Iris (Frostflake-heart)

iris ✾ she/her ✾ ✾ rain ✾ baker 
Iris 	Iris
 	
Credits 	Credits
Owner 	frosty
Creator 	frosty
Artist 	base by ivy
Coder 	modified by frostybase cr. himmalerin
Background 	foad roshan
Inspirations 	Inspirations
Theme 	self-doubt, impostor syndrome, living in another's shadow
Animal 	finch
Song 	Pushed Down - Stahl ft. Caroline (nightcore)
Character 	Character
Full Name 	Iris
Age 	11 years
Hatching Date 	february 27
Gender 	female
Pronouns 	she/her
Orientation 	biromantic asexual
Occupation 	baker + owner of Pleasing Patisseries
Tribe 	rainwings
Goal 	to have a happy life with her girlfriends
Residence 	Tropica
Relatives 	Sweetpea (father)Violet (mother)Vibrance (older sister)
Allies 	Eden, Lucy, Jello, most locals and customers
Enemies 	her family (complicated relationship), rude customers
Likes 	romance, baking, floral scents, her girlfriends and their company, celebrations, festive seasons, pastel colors (mostly green), happy endings
Dislikes 	feeling inferior, being compared, egotistical dragons, anyone insulting her girlfriends, customers being difficult, sour tastes and smells, intense physical activites
Abilities 	standard RainWing abilities (venom + camouflage), baking skills
Weapons 	venom
Love Interests	Snakeroot (formerly), Eden, Lucy
Quote 	“Welcome! How can I help you today?”
Appearance
May I recommend you today's special? Let me know if you can't have nuts or something.
Standing behind a counter and greeting you cheerily as you enter her shop is how most dragons meet Iris, a RainWing with a small size, big heart, with dreams and secrets that she would never tell anyone but those she loves.
Iris is shorter in stature than other RainWings of similar age, and is noticably chubbier, but it isn't her only defining feature. She's pretty ordinary in other terms, not having any standout traits when it comes to looks. Most of the time, she smells faintly of pastry flour and fruit, a sign of her profession. Being a RainWing, Iris sometimes wears flower crowns most commonly consisting of violets and daisies. 
As with all members of her tribe, her scales are ever changing in color, but she favors a palette that mostly include greens, especially pastel and lighter shades such as seafoam, the color she is most commonly seen in. Her underbelly is almost always kept the same tones, with a pale maize yellow being the most frequent complementing color. The row of spines on her back are tea green, which are usually unchanging and dull. Iris's frills, however, are usually a more vibrant shade, ranging from spring green to chartreuse, and sometimes even warmer oranges or reds when she's feeling the mood.
Any form of color expression she chooses to do is usually in her wings - they are most commonly in the range of purples and pinks, as they are reminescent of her favorite flower hues, but any other color is also not uncommon. It is also where her emotions usually splash out - Iris has managed to tone down her feelings showing in most of her scales, but her wings are off limits to this rule. 
Iris has heterochromia, meaning two different colored eyes. Her right eye is a bright sky blue, while her left is a shimmering gold, like flickering sun rays. While assuming her duties in her shop, she wears a constant polite smile that never seems to waver. In private, or around her closest loved ones, however, her frills are very responsive to her emotions, obviously flaring when experiencing distress or anger, and drooping whenever gloomy feelings take over.
Personality
As I grow older, I realized that love is not a one-way street... and it's almost never easy, either.
On the surface, Iris is easy to evaluate - an ordinary townsfolk with a sweet tooth who's passionate about her job, perhaps a bit shy at first but is chatty to friends, which is unironically how you would describe most other dragons anyway. To put it simply, Iris is typical and perhaps boring in terms of personality.
However, such an evaluation is much too shallow for a dragoness like her, someone who doesn't keep her troubles up for display for the world to see. Iris is a sensitive, sweet soul that is perhaps too humble for her own good, her silence making her a background character in the bustling crowds.
Iris is what you would call a "social introvert", as weird as it sounds. She loves interactions with others and is proficient in holding up a conversation, and making friends as well as hanging out with them is often something she would actively seek to do. She does get tired of them though, and she won't be attending any parties until she has sought refuge in a good book and some quality alone time. Once a conversation starts, she is almost chatty enough to fool others to think she's more outgoing than she really is. Iris is great at not letting the atmosphere go dull or awkward, and she is good at sensing when to steer the conversation into a different direction. 
Her greatest defining feature is something that isn't known to the world: her tendency to blame everything on herself. "Too hard on yourself" is basically a term invented for Iris, as she can't help but feel like everything gone wrong is her fault if she happens to be involved. She has grown too used to living in the shadow of others, and has many times dulled her own shine over the years. She is, for lack of a better word, a pushover, and humble to the point of self-depreciation, so much that at one point, she failed to see anything but her own flaws. The thing that would crush her most is often failure, and seeing disappointment in others directed towards her. Iris often gets jealous of others if they can outperform her in things that she loves, and she hates herself for this, thinking of herself as horrible for feeling that way.
Iris thrives on maintaining and constantly strengthening any meaningful connections she has with other dragons. Personal failures may be hard, but losing a friend or loved one will shatter her to the core. Family is a touchy subject around her, as she envies those with happy, loving and most importantly, unbiased families. She is often touch-starved and deprived of love and affection, causing her to hang on to these relationships as long as she could. This also makes her gullible and easy to guilt trip, as she sometimes fails to find strength to break off failing relationships. She is a daydreamer of romance, and often fantasizes about situations that are borderline unrealistic, even though she has brought herself closer to the ground as she grew up.
When she is in a steady, healthy relationship, however, Iris gives everything that she has. She is very in tune with the love languages that others speak, and often goes out of the way to make them feel happy and comfortable with themselves. She is generous, so much that she appears entirely selfless, and often finds roots of her own happiness stemming from the smiles she sees on others' faces. Those who bring out her caring, sweet and gentle side are often those that she works as hard as she can to keep in her life, and she would go to the ends of the earth for them.
No matter how much of a goody-two shoes she appears to be, all rules get thrown out the window when her loved ones are endangered. Iris can appear as polite and docile as ever in situations where she is attacked, but recklessly throw herself into danger if it were someone she cared about in the same place. In those cases, she can even be provoked to attack, and who knows, one might see her use her venom one day, something that is still considered widely taboo and horrifying amongst commoner RainWings.
Iris is a complicated dragon underneath the surface, especially when she fights her own battle against impostor syndrome, and all she really needs is unconditonal love and support, daily reminders that she matters, and maybe she can let go of the hurt she has in the past. 
History
If family is all about being blood-related... then I wish I didn't even have one.
Iris came from a family of born and bred tree-gliders. Everyone was either decent enough at the sport, or were high-ranking competitors in events hosted by the royal family. It was their pride, and possibly the only notable one. Despite having almost ancient roots, tree gliding was still a respectable thing the RainWings carried on, and her family was the prime example of it. 
Until Iris herself came along. 
She was born a year after her older sister, Vibrance. From the very first minute, her parents were already glorifying how their newest dragonets would top the ranks and be recognized by the queen, and perhaps eventually be famous worldwide for their prowess in tree gliding. Unfortunately, they were only half right. 
Vibrance was everything their parents had hoped for - athletic, a streamlined body made for agile movements, and the sheer speed and quickness she had for learning almost any type of sport. Most of all, she enjoyed it and spent a lot of her youth racing her friends. Iris, however, was the total opposite - she frequently got hurt during her tries, and preferred to stay in and do quiet activities - even when she's outdoors, she grativated towards flowers and bird-watching, and she tires out incredibly easily. 
Her parents tried multiple times to get her into the sport, horrified that they had a dragonet that would not represent their pride and fame, but Iris, in their own words, was "the greatest disappointment bestowed by fate upon the family." She was too young to know what it truly meant, but the moment they said that was the moment they had made their favoritism official, and there was no questioning it. Vibrance was their favorite daughter, and she was showered with physical gifts and compliments to no end, while they simply let Iris fade away into darkness, where they thought she should belong. 
Iris grew bitter towards her family, but her kind and gentle nature did not make her fully resent them to the point of badmouthing them. To make the situation lighter, Vibrance was much less cocky than their parents were, and sympathized with her younger sister a lot. She made it clear that she never wanted to hurt her, and often shared her gifts with Iris whenever possible. It did not help that her parents would constantly go to great lengths to compare the two, eventually causing Iris to even doubt herself, greatly affecting her as she grew up. Her sister did her best to help, but couldn't do too much under the strictness of her parents. 
She left them behind when she was old enough, desperate to find some sort of recognition. It was how she ended up in her first relationship - when she hit it off with another RainWing named Snakeroot. Iris was younger back then, and dumb enough to not realize that his sweet words and affection were all false pretenses. He managed to persuade her to be his girlfriend, and she believed it to be genuine love, not realizing that he continued to destroy her self-esteem instead of helping her rebuild it like she thought she was. The disaster eventually ended when he straight up told her she was useless before he left, shockingly similar to how her parents treated her in the past.
Iris was close to breaking back then, but she found solitude in a new hobby - baking. Her natural talent for it helped her make it a career, and she seized the opportunity to take over an abandoned store for herself at a lower price in Tropica. She quickly became the talk of the town, and was rightfully getting credit for what she's doing. Despite that, though, Iris felt empty on the inside, feeling like an outcast even in her own scales, believing that she would never have someone close enough to love again. She still wrote letters to her sister, but even now she couldn't help feeling jealous of Vibrance and feeling bad about it. Why should she get all her parents' attention but Iris doesn't, and why would Iris think she should give it all up for her useless younger sister? She of course felt bad about these thoughts stewing in her head, but they wouldn't stop haunting her, making her feel even smaller than she already had been.
One day, when she was drowning in all these self-depreciating thoughts, alone in a corner at the local teahouse Maple Cloud, a SeaWing with fascinating colors approached her, seemingly with friendly intent. Iris's heart skipped a beat but her brain put her on guard, knowing that she had been manipulated into romance in the past. Still, she allowed the new dragoness to talk to her, who introduced herself as Lucy. And for whatever reasons she believed to be stupid at that time, Iris eventually broke down and told Lucy all her problems, ending up crying while the SeaWing comforted her. 
Maybe it was because she thought the dragoness would be less judgmental, looking at her missing left hind leg. Perhaps they just had a mutual topic and it made the conversation progress in a less awkward manner. Whatever it was, she heard no deception in her words, and the day ended with her heart feeling lighter as Lucy placed a flower behind her ear, telling her that she could come back next week and meet her again if she wished.
Iris thought she was an idiot for accepting the offer, but she did anyway. Again and again, and for once she felt safe around another dragon's presence, safe enough to relay all of her hurt to, and eventually she even told Lucy all about how her family treated her in the past, and the SeaWing could see how much she had been through, how bad her current mental state is. Lucy earned her trust and for the first time, Iris thought she truly deserved it. Falling in love was the only next step, However, it wasn't the end of her journey to romance, and it would come to surprise the RainWing.
Lucy had been the first to confess, and when she did, they gathered around a table at the teahouse where they met, but besides her was another dragoness, a purple IceWing with a solemn expression and multiple scars. She introduced that IceWing as Eden, and admitted that she loved both of them and wished for them to at least get along. 
While Iris agreed for she was hopelessly in love with Lucy, she couldn't deny that she was a little reluctant at first. The familiar feeling of ugly jealousy came back every time Lucy looked at Eden affectionately, even though the SeaWing did the same to her. Of course, she believed that the dragoness wouldn't lie to her, but thinking of having to share the one that she loved with someone that she doesn't even know? That stung Iris a bit, and she could tell Eden was also on edge with such a proposal despite their mutual agreement.
What happened next surprised all three of them: Eden and Iris both met each other multiple times, and time passed by quickly as the two conversed more and got to know more about each other. It was by no means an easy journey - their initial lack of understanding sometimes resulted in accidental pushes of each other's buttons, and in the early stages, it took Lucy's patient and understanding nature to keep them together behind the slammed doors. However, once Iris got to understand the IceWing, she developed feelings - firstly as tiny stabs of sympathy, to mutual understanding and sharing comfort in their rocky pasts, and finally, Iris realized she couldn't love Lucy without also loving Eden the same way.
It was a daunting moment - Iris never thought, nor was she told that she could ever come to love two different dragons at the same time. She knew such relationships came with challenges, but then again, so did every other one. Most importantly, when the two had a heartfelt conversation about their feelings for each other, Iris was bubbling with joy when Eden expressed that she loved her too. They got together watching the sunset, with Lucy lovingly wrapping her wings around both of them.
Iris's journey was far from over, and she still has a lot of mental baggage to unpack - but for once, she wasn't alone. And nothing warms her heart more than helping her girlfriends through their problems at the same time they help her with her own. Even though the scars her family left still remained, seeing Lucy and Eden smile every day was enough of a reason for her to live life to its fullest.
She might not be the RainWing that her parents wanted her to be, but she is still determined to be better than that. 
Abilities & Weaknesses
I wasn't what they wanted me to be, and I never will be. But... some dragons have shown me that being different isn't always a bad thing.
When it comes to natural abilities, Iris is just like any other typical RainWIng - armed with fangs filled with corrosive venom and decent camouflaging skills. She has never been in a situation where she's forced to fight, but she isn't immediately repulsed by using her deadly venom as a self-defense tool. Iris is great at naturally keeping things spick and span, and has a innate talent for cooking, especially in terms of pastries. One of her greatest strengths is that she is undeniably hardworking, and it is hard to get her to slack off from doing what needs to be done.
Iris lacks the agility necessary to move through treetops quickly like other RainWings, and her stamina fails her greatly as she tires out from physical assertion quite easily. She is not as academically intelligent outside of her interests, and her tendencies to be led by her emotions can sometimes drive her into foolish decisions, especially those involving her loved ones. She also suffers from impostor syndrome, something that is driven by her low self-esteem, and on her own, she is very much a doormat who has let others run over her quite a few times. Because of her aforementioned traits, she can also be gullible at times.
Relationships
I love you. Both of you. And while I may be easygoing in any other thing in life, the two of you are non-negotiable, and trust me when I say you never will be.
Sweetpea & Violet: It's hard to use the word "loathe" in a sentence for Iris, given her usually forgiving nature, but it's the closest thing she can describe her parents with. From the moment she turned out to be anything less than their ideal dragonet, her parents had cast her out of their lives. She feels a little conflicted sometimes, as they still did provide her with food, shelter and at least somewhat adequate care while she needed it. Whatever it was, Iris accepts that she would leave the two dragons behind her, while she learns to deal with the pain they caused with her newfound support system by her side, and is absolutely not interested in reconciling with them. Sometimes, she thinks that they would not approve of her relationship anyway, which made her extra pleased to know she was every bit that they didn't want her to be.
Vibrance: Iris has complicated, somewhat overlapping views regarding her sister and parents, but deep down, she didn't truly hate Vibrance, knowing it was never her fault, and she did everything she could to make it less painful back at home. They still exchange letters, and Iris acknowledges that their relationship isn't as negative as it could be, but there is still a lot to digest on Iris's side, from the years of jealousy and living in her sister's shadow. Everytime she tries to think of the positives, all she felt was a bitterness at how her sister didn't try hard enough - perhaps she didn't want to give up the luxuries her parents provided - who would? She doesn't resent her nor hold grudges, but isn't entirely trusting of her either, keeping her relationship and personal details out of their communication.
Lucy: The SeaWing is the first dragon that Iris ever truly opened up to, and has seen all her vulnerable points. She trusts Lucy more than she trusts herself, and she thinks that there's truly no one who can offer more comforting hugs than her kind, gentle girlfriend. She knows she can be herself around her, and is eternally grateful that Lucy often encourages both her and Eden to be more outgoing and overome their own barriers. Iris would not stand for it when Lucy's disability gets insulted or even brought up in a negative light, and she is one of the dragons that Iris would fight tooth and claw for. She would never admit it to anyone else, but cuddling with the SeaWing often makes all her fears and worries melt away like magic. 
Eden: It wasn't exactly love at first sight when it came to these two - Iris and Eden both saw each other as somewhat of a competitor for Lucy's affection, despite the SeaWing reassuring both of them through actions and words that she loved them equally. However, once the two really bonded over their troubled pasts and the comfort they found in each other, softer feelings began to bloom as their relationship flourished, resulting in a bond that is only rivaled by their shared connection with Lucy. Eden is not as talkative as the other two in the trio, but she is surprisingly sweet and caring, and these little quirks that Iris eventually found adorable was not lost on her. Both of them are very coordinated and understand each other's desires and pains very well, making them inseparable even through hell and high water. 
Jello: At first, Iris was wary of the odd-colored SkyWing, as her first impression of her was simply a thief and a rather unpleasant, spoiled brat of a dragonet. However, she gave Jello a chance to help out in her shop, and she has since impressed Iris with how much she has grown up and changed. The RainWing actually enjoys her energetic and excitable personality, and has sympathy for what happened to her. She is protective of the younger dragon as that of a sibling, and tries to look out for Jello whenever she can, never hesitating to show her appreciation for her help.
Frosty: The darker looking IceWing started out as a customer in Iris's shop, to a frequent visitor and a casual friend when they met each other at several community events. Iris had the experience of teaming up with Frosty a few times, and she enjoyed the other dragoness's dry sense of humor and surprisingly sharp intuition. They have a mutual respect for each other and Iris is one of the dragons that Frosty doesn't mind holding a conversation with.
Quiescent: Iris does not know Quiescent personally, but she has frequently met the IceWing at social events, and they are known for their charm in a conversation, something that the RainWing does agree with. She finds her to be a humorous presence and a lighthearted addition to any atmosphere, and finds the IceWing to be quite a fun teammate to have. Quiescent has dropped by Iris's bakery a few times, and she appreciates their general politeness in a day-to-day conversation.
Mala: The NightWing is a frequent returning customer to her shop, and Iris has become rather fond of her friendly persona and sociable nature. She often gives discounts and special deals to Mala on particularly good days, and is always happy to see her around, be it on work days or seasonal festivals. She also thinks of her relationship with Frosty, whom she is frequently seen together, as interesting as they are observed to be quite contrasting. Overall, her impression on the young dragoness is positive. 
Trivia
Coffee? Do dragons actually... drink this stuff?
*Iris doesn't use any nicknames as she can't find any cute enough
**the pet names such as "love" and "darling" used by her girlfriends are different in this regard as she absolutely adores them
*her theme song, Pushed Down, was chosen to represent the irony of how her character is used to lifting others up, but can't do so for herself
*her diet mostly consists of vegetarian things because of how she was raised but she does eat meat
*sweet onion soup is her favorite dish, only because it's made by Lucy
*her love language is words of affirmation
*lavender is her favorite flower + scent
*vanilla is not a boring flavor; she'll fight you on this
*decent at singing
*she physically cannot swallow coffee; can't stand the smell nor taste
*memorized every single favorite cake flavor of her loved ones
*has stage fright
**she has dreamt about performing on stage before, and sometimes entertains these fantasies in her head, but actually asking her to do it will send her into panic mode
*hates rainy days and violent storms
*loves soft objects, especially animal plushies; she cuddles a pink rabbit to sleep at night, a shared gift from her girlfriends
*she likes natural tones and earthy colors when it comes to palettes
Gallery
Huh, you are calling me pretty? O-oh. Um, thanks, I guess...? I've never really been complimented that way.
reference base by biohazardia
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gallery will go here
Category:Content (Frostflake-heart)
Category:Characters
Category:Females
Category:RainWings
Category:LGBT+
Category:Occupation (Cook)
Category:Occupation (Merchant)
Category:Status (Commoner)