World of Darkness: The Darkness of Space - Tejah Ebadi [DoS Characters]

[z-Tejah Ebadi]

Name: Tejah Ebadi

Personal Information:

Public Identity: Tejah Washington Spring Ebadi

Nicknames: Tey, Teej

Real Name: same

Occupation: Junior Engineer

Nature: Optimist

Demeanor: Architect

Concept: Deaf Engineer

Legal Status: Texla IX native, member of the United Human Alliance

Marital Status: Umarried

Known Relatives: Bastion Washington (father), Eliaha Samara Spring Ebadi (mother), Abraham Geremiah Spring Ebadi (brother), Bradan Bastian Spring Ebadi (son)

Physical Traits:

Weight: 155 lbs

Height: 5’ 9””

Apparent age: mid-twenties

Gender: Female

Ethnic Background: mixed

Eye Color: various

Hair Color: Pink

Handedness: Right

Age: 24

Appearance: The exact ethnic background of the base’s newest Junior Engineer is unknown and hard to identify at a glance. What is clear is that something has touched her beyond the normal. Her hair is naturally pink, and her eyes change color with her mood. Tall and skinny, Tejah as a classic exomorph body type – she can eat anything she wants without packing on fat, but she is unable to build muscle either. Common clothing styles are usually comfortable and easily cleaned; Tejah is fond of working on machines and that’s a little hard on clothing. She is almost always wearing custom-made goggles with a head's up display that take sounds and convert them into colors and words. Speakers and a textpad allow her to 'speak' though the same system. A friend of hers made them in college.

Powers, Skills, and Personality:

Known Powers: As a mortal, Tejah has no powers, but she does seem to have certain tricks. Her hearing is null and void, but her sight seems to be stronger than most. Her eyesight is very keen. She’s been tainted by some kind of magical flux but aside from changing her hair and eye color, it seems to have had no other affect.

Abilities/Special Skills: Tejah also has mental prowess: she can do math in her head that would make calculators balk. Her memory is nearly perfect and her IQ is prodigious. Tejah is a good engineer, having gained a Masters in Engineering from Numine University. She’s also received a Bachelors in Computer Science.

Personality: Life hasn’t always been kind to Tejah, but her mother raised her to be a optimist. This hopeful, cheerful attitude has sustained her through some very hard times. Tejah smiles quickly and easily. Her temper rises slowly and burns away as slowly; she wouldn’t say she holds grudges, but her eidetic memory makes it impossible to forget the reason she was angered – and the pain that accompanied it (also, she totally holds grudges). She hides sorrow and other negative emotions, a hold-over from a childhood where she gave her mother the face she wanted to see.

Other Notes: Take away her goggles and her confidence is removed as well; she depends on them to get around and do her job. While she knows Universal Sign Language, very few people know it in return as deafness is almost unheard of with medical science (and Tejah cannot afford the magical correction).

Bradan: Her son is about two years old at the time that they moved out to the base. His father is not in the picture at all. Anyone who does some research knows that there was a custody battle with the father's family, but it was resolved just before she was offered the job. She doesn't like to talk about it and there is the feeling that the father is somewhere but she doesn't want him to be part of her life at all.

[z-Tejah Ebadi]

Background:

Tejah was born on the Earth-like Texla IX. Her father was a structural engineer; her mother a botanist. She has an older half-brother from her mother’s marriage, Judia Ebadi, who was a member of the Texlan Senate at his death. Going up, Tejah heard many times how much Eliaha had loved her husband; little was said of Tejah’s father, Bastion, once he left their life. With a child’s clarity, Tejah understood that her brother was the son of the beloved of her mother’s heart and while she never felt unloved, she felt second to her brother.

This rift only widened as the girl’s hearing issues became apparent. Her mother wasn’t worried; medical science could repair the hereditary defect easily. They made their first attempt when she was four. Something went wrong with the simple procedure, doing more damage to the child’s inner ear. Her parents decided to forego any further attempts, waiting until she was older.

When she was six, her father and mother parted ways. They had never married nor planned to marry; they had never meant to have a child. Tejah had been an accident, and they had remained together far longer than was comfortable for either because of her. When they finally gave up, it was with a quiet relief. Tejah missed her father, but her homelife was far less tense now. He gave them the apartment and moved into a complex halfway across the planet. Tejah was able to see him, though it was clear he wasn’t sure what to do with a child he saw only a few days a year, much less a deaf one.

One more surgery was attempted when Teej was ten, but it couldn’t repair the damage. Instead, Tejah lived in a world where no one else had defects but her. The child attempted to be as normal as possible, but nothing could help that. None of the other kids knew sign language and while she could carry a small computer and type things out, it still set her apart. She felt alienated from everyone.

Texla IX was the home base for the system’s miner crews. There were always people going to and from the four asteroid belts that supplied ore. Machines were always coming and going too, and her father’s work put him in the heart of that field. As Tejah grew older, she became more and more interested in his work. It was through engineering that father and daughter bonded; even her deafness no longer stood between them. Their time together inspired her father to recreate an older technology: a program to turn typed words into spoken. Combined with a small computer and voice recognition software, Tejah had a voice.

When she finished secondary education, she went to Numine University on Texla V, studying engineering. Studies were harder for her than most students but she found people willing to look past her handicaps. For the first time, she found peers who were willing to become friends. One friend in particular, Jessie McCrawn, was her closest friend. The vampire was the first she’d ever met; he had been Embraced only a few years ago. He was at university to finish his education in computer science. It was Jessie who took her father’s work to the next level; he used the voice recognition to create a heads-up display. Housed in goggles, they not only turned the spoken words to text for her to read, they also changed sounds into bursts of color and directional indicators. This opened up a huge world for her; music was now available or she could ‘hear’ someone walking up behind her. The system was named AVIS – Audio to Visual Integrated System.

Already coming out of her shell, Tejah blossomed further. For the first time, she dared to date. Her first real relationship was with Cormic McLugh, a local who was a typical ‘bad boy’. He was a singer; his music made Teej’s AVIS swim with glorious colors. He was handsome in a rough-and-tumble way, and the young woman was head over heels. She gave him everything she had and asked for little in return. Things were great, until she realized that she was pregnant.

She told him; Cormic was nice enough about it, but uninterested in being a father or even a long-term partner. He offered to keep in touch, in case the kid wanted to know him. When Tejah threw a fit about being cast aside now that she was in trouble, he cut ties and disappeared from her life. She hunted for him but he’d just drifted on somewhere else. Resigned and depressed, the human went on a summer trip to a seed colony on Deffon, serving as their assistant engineer. The trip was designed to get her out of her place and give her some hands-on experience. At this early stage, her pregnancy hadn’t progressed so far as to keep her from working. Things were going well when disaster struck.

Today, no one is sure what happened. Some sort of surge passed over the planet, affecting all of the non-native life. The colonists were all mutated; some developed terrible diseases which killed them. Others were merely changed a little and were considered the lucky ones. Tejah’s hair and eye color changed and it seemed that this was the only mutation.

Something else significant was learned; one of her rescuers was a Silent Strider. During the course of the evacuation, he had to change into his war-form and noted that the young woman didn’t flee from him. She was kinfolk – and a kinfolk with child.

Thinking he was helping, the Silent Strider made inquiries and found out that Cormic was a Fianna. He contacted the werewolf through the spirits and brought him back into Tejah’s life. Now he offered to be around take her and the baby to his family, so that it could be “raised right”.

He’d left her broken-hearted when he’d thought that the baby was ‘just’ a kinfolk. Now the baby might be something more and he was interested. But he still wasn’t father-material; he wanted her to drop her life and submit to his family’s care. Tejah flatly refused and returned to school. She started her final year, only taking the next semester off to have the baby. She named the boy Bradan as a nod to his father’s culture but still refused to allow him to be taken by his father’s family.

A long custody battle ensued but Tejah left that to her lawyer. With her mother’s help, she finished her Bachelors and Masters. In the first round of legal fights, Tejah had been awarded custody. The ruling came down days before she was offered a job on the United Planets Base. The opening was for a Junior Engineer, the perfect career-starter. Balancing work and motherhood would be hard, but she was ready to try.

Inspirational Videos for the Character:

Cormic's Ballad to Tejah:

Tejah's Reply:

[z-Tejah Ebadi]

Experience

Profile - +5 / 5

5/16 - +1 / 6

5/23 - +2 (4 posts) / 8

5/30 - +1 / 9

May total: 4

6/6 - +1 / 10

6/13 - +2 (3 posts) / 12

6/20 - +1 / 13

6/27 - +2 (3 posts) / 15

June total: 6

7/4 - +2 (5 posts) / 17

7/11 - +1 / 18

7/18 - +1 / 19

7/25 - +3 (8 posts of sustenance) / 22

July Total: 7

8/1 - +3 (8 posts) / 25

8/8 - +3 (6 posts)/ 28

8/15 - +1 / 29

Kudos

Post # 275171 +1 / 1