BIODATA
Name: Tara-Fay Smith
Age: 15 and 3/4
Canon: original canon!
Canon Point: the end of the campaign/after discovering her origins
Appearance: long wavy red hair, sometimes pulled back in a rough ponytail but kind of messy; blue-green eyes; skinny and a little knobbly; sour expression; pretty but by no means beautiful
Birthday: late in the year
Height/Weight: 5'4" / thin
Canon Abilities:
SHAPESHIFTING - ability to turn into any kind of bird (including mythical birds) and occasionally other creatures (<50% success rate).
SCRYING - ability to see scenes from the future relating to a specific question asked
History:
Tara-Fay grew up in Khola, which is to say, the Jewish medieval fantasy equivalent of a truck-stop town with like six teenagers who are all painfully, painfully familiar with one another. Trade comes through there, and the occasional adventurer, and now and then tourists file through to see the abandoned dragon skull north of the city. It is, at least on the surface, a simple kind of place, far removed from the politicking of the Summer and Winter Tsars in their distant palaces. People do still remember the the thwarted revolution--or is it conquest?--spearheaded by the late King Alexandre, and one of his knights, his former right-hand woman, lives in the town. She has a daughter. She keeps goats.
Not much happens in Khola, for the first fifteen or so years of Tara-Fay's life. She is the perfectly normal daughter of the perfectly normal innkeepers and, at times when she's not avoiding all human life, can be found unwillingly helping out in the tavern. She grew up on stories of fanciful campaigns and battles, sure, related to her by her childhood friend Fabiana, but to be honest, only really half-believes them. (Fabiana also happens to be a grade-A bullshitter.) She's not a mage-in-training, or a chessmaster, or a budding fighter. She spends most of her free time trying not to make eye contact: honestly, other people make Tara-Fay kind of uncomfortable. She gets fairly good at sneaking around and fading into the background, instead. She skulks around some disreputable pickpocket types, and learns a few of their tricks. She, uh, gets the shit beaten out of her the first time she actually tries to steal something.
Tara-Fay has exactly one (1) friend, and it's because of this incident: Linnet, the enterprising young hedgewitch who took a beating with her. Linnet is tolerable, probably. The other six teenagers in Khola can all get bent, including Fabiana, at whose hands Tara-Fay received a spectacular friendzoning a few years back. (She's not bitter.) This doesn't stop her from spying on them, of course, which is how Tara-Fay gets herself caught up in a series of increasingly far-reaching exploits. It turns out that sometimes, when there are only six other teenagers in the village, and you all know each other way, way too well, you just wind up sticking together while you try to figure out how to get Tristan's sister-in-law back from the queen of the fairies. Even though you don't actually like Tristan.
Sometimes it turns out Tristan's sister-in-law is the queen of the fairies, and you have to hang out awkwardly on the sidelines while he tries to convince her that no, she's not about to get divorced.
From then on, Tara-Fay finds herself part of a dubiously willing party of five, with Fabiana, the plucky swordsgirl whose mother fought at King Alexandre's side; Tristan, the rules-stickler necromancer who may or may not be dating said dead king's ghost; Brad, whose chess- and fishing-related exploits have caught the attention of some dwarven merchants; and One Friend Linnet, who finds it in her somewhere to care about all these knuckleheads. (Evangeline and Theodore Miller, noncombatants and sometimes-stowaways, round out the Khola teens.) They do what any band of bored teenagers with a heavily inflated sense of their own invincibility does: stick their heads into shit they know nothing about.
Their quest for, um, adventure and answers brings them to the dwarven city of Altstadt, whose buildings have mysteriously begun to fall apart. Tensions between the city, once a staunch ally to Alexandre, and the ruling Tsars are still bubbling under the surface, and Tara-Fay and company find themselves drawn into the conflict when one of Linnet's moms, Nyna, turns out to be part of a resistance organization. Nyna is . . . not the most scrupulous or responsible adult, shall we say. When she notices Tara-Fay's preternatural talent for sneaking around, she quickly attempts to recruit the party into an operation: help her group intercept a shipment of experimental weaponry going to the Tsar's army, and render it harmless.
Tara-Fay had a first, unpleasant run-in with the Tsar's men on the way to Altstadt, and, like all good disaffected teens, is sure there must be something better out there than being the Khola innskeep's daughter. She jumps at the opportunity. Linnet, staunchly loyal to a fault, agrees as well. The problem comes when the other kids are, for some weird reason, less than enthusiastic about joining a terrorist cell, and reluctant to stand by while two of their number do the same. There are arguments. There is screeching, mostly on Tara-Fay's end. "We are your friends, Tara-Fay," Tristan says, in that blisteringly earnest way of his. Please. Tara-Fay doesn't have friends, especially not chuckleheads who want to keep her away from--completely objective and levelheaded analysis--THE MOST IMPORTANT THING SHE HAS EVER DONE IN HER LIFE. If she wants to randomly split off and join a seditious organization in the middle of their trip to Altstadt, what business of it is theirs?
Eventually, the party manages to reach a grudging agreement to at least try and investigate the situation before getting involved. What exactly is this weapon, and where is it being kept? This quest brings them through the great dwarven university at the heart of Altstadt, where they hear whispers about "First Creation involvement" in recent happenings around the city, and into a secret passage under a synagogue. There they--well. In the deepest part of the passage, they encounter a being of the First Creation, more commonly called a demon. He's chained up, and bound not to answer any of the really interesting questions about why, but he does have something significant to tell Tara-Fay: she is one of them.
Part-demon, that is. One-quarter, to be exact.
Tara-Fay rebuffs her companions' attempts to--comfort? console? Convince her not to just shapeshift into something appropriately demon-like and fly off into the sunset? with her usual lack of grace. In truth, she isn't quite sure how to process the confirmation that her teenage angst about not fitting in actually has a basis, and, moreover, doesn't exactly have a lot of time to mull it over. The operation is going down that night. She makes her way to where the weapon--a vat of Greek fire--is being kept, and, after bearing witness to some radical group infighting, encounters Dvoyre, a scholar at the university and one of Alexandre's former devotees. Dvoyre's been sent on a mission by the now-ghost, apparently: she's the one behind the sudden lack of structural integrity displayed by Altstadt's buildings. She's not exactly sure what she's doing it for, since he didn't specify, but she knows it's important.
The Khola teens, displaying a moving if rare unity of sense, are not impressed by this explanation. They battle Dvoyre and her magically animated statues to prevent the destruction of the city, and are surprisingly successful in this until she brings out her trump card--turns out she's also the one controlling the demon they found, called Ashmodai. She orders him to take Tara-Fay out, which he does, but Tara-Fay's last, lucky parting gift is a well-aimed jar of Greek fire. Dvoyre is killed, and Ashmodai freed from her bindings. He heals Tara-Fay before flying off to who-knows-where, and she, along with the rest of these shit teens, lives to screw things up another day.
They're all banned from Altstadt, possibly for life, but, eh, you win some, you lose some.
The lull in action immediately after affords Tara-Fay the opportunity to, uh, the technical term for this is "fuck off." She leaves a note for Linnet, and a note-by-proxy for her parents ("Um, is there something you wanted to tell me about my parentage???") and heads into the fairy kingdom once ruled by Tristan's sister. The inhabitants there are more understanding of Tara-Fay's desire to be alone-forever-people- are-so-hard than any humans she's been around, with the possible exception of Linnet, and she has the opportunity to practice her newly discovered shapeshifting abilities -- but, ultimately, she doesn't belong there either, and she heads back home. Right into shenanigans, naturally.
This time "shenanigans" take the form of a young steppe woman by the name of Vartilet, and the dragon problem her home has recently developed. Spoilers: they're weredragons. Get bitten by a dragon, become a dragon. In the midst of their journey to discover this, involving encounters with creepy toothed ducks and more totally standard wilderness horrors, Tara-Fay makes a--frenemy?--in Vartilet and learns that maybe staring at strange water-filled bowls just because you saw someone else do it is, uh, a bad idea. (Vartilet does, after some yelling, teach her how to scry properly. Without accidentally causing the things you scry to happen, ahem.)
They continue on to find the source of the dragon problem, motivated now by the fact that Brad is very obviously turning into one, and find one very exasperated Parsbit, ex-wife and murderer of Alexandre and also Alexandre's imperial-slash-revolutionary ambitions. She fights them! They attempt to fight her back and nearly die! In the end, they manage to release her from the bindings causing her to attack them and get answers in the process--much to the party's (read: Tara-Fay's) consternation, there is no actual cure for weredragonism, but Brad and now Linnet, bitten during the battle, should keep their right minds, and healing magic will keep back the physical changes. Parsbit also has some words on the subject of why she killed Alexandre: "He wouldn't have stopped," she says. "He wasn't going to stop."
Double spoilers: dying does not actually stop him either!
Of more immediate concern to Tara-Fay, though, is her imminent return home to be . . . not actually the most grounded teenager in existence, because the illness of her grandmother is distracting her family. This is . . . awkward. It's especially awkward when Tara-Fay works up the gumption to ask Grandmother Weaver on her deathbed about how, exactly, she got to be a quarter demon, and receives nothing but evasiveness in response. (Not that the death isn't awkward. Or . . . other things. Like--ugh, don't talk to Tara-Fay about that.) It's safe to say she isn't thinking much about ghostly kings and the circumstances of their murder, up until said ghostly king crashes Tristan's wedding to Evangeline Miller and announces that he's giving this "liberating the entire kingdom from the Tsars' autocratic rule" thing a second try. Oh, but the spell he's using to raise an army of the undead is going to create a portal right through Khola, destroying the town and the surrounding forest, so . . . it would be good of the villagers to evacuate. Terribly sorry about that. Collateral damage, you know.
Tara-Fay is still no great fan of the Tsars, or of Khola, and to be honest might just as soon leave Alexandre to his conquest . . . except for Linnet. Linnet, who actually cares about the wanton destruction of the town she's called home, and more to the point, the woods she's spent many long hours in. Linnet, who is going to stop Alexandre even if that journey takes her into the literal underworld, and who is still Tara-Fay's one friend in the world, and . . . basically this is the worst thing ever, but Tara-Fay is going down to the land of the dead with the other Khola teens.
Their journey takes them into a powerful enchantment amidst a camp of soldier-ghosts, replaying the memory of the final days of Alexandre's campaign. The enterprising teens make their way to the very center of the enchantment, where Alexandre is waiting for the right moment to become corporeal again and lead his army of shades right out of the land of the dead. They . . . don't succeed in stopping him, not precisely. At one point, Tara-Fay finds herself tangled up in Alexandre's tent. But they do manage to screw up his spell just enough that he lands in Khola without any ghost-soldiers, and--whether they had anything to do with this or not--he's just corporeal enough that he can be fought and killed a second time.
Which they do.
The ensuing battle is furious and not a little tragic, especially for Tristan, who genuinely cared about this douchebag conquering king. But in the end, they prevail, with help from Tara-Fay's transformations, a couple of well-aimed True Strike spells, and of course, two partial weredragons. Khola is saved, if a little rattled, and Tara-Fay's parents are upsettingly happy to see her alive and well. Tara-Fay contemplates her next move. She doesn't want to stay in Khola, with its small town atmosphere and definite lack of political intrigue, but she's got Linnet, and her parents continuing to display a concerning amount of affection and . . . eventually she finds herself wandering out to the old dragon skull to think about it.
Said dragon skull . . . starts talking to her? Tells her to call him "Zayde"? Is apparently her grandfather???? The late Grandmother Weaver got up to some exciting shit, apparently. "The bird trick is nice," he comments, "but you could be so much more." It's something she's wanted to hear her whole life: that she's somehow destined for greater things than Khola. She'll go out to meet them, she promises herself, soon.
But she will come back. After all, she promised Linnet.
Personality:
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