Taranis "Tara" Behzad

Name: Taranis “Tara” Behzad

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Grade: 12

School: Cochise High School

Hobbies and Interests: Running, reading, writing, theater makeup, film, war and disaster accounts such as SotF

Appearance: Tara stands at 5 feet 5 inches and was 101.9 lbs at her last weigh-in. She is thin and wiry, with high cheekbones and neck-length black hair which is typically glossy thanks to careful conditioning. Her bangs are cut just above her browline. Her brown eyes are a little too big for her heart-shaped face, especially in comparison to her small, pointed nose. Her eyebrows grow quickly but she tends to keep them meticulously thin. Her jawline tapers down to a pointed chin. Her hips are narrow and her breasts are small. Her teeth are slightly crooked from inadequate dental care, since she has seen a dentist on average about once every two years throughout her life, but she keeps them very clean after a nasty cavity when she was six. Her lips are dark and full.

She favors long tight jeans to emphasize her muscular legs when it's cooler and breathable long skirts in bright colors when it's warmer. She consistently wears long-sleeved tops, particularly loose blouses in darker colors, because they're breathable and tend to conceal what few scars she has on her arms, the most prominent of which is a scar on the inside of her right wrist, just beneath her thumb. She generally wears sneakers and tends to use only a cursory amount of makeup unless it's a special occasion, usually sticking to foundation and eyeliner unless there's something she wants to emphasize or conceal. When wearing more revealing clothes, she does not try to hide the large scar on her right elbow, which is the result of a broken arm when she was 11.

There is a small scar on her forehead from a swingset accident when she was three years old, which is usually concealed by her bangs. Both her lobes are pierced, and she had the cartilage on her right ear pierced in two places as a present to herself on her 18th birthday. She favors simple studs for her lobes and a more ornate arrow-piercing for her cartilage. As an additional birthday present to herself, she got the words Nil opus est uotis iam fatum accersite ferro in manibus uestris quantus sit Caesar, habetis tattooed in script on her right shoulder blade over the following month. She has a benign mole the size of a dime on her left hip.

Biography: Tara is the product of the impulsive elopement of her parents, Alaine Cornelison and Kamal Behzad. Kamal, a first-year grad student and third-generation Arab-American, met Alaine, a college senior and Kingman native whose Irish ancestors had moved to New York in the middle of the 19th century, while Kamal was doing his Masters coursework in History at Arizona State University, teaching his professor's Pre-Christian European Religions course, in which Alaine was enrolled. She asked him out after handing in an essay on the syncretization of Jupiter with the Celtic God Taranis. They eloped two months later, and Alaine was pregnant two months after that. A mistake in the ultrasound convinced her parents that she was going to be a boy, who they gave the name Taranis. When she turned out to be a girl, they kept the name in honor of their first date, but called her Tara.

But whirlwind romance didn't long keep her parents happy. Kamal completed his Master's Coursework but could not afford to continue his studies with a child to take care of, and ended up getting a job as a history teacher at a private school in Phoenix while Alaine stayed home to take care of Tara.

Alaine had developed anorexia in high school as a result of body image issues largely stemming from her own mother's emotional abuse. She had overcome these issues thanks in part to the counseling services at her college, but left alone at home and unable to lose some of her pregnancy weight, her eating disorder made a resurgence. Prone to drinking already, she turned to alcohol more and more as a coping mechanism for her issues.

Kamal was by nature emotionally aloof, and instead of engaging his wife's problems he retreated more and more to his work. The only time they would touch on her issues was during explosive fights where Kamal would blame Alaine and Tara for keeping him from the academic life he'd wanted. Kamal eventually had an affair with a secretary at his school, and Alaine found out a few months afterwards. They divorced when Tara was 5, with Kamal giving up custody in part because the evidence of adultery gave Alaine's case more weight and in part so he could pursue his PHD and get his life back on track. He later married the secretary with whom he'd had the affair.

Trapped at home with an alcoholic mother, Tara learned destructive ways of coping and feeling in control. Her most prominent self-destructive habit became pulling out hair in moments of stress or anxiety. Her teacher noticed her doing this when Tara was 7 and suggested counseling, which her mother insisted she didn't need. She started to stringently punish Tara for her lack of self-control, withholding meals at home if she caught Tara pulling at her hair.

So Tara drew as little attention as possible to herself so as to avoid any further punishment. She made sure to get her homework done and tried not to get in any trouble at school. Her mother had difficulty holding down a steady job, instead working part-time and living off child-support and alimony from Kamal. She disdained any form of welfare as a sign of weakness, so Tara did not invite what few friends she had in Phoenix over to their impoverished house.

Tara learned to read around the time of her parents' divorce. Reading provided her a consistent escape from her circumstances and allowed her to be entertained without drawing more attention to herself. She turned into a voracious reader, consistently reading above her grade level throughout her life. At home, she would often sit in her room and read quietly, not wanting to draw her mother's ire. As a younger woman she favored fantasy and sci-fi, books that provided her a broad escape from her own circumstance. But even from a young age she couldn't stand any material that refused to grapple with heavy subject matter. The first novel she ever completed was an abridged version of Moby Dick at the age of 6, and some of her favorite works were the His Dark Materials trilogy when she was nine and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant when she was thirteen.

However, in recent years her interests have pivoted to non-fiction, particularly disaster and war stories. Her advanced reading habits did get her recommended for gifted programs when she was younger, but she was still paranoid about any extra attention and didn't want to participate, and for once her mother's negative opinion worked in her favor; she didn't believe her daughter was gifted and acceded to her wish not to get tested. When they later moved to Pahrump, Tara had gotten better at not drawing attention to herself, and was able to avoid any further recommendations for the Gifted program.

When Tara was 9, however, Alaine finally sought some sort of help at the behest of a friend and began attending AA meetings. It was there she met Barney Collins, a software engineer with a history of depression who'd turned to alcohol as his own coping mechanism. They married when Tara was 10, and a little after Tara's 11th birthday they moved away from Phoenix when Barney got a job at a small software developer in Pahrump, NV.

Barney acted as a stabilizing influence for Alaine and gave Tara some much-needed emotional support. Barney had always been a shy but empathetic man who tended to avoid confrontation. He was gentle and patient with Tara, and helped her to come out of her defensive shell.

However, both Barney and Alaine stopped going to AA meetings shortly after moving to Pahrump. Just after Tara had gotten her cast removed shortly before her 12th birthday, Alaine fell off the wagon once again, and Barney soon followed, though he was able to retain his job and drank only after work. His drinking, however, made him a much less supportive influence in Tara's life, and he tended to not get involved when Alaine started acting emotionally abusive towards Tara, particularly as his depression made a resurgence and he failed to seek treatment for it.

Alaine never hit her daughter, but was constantly berating her for her appearance, her grades, and her projected lack of self-control. As Tara got older, Alaine's comments got more vicious, highlighting her physical flaws and raking her over the coals for every mistake. It was after one particularly vicious fight shortly before Tara's 13th birthday that Tara first cut herself with scissors, but she remembered her punishment when she was 7, and took great pains not to be noticed. She started with the hollow of her right wrist just beneath her thumb, since it was a hard place for anyone else to see clearly. It was as a result of these first cuts that she started using make-up. Her first attempts were clumsy, but over time she became adept enough with foundation and concealer to hide the worst of the cuts. She learned the basics of applying make-up from Alain in what would prove to be one of the few fond experiences with her mother, and quietly experimented with different ways of obscuring her cuts over the course of her life. She switched to her upper thighs when she started participating in athletics, since this area was much easier for her to conceal beneath her shorts, and tended to delay in the showers and changing rooms to make sure she wasn't noticed, always finding a locker near a wall she could face. Her early efforts in cutting would leave her with a scar below her thumb, which she would pass off as part of the same break that left a scar on her elbow when anyone asked.

Tara threw herself into school activities so as to stay away from home as much as possible, taking track and cross country as soon as they were available. She excelled in particular at the 400m dash, since it demanded the most from her in terms of both endurance and speed, and placed fairly high at State during her junior year at Cochise. She prefers cross country, however, since it demands the most from her in terms of endurance, and tries to run in the 5000m whenever possible.

It was when Tara first started running that she began to develop anorexia, forcing herself to run farther and farther on fewer calories, pushing herself to extremes so as to feel more in control of her circumstances. Tara's anorexia has very little to do with her body-image and a lot to do with ideas of self-control and discipline. It developed gradually, in part as a response to her always-chaotic home life and in part due to her mother's constant attacks. It gives her sense of control and of equilibrium, and serves as one more way to distinguish herself from her mother's legacy of failure.

She spends as many weekends as possible sleeping over with friends so as to avoid her troublesome home life. Her athletic activities gave her reason to keep her grades up; she has consistently hovered around a B average, with some dips due to troubles at home or peaks in specific subjects such as English and reading comprehension.

She convinced Barney to let her adopt a cat as her 13th birthday present. The cat in question, Bast, lives with her still, along with two of its kittens, Jaspers and Scamp. She doted heavily on all of them, buying them toys and saving her allowance to make sure they had food when either of her parents dropped the ball, and using them for comfort as her home situation deteriorated once again. The cats also proved convenient because they allowed her to have a valid excuse for her cuts and scratches. She has repeatedly used cat scratches as an excuse the few times the cuts on her thighs have been noticed.

It was shortly after her 13th birthday that she met Raynor Laroque, an aspiring filmmaker who lived a little more than a mile from her on the outskirts of Pahrump. Raynor was the child of a widower who worked long hours as a licensed pyrotechnican for a company which made its money through a series of contracts with Nevada theaters in general and Las Vegas in particular, supplying these shows with the pyrotechnics they used. Raynor's father had been promoted to a managerial role but he still helped to design some of the more-specialized explosives, and maintained a small workshop at his house thanks to a license obtained through the ATF. His father sometimes allowed Raynor to use this workshop under his supervision.

Raynor was fond of movies with big stunts and tended to be a little wild, always trying to find ways to create interesting scenes on the shoestring budget for his home movies. His risky ambitions fascinated Tara, and they began spending more and more time together.

Raynor introduced her to many of his passions, first and foremost of which was his obsession with making movies. Having already taken an interest in make-up, in part to help her cover the cut on her wrist, Tara developed a fascination with make-up for film and for the stage. She learned the basics from online tutorials and then refined her skills by experimenting on the various friends Raynor roped into helping with his projects. She specialized in designing monsters and gore for Raynor's movies. She tends to prefer especially dramatic make-up--wounds, transformations, mutations, fantastic shapes. While doing her research, she fell in love with some of the work of Michael Westmore, most prominently known for his work on the Star Trek franchise.

She became involved with Raynor's home video projects principally doing make-up, but soon learned how to help with the stunts as well, learning how he built the pyrotechnics he used on his father's few acres outside of town. These stunts were of dubious legality, but the house was remote enough that the police were never called, and his father insisted that he clear any potential fire hazards away from his shooting sites first.

It was while helping Raynor with his movies that she discovered how much she liked writing. Raynor usually conceived of his movies around some big flashy stunt he wanted to try without much in the way of plot, so Tara gradually started writing for him, giving his actors lines and motivations, helping each project to come together as a cohesive whole that actually felt like a story from beginning to end. Raynor's eclectic taste and stunt-focused directing interests meant that her first encounter with trying to write for multiple genres was in many ways a baptism by fire, trying to figure out narrative reasons for pirate swordfights, space explosions, and duels between fantasy characters using roman candles as wands. Tara did not learn by writing traditional screenplays, instead hastily figuring out rough scripts for each ridiculous scene by first writing the scene up as a short story so she could better understand all the motivations and factors in play and then figuring out what dialogue absolutely needed to be in each scene. As such, she remains principally a short story writer, though she has gotten more familiar with script-writing as she's aged.

Raynor was also the one who introduced her to wrestling, teaching her what he knew and what he learned on their school's team. Tara came to enjoy the contest and eventually knew enough to beat Raynor 6 times out of 10.

Tara got her first job as an off-the books hostess at a Chinese restaurant a few months after her 14th birthday. She saved carefully and worked hard, throwing herself into every task so as not to give her employers any reason to complain or let her go, forcing herself to as much of an extreme at work as she did in running.

It was shortly after she got this job that she started dating Raynor, first in secret and then more openly. It was a difficult relationship to manage, as she was always leery of him suddenly turning as her mother so often had before, but Raynor was patient and very in love, and she came to trust him more than she had trusted anyone else in her life.

Between her athletic commitments, her job, Raynor's various projects, plays, and school, Tara had to spend very little time at her home, and on the worst nights she would sneak out of her house and walk to Raynor's, usually without his father's knowledge thanks to Raynor's bedroom being located in the garage a little ways from the main house.

It was during one such stay that she woke up to find Raynor watching some of the footage from SotF available online. Raynor was ashamed of being discovered--he'd started watching the videos because he wanted to try and make a movie loosely based on these events, and then found himself hooked as he searched through these online communities for edited storylines. But Tara didn't judge him, and found herself intrigued as well. Tara hadn't heard much about SotF before, besides what was common knowledge after the release of the feeds, but she found herself fascinated by the nature of the videos. Yes, it could be brutal and violent and horrifying, but it forced young men and women from all walks of life into impossible extremes, and as a result the stories that played out between them were compelling in a way she'd never found before. She and Raynor watched much of the raw footage together, as well as some of the edited storylines available online.

These videos led Tara to a larger fascination with war and disaster stories, both in documentary and in novel form, exploring the way humans react under intense pressure, failing their friends or rising impossibly to the occasion. Tara is as cautious with this fascination as she is with all her habits, refraining from even bringing her war and disaster accounts to school in case it should lead someone to discover her fixation. Larger acceptance of stories such as Between a Rock and Hard Place and the related movie 127 Hours, as well as child-soldier memoirs such as A Long Way Gone, has given her some leeway in expressing her interests, but she still tends to hide them, torrenting the books online and reading them on her laptop. She is aware of how reprehensible some people find these materials, but finds these stories gripping--not because of their violence or shock value but because of what these intense circumstances demand from those caught in them and how they respond to these pressures. She takes both a voyeuristic and a cathartic pleasure in these stories, imagining herself caught in similar struggles and intrigued by how others react to these immense pressures. She has torrented many of the biographies and autobiographies of SotF winners and survivors, with particular attention paid to the V4 crowd.

Things at Tara's home took a turn for the worse as the years went on. Barney was struggling to shake off his alcoholism and was trying to get Alaine to do the same, sparking a persistent cycle of failed recoveries that strained their marriage further each time and frequently sent Barney tumbling back into depression. A few months before Tara's 17th birthday, Alaine's mother died, and the ensuing spiral of depression plunged Alaine off the wagon once again after four months sober. This proved too much for Barney, who finally left her without much fanfare.

Alaine and her mother had not spoken in close to a decade, but Alaine had been her sole heir, so she inherited her mother's house as well as her modest nest egg. Alaine decided to return to Kingman and brought Tara with her. This decision sparked an intense few days of fighting. Tara's only reason to stay in Pahrump was Raynor, since she blamed Barney for abandoning her once again, but Alaine threatened to have Tara committed if she stayed behind, and so at last Tara joined her mother and came to Kingman in the summer after her Sophomore year. Tara's relationship with Raynor ended a little while after that, largely because Tara couldn't handle the additional strain of a long-distance relationship on top of all the other changes going on in her life.

As Alaine stayed in the house she had hated as a child, drinking her days away as she ostensibly cleaned it out and saw to her mother's affairs, Tara flung herself into her activities once again, taking up a job at the local movie theater so she could spend more time away from home. The lack of any real friends in Kingman left her without safe place to run for the first few months, with only her cutting and her anorexia leaving her feeling in control. Her weight dropped to 96 lbs, which had a number of negative side effects; running left her feeling faint, and to her panic her period stopped for two months.

Once she'd adjusted to life in Kingman, things started to normalize once more. She made friends at work and at school, giving her places she felt safe and in control. She remains underweight, but not so dangerously as she was.

She helps with theater both locally and at Cochise, doing work as a stage tech and helping with the make-up. She has assisted with a few local video projects, helping with the makeup and using some of Raynor's knowledge to help them design stunts, but without access to Raynor's workshop she hasn't been able to keep using what she learned now that she's in Kingman. She does, however, help choreograph some fight scenes, using her time with Raynor largely as a series of counter-examples so no one runs the risk of getting hurt. She's only an amateur, however, and usually is better able to say what won't work rather than what will. She writes and reads a great deal and prefers realism in both pursuits, trying to understand the very real pressures that can shape people so differently, with particular interest paid to peoples' differing responses to identical circumstances. She likes exploring both how people can react in wildly different ways from the same set of original conditions and how people can come to behave similarly even with radically different backgrounds. She maintains her B-average so she can continue to compete in track and cross-country. She is a fairly competitive runner.

Tara started working part-time at a gas station a few blocks from her house when she was 17, lying about her age to a manager desperately looking for someone to work the 10-2 shift. She left her job at the theater immediately after getting the gas station job, since it fit more conveniently into her schedule. She works three nights a week so she can have time for all her activities, and often takes extra shifts so she can call in someone to cover her when she's busy. She and Raynor remain on fairly good terms and talk regularly. She still runs track and cross country and recently ran in her first marathon.

Tara is quiet but personable. She finds people fascinating, and will listen to them at great length, often using what they tell her for short stories or plays, though she rarely shares much about her own life and tries to deflect or avoid any personal questions. She is aware of the ways in which her life has been very different from others and finds such differences fascinating. Her attentiveness tends to be attractive to others due to its earnest totality, but since she fears vulnerability it is difficult for her to make lasting relationships, save for the few people who have the patience to overcome her hidden insecurities.

She is always attracted to extremes, both personally and in terms of who she speaks to and what she watches and reads. She likes stories and events that push boundaries, and seeks out extremes in athleticism, pain and pleasure. She craves novel experiences and novel sensations. She tends to date and befriend people who both intrigue her and who look out for her, giving her the novelty she craves as well as the safety, the control, and the comfort she's never really known at home. This tends to create an uneasy tension in the relationship, however, since it is so difficult for her romantic partners to find the right balance of safety and novelty to keep her invested.

Tara values self-reliance and self-control above almost all else, largely because of the ways in which the adults in her life have failed her. She is also generally distrustful of people, always wary of any new betrayal. Although she likes to learn about other people and often tries to spend the night away from home, she rarely confides in them about her own secrets and problems, and can become defensive and evasive when people try to probe her for more information. She takes any form of betrayal extremely personally, often ending friendships and relationships for broken promises as small as failing to show up when expected or lying to her about being busy. She has only ever told a few people that she cuts, and almost no one is completely in the know about her mother's drinking problem. She spends most of her weekends with her friends, and usually comes home only to sleep, feed her cats and keep her things in order. She buys most of her own clothes and pays for many of her amenities, determined not to give her mother any more control than she has to. In many ways, she reacts against her mother in all she does.

Tara's relationship with her mother is complicated, to say the least. She aims to be nothing like her and is uncomfortable with some of the similarities that have developed between them, especially the fact that they both put such value in self-reliance. She sees her mother as a hypocrite but always nurses a kernel of self-doubt, wondering if she follows the same track as her mother, a pathological fear of being seen as weak undercut by repeated failures of character and self-control. These doubts create a vicious short-circuit which forces her to push herself even harder. Their mutual failings and fear of attracting attention sometimes compel them to protect each others' privacy, lying about their more worrying behaviors. Alaine is almost always willing to sign anything for Tara, for fear of drawing more attention to them.

Tara prides herself on her ability to work hard and to control herself. Although she is sometimes uncomfortably aware of her flaws, her careful hiding of her nastier habits enables her to view herself as being in control of these compulsions. Her friendships are sometimes complicated by her instinctive wariness of being dependent on anyone, leading her to distance herself from her friends if she feels she's relying on them too much. In addition, Tara's insecurities compel her to call out anyone who violates her demanding personal standards, for fear of seeing herself as weak. The combination of these two qualities has made her a few enemies, both among people who were formerly friends of hers and acquaintances who have enraged her.

Tara is not close with Kamal. She has seen him only a handful of times since the divorce, in large part because Kamal blamed her and her mother for derailing his life and in part because Tara blamed him for abandoning her. Kamal wanted to return to the life he thought he was supposed to have, and didn't try to keep in contact with his daughter immediately after the divorce. After a cancer scare two years ago, however, Kamal has been reevaluating his life and trying to become close to his oldest daughter again. Tara is torn between her dislike for and anger at Kamal and the fact that she has two half-sisters through him and the secretary he married. She has met these sisters only twice.

Barney moved back into the house they'd shared in Pahrump once Alaine moved out and has offered to let Tara come stay with him and visit Pahrump, but Tara's feelings towards him are too mixed for her to take him up on it. She understands why Barney had to get away from her mother, but her issues with Kamal also complicate her feelings towards Barney, as she can't help but feel abandoned by him. She also blames him for his weakness, feeling like if he'd been willing to stand up to her mother she could have avoided the hardship of the last several years. She talks to Barney more frequently than to her father, however, and in the last year things have warmed considerably between them.

Her mother, frugal in everything except alcohol, has managed to live off a combination of her inheritance and the child-support payments Kamal was required to pay until Tara's 18th birthday. Tara is staying with her only long enough to finish school, and intends to move out the moment she has her diploma. She sticks around in part because she instinctively fears having too much attention drawn to her and in part because she feels her leaving would be a sign of weakness, a concession that she was incapable of rising to her mother's challenge. It would be the ultimate failure.

Her anorexia and cutting tend to be more immediate responses to harsh circumstances, typically involving her mother. For Tara, extremes act as a form of control and reassurance, letting her feel as though she is in charge of her own circumstances, equal to the most intense challenges, and capable of growing into someone stronger than her mother. She maintains a careful facade of normalcy and hides behind a wall of emotional distance which few people are ever allowed to see past.

Advantages: Tara is athletic, with high endurance and agility from various track and field events. She is emotionally cautious, wary of being vulnerable after frequent betrayal, and so will not be easily misled. She is also extremely diligent and has a high tolerance for pain. Disadvantages: Tara is compulsively insecure, and will reflexively act to restore her self-image of strength. Her status as chronically underweight mean that she will be easily exhausted. Her fear of vulnerability also means she has few friends she can truly count on, and has earned a few enemies due to the extremes her behavior can push her towards. She is a bundle of anxieties and neuroses that will only be aggravated by contact with the harsh demands of SotF.

Designated Number: Female student No. 012

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Designated Weapon: Flashbang grenades x3

Conclusion: Flashbang grenades can get you out of some dangerous situations. Use them wisely. Being fit will help, but make sure to eat and keep up your strength. Know that you're strong and live it. Don't let insecurity and fear get to you. - Boris Petrikov

'The above biography is as written by GrimWolf. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

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Collected Weapons: Flashbang grenades x3 (assigned weapon)

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