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Even for a Skydancer, Yarrow's small of frame, though too muscular to be called petite. A cold, gray sheen flows over her wings like oil, making the scattered stars more reminiscent of frost than sky. You might catch a glimpse of golden scars crossing her torso and limbs, though they're usually hidden under apparel. As might be expected from a dragon hailing from the inland Icefields, she's used to dressing warmly, and that doesn't seem to have changed despite her long flight to the northern territories of Sornieth.
Yarrow's the first to greet strangers warmly, and her friendly nature, good humour, and quick wit makes her easy to get along with. Perhaps in part due to the natural empathy of Skydancers, she's alert to the needs of others, and settles quickly into the role of a host and confidant. While she's often found travelling as a courier, she seems to always be in need of treasure and takes up odd jobs here and there when she can.
Behind the facade of cheerfulness is a colder dragon, true to the original roots of the Ice flight. Yarrow is a detective working for the Seekers, charged with investigating and outing Shade-affiliated dragons and Shade-touched beasts that skirted the Gaolers' gaze to infiltrate dragon society. Utilitarian, pragmatic, and strict to a fault, Yarrow's astoundingly well-suited to the Seeker life by nature, and it often comes as a surprise to her coworkers that she wasn't Gaoler-raised.
- In the course of her work investigating the Shade, she's seen a lot of disaster and horror, and become somewhat jaded and expectant of worst-case scenarios. Terror's become a good friend of hers; it's not that she doesn't get scared, she's just used to it now. She's very good at compartmentalising and reducing trauma into numbers. While this makes her an efficient worker, the repression isn't great for her mental health, and in her personal life she has trouble externalising feelings (both in terms of trying to find the words at all, and the fear of making herself vulnerable), which might be a little odd for a natural empath.
- Working as a detective is a good fit for her; she's naturally inquisitive and likes figuring out problems and collecting information. You could say that the investigative portion of her work exemplify her positive traits and what she enjoys most in life. It's probably the purest part of what's left of Yarrow when you remove the cynicism and severity forged from years of tracking eldritch beasts.
- The fact she likes investigative work contributes to her workaholicism, but it's mostly just a coping method to distract herself from existential terror and trauma. Her job is a large part of her identity; her automatic mode of existence is wanting to find busy work to do. Even if she doesn't have a job lined up, she has a tendency to start fiddling, cleaning, building things, or taking them apart.
- She tries her best not to stand out or to leave traces or roots. She has little to no personal life or possessions, and commonly uses false names when travelling.
- She is extremely risk-averse. Her strength is in patience, and she'll always take the safest option; if there's a route that guarantees 0% chance of incurring damage, she'll take it.
- While she'll help out civilians if she can, she isn't the type to sacrifice herself or put herself in danger to save innocents. She consistently takes the most efficient solution, is comfortable doing mental maths with lives and has accepted collateral damage as a reality of her occupation.
- Efficiency
- Things going as planned
- Eureka moments, figuring things out
- Unnecessary bureaucracy
- Failure resulting from complacence
- Being noticed or remembered
- The main difference between FR Yarrow and canon Yarrow is a difference in priority. Canon Yarrow's worldview revolves around enforcement of justice and stability, whereas FR Yarrow's worldview revolves around making sure the world doesn't end. Fundamentally, both of them have the big picture of the population's best interest in mind, but FR Yarrow puts little to no value on individual lives and as a result is somehow even more jaded.
- FR Yarrow's seen how quickly the shade spreads and what it can do to entire dragon populations; there's a lot more at stake for her, at all times, so she's very high tension, very strict, more cautious, and less likely to make allowances. She has the tendency to make personal judgments on people and go vigilante (something canon Yarrow Does Not Do).
- Conversely, FR-verse doesn't have canon's tendency of working herself to the bone with all-nighters & non-stop work, due to an acute awareness that small misses can result in world ending events. She takes better care of herself than canon Yarrow, and tends to be more self-assertive.
She has a breath of the wild style Ice Magic iPad which she uses to take calls from the Seekers. It also functions as her pass card into the Fortress of Ends. It's ice-cold to the touch.
If you were wondering, I don't consider this common technology to Sornieth, but it's also not unique to the Seekers. Rich lairs or public institutions probably use their own flight's version of them.
Yarrow's bankrolled by the Seeker's icebox of a treasury (funny how much a stash of useless ancient frozen relics can auction for). Any purchases made using Seeker funds must be somehow related to her Seeker work, and it may take several days to receive the treasure via courier. Everything else (including living expenses) must be paid for herself. She's technically a contractor and doesn't actually belong to the Fortress of Ends, so...
In terms of personal funds she usually doesn't carry much and prefers to forage as she goes. She has little to no belongings, is unsentimental, and isn't struck by the tendency to hoard like most other dragons, so she doesn't really need treasure outside of her work.
- Hobbies
- Weapon & armor maintenance and training counts as a hobby right
- Of her less practical skills, she picked up how to cook from Longneck associates in the Windswept Plateaus and Icefields. Dragons can eat everything raw anyway but she enjoys the process.
- Diet
- Prefers mild flavours, but isn't fussy. She's pretty functional about food and defaults to nutritionally balanced options. High fat & protein insects like crickets and grubs, and lots of greens. Mana Thieves are her favourite, but over-indulging isn't good for her...
- Her foraging skills are specialised for the extreme cold, on par with most dragons who live in the southern Icefields.
- She has zero hunting instinct and makes a pretty poor hunter, despite Score's attempts to teach her.
- Type
- Bi.
- Soft spot for Nocturnes.
- Likes butches & bara girls.
- Not a cop in this AU but law-breaking is still a big turn off for her.
- Combat
- While she's trained in basic combat, when at all possible, Yarrow will avoid fights, or retreat when pushed. Her complete lack of pride and indifference to injustice makes it easy for her to look the other way rather than getting into conflicts. She's not a natural combatant, nor is it really her job (which is more to track down and identify potential threats, then call the Seekers to send a warden to collect it). She will generally aim to distract or to wound for long enough for her to make an escape.
- When push comes to shove, she defaults to remotely detonated explosives to deal with monsters (she uses both explosive charges from Lightning, and magic seals from Arcane). Accordingly she almost always defaults to human form when dealing with hostiles.
Though Yarrow was born in the Southern Icefield, she was taken along with her clan to the Windswept Plateaus in her early life. She was raised through infancy to adulthood in Wind territory, and doesn't have many childhood memories of the Icefields.
At the Plateaus, she met Score - a hatchling introduced to Yarrow's lair shortly when Yarrow was still a child. Maybe because they were similarly aged, but they bonded immediately and the two lived out a pretty idyllic childhood free of responsibility, Yarrow being a lot more carefree and laidback during this time.
...
Yarrow and Score's clan was scattered to the winds. The guidance of the progenitor seemed to have been the only thing keeping them together until then, and the stress of the revelation had led them each to different lands. Yarrow herself returned with Score to the Southern Icefield to investigate the Shade. Noah didn't follow them, instead returning to the Viridian Labyrinth to resume her training as an ambassador-elect, and see what she could do to right the world from a position of influence.
Now clanless vagrants in the Icefields, Yarrow & Score got to digging for information, knowing that they could find more information somewhere in the endless archives of the Icewarden. In the course of their investigations, they were reached out to by the Gaolers to undertake outsourced Seeker work, in places where the Gaolers couldn't reach discreetly, in exchange for the knowledge and power that they were looking for. The pair took to this reconnaissance work pretty readily; Yarrow as a Skydancer being suited to infiltration and information gathering, and Score as a Nocturne being suited to subterfuge and deceit.
meeting kye goes here
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