Fleur

With every exhortation, Orchid's voice grew shriller, harsher. In response, her daughter obediently straightened, arched her shoulders back, or stood properly. Yet her face showed her true feelings quite openly; she was tired, annoyed, and sick of this. But every day, her mother insisted on proper lessoning for a Young Woman.

"By Aeline, Fleur..don't you use the soaps I buy you in your hair?" Orchid came to stand beside the slowly slumping girl, a perfect example of a Lady; her body was trim and healthy, her long golden-brown hair braided without a strand out of place. Her skin was perfect and smooth, her lips a soft pink and her eyes a dazzling green. Her dress was perfect, the overdress on top of it was perfect; even her slippers, older and well used...were perfect.

On the other hand, Fleur was a bit shorter than Orchid and took after her father in almost every way. She wasn't as fine boned as her mother but stockily built like Gregor. Her hair wasn't the glossy golden-brown her mother sported, but was instead the indifferent brown that some called mousy, and others called mud. The only thing she got from her mother was, in all honesty, the eyes. Sometimes her skin was like her mothers, but she had freckles like Gregor did.

Orchid's hand lifted the hunk of hair that was Fleur's braid. Hastily twisted in the morning before Fleur went to help Gregor with the Inn chores, it was sloppy and falling loose. Her hair was coarse and thick and her mother dropped the braid disdainfully, letting it thump heavily to Fleur's neck.

"I don't know why I bother with you, girl," Orchid made her way to the back of the common room, beginning up the stairs to the upper level.

"You're disgusting."

The much beloved daughter of Gregor and the less-beloved daughter of Orchid, Fleur was generally a pleasant, happy girl. Her mother's lessoning and nagging did wear on her, but her Father's love and affection made up for it. But when Fleur was 13, her world was turned upside down by jovial Gregor's abrupt death of a Heart Storm. He had been preparing for the day when he went, and when Fleur came down to help, she found her precious father sitting beside the bar, dead.

The Happy Hornet Inn was left to her, but as she was a minor she could not inherit; her mother, Orchid, took posession of the Inn until Fleur was to reach 18. Finally rid of a husband she did not love, but saddled with a daughter that was, in her mind, ugly, fat and disgusting, Orchid made it her life's mission to make Fleur into a Lady, with the trim body and beautiful hair. Fleur's life became a living hell, and as the Isjian army broke the line and occupied the city, she didn't think it could get much worse.

Then again, she hadn't met Michael or Natahn yet...