Curlycloud

RedwoodClan

Gray tabby she-cat with long fur, brown eyes and curled ears

Curlycloud is as sturdy as one would expect from a warrior of RedwoodClan. She is not especially tall, but her legs are well muscled and strong. She's not particularly large either, but she is densely muscled as one can easily tell from the rectangular shape of her body. Her paws are large with tufts of black fur between her toes to act as snow shoes in the winter. Her tail is long and plumed with feathery fur drifting in color between silver and black. Her pelt is long and silky, but with no undercoat to speak of, not really that thick so what you see with her size is what you get. 

Her pelt is that of a gray tabby, though with her long and flowing fur, the black stripes that cover her body are broken more into waves and splotches than defined fishbone lines. She has no white, though there is a lightening of the fur to almost an oatmeal shade of light tan on her throat and underside. 

Curlycloud has a round head with soft features. Her eyes are walnut shaped and a bit on the larger side emphasizing the young, soft look she has going on. Her muzzle is small and delicate with a nose a shade of a deep, burnt red. But perhaps the most interesting thing about Curlycloud visually sits at the very top of her frame. Her ears. Her ears are immediately noticeable because they curl up and back, appearing almost inside out. Her ear fur, fluffy and white, sticks up in all directions, adding to her fluffy silhouette. 

Patient | Encouraging | Considerate
Curlycloud has seemingly limitless patience. Some days it seems that nothing can get under her fur. As a result, she is very tolerant of frequent mistakes and Clanmates that are, perhaps, slow to follow instruction. If a cat seems willing to learn how to do something, she doesn't mind showing them as many times as it takes for them to get it. She is very encouraging and quick to point out the good things that someone has done. She figures if she can stoke the flame of what someone is good at, it could build their confidence to try and improve themselves in other ways. She likes to take time to think about what she's going to say and how it would make her Clanmates feel. She doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings or say anything that would make another cat dislike her. The suffix -cloud was given to her because of her gentle and encouraging nature. 

Strict | Over thinker | Insecure
When it comes to the behavior of her Clanmates, she has high expectations. Warriors should act a certain way and, while she wants to encourage success, she also isn't shy about vocalizing that she expects an apprentice, for example, to keep trying at their task until they are successful. To her, there is no excuse for fooling around when there is work to be done. She tends to spend a lot of time dwelling on and over analyzing any conversation, especially one that she feels didn't go well. It's easy for her to convince herself that she said something wrong or that she did something to make another cat think her foolish. It is this over analytic nature that partly drives her to be careful about what she says. She deeply wants to be liked by every cat she meets even though she realizes that no cat is liked by everyone. Privately, she worries that even the cats that she considers friends only just tolerate her and talk about how much they don't actually like her when she's not around. 

It has been rumored that somewhere in her lineage, there was an affair with a kittypet and that was how curled back ears came into her family. Curlycloud's mother was the first to be born with curly ears and she passed them down to her only daughter. Her mother had difficulty deciding on a name for the tiny kit and she went unnamed for a while. Not that that was an unusual happenstance in the Clan. Her mother sampled several names but none seemed quite right. Just when she was about to give up and settle on a name she didn't feel fit the young she-cat, she noticed her ears beginning to curl back like her own and the name Curlykit stuck. 

Curlykit grew up as a mild-mannered kit, well liked by the elders and not underpaw of the warriors. When she became an apprentice, Curlypaw eagerly tried to please her mentor. But he was a stoic, distant tom and, while he never expressed outright disappointment with her, he was stingy with praise and it make Curlypaw worry. She would stay up at night, awake in her nest and worrying about whether or not she was being a good apprentice. The young cat would often push herself too hard trying to get her mentor's attention, volunteering for extra tasks until she was so exhausted she couldn't lift her paws anymore. Once, she went without proper rest and pushed herself hard enough that she came down with a mild case of white cough and had to rest in the medicine den for several days until she was better. 

Once her warrior ceremony came around, she held her head high as she was named Curlycloud. But still her mentor showed no pride and she was left feeling like a disappointment. She was skilled enough to become a warrior but was it just by the skin of her nose? There was no way to know now. And though she hasn't had an apprentice yet, she vowed that once she became a mentor herself, she would never put her own apprentice through the emotionally stressful apprenticeship she had endured. Her apprentices would know what they needed to do. They would know when they did a good job and she would push them to do their best when they didn't quite meet her expectations.