It wasn't enough to just have a snack on hand, no. Of course not. Ylsa had to wash up, every couple of hours, and head down to the dining hall, to eat a reasonably full meal. If there had been such things on Pern, she would have been said to have a hummingbird's metabolism. She was smallish, well-muscled, she hardly kept fat on her bones at all. If she didn't get some food in her, she got woozy and if too much time passed, she'd simply slide to the floor unconscious until someone got soup or broth into her.

Needless to say, Ylsa wasn't a big fan of this feature. Apparently it had been something her aunt dealt with, too. But her aunt was a dragon rider, and they had that in common too. Well, she'd been searched, but never stood until recently. At thirteen, last year, she went to the sands at Dragonhope. She didn't impress, but she did decide to stay on, since they had a wide variety of crafts in need of hands to work them.

Adept enough at clay pottery to put together a nice set of cups and saucers, but not good enough to be taken by a guild hall (and that wouldn't even have elicited a cry of woe from her parents, dealing with the twins and all...) she was set to work in the potter's hall.

At first it disturbed things a little, when she had to get up and leave, to come back half a candlemark later and resume. Cups and saucers would be what she'd be best at, since she could hardly devote more than a few hours to the trade at a time.

Whether this would impact her dragoning ability, no one knew. She was attentive and intelligent enough to learn in quick bursts, and get work done as well as anyone else. It was difficult when she would miss speeches or important lectures, though, so her instructors and the weyrling masters decided it was best that she brought some kind of foods with her to her classes. This would at least keep her awake enough to make notes, and afterwards she could eat as much as she liked.

She could eat as much as she liked. This fact was not lost on the other hold-born girls, some of whom were loudly jealous of her build. Some mocked her, that she did something nefarious or stupid after eating, but she was healthy and when they followed her around (all day, for almost a week, one time) she never purged herself, and always wound up hungry again.

As the second child, and eldest daughter of her family she'd originally been set up to marry - but then, the man she was meant to be wed to was killed in a duel, his brother offered to take up her hand, and her parents thankfully retracted the dowry and let her go on her way to the Weyr. Her younger sister would find a better man anyway, being much prettier than Ylsa. She had no illusions, she was plain, but she knew she wasn't deformed or ugly.

Her first impression of the Weyr wasn't all that shiny, she wrote to her parents about it shortly after her arrival. Along with several other Hold girls, they were chased around by a very drunken Brown rider, one who continued to make leering eyes and awful comments to the girls since then. He wasn't much older than they, perhaps sixteen to her thirteen at the time, but still that didn't excuse him. Eventually he would be shipped off to another more suitable Weyr, a place, Kira the Weyrwoman assured the girls, where he would be suitably busy cleaning weyrling dens and brushing up on his courtesy salutes.

"Why not here?" Ylsa asked, quietly. "I mean, he's a rider here, shouldn't he be punished here?"

"It's a good question," Kira said, glancing at the girls who were relieved but wondering the same thing. "Because here at Dragonhope we have standards to uphold, and it's our belief that he would never be able to keep to them. If he were a much more brilliant rider, we would have made an effort. But as it is, you're all far more valuable to us than he would be."

That puffed up the class of potential riders.

Ylsa put her heart into learning everything she could, though truth be told she was a little iffy on star charts and much better at riding gear and cleaning dragons. In fact, the weyrling masters noted, she might make a good attendant to the dragonhealer, until that one day of training when she'd forgotten to eat more sugar... She just dropped straight away, and people didn't really know whether it was because she was light headed, or profoundly disturbed by the odd ichorous blood of the dragon they were tending.

Shortly before being sent off to Stardust Weyr for a new clutch, Ylsa and the other girls went to the beaches - the chilly, smelly beaches - to see if there were any firelizard eggs around. There were none, of course, but during the half-hearted search she managed to lose a little ring she'd kept since she was quite young. If only she did have a flitter, she mused on the way back up to the Weyr, it'd probably be able to find it. But now, it was long gone, somewhere under a rock, or swept away to sea.

Ylsa had no fear of the dragons themselves, big as they were, and enjoyed talking to them even if they didn't talk back. She had packed rather lightly for her stay, gotten a good number of new clothes in trade for her clay works, and was happy to note that at Stardust, she'd be able to continue her practice in the pottery area! Theirs was more focused on artistic intent, where Dragonhope's was more practical and sedate - but here, she learned much more about glazes and clever tricks to decorate even the simplest of cups.

Perhaps some day soon, she hoped to bring some of her new brightly colored creations to her family's hold, on her own dragon's back!

***

Ylsa was right at home, making things with clay and helping to spackle some holes made by over-eager construction crews. When the call for the candidates to head to the sands came out, she was of course completely messy. Yet, years of cleaning up to find food made it quick work to fix, and on the way down to the sands she made a very brief detour into the kitchens for a roll. Just in case. She'd eaten recently, but it would be disasterous if she passed out now.

A blue hatched, very pretty and obviously very proud of himself. But it was a bright green hatchling that caught Ylsa's eye, she came to a clumsy stop in front of Ylsa, sending a light shower of black sand onto her legs.‘Come on, come on,’ she crooned excitedly, ‘I’m hungry and I smell food, and oh hey, why is that guy wearing shiny purple pants exactly? Ylsa, you don’t wear shiny purple pants do you?’

The nymphish girl laughed amusedly and knelt, patting the small green on the head, “No Galzeth, I’ll leave that to him. Come on, I’ll get you fed.”

Excitable little green, and somewhat distractable young woman, found that food and were proud to call one another partner.