Name: Cloud Atlas
Gender: Female
Age: Young Adult
Species: Lightning Pegasus
Pelt Color: Average steel grey
Mane/Tail Color & Style: Lighter cloudy grey with a single silver streak through the mane, two through the tail. Mane is straight, short cropped and windblown, clear from the face, tail is cut similarly short and equally straight.
Eye Color: Very light lavender purple.
Cutie Mark: Stylized arcane yellow sky map representation overtop a navy blue dodecagon with thick black border.
Residence: Canterlot
Occupation: Guard-in-training.
Talents, Skills: Strategizing, cartography, survey, scouting, extensive standard combat knowledge (nothing spec-ops or advanced), basic weather control, extensive military history and doctrine knowledge.
Likes: Flying, organization, cartography, not being put in charge but still receiving deserved respect, having support to handle her drawbacks, storms, better vantage points.
Dislikes: Being grounded, being blind to the situation at hand, not being able to plan adequately, close range brawls, losing, disrespect.
Character Personality: Very no-nonsense. Direct and forceful, even to a fault sometimes, but she is very polite and proper and provides a very honest and honorable friend. She relies on her honed instincts to evaluate situations, and has avoided a bad situation more than once because of them. She also works her way around such situations or tactics her gut tells her are improper or aren't worth the risk. She also has no issue voicing her own ideas and has been reprimanded before for questioning an 'experienced' opinion. She is intuitive and innovative as well and has employed misdirection successfully, but prefers to rely on doctrine and personal knowledge if she can.
Bio:
Cloud Atlas' life was almost always predetermined for her. Born in Fillydelphia, she was raised by military parents and went to a part-time boarding school at age six for foals in a similar position, so busy parents would be free when the nation called for them. From day one, students were grouped into teams, and they stayed together for the whole duration, this provided a very close and supportive environment that helped students in all aspects of their lives. Military history and tactics were included with standard classes. Physical education was rigorous, following pared-down versions of military bootcamp training, with certain events focused around pitting teams against one another. Needless to say, it was a lot to handle, especially with both parents gone at times, but she had friends and teachers and her whole team to fall back on.
In the later years, her matured wings became instrumental in most of her successes in fights and the team challenges. They granted her the freedom of three dimensions on a two-dimensional playing field, and she specialized in reading tactics and mapping the environment for her peers. She won in-school honors for her performance and contributions to the overall soaring success of her team, and she earned her cutie mark later that day while showing the instructors how she read the land better than they had planned and beat the game rules. Her cutie mark was late, much later than any of her fellow students, but she and her friends were overjoyed nonetheless. She was no star of the class in terms of academic or physical performance and prowess, but she was one of the class favorites.
Shortly before graduation, the first inklings of the Cult of Eclipse were starting to come to light, and both her parents were called to serve yet again. Her friends and teachers cheered her at graduation, however, providing her a replacement family better than any other. She sent some letters to her parents while they were out on tour, and she moved to Canterlot shortly after, intending to enlist in the guard like her parents. The guard readily accepted her with the long resume that followed and put her in the next batch of hopefuls for the support and specialized tactics wing of the aerial division, befitting a pegasus of her unique abilities. Fast forward some months and the Cult of Eclipse had been dissolved following the rituals and confrontation at the Cult staging area. Her parents returned home to Fillydelphia, but travelled to Canterlot at the behest of the Princess and to congratulate their daughter.
They all ended up staying in Canterlot when Equestria was invaded by Celestia and her hodgepodge of a military. Tensions were high but all three remained in Canterlot, Cloud still in training and her parents in the reserve fallback. Her parents both fought alongside other Equestrians during the raid on the city while Cloud and the other recruits were ordered to get the hay out when the raid started. She saw the streetfighting, she saw the fleets, Blackmane, and the sky titan, and was teleported into the caves like everypony else. Her parents were miraculously unharmed through the raid and remain on duty for the Princess, and Cloud, with half-finished officer training and skills to compensate, joins the crowd as yet another war refugee.