Pandora

Pandora

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For her entire life, Pandora has been passionately fascinated by aliens. They’re all she drew pictures of as a hatchling, they’re the subject of all the books she has ever checked out of Nightgleam’s library, they’re the reason she has spent so many nights staring at the sky and begging to borrow Cymry’s telescope. It came as a surprise to nobody when she announced that she wanted to enter a field centered around the study of aliens.

Not too many dragons really take Pandora seriously. There’s no proof that aliens exist, let alone that they would choose to communicate with the dragons of Sornieth. Yet Pandora keeps searching, and waiting. She’s very interested in speculative biology, and has spent a lot of time analyzing what dragons know about other planets and how aliens might adapt to survive and thrive on those planets. Pandora is prepared for every possibility for aliens: which planet they might come from, their intelligence level, their similarity to dragonkind…Every possibility, except for the idea that they may not exist.

Her clanmates may not take her seriously, but they did make the mistake of telling her about the Astrolab, and how it crashed. Pandora is totally enthralled by the idea, and thoroughly disappointed she only hatched after its crash-landing. She so desperately wants to go investigate it, to see if the Aethers in orbit found any proof of or engaged in communication with any alien life, or if they left behind any blueprints that could tell her how to reach the stars and check for herself.

There is only one dragon on Pandora’s side in this regard: Kuiper. Although Kuiper is generally regarded as a quack, he shares Pandora’s eccentric passion about space, and has similar interests in investigating the remains of the Astrolab. In their collective scheming for entryway into the Astrolab, Kuiper has grown to a sort of father-figure status to Pandora. Pandora believes it’s just the two of them against Sornieth in their quest for space, and Kuiper returns the sentiment and cares for her deeply.