app: synodiporia

[nowthatsfunny]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Froda
AGE: way older than 16
PLAYER JOURNAL: froda_baggins
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT: PM the character journal or frodabaggins
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Tess
CANON: The Last of Us
POINT IN CANON: Her death in the Capitol building in Boston
AGE: late 30s
APPEARANCE: Here! She's kinda scrawny and undernourished, with brown hair and brown eyes, and she'll be arriving with a bit of a nasty scar on her right shoulder/neck area.
CANON HISTORY: Tess @ TLOU wiki

CANON PERSONALITY:

Tess is at first glance tough as nails, no-nonsense, and frankly, not someone you would want to cross. She's ruthless even for a survivor in her world, being involved in smuggling and other varied illegal activities. She has no problem committing acts of violence, even cold-blooded murder, to protect her business interests and live to see another day.

She's a natural leader, and very charismatic. This is made very clear in the early parts of the game, where nearly everyone she encounters addresses her with respect - and possibly a little fear. It's clear that in her partnership with Joel, she is more or less "the brains" - she's the one making contacts, hammering out business deals and the like, while Joel tends to follow her lead. He even refers to her occasionally as "ma'am" and "boss". She's also headstrong, and occasionally impulsive - she goes to make a drop on her own, knowing it's dangerous and knowing she'll probably incur Joel's wrath, and Joel makes some comments to the effect that she sometimes goes haring off without being very cautious. In short, Tess is a bit of a firebrand.

Joel is her business partner, but also her closest friend, and the person she trusts most in the world. Her feelings for him run deep, and it's clear that they have some romantic undertones to them - they enjoy flirting with each other quite a bit, anyway. No matter the exact nature of the relationship, it's clear that Joel is the most important person in her life, and someone she trusts a great deal. Most of her other relationships seem to be purely about business. But she actually likes Joel.

She gets along well with Ellie, too, though she doesn't have as much time to develop a real bond with the girl. Still, she's not nearly as hostile to Ellie as Joel is at first, and actually commiserates with her after a particularly scary encounter with infected - despite the fact that she's clearly much more experienced with them than Ellie is. She comes to see Ellie as the key to a cure, however, pretty fast, especially once she herself is bitten. She bears no animosity to the girl for anything that happened - she is, after all, just a kid, and there's not much in this world that even an adult can control.

She's also perhaps a little less cynical than she seems at first glance. She takes a certain amount of enjoyment in what she does, and in life in general. When they get outside, she comments that she loves the fresh air, as opposed to the stink inside the QZ, and relishes taking a deep breath. She enjoys playfully bantering and flirting with Joel as well, and even has a bottle of alcohol that she's acquired from somewhere. Essentially, Tess likes to find pleasure in whatever she can - the world is shitty enough without her being doom and gloom all the time. Her sense of humor tends toward the sharp and acerbic, even morbid at times - for instance, she makes a joke out of killing a couple of guys who try to jump her in the street. This is as much a product of the world she lives in as anything else - when death is a normal part of life (gruesome, terrible death no less), Tess feels that one either learns to deal with it by making light of it sometimes, or you go crazy.

Furthermore, she has a kind of hope that Joel seems to lack, at least in the early stages of the game. She buys Ellie's story about being immune while Joel is still disbelieving, and she honestly begins to think that Marlene could be right: Ellie could be the key to a cure. When Tess is bitten, this only exacerbates her feelings, and drives her need to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies. It also motivates her to press Joel for a promise that he will finish the job when they find all the men at the capitol building dead. The bite signed Tess's death warrant, but rather than completely give in to despair, she remains strangely, fiercely determined that a better world can happen, if Ellie can just get to the people trying to find a cure.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: N/A

ABILITIES: Tess is a baseline human, with all the limitations and vulnerabilities that go with it. She is pretty badass, though - she's great in a fight, knows her way around a gun, she's clever and resourceful and can adapt well to extreme situations. She has, after all, been living in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world since she was a teenager. She's also got a good head for organization and numbers - she's been essentially running her own business for years.

INVENTORY; The clothes on her back - jeans, sneakers, t-shirt, button-up shirt, a bandana in her hair.
Also a backpack, inside of which is:
- a 9mm pistol
- 5 spare clips
- a gas mask
- a change of underwear
- a couple of long-expired protein bars
- 2 homemade shivs
- 2 homemade med kits
- a few ration cards, stamped BOSTON QUARANTINE ZONE

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Not that I can think of! I'll be bringing her in as brand-new to the whole Traveling thing, so she'll be starting fresh from her canon point.

S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON: Here!

THIRD PERSON:

Three weeks. Three weeks, if the kid is telling the truth. She was bitten three weeks ago, and hasn't turned. Tess looks for the lie in her eyes, searches for some reason why she would make that claim other than it being the truth, and she can't find one.

She knows Joel doesn't buy it. Knows him well enough to translate the look in his eyes to 'stubborn disbelief'. That's Joel – he wears his cynicism like armor, like it'll protect him from all the terrible shit in the world. Usually, he's right, too. But another thing Tess knows about Joel – she knows he won't look too closely at the kid. She knows he'll do anything to keep her at arm's length.

“I get it,” she tells him, and that's all she needs to say, because Ellie is in earshot and they both know what she's talking about, even if it'll just piss him off even more, but Tess does get it. And she can't help thinking that he needs to not believe, for that reason.

Tess has no such hindrances, however. She knows Marlene, even if she's never been a fan of her cause. Marlene, for all her faults, all her idealism, is a damn smart woman. She knows what Joel and Tess are capable of, and she is clearly running out of options. She'd be an idiot to cross them. And Ellie, she's pretty sure, isn't lying. Tess has always had a strong bullshit detector, she wouldn't have survived this long without one.

Shit, Tess thinks to herself, maybe this is the point of it all. Maybe a couple of smugglers are gonna help save the whole goddamn world.