Post by Illu on Nov 23, 2011 14:15:15 GMT
Gunshot,
Species: Horse; Thoroughbred (shut up)
Gender: Male
Age: Under a year
Appearance:
Gunshot is, well, clearly not a brumby. You don't need to be a genius to figure that one out. He's a bit too tall, a bit too refined in the face and slender through the body like a greyhound, with long, clean legs and a general look about him that just seems... out of place. It doesn't help that being so young, he's still in that gawky phase where his height seems to have grown faster than the rest of him. Heck, he looks liable to trip over his own legs at any minute. If he was, say, a bay, perhaps this would be easier to ignore, but his black coat, blue eyes and solid white head and legs make it hard for him to vanish into the background.
Personality:
It won't take you long to find out that Gunshot is in sore need of a reality check. The colt has a surprisingly overdeveloped ego for his age, a bit like that 13 year old gangster wannabe who talks about how tough he is when he probably couldn't outwrestle an epileptic kitten and whom you sorely, sorely want to punch in the face. Couple this with a tenancy to sulk, get spiteful, and a need to throw his nonexistent weight around, and you have a problem. Irritatingly, he does seem to have glimmers of intelligence, the trouble is he's not actually using it.
On top of that, Gunshot appears to have little to no idea what he's doing. He can't seem to read herd movements, weather patterns, looks to have no direction in life in general, has no concept of stealth or care, and appears to have no fear of things he probably should be worried about. He's sort of just blundering through life managing not to get himself killed. It's understandable for young horses to be a little bit clueless, but yeesh. You'd think he'd been a tame horse all his life.
History:
Well, now that you mention it, he kinda has. Gunshot was born north of Kosciusko, in a town above Grey Mare Lease, to a mare who would have been destined to be a racehorse if not for an unfortunate accident as a foal with a barbed wire fence. She was a grouchy mare, who lamented what she considered her 'lost glory' and considered life as a mere broodmare beneath her. She was bred to some other up and coming racehorse with nary a title to his name yet, and thus, 'Gunshot' was born, bred, and sold along with his dam for a cheap price to some squatter with a penchant for collecting horses.
His early life pretty much involved sitting in a field with some other mares also with colts at foot. They were a few months younger than he was, so Gunshot was more than capable of beating them up and happily bullied himself into the position of leader of the little group. Word eventually came from another horse sold to them at a later date that Gunshot's sire was actually starting to make a bit of a name for himself in outback races, and Gunshot's dam decided to take that to mean her little son was destined for greatness and wasted no time constantly reminding him so. The idea didn't seem so far fetched; Gunshot certainly appeared to be living up to the speed of his namesake, at least on the flat, and as he grew he was already starting to outpace some of the adult mares.
Whatever glorious fate he was supposed to have never came to be, owing to the fact his owner ended up kidnapped. Gunshot's not quite sure what happened, but one day some official looking men on horses rode up, rudely knocked down his door and dragged him out. The kidnappers (who all had the same name for some silly reason; 'police' he thinks their name was) came back a few days later to round up all the horses, and Gunshot was squashed together with a whole bunch of others from his farm and sent off to some horrible place an older horse informed him was called 'Auction'.
Gunshot spent a few miserable days in the land of Auction, stuck in a too small pen with too many horses, with men walking by all day surveying them and occasionally taking one. Gunshot would have been sold sooner if not for a biting habit he developed out of sheer frustration. The only pro was that they were close to a mare pen, and he wasted many hours trying to get the attention of a very handsome sooty bay mare he'd seen once or twice at his old home called Saffy, although more often than not he ended up talking to her tail. She didn't last long anyway, some chump (whose appearance he can't remember to save his life) picked her up relatively quickly, leaving him alone without even a piece of eye candy to pass the time.
He was eventually taken away from the land of Auction and passed to a new owner who took him very far south and turned him out in a nice pen with some other colts where he actually had some leg room. They remained there a while, where Gunshot wasted no time making an annoyance of himself, until one day a new ranchhand didn't lock one of the fences properly. After a few minutes of 'dare you to go first', Gunshot wandered out, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Genes: Ee/aa/SPLspl
Extra Comments: Reference, sort of. The leg whites go higher up than that.
