InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Queer as Tweak."

Tandy / DAGGER → shone up bright like a knife (glinting) wrote,
@ 2012-01-01 04:58:00

-- info.

for

operators!

light grenades that burst and blind them with the truth
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth

vital statistics
Source: Marvel AU.
Name: Andrea "Tandy" Grace Bowen.
Age: 24 (July 30, 1987).
Gender: Female.
Race/Nationality: Caucasian mutant from the good ol' US of A.
Occupation: Vigilante.

appearance
Height: 5'6".
Weight: 125 lbs.
Hair: Long, blonde, and gorgeous. Even has a natural wave to it. It's one of her few major vanities.
Eyes: Slate grey.
Identifying Marks: Four stars (one large, two smaller, one tiny) tattooed in white ink on the inside of her left hip. They're low enough that jeans usually cover them, and the white ink makes them almost invisible unless under ultraviolet light. Also has a number of faint scars (both large and small) from cuts and gashes sustained while fighting crime, none of which were disfiguring.
Wardrobe: Hipster chic meets Fifth Avenue price tags. Though her tank tops and torn acid-wash skinny jeans may look cheap, they rarely are, and the leather jackets and ankle boots she pairs them with have obviously cost a pretty penny. She likes designer sunglasses and chunky jewellery, big hats and tunic dresses.

vigilantism
Codename: Dagger.
Identity: Though the duo "Cloak & Dagger" are known to the public, their civilian identities remain secret for obvious reasons. Neither one of them intends to get caught.
Allegiance: The "good guys". But unlike some other vigilantes, they haven't formed any kind of larger group; Cloak & Dagger's allegiance is always first and foremost to each other.
Reputation: Loners. They like to work as a pair and don't always play well with others. Though they've lent a hand to several other vigilante groups, they've always turned down any offers of joining up permanently, and they reject political affiliations outright.
Gear: When kicking butt across the city as "Dagger", Tandy wears a distinctive all-white jumpsuit made from a surprisingly lightweight and breathable cotton/kevlar fiber weave. Though the full-length sleeves and pant legs provide great overall coverage, a very open neckline also leaves little to the imagination. (She had it commissioned from Stark Industries under a pseudonym when she was just eighteen, and her relative immaturity at the time is evident in the, ahem, design.)

skills & abilities
Photogenesis: Tandy's body is able to generate electromagnetic energy, which escapes as photons, the basic particle unit of light. The light she generates is full-spectrum, meaning some of it's on visible wavelengths while some of it isn't, and her control isn't good enough to select only a single type of light. This is unfortunate because being able to produce only one particular colour of light -- like red light, for instance, which can illuminate without forcing eyes to adjust to it and thus won't destroy your night vision -- would be really handy. Still, it means she can cause her entire body to glow bright enough that it hurts average human eyes to look at her, and definitely bright enough to screw up their vision when they look away. It also means she can focus these photon particles into concentrated projectiles, which she calls her "daggers" or "light knives" because of the shape they take. Their effect, if you get hit by one, is mostly concussive (physical force and pain) with a side helping of electromagnetic energy shock (disrupts the nervous system). Multiple hits can cause skin burns, hallucinations, muscle spasms, and even full-on seizures, rather like being hit by a taser.
Photokinesis: Tandy can also control light -- not just the light she herself creates, but any light within a 50-foot radius -- by changing its brightness, refracting it, or (in the case of her projectiles) moving it around. This means that she can not only cause artificial lights to amp up and flare, but she can direct her light knives even after she's thrown them, changing their trajectories in mid-air. So long as she can still see you, she can make her daggers follow you even through twists and turns.
Adaptive Phototransduction: The photoreceptors in Tandy's eyes are unique, in that they can be stimulated several hundred times further than those of most people, giving her an exceptional tolerance for bright lights. Her membranes are also more reactive and can depolarize almost instantly, meaning her vision adapts back from bright-light exposure fast enough not to be hampered with blinded vision once the light stops. In short: Turning into a human light bulb might screw you up, but she'll be fine.
Skills: Eight years of dance training. Five years of gymnastics. Five years of Jeet Kun Do. Decent driver. Moderately capable cook.
Weaknesses: If her daggers can't hurt you, she's screwed -- anything that can take a fistful of light knives and not care is hardly going to be taken down by a skinny white girl, even if she did take a few years of martial arts classes. At that point, the best she can hope for is to dodge or parry incoming attacks while she runs her butt off. Also, her superseding loyalty to Cloak can be a real liability when they do join up with other teams, since she won't think twice about breaking rank and dropping the rest of the fight to go to him if he gets taken down. (They might even leave.)

personality
In-Depth: Before her kidnapping, Tandy was the epitome of the bored rich party girl. She was clever, confident, wily, entitled, and wary in the way of all young people who believe they've got the world all figured out. She was an extrovert, always flitting from one group of friends to another, and the type of girl who could feel at home as the center of attention.

Tandy today is a different person, but she borrows liberally from the one she used to be.

To most everyone, she comes across strong and confident, not intimidated by anyone or anything. She never clams up around vigilantes ten times more famous than she is, nor flinches in the face of a truly evil criminal. She gives everyone the impression that it's all one level playing field and she could roll with anything. She's got a comment for every situation and throws humour around at every opportunity. She jokes, she quips, she throws around pride and attitude and doesn't mind a little good ol' roughousing. She likes challenges, pretends she's got an image to uphold, and is not afraid of playing the coy innocent to get a rise out of you.

In short: Girl's got sass and she wants you to know it.

This shows in the way she fights, too. Dagger can be just as headstrong as Cloak, if not moreso. Though she's a hell of a lot more cautious than she used to be -- six years of getting pummeled will teach you to look before you leap -- she still has no problem running in first and figuring it out on the fly, letting the chips fall where they may. It's one of the reasons why the pair work so well together and less well with other people -- they know each other well enough to go in without a plan and make it work, operating like two halves of the same whole without having to communicate much, which leaves any third parties in the lurch.

But underneath all of that, she's really a lot quieter and more serious now than anybody except Ty has cause to know. What happened to her made her feel severed from her past life, and she can never really go back to being that naive, self-centered girl who agonized over which Jimmy Choos to wear and cleaned up her mother's bottles of gin. That comforting illusory wall between normal people in their nice happy lives and the truly awful things that happen just outside of view got ripped away for her. She's older emotionally as well as physically, more wary and with less tolerance for other people's bullshit. It's just not something she feels she has room for anymore.

This is probably one reason why she can be so matter-of-fact about the negative stuff, whenever it does come up. (And you can bet that it doesn't come up often, not if she can help it. But more on that in a minute.) Tandy spends more time now dealing with things that are ugly than with things that are pretty, and she tries to call a spade a spade. She'd rather not dole out lies and platitudes, but she also doesn't like hurting people, and often her desire to keep innocent people away from the things that would change them butts heads with her personal perspective on the world, and she winds up biting her tongue rather than having to choose.

At the heart of her, Tandy is both fiercely stubborn and fiercely loyal. Once she makes up her mind about something, it's hard to get her to change it, even once you've shown her that she's wrong. (And she always, always hates to admit it.) She's pathologically independent, to the point where she dislikes being offered help even by the few people she actually considers her friends, which is another one of the unfortunate changes that trauma brings to a person. Ultimately, there are only two people Tandy really believes she can rely on: Herself, and Ty. Where she will keep out anyone else, she has no secrets from him, and the codependent nature of their relationship means his wellbeing is often her first concern, even above her own. Even though it's usually her making the decisions, she'd go anywhere he wanted to, do anything he needed, and give up anything that was required of her.

Likes: Coffee Crunch bars. Smarties. Sushi. Hunan Beef. Still has a thing for fashionable clothes, when she can get them (for which Ty laughs at her). Really long, hot showers. Sex. Playing foosball and rolling around on the couch. Cooking, even if she makes a mess and it doesn't turn out. Watching Ty soak up brainy TV channels like a sponge. Fireworks. Hanging out on top of buildings where she can watch the city.
Dislikes: Cleaning up after herself. Being stuck under heavy covers (unless it's the middle of winter and she'll freeze otherwise). Any shelled seafood (too much like eating sea bugs). Being lectured. Being interrupted or talked over. Drugs, obviously, and the people who push them. Paparazzi and nosy press. Heels.
Habits: Always likes to have her hair up and out of the way. Taps things against her teeth when she's thinking. Sleeps with the windows open, even in winter. Sits alone in the dark when she needs to think.
Hobbies: Not many. Apart from an on-again off-again interest in keeping up with fashion mags, and their joint tradition of doing their own fireworks on holidays, Tandy has an unhealthy lack of normal hobbies. Her job -- if you can call it a job, considering it's technically illegal and she doesn't get paid -- is her life.
Phobias: Claustrophobia, for one. Tandy hates being in enclosed spaces, especially with other people, because it reminds her too much of being trapped in a shipping container again. She avoids elevators whenever possible, for instance. Needles, for another. It would take a major act of willpower to sit there and let you shove a needle in her arm, and you'd better have a damn good reason. Obviously losing Ty is at the top of the list, too, though that hardly needs explanation.

history
• Daughter of Phillip Carlisle, a film producer, and his fashion model wife, Audrey Bowen. Audrey had never intended to give up her career, but between changes in the industry, her advancing age, the baby, Phillip's schedule, etc, etc, she wound up pushed out of it and was prevented from returning, which she resented deeply.
• Tandy's earliest memories are of her parents' divorce -- her father's absence, her mother crying, both of them yelling, lawyers. A court appearance where her shoes were too tight and her nanny kept telling her to sit still.
• Audrey was always busy with parties and social events, trying to make up for her ended career. Tandy remembers a lot of boyfriends -- men with fancy suits who liked to ruffle her hair or touch her chin and always smelled of too much cologne. Tandy was mostly ignored -- she was enrolled in dance classes early just to give her something to do -- and her father had moved too far away for casual visits. Tandy began to throw tantrums to get attention, but they never worked -- the only person who was there to pay attention was her nanny, and so eventually she gave up.
• Was sent away to an all-girls private boarding school just outside the city when she was seven, which was like being dropped into an isolated fish pond. Found a lot of creative ways to take out her frustrations with the world -- her bullying, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, put her on top of the social heap in short order. Was pretty vicious for a few years.
• Audrey remarried when Tandy was eleven, but Tandy wasn't even driven in to attend. They honeymooned in Vienna. Her mother sent photos. The marriage lasted a year and a half.
• By the time Tandy hit high school, she'd mellowed out significantly -- a lot of her anger had been channeled into more constructive pursuits, like dance (and, later, gymnastics), and she'd figured out that the petty dramas of her family life were just a drop in the bucket compared to everything else out there for her. She became more centered and seriously independent. She showed up at home with her suitcases that July to inform her mom that she'd decided to attend school in the city. Found Audrey a changed woman, and not for the better. Audrey was miserable all the time, after flitting from failed relationship to failed relationship, and drank too much.
• At Nightingale-Bamford, Tandy was just one more outgoing kid with too much money, not enough supervision, and the usual wild streak found in most teenagers. Apart from her regular gymnastics classes (which she'd switched to the year of her mother's remarriage out of a desire for a change), Tandy and her friends were active in the New York fashion and music scenes, attending shows in Brooklyn as often as they went to study groups and garden parties in Manhattan. Eventually her mom upgraded from mimosas in the morning and martinis throughout the day to vicodins and lie-downs. Tandy, tired of coming back to find her mother passed out on the couch or, worse, to get yelled at and questioned about all the things Audrey had been too out of it to pay attention to, avoided home as much as possible.
• The summer of Tandy's sixteenth birthday changed her life. After several major blow-out fights with her mother, Tandy packed up some things and left. She crashed at the house of a good friend who was away on family vacation and had the whole place to herself, which went from fun to lonely within a week.
• Went out party-hopping alone one Friday night. By 4am, she'd wound up in the Bronx at the house of a stranger, brought there by people she'd met ealier that evening, and she was too drunk to care. She couldn't remember passing out, but she woke up on a boat, crammed into in a shipping container with a bunch of other people.
• To this day, Tandy doesn't know how long she was down there, whether it was days or weeks. But she remembers the rest. She was a human guinea pig, unwashed and underfed, being shoved around by petty thugs while they forcibly injected her with something that made the whole world turn inside-out.
• She and some of the others banded together, connected, traded names and kept watch over each other through the trips. It didn't always keep them from dying. The less said about the experience, the better, but the trauma caused Tandy's latent mutant powers to manifest during her worst and final drug trip. She exploded into a blaze of light and brought their captors running. In the commotion, Ty, one of the other "guinea pigs", grabbed her and shielded her with his body. Something weird happened and they both came to in an alley in the Bronx.
• After their escape, the pair clung to each other through the detox, through trying to find food and a place to sleep, through figuring out what had happened. They both had powers now, brought out by the experience. Ty wanted to go back and destroy the entire boat, but Tandy wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Eventually it became clear that he was going to go with or without her and, knowing she couldn't let him go back alone, she came too.
• They tracked down the boat less than a week later when it came back in to port to pick up more human cargo. Up until they started fighting, Tandy had been terrified. But once it came down to her or the other guy, with one of the same thugs who'd shoved her around and pawed at her standing right there in front of her with a gun, her switch flipped from victim to revenge. They took down the boat.
• After that was a period of aimlessness and angry vigilantism. Ty had a blind rage that needed to hit things, and Tandy found that joining him made her feel better -- less violated, less victimized. But her anger wasn't as blind, and if it weren't for her insistence, Ty might have just kept going through the days and the night without eating or sleeping. But she needed those things, so he made them happen. They slept in the basements and boiler rooms of commercial buildings, where people never went at night, and did not think twice about stealing for food. Ty would have broken his hands hitting anyone who gave him an excuse to do so, but Tandy cared more about making the real assholes pay.
• Once she felt ready, Tandy went home again. It was hell -- crying and screaming and yelling. She'd been missing for two months, and no one had had any idea what had happened to her. She said only that she had needed time to cool off, so she'd gone to stay with old friends in another city. More crying, more screaming, more anger and incredulity from Audrey. Tandy left, but at least now she had clothes and access to her bank accounts again, which meant they could at least get off the streets and into a motel.
• Over the next year, Ty and Tandy put their lives back to together, in as much as they were able. Tandy moved them out of the motel and into a small apartment paid for by her mother. They continued their vigilantism, though eventually they got organized and began tracking down the people responsible for what had happened to them beyond just the thugs on the boat.
• Turns out the drug they'd been injected with was a synthetic heroin called D-Lite, manufactured and distributed by their local Maggia syndicate, and that they had been part of the experimentation and refining process. Most of the people who'd been kidnapped had been homeless, like Ty, the kind of people nobody would notice had gone missing; grabbing Tandy, the daughter of celebrities, had been a mistake.
• By the time D-Lite hit the streets, the media's love-hate craze with mutant vigilantes was in full swing and the pair were dubbed "Cloak and Dagger", monikers which they opted to keep. Tandy started taking martial arts classes, and as they got better and better at kicking ass, more and more Maggia were found tied up in their homes or warehouses, surrounded by drugs, firearms, and further evidence. It's also common knowledge that they like to keep an eye on the ghettos around the city (Queensbridge, South Bronx, BedStuy, the Lower East Side projects, etc) and have a major problem with anyone who hassles kids.
• In the five and a half years since, Cloak and Dagger have succeeded in doing serious damage to New York's illegal drug trade, and have made a name for themselves as openly mutant vigilantes. They've put the fear of God into the East Coast Maggia, and have climbed the chain of New York City's criminal power all the way up to the man who calls himself the Kingpin. They've helped Spider-Man on several occasions, saved the collective butts of Charles Xavier's old crew (and were even offered membership, which they declined) not just once but twice, teamed up with Power Pack, and even played back up for a few members of the Avengers. But despite having lent a hand against some truly devastating superhuman criminals, their main target has always been (and will continue to be) everyday human-on-human crime, which is more than bad enough.
• They have recently been targeted by H.A.M.M.E.R., the US government's special taskforce for handling "mutant violence", including the location and capture of superhuman vigilantes. Unbeknownst to Cloak & Dagger, their latest tip on a super-criminal planning to blow up a chemical plant as an act of domestic terrorism was actually a trap orchestrated by H.A.M.M.E.R., with the arrest of a number of major local vigilantes as its goal. Before they could arrive in time to stop the "crime", however, Tandy was copied and woke up in the Introduction Room. She has no idea what the outcome of the trap was, or even that it was one.

relationships
Family:
→ Audrey Bowen-Marino (mother, age 53), former elite model.
→ Phillip Carlisle (father, age 57), film producer.
→ David Marino (current step-father, age 57), real estate mogul.
Friends:
→ The vigilante known as "Spider Man".
→ The teenage vigilante group known as "Power Pack".
→ The incredibly famous "X-Men".
→ The less famous locally but more internationally renowned "justice enforcers" known as "The Avengers".
Enemies:
→ The Maggia, an international mafia-like crime syndicate.
→ D'Spayre, a superhuman criminal who made a pet project out of terrorizing inexperienced vigilantes, including Cloak & Dagger themselves.
Past Romances: She had her share of boyfriends before the kidnapping, but it was just teenage malarkey -- in her old social circle, boyfriends were like fashion accessories. She isn't in contact with any of them now.
Sexuality: Heterosexual. (1 on the Kinsey Scale.) She made out with other girls a few times while drunk at parties, but only because she was expected to.
Marital Status: In a relationship with Tyrone Johnson (CLOAK).

ooc
PB: Blake Lively. (01, 02.)
Player: Chelle!
Timezone: EST.
Contact: terpsichory (CDJ) & the chellenator (AIM).
Samples: All samples or Tandy-specific samples!