's jaws after they slipped and fell in. Taavi physically pushed his body into the way to save their life, and as a result his skull was crushed, leading to the loss of his eye. It took him several months of rehabilitation just to be able to use his new eyepiece, and in that time, Nura had taken to speaking to him regularly to keep him company, impressed and surprised by his bravery (and maybe his stupidity). In turn, he began to consider her a close friend, someone he could rely on to help him.

The Vagabonds

Eventually Taavi returned to work, and for several years he worked in the same mining team, respected for his mechanical skills and trained in machining and electronics by the senior members of the staff. Despite Taavi's attempt to be friendly, however, not everybody on his team shared his desire to help other people.

In December of Taavi's 24th year, Taavi and Nura were dispatched to the asteroid fields for a routine mining expedition. Taavi had received a map and details from one of his fellow coworkers, a Waddle Dee; believing her intentions to be innocent, he accepted her information without question. Truthfully, she'd actually made a falsified map of the area showing an abandoned section of the mines; she was greedy, and wanted the credit for any discoveries or ore for herself.

But she didn't expect how terrible things ended up being. The abandoned mines were dangerous, and when Taavi and Nura entered them, the caves collapsed. In the resulting rockslide, Taavi's wing was completely crushed. The two were trapped together in the cave system for almost a week without anything but a few tools, and were severely wounded and sick by the time they were found. The extended period in the caves together forged an intense, isolating bond between the two, to the point of some slight codependency. Though they were able to recover with the aid of prosthetics, Taavi knows that he and Nura came very close to death, and he never forgets how lucky he was to be with her.

Present Day

By the present day, Taavi's experiences are more of a background memory than anything, and he's pretty much back to his chipper self, excited about new discoveries and blithe about the possibility of danger. He works on the freighter the Cornucopia, where he, Nura, and the rest of the mining team were hired after the debacle in the cave system got the attention of the Captain, the Halcandran Burt that owns the freighter. Taavi and Nura are the most senior staff on the Cornucopia, and their expertise and knowledge help keep it running smoothly. Taavi is glad for how far he's come... though he still misses his clan sometimes, and he hasn't yet shown his face to them after all this. He's trying to work up the courage to face his family again and stop running, but it's so easy to keep his distance in space. Maybe after his next adventure...

• He has three half-siblings. (Most Cupies have at least one.) He doesn't know them very well, since they moved to other clans and Facebook-equivalents aren't really a thing amongst more traditionalist Cupies yet. I also haven't thought of their names or anything.
• He molts his wing feathers every six months or so. He has a special comb made just for helping pick the old feathers out, but sometimes it breaks the feathers instead. He also preens them using an oil from the glands on his cheeks (though sometimes he'll use other oils too). He'll preen his friends' hair or feathers if they let him; he preens Nura's cowlick all the time.
• His favourite musical genres are bubblegum pop, showtunes, romantic ballads and other cutesy music... but he'll break out the occasional hard rock if he's feeling energetic.
• He sleeps on his side so he doesn't squish his wings.
• Theme Music: Best Friend by Toy Box