Sunshine of Hearthside
I'm busy writing part 2 of Beating the Heat, and I'm starting to do "real" writer-type stuff that I swore I'd never do because I'm not a writer and this isn't a writing project, like outlining plots and writing character profiles. So here's what I have on the Dewfall's healer.
Like other natives of Hearthside, Sunshine has larger ears than the average yinrih. This is an adaptation to cope with the sweltering heat of the day side of the planet where most people live. One of her sets of bandpass membranes (secondary eyelids that filter incoming light) is a rich glossy blue rather than the metallic specular appearance expected of other yinrih. This is the other physical characteristic that sets Hearthsiders apart.
Like all yinrih healers, she takes drugs to keep herself hairless in order to maintain medical hygiene. Yinrih otherwise have an undercoat and dander that sheds constantly. Her bare skin is a little darker than similarly pigmented human skin thanks to yinrih blood being maroon. Her paws and muzzle are covered in black splotches. The balding drugs remove all fur, but leave the whiskers, which are very important tactile sense organs. When not taking the drugs, her fur is red like Tod's, but she lacks Tod's black ears. She's about 55 lbs. Humans often compare her to a Xoloitzcuintle.
She's very friendly and talkative. She likes to go for walks around the apartment complex where her host Sarah lives, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, stopping passers-by to ask innocently insensitive questions about human biology in general and their personal medical histories in particular.
While out and about, she typically wears a shear, flowing garment common to Hearthsider healers that covers her entire head, body, and tail save the paws and muzzle. This is meant to protect her naked skin from the sun.
She tends to be overconfident at first, jumping head first into something only to realize she's in over her ears and needs help. Nevertheless, she's a master when in her own element. She has to be in order to be chosen as an interstellar missionary.
Her "job" as a missionary is to catalog as much info as possible about human biology and health. She regularly reports her findings back to Wayfarers' Haven, where the town healer, who was also the mistress of novices of the healers' college Sunshine attended, organizes and publishes her findings to the wider yinrih medical community.
Like the other missionaries and Wayfarers generally, Sunshine is very excited to finally meet other sophonts, and wants to help us humans in whatever way she can. However, she's still pretty naive and ignorant of human anatomy and medicine, as can be seen from my last story.
Sunshine is older than the other missionaries, being around 200. She has already raised her litter.
She was approached by a pre-existing friend group who were looking to start a family and needed a dam to even out the ratio. Healers are in high demand by childermoots looking to fill the gender gap because who wouldn't want a doctor raising their children? She agreed, and they hatched their litter.
One of the boys, named Dapple after the shifting pattern of light and shade created by light shining through rustling leaves, began showing behavioral problems. He would throw a fit if he wasn't the center of attention, break his siblings' toys, tell outrageous lies about his siblings to his friends at school to alienate them. Multiple times he set fires in the house and blamed them on a litter mate he didn't like that day. Sometimes he was even physically violent towards his brothers and sisters, punching or clawing them. When confronted he would deny it, claim it was an accident, or insist it was just rough play.
Sunshine became Dapple's designated parent. She was very skilled as a nurse, and particularly experienced at subduing large, strong, and uncooperative patients. So went the reasoning of the rest of Sunshine's childermoot, but she was also an outsider relative to the other sires and dams, who had all been friends since their school days. From Sunshine's perspective this was them singling out the friend of convenience to do the dirty work of raising a difficult child.
Her paws were full putting out the (all too often literal) fires left in Dapple's wake. It was rare for her to snatch a truly happy moment with any of her other pups, as they wanted nothing to do with Dapple, and since Sunshine was his minder, they wanted nothing to do with her by extension.
Dapple was superficially charming and made friends easily. He was also a master manipulator. As he got older he didn't fall in with the wrong crowd, the wrong crowd coalesced around him. His little gang of thugs were guilty of all the usual stuff, shoplifting, vandalism, using and dealing drugs.
On Hearthside, drug possession and use, while illegal and subject to the same warning PSAs, isn't punished to the same degree as a human might expect. But selling, trafficking, and especially producing drugs is penalized severely. Anyone may fall to vice, and one should help pull them out of it rather than punish them. But willfully enabling self destructive behavior for financial gain is another story. Dapple, of course, was guilty of all of this.
In his later puppy years Dapple would often run away from home, frequently after an argument with Sunshine about something or other, but sometimes for no reason at all. He was often missing for days at a time, causing his dam no end of worry, only to show up out of the blue, usually with some empty apology and meaningless promise to do better. These absences grew longer and longer as Dapple approached adulthood, and he was frequently escorted home by local police rather than showing up on his own.
Eventually he just never came back. This was Sunshine's last whisker plucked. This had been her lot as a dam, forced to take care of a child who did not reciprocate her love, practically a stranger to her fellow parents, and alienated from the other pups who were just as much her own children as Dapple was. After all that heartache, all the arguing, all the love and worry, she was denied even closure.
She completed her expected 53 years as a dam, but promptly left once the litter was grown. Everywhere on Hearthside was too close to bad memories. One of her teachers, gray in the snout and nearing retirement, found herself the most senior healer at a newly built orbital colony in the inner belt. She invited Sunshine to join her, as she needed four extra paws to help fill the medical needs of the growing community. Despite never having been off world, with zero experience in microgravity, and speaking not a whisper of the local language, she leapt at the offer.
Just as she was getting comfortable in her new home, the locals decided to organize an interstellar missionary journey. Forced from their homeworld of Pilgrims' Rest, they wanted to do something to show continuity with their former way of life. Pilgrims' Rest was historically a hub of missionary activity, being as it was founded by Wayfarers from the Outer Belt fleeing Firefly's genocide during the war of dissolution 33 millennia prior.
Five locals, a hearthkeeper, a knight, a farspeaker, a soldier, and one fellow strongarmed into going because the rest of them were his only friends, were selected to be missionaries. But a mission requires at least a hearthkeeper and a healer, and the latter was in short supply. Some had volunteered, but had failed the screening process. Sunshine's teacher had always wanted to be a missionary, but was now too old to pursue her dream.
Sunshine, perhaps feeling like all of Focus was still too close to past regrets, agreed to her teacher's plea for her to fulfil her dream in her stead. She would be gone 500 years, not aging a day along the way, plenty of time for the remnants of the past to wash away. And in the vanishingly unlikely event they finally achieved First Contact, she could leave Focus behind forever.
As a parting gift, her teacher bestowed on her a relic of the healers' college, a hame made from the pelt of the saint who founded the college three millennia prior.
Of course, Sunshine would not return to Focus, at least not in the way she expected. She, along with the other missionaries aboard The Dewfall, would make history when they made First Contact with a race of smelly bipedal hairless apes.