ataraxion application

[puppydogeyes]

STUDENT #36411

PLEASE NOTE: TYKE HAS BEEN ON BOARD THE TRANQUILITY FOR 3 YEARS NOW, AND HAS GONE THROUGH A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF DEVELOPMENT. AS SUCH THE FOLLOWING APPLICATION IS NOT 100% ACCURATE TO HER PERSONALITY AND BEHAVIOUR ANY MORE, BUT IS KEPT OPEN ON HER JOURNAL FOR REFERENCE.

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Koke
OOC Journal: kokanshu rarebirds
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope, 24.
Email + IM: kokanshu[at]gmail[dot]com, galahadfalling
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Taylor Lianne Kee aka Tyke
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: Current - 18 years old
Number: 011

Setting:

initial write up @ cartazonos

Taylor is a student at the Cartazonos Academy, which is an all girls boarding school run by a secret-alien-masquerading-as-a-human by the name of 'Coral Sparrows.' Headmistress Sparrows recruits young ladies of special talents to her school. She calls these talents 'pathos' or 'passions' but that's euphemism and what she's got are a bunch of girls with superpowers. These superpowers are not widely known about in this verse, but there are several schools and programs which take in those who possess them. These schools and programs all do their part to suppress and any attention to their communities. The Cartazonos staff and students are all well-versed in the removal of those who know too much, be it through memory erasure or 'other' means. Any video or photographic evidence of the girls while outside the Academy is destroyed, without exception. Anyone who witnesses them is left to keep their mouths shut, have their minds erased, or have their stories mocked as crazy. With the community under wraps, there has been little information published about where these powers come from, but children across the world are born with them. Sparrows seems to know the answer, but makes no concrete statements on the issue.

'Taking in' students is a reasonably euphemistic way to describe the school's acquisition process. A number of the girls are the daughters of wealthy families, given over to the school out of embarrassment, they accompany their daughters with sizable donations to keep their freakish children under wraps. Others student were scouted and kidnapped, some from as young as infancy. When Sparrows decides she's interested in adding someone to her collection, there's no stopping her.

Girls are assigned to four-person teams, which they are expected to consider as their blood sisters. The majority of girls do form these close bonds throughout their school days and missions, and there are harsh punishments for resisting. There are harsh punishments for any kind of failure. The students of Cartazonos are expected to excel at everything that is put before them: academics, athletics, arts, diplomacy, you name it. These high expectations bleed into the social interactions of the girls, and there are high standards of physical beauty and a lot of bullying. It's a demanding environment, and many of the girls don't make it. This doesn't seem to trouble the Headmistress, in the slightest. Only the strong are worth her time. The few students who do make it to the age of 20 are generally recruited as teachers, but even if they have nothing to teach they are never really released from Sparrows' grasp. She is not explicit in her desires for word-domination, but she's also not subtle in them.

Missions can take the form of anything from rescuing cats from trees, espionage and assassination, relief work, or battling rogue powers and anything in between.

This verse is heavily inspired by Umbrella Academy, X-Men, Powerpuff Girls, Teen Titans; all of it, if it seems familiar that's probably because it is.

History:

Taylor was born the only child to Aidan and Jane Kee. Aidan, a struggling fisherman with a tendency to drink too much, often took out his frustrations by physically abusing the sweet and docile Jane. Even from a young age, Taylor quickly learnt to see her father as a threat, and developed an incredibly close relationship with her mother, rarely okay with leaving her side. However, sometime shortly after she turned five, she began the strange behaviour of talking to the local dogs. Her mother considered it harmless at first, but soon found Taylor doing it more and more, and worse, the dogs seeming to understand, often following Taylor home. Despite frequent and increasingly desperate attempts to discourage the behaviour, Taylor stubbornly and obliviously persisted, even beginning to pick fights at school or play truant when she was bullied for being a freak. With the pressure from the school and no way to stop Taylor's seemingly delusional behaviour, her mother eventually couldn't cope any more, and took her to a local psychiatric hospital, abandoning her there. While she was only taken in for roughly 24 hours - long enough for the hospital to contact the local police in an attempt to have her returned home - it was at this point that operatives of the Cartazonos Academy came and took her back to the Academy. She was seven years old.

Taylor did not adapt well to Academy life. Hurt by her mother's abandonment, she blamed the Academy, and continued the aggressive and antisocial behaviour she had begun to develop at school. It was only when she learnt about the possible threat of losing her memories of her mother entirely - an older student by the name of Oona Frieze aka 'Histor' possessing the ability to erase memories - that she quieted, falling back into sullen resentment and more subtly rebellious behaviours. She began to develop alexithymia or disaffection. Unable to cope with the pain, fear, sadness and loneliness her mother's abandonment had left her with, she 'purged' her understanding of those emotions and instead began to understand them more often as anger.

This anger and defensiveness made it difficult for her to settle with her team, with Carla Morir aka Impetus' sociopathic tendencies making her near impossible to grow any attachment to, and Zara Cook aka Flashbomb's temper meaning her and Taylor would end up fighting more often than not. This only began to change when the strange and quiet Chelsey Lourdes was added to their number. A seisirpath with the ability to possess the bodies of others, Chelsey aka Theft's pathos had affected her to the point of not truly being anchored to herself properly anymore. Her moodswings and fits of forgetfulness meant it was often necessary to protect her and attempt to ground her again, a role that Taylor took up without truly being aware of it. This protectiveness and loyalty eventually spread to the rest of the team, even though Carla's attitude would never truly warm towards any of them. As such, Taylor often took the defensive position in their missions, primarily using her dogs to guard the other girls, while still taking advantage of their qualities as scouts and hunters.

With the rest of the students in the school, however, Taylor earnt a reputation for fighting and, often enough, winning. Academically she excelled, showing a sharp intelligence and good mind for analysis, despite the fact she continued to be belligerent and sullen with the instructors, often skipping classes - and using the punishments she received for this to further cement her resentment. This was only furthered when the Academy's battle tactics instructor murdered one of the students. There were many rumours about missing students, but no one had ever seen their possible fates so clearly demonstrated, and it rocked the Academy's population. Despite the fact that Headmistress Sparrows displayed a fearsome rage regarding it, and that the instructor was immediately fired (and some say worse), Taylor used the incident as more evidence towards her hate of the Academy, but that she should be careful how openly she showed it.

When she was sixteen, her talent with the cello saw her catching the attention of Fallon Pinset, the newly appointed music instructor. Beautiful and cruel, Fallon had excelled during her time as a student and was an active advocate of the Academy's process and ethos. She did not take well to Taylor's reticent attitude and refusal to admit her skill at music, and took to frequently finding the girl out and dragging her to lessons. Her persistence in this leaves Taylor confused, torn between digging her heels in deeper and growing to accept the faith Fallon seems to have in her and allow her to be something of a mentor.

Along with her other rebellious and destructive traits, she easily fell into the Academy's extracurricular environment of recreational drugs and alcohol. She preferred to drink more than anything else, and frequently ended up in the loose groups girls would form around whatever bottle or twelve-pack they'd managed to sneak in that week. Taylor used these little groups to ease the loneliness she felt but was unable to truly understand and seek to properly sooth. It was at one of these gatherings that she met Calleigh Sherman aka Pledge. The younger girl had a tendency to develop crushes very easily, and soon had one on Taylor. Persistent and a bit stupid, Calleigh ignored most of Taylor's defensive attitudes and continued to bother her long past the point where others would give up. While Taylor would never admit to having any friends, Calleigh is possibly the closest she has, beyond her teammates.

At eighteen, Taylor still continues her rebellious and reluctant behaviour within the Academy, but has proven to be a resourceful and strong individual in her missions. She has no intention of becoming a teacher, and still harbours some desire to break free of the Academy entirely. With no working scenario of how exactly to do this, it remains a pipe dream, and she has no real idea what her future holds for her.

Personality:

One of the main things that affects Taylor's personality is that she suffers from alexithymia or disaffection. Her case is not so extreme as to cause the general numbness or clinical worldview detailed in the alexithymia article. Instead it is more that she has 'purged' her understanding of the deep and painful emotions she experienced following her mother's abandonment. She still experiences sadness, emotional pain, loneliness and fear, but cannot understand or express them in anything more than the most basic sense of being 'unhappy'. This makes it easy for her to interpret them as discomfort or anger.

As such, most of Taylor's behaviour is crass, aggressive, and confrontational. She reacts to situations that scare or pain her with rudeness or violence, often using threats or daring people to go ahead with whatever they're threatening in turn. She does not, however, go looking for fights. If left to her own devices, she keeps herself to herself. Her anti-social behaviour can also be expressed in more quiet ways, a general sullenness and reluctance to speak or be involved in things. Abandonment issues mean that even without her alexithymia, she would keep people at a distance. She does not have or make friends, but with those that have managed to become close to her, usually by tenacity, she can express a more friendly and contentious attitude.

In truth, Taylor is deeply lonely. She holds a core belief - unexamined and therefore not truly conscious - that there must really be something wrong with her for her mother to reject her the way she did. She therefore cannot accept anything good in her life or about her, because she will obviously inevitably fuck it up. Even with the Academy (which accepts and encourages her in her pathos, the very thing that had her mother abandoning her), she can only stubbornly blame it for keeping her from her mother, and refuses to believe in its ethos or indeed the good education, skills and strengths it has given her. She ignores these things and instead focusses on the negatives the Academy causes in its students and treatment, using them as evidence to further strengthen her hate for the place.

This extends into her relationship with Fallon Pinset, the music instructor. Despite Fallon's persistence and insistence that Taylor is better than how she makes herself out to be, and that her rebelliousness is ungrateful, Taylor continues to fight her. She cannot accept the faith (or simple honesty) the woman displays towards her, and instead views her as an enemy, when in many ways Fallon could be a mentor to her.

The things Fallon says about Taylor are true, however. Despite her habits of skipping class and backtalking to instructors, Taylor has excelled academically. She is intelligent, doing well in a wide range of subjects, such as English, Maths, Science and Foreign Languages. Her participation in more creative classes tends to be a bit more hit and miss, her imagination for artwork, cookery or dance severely lacking in comparison to her ability to follow instruction. Music is the exception to this, Taylor's natural talent being what caught Fallon Pinset's attention in the first place, and the music instructor is constantly attempting to craft it into something with a little more finesse in Taylor's playing of the cello.

While Taylor is smart, she is not necessarily quick. If she isn't given enough time to properly assess a situation or analyse a problem, she will fall back on her more bullheaded and aggressive behaviour. This happens most when she is out on missions with her team. She is a capable soldier, has excelled in her physical training as she has academically, and in these situations her quiet wilfulness and stubborn nature are often boons. While she fights daily to keep people at a distance from herself, she is closest to her teammates, and as such has developed an undying loyalty to them. She would and has, several times, put her life on the line to protect them, and this would extend to anyone she cared about, if she allowed that to happen.

At the moment, however, it's her dogs that she cares about most in the world. The large pack she has been allowed (instructed) to put together while at the Academy consists of a mix of breeds, in order to always have a dog suited for any particular mission. She has trained these dogs since they were puppies, and they are her family. While she claims the need to always have at least one with her is more to keep her pathos from being utterly useless, there is also companionship there. The rest of her life is a constant struggle of anger and sadness, but with the dogs she can and often is truly happy. She finds it incredibly difficult if any die while on a mission, but generally uses it as more fuel to feed her hatred towards the Academy.

With Taylor, actions will always speak louder than words. She would rather simply spend time with someone or give them a gift than ever admit out loud that they are someone she cares about. As emotionally muddled and reticent as Taylor is, her body language will often express more than she's able to understand about how she's feeling, and the courses of actions that she ultimately chooses to take are always the ones she truly believes in. If she says one thing and then does another, then it's the latter that's the more honest.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Taylor is a caninapath, which basically means she can talk to dogs and/or control them. She does not need to do this out loud, as it's not technically a case of talking to them, but she often does when it's trivial stuff/she's on her own - like people talk to their pets. When communicating, the dog still has the ability to refuse her. She can force them, but it takes more concentration, and can tire her out with a large amount of dogs. To combat the possibility of this, she has a large pack of dogs at the Academy that she's been training since they were puppies, and who subsequently are battlefield ready and show her little to no resistance.

The obvious weakness to this is that it's useless if there are no dogs around. As such, she tends to keep at least one with her, if not a whole pack. She has to be within normal shouting/speaking distance to communicate with a dog (although, again, this is not normally done out loud), but if she forces her control on them, it will last beyond this limit - but usually begin to fade after 48 hours.

Because she is reliant on outside entities like this, a lot of her training has focussed on her. She's experienced in a wide range of hand-to-hand fighting techniques, as well as having knowledge of many weapons and firearms. However, she is not any stronger or more durable than your standard human.

Inventory:

• 2 packets of chewing gum.
• 1 tube of lip salve.
• 3 military standard smoke grenades, white.
• 1 tube of mascara, black.
• 1 packet of dog treats.
• 1 short-haired sable Chihuahua ("Chubbs").
• 1 Glock 26 pistol.
• 2 spare magazines.
• 1 dog tug toy.

Appearance:

Eliza Cummings, hair bleached white-blonde.

Tall with an athletic figure, somewhat androgynous features, tends to keep her makeup very simple and plain. Taylor is a rough-and-tumble sort of girl, she doesn't have a particularly graceful posture, and her body language tends to swing between the extremes of defensive or aggressive, even when supposedly relaxed.

Age: 18 (has been on the ship long enough now to hit 21)

SAMPLES
Log Sample:

Taylor doesn't skip music class every time. Just the days where she knows Miss Pinset's going to have that look on her face, like she's satisfied that Taylor's succumbing. Submitting, coming to class and picking up the cello like she gives a shit about being able to play the damn thing (about being good at playing a useless lump of wood). She'll have that look today, Taylor knows, so she's up on the East Wing roof instead, the one with the pitched roof and wide ledge. It's easy, there, for her to hang her legs over the edge and lay back against the warm slate, close her eyes in the sunshine. Two of her smaller dogs have followed her out—with a little help—but the other two she'd had with her preferred to linger back at the window she'd climbed out of. They might have had to deal with heights in other situations, but today was a school day, and they weren't having any of it, quite content just to poke their noses over the sill to catch some of the sunlight.

It's peaceful, up there, away from the noise of the Academy's halls. No need to worry about fighting, either the other students or any of the instructors, battles of will or physical altercations. Taylor's knuckles are already bloody from crossing paths with Blitz, earlier, another student that loved to give her dogs little electric shocks to see how their fur would sizzle. She'd earnt a few bruises from the encounter too, but going to the healer only meant having to explain herself, having to look at the guy's sorrowful puppy-dog eyes. Taylor didn't want any of that, didn't want to see that someone in the faculty actually cared about the things that happened to the girls here. It was better, just to hate them all, and she could keep her hurts for a while. They certainly don't keep her from relaxing now, sunlight on her face and Bob, the terrier, flopped against her thigh.

It's the dogs that wake her from the doze she falls into, barking and letting her know Fallon Pinset has decided to personally come find her, like so many times before (stubborn, persistent, Taylor doesn't get it, why does the woman just give up on her like everyone else?) Taylor looks over the ledge just in time to see Pinset lean out of the window, and scrabbles back quickly, but not quickly enough.

"I know you're up there, Kee. Your dogs give you away." Her tone's honey-sharp, like always, makes Taylor's spine go straight just hearing it, muscles tense. "Get down here before I make you." She could, as well, her pathos making her a literal pied piper, and Taylor hated how it made her feel, like she was shut away in a tiny corner of her mind, paralysed as her body followed the song Pinset weaved.

But that wasn't enough to make Taylor give up without a fight, obstinate to the last. "Fuck you." She scoops up the two dogs with her, trusting the other two to look after themselves as she heads up and over the roof, intending to hopefully put enough distance between her and Pinset to render her singing inaudible. She'd have to come down eventually, but she was going to get punished no matter what she did, now. She might as well make it worth it.

Comms Sample:

[The video starts out at an odd angle, the device left on the floor as Taylor continues dressing in the uniform provided. Confused and a little disorientated, but Taylor still starts out with an accusatory tone in her voice, clearly thinking that she is addressing someone specifically.]

Is this another test mission? You should give us briefs, you know, it's not like we ever get a real mission where we just wake up wherever and fumble through it.

[Quiet for a long minute, waiting for a response, zipping up the jumpsuit and shifting her shoulders to get it settled right. Still no response, though, and she continues, more anger seeping into her tone.]

Or maybe you're finally trying to get rid of me. Fuck it, whatever. Guess the worst I can do is survive whatever this is.

[She pulls a gun out of the locker and checks it before holstering it; then three grenade-like devices that she settles onto the jumpsuit's belt. Lastly, she scoops out a dog from the top shelf - a chihuahua, surprisingly calm looking for the strange environment - and rests him on her hip.]

Oh, yeah. And don't ever stick one of my dogs in a fucking locker again.