Braughan

Character type: HealerMouth
Rank: Senior Journeyman
Age: 51
Gender: Male
Sexual Preference: His wife. That's the only answer you'll get if you ask.

Appearance

As far as healers go, Braughan doesn’t cut a particularly comforting figure. He’s a big, broad, burly man, a man of substance — physically, at least, and that’s enough for him. Calloused hands that look too blunt and meaty to do delicate work are actually quite deft at cutting precisely and stitching straight and strong; feet that look too large and clompy to ever step quietly are… exactly as heavy-footed as they look. Red hair is the hallmark of his family, and he’s covered with it, from the short locks crowning his head, to his beard, to his chest and arms and legs and everywhere else in-between that you’d expect to find it. His face fits his form well, square-jawed and straight-nosed, with thick brows and brown eyes that do a lot of frowny squinting.

Braughan would wear anything so long as it’s comfortable and functional if it were up to him, but his wife has been laying out his clothes every morning for over thirty turns now, and she knows how to tread the thin line between what matches, works, and sometimes even flatters his form, and what he’ll get impatient or uncomfortable with and refuse to wear again. If his clothes are mostly dark colors, it’s only to hide the blood. Not that it really helps, because the apron he frequently wears while working is leather brown and fresh crimson shows up just fine on it.

Personality

Despite the (reasonably accurate) preconceptions that people may have concerning healers as intellectuals, Braughan is far from it. Back at the little podunk minehold he came from, he probably would have been considered the local smartypants, just as his father was before him, if only he had stayed — but he didn’t. It’s all in the perspective, you see, and Braughan himself probably doesn’t think deeply enough about it to appreciate the distinction. There’s still a lot of miner in him, a lot of the blunt practicality of a man raised in the dirt and dependent on the fickle generosity of the earth for a living, and if he seems exceptionally harsh then, well, it’s only because he understood the harshness of reality from a young age. Oh, your Threadscore hurts? So sorry, you chose this life even with the bounty of the entire world open to you — don’t talk to him about the nobility of sacrifice. Try being born in a place where you’ve no choice but to follow your father into the mine just to keep yourself fed, knowing all the while that if you survive the rockslides and accidents, you’ll just die young coughing your lungs up, anyway. Here at the Weyr, where the brats are born fat and raised in good health and happiness, where they’re so well-educated and their futures are so bright and open that they literally get to pick crafts to “play” in while they take their leisurely time figuring out what to do with themselves, Braughan doesn’t give a lot of sympathy — but nor does he expect any from anyone else.

He’s a proud man, as stubborn as the day is long, and he’s not going to apologize for his rough hands or his course language, and he’d take it as an insult if anyone thought him delicate enough to have to apologize to him for the same. He is what he is, and he’s not only too old to change, he’s too old to care if anyone else wants him to. He’s not particularly intelligent, not much of a reader, not at all appreciative of the arts, and things like “philosophy” and “theory” just make him angry for some reason (as do most things that he doesn’t understand). He may be a healer, but his medicine is rooted entirely in practicality, in what he can see and understand. Sure, he’s of course aware that there are very delicate functions inside the body, and that things are often interwoven and interrelated in subtle ways, but that’s not complicated to him because he’s spent a long time with his hands inside the damn things and he’s learned far more by doing than he ever did by being taught (though he probably doesn’t give nearly enough credit to the teachers he had). Healing is not an intellectual thing to him, it’s an action, a thing you do, and it’s fitting, then, that he specializes so heavily in hands-on, split-second-decision sort of healing. He’s not interested in trying new treatments or medicines to cure a wasting illness — give him the people who need care now, and let him do what he has to do. It’s a waste of damned time to wring your hands over whether it’s “right” to cut a patient open when the patient in question is just going to die anyway if you don’t. He’s not going to experiment, but he is going to apply the knowledge he has to cut out, cut off, and stitch up whatever he has to.

And that’s pretty much how he approaches everything. He’s not going to think too hard about anything if he can help it. There’s no such thing as a moral dilemma in Braughan’s world. It’s either right or wrong, and he may not even have reasons to support how he feels — he just does, damn it, and he doesn’t owe you a debate or explanation.. If it’s something he doesn’t like, something he doesn’t want to deal with or talk about, he’s just going to treat it like surgery to be performed. Confusing feelings? Cut them out, toss them away, sew up the wound and heal. Person who causes undue pain and stress in his life? Sever connections with them — amputate and compensate for the loss of limb. He doesn’t have time to waste on people. He doesn’t have time to waste on feelings. Men don’t get indecisive and weepy! Needless to say, he has a very strong belief in traditional gender roles, and many other leftovers from his holdborn upbringing. He’s very conservative, disdainful of anyone who doesn’t fit into the molds he expects of them, and though living at the Weyr for nearly twenty turns now has given him a bit more of a sense of live-and-let-live (or, more accurately, “I won’t do more than grumble about it so long as you don’t try to force your weirdness on me”), he’s not likely to change his thinking anytime soon.

Common Knowledge

Loud, rough, and unsympathetic. Braughan is a stellar surgeon, with the stomach and skill to do what a lot of Pernese find distasteful at best, and if you’re Thread-eaten you’re probably lucky if he’s the one removing your arm to save your life, but he’s one of the worst healers to get if you need anything else. He’s a conservative holdborn, and probably grumbles about you a lot. To your face. Has a wife — a real, honest-to-Faranth holder-folk sort of wife, not a weyrmate — and a lot of kids, most of whom are easy to pick out because of the fair skin and hopelessly Northern gingerness. He’s a reasonably regular member of the Weyr’s drinking-and-gambling crowd. May also owe a lot of people some money. Or some people a lot of money.

Is a relaxed, playful drunk.

Has an immature man-child sense of humor, when it makes itself known.

Knowledge common to his Infirmary associates, but probably not anyone else

Does not ever go in the ocean. If anyone points it out and manages to dig past the initial grumbly "I just don't feel like it right now" excuses, he'll say that he swore to his wife a long time ago that he wouldn't. And Sooty, whose fear of the sea is well-known and unhidden, will back him up on this. But… it's obvious to anyone who knows him, or who is perceptive enough to watch him on the beach when he watches his children play in the water, that Braughan is just as terrified of the ocean as she is, and doesn't really know how to deal with being afraid.

Needless to say, he can't swim.

Once he progresses beyond "relaxed, playful drunk", he degenerates into "horny drunk".

( ᕤ)ᕤ ┻┻

History

Birthdate: 403.02.01
Birthplace: Kolden Minehold, Nabol

Braughan was born at a small minehold in Nabol territory, the eldest of two sons. His father was the mine’s resident healer, as his father had been before him — neither of them fancy Main Hall-trained healers, but healers apprenticed by the practicing healer who came before, then perhaps shipped off to the main hold to be further trained and assessed by the Master residing there, then sent back home to treat the people they had grown up with. Braughan and his brother both followed in the family footsteps, literally following their father on his housecalls, learning at his knee, helping him deliver babies and treat sniffles and disease alike, and, occasionally, assisting as he worked feverishly to save the life of a miner who’d suffered in an accident or a brawl gone wrong — crushed limbs from falling rocks, horrendous puncture wounds from pickaxe mishaps, and other assorted hazards of a miner’s life.

Braughan’s younger brother was a more patient sort, with naturally comforting bedside manner. Braughan himself was… less so. What he lacked in patience, he made up for with confidence and decisiveness in his work when under pressure, and an unusually steady hand. What he lacked in charisma, he made up for by being the only healer’s eldest son, clearly set on the same path, himself, and that made him a prime catch in the local marriage department. His father thought he’d benefit from the comforting, steady presence of a wife before he was sent off to the Hold to train more, and negotiated a nice match for him in the form of the foreman’s second daughter, Soolie (or “Sooty”, as she’s been known now for turns, because Braughan says she’s his dusty mineshaft girl, and somehow means that as a compliment).

As it turned out, Dad was right. Braughan found that she suited him just fine, and he suited her just fine, as they adjusted to living at Nabol Hold, where he could train with the journeymen and masters there. Despite being looked down upon by some of his Hall-trained seniors, Braughan proved a quick study, and seemed particularly unflappable when it came to gore and the occasionally-necessary-but-only-reluctantly-tolerated foray into invasive procedures. It was only natural that he specialize in surgery once he was comfortably into his journeyship, which hadn't been part of the plan — but by then, his younger brother was training at the Hold, too, and showed far more interest in general medicine, so the minehold would be taken care of into the next generation even without Braughan there to see it through.

His choices for placement with a focus like his were limited. Of course, there was the Healerhall in Fort, capital of his craft. Sooty was for it, drawn to the idea of living and raising their growing family in the fancy dancy First Hold, but even the much smaller and more rural Nabol had been a bit too urban for Braughan's taste, and what awaited him at the Hall but study and teaching and, ugh, scholarship? So he opted for the only other option available to healers of his bent: the weyrs. Even without Thread in the skies there was always healing to be done, and the occasional training accident (by-products of working side-by-side with enormous flaming beasts that fly), and by the time the Pass came around, the Weyrs would be desperately in need of established healers capable of handling gory trauma, amputation, and invasive procedures. He didn't have any particular love for dragonriders, but if he was going to be a healer, then damn it, he would be a healer who actually fixed things!

The assignment he got, as a thirty-turn-old journeyman, was Ista Weyr. It was odd at first, a far cry from inland Nabol, more cosmopolitan than he expected even with Ista's isolationist mentality, and far more open-minded than he was prepared for. But his lodgings were comfortable, his children were well-fed and educated (though he and Sooty had their hands full trying to raise their kids properly with all that Weyr influence seeping into those impressionable little brains), and, more importantly, the work was good.

And then the Pass came, and Braughan's been up to his eyeballs in… well, sometimes eyeballs, but mostly other parts, ever since. It's exhausting, though nothing will ever compare to the first 'Fall of the Pass and the sevendays afterward as the exhausted healers struggled to keep up with the massive lists of wounded. When it's not overwhelming, it's positively invigorating to finally be really playing to his own strengths as a healer.

Ironically, though, Master Paskam has been after him to write a paper on emergency treatment of lower-abdominal second-degree Threadscore. Or, as Braughan calls it, "jumbleguts".

Relationships

Family

Father: Bresslin, journeyman healer
Mother: Fraveni, good old-fashioned wife who makes great biscuits
Brother: Baynar, journeyman healer
Other sibs, in-laws, assorted nieces and nephews

Wife: Sooty, good old-fashioned wife who makes better biscuits
Children: Bucnar, junior journeyman healer (31 turns)
Birka, wife of Tagilin, Ista Weyr (30 turns)
"Fussy", a daughter (27 turns)
Samma, a daughter (26 turns)
Broan, a son (23 turns)
K'vrett, weyrling to blue Nezenth (19 turns)
Bertaula, weyrling to green Rekkith (19 turns)
Ellou, healer's aide (16 turns)
Guts, junior apprentice healer (14 turns)
A daughter, romantic-minded weyrbrat (12 turns)
Beuzila, cheeky mini-Braugh weyrbrat (9 turns)
"Dusty", the baby who hides under the couch (7 turns)

Friends

Hawlsen, senior journeyman healer
Paskam, master healer
Tartolgen, master tanner
Probably some other crafter-types

Uppity Women Who Need To Learn Their Place

THAT WOMAN
Sudaje
Caistina

Tolerable Lesbians?

Nesseley, senior journeyman healer

Don't Touch Me

Eldavari, junior journeyman healer basket of fruit

BRAUGHAN'S CRAFT: HEALER

Rank: Senior Journeyman
Specialty: Trauma Surgery
Experience: 40 tns
Education:
Kolden Minehold, under Journeyman Bresslin
Nabol Hold, under Master Neffon and Master Malgun (specialization)

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