Cicadastorm

Appearance
Cicadastorm is a small, skinny cat with angular features and long limbs. She has large ears and a long tail, and her claws are notably sharp.

Her pelt is mostly white, but it is splotched with large patches of ginger-gold and black, as well as some small golden and dark gray markings on her flanks and legs respectively. She has an interestingly intricate black marking on her face. One ear is ginger and the other is golden. Cicadastorm has slanted, piercing lemon-yellow eyes that sharply contrast the dark fur of her face. A stare from her is quite unsettling.

Personality
While she's not a ton of fun to be around, Cicadastorm's intense, cold personality is a balancing contrast to her father's flighty manners. Despite her small size, Cicadastorm is oddly and intensely intimidating, and cats' first impression of her is based on her cold, fierce stare and judging glares from across whatever place she happens to be in - which is usually lingering around her father.

Cicadastorm is stubborn and dogmatic in her opinions; she'll never let anyone change her mind. And if she does, you can bet she'd rather eat her own tail than admit that someone else's good reasoning altered her opinion. She is arrogant and won't take no for an answer - at least not without giving it a physical fight first.

One thing about Cicadastorm is that she doesn't think before she acts or speaks. So she often hurts cats' feelings or makes thing worse for herself. This is usually followed by blurting out something else that also worsens the situation. She is a master of sarcastic remarks, though.

Snappish and cold, and fiercely loyal, Cicadastorm is a force to be reckoned with - in conversation and in battle.

Kithood
Cicadakit's birth was a mess. Her mother and her siblings just up and died, leaving her alone. Her father, Bitternberry, was horrified by this and kept as close as he could to Cicadakit at all times, as if she could just keel over at any moment.

Of course, without milk, that was certainly a possibility. So the next goal for Bitternberry was to find her a suitable foster mother. And that mother turned out to be Solthistle, a well-respected warrior with enough energy to run right across the ocean. Solthistle's own mate had died recently, so perhaps she took in Bitternberry's daughter out of pity. Either way, Cicadakit had a new parental figure in her life, whether she liked it or not.

From early on, Solthistle was rather unimpressed by Cicadakit. It didn't seem to occur to her that she was nursing the kit of the deputy, which made Cicadakit rather unhappy. But while in her place her father might have curled up and cried and felt worthless, all this caused Cicadakit to do was get angry and throw a temper tantrum. Solthistle promptly got up and took Cicadakit 'exploring', which involved coincidentally 'losing' her, or dumping her out on the beach where the incoming tide could get her and bolting back to camp. Unluckily for Solthistle, though, a missing kit - especially the missing kit of the deputy, thank you very much - warranted a search party that found Cicadakit pretty quickly. And Cicadakit was not happy.

Then came the time for Solthistle to have her own kits. Cicadakit got to spend the day learning to swim with Bitternberry and his little brother Hillwatcher. She had fun, and she almost caught a little fish. By which I mean she swam out into the waves to get it, was dunked underwater, got salt in her eyes, and cried while her uncle dragged her back to shore. So yeah. But she recovered alarmingly quickly and went out swimming again, despite Bitternberry's fearful protests. By sunhigh, she was starting to get tired, and so Bitternberry dropped her off with her grandmother Rainbowblaze and her friend Boltshine, his former mentor. Cicadakit found out that day that she was not remotely interested in elders' tales. She didn't even blink at their ghost stories, or laugh at the regalement of their troublemaking apprenticeships. She was more interested in why it was taking so long for Solthistle to just go ahead and give birth.

What was happening, as it turns out, were some, uh... complications. For the second time in less than two moons, tragedy struck where there should have been joy. While the kits were seemingly born fine, they all died within a few hours of their birth, and Solthistle was left extremely weak and had to spend a half-moon in the medicine den recovering. So that's where Cicadakit ended up too.

There was somewhat of a positive side to this, though - bittersweet at least. Beginning to come to terms with the fact that she would never be able to raise kits of her own, Solthistle started making an actual attempt to be a good foster mother to Cicadakit. Though she resisted at first, Cicadakit eventually let Solthistle in, and the two formed a very positive relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives. At some point, CIcadakit subconsciously switched from fantasizing about how much better her real mother would be at raising her and started to see Solthistle as her real mother. Bitternberry was incredibly grateful for this, which sparked some embarrassing rumors that Bitternberry and Solthistle were going to become mates. Obviously they never did, but Cicadakit found that if they had, she wouldn't have minded too much - because in her mind, they were her parents. Her mother and her father. And for the rest of Cicadakit's kithood, things were just perfect in her mind.

Apprenticeship
Cicadapaw was apprenticed to Yellowblaze, a tom whose aggressive personality matched her own. Unfortunately, though, he didn't like her. Why, you ask? Well, because he was the leader's son, and he was not happy with the idea that his mother could be replaced. And Cicadapaw started an unruly amount of sentences with "When my father is leader...". This annoyed Yellowblaze to no end and he often made training just that much harder for his apprentice. Cicadapaw became sort of a bully, taking out her frustration on the other apprentices. Solthistle decided to remain a stationary queen, so Cicadapaw paid a lot of visits to the nursery.

It was at this point she made a rival out of Bronzepaw, an older apprentice. He was doing better than her in just about everything, and it made her angry. She often challenged him, and he almost always won, and that fueled her determination to beat him, which made Yellowblaze encourage her to train way too hard to beat him, which gave her the confidence to challenge him again. It was a vicious cycle, and it clearly made cats worried - Bitternberry and Solthistle especially. Bitternberry tried to have a talk with Cicadapaw about it, but she just yelled at him and skulked off to go fight Bronzepaw.

So her apprenticeship just continued on for a while. Bronzepaw made fun of her size one too many times, and she tore a chunk out of his ear, which got her into loads of trouble with her parents. So she decided she was going to practice fighting so that she could beat Bronzepaw one day. Did it occur to her to fight less experienced apprentices? No. She decided the best course of action was... beating up kits. On the grounds that she was 'showing them battle moves' to 'prepare them for apprenticeship'. Solthistle, who was very protective of all kits, very quickly put a stop to this. This made Cicadapaw angry at her. So, like any rebellious teenage cat, she decided to stop talking to Solthistle. And beat up the younger apprentices.

Then one day, the unthinkable happened. While out on patrol, one of the warriors found Solthistle's body in the lagoon. It seemed that she'd decided to try to hunt, despite her weakness since giving birth, and had been overcome by the waves and drowned. That was the most likely explanation - to everyone except Cicadapaw. No, Cicadapaw insisted her mother was murdered. And she was going to find out who did it.

Of course, the suspect list was alarmingly low. Bitternberry was too terrified of everything to even think about killing anyone - besides, he'd liked Solthistle. Bronzepaw was certainly capable, but even Cicadapaw had to admit he wasn't likely to have done something like that. So her suspicions fell on Yellowlaze - he didn't like Cicadapaw or her father, and what better way to upset them than to kill Solthistle? Cicadapaw formed a burning hatred for Yellowblaze, and she did everything in her power to make life harder for him, or to trick him into admitting he'd murdered Solthistle. Nothing ever came of it, though.

At this point all of Cicadapaw's frustration had reached a point. She needed to have some triumph in her life right about now. She remembered her father telling her about how dangerous the cliffs were - how two apprentices had died trying to climb them back before she was born. Cicadapaw was sure that she could climb the cliffs - and if she couldn't, if she fell to her death, would it even be that bad? StarClan sounded amazing - plus Solthistle was there. And so was her real mother, and her siblings. So she woke Bronzepaw up in the middle of the night and challenged him to a race up the cliffs. He accepted, and the race was on.

They met at the bottom of the cliffs behind the elders' den and started climbing, each one determined to beat the other to the top. They were good up until about halfway up. That's when things started to get harder. Loose rocks tumbled down the cliffside with every pawstep, and the rocks became more jagged and impossible to navigate. Cicadapaw was determined to get to the top, though - she would be the first TorrentClan cat ever to do so. Bronzepaw thought the same. He was actually beating her, too - up until a loose boulder turned under his weight and sent him falling. He hit a rock a few tail-lengths down, knocking the wind out of himself and gashing open his leg. Well, Cicadapaw's great secret accomplishment was made to impress, not get anyone in trouble - and, though she'd never admit it, she felt kind of bad. So she begrudgingly climbed back down to where Bronzepaw was and helped him get down the cliffside. They made if to the bottom, surprised that the boulder he'd knocked loose hadn't fallen down and squashed them. They were proud of themselves, but decided not to tell anyone for fear of getting in trouble. After washing Bronzepaw's leg in the lagoon and cleaning out the wound, they went to bed, pleased at the fact that nothing had gone too horribly wrong.

As it turns out, though, something had gone pretty wrong. Because the next morning, the boulder fell out of the cliff and onto the elders' den, killing Ranbowblaze and Boltshine. Cicadapaw was understandably horrified, especially because nobody knew that she'd caused it - and for some reason, having to keep the secret was worse than being in trouble for it. She couldn't just go telling anyone, though, so she just grieved in silence for all of the death haunting her recently. She and Bronzepaw actually kind of bonded over their shared guilt, so that was kind of nice.

Shortly after, Bronzeheart became a warrior, leaving Cicadapaw alone in the apprentice den with cats who were terrified of her because she'd beaten them up multiple times each. So she was kind of just lonely for the rest of her apprenticeship.

Then Wheatstar lost her last life, and Bitternstar became leader. Cicadapaw was happy for him. She decided her new life goal was to be leader one day.

Warrior Life
First, though, she had to become a warrior, which she did. No thanks to Yellowblaze. The newly named Cicadastorm was still decidedly furious with him. But at least now she could hang out with Bronzeheart. She did that a lot, because he for some reason was the only cat who seemed to not hate her. She found that she didn't actually mind spending time with him. Though she was too proud to admit that. And he was the same way. It was pretty funny.

She also trained an apprentice, Larchpaw. And he eventually became Larchlight. It wasn't super eventful.

Anyway, for a while she just kind of hung out with Bronzeheart and supported Bitternstar and other normal warrior stuff. She was happy with her life for once, beside the fact that she was convinced that Yellowblaze had killed her mother. But she never really found out whether he had, because he died of greencough along with the deputy, Larkflower. That was sad.

And then suddenly she was deputy. She was surprised at that, but happy. Of course, for the first time in her life, she managed to feel insecure, realizing that many cats would think she only became deputy because she was Bitternstar's daughter. Larkflower, the last deputy, had after all been his closest friend. Cicadastorm had never liked her all that much, but that's beside the point.

One morning, she was out on patrol with Bronzeheart, and he just randomly straight-up asked her to be his mate. Cicadastorm was confused. She'd honestly never really thought about romance or mates. She liked Bronzeheart, of course, but she wasn't sure she liked him like that. She asked him if she could have a little time to sort out her feelings before she made a decision, and he said yes, but she could tell that he was clearly heartbroken already. She felt kind of bad. She actually had a long talk with her dad about romance and stuff, trying to figure out if what she felt for Bronzeheart was anywhere near love. She didn't mention him by name, but Bitternstar figured it out pretty quickly. The conversation was inconclusive.

That leaf-bare, there was a sudden and surprising food shortage. It was short, but it managed to claim the lives of quite a few TorrentClan cats - including Hillwatcher, Larchlight... and Bronzeheart. Cicadastorm was actually stunned out of her arrogant ways for a while. She just could not process a life without Bronzeheart in it. She realized she had loved him - maybe not romantically, she realized that now, but he'd been one of the cats she was closest with. It felt almost worse than losing Solthistle. Because now all she had was Bitternstar, and he was just as sad as her, maybe more. They grew very close, and Cicadastorm gradually started to recover. She decided to make an effort to be the best deputy she could be, to prove that she wasn't just deputy because she was related to the leader.

And so that's where she stands now. She thinks that the Clans should try to drive out CoveClan. And if that doesn't work, using their sheer numbers to wipe out the whole group is a solid backup plan in her mind. Either way, she wants them gone.

Trivia

 * I (Dragon) really like her design. A lot.
 * I plan to give her some closure on Solthistle's death, either when she joins StarClan or becomes leader.
 * I originally planned to have Bronzeheart break his leg on their race and be unable to become a warrior, and have them remain enemies.
 * I also originally forgot that her backstory included the whole assuming-her-mom-was-murdered thing. So I changed Bitternstar's backstory to have that happen to Marblemoon. But I eventually decided to just have that happen to Cicada's foster mother instead.
 * Rainbowblaze liked her a lot.
 * She has never told anybody about her race up the cliffside with Bronzeheart.

Quotes
I don't think she has any yet.