User Profile

Arliss comes from Cajun/Irish ancestry and grew up on a homestead northeast of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His father, Jean-Pierre, was killed in a feud between rival ranch families when Arliss was a toddler, leaving his mother, Eileen, to raise him alone. Arliss was a quiet young boy who spent most of his free time in the woods and swamplands near his home, but when he was nine years old he gained the promise of a new friend: a Pascal's Blue living at a neighboring homestead, considering the Boudreauxs good and trustworthy people, decided to give them one of her eggs. Eileen was utterly delighted-- after all, a dragon would be a tremendous help on the farm.

However, that summer Eileen died during a yellow fever epidemic just as the shell began to harden, and soon Arliss was left alone with a newly-hatched (and very hungry) dragonet. He and the young dragon, who turned out to be a courier-weight Pascal's Blue/feral hybrid, had no one to take them in and so, with the clothes on his back and his father's rifle, they began to wander the countryside in search of work. For the next ten years he and Darlin' (the dragon's name was inspired by her sweet disposition) traveled from farm to farm doing odd jobs for very low pay, until they arrived in New Orleans when Arliss was nineteen.

In New Orleans Arliss discovered what he thought was a much better career-- dragons and their handlers were often hired to protect the merchant ships from the pirates that still harassed trade in the Gulf of Mexico, both of the seafaring variety and also rogue dragons and their crews. Darlin' was eager for the job and also perfectly suited to it-- her small size allowed her to travel relatively easily on most merchant vessels, and she had no fear of water; in fact, her feral heritage --local ferals were indigenous to swampland and semi-aquatic-- gave her webbed talons and excellent swimming skills. The two of them worked for hire along the coast for three years until disaster struck-- during a skirmish with a pair of pirate dragons along the Mississippi coast, a U.S. Navy frigate came to the merchant vessel's aid and, mistaking Darlin' for one of the pirates, opened fire on her. Bullets ripped through Darlin's wing membranes and sent them both crashing into the shallows. Arliss survived the impact with his left arm and leg were both badly broken, but Darlin's lower back was shattered and she was bleeding to death from a dozen wounds. There was nothing Arliss could do, and no one was near enough to help them; to his horror, Darlin' begged him to spare her even more agony. Arliss refused, telling her that he could sooner shoot himself, but Darlin' was in so much pain that he finally gave in and, turning his face away, shot his own dragon in the head.

Arliss was eventually rescued and spent months in a charity hospital in Pascagoula, suffering from the pain of his injuries and crushing grief.
His left leg was too damaged to heal properly, and left him with an obvious limp. After leaving the hospital, Arliss wandered from town to town along the coast, living from day to day and squandering what was left of his money on whiskey. When war broke out and all dragons and aviators were called to service, Arliss ignored his summons, determined never to fly with another dragon.

Some weeks later a group of recruiters caught up with him in a tavern in Biloxi, and after sobering him up, i.e. dunking him repeatedly in the nearest horse trough, tried to convince him that his experience as an aviator and his skill with ferals would be invaluable to the desperately undermanned CSA Aerial Corps, and besides, wasn't it the United States Navy that had killed his dragon?

Arliss was still unsure, but he was desperate for work and the recruiters' words were enough to turn his simmering rage into a full-blown, almost irrational hatred for the North. He eventually agreed to join, but on the way to the covert he spent days wrestling with his conscience, as he was sure that flying with another dragon would betray Darlin's memory. At the covert Arliss and a dozen other dragonless recruits were assigned to a hastily-assembled clutch of dragon eggs, and in the weeks that followed, to his own surprise Arliss found himself spending time with the unhatched dragonet, talking to it the way he had once talked to Darlin'. Three months later, when the shell began to harden, Arliss came to a decision: remaining cold and distant would only hurt the dragonet, something he could never bring himself to do. This dragon could never replace Darlin' --no dragon ever could-- but perhaps could be a new companion, and friend.