Lead

17

Female

Two french braids

None

Brown

Osombi

Big-boned

Veins: light orange
Birthmark: Kotoma Clan

Medium brown

147 lbs

5'3"

Brown

Storytelling, imagining

Storytelling

Depression, anxiety

Polite, dreamer, hardworking,

Freedom

Over-apologetic, overworks herself, tries to please everyone, ignores her own needs and emotions.

Wants to be a writer and storyteller... even though she's apprenticed to a tailor.

Kessofi

Grey, blue

Sweetcakes

Definitely not the blanket her parents gave her when she was six, her sister's doll, or the bowl that was made with a glaze that her father made.

Bird

None

Character Sketch (I know a lot of this is in the other pages, but still)

Elonta Oriana Kermab Kallisess is the main character in the short story “Wings”. She is of the fictional race Osombi and has brown skin, hair, and eyes with light orange veins that are visible through her skin in some places. The birthmark on her palm designates her as a member of the Kotoma Clan.
Oriana is a young woman of seventeen years, living in a small town with her mother Kallis. After the deaths of her father and sister she becomes quite withdrawn and depressed. She does not know why she feels this way or that she could heal with help. She is very industrious and helpful, often to the point of depriving herself of her personal needs and wants. She is polite and cares genuinely for others, but she is very much in her head and is often distracted by daydreams. This leads to well-told and thought-out stories in her schooling, but also late assignments.

Oriana hates to be the center of attention and prefers to be in the background, working hard. She often wishes people would recognize her efforts, even though when they do, she gets uncomfortable and brushes it off. Criticism makes her very anxious, as does having someone annoyed or angry at her. Her friends tend to come and go. There were a few that she thought might understand how she felt, but the very few times she has told her friends her feelings, they were confused and ceased to spend time with her.

When Oriana experiences hardships or problems, she tends to withdraw into herself, hiding her own emotions so that she can be more supportive of those around her. She gets angry when people insult her friends and family, but otherwise she is friendly to the people she interacts with. She enjoys alone time, and although she’d never admit it, sitting back and relaxing for awhile. She often tells stories to herself as she works: either tales she has heard or ones she has imagined. Someday, she promises herself, she’ll be a writer and storyteller.

Oriana grew up in a loving home, and although her parents, Drem and Kallis, were busy with their jobs, they took care of her and her sister Lianna well. Emphasis was certainly put on hard work, but also on things like acceptance, tolerance, service to the community, and openness, which Oriana had a hard time with, especially as she grew older. At around age nine, she began to lie to Kallis. Not a lot, but just enough to make it seem like she was happier than she was.

As Oriana grows, she becomes busier and busier, with her apprenticeship and schooling on top of helping out around the home and around Kallis’s chandlery and shop. She distances herself more from her friends and even her mother, burying herself in work to tire herself out enough to fall asleep before she has time to feel her emotions. They get shoved deeper and deeper under stress and exhaustion. Even when she gets to know Jalei well enough to confide in her, she’s nervous about telling her. The reactions of her once-friends have instilled in her a great anxiety over talking about how she feels. She doesn’t want to be rejected once again, but she has pushed her emotions away for so long that they almost come out on her own.

Whether she knows it or not, Oriana is quite eloquent. Her classmates nominated her for public speaking competitions several times, but she always refused, hating the attention it gave her.

It is important to note that Oriana, despite being depressed and suicidal, doesn’t want to die. She wants change and peace, a break from the hopelessness, the sadness, and the emptiness that plagues her. She wants to care about something enough that life is worth living. Jalei gives her that, but also makes her realize that there is something she wants even more: the freedom that comes with flight. Partly because of her depression, and partly because it really should be impossible, Oriana believes that she will never be able to fly. This leads to her cementing the idea of jumping from the cliffs at the river: she will never fly (and thus also never be equal to Jalei) and so, having attached the idea of a life worth living to the idea of flight, she comes to the conclusion that it really will be the best outcome for everyone if she commits suicide. To an outside viewer, her logic is incredibly flawed, and yet to her, it is perfectly sound. However, there is a part of Oriana’s mind, her subconscious, that knows and understands that this is the wrong thing to do. It tries to communicate with her by alerting her of the lie “It will be better this way” but the message does not go through. One can also see this aspect of self-preservation in the tears that come when Oriana is on the cliff.

A few more details about Oriana: her favorite colour is grey before she meets Jalei, because she feels that if her thoughts had a colour, it would grey. It is a safe, comfortable colour to her, without excess emotion. After she meets Jalei, her favorite colour is blue. It is the colour of the clear sky, the river, and of some of Jalei’s feathers. It come to represent freedom in a few different ways: flight (sky), love (feathers), and death (river). Oriana’s favorite food is sweetcake, a slightly sweet Medalian snack food made with berries, oats, and nuts. It is somewhat like a muffin. They are easy to make and eat. Her least favorite possession is a blanket that her parents gave to her for her sixth birthday, because it reminds her of her father and sister. She keeps it folded up in a trunk anyway, though, with a doll of her sister’s and a bowl that was made with a glaze her father made. She avoids so much as looking at the trunk, but she has never even thought of getting rid of it.

Shimao Basem Mbunis Tosotet

Tailor

Runiske

No other magic

Large

Feather

Black at the connection points, mottled fade to pure white at the tips.