Tara Markov

Player —

Player Name: Kai
Pronouns: She/her
Are you over 18? Yes
Contact: ectoplasmfear
Current Characters: N/A
Who Invited You?: Juu

Character —

Character Name: Tara Markov / Terra
Character Canon: DC Comics (Rebirth)
Character Age: Early to mid twenties.
Canon Point: After the disbandment of Defiance and shortly after joining the Outsiders under her brother, Brion.
Link to History: It’s a whole mess.
Inventory: A disguise kit, a bunch of rocks she can use as weapons kept in a specially crafted case, a pack of cigarettes.

Powers —

Skills:
-Manipulation: Tara is extremely proficient in using deception and charm to get what she wants, most notably with the Teen Titans but even before and after that, she seduced men and used them to get what she wanted, normally money, clothes, transportation. She later went to work as a bodyguard disguised as an escort or date and accompanied her clients to high profile events.
Superpowers:
Geokinisis: Tara has the power to manipulate all kinds of rock and other earthly substances, from dirt to kryptonite. There is no hardline limit to the range of her abilities, beyond that it’s tied to her emotions so it requires a considerable amount of control for her to do it with exact precision and it requires an extremely heightened emotional state for her to do anything as catastrophic as causing an earthquake strong enough to level a whole city.

Flight: She can also manipulate gravity and make rocks float in the air, and use those rocks to fly.
Limitations:
Mortality: She is, physically speaking, a normal human being, and if you stab her in the heart she will die. Even her own powers can hurt her if she’s not careful, as seen with her original death in the New Earth timeline where she buried herself under a falling building and died.

Mental Instability: Tara has grown up a lot since she was a dangerously unstable teenager, but that doesn’t change the fact that she has a near bottomless well of unexamined trauma, anger and hatred that can rise to the surface under the right circumstances. This is both a limitation in that it will rapidly cause her to have less control of her abilities but it will make her powers a lot stronger at the same time. She’s just as liable to hurt her enemies as she is to hurt herself.

Personality —

What were your character's most formative experiences?:
Tara’s earliest formative experience was being brought from America to Markovia to live as a princess. Her mother was not the queen, and as such, she was something of a scandal to the royal family, and they treated her as such. She was dealing with the loss of her own mother and was not happy with being transported to a new family, and as such made any attempts by her father and brothers to get to know her difficult. While there, the only person who she came to care about was her older brother Brion Markov. And even then, she found his forgiving and loving nature to be confusing and frustrating, and she reasoned it as just him being too stupid to realize that he’s supposed to hate her. This confusing period of her life came to an end when one of the servants tried to rescue her from an assassination attempt, only to end up being murdered in her stead. After this, she promptly ran away.
Meeting Slade Wilson and becoming his apprentice was another extremely formative experience for her. He manipulated her and dangled promises of love in front of her to keep her compliant and under his thumb, even kissing her to keep the lie going. Ultimately, he indoctrinated her into a life of killing, but she tended to follow what he practiced rather than what he preached, so she took glee in killing and deceiving people and ignored his stated moral compass. Deep down, she knew the whole time that he needed her way more than she needed him, but she was terrified of being left alone with nobody to love the “real her”, who was cruel and abrasive and selfish in a way her cute but blunt tomboy-esque disguise wasn’t.

What values, morals, and/or philosophies does your character live by, and how are those beliefs demonstrated? What happens when they have to compromise what they believe in?
Tara’s morality has changed from one of outright destructive malice to one of pure pragmatism. She officially severed her ties with Slade after trying to kill him and letting him be dragged into Arkham, and has since been working with her brother Brion in the Outsiders’ Markovian branch. She looks out for herself, uses her powers for her own benefit, and is only dedicated to living the life that she wants to live without bowing down to the orders of people who she views as weaker than her. She still hasn’t fully come to terms with what happened to her as a teenager, beyond recognizing that Slade never loved her or cared about her, but in her head she’s somewhere between the way that Slade described her to Beast Boy as someone who was insane and hated everyone for no real reason, and Brion’s description of her as someone who was used and had her worst nature drawn out of her intentionally by a manipulative monster.

What is your character afraid of? How does avoiding or preventing these fears influence their actions and decisions?
Tara is afraid of being “seen for what she is” and then subsequently rejected by anyone who she might care about. She’s used to being treated like dirt, so being treated kindly is something she can only reason as being due to her tricking everyone into thinking she deserves it. This insecurity was encouraged at length by Slade, who nurtured a moral inferiority complex in Tara aimed at the titans and her brother. She’s less dedicated to putting on a false front than she was while working with the Titans, so instead she focuses on keeping her walls up so any inevitable rejection doesn’t sting as much.

What goals does your character have right now? What do they want, and how do they go about getting it?
Tara doesn’t have much in the way of concrete goals at the moment, beyond day-to-day survival. She’s very much still trying to find her place in a world that doesn’t really need her anymore. What she wants, however, is to be loved, and her ways of getting it are mainly to pretend she doesn’t want it until it’s outright kept from her, in which case she snaps and becomes a whirlwind of violence and rage.

Gameplay —

Areas of Interest / Brainstorming: To start with, she has little to no interest in going back home. She’ll miss her brother, but the self hating part of her will honestly believe he’s far better off without her to muck up his life.

As for what she wants to do here, there’s two major roads she can go down. One is to keep traveling down the way that she’s been going as a mercenary that largely minds her own business, probably staying independent and being something of a wildcard in going between hero and villain depending on the job.

And the second is for her to rise above her status as a sidekick, either as a full hero or a full villain. This one is what I’m more interested in pursuing, at least down the road, I’d like for her to carve out an identity for herself without being influenced by either Slade or Brion.
Samples:
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