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Tara Glass; Alias: Terry Finnigan. Totally not a woman OR a figure-skating champion! (Really, I swear.)
Topic Started: Sep 15 2013, 12:34 AM (281 Views)
The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Name: Tara Glass (alias: Terry Finnegan)

Age: 24

Gender: Female

School/Occupation: Professional Figure Skater: four-time winner of ladies' singles in the British Figure Skating Championship, two-time winner of the European Figure Skating Championships, one-time winner of the World Figure Skating Championship. Currently on break.

Clubs: n/a

Interests/Hobbies: Tara loves ice-skating, and also takes pride in her singing voice, though she hasn't had time to do more than karaoke and anonymous covers on the Internet with the latter. She also enjoys romance novels and romance movies, although she dislikes ones that portray romance in unrealistic or glorified ways.

Appearance: Tara's figure is slender: there are just enough curves and only about as much to her chest as it takes to make it obvious that she's a full-grown woman, and she's quite pretty despite what she lacks in the raw "assets" department. Her eyes are a rather striking ice-blue, and her hair is naturally wavy, dirty-blonde. She is known for wearing it long, and in ponytails, but since coming to Japan has cut it so that the ponytail is shorter and simpler.

When she dresses as she normally would, she wears simple feminine clothing: blouses, mini-jackets, and skirts that extend to just above her knees being the preference, usually in shades of light blue and white like the sky.

Under the alias of Terry Finnigan, however, her breasts are bound and she manages to pull off the appearance of a slender young man rather well. In this guise, she wears pants with belts, cargo and dark-blue denim usually, as well as black button-up shirts, usually with a leather jacket tailored to fit well but somewhat conceal the curvature of her body. The result is that she appears to be a young (possibly teenage) boy with a vaguely androgenous appearance.

Needless to say, she is obviously not Japanese, regardless of what gender guise she has donned.

Personality: Tara is a very quiet and reserved woman, very pointedly introverted. Her time in the spotlight has instilled her with a deep suspicion of those who make an effort to get to know her. This combined with general feelings of loneliness have caused her to resent the fame that has arisen from her achievements, which is what brought her to Japan in the first place. As such, she is a very guarded individual in social interactions. As Tara, she is constantly on the lookout for signs that people are only interested in her because of her accomplishments or looks; as Terry, she is always afraid of blowing her cover and being discovered as Tara Glass. When one gets her talking under either guise, she is soft-spoken even when excited, though the way her eyes light up is more than tell enough when she's truly into a discussion or passionate about a topic. Not one to dwell on the negative, she will either drift out of a conversation or attempt to change the subject when talk turns in that direction, unless there is good reason not to. Even on the subject of books or movies she dislikes, she is rarely inclined to do more than briefly state her thoughts and leave it at that.

While Tara has a strong sense of morality, she is rarely ever placed in a situation where she must think deeply about her own worldview; she is generically "good-hearted" but possesses no strong opinions on specific issues. While a little too old and intelligent to be written off as naive, her perspective on many social matters is either underdeveloped or uneducated, doubly so because she is disinclined from following current events outside of athletic matters and significant national or world events--she hates reading or watching the news. Anyone who asks her why would receive the answer that it always contains something that depresses her.

As Terry Finnegan, the way she projects herself changes little--save that she makes an effort to move and speak in a masculine way rather than feminine.

History: Tara was born to a pair of middle-aged, distinctly old-fashioned farmers who started on the whole "children" thing about as late in life as one really can. Her hometown in Canada, Greenway, was a small, rather desolate country town mostly populated by older people, children, and teenagers bored out of their minds who had nothing to really do with themselves. Introverted and quiet, Tara didn't have much trouble adapting to this environment, but as she got older she found herself drifting further and further apart from her peers, particularly the boys, who seemed to gravitate toward her and other reasonably-pretty girls and squabble over them like animals (her school had an almost two-to-one boy-to-girl ratio).

As Tara grew up, it quickly became apparent to both her and her parents that she was very talented. Not only was she near the top of her class at school, she always took to new things quickly, whether they were more intellectual or athletic in nature, though she never joined any sports teams in school out of shyness. Tara's true passion as she grew was in ice-skating: her first trip with her parents to an out-of-town ice skating rink was followed by her seeking any opportunity she could to revisit the place, and to go ice-skating on her own whenever the opportunity presented itself. While researching advice on how to take her skating ability further, she fell in love with the idea of becoming a figure-skater.

She applied for classes, and it was all uphill from there. Tara's obvious "natural" talent eventually caught the eye of a scout, who encouraged her to go professional. She was quite young indeed when she won her first competition, and within two years had managed to win herself a reputation for grace and skill on ice. For a while Tara reveled in the attention, even if her shyness made it hard to adjust to at first. But her focus was always on getting further, taking herself higher. She felt as though she were someone else when she was on the ice; she wasn't a woman, she was a goddess, she had transcended her simple and lonely existence and become something worthwhile.

Her career took off, but she found herself disturbed by the obvious shift in attitude she faced in her hometown. Rather than being ignored by other girls and occasionally facing courtship simply out of statistical necessity, Tara was beset on all sides by either adulation or jealousy (the latter mostly from other girls). She was, simply put, the most interesting thing in town, and it was stifling. After her first victory at the British Figure Skating Championships at the age of twenty, Tara decided to not just leave the nest, but leave the very country the nest had been in--bidding farewell to her parents, she moved to the United Kingdom and purchased an apartment, and began to make an even bigger name for herself in that country.

The real problems started once she began competing on an international level, though. She began to suffer the same sort of attention from people that had bugged her in her hometown, and gradually she became aware of why it made her so anxious: it wasn't her they wanted to know, it was the goddess on the ice, the graceful and perfect motions and beauty, not the quiet young lady who liked to curl up alone at home and watch romance movies, or who sometimes sang in the shower, or who liked peaches, or any of the personal things about her. If she hadn't become famous as an athlete, none of these people would have looked twice at her.

At age twenty-four, Tara had become quite accustomed to politely bowing out of conversations strangers started with her, making random autograph requests brief experiences, and separating herself between her ordinary at-home persona and the person people expected when they spoke with her. But all attempts at friendship or courtship were gently rebuffed, and Tara began to yearn for a chance to get to know people without the barrier of fame and accomplishment between her and meaningful interaction.

It was after she read a romance novel about a princess who disguised herself as a man and walked among commoners that the idea occurred to her. Once she finished the competition she had committed to that month, she announced that she was going on break indefinitely. The only official reason given was that she was mentally exhausted and needed time to rest. What she really wanted was time away from her reputation, a chance to meet people who didn't know who she was or why they were apparently supposed to respect and like her.

And so she traveled to Japan, a country she had always had an interest in someday visiting, and assumed the guise of a man: Terry Finnegan. As it happened, she also happened to pick Yumegawa as her temporary place of residence. She hoped, rather than expected, to form some sort of friendship here, both anticipating and dreading the day when she might become close enough to a person, trusting enough of them, that she could confess her true name and self to them. Perhaps it would even end like a fairy tale love story?

Perhaps. Or perhaps they would care more about her accomplishments than they had about Terry Finnegan.

It would be an interesting experiment...

Weapons/Equipment/Combat Skill: Tara has no actual fighting experience. However, she does have a basic knowledge of self-defense martial arts, as she took classes for a short time while in the U.K. She owns no weapons and has no skill with any sort of weapon; until arriving in Yumegawa, she simply had no interest or reason to be interested. Since her skill is in agile, graceful movement, she is most likely to excel with light weapons such as knives or rapiers.

Initial Persona:

- Name: Tala
- Arcana: XVII - The Star
- Drain: n/a
- Reflect: Ice
- Null: n/a
- Resist: Force
- Weak: Fire, Earth, Gravity, Light
- Initial Skills: Bufu, Zan
Tala, goddess of stars in Talagog mythology, takes the form of an animated glass sculpture of the female form--its shape is that of a hairless, faceless idealization of womanhood, and within the glass, an illusory, semi-transparent vision of a clear starry sky can be seen from any angle. It moves with grace, always, skating through the air as if on ice and often maneuvering like a figure-skater. A faint trail of sparkles alights on the air behind its feet and hands as it moves.

In combat, Tala specializes in using the Ice and Force elements offensively, both for single-target spells and area attacks, but also learns a good deal of healing magic. Unlike many Persona, Tala will never learn any sort of physical attack skills; if Tara wishes to attack physically, she will need to do so with a weapon or other means.
Player Character Log - Plot Character Log - Social Links - Internet Usernames - Recap Episodes

Underlined text is in a different language... English, unless otherwise specified.
Regular old dialogue is supposed to be spoken in Japanese 'cause this RP takes place in the land of the rising sun, don'tchaknow.


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The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Approved.

Why, thank you, me.

>_>

<_<
Player Character Log - Plot Character Log - Social Links - Internet Usernames - Recap Episodes

Underlined text is in a different language... English, unless otherwise specified.
Regular old dialogue is supposed to be spoken in Japanese 'cause this RP takes place in the land of the rising sun, don'tchaknow.


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