Rowan Keâts

[Deleted]

Original

Name:
Rowan “Ro” Grace Keâts

Age: 17
Gender: Female
Species: ½ Dulcian, ¼ Karlaithyan, ¼ Time Lady
Planet of Origin: Earth.
Occupation: Aspiring xenobiologist

Physical Description:

Rowan looks like a typical teenage girl. Due to her Dulcian heritage, she has reached her full height of three inches past five feet. She won’t grow anymore, but she’s fine with being short. After all, she has a big enough personality for her tiny frame. Rowan looks very much her family. She resembles her mother a great deal and her grandmother, Magpie, as well. She looks much more like the women in her family than the men.

Ro has medium-colored brown that she usually keeps tied up. She nearly always has her hair in a braid or in a messy sort of bun on her head. She’s fairly low maintenance when it comes to her appearance and she doesn’t want to spend much time on her hair. She once cut off all of her hair because she was tired of her parents nagging her to keep it brushed. She didn’t see the big deal, but her parents weren’t impressed by that move.

One only has to look at Ro’s eyes to determine which parent she takes after. Ro’s grandfather, father, and twin brother all have vivid green eyes. Ro takes after her mother – and in a smaller way, her grandmother. Her eyes are lined with a thick border of dark blue that edges into a paler blue which eventually leads to a jade color near the top. Her mother also has hazel eyes. Her grandmother had heterochromia as well with green and blue, but Magpie’s eyes were either green or blue, not both as in Ro’s case.

She gets her smile from her mother. The addition of dimples gives her smile a very sweet and innocent look, which she uses to her advantage when she’s in trouble... which happens a lot. Her cheeks are a chubby as well, which adds to her innocent looks. She is very expressive and uses a lot of gestures when she speak. She speaks quickly and doesn’t ever seem to pause for breath. Occasionally her twin brother has to act as a Rowan to English translator as he’s the only one who can understand her manic speech.

Personality:

First and foremost, Rowan is a very ambitious child. She doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and if she wants to do something, you can bet your left arm she’ll find a way to do it. Thankfully, she mostly uses her ambition for good and not evil. Mostly. She’s very infectious with her enthusiasm, and she can sometimes sweep people up into her plans just by her sheer liveliness and charisma. She’s not manipulative, but people tend to listen to her because she has an air of ‘of course I know what I’m talking about! Trust me!’ around her.

One of the first things that people notice about Ro is that she is very candid. She doesn’t mean to hurt people’s feelings, and she’ll apologize if she realizes she’s done so , but she’s bad when it comes to reading other people’s emotions. She’ll tell people what she thinks of them. If they say something stupid, Ro will be the first to say it. As soon as she has thought something, it’s out of her mouth. She also curses loudly over little things. Stubbed her toe? Prepare to hear at least twenty curses, some of which you know and some of which she’s made up on the spot.

She’s also very open about her life. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and doesn’t think about lying or holding any of her emotions back. If she loves someone, she loves them. If she hates you, run from man-eating plants. We’ll go over that later, though. It’s hard for her to keep quiet, and she has not yet developed her ‘inside voice’. She needs to learn how to whisper. She can be a bit unnerving to strangers because of her open and blunt nature. Tristain, her twin brother, has often had to try to cover her mouth when she has begun to piss off someone and keeps going because she doesn’t realize she’s made them mad.

Despite her occasional rude remarks meant non-maliciously, Ro is quite friendly. She loves to talk to people. She will pick up conversations with strangers, she’ll ask them personal questions. Within ten minutes of knowing Rowan, people tend to know her entire life story (barring time travel, but we’ll talk about that later), her hopes and her dreams. Ro will also pry entire their personal lives, and she loves to play therapist... although she’s horrible at it, due to not being able to read people’s emotions accurately.

She’s a very playful person. She loves to goof around with her friends and brother. Ro is quite energetic. One of her favorite past-times is playing Cupid. With the exception of her brother, Rowan tries to find everyone’s ‘soulmate’. She can’t hear a story of unrequited love without plotting to take the ‘un’ off. Even if people insist they’re happier alone, Ro refuses to hear it and forces them on blind dates. She’ll make lunch dates for people and then ‘forget’ to show up, forcing the two to spend time alone. She also has a plant that releases endorphins, so she occasionally uses that to her advantage in her conquest to spread love throughout all of London.

Although she is quite friendly, that doesn’t mean she isn’t afraid to fight. She has very weak bones – they’re hollow, a trait of being Dulcian – but she is quite a spitfire. Especially if you trashtalk her family, in particular in her parents or her brother. Especially her brother. She knows that she’s going to be the loser getting into these fights, but that doesn’t stop her. She’s more than willing to break a few bones to make a point. Most of the time, her willingness to fight makes people think twice about messing with her.

She also mixes up sayings quite easily. ‘Don’t count your chickens until the fat lady sings’ is one such malapropism that Ro employs on a regular saying. They can be quite amusing and more than a little nonsensical, and thus it’s usually Trist’s job to translate what she means to say. She also gets distracted very easily. She has the attention span the size of a quark when it comes to some things. She’ll stop in the middle of a sentence because she lost her train of thought, and then pick it right back up mid-sentence weeks later and get frustrated when people don’t understand what she means.

History:

Although they weren’t the stereotypical twins, Tristain and Rowan were always incredibly close. They were as different as different could be, but that only strengthened their bond. Even from a young age she was protective of her brother. She was never the soft little girl that her mother was – on the contrary, Ro was always a force to be reckoned with.

Their bond was forged stronger when they realized that they could communicate telepathically. For a time Rowan would only talk to Trist, and Trist would have to explain Rowan to their parents. Whether it was a developmental delay or Rowan being simply difficult, the world may never know. But after her third birthday, Rowan finally graced her parents with more than just grunts or cries.

Something that was obvious from a young age was her rambunctious nature. Léon, their father, had once barely grabbed Rowan’s leg when she decided to jump over the balcony after watching a movie where the main character did so and landed gracefully on his feet. She was always on the move as a toddler, and she was known for tackling the back of her dad’s legs and pummeling him. A few months after she turned four, she had engaged Léon in one of their routine play-fights. She slammed her fist into his shoulder and broke her wrist and two of her fingers.

She gave him the stink-eye for weeks after the incident.

The next year passed in Ro being hurt a few more times in various circumstances. Her parents joked that she was trying to turn them prematurely grey. When the twins started Kindergarten (much to Rina’s hesitation due to her own experiences in public school), Ro’s protective and dominant traits fully took over when a girl tried to push Tristain because of his eye color. So, she did what any good sister would do – she latched her teeth into the girl’s arm. It took quite a few adults to pull her off.

Rina and Léon attempted to homeschool Rowan after that, but Ro just sat in front of the bakery doors, waiting longingly for her brother to return home. Finally they gave up and let her go back to the school under the promise that she wouldn’t bite again. Ro eagerly agreed to those conditions and returned to school happily – not in the same class as her brother, but still close enough.

The next few years passed mostly uneventfully. She broke a few more bones during gym classes, where she applied herself rather aggressively to the gym activities. It was always her favorite time of day despite her parents’ concerns. She was supposed to sit out, but she refused to have any special treatment just because she was fragile. When she was nine, she saw a cat in a tree on the way home from school, and broke her ankle rescuing it.

That was also when her mother began to get sick. Ever the eternal optimist, Rowan brushed it off. She ignored the signs because obviously mothers didn’t actually die in real life, only in sad movies or books. Ro didn’t understand why her grandmother was coming over to help or why Trist was determined to stay home. It was therefore a shock when, a month before their birthday, Rina died. Rowan was numb, the entire experience too surreal for her to comprehend.

She wasn’t quite able to understand what was happening, because it felt like a bad dream. Her mother’s death didn’t quite hit her until everybody changed. Her brother refused to talk to her, and Ro tried not to let him see how much that affected her. Her father seemed to be just as quiet as Trist, except for the occasional half-hearted smile or laugh. Ro began to resent her mother for dying, feeling bitter and angry. She began to pick fights in school, constantly getting suspended. She hated the days when she was at her home, and so she began to stay over with friends more often, avoiding her brother on the days he went to school.

Ro remembered how her father used to be amused by her antics, so whenever she had to go home, she would try to goof around with him. Things seemed to just get worse, so Ro continued to fight at school. She only stopped when Trist spoke to her. It was only when Trist began to speak that all of her grief over her mother’s death hit her in the chest harshly. Ro always refused for people to see her cry, so she locked herself into her room for a few hours, sad and relieved and still a little angry at her mother.

She was twelve when she discovered xenobotany after her uncle Nico brought her home a flower from a planet he had visited. She demanded for him to bring her more of them, and she took classes in gardening and began to work with her father on creating a device like a greenhouse, except smaller and designed to simulate the climate on the foreign planets. Nico continued supplying her with seeds and little booklets of information from the planet, and she began to pay particular attention to her biology classes, particularly when they were studying plant structures, crossbreeding, and Gregory Mendel.

It wasn’t until she was thirteen that she made her first attempt to grow something from another planet. Nico brought her a seed from a plant show on one of Saturn’s moons, and she planted it. She named it after her brother and refused to let anyone near it except for Trist. She’d sit outside and read the flower stories. Nico continued to bring her different seeds and Ro planted them, playing the plants music. Her other uncle – or ‘aunt’ - Sébastien once offered to play his violin to the plants, but Ro snubbed his offer, telling him she was going to raise her ‘children’ to have decent musical taste. And thus, the plants thrived on bands such as Michael Jackson and The Beatles.

By the time they were fourteen, the twins had discovered very different passions in life. Tristain had convinced their father to reopen Rina’s Ritz, and Rowan was busy gardening. She grew both alien plants and ingredients for her brother. After running out of room, she forced her father and grandfather to make a basement garden, where she put the greenhouse device her father had made for her in order to grow the items. It was rather unconventional, but it worked for her. She maintained the front of the shop, making sure that the flowers in the front never died so that people were more attracted to the shop.

When she was fifteen, she ran away to go explore the world. She got as far as downtown London before she got lost. She was eventually found by a policeman and returned to her home after only two hours. Rowan has no sense of direction – or time – and assumed she’d be gone for at least nine hours and that she was probably in Wales when she was picked up... so learning that she’d only been gone for two hours (and that she was less than an hour from her home) did a deal on her self-confidence, but Ro perked right back up.

Although it nearly killed her to do so, Ro kept up with Trist’s credits in school and graduated with him. He took over full-time at Rina’s Ritz, and Ro continued to grow her plants. She eventually created a ‘man’-eating plant. She named it ‘Gavri’. She continued to cross plants, creating what her father called a vicious homicidal plant army. In the basement. She fed the plants some of her brother’s cupcakes and uncooked meat.

A few weeks after they turned seventeen, Tristain finds an old vortex manipulator. True to form, Ro grabs her bags of seeds, kisses her plants goodbye, and demands Trist takes her with him.

Additional medical information: Allergic to pretty much everything, hollow bones, no wisdom teeth, no tailbone, no goosebumps, two hearts.

[Deleted]

Accepted