〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: colin
AGE: 27
JOURNAL: zweihander
IM / EMAIL: gammashade at gmail
PLURK: roseward
RETURNING: Tempo / Quake Woman, functionoverfeels

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Tara Markov | Terra
CHARACTER AGE: 16-ish
SERIES: Teen Titans (cartoon)
CHRONOLOGY: Just after the series finale
CLASS: Hero, reluctantly
HOUSING: Random is fine!

BACKGROUND: The world Terra comes from is generally pretty similar to our own, only with superheroes. They're public figures and generally looked upon favorably. The place she's spent most of her time, Jump City, is a major city on the western seaboard that seems up-to-date with the technology of the mid '00s. The Teen Titans, who live in a giant T-shaped tower in the bay, are the local superhero team. They defend Jump City from supervillains like Slade, a dangerous man as intelligent as he is mysterious, as well as smaller threats like Control Freak, Doctor Light, and a block of tofu that one time. The Teen Titans in this universe are made up of Robin, Cyborg, Beast Boy, Raven, and Starfire, all of whom are generally around the same age and spend their time doing pretty normal teenager things.

They discovered Terra running through a desert on the outskirts of Jump City and, if nothing else, decided to give her somewhere to stay for a little while to clean herself up and give her a break from running from place to place. Turns out the girl named Terra has the ability to manipulate the earth, and that would make her a pretty solid asset on the team—something which Robin definitely noticed. She connected pretty well with the team, minus Raven; she even confided in Beast Boy the fact that she has serious problems controlling her powers, and made him promise not to tell anyone. When she was all ready to pack up, Robin came up to her and offered her a position on the Titans. Unfortunately, the boy detective did a little too well at detecting and called her out on having poor control over her powers, which shattered her trust in Beast Boy and set her off running again.

She came back a while later with much better control over her powers, impressing basically everybody except for Raven. Of course, when she helped Raven save the city from being driven underground by giant laser-shooting tunnel snakes (which did not rule), she ended up with the trust of the entire team and another offer to join the Titans. She took it this time and things were generally pretty great!

Oh yeah, except for the part where it turned out she was working for Slade and feeding him a whole bunch of personal information on the Titans to take them down from the inside. She tried to take Beast Boy out on a date to spare him from the attack Slade would launch on the Tower, but when she tried to admit she'd been a spy this entire time, Slade himself showed up and broke the news for her. Beast Boy didn't take the news well, to put it lightly; he declared that Terra didn't have any friends and left her there to serve her new master.

After the situation at the Tower normalized and the Titans tried to formulate a plan to bring Slade down, Terra showed up again wearing a specially-made uniform that declared her allegiance to Slade. Her powers were amplified even more with the suit, which had a built-in neural interface with Slade to help him control Terra on the battlefield. First in a more blatant show of power, and then in a series of one-on-one sneak attacks, Slade's new apprentice took out each Titan individually, sending them down to a cavern far below the earth's surface by dragging them through mud, throwing them off a cliff, or simply opening up a fissure beneath their feet and watching them fall.

With no opposition, Slade and Terra took over Jump City, rendering the streets silent and covered with an oppressive fog. But the Titans emerged from the earth in which they'd been buried and launched their own series of sneak attacks on Terra, which she was in no state to fight against. Upon Slade's orders, she returned to his subterranean volcanic base, where he smacked her across the room as punishment for her blatant disobedience. It was around that time she began having second thoughts, realizing that she had screwed up pretty badly.

The Titans found Slade's base shortly afterwards and tried to fight back against Terra and Slade in a much more controlled environment. But Slade took control of Terra's body through the suit and forced her to use her powers in increasingly cruel ways, pinning the Titans down and threatening to impale them with stalactites. She wrested control from Slade at the last moment, though, and fell into a tearful reunion with Beast Boy. Even though she was begging him for death, asking him to kill her, he refused to give up on her. He refused to believe she was evil, and knew that she had the strength inside her to fight back against Slade's control.

She crumbled the ground beneath Slade's feet in a burst of power, sending him plummeting to the lava below and, as far as anyone present knew, killing him. But the seismic activity she created from doing that destabilized the volcano, setting it to blow—and destroy all of Jump City in the process. Terra knew this was her last chance to be the hero the Titans wanted her to be. She sent them all above ground, said her goodbyes, and expended all of her power to stop the volcano from erupting.

When the dust cleared, her body had turned to stone—her gravestone. Below Jump City, Tara Markov stands as a statue, a monument to the events that had happened there. The Titans wrote her epitaph: "Terra. A Teen Titan. A true friend."

Somehow, two years later, Terra found herself resurrected—completely flesh and bone again. She made her way back to the surface and tried to live life the way she had been for a while, but it didn't take long for her to realize that the superhero she used to be, the girl that the Titans wanted her to be... she didn't exist anymore. Tara Markov was just a girl who wanted to be normal again and leave the world of superheroes and supervillains behind. If you asked her how she got her second chance, she wouldn't be able to tell you and she wouldn't care. She's just got a math test next period, and she hasn't studied.

PERSONALITY: Terra tries her best to be easygoing and let things happen as they may. She's a free spirit with her own opinions as to what people her age should actually be doing with their lives. Slacker isn't the right word, because she does have the drive to do a lot of things she puts her mind to; "relaxed" is probably a better way to describe her outlook.

She used to be really gung ho about being a hero, because hey, what's better than helping people and looking really cool while doing it? But given her experiences with both Slade and the Titans, she has gotten significantly less enthusiastic about that entire lifestyle. She just kind of wants to be a normal teenager, the kind that gets into normal trouble like staying out too late or being caught at Makeout Point or whatever. She still has her powers, of course, but she's denying they exist almost every step of the way, and is definitely not aching to do anything heroic anytime soon. She's even stopped using her superhero name.

She doesn't trust easily, but she might give off the impression that she does; she keeps a lot of her own information close to her chest while remembering all she can about others. This makes the people she decides she can trust very important to her, even if they are few and far between. She's used to being able to disappear at a moment's notice if things go wrong (less of an issue now that she has complete control over her powers) and doesn't like having a lot of people or things that tie her down. That's why she likes to know so much about the places she visits—she needs to know who's safe to talk to and where she can hide for a while. And if it turns out they serve some really good cherry pie at one of those places, all the better.

Slade taught her how to think quickly and lie well, and whether she likes it or not, those qualities are a part of her now. She has enough self-control not to act on any impulses her training with Slade may have given her, but that won't stop her from, for example, making plans to hurt or kill people who piss her off enough. That's also where the information collection comes in: She still feels like she needs to pick up on anything anyone might say that could be used against her. He made her more perceptive, more vindictive, and more dangerous, and she can't unlearn that.

At her core, she just wants to believe she's still a good person. She tries to be kind, funny, and lovable, because if she acts enough like the person she wants to be, eventually she'll become her. That's how it works, right? She needs that to be the way it works.

POWER: Geomancy—that is, control over earth—which has the potential to include things as big as causing earthquakes, tearing open the earth, and summoning golems. She could only do those on purpose when she was being controlled by Slade, though, so they're probably not going to come up.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

Hey guys. My name's Tara and I guess I'm new in town? I've heard there's a lot of really weird stuff going down, but honestly I'm going to leave that to the people who actually know how to hero. That's not really my thing. I'm just looking for some good recommendations for what to do around here. I'm used to traveling and every time I hit a new town I like learning what the locals like to do, you know?

Man, I sound like some Travel Channel host. I promise I'm cooler than that. And I mean, look at this place! There's got to be a ton of little hole-in-the-wall diners and drive-ins and dives or whatever. How's the pizza around here? We do still have pizza, right? The Russians didn't take that away? Yeah, we've gotta still have it. If this place is anything like where I'm from, this war would have heated up a LONG time ago if someone took away our pizza.

It's nice to meet everyone! Thanks for your help in slowly clogging my arteries.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: With Lapis Lazuli on the test drive