Chibi Terracoon
RoxPersonality
Chirra is a very sweet playful young girl. She loves anything pink or sparkly, like most girls her age and often gets distracted when out walking if there is something pretty around. Chirra tries to always include something pink in her outfit, be that an accessory or the main item of clothing. She prefers to wear skirts and dresses, but for the sake of practicality will sometimes also wear jeans with a top or leggings with a tunic top.
Chirra's love of all things girly is in direct contrast to her mother, who generally prefers blues, teals and greens. No one in the family really knows where Chirra got her love of pink and girly things but they have finally accepted that she will always love girly things and no longer try to change her by buying more gender neutral colours or by trying to get her to join her cousins climbing trees. Instead, they let her sit reading fairy tales and drawing pictures of princesses with fairy wings.
As sweet and innocent and girly as Chirra is, she also has a stubborn side and can be very cocky. She can come across as pretentious and loves to make others feel slightly ridiculous for assuming that because she is a child she won't know very much.
She can also be precocious as she loves to correct people when they are wrong, even if it would get her in trouble.
Appearance
Chirra has very curly dark hair and dark eyes. She is slim and slightly smaller than the average five year old which only serves to make her look younger. Her clothes, being as girly as they are, often make her look younger too.
In order to stop herself from looking so young, she usually wears her hair up at school. She prefers it pinned high or in a french braid so that it looks shorter and that, in her mind anyway, makes her look older.
Her parents, for obvious reasons, will not allow Chirra to wear makeup although on picture day at school her Mom does allow her to wear a tiny amount of tinted lipgloss just so that she doesn't feel left out. However, Chirra doesn't really like the feel of the lipgloss and only wears it because her Mom expects it.
Backstory
When Chirra's parents first met, her mother, Layla, already had two daughters. Kaydence was eight years old and very much a tomboy. Mia was six years old and very much idolized Kaydence. Chirra's father, Maxwell, loved Layla and her daughters very much and, after dating for two years, Kaydence and Mia wore beautiful jade dresses as Layla and Maxwell got married.
Maxwell and Layla had the perfect family and were very happy. Maxwell treated the girls as if they were his own and loved to spoil them with trips to the zoo and days at the beach. Maxwell was often away with work but he would always bring gifts for all three of the beautiful women in his life from all the places he travelled.
One morning while Maxwell was away, Layla woke up and felt violently ill. She cried out for Kaydence, who was now fourteen, and begged her to call Maxwell and ask him to return that afternoon instead of the early hours of the next morning as he had originally intended. Terrified there was something severely wrong, Maxwell caught the next flight home and caught a taxi to the house in time to see Layla bundled into the back of an ambulance.
His face white, Maxwell yelled for Kaydence and Mia to get in the cab and they sped to follow the ambulance.
Chirra was delivered by Emergency Caesarean. Layla and Maxwell hadn't even known they were expecting. If they had known, perhaps things would have been different. Perhaps Maxwell would have insisted that Layla take it easy and maybe the placenta wouldn't have ruptured, causing Layla to be violently ill that day.
For the first three months of Chirra's life, she was in an incubator while the doctor's tried to help her do more than just survive. They operated on her to repair the hole in her heart when she was just two months old, while Maxwell and Layla held their elder daughters and tried to hide their fears.
Chirra survived the surgery and her parents were able to take her home when she was three months and three days old. Layla, who had no need to work thanks to Maxwell's job, worried constantly about her. Her small body had been through so much so young. Layla needn't have worried.
A month after she first came home, Chirra rolled over on her own and started to crawl. Within a week Chirra was pulling herself up to stand. The Health Visitor was astonished.
By the time Chirra was five months old she was walking, with the slightly unsteady gait of any toddler.
At six months, Chirra turned to her mother and said, quite clearly "Mama, please bottle?"
By the time Chirra was a year old she was speaking in fully formed sentences and had reliably informed her Health Visitor that her red crayon was broken: "It's not red. That's burgundy."
At 16 months old, Layla took her daughter to the doctor to have intelligence tests. The doctor performed the tests for her own age group and then, when she was so far ahead of the bell curve as to render the tests useless, he tested her for age 5, age 7 and age 11 intelligence tests. She passed all with incredibly high scores.
Begrudgingly, the doctor handed Layla an entrance exam for the local high school. Her exam was sent to the school for genuine marking. Chirra, at the age of 19 months, was offered a place at the local high school in several of the AP classes.
Layla, concerned that the school would not make enough adjustments, insisted on accompanying Chirra for, at the very least, a week. She stayed for just 2 classes. Everyone loved Chirra and took her under their wing.
Chirra loved school and absorbed knowledge like a sponge, retaining more information than most of the older students. She flew through classes and, by the age of five, was already top in the class of 15-16 year olds.
Story
It's a peculiar sensation to walk into your first class in a new semester and realise that someone is missing. Even stranger still when no one has any information. On the first day after summer vacation, all the high school seniors noticed that their star pupil was missing.
Chirra wasn't in homeroom. She didn't make it in time for Chemistry, or AP Maths. At lunch, her girlish giggles and home-baked cupcakes that were always brought in on the first day of term were noticeably absent. By the end of the first day, everyone was sure that Chirra had been moved up a year early and was in college. Several of her classmates (now former classmates they supposed, although the notion felt alien) had older siblings who would doubtless be telling stories of the six year old prodigy with the sweet giggle and the slightly precocious wink she gave after every correct answer.
Her best friends, Sophie and Jade, were both hurt that she hadn't mentioned that she would be going to college but assumed, as did the rest of the school including the teachers, that it had been a recent decision and she hadn't had a chance.
In homeroom on the second day, Miles solemnly informed the class that Chirra was not at the local state run college. His brother was one of the more popular second year students and was in charge of the orientation week and could guarantee that Chirra was not in the college. Lizzie, whose parents were both teachers at the local private school, stated hurriedly that Chirra was not in the senior equivalent there either.
Sophie wondered aloud if it was possible that Chirra could have been moved into a university somewhere but Doug, who had always been considered the braniac before Chirra had joined the school, calmly stated that a six year old university student would have made news. If not on a national scale, at least on the local news stations. Jade frowned, trying to work out what the other options were, and the whole class stared blankly in subdued melancholy silence, moving slowly to their first lessons and hoping that everything was ok.
Sophie and Jade, who Chirra had proclaimed were her "bestest best friends in the whole wide world", had decided by the end of first period that they simply had to find out what had happened to Chirra. The next five hours of their school day were hell as the rumour spread around the school and they were constantly being asked to send their classmates regards, or condolences, depending on the rumour that had been heard.
As the final bell rang, Sophie and Jade snatched up their bags and darted through the classroom door, pushing through the crowds that started to appear as students of all ages rushed to leave. The students yelled out messages for Chirra that were drowned in the shouting mass.
Sophie and Jade had walked to Chirra's house before, the day she had jokingly called them her "bestest best friends in the whole wide world" when an old lady had asked if they were sisters. They knew the route easily, their feet pounding on the pavement, never slowing until they reached the corner of her road. They slowed their breathing, determined to appear calm in front of Chirra's parents no matter what they discovered.
Jade lost "Rock, paper, scissors" and had the dubious pleasure of knocking on the door to Chirra's home. Chirra's mother, who was always immaculately dressed, opened the door in jeans and a pale blue tshirt, her eyes shadowed as if she hadn't slept in days. Jade and Sophie glanced at each other nervously, more convinced than ever that something terrible had happened.
Layla's eyes went wide and she babbled in relief, dragging both girls inside, firing questions at them both. Sophie eventually managed to understand two words out of the jumbled mass of syllables being fired at them both. Chicken pox. Sophie started to giggle and tried desperately to explain to both Layla and Jade what was so funny. As Jade gleaned that the students at school had, in actual fact, made a mountain out of a molehill, she threw back her head and laughed.
Their laughter woke the sick little girl upstairs and her soft calls disturbed them. Layla asked if both the girls were immune and, smiling, they both giggled that they had actually had chicken pox together at the age of 5, suddenly catching themselves as they remembered that they had only been a year younger than Chirra was now. It hit them hard then.
She was still just a little girl. She hadn't had her first kiss, her first dance, her first heartbreak, her first love...so many things she had yet to experience. Sophie grabbed the glass of fruit juice that Layla had poured for Chirra and marched upstairs, Jade following hurriedly in her wake.
Sophie tapped on the door of Chirra's room, the pink glittery letters that spelled out her name serving as yet another reminder of her youth. Chirra's voice was hushed, croaky, carrying the obvious marks of the sick. Jade reached around Sophie, who appeared to be frozen in place, and opened the door slowly.
Chirra turned to look at them and pulled herself up hurriedly, sitting upright as they moved into the room. She took the glass of fruit juice held loosely in Sophie's hand and drank it almost without pausing. Sophie and Jade sat on the bed, passing on the less morbid messages that people had sent to Chirra, giggling with her over everyone's ridiculous notions of why she was absent (and conveniently forgetting their own)...
They sat with her for over an hour until it was obvious that she was tired and really needed to rest. They both gave her a hug and she smiled sleepily as she wriggled her way down under the duvet, a small hand reaching for a ragged looking toy that may or may not have once been a pig.
Sophie and Jade smiled down at the little girl, seeing her very clearly for the first time in a long time as she cuddled the toy close. They turned to leave as quietly as they could as her breathing evened out and she appeared to already be dozing. As they reached the door a small voice spoke from behind them.
"Can you leave my homework on the desk?"
