Scallion

Purchased traits
Physical: Primaries have been clipped off, though will grow back next molt
Items: Fullbody suit, leather gloves for hands and feet
Pets: Leek, domestic horse
Size class
Minuscule
Weight class
Lanky
Appearance
Scallion is a tiny, lithe harpy, lean muscles hidden beneath their thick pelt. Their feathers and tail are for the most part dark, though the backs of their wings have the blue-green iridescence of all eurasian magpies. Their primaries have white inner webs, but currently they are missing, roughly cut off just short of the base. Their fur is dense yet incredibly soft and is pale on their forequarters and blue-grey on their hind. Their teal eyes are unsettlingly large and almost always set in some degree of a scowl, which, paired with their sharp, calculated movements makes them surprisingly intimidating for such a tiny avetherian.

Nestling-Fledgeling
0-1
Scallion was born to Rata and Vervain at the very tail end of the war. After Rata lost her father to the war, the young couple sought to distance themselves from the bloodshed and make a career out of textiles. Their small, nimble hands lended to exquisitely detailed weavings and padded armour was in hot demand, so it wasn’t long until Rata secured herself a lofty rank within the fabrics guild.
A year after Scallion was born, the war finally gasped it's lasts breath and an uneasy peace settled across the land.
With a comfortable life secured for the family, Scallion and their siblings Allium and Chive had everything going for them. Their parents hoped they'd know nothing but peace. 

Sub-adult
1-2
While the start of their official schooling was rather jarring for Scallion, the first major upheaval in their life was the return of their grandfather. Despite being missing for several years, the roo was not, in fact, dead. If their parents ever got an answer as to where he'd been, Scallion and their siblings certainly never heard it. What mattered more to Scallion, though, was that they had been named after the roo, which was mighty inconvenient now they were both alive and in the same house. There was nothing to be done, however. Scallion was nicknamed 'Scalli' and their grandfather was referred to has 'grandad', 'dad' or simply 'old roo' whenever possible. Despite their initial hesitation, Scallion was quick to form a bond with their grandfather, taking a great interest in his stories of war and it's weapons and armour.

Within their first few months of school, Scallion was already showing academic promise. While they were rather shy, making only a few friends and staying close to their siblings for the most part, their work was good and so the only notable attention from teachers was positive.

And then everything went to hell.

During what should have been a normal jungle navigation lesson, Scallion became separated from the class. Also relatively normal; at half way through the course, most students were entirely capable of making their way back to town. Unfortunately for Scallion, they lost the class because a wandering band of humans below had caught their attention. Unfortunately for Scallion, diving closer to investigate led them to meet a human who seemed just as curious about them as they were about it. Unfortunately for Scallion, the rest of the class was too far off to hear their cries through the thick pelt that ensnared them.

At first they feared being eaten. Humans were partial to meat, they knew that. Then they feared suffocation. Choking on hair and overheating, the pelt they were carried in was stifling. After being unceremoniously dumped in a cage, the fear of being eaten returned. They were kept with chickens. Livestock. No one had told them humans kept livestock.
Initially they raged, squeezing and prying, trying to force their way out of their wattle prison, crying for help. For their teacher. For their classmates. Finally their parents. Nobody came except more humans. Eventually, they collapsed on the bottom of the cage, exhausted. Their first day of imprisonment went much the same.
On the second day, they met a human who would become familiar. It gave them food and water. Half starved, they didn’t notice the hand approaching until it was upon them. They beat and pecked and lashed out until it retreated and they were free to eat in the relative peace of the humans constant gaze. The first week went similarly.
In the second week, a different human accompanied the regular one when feeding time came around. Scallion was suspicious, and unfortunately their suspicions were correct. In came another hand, but this time of the second human. This one wasn’t so easily deterred. The confusion over humans having and using metal blades barely had time to register before their primary feathers were gone, scattered on the ground.
The rest of the year passed as a miserable blur. Hopes of escape dashed with their wings, they spent a lot of their time listless on the cage floor. They made a few escape attempts when the human started taking them out of their cage, but with their primary feathers missing they weren’t agile enough to get far or evade capture for long. Eventually they just gave up.

During their imprisonment, they learned a lot about humans: glimpses at how they lived; how they communicated; even picking up some of their words, though they weren’t sure what half of them meant. Though well fed and even getting some limited time out of the cage under the familiar human’s watch, this was no life.

Adult
2+
One night Scallion heard avus voices overhead. It was an argument of some kind, rising from whispers to shouting in a matter of minutes. After a year of silence, they began crying out for help again. The human settlement broke out into quiet chaos immediately. The panic was clear in their tones as one practically tore them from their cage, despite the protests of their regular human. They saw much panic and rallied warriors as the human pelted through the village with them in its grasp.

And just like that they were free, tossed onto the village outskirts.

Shortly after the avus they'd heard arguing above located them, halfway up a tree through a combination of jumping, climbing and fluttering. Carpobrotus and Telopea were baffled by the young harpy’s appearance, but seemed intrigued by the harrowing tale they told on the way back to civilization.
Freedom was sweet for a while, being reunited with their family was joyous.

Unfortunately, reality was quick to set in.

Their mother had passed away while they were gone, suffering from ailments that couldn’t be cured until the toll they took was too much. Devastated by the loss, Vervain's status among the guild had fell. Now graduated, their siblings had stepped up to help the floundering business, but the damage was done. They lived paycheck to paycheck and spent months at a time living off the goodwill of others.

On top of everything, their ordeal was shrugged off. Humans were no more intelligent than crows. They had tools and a social structure but not civilizations. A child had been kidnapped and dreamt up something else to hide the horrors of reality. The list went on and on. It was infuriating. Finishing the half-year of education they had missed was a slog. They struggled to find their place in society again. They struggled to fly with their clipped wings....
 
Their only comfort was Carpobrotus and Telopea’s faction. Shortly after Scallion had begun painfully acclimating to society again, the pair had introduced them to Coprosma, the leader of the faction himself. He was very interested in Scallion’s ordeal. For a while it was a welcome comfort that so many people would listen to their recountings, believe them, take notes, want to know more. Eventually, though, the support they received from the faction twisted and warped. The harpies there couldn’t care less about how they felt, all they wanted was to wrack their brains and fill their books with fawnings over what humans were capable of. How oh so smart the beasts were. Disgusted, Scallion finally snapped and cut ties when Coprosma asked them if they wanted to accompany them back to where Carpobrotus and Telopea had found them, citing that Scallion was most likely to spot signs of the humans who had vacated the area. They didn’t want anything more to do with humans. They just wanted a normal life, whatever that was. Weaving or some other menial job, they didn’t care.

Once again aimless, they drifted through life.

They spent a year unofficially apprenticed under their father. They enjoyed learning to design clothes, the ins and outs of weaving and sewing. They especially looked forward to when they got the chance to help their grandfather design armour, though these projects were few and far between as the peace stretched on. They did not enjoy manning the stall, learning how to sell, how to make bargains, how to take orders... the list went on. He dreaded everything about working with others, even their siblings, who often teased him for his social shortcomings while excelling at their own.

Scallion did, however manage to pull together a few deals of their own. The most notable was securing a heafty portion of wool from a shepherd named Silkworm, though they also made a deal with a dromaeus, of all avus. This wasn't significant so much as it was terrifying, but successfully designing a padded sock for the dromaeus' friend and the connection they gained with the stablemaster who helped them carry their earnings back home was the reason their father finally gave them the official title of tailor. Their ability to make deals was still lacking, but their designs were promising. They'd also worked their tail off at the stablemaster's and secured themself a horse of their own, which quickly proved invaluable for transporting goods.

With a bit more direction, Scallion carried on.

KIN:

OTHER:

Likes

• Succeeding
• Most sweet, floral smells
• Blue, specifically dark or vivid

Dislikes

• Being touched
• New people and also most old people
• Literally any strong smell or incessant sound

Trivia

• Can still fly, as secondaries are the biggest factor in staying aloft and galago legs allow them to spring into the air for takeoff, but aren’t very agile and usually crash-land
• Actually secretly shredded in the wing department as more strength is required to keep themself aloft and they've trained obsessively in an attempt to keep up with their former classmates
• Caught between holding their wings in tight to hide their missing primaries and holding them out because the clipped shafts irritate their skin
• Their primaries will start to come back in with their yearly moult; starting in December-January and ending March-April, though curiously, their molt seems to have skipped a year
• Large eyes and big, mobile ears make them well suited for navigating dim light
• They're rarely take their gloves off, as they hate the feeling of touching almost everything, but especially most fabrics
• They wear their suit almost always when in public, as it hides their clipped wings from staring eyes and shows off their work to customers

Songs

• Blood - the Middle East
• Upward Over the Mountain - Iron and Wine
• Count the Lightning - Until the Ribbon Breaks
• Mercurial - Picture Atlantic
• All These Things That I've Done - The Killers