Name: Coriander Tate, but most people simply call her ‘Cory’.
Gender: Female
Age: 13½
Physical Appearance: See picture above.
Typical Outfit: Coriander wears summer dresses with short sleeves that have cuts in the back to allow room for her wings, though they’re designed so that when her wings aren’t out, the sailor-style collar of the dress covers up the slits for the wings so that the garment appears unaltered. She walks around barefoot. During chillier months, Cory retrieves a thick, musty bearskin cloak that was made for a man from the hollow of the tree near the lab and wears that until the days get warmer once more. The cloak is heavy and she cannot fly while wearing it around her, and it smells like sprigs of dried lavender and mothballs. Underneath her light, cotton dress she wears sky blue shorts and a white tank top.
The cloak was “borrowed” from the lab’s attic. Other things that were “borrowed” and hidden away in the hollow tree trunk were a velvet eyepatch, silk stockings, a threadbare lab coat permanently creased in several places, and a beautiful fan of glossy pigeon feathers with the name “Rasputin” carved into its oak handle.
+Anima: Pigeon
+Anima Marking: On her right foot, bird foot prints track around the sole, with a tiny down feather in the middle.
+ Anima Abilities: With the aid of Coriander’s +Anima, she can fly with ash gray wings that grow to a much larger size than what is depicted in the picture above. Another special ability her +Anima grants her is an amazing sense of direction. If she has been to a place before, she can find it again despite not remembering any specific roads or landmarks.
Likes: The feel of dirt underneath her feet, heavy rain, and bright sunshine.
Dislikes: The smell of chemicals, overly clean places, and forgetting anything or anyone.
Good at: Coriander is good at backtracking and remembering small details about people she’s met. She’s also decent with a slingshot, and her +Anima ability grants her an internal intuition to finding towns she has visited before.
Bad at: She is honest, and to be honest, it’s not pretty sometimes. Also, she can’t sneak around very well and her wings fly noisily. Cory has a coo-ing giggle that is very unique, so even in disguise, if she laughs, a person who has met her before can tell it’s her.
Bio: Her mother (Rosalie Tate) worked as a gardener and caretaker for a laboratory’s botany grounds and her father (Archen Grant) was a biology researcher who studied plants and humans. Eventually, they fell in love and had a daughter named Coriander who grew up happily.
When Cory was around nine years old, her mother decided to leave to find the legendary blue rose that supposedly was the cure to a childhood disease that swept away small infants before they were even big enough to stand on two feet. She loved Cory very much, but she also wanted other children to grow up and experience life, and left to undertake a very long and arduous journey that made Coriander and her father very proud, a great deal curious, and just a little bit lonely sometimes.
Coriander would anticipate the letters that her mother would send twice a month through Rasputin. Rasputin (Or ‘Raspy the Rat’, as her father called it) was a cantankerous pigeon that was the color of a dusty mop, nipped at fingers like a ravenous crocodile, and was the source of her father’s pigeon phobia. Despite being one of the most disagreeable and grouchy birds in the world, Rasputin could fly great distances- Even all the way from Sailand’s mountains, where Cory’s mother searched high and low for the blue rose.
Her father was always busy with research, so now that her mother was away, there was no one to tell her that she couldn’t do this or that. Her boundaries grew, and she played farther and farther away from the safe grounds of the research facility. It was fertile land, and Coriander found exquisite flowers all year long. One day, newly ten-years-old and the farthest from the research lab than she had ever been before, the ground was so thickened with the distracting flora of spring that she did not notice that she had wandered all the way to the edge of a cliff as she bent down to pick an ivory cluster of bell-like flowers. The pretty flowers, as delicate as they appeared, were deeply rooted, and with one strong tug, Cory pulled them out-
“AIIEEE!”
-and the hard pull sent her falling backwards over the edge of the treacherous cliff!
As she fell, Cory felt pounding dread course through her limbs.
“Papa!” Her mind thought desperately, though logic told her that he would be deeply engrossed in the lab, many miles away from the flower fields and the cliff.
“Mama!” Her lungs screamed, though Coriander knew her mother was far away, somewhere in the north for the sake of helping other children live.
As Cory fell, she heard (Or at least swore she did) the soft flutter of a pigeon’s gray wings. A single, ash colored feather drifted calmly down the sky while the panicked child sunk through the rushing air.
“Rasputin… Tell Mama and Papa I love them.”
Suddenly, wings pulled her up, and she floated to the ground as gently as the feather. The sudden shock of the ground having been only inches away from her deadly moments ago and the new appendages on her back appearing seemingly out of nowhere was shocking. Fright and wonder caused her to faint right before she landed onto the ground in a crumpled heap.
Cory woke to the painful sensation of Rasputin pulling sharply, if good-naturedly, on locks of her hair.
---
Three years passed since the day Coriander had been saved by her +Anima. Her father and the lab’s inhabitants all knew about it. Everyone was fascinated by the lovely, angel-esque wings at first, but soon grew used to her returning by flight instead of feet.
Rasputin, the ever faithful pigeon, still carried letters from distant Sailand to Asteria, though the journeys took their toll on the aging bird. He was stubborn, and eventually the next and last letter that Cory’s mother sent included a request for her father to clip his wings a little to prevent him from attempting another flight that would surely kill him from the strain. As painful as it was to cut the last connection to her mother, Coriander and her father considered Rasputin as a deep family friend and did not wish for him to die just for the sake of communication. With great remorse, Rasputin lost the ability to fly high into the air, though he lived in the research facility’s botany grounds around the very same plants which Cory’s mother had tended to long ago.
Not a week after having his wings clipped, Rasputin died of old age. Everyone in the lab was too busy to attend the funeral, but Coriander placed him lovingly inside an old jewelry box and buried him underneath her mother’s roses.
Rasputin’s passing inspired Cory to take up a journey to find her mother herself. If Rasputin made all of those trips with no worse an injury other than a bent feather here and there, then what was she, the lass with pigeon wings, waiting for?
Leaving a detailed note that expressed appreciation and love to her father and all of his colleagues who had known her ever since she was born, Coriander flew away at the break of dawn.
---
The note was discovered four days after she left, for the lab and all its adult inhabitants had been hard-pressed with work and frantic research after the military was stressing them to find information on developing adult +Anima. Her father’s hair, already graying from hard work, old age, and lack of sleep turned paper white after reading Cory’s message explaining that she was traveling to Sailand.
