Editing Crissal (section)

==Background== 
At her birth, Crissal was named after the slender, cautious little desert thrasher of the same name. Her parents thought that their daughter's sandy beige feathering matched that bird's plumage most closely.

In retrospect, they probably should've gone with "Mockingbird", but that wasn't really apparent until later.

Crissal had about as happy a childhood as one can have in a post-apocalyptic desert hellscape. Her family lived alone, in a remote, hidden "nest" of a domicile, protected from most threats. Her parents were loving, and saw to her needs. Due to the increased mobility of flight, they were mostly able to keep the dirty day-to-day business of survival separate from the home environment they created for her.

She still knew how bad the world was, out there, but only secondhand. Only from her parents' tales. They kept saying they tried to live life better than that, and kept telling her she was better than that, too. Superior to the endless, needless savagery and want. Being able to fly made it easier for all of them to believe it. Easier to just . . . keep rising above it all.

Until that life came to a tragic end.

Because even winged creatures need to come down eventually. Can't stay aloft and protected forever. No way to sleep up there, for one thing. And so a fluke nighttime attack from a rare desert beast, while they all slept, was what ended her idyllic childhood. Her parents bought her the time she needed to take to the air. Bought it with their lives. She escaped, but now traumatized and alone, and in a world where she didn't truly belong.

She wouldn't let this terrible place defeat her, though. She was better than that! She explored, made contact with the various settlements she'd spied from above, and leveraged her flying ability in useful ways for any communities willing to listen. She made her way in the world delivering important messages, or couriering valuable items from place to place, all done safer and faster than any groundling could match.

This being an apocalyptic wasteland, though, of course bad things happened. There were the inevitable attempts at betrayal, or violence, or greedy exploitation. She never responded in kind. It wouldn't be honorable, she was above that sort of thing. But she could still give them a sharp piece of her mind! She wouldn't sink to their level, all murdering and backstabbing, but she could at least thrash them with her words, if not her fists.

And so she did. She developed a matchless acerbic wit, a mercilessly sharp tongue that lashed any and all who had it coming. Mainly, the kind of people most responsible for bringing things to this sorry state, back in the past, and whose current behavior kept it there now. She wouldn't kill them-- usually, unless it was unavoidable, she had higher standards than that--but she could sure as sky put them in their place!

She could vent all of that existential fear, trauma, frustration, and disappointment, into a boiling torrent of vitriol aimed straight at their hearts. Right at those who'd failed her, and her parents, and even themselves. Hey, you!!! Yeah, you! You wanna keep making the world an awful place?!?

''Let's talk.''

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