Tallis Cade
Race: Human
Birthday: Vortas 16, 2696
Age: 24
FC: Imogen Poots
Place of Origin: Vienda, Anaxas
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Innkeeper, underground teacher
Resistance Name: Quill
Player Name: Cayelle
Birthday: Vortas 16, 2696
Age: 24
FC: Imogen Poots
Place of Origin: Vienda, Anaxas
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Innkeeper, underground teacher
Resistance Name: Quill
Player Name: Cayelle
Physical Description
A so-called tow-head from temple to curls, Tallis keeps her flaxen locks tucked up under the crook of a broad-brimmed hat or the wrap of a scarf more often than not, leaving behind a pale complexion, a sharp nose, and a set of wide, Anaxi eyes. There was a time when easy smiles consumed the narrow planes of her angled face, when laughter filled her chest and the noisy halls of the Trod alike. That was before her father swung lifeless from the hangman’s noose, strung up and killed for one of the few crimes he never committed.
The months that followed have been notably quieter.
Thoroughly average in the physical sense of the word, Tallis stands nearer to 5’6” than 5’5.” At least, she would if she were to straighten her back from its natural proclivity for slouching. Slight of frame and lithe of limb, the mess of waves and curls that spills from whatever hat or scarf Tallis has chosen for the day is easily the most striking feature among an ensemble of otherwise unremarkable characteristics. The Trod has been good to the Cades, leaving Tallis with a wardrobe of four rough-spun dresses, a pair of personally tailored trousers, and a thoroughly worn leather overcoat. Of all her dresses—the winter grey, the loose brown, the verdant green, and the simple blue—it is the blue Tallis favors the most, evidenced by the little patches of darning and hemming the simple frock has weathered over the years.
More than a year now has passed since Angus Cade’s death and though his daughter still smiles, they are empty, hollow gestures. Muscles moving reflexively through familiar, expected motions, never quite reaching her eyes. On the rare occasion she is met with a joke or a jest, Tallis responds with a flat huff of air and another ready smile.
It has been over a year since she really, truly laughed.
Personality
Not long ago, Tallis Cade might have been likened to a summer breeze, a warm respite from the oppressive heat of the day. Quick to laugh and quicker to smile, hers was a simple, easy demeanor born of a good life with a sense of purpose. That warmth paled after her father’s death. It lingers still, frozen somewhere beneath the icy surface of her practiced smiles and sharpened tongue. Waiting—to be remembered or, perhaps, to be forgotten entirely.
A quiet mix of stubbornly opinionated and meticulously contemplative, Tallis is rarely the first to speak in any situation. Instead, she watches and she listens—for what is said, and for what is not, withholding her own thoughts until they have been chewed up and turned over within the gnawing interior of her own mind. Guided as much by empathy as she is by intuition, Tallis is not content until she has analyzed a situation—or a person—from every possible angle. When, at long last, she finally manages to arrive at a decision, it is held to with fiercely stubborn resolve. It would be an admirable quality were it not for the profound limitations of her own personal experience.
Like many a doting father, Angus Cade raised his daughter under the shadow of his own fears and misgivings, closing Tallis off from any version of the world that lay beyond the bricked walls of the bustling Trod. In all her twenty-three years of life, Tallis has never left the streets of Vienda. She has, instead, had to make do with her books and her strangers, with the depictions of the world recorded in pilfered tomes never meant for human eyes and with the stories told by travelers seated round the dying fires of the Trod late at night. Her perspective is, therefore, a varied one. But a limited one nonetheless.
Prior to the riots that left her father hanging lifeless in the street, Tallis maintained a far more forgiving opinion of the galdori than that of her father. Reading taught her to look for the individual, for the exceptions to the rules, and the nuances that separated a person—even a golly—from the whole that claimed them. Life taught her something else entirely.
Tallis receded into herself in the month’s following her father’s death. A child reeling from her first dark glimpse at the real world. There was, however, still the matter of the Trod and her own livelihood. She could not afford to reel for long. And so, Tallis emerged from her shell a harder version of herself. Stolen books lay stacked on a shelf, hidden in a backroom of her noisy inn, collecting dust. Only a handful remain on the little table in the center of the room. Primers she uses to teach those that seek her out how to read and to write.
In those few moments, hidden behind the kitchens, finger scanning one word after the next as she mouths the sounds of each letter in turn, Tallis returns to herself. To the girl that she was. Before.
Personality Type & Alignment: ISFJ (The Defender) | Neutral Good
Backstory
Willa Cade did not die in childbirth, though she might as well have. Gone with fever some hundred days after her daughter was born, it was the wet dark of winter that took Tallis’s mother, leaving behind a squalling blue-eyed babe in the burly arms of a devastated father. Angus Cade never forgave the world for his wife’s death. For the chill draft that wafted through their narrow flat. For the medicine he couldn’t afford that likely wouldn’t have saved her even if he could have. Angus blamed the whole of Vita—and the gollies running it—for his loss, right up until the day he died himself, feet swinging like a pendulum, ticking and tocking to the fading rhythm of a lifetime of anger and hate.
Tallis watched him hang.
She never put much stock in the Resistance before that day. Not really. Her father was a cadet, joined up less than a month after her mother died. Ten years later, Angus was running the Trod, moving parts and people and plans—whatever it was the Resistance told him to move—through its backdoors and cellar compartments. Built smack-dab in the middle of a fork in the road, the little inn gets its fair share of traffic, from travelers looking for a bed for the night to locals stopping in for a hot meal and a quick drink. (A creaking sign still swings over the door, emblazoned with the words “The Trodden Fork Inn.” Named by a golly, no doubt. It’s a mouthful to say, and most folks don’t know what the word trodden means, anyhow. So, to locals, plain old Trod works just fine on its own.) The place might not have been built with the Resistance in mind, but its nooks and crannies and revolving doors of changing faces serve the freedom fighters all the same.
Angus Cade found a new sense of purpose behind the oak bar of the Trod; there was security in the work the inn promised and surety in the jobs he did for the Resistance. A boisterous, bearded bark of a man with a barrel for a chest and a thunderclap for a laugh, Angus built a home for himself and for his daughter within the four walls of that stacked-brick inn. Wicks, gollies, and the like—Angus served them all, and served them well. And when a man came in looking for his ‘aunt,’ he was led to a backroom tucked away behind the kitchens, to where a wizened Aunt Nan (she came with the inn) sat waiting, an illegal primer ready in her hands.
It was a good life. Better than most, really. Aunt Nan taught Tallis to read between her shifts spent cleaning tables and changing bedsheets and when the old woman’s vision started to fade, it was Tallis who took over her clandestine lessons in the smokey backroom of the bustling Trod. A few years later, they buried Aunt Nan. Dead of old age, or possibly the smoke. Her name could have been Dolores for all Tallis knew, but Nan was the name she had chosen and Nan was the name they spoke over her grave as they laid her to rest.
The arguing between Angus and Tallis started not long after, when Tallis took a name for herself in the Resistance and Angus took more and more jobs outside the comfort and security of the Trod. Tallis looked for revolution in the pages of her books and the stirring minds of her eager students. Angus preferred to look elsewhere. His daughter might have forgotten the squalor and indignance of their life before the Trod, but he had not. It was through blood—not words—that their cause would be won. Tallis disagreed.
That is, she disagreed right up until the day her father died. Hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.
Now, his fight belongs to her.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Good
Good
Physical
Average
Average
Social
Good
Good
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
Two years ago, Tallis wanted to see the world. To visit the places described in the books she read and in the stories told by those who laid the heads to rest at the Trod. It is possible that desire still exists somewhere inside her, but Tallis’s ambitions have narrowed in the year following her father’s death.
Today, she works to keep the Trod afloat, to weather the storm that followed the revelation of Angus’s involvement in the Resistance. That, at least, is what she tells herself. What she would tell someone else, should they occasion to ask. The truth, however, is that Tallis craves justice for the death of her father. It is a longing that edges on the line of vengeance, a hot angry yearning that keeps her awake at night and leaves her restless throughout the day.
