Tate Desmarais
Oct 23, 2011 3:33:50 GMT -5
Post by Tate Desmarais on Oct 23, 2011 3:33:50 GMT -5
[/i][/size][/right]The Basics
Name: Helvetica Tate Desmarais (dehz-MAH-rae) (her mother was a graphic designer, and thought it'd be cool and modern to name her daughter after her favorite font. Tate's thoughts on this are thus: Bluh.)
Nicknames: Tate. (The nicknaming options for "Helvetica" are pretty sparse, and it's a shitty name; besides that, she likes the asexuality of the name 'Tate'.)
Age: 16
Orientation: Romantic Asexual (She's interested in a romantic relationship, and would like to fall in love, just she has never actually been interested in sex. Although if asked, she will identify as straight--but she actually holds next to no interest in sex beyond the academic, and never will.)
Desired Rank/Job: Student
Powers: Retrocognitive Projection - Tate can show other people the past through touch--and not just the past, but particularly her past. The moments shown could be something as small and mundane as getting up for a cup of coffee or something as world-changing as the death of a parent or her recruitment to Hammel. This requires skin contact to initiate, and is often involuntary--if she grabs someone while she's calm, very little will pass over to them (a snippet of an image if anything) but if her emotions are heightened it's entirely possible that she can force an entire memory over to them within the duration of their contact.
Her victim--that's the appropriate word, certainly--will experience mild to severe disorientation, depending on the duration and content of the memory, and possibly a headache on the harsher side. As for Tate? Every memory that gets broadcast, she relives it, too. And after she relives that moment, it's gone, leaving her confused, disoriented, and somewhat nauseous. She knows the memory happened, intellectually, but she cannot remember details or the date; using the example of parental death, she would intellectually know the parent was dead, but not know how they died or when they died or even if they had a funeral. A few things are integral and woven through so many memories she basically can't lose them--basic life skills like reading and writing, as well as her name, etc. If you can't live without it, she can't forget it. She essentially gives away her past. Wearing gloves can halt it, but as always, powerful emotions can burn right through them.
Play By: Szandra Szilvassy
The Details
Hair Color: Auburn
Eye Color: Indeterminate darkish color (Green)
Any Piercings? Ears, in the lobe
Any Tattoos? No thank you
Any Scars? A couple miscellaneous nicks that healed wrong, nothing big, and they're mostly around her hands: One around the middle finger of her left from an incident with a plate of rice krispies, a wire burn in her right pinky from an eighth-grade electricity experiment, a jagged gash from cheese-gratering herself on her right index. There's a scar from stitches in her chin from being bowled over in gym class, but they're all Common First World Scars so nothing anyone would really remark on.
General Appearance: Tate is pretty well metrosexual, and maybe that's attached to her lack of interest in sex or sexuality beyond academia and maybe that's because she has a stupid love for Sherlock Holmes on levels that would border fetishistic if they only could. Facts remain she has a boyish face, with a strong jaw and a straight nose. Her cheekbones are high and sharp, and the close-cut low-maintenance bob does little to help that. She's tall, obscenely so, and gangly; six foot one in stocking feet, her proper posture and proper shoes makes it look more like she's six foot three. Her ears are pierced, but she almost never remembers to put her earrings in and doesn't actually like to.
She doesn't wear very feminine clothes; in fact, she tries to appear as the consummate professional, wearing business casual to any occasion that doesn't require something more formal. A regular school day requires a collared shirt with at least three-quarter sleeves (although if she has to she'll deal with the short sleeves the summer months demand) trousers, belt (or suspenders, or both) and tie--her only allowance for the fact that she's not a professional in the I/T field yet is her shoes, which are incongruously fashionable sneakers in black with a white sole. She says it's more versatile to wear business casual--you're only rarely underdressed, and she only needs to throw on a suit jacket (which she has several of, coded by season) to be properly dressed for anything.
She always tries to remember to wear gloves, since the effects of her power seem to be lessened by them.
Personality: Tate is one of those people who can take one sweeping look around a room and remember a lot of silly details without really working at it. Not, like, the number of buttons on your cardigan, but she's going to notice if you look tired, the general state of your clothes... stacks of papers on your desk... and from that, she'll draw a general conclusion about you that will color the rest of her interactions with you. She notices tics and themes in how a person dresses pretty quickly. It's usually correct, but not always; Tate's certainly fallible. A dirty or rumpled appearance doesn't always make you stupid and/or a hobo, after all, no matter what she's observed. This can greatly vary her interactions with you between meetings; it's a very real possibility she won't remember the specifics of meeting you the next time she sees you, which can get... uncomfortable.
Tate demands a lot of herself, and she lives up to it. Before her powers manifested, she didn't mind depending on her parents; but after, she's learned that no one's going step up to catch you when you fall. And honestly, what's the point of being so far away from every friend she's ever had and everyone she's ever known if she doesn't get everything she can out of it? While she can and does slip back into old habits sometimes, she generally keeps her homework done, which is more than she can say for most of her peers...
As an added bonus to her responsibility, she's extremely tenacious. Tate sees everything she starts through to the end. She is quite capable of smothering fear, common sense, and her better nature in order to continue on a path she's chosen in the proper order. She's prone to continuing arguments she's lost, and bringing up old arguments again and again and again, but she'll also make and keep a ridiculous schedule in order to get out of Hammel as fast as she can so she can study criminal law. If there is one thing she is absolutely certain about, it's that she wants to study hard and become a detective, or a lawyer, or something.
Tate is also extremely insecure, and this is in part because she keeps losing integral parts of her memory. She believes, quite sincerely, that everyone she knows and everyone she loves is going to leave her. She also believes that even if they don't leave, they'll lie to her about what relationship they have, and that's almost worse. Because of this, Tate is largely solitary, and even when socializing can get pretty quiet if she doesn't know you too well.
She latches on to people who are consistently nice to her, and can get pretty clingy if you let her because she believes you're going to leave. However, if you don't let her get possessive, she'll try to push you away because obviously you're going to leave her or lie.
Tate doesn't like being shown up, or people trying to befriend her friends--she's pretty much the ultimate possessive bestie. She often can't remember how long she's been friends with someone, but she thinks that if she simply holds on tight enough, people won't leave her. To make things worse, she's passive-aggressive about her jealousy; she won't bring it up to your face, ever. Sure, you can skip spending the night with her to go on a date with your boyfriend, but she isn't going to talk to you afterwards. You're going to have to approach her, not the other way around.
And to top it all off, Tate is somewhat perverse about trying to keep her friends close. She will bring up things she knows make you uncomfortable and try to get under your skin. This tends to drive people away, but Tate believes she does it for a reason--it weeds out the people who really care for her from the people who just want to use or leave her. She doesn't want to hurt you, she just wants to know how important she is to you. She drives you away to keep you closer. Kind of perverse, yeah.
It's important to note that while Tate uses female pronouns and marks herself as female on state forms, that's only because she's not sure how one goes about as declaring oneself as not having a gender; the proper term of address would be "it" or "zey".
Your Vices
Likes:
Video Games
Sherlock Holmes
Scouring the Library for Old Newspapers
Journaling
Reading Her Own Journals
Reading Other People's Journals
Snooping
Getting in Your Business Every Second of the Day
Dark Roast Coffee
Magical Girl Manga
Fashion, And Dressing Fashionably
Dislikes:
Slobs
Weak Coffee
Young Adult Novels
Sloppy Bookkeeping
That Annoying Sound Spoons Make on the Side of Bowls
Also, That Clicky Noise When You Set a Teacup Down on a Saucer
Actually, Just Don't Eat Around Me, I Hate the Sound
Uppity People
People Who Text Loudly
Skirts
Strengths:
*Responsible: gets things done, she knows how to use a planner and literally has to
*Intelligent: If Tate didn't forget things all the time, she'd be scary smart. As it is, it's remarkable how well she does when she can't remember her class schedule from day-to-day.
*Tests: She tests very well because she incessantly reviews all of her course material.
Weaknesses:
*Socializing: Tate's standoffish, prickly, and sometimes downright cruel, and her favorite targets are often the only people who can actually stand her. So it's pretty hard for her to make friends with people.
*Forgetfulness: Obvious, isn't it? She loses bits and pieces of her memory, time is trickling away from her like sand in an hourglass; if she forgets to write something down, it could very realistically be lost to her.
Fears:
*Complete loss of her memory, or forgetting an integral fact: Not something like forgetting her age, she can find that out anywhere. Tate is terrified of losing her name, her address, her phone number--any of those things. Forgetting what year it is is passe. Forgetting who her parents are? frightening.
*Being in a moving vehicle: Plane, car, motorcycle, it doesn't matter; she gets antsy, and the more dangerous a crash the more antsy she gets. She can almost handle being in a car, but being in a plane is nigh impossible for her.
*Her power: Because of #1. Add in that Tate is naturally very secretive, and you understand why she would fear her own abilities.
Secret:
Her power. The staff know she has it, but she tries desperately to keep it hidden from her peers. She is more than ashamed of what she can do, she's terrified of it. She tells people she's there for her observational abilities, but if you look hard it's obvious it's something else.
Family Ties
Father: Dr. Jacques-Louis Desmarais, cardiac surgeon, 50
Mother: Dr. Annette Desmarais, typographer (Ph.D in art history), 53
Siblings: None; Tate was the only successful pregnancy out of four attempts.
Any Other Important People: Tate is allergic to cats and annoyed by dogs; she doesn't want to be responsible for another living being, either. So, none.
History
Tate was born on December 24th, 1994, to Dr. Jacques-Louis Desmarais and his lovely wife, Dr. Annette Konstantin-Desmarais. It'd been a long and difficult pregnancy, to the point where Jacques would have agreed to just about anything in the hopes of actually having the child; his wife was getting on in years, but they'd held out hope that someday they'd have a baby. One of the things they'd agreed to was giving their child a "fun, unique" name, and so it was after a twenty-three hour labor they had a girl they'd named "Helvetica".
She could be best described as precocious; her first words came late, but they were in a full sentence, subject-verb-object structured, and she was walking early. Even very young, she didn't seem inclined to play make-believe or with dolls; even very young, she preferred puzzle boxes, moving up from simple shapes to more difficult brain-teasers. Tate was largely homeschooled through to fifth grade, and displayed a talent for reading, writing, and critical thinking to the exclusion of just about everything else. Math proved extremely difficult, while science labs were easy, but remembering dry facts proved the real test. Tate never had any talent for art, either. But her talent for history was burgeoning and precocious, and the tutor would often regale her parents with stories of her talent while Tate read a book.
They ran through several tutors over the duration of Tate's homeschooling, especially as they became frustrated with trying to teach her through examples. Crowns for a princess, shopping trips, cookies, none of them particularly interested her; she did the problems, of course, but that lazily, at her own pace. Dinosaurs and trucks didn't do any better. When presented with stories about princesses like Marie Antoinette she would groan and ask "This again?" Tricks meant to work on little girls only worked rarely, and the opposite type--expecting a tomboy, her teachers tried dinosaur and construction--just about as rarely. Only when she was presented with dry facts and numbers would she perk up.
Her parents were puzzled, too. They participated in a social group for homeschooling parents, often going out to bowling nights or days at a theme park to keep Tate in with her social group, but offers from other parents to have Tate over to their home always ended badly. It wasn't that Tate was bad--just awkward, and she had a hard time making friends with many of this small cross-section of her peer group. It wasn't hard to see that she felt ostracized, and when she hit middle school they transferred her in.
Public school was better in some ways and worse in others. She found friends that shared her interests (Sherlock Holmes, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the French Revolution) and introduced her to new ones (this is when she acquired her fondness for magical girl stories, as well as her penchant for horror video games). At the same time, she also found that people were not always so nice as she'd been led to believe; many factors fed into her isolation from the majority of the student body, including her formal manner of dress, her height (even then she outclassed most girls) and her proclaimed "nerdiness". No one shoved her into lockers, but they teased pretty bad. Several times she begged her parents to let her go back to home schooling, but they were adamant that she remain in public school. Homeschool had always only been to give her a good grounding to work off of, and now she had to learn to socialize. This would be better for her in the long run.
She did, grimly, clinging hard to the friends she did make, who often clung back just as hard. School became a cross between an obstacle course and an acting trial, interspersed with moments of high joy where she didn't regret being there even for a moment--Tate was the star of her communication arts class (focused around debate and essay writing), and joined student government even if she was never elected to anything. She joined Mock Trial, always angling to play the detective--she loved Sherlock Holmes, and the year she moved up to high school she petitioned her parents for months to change her name for her birthday. (They said no.)
Tate definitively hit puberty around age fourteen, but her powers didn't manifest until two years later; being relatively healthy, there was no reason for her to get bloodwork done. It first happened when she was sixteen, and arguing with a teacher about a grade she'd been given--it'd been on a paper she thought she had absolutely in the bag, and she was angry because she'd only gotten a B on it. To top it off, she'd had a terrible headache all morning and her mother had been irritable, so even Tate felt snappish. Her teacher reached out to pat her hand, and when she did, suddenly Tate could no longer remember what had happened that morning to make her angry--the teacher, of course, could. Knowing what that meant, the teacher placed a call to Hammel. Less than a week later, Tate was called out of class for the routine blood test, and despite repeated avowals that she was not going, there was nothing wrong, she didn't want to go--between the insistance of the Hammel recruiter and her parents, Tate ended up in the small school in Vermont, where she has been for less than six months.
Roleplay Example
Tate didn't have any papers due; she had given up on monitoring what the police knew. The more she learned the more she realized they didn't seem to know anything, and telling them that the terrorists were in fact pretty-suited sailor soldiers of love and justice (or dastardly murderers masquerading at being military) seemed more likely to get her thrown in the looney bin than taken seriously. With midterms coming up, she didn't need to be locked up for her own protection. She needed to be in the library, studying, because it was hard to turn the pages of a textbook or type names into JSTOR with your arms in a straightjacket.
Which was exactly why she'd chosen to wear her aqua cable-knit sweater with the awful black cats on the front. (It did so much to convince the general public of her generally sane demeanor.) Marlo had tried multiple times to get her to give up on the kitten sweater, so many times that she'd finally resorted to just not wearing it around him. No matter that it gave her an advantage in Battleship because the younger Xanis brother couldn't take his eyes off the gaping yellow of the cats' unnerving gaze.
That entire last paragraph, by the way, was sarcasm. Tate loved her sweater, but she knew that it was not everyone's speed. She also knew she didn't care, and if you couldn't handle the hideous cat sweater then you were poorly equipped for life. Sort of like people who couldn't grasp the basics of tort law, she supposed, tapping her pen on the side of her textbook.
She was aware of the person leaning their chair back towards her without really acknowledging it; growing up in her house gave you a great sense of when you were being watched or snuck up on. Tate did jump when the person actually spoke to her, half-turning in her seat. When she caught sight of the other student, her stomach twisted itself into a funny little butterfly knot and she blurted, "I like yours too," and then covered her mouth, evidently annoyed by the outburst. Way to lack self-control, Desmarais. You can't win Big Brother if you tell everyone your secret right off.
Now to the more pertinent puzzle, which was... was this person... Attempting to get points back on her own mental scale, she asked in as dry a tone as she could muster, "Do you usually wear sunglasses indoors, though?"
What About You?
[/blockquote]
Name: Roma!
Age: 20!
Experience: Nine years!
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