L'ria is very blunt, one thing about her that will never change, but she has developed more tact about what she says and no longer says things just to rile people up and get a reaction out of them. She has realized that now that she is no longer the stunningly attractive thing she once was, her looks will not cause people to flock to her, so she must work not to drive people away with her sharp tongue. Things often amuse her, and she doesn't mind sharing her amusement, but not if it hurts anyone's feelings. The mean and malicious behavior I had her exhibit when she was first introduced was actually a defense mechanism for her that was developed due to her past. L'ria's father is Lavral, a Master at the Glasscraft Hall, and her mother was named Annia. Annia was a cook at Storm Fires Hold. Lavral was only doing Annia a favor since the woman wanted a child so badly, and once Annia had the child, he went back to the GlassCraft Hall and never saw Annia again, and never planned to see his daughter again either.
When L'ria, at that time Liveria, was five, Annia died, and since she evidenced interest in the Glass Craft, she was sent off to the Hall where she met her father for the first time. They didn't hit it off on good terms to put it nicely, and he blamed Annia for dying and leaving him in this position. Later on, although he didn't realize it, he became jealous of his daughter's talent in his craft, for she learned faster than he had. L'ria was more than happy to ignore the man, and whenever she was forced to be in his presence, she would only call him "papa" to annoy him.
As L'ria started to get older and inherit her mother's good looks, she started a number of fights and had a large collection of lovers. Since she started her training in the Glasscraft earlier than most people, she should have made Journeywoman status at about age 14, and she deserved it, but the internal politics of the craft worked against her.
There were seven Masters in the Hall who decided which apprentices were to be tapped for Journeyman or Master status, and Lavral happened to be one of them. Unable to see past his personal dislike of his daughter, he always voted no when her name came up. Lavral's best friend was a Master named Guther, also one of the seven, and he always voted however Lavral did. The final obstacle in her path to Journeywoman was a Master named Lefstic, who always voted no unless every other Master voted yes. Since five out of the seven had to agree, and there were three votes against her right from the start, L'ria never achieved her Journeywoman knots, and was very bitter about this, although it doesn't matter to her now.
One might think that this would hurt a child's self-esteem, but L'ria was always a strong child, and her self-confidence was never in question. She's very stubborn and opinionated, even now, and has no trouble displaying her opinions when she feels she needs to. There was a bit of a scene between her and her father when L'ria was Searched, and she effectively told him off before she raced out the door and out to the dragon waiting to take her to the Weyr.
She immediately fell in with the Weyr's biggest trouble maker, D'ale, since he also enjoyed a sensual nature. Since the Bronzerider was never possessive of her, L'ria decided that she liked him, and the two became strong friends, L'ria bringing out the softer side of D'ale's personality so that people began to see him as something other than a complete jerk. Not that these two haven't had their fights. :) L'ria doesn't fight what ANYONE would ever call fair.
She arrived the night before the Hatching, which is good, because if anyone had gotten the time to know her, they probably wouldn't have allowed her to stand, and if she'd known some facts about being a weyrling, she wouldn't have been willing to stand, either.
Jezlith found her on the sands at Storm Fires Weyr the next day, and L'ria finally had someone who loved her as much as her dead mother once had. It was only AFTER she Impressed Jezlith that she found out that weyrlings are required to remain celibate for the first turn, and she was not pleased.
When it was pointed out to her how having sex could harm her dragon, she capitulated, although she loved to complain about it. Even now, Jezlith acts as a conscience for L'ria many times, telling her to calm down, and when not to speak her mind, for L'ria's temper is not something that she controls very well, and her tongue gets very sharp when she's angry. In her spare time, she helps to fill the Weyr's needs in the glass department, making bowls, glow shields, plates, and other glass objects while working on her own trinkets off to the side. This has to be done during her spare time, however, for being a dragonrider comes first.
Once L'ria graduated, I had to find some way to make her grow as a person, so I decided to throw a little something her way. I got her pregnant from a Brownrider NPC named D'kal. She decided to keep the baby, and had a daughter, which she named Annia after her mother. Her father loosened up to L'ria, and finally told L'ria that he loves her, so they have patched up their relationship and are on the way to a normal father-daughter relationship, although they might never be as close as most fathers and daughters. That is mostly due to Master Ilival, whom Lavral fell in love with and married. She has a calming effect on Lavral and can get between father and daughter to prevent fights from breaking out.
L'ria's daughter Annia is one of the main joys of L'ria's life, softening the shrew into a person that other people can actually stand to be around. Not that she lost her sensual nature because she became a mother, oh no. It was just muted as she gives her daughter more attention now than the thought of sex. When thread began falling, she realized that her daughter was going to need more care than she was able to give her, and so she fostered Annia with Lavral and Ilival. She visits them as often as she can, and is still a major part of her daughter's life despite not being her primary care giver.
One way to make her grow further was presented to me in the form of a natural disaster. I had L'ria move to Rising Dawn Weyr when it opened so that she could be closer to her family, and a hurricane blew through. L'ria was on her way out, when the wind broke a tree branch above her. She looked up just in time to see it descend, and it hit her on the left side of her face. She only has the use of the right side of her upper lip because the other side was scraped back from her upper jaw, and the left side of her face is terribly scarred. Despite the loss of her stellar looks, L'ria is still confident about her appearance, for her body has no such problems and she's always been a very confident woman. To help those around her deal with it though, she began making fanciful half-masks to cover her scars. She wears her masks when she is out in public, although not in her own weyr or on the beach in front of it. This way, the little children don't run screaming from her, or so she says. She also gets a lot of attention with her masks and it isn't the negative kind. She doesn't mind being considered eccentric.
She became very close to bronzerider O'kona, and they weyrmated shortly before I had to leave the group for a short while. I gave her to Kelly when I left, and Kelly wrote her out of the SL with the possibility of bringing her back in. What Kelly wrote was that L'ria and Jezlith had a *between* accident and disappeared, but left it open so that they might come out at some point in the future. Since she hadn't been gone all that long, I decided that it would be a good idea to bring her back into things when I returned, and she came out of *between* a few months after she disappeared. The excuse that I gave was that she gave a bad visual to Jezlith because she was exhausted, and probably should have died because of it, but instead she lost ten weeks of time and gave everyone a very bad scare, since they thought that she'd died. Upon her return, she had to adjust a little to having been gone for so long and all the changes that happened, since she disappeared when Storm Fires had just erupted, and when she reappeared all of the refugees were living at RDW and already looking for a new place for their Weyr.
She managed to adjust quite well and was happy when all of the Storm Fires weyrfolk moved into their own Weyr once more, but shortly after that, Rising Dawn Weyr was attacked by pirates. When all the fuss had died down, she couldn't find O'kona. Pterath wasn't answering Jezlith, and she reluctantly had to give him up as dead, but it always haunted her that they never found a body, and she never knew what had happened to him. What had happened was that O'kona had been badly injured, as well as Pterath, and when they'd come to a few days later, they'd been approached by Weyrwoman Ysara for an undercover mission. So undercover that they weren't even allowed to let L'ria know that they were still alive. So while L'ria mourned her dead weyrmate, O'kona was on the Northern continent working to bring the pirates that had attacked the Weyr to justice. When that happened, he was allowed to come back. After a bit of a stormy reunion, L'ria quickly relented and forgave O'kona his absence and silence, for she'd missed him terribly and couldn't really imagine her life without him.
When Rising Dawn Weyr was reopened as a Weyrhold, O'kona was asked to become the acting Weyrleader until Minerva's queen Flaireth were to have her first flight, and L'ria had no hesitation in urging him to say yes and moving back to Rising Dawn Weyrhold with him. So now she is the Weyrleader's weyrmate, with a daughter who has very odd ideas about death, having seen both her mother and "father" come back from the dead. Right now, Annia is applying to get into the Dolphincraft Hall, with plans to be Searched when she turns 14. Since the Dolphincraft Hall is located at Rising Dawn Weyr, she'll be in closer contact with her mother, although they won't be living together, as Annia will be housed with her fellow apprentices. Her Search is something that L'ria both looks forward to and dreads, because she isn't really sure that she wants her darling daughter to become a dragonrider when it means putting her life in danger and having to deal with mating flights. (Are children ever old enough to have sex in a parent's eyes?) That's just something she'll have to deal with.