Name/Work Name: Tara-Fay "Sunshine" Smith / "Naomi"

Canon: original (a modified version of the Beyond the Wall tabletop RPG)

Age: Fifteen and three quarters, thank you very much.

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.

They've got seven days to figure out an answer to the question: how do you kill a king, when that king is already dead?

(Okay, maybe she's not exactly eager to see the rest of them die, either. Lingering anger over the terrorist cell thing or not.)

Personality:

There are really only two things you need to know about Tara-Fay: one, she is deeply uncomfortable around other people; two, being a . . . Tara-Fayish sort of person, she has decided that naturally, this is everyone else's fault.

In a world with DSM-V diagnoses, you might characterize her affliction as social anxiety disorder; unfortunately for Tara-Fay, Khola isn't exactly thick with psychologists. All Tara-Fay knows is that all kinds of little things--greetings, questions, eye contact--that seem easy for everyone else are fiendishly hard for her; that she can never seem to string a sentence together precisely the way that she wants to; that more often than not, she walks away from a conversation feeling like she's been hit with the Jewish medieval fantasy world equivalent of a tire iron. Even if nothing actually happened. Especially if nothing actually happened. In short, talking to, interacting with, other people makes Tara-Fay feel bad. It's a feeling that's been with her as long as she can remember, to the point where she doesn't consciously think about it: it's just there, under the surface, informing everything she does and every decision she makes.

You can, generally speaking, take a couple different approaches to an ever-present feeling of wrongness that flares up whenever you look someone in the eye. You can decide that the source of wrongness lies ultimately with you, whatever nebulous thing makes you different, and turn inward with self-recrimination. This is not--at least, not outwardly--the approach Tara-Fay has chosen. No, to Tara-Fay, other people are generally, oh, boring, dull, stupid, self-important; not worth the time or effort it would take to talk to them. That's why she feels conspicuously and unavoidably different from the people around her; why she prefers to spy from afar rather than joining the conversation, to see others but not be seen. She's just cleverer, more sensible--better.

Mix that with a little of the standard teenage rebel Not-Like-The-Other-Girls complex, and, well.

She's not entirely wrong, of course: Tara-Fay is caustic, unsentimental, awkward, uncomfortable with attention and expectations--in short, a bad fit for the small-town atmosphere of Khola and the cheerful, extroverted normalcy of her innskeeper parents, even before we get to the demon heritage and the unusual skillset. Consciously, she thinks of herself as destined for better things; on a deeper level, you might say she's searching for somewhere to belong. She cleaves tightly to the few people who seem to like her as she is--once Fabiana, now Linnet. Conversely, she is fiercely independent and not a little contrary, not inclined to be lectured or led. She responds to rejection with anger, and is liable to decide that, if you make her feel bad, it must be your fault. She says almost none of this aloud. (Fabiana is still wondering why her former BFF doesn't want to make friendship bracelets anymore.)

She's not the most mature teenager. But then, she's not even sixteen yet, is she?

Debt: Tara-Fay would like some help figuring out how to kill a ghost, or, failing that, how to get herself and Linnet out of the blast radius without Linnet complaining too much.

Inventory:

• the clothes on her back, standard medieval village fare

• a fine set of lockpicks, stolen from some sleeping asshole

• several daggers

• a dark iron shortsword, good for hitting undead things and breaking weird fairy curses

• one (1) coil of rope

• a mysterious silver bowl -- water you put in this will ripple continuously and can be used for scrying

• mancala stones, which double as sharpening stones in a pinch

Abilities:

• Shapeshifting -- being a quarter demon, Tara-Fay has inherited some ability to change her form, although whether it works is up in the air, and it will get harder as she gets older. After some extensive practice in the fairy kingdom, she can reliably turn into most bird species found in the Khola-and-adjoining-fairy-kingdom area, and this extends somewhat to other types of birds she's familiar with, although this is limited by her level of recall and she didn't exactly spend the first fifteen years of her life studying the particulars of birds. (In short, anything she hasn't specifically studied for turning-into-purposes may look . . . overly generic.) Anything else is probably going to be a special-occasions-only type of deal, and she has a success rate just over fifty percent, less for anything big, complex, or unfamiliar to her.

• MAX DEX -- er, that is, she's quick, fairly light on her feet, good at dodging and climbing, good aim. To an extent that is somewhat unusual for a teenager of her age and general background, but not supernaturally so or anything.

• Combat skills: she's got fairly good aim with throwing knives/daggers, and . . . well, she knows how to hit things with the sword. She's also got rudimentary bow skills. Her main asset, though, is her speed; she's not a great head-on fighter by any means.

• General sneaking around, hiding, following people, and otherwise being quiet and unnoticeable. She's also a fairly good lockpicker.

• . . . she can also hold her liquor surprisingly well for a small, scrawny fifteen year old . . . (Practice went into this. Practice, and living next to a tavern.)

Strengths and Weaknesses: (aside from abilities above)

• Excellent fine motor skills: the lockpicking, of course, but she's also . . . if Khola had chopsticks, she'd be the one picking up individual grains of dry rice with them. She'd probably be good at card tricks if anyone taught her.

• She doesn't do this often, but she's capable of a very concerted focus when she wants to be, and she is clever in the sense that when she puts her mind to something (i.e. shapeshifting, lockpicking), she usually picks it up fairly quickly.

• Like a lot of socially anxious people, she's closely observant of other people's habits, moods, and other conversational nuances: when you're constantly trying to figure out how to say the least embarrassing possible thing, you pay attention to any possible clues about what that thing might be. She's good at noticing the tenor of an encounter based on very little. This also makes her surprisingly good at lying, in the come-up-with-a-plausible-story aspect if not so much the convincingly-innocent-affect aspect. (Adrenaline does help a little with the latter.)

• She's practical, in a sometimes-ruthless sort of way: she's the one in the party who's going to point out that no, they don't actually have to help the Tsar's men, especially if it's going to cause them trouble, or that this plan they've cooked up is actually kind of hairbrained--or that, hey, maybe dating the ghost of a middle-aged, conquering king who laughs when you tell her your sister-in-law has been taken by the fairies is a bad idea. Or she would, if anyone ever asked her about the last one.

• If you manage to walk the tightrope of actually earning her trust and respect, she will . . . literally follow you into the land of the dead.

• She has . . . absolutely no charisma. It is extremely difficult to get Tara-Fay to adopt an affect that isn't really-uncomfortable-to-be-standing-here, even if you are Tara-Fay. If the fate of the world depends on her befriending or charming someone, the world is probably doomed--unless that someone has very, very unusual tastes.

• Awful case of above-average-driver-syndrome. Tara-Fay thinks she is smarter and more sensible than basically everyone around her, certainly compared to the other Khola teens. In reality, her INT is above-average but not spectacular: she's clever and observant in some ways, as described above, but she overestimates the extent to which she is Special in this regard.

• Scrawny. Please don't ask her to help you move a couch.

• She is . . . while she is capable of being very observant, she is also not the most expansively curious person in the world. Tara-Fay isn't that interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake, and tends to tune out or forget information she doesn't see as relevant to her. Absolutely don't ask her about world lore. She doesn't remember.

• Her emotional self-awareness is lacking: she's unwilling or unable to admit that, for example, her animosity towards Fabiana has very little to do with anything Fabiana did and everything to do with her feelings of hurt and rejection. She doesn't honestly realize that she's lonely. Tara-Fay tends to process things in terms of This Thing Person X Did Was Bad, Because Reasons!! rather than, well, This Thing Made Me Feel X. Who cares about feelings, anyway?