Iesovyenyie
Age 15
Taikie’s roommate

Iesovyenyie is a tall girl, 5’5″, with solid black hair and golden eyes. Her skin is likewise golden, and her chin pointed and stubborn; she’s a bit broader in the hip and shoulder than is common, and a bit more voluptuous than many of the girls her age. She has very full lips.

Her parents named her with an initial vowel, as her mother’s parents had done for her, and the palace office stamped approval of the royal lineage, but she is one of those who has so little royal blood, so diluted, that the initial vowel is a little silly, and seen as putting on airs. Many people where she grew up called her Sovnyie; the less kind called her almost-royal Ienyie.

She can get in quite a snit over that on occasion, and when she does, she’s no fun at all to be around. She is royal, damnit, even if her distance from the throne is measured in hundreds or thousands.

She prefers non-conventional shortenings of her name – Iesovya is her favorite – in part because of the stigma of “almost-royal Ienyie,” and in part because a tyienyie is a noxious lizard.

Iesovyenyie grew up in Lanamer, the capital city, and received her schooling not in a royal-household school but in that of affluent merchants’ children. When you come down to it, airs or not, her father is an artisan crafter of wool goods and her mother a beader and dyer. If they could avoid putting on airs, they could gain much renown in their own fields.

Iesovyenyie has quite a bit of skill in the fiber arts, but went into Mechanics and Engineering to learn how to work with the new mechanical looms, among other reasons (for one, Art House was full but Mech/E had two slots open when she applied).

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Gaikvya
Age 15
Taikie’s roommate

Gaikvya comes from the east coast, an area which, even in 1750 R, is fairly isolated from the rest of Calenta. The spine of mountains on the east of the continent serves as a difficult-to-pass barrier most of the time, impossible in the wintertime; the boat travel down around the southern tip of the continent is prohibitively long and the icebergs make travel around the northern end impossible.

The people on the east coast have ended up generally shorter than the rest of the country, with chestnut-brown hair that has a tendency to wave and sometimes even curl, skin darker brown than even most of the ‘pure Calenyena,’ and copper-hued eyed.

Gaikya has that look, as well as a more slender build than most of the rest of the continent, almost boyish; her people mature late and slow. They are sometimes called “sira-touched” by the superstitious.

She stands just under 5′ tall, and wears her hair in thin complicated braids. Her hair is curly, although she almost never lets it out of the braids. She speaks with a lilt to her voice, has a very hard time with s and v sounds, and clips her k sounds harder than is now the fashion.

She is uncertain about coming to school and will spend much of the year homesick; her people are fishers, have been fishers for centuries, and she is very much a fish out of water on the other coast, with no fishing nets to knot and no lobster cages to repair.

She will lose herself in her mechanics classes – the reason she, alone of her entire settlement, was chosen for the Academy – spending time trying to invent a better lobster trap, a better boat.

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Kotnelbyotke (Kotke)
Age: 15
One of Enrie’s two roommates.

Kotke is from the far far North, where a group of Bitrani refugees have been living for hundreds of years. She’s got hair so blonde it’s almost white, ice-blue eyes, and snow-pale skin. The red, teal, and purple of the Diplomacy and Law uniform makes her look even paler.

She wears her hair in the low-on-the-neck looped braids that are as much a mark of her township as the pale coloration is; ribbons of her House colors are woven through the braids.

She is short, barely over 5′ tall, and a little more stocky than Calenyena norm, being built like a small tank, designed to survive the frigid winters and barely-better summers. She’s soft-spoken by native habit, and a little lost here at school.

Homesickness plagues Kotke through her year at school. She perseveres, however; she is attending the Academy and majoring in Diplomacy because she knows the remote townships like her own need representation, and thinks that this is the best way to get it. She is not the most brilliant student, but she may be the most devoted.

Ledryainryie (Ledryie)
Age: 15
The other of Enrie’s two roommates

Like Taikie, Ledryie has the ethnic Calenyena look. She has a short nose with a bit of an upturn, a very pointed chin, and a high forehead ; she wears two narrow braids looped low on her forehead to differentiate herself from dozens of other girls in her home city who looked much the same.

She’s about 5’6 and broad-hipped, broad-shouldered, and slender in between. She has the best-tailored clothes of anyone in her dorm, because she tailors them herself.

Ledryie is a bit vain, in a conscious-about-her-appearance sort of way. She was a scholarship girl from primary into secondary school, and earned money working for the school to pay for clothing to look as nice as the more affluent girls.

She was born Lyedra; the Academy allowed her to change her name to reflect the status she is working towards.

She’s a brilliant student, and sometimes forgets to concentrate on her work.

Names in Calenyen culture
(Note to self: cement when Calenyen and when Calenyena. The people are Calenyena. The Language is Calenyen. The country is Calenta. The culture…?

About Lyedra/Ledryainryie – this is mostly a matter of affectation in length. She is doing her best to “pass” as a daughter of affluent parents, merchant princes, if you will, a family of skilled trades. They tend to give their children longer names, where farmers, unskilled laborers, tend to give their children short names. Rin. Noni. Lyedra.

Secondly, nouns with a palatalized first consonant are classified as “not-useful, unskilled, crap.” (Ly vs. L.) (NON palatalized first-consonant nouns are “Useful, skilled.”)

As others have pointed out, an initial vowel is saved for royalty and the children thereof, Enarienarie, Arinyanka, Edaledalendu (and thus the tendancy for going for very long names. The translation of many of these things is lost in an old variant of Calenyen, where the name might mean something like The-stars-shined-down-brightly-shining. (yes, with the redundancy.)

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Instructor Getalréta
Female

The Head of the Diplomacy and Law/Counting & Accounting House, Instructor Getalréta is a leonine woman in her late fourties.

She wears her steel-gray hair in a nine-braid strand (http://www.circleworks.org/hairbraiding.htm) with three side braids at each temple; she keeps beads on the side beads which she uses for abaci; the braids reach to mid-back.

She wears the colors of her House (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/64238570666/right-so-based-on-this-post-made-a-loose)- purple, teal, and red – prominently in a skirted outfit like thus (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/23457416205/i-am-ambivalent-about-these-colors-oh-well-i); generally the overtop and bottom skirt are red and purple, teal, and variations on those three colors feature in the other layers. She is a tall woman by Calenyena standards, at 5’7″, and has long chosen to simply be taller and wears heeled boots.

She’s gone a bit thick in the waist and a bit thick in the face over the years. Her nose is small and upturned, a classic Calenyena nose, and her mouth is wide and generous.

She teaches Accounting, primarily, although she has taken a hand at teaching all of the classes in her House at once time. She makes a point of teaching the Basics class every year, as well as the Graduating class, and writes all of the exams for all of the Accounting classes.

She’s a cheerful woman, often smiling, generally friendly with all of the new students. She’s not motherly, but can often find an anecdote or a little quest to cheer up homesick first-years.

She had two children of her own early on; one she lost to the war, and the other married a princeling. Her husband himself was a princeling, so she is connected to the royal family, albeit a bit distantly. In her youth, she worked as an accountant and business manager after graduating from the Aneskan Academy in Ossulund. She worked her way to the top of the House by, as she has often put it, simple addition and subtraction.

Her husband is currently in ill health, which makes Getalréta a little less pleasant than she normally is.

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Saydri – (SAY-dree)(thnidu?)
15 years old
Male

Saydri is a blonde, as the far South people still tend to be – his hair is sandy blonde, his eyes are blue, and his skin is tanned, but still paler than either of the other two. He’s build tall and broad, but hasn’t really grown into it yet; he has big hands and big feet, but his body doesn’t have the breadth of chest yet that it probably will. He stands almost a head taller than the two girls.

He has the long, almost-pointed-seeming nose that’s common in ethnically Bitrani people, and thin, pale eyebrows that almost vanish into his skin

He grew up in a rather fanatical household, deep in the South, where rebellion is still a whispered idea. His family is very deeply religious, in the old form that is not practiced anywhere else, and they speak Bitrani, which has fallen from use everywhere else on the continent.

He’s quiet, shy-seeming, with a fiery temper that boils just under the surface and will erupt at the oddest provocation.

He was “chosen” for the school by a government project that seeks to make sure Calenyen ideas are percolated through the youth of the whole country, and he does not particularly want to be here.

He needs to learn to control his temper, to find a balancing point between his faith, his nationalism, and the reality of the world he lives in. He will struggle with the education and the language and find his own identity.

Also, there will be clothing shenanigans.

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