Post by temperance blythe caldwell on Jan 18, 2016 19:27:32 GMT -5
TEMPERANCE BLYTHE CALDWELL
FULL NAME: Temperance Blythe Caldwell.
NICKNAMES: Tansy.
AGE: Twenty-one
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Straight.
STATUS: Single.
GROUP: Student.
GRADE: Junior.
MAJOR: Cosmetology.
JOB OCCUPATION: Receptionist at Serenity Spa.HAIR: Blonde and seemingly long. Naturally, it’s feathered around her jaw after a bold move, but she uses a lot of extensions since she misses playing with the lengths. She does a lot with it when she has the time and tries different ways to style it based on her favourite characters. She does play around with wigs, so that is why she’s seen with short, bright hair sometimes.
EYES: Blue.
SCARS/BIRTHMARKS: None.
TATTOOS: None.
PIERCINGS: Her ears just once.
PLAY-BY: Allison Harvard!LIKES: Manga, anime, blood oranges, temporary body art, body paint, photography, dressing up, playing characters, making her own clothes, bouldering, yoga, contortionism, almond milk, oat bars, body jewels, quotes on post-its, graphic novels, kaleidoscopes, Alice in Wonderland, sewing crafts, fabric stores, lace, collectibles, Paris, sea salt scrub, haunting music.
DISLIKES: being teased, bullies, her overbite, crowds, being stared at, her parents antics, drugs, burning her cooking, waiting for text replies, horror movies, apple juice, violence, walking when it’s icy, feeling lonely, public speaking, ‘freak’ title, drinks leaking in her bag, bad make up, feeling faint, car alarms going off during the night, feeling scared.
FEARS: Living with her parents again, tight crowds, being alone forever.
SECRETS: Tansy considers the worst bullies in her life to be her parents. They gave her more issues than her peers and treated her in such a way that she escaped at every chance she had. She secretly feels like she could die tomorrow and they wouldn’t care enough to shed a genuine tear for it – it would all be a show for the attention.
PERSONALITY: Tansy is a strange thing who comes across as being quite shy. This isn’t wrong, but it’s a trait that’s developed of being betrayed and hurt by the people who she thought she could depend upon. She’s a bookworm who finds herself daydreaming the time away. Creative and artistic, Tansy takes a slightly unconventional approach of seeing the skin as her preferred canvas, often using herself as her model since she doesn’t have many friends. People are often put off by her haunting appearance and quirky ways. She’s never been one to make friends easily; at least not in person. She has friends online who have never seen her face or met her in person. Nothing about her really makes much sense. Her contortionism hobby she picked up from weird genetic dispositions coupled with boredom and a travelling circus, whereas her love for bouldering came from a youtube video which she thought looked fun and a bad night when she had enough of the bullies in her life. She’s gotten good at keeping a blank face, which adds to people being startled by her, but in fact is a defensive mechanism so people can’t see the effect they’re having on her with their mean words. She buries her emotions into her crafty obsessions, be it sorrow or anger. It’s rare for this quiet girl to verbally express how she’s feeling purely because there’s never been anyone around to care about it before. Tansy has never experienced love before. She’s dreamt about it; imagined a prince rescuing her from her Parisian tower and saving her from a world of horrors, but it’s never happened. She is sort of wary of anyone who pays any kind of interest in her, be them platonic or more, simply because in the past there has been a joke, prank or bet behind their motives and Tansy doesn’t want to go there again. She’d afraid of spending the rest of her life as everyone else’s joke and never finding an escape from that horrible fate.MOTHER: Sofia Annabelle Caldwell, 45.
FATHER: Oscar Gregory Caldwell, 46.
SIBLINGS: N/A.
OTHERS: Dottie Helena Rice, deceased, nanny.
PETS: Hope & Chance, two black American shorthairs.
HOMETOWN: Paris, France – but she split her life between there and Palm Springs, California.
HISTORY: Sofia and Oscar were spoilt little rich kids who married purely because they thought it would be funny when they were in Vegas after they had won big at the poker tables. They had been together for two years after meeting at a friend’s pool party in Beverly Hills, but both came from the affluent end of Palm Springs. They were rich kids who had partied their way through high school and who had enough money to live comfortably without doing much for the rest of their lives. Oscar’s dad had a company that would essentially run itself, and Sofia came from a leisure chain that had branches across the country. They were set. After their for thrills wedding – approximately six months – Sofia discovered she was pregnant. She was pissed off because a baby would cramp her style. In a spur of the moment move she headed to Paris and bought a home their so she could at least see out her pregnancy with a touch of lavish treatment since she couldn’t party hard until the baby was out of her.
Their daughter was born in Paris, and named a name that her parents found entertaining, but never really thought much about. They picked her middle name from the first page of the baby book that they flipped to, and her first name came from a rather cruel joke about how Sofia couldn’t drink for nine months. The first thing she did after she had the baby was grab a bottle of wine and hire a nanny. She wasn’t going to be a mother, but a baby had given her a reason to have things like a baby shower and draw the attention to herself. Both Sofia and Oscar liked to have the attention on themselves. In their lives they would stage scenes if they felt someone was upping them, or had something better than them. All in all, it didn’t matter how old they got, they always acted like sixteen year old school kids desperate for drama.
Dottie Rice was the nanny hired to care for Tansy; she even gave her the cute nickname when Tansy struggled to spell her own name in full as a little girl. Most of the time she was alone with the baby while Oscar and Sofia flew to wherever a party might be. Dottie kept Tansy in Paris, just the two of them in the cosy Paris home while the parents called every now and then. Dottie always hoped that they might settle down once they youth passed them by, but it didn’t. They flew in every now and then for fashion week or whenever they thought they wanted to be in Europe and it was never pleasant. Tansy’s unique appearance was something Dottie always complimented and praised. She called the little girl her china doll, and made her giggle with face paints and photographs, but her parents were the opposite. They would land and take one look at their daughter before they’d start asking if there was anything they could do to make their daughter look like the other kids, question Dottie about if she was eating the food they paid for, and ask why she looked the way she did when neither of them were so peculiar. On one trip Sofia even took the little, scared girl, to a doctor to see if there was anything medically wrong with her. In the end, when the doctor declared a clean bill of health, Sofia made a comment that she was happy that they didn’t have their daughter with them back in Palm Springs or anywhere else they travelled to. Dottie did all that she could to protect Tansy, and held her when she cried. She was everything a mother ought to be to the little girl, and the only reason she never made a move to permanently remove her from the custody of Sofia and Oscar was that they had more money than sense whereas she lived in the house they owned, and with the wages they paid her. To go to court would only see them wipe the floors with her and ensure that she never saw Tansy again. And they were the type of people who would do it purely out of spite. Tansy was an excuse for them. If their flights to anywhere were delayed they could use their daughter as an excuse. If they wanted to meet someone big and famous they found that using the little girl back home got them access more than their money did.
Unfortunately, when Tansy was nine, Dottie died suddenly. Cardiac arrest, the coroner’s report said, but Dottie was fighting fit. Someone, a stranger in black at the funeral, told Tansy that sometimes life was cruel and these things just happened. She soon got to know how cruel life could be. With the death of her nanny, her parents were forced to come and see her. Oscar wanted to get back to Palm Springs before the influx of parties and college kids for spring break, which meant they wouldn’t stay in Paris to hire a nanny again. So, they went home and reluctantly took Tansy with them. She wanted to go as much as they wanted to take her.
When she got to Palm Springs, there was no welcome party or fanfare for her. Her parents simply told her that her room was on the top floor and the one of the far left – furthest away from anything else. It was a nice room, and one that Tansy made her own over the years to hide away in and watch the world go by from. However, she soon discovered even more shocking truths about her parents. They might have been married, but any vows they had were not taken seriously. They had something of an open relationship and took part in affairs left, right and centre. It wasn’t uncommon for Tansy to wake up for school and find strange people still in the house after a party, some of them barely dressed and slurring words at her about how she looked or what she was doing. She took to asking one of the staff in the house if they might help her find and put locks on her door just so no one could stumble in her room accidentally. She didn’t like any of them. The staff were nice, but always run ragged by her parent’s demands, and when her parents were away there was always some big party to prep for when they were due home. No one was to Tansy like Dottie was. Seeing her parents live like they did made her question her own parentage. There was no real guarantee that Oscar was her dad if they engaged in flings and lived this kind of open marriage like none of it mattered. She once heard Oscar say that ‘sex was just sex – there didn’t need to be love there’. She didn’t want to ask what he meant, but since he remained married, she could only assume that on some level he loved Sofia, but they just enjoyed the company of others in their beds.
She attended a local school and that was no more pleasant. In Paris people had been nice, or at least subtle. Here the kids were mean and cruel. Her big eyes drew a lot of attention anyway and her overbite before she had dental work and braces made her look gaunt. Kids preyed on her to the point of tears daily, and she hated school so much that she struggled to keep her grades up throughout a lot of her classes – the ones where the bullying was worse. It never ended. Not really. Braces helped with her overbite a little bit, but it remained and she grew into some of her features, but she was a skinny girl, gangly and with a very haunting appearance. Her looks were what encouraged her to embrace the world of manga and anime. The art style kind of embraced how she looked – skinny, long limbed and big eyed. The only friends she made were on online forums and social media where none of them ever saw what she looked like unless it was a very detailed costume. She loved hiding in her room after a day of harsh words and turning herself into a character who wouldn’t stand for it. Tansy herself didn’t have the courage to stand up to her hordes of bullies, but she liked envisioning a world where she could turn into someone who could. She made the costumes on a sewing machine out of the fabrics she bought with her allowance, oddly given to her by the house staff and not her parents. She worked on body paint and make up stills turning herself into different people before getting wigs to complete the costumes from an online store where she would make three or four monthly purchases. She needed the room she had purely for the space. Still, the real world was cruel to her. She spent her school holidays in the unused Paris home because no one stopped her and because she didn’t want to be with her family. Whenever she did bump into her parents they still had nothing fun to say to her. If they caught her playing dress up they mocked her, make up was laughed at, and on a few occasions Oscar even pointed out that they had the money to make her pretty, so why not do that?
Tansy wanted to get away from them, from Palm Springs, from all of it. Her favourite class had been art, but it wasn’t quite the same as when she could play with the make up or body paints. One day a teacher caught her using a photo of herself as her source. She was kitted out in body paint and jewels and looking downright villainous, but it was a work of art all the same with the photograph taken by her own hand and a timer setting on a tripod setup. Tansy did everything herself. The teacher complimented the work after poking Tansy into giving enough short answers and then the next class she came back with information about cosmetology and aestheticians. She showed her websites and brochures about all the different options from clinical work to salons and further afield. Tansy had been delaying college applications because she didn’t know what she could do. She was middle of the class for most things now, someone who the teachers never called on or praised - aside from this art teacher. She just longed to get through the day without teasing or bullying, but it never happened. She was asked if she had thought about what college she might like to go to, but all Tansy said in reply was that she wanted to get as far away from Palm Spring as possible. The teacher smiled and told her that East Coast schools were some of the most beautiful.
She couldn’t help herself. Tansy looked into it and checked the requirements. They wanted a portfolio, which was tricky, but she bribed some of the house staff into coming back on their days off to help her by sitting for her and letting her turn them into different people, things and creatures. She stuck photos of herself between them, too, since they already existed. Her grades were passable enough and she applied for East Coast schools, taking the acceptance for NYU and seeing it as her golden ticket out of her personal hell. Tansy didn’t tell her parents. She just packed everything up and looked for an apartment online. No one came to her graduation, no one signed her yearbook apart from that art teacher who wished her luck and told her to keep her chin up. There was absolutely no doubt about what she was doing. She had movers come along to take her things before she made the drive herself and simply mentioned it to her parents the day she was going. They laughed, mockingly said good luck, and then she walked out. In one solo act of defiance, she also took the keys to the Paris home – her home. She didn’t think her parents even remembered it. They hadn’t been there since Dottie died, and never seemed to pay much attention to Tansy up and vanishing for weeks on end. Hell, she only had her car because she had ruined a party set up by coming in the hall ripping wet from a storm after walking home from school one day.
New York was a fresh start. She was out on her own, but it wasn’t a transformation. Her life so far had left deep scars on her mind and heart. She was awkward to be around, shy of all the new strangers. She struggled to make friends and still stood out a mile for her quirky ways and different appearance. Tansy liked to make or adapt her wardrobe, so she was a little more out there than most. She tried, but crowds bothered her, parties were not her thing and she often just wanted to retreat back to a place where she could be in her own company. She rescued two cats so she wouldn’t be so alone at home, but a lot didn’t change. People didn’t bully her to her face any more, or at least not unless she was out late and then someone might drunkenly shout something, but she realised that happened to a lot of people in the city. They might have talked behind her back or whispered, but she knew at this point that she was a little strange and that meant that people wouldn’t always be able to accept her. Still, Tansy hasn’t given up hope on finding her place. Her course for the last three years has been everything she loves and she’s good at it. She got a job through her professor at a spa in the city as a receptionist, but it gave her a glimpse into one of the options for her future. There’s a voice in her head though that says nothing will be better than playing dress up, because who doesn’t want to be a hero, or someone with all the power to make their monsters go away?
With a year and something left to go in school, Tansy is doing well. She’s not exactly over the moon happy, because she’s too wary of things to relax enough. Her parents have spoken to her maybe three times in all that time. They were asking if she was coming back to Palm Springs, to give her access to a bank account from her grandparents which has remained untouched by Tansy because she saw her grandparents less than she saw her own parents – though at least they were working and not partying – and finally to ask how old she was because they had forgotten and they were having a discussion about something that took place when she would have been three. Tansy did not miss them.
YOUR ALIAS: Kim.
RULE WORDS: kidnappedbykimandheldforransom.
WHERE YOU FOUND US: Once Upon A Dream.
SAMPLE:I think not!
