App

[minder_one]

"Tara can kill people with her bare hands and escape from Iran with two bullets in her body, but she can't maintain a personal life worth a damn." -- Greg Rucka

Basics
Name: Tara Chace
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Fandom: Queen & Country

Appearance
PB: Katee Sackhoff
Description: Tara's an attractive woman, with shoulder-length blonde hair, fair skin and hazel eyes. She keeps herself in good shape - as she must, in order to carry out her job effectively - and it shows in her well-toned form. And she carries more than her fair share of scars, though the worst of them aren't the physical ones.

Skills
Powers: None
Abilities: Tara is a Special Operations Officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service - a spy, in other words, and one of the best. She has extensive training and experience in espionage, speaks multiple languages fluently, and is a highly effective strategist and tactician. She's an expert marksman, and is highly skilled in both armed and unarmed combat, capable of neutralising a target swiftly and silently. Put simply, you don't want to get on this woman's bad side.


Personality
General personality: Tara Chace embodies all those qualities Paul Crocker, her immediate superior, regards as essential in an officer of the SIS Special Section: ambition, passion and utter self-loathing. The latter feeds a deep-seated need to prove herself, to continually strive to be better, to perform her job to the absolute best of her ability, to complete the op no matter what the cost. It also makes her head a rather miserable place to live in a lot of the time. She's always had something of a propensity for self-destruction - even as a child she was a rule-breaker, a discipline problem.

She carries with her a lot of guilt - guilt for the lives she's taken, guilt for the ones she's not been able to save, guilt for the things she's willingly done in the service of Queen and Country. She almost certainly suffers from post-traumatic stress - over two years after Tom's death she stills has nightmares of cradling his bullet-ridden body, and she struggles with physical intimacy since being tortured seven months ago in Uzbekistan - though she's never made any serious effort to get treatment for it, opting instead for avoidance and self-destructive behaviours.

Once, she would drown out her emotions in copious amounts of booze, smokes and anonymous sex. Now that she's a mother with a young daughter who relies on her, those options are out of the question; her self-abuse has become more internalised. Certainly balancing a high-risk job with motherhood has given herself plenty of new things to beat herself up about, and she's constantly battling with feelings that her job is somehow a betrayal of her daughter, that she's missing too much of Tamsin's development.

She knows the job is destroying her by inches. She knows it's not healthy for her, knows it's crippled her social life, knows it's quite probably dashed any chance of her having a stable relationship. And she knows it may very well kill her, the way it killed Tom Wallace, the man she loved. But it's the only thing she knows how to do. The only thing she's any good at. And, god help her, for all that it's taken from her - she loves it. She's addicted to it. Until Tamsin was born, it was all she lived for.

Outside of work and motherhood, she has few hobbies - she's an appalling cook, and her mother's attempts to push her into lady-like pursuits like ballet, riding and piano as a child never stuck. She does love painting, in her own messy fashion; smearing, splattering, splashing and drizzling bold colours across great canvasses, relishing the sensation of paint underneath her hands and the sharp smell of it at the back of her throat. It's more Modern Accident than Modern Expression, but it's one of the few things she can really lose herself in.

And, of course, she adores her daughter, loves her more than she had thought it in her capacity to love. She'd do anything for Tam, and woe betide the person who gets between Tara Chace and her child.

Personally she's smart and resourceful, with a filthy mouth and a quick sense of humour. She's also totally ruthless when the need arises, and she's not one to suffer fools easily.


History
Tara Felicity Chace learned to be self-reliant from a young age. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and soon after she found herself shipped off to an expensive boarding school - to get the proper education all young ladies ought to have, her mother told her, and even at ten Tara didn't believe her. Annika Bodmer-Chace had always been of a flighty temperament; she was warm and vivacious, even loving in her own way, but she was utterly impractical and more than a little self-indulgent. Tara suspected, and still suspects, her mother simply found it easier to live her own life without a young daughter underfoot to complicate things.

She was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) during her final year of university at Cambridge, the agency seeing in her in intelligent, resourceful and driven women with field agent potential. The training was intensive, forcing Tara to push her mind and body to her limits, but she rose to each new challenge, revelling in the rush it gave her and proving herself an exceptional student.

She was twenty-seven when she joined the Special Operations Directorate as an officer of the Special Section, known in-house as the Minders. A small hand-picked team of elite intelligence agents, answerable directly to SIS Director of Operations Paul Crocker, the Minders are charged with the most delicate and dangerous of covert actions: the recovery of politically sensitive stolen documents, the foiling of a terrorist plot before it can be put into action, the extraction of defectors from hostile territory, the assassination of enemies of Her Majesty's Government; all may potentially fall to the Special Section. It's a job few people can handle - weeks and even months at a time of tedious desk work, interrupted by bursts of indescribable panic.

Tara Chace is very, very good at her job.

But it's a job that comes with a limited life expectancy, one that's precluded her from having anything resembling a social life and is destroying her slowly from the inside.

In over six years in the Special Section - six years in which she's excelled, rising to the rank of Minder One and head of her section - Tara has murdered men for queen and country. She has killed for self-defence and in the name of the mission. She's been forced to shoot a man in front of his own son, a two-year-old boy. She's been tortured, beaten, shot at, almost killed. And she's lost the one man she ever loved - Tom Wallace, her former Head of Section, shot in front of her on a nightmare op in Saudi Arabia.

Tom died never knowing that Tara was pregnant with his daughter. She didn't know it herself at the time, either - that realisation would come later, back in England, when she began to twig that maybe the monster hangovers that had her throwing up into the toilet bowl each morning were more than just the product of the binge drinking she'd fallen into in her efforts to blot out the memory of Tom's bullet-riddled body.

There was never any question of whether she'd keep the baby. How could she terminate the only thing that survived of Tom? And when Crocker refused to give her the leave she was asking for, Tara quit. She left SIS and she took herself to the town of Barnoldswick in Lancashire, where she found herself nervous and tongue-tied on the doorstep of Mrs Valerie Wallace - Tom's mother.

Five and a half months later, with Val Wallace holding her hand, Tara gave birth to a baby daughter. Seven pounds, eleven ounces; healthy, and more beautiful than she could have thought possible. She named her Tamsin.

But for all that Tara adored and delighted in her daughter, for all she was fond of Val and forever grateful for the older woman's support, adjusting to life in Lancashire was less than easy. It wasn't that the people of Barnoldswick were unwelcoming; on the contrary, Valerie's friends and neighbours couldn't have been nicer. Certainly once it circulated that her baby was poor Tom Wallace's daughter, who had died without ever knowing that he was a father-to-be, they looked at her with a certain respect and clucked over her kindly, trying in their own way to welcome and reassure.

But there was pity in their looks, too, and that was something Chace couldn't stomach. She didn't want to be pitied; not now, not ever. And gradually she came to avoid other people, and her social circle dwindled until it encompassed only Valerie and Tamsin. And she tried to content herself with the joys and the challenges of motherhood, and she told herself it was enough, that she didn't need any more than this.

Then, when Tam was almost ten months old, the unexpected happened. Paul Crocker arrived on her doorstep with a job for her. It was strictly off-the-books, he explained; officially sanctioned but requiring a secrecy that meant avoiding the traditional channels. Which also meant that he couldn't use any of the Minders. She was the only one he could trust with the op.

Crocker knew her, and he knew exactly which buttons to push. He knew there was a part of her that was quietly suffocating from this placid village life and he knew how to appeal to that part, how to sell it to her in a way she wouldn't be able to refuse. Pull off this one op, he promised, and she'd have her old job back. Minder One. Head of the Special Section.

Cursing him, hating herself, she'd taken the job.

The op itself went sour and Chace found herself captured and brutalised in an Uzbekistani torture chamber before the Americans arrived and pulled her out. Technically speaking it was a failure, one that would haunt her nightmares for months to come, but politically it has served its purpose. Politics tends to be a tricky business like that.

It nearly killed her, but returning bloodied, bruised and hobbling on crutches to London, she knew that this was where she needed to be. She couldn't walk away from it again.

She returned with Tamsin to her home in Camden, began interviewing nannies and endeavouring to convert her bachelorette's apartment into a home fit for a single mother. Val was willing to look after Tam whenever Tara was away on a job. She told herself this could work. She told herself she wasn't shirking her duties or betraying her daughter, that this was what was best for her and in the long run that made it best for Tam as well. Occasionally she even believed it.

It's been seven months. Tamsin's close to a year and a half now, and a bright, beautiful, happy little girl. At the office, things finally seem to be settling back into what passes for normality in a job that can easily turn everything upside down in an instant. But she still carries that guilt inside of her, and she knows that she won't be able to keep this balance forever.


What they have on arrival
- 1 packet of cigarettes
- 1 plastic lighter
- 1 cell phone
- 1 wallet, containing cash, cards and a photo of her daughter Tamsin
- house and car keys


Sample
Chace knows something is off the moment she wakes.

The bed beneath her is hard, unfamiliar; the ceiling above her vaulted wood rather than the damp-stained plaster of her bedroom at home. There's a distinctly woody, herbal scent in the air, like incense; and underneath that, more faintly, the smell of smoke and damp straw.

Carefully, not wanting to alert anybody to the fact that she's awake before she has to, she twists her head to one side, earning her a view of a crackling fireplace set into a heavy stone wall. Bundles of drying herbs hang suspended from the mantle. To her other side there's a small window, and tilting her head upwards a little she catches a glimpse of what looks like a pretty rural landscape, with no major roads or buildings in sight.

She slumps back onto the pillow.

Shit.

She doesn't know where she is.

Even worse, she doesn't know how she got here.

She remembers leaving home in the morning, giving Tamsin a cuddle and a kiss on the forehead before handing her over to the nanny. She remembers walking down the steps into the tube station, remembers squeezing onto the crowded train, and then…

Fuck. Then what?

She needs to have a better idea of what she's dealing with here. Tara waits, straining her ears until she's satisfied there's nobody else close by, before sitting up. Her muscles are a little stiff, but there's no unexpected pain, no indication that she's been manhandled or beaten, and she's not sure if that's a good thing or bad. Even more bewildering, her pockets haven't been emptied: Not only has she still got her wallet, keys and smokes, but nobody's thought to take her lighter or her phone off her.

The latter gives her a glimmer of hope, but it doesn't last long. No reception, the glowing display informs her. Damn.

She turns her attention to the room instead. It's small, seemingly a very modest bedroom opening onto some kind of outer chamber. She ignores that for the moment, moving around instead to the window. The view it offers is even less encouraging than first she'd thought; there's nothing familiar in the landscape, no landmarks that leap out at her. Worse still, she's at least four or five storeys up. An easy escape is looking less and less likely.

It's as Tara's standing at the window that she hears the shuffle of feet on stone announcing the arrival of somebody new. She spins around, but she's got no chance to climb back into bed or hide herself from view. The man is already staring at her.

As, she imagines, she must be staring at him. The man is a stranger to her, perhaps in his early fifties, and clad in heavy brown robes. He looks, more than anything, like a medieval monk.

What. The. Fuck.

"Ah. Er… W-welcome, Stranger." It's clear he wasn't expecting to see her awake; he fumbles uncertainly over the words, trying for a grand pronouncement but managing only to look awkward and not entirely convinced by himself. "Welcome to--"

He gets no further, because it's at this point that his finds himself slammed roughly into the wall, Chace having taken advantage of his faltering by choosing that moment to lunge for him. Her left hand goes straight for his crotch, prompting a small noise of protest which is just as quickly silenced with a threatening squeeze. As an immobilisation manoeuvre, it's a flawed one, leaving his arms free for a counter-attack - but unless she's misjudged the man, he's not a fighter, and as far as psychological manoeuvres go, there are few quite so effective as the crotch grab.

"Who the fuck are you?" Her voice is a low hiss, quiet and angry.

The monk squirms feebly against her hold. "My-- my lady, please--"

He breaks off into a low whimper as her left hand tightens around his nethers, while the right begins patting him down efficiently. "Answer the question."

He's almost gabbling by this point. "Dameon. Please-- I am Maester Dameon, a humble servant to the Lord of this place."

Lord? Tara's not sure what to make of that one, and his answer leaves her as mystified as before. "Where am I? Who brought me here?"

"That is what I have been trying to-- my lady, please, if you would only--"

Tara sighs. Her search has revealed no weapons hiding beneath Dameon's robes - and, unfortunately, no ID or anything else of practical use, either. But the monk's not a threat at the moment, and he's not going to be of any use to her if he's incoherent with fear. She loosens her hold on his crotch.

Then, as the tension begins to leave the man's body, she squeezes tightly and, leaning in close to his ear, murmurs, "You shout for help when I let you go, you try anything at all-- I'll rip your balls out with my teeth. Understand?"

Dameon nods feverishly, babbling frantic assurances, and Tara steps back from him with an unsettlingly pleasant smile. Then she folds her arms. "Okay, then. Talk."

She keeps him in her vision, but her eyes are already scanning the room again covertly, seeking out anything that could potentially be of use to her. Preferably a weapon. The fireplace poker is an immediate candidate, crude but effective, and she keeps it in mind.

Meanwhile, abandoning his attempts to straighten his robes, the monk sags against the wall. His eyes never leave Chace, regarding her with the fear and apprehension of a man come face to face with an unpredictable beast of prey. "You have…" He fumbles, struggling to recall his place in his carefully-rehearsed monologue. "By the grace of the Gods who watch over this land, you have been brought to Westeros, to the great nation of the Seven Kingdoms…"

He falters again under her incredulous stare.

"Oh, no, go on, I'm listening," Chace urges him with a sarcastic smile. "What, is there a dark lord that needs slaying? A One Ring that needs to be disposed of?"

Dameon looks resigned. "Your path is your own, my lady. Where you go now, what you choose to do, that is for you to decide."

That does surprise her.

"So, what, you'll just let me walk out of here?"

"Of course I will, why would I--"

And now, finally, her eye alights on something of use. She'd missed it initially, half-hidden as it is beneath some papers on a chest at the end of the bed, but as she frees it the corner of her mouth curls into a smile. It's more of a dagger than a knife, slightly old-fashioned, but with a good grip and a sharp edge. Certainly better than nothing.

She's aware of Dameon watching her still. "The rest are yours too, you know," he says.

Tara frowns at him. "The rest of what?"

He waves his hand at the chest. "The map. The coins. The mirror. I was to give them to you, to aid you in your travels."

She narrows her eyes at him, then glances back at the chest. "How is a mirror supposed to 'aid me in my travels'?"

"It is…" Dameon hesitates, sparing a worried glance for the dagger still in her hand. "I admit, I've never seen one in use, but it's my understanding that the mirror allows communication with… with others like you, others with similar devices. I'm told that if you only hold the mirror and speak, then the person you are seeking will answer."

It's too much. Tara groans loudly. "Oh, fuck me. You really are a bowl of fruit loops, aren't you?"

And it's at that moment that the bloody mirror starts talking to her.


Player Info
Name: Jess
Age: 24
Do you have any other characters here? Yes; Stephanie Brown