Tierra Mackenzie Taylor

"Tia" is her nickname.

24

She/Her

Dancer/Choreographer

Necromancer (Mage)

October 19th

Jessica Brown Findlay

5 FT 5 IN

Slender & Soft; 120 LBS.

Blue

Dark Brown

Loose curls, about down to her shoulders

Her clothing style is eccentric. She does a majority of her shopping at thrift stores and charity shops, so while she's got plenty of modern styles and fashions her closet is also half-full of vintage clothes she's purchased and re-purposed into new outfits. She's got some skills with a sewing machine and coming up with new outfits out of old clothes is a favorite hobby of hers.

Tierra stands at 5'5" in her bare feet, with long, dark brown hair and soft blue eyes. She began taking dance classes at 9 years old, so her growth into a young woman was influenced by the dancing that would become her career. She has a slender body, almost all lean muscle and soft curves. Her dancing keeps her body in tip-top shape, but it also means some body part or muscle set is bruised and sore every day. Given the choice between constant painkillers and more natural medicine practices, Tierra picks the holistic methods every time.

Tierra is a bright young woman quick with a smile and always up for a chat. She leads a heavily structured and busy life, yet somehow can find the time to squeeze in everything she wants to get done in a day. She is driven and determined - despite all the hardships life has thrown at her she bounces back with ease and is more than ready to roll up her sleeves and get down to work.

As an added bonus, she is also friendly to ghosts! For the most part. There is such a thing as bad timing, but ghosts have no concept of time so that's not really their fault. Tierra is always willing to offer a ghost a listening ear and some help in crossing over, if she can provide it. She's also gotten very good at figuring out a ghost's Unfinished Business throughout the years. The ghost might have to schedule a time for a chat so she can pencil it in her planner, but give her a few good hours of conversation and she can set a ghost on the path to completing their Unfinished Business.

• Yoga


• Warm Sweaters


• Hot Chocolate


• Fall weather


• Cute shoes


• Cats


• Holistic Medicine

• Sticky heat


• Feeling sore/achy


• The smell of wet dirt


• Large, slobbering dogs


• Mental hospitals


• Hospitals in general


• Funeral homes and graveyards

In Control - Tierra is one of a few necromancers who have somewhat of an understanding and a control of her magic. She comes from a long line of necromancers, with each generation adding a little more to the understanding and control of their necromancy. She's at peace with what she is, even if it's annoying and heartbreaking at times, and strives to live as ordinary of an extraordinary life as she can.

Social Butterfly - Tierra is a total social butterfly. She is an extrovert, loves to talk with everyone and help people out. She will almost always say 'yes' to every party and social engagement she's invited to, provided she can get it all to fit in her schedule. You can count on Tierra to show up just about anywhere she's invited.

Distant - Tierra is one of those social butterflies who knows everyone, but when it comes down to it, no one knows anything about her. She is an incredibly private extrovert who knows how to reflect attention away from herself. This often leaves her with a lot of acquaintances and very few close friends.

Hardcore Multitasker - Tierra has a bad habit of trying to be superwoman. She's the type to own a planner with each day scheduled out down to the hour, her life a constant whirlwind of activity. She's doesn't do downtime unless it's productive downtime, and she often multitasks to the point where she exhausts herself. But she has to be pushed to the absolute breaking point until she can admit that she needs to slow down and take a break.

ATHLETIC | INQUISITIVE | HARD-WORKING

Father: Brian Taylor
Mother: Joan Taylor (née Fox)

Maternal Uncle: Oliver Fox

Older Sister: Emelina Hampton (née Taylor)
Brother-In-Law: Henry Hampton

Younger Sister: Serena Taylor

October 19th

Bear River, Montana

Tierra's complicated history starts long before her birth. She is one child in a long line of necromancers from Pennsylvania; her uncle traced their lineage back through to the marriage of Tierra's great-great-grandparents, though which one was the necromancer is impossible to say. Her grandfather was a necromancer while her grandmother was a knowing human, and from them came Oliver and Joan Fox, who were also born with the magic of necromancy.

Joan and Oliver were raised to tolerate, if not accept, their magic. It would be impossible to fully avoid the ghosts and the Spirit World and it was understood by the brother and sister that it was unwise to live their lives in total ignorance. They learned as much as they could from their father and their ancestor's notes. But while Oliver dedicated his life to the study of necromancy and how to improve himself and his magic, Joan longed for a taste of a normal life.

That was how she met Brian Taylor. He was a charismatic man, a hard-working blue collar factory worker who went straight to work after high school instead of going to college. They met at a party held by mutual friends and became fast friends... which quickly developed into something more. Brian was a human living an ordinary life and unaware of the supernatural, and Joan was drawn to that.

Oliver, for his part, took an instant dislike to Brian. He didn't like the man's attitude or his anger problems behind those good looks and smile, and Joan's relationship with him drove a wedge through her relationship with her brother. It only got worse when Brian proposed and Joan refused to tell him she was a necromancer, instead locking away that part of her life and locking out Oliver, as well. Partly due to their constant arguing and partly under Brian's influence, a year after the wedding Joan cut Oliver out of her life.

The three sisters arrived in short order the following year: Emelina, the oldest, fair and blonde like her father; two years later Tierra arrived, the middle child, dark haired and blue eyed like her mother; and two years after that finally came Serena, the youngest, the cute and chubby little girl with a head of gold curls.

From the moment each of them was born it was apparent to Joan that all three of her daughters had inherited the family's necromancy. Here, she struggled; she wanted to raise them as she had been raised, but was too frightened of Brian finding out or knowing that she and the children were magic. Their marriage was far from smooth sailing; Brian did have anger issues and also suspected that there was something 'wrong' with Joan, though he didn't know what. The fighting began shortly after Tierra's fourth birthday and never stopped.

A house full of four necromancers and a human drew ghosts to them all like moths to flame. For as long as she could remember Tierra saw them, stalking outside the house, bombarding them every time they went outside to play. Whenever Brian was at work, Joan could deal with them freely, teach the girls how to handle them and what to do if they were approached. But whenever Brian was home Joan was forced to pretend there was nothing wrong, even with three frightened little girls claiming to see dead people. Night after night there were arguments. Brian accused Joan of poisoning their daughters, of passing some sort of disease onto them, and even after she tried to tell him about the necromancy he only thought her insane.

After Tierra got sent home from kindergarten one day for insisting that her teacher's deceased father had something to say to her, the marriage fell into shambles. It was only because they didn't have much money that the two of them stayed together. The teachings stopped. Brian threatened to kick Joan from the house and have her committed if she so much as breathed a word about her insane ramblings on ghosts to their children. Wisely, Emelina refused to acknowledge her magic, ignored the ghosts, and even learned at a young age to dissipate them until they stopped coming around. And Serena, frightened of their father and adoring of her oldest sister, eventually followed suit.

Tierra was the only one of the three who insisted the ghosts were real. She had seen too many of them as suffering souls who just needed help. Joan, with her hands tied, could do nothing to help her; so she called Oliver. Tierra met her uncle for the first time when she was ten years old. In the years since his sister cut him out of her life, Oliver had become a historian and a writer, if only to try and gather as much knowledge on necromancy that he could find. Tierra spent more and more time at her uncle's house as she got older, learning how to control her magic, and trying everything she could think of to get her mother away from her father.

When Tierra was 13, Brian and Joan's relationship hit a breaking point. Joan and the girls were visiting Brian at work at the factory when a Shade who skulked the factory floor tried to attack them. Joan had no choice but to fight back; with those evil spirits it was kill or be killed. She performed a very hastily put together ritual in the break room to try and banish the Shade, but before she could complete it Brian flew into a rage, screaming about how she was crazy and embarrassing him in front of everyone, and dragged her out of the break room. He threw everyone into the car, drove his sobbing wife and children to a local hospital, and had his wife committed to the mental ward on the spot.

Tierra immediately got to the nearest phone and called her uncle. Oliver drove over and met Brian just as they were arriving at the house. First there was arguing, then there was shouting, and then Brian socked Oliver right in the mouth. Oliver swore he would come back and take the girls and get Joan out of the hospital, and so began a long legal battle. Despite his best efforts and even a few tricks from a sorcerer lawyer friend he had, Oliver was unable to build a strong enough case of abuse against Brian since necromancy was not a legitimate legal defense. The best he could do was gain custody of Tierra. Frankly, Brian was more than happy to give up the 'messed up' daughter, and Tierra left her sisters and her family home behind and moved in with her uncle.

Shortly after she turned 15, her mother passed away inside the mental institution she'd been placed in. Tierra had been taking dance lessons since she was 9 years old, something her mother got her into so they could spend time together away from her father, and with her mother's death Tierra threw herself into her dance classes with renewed vigor. She decided she wanted to become a choreographer, and began working herself towards that goal.

She graduated from high school, moved out, and began working part time at a dance studio near her uncle's house, eventually working up to teaching classes herself and doing choreography for contests. She had been saving up for years to move out to Los Angeles to get a job as a real choreographer, and at 24 was very close to her goal, when she got a call.

Tierra hadn't been close to her sisters in years; the last she had heard, Emelina got married to her long-time boyfriend at 19 just to get out of the house. Tierra wasn't invited to the wedding. The phone call was from a tearful Serena. She had moved out of their father's house and into a boyfriend's house at 17, and had bounced from place to place with each new boyfriend ever since. Now, she was pregnant, and when she and her current boyfriend went to their father for help, Brian put the man in the hospital and threw Serena out of the house. She said he was a drunk now, had called her all sorts of names, and said she would pass on the 'disease' their mother had given them to the baby and she should never have kids. Her boyfriend dumped her after the incident and was kicking her out of their apartment, she couldn't get a hold of Emelina, and Serena was genuinely frightened of the necromancy she'd never been allowed to learn.

Horrified, Tierra swore that she would help her, to stay put, and she was on her way. She drove to Serena's apartment and picked up her sister and all of her stuff and promised her she would be there to help her, with the baby and with the necromancy. But they needed to leave town, go somewhere to get a fresh start, and somewhere where Brian couldn't threaten Serena again.

Uncle Oliver suggested Bear River, Montana; it was far from home but it had come up several times in his research, and it would be a quiet little town to start over. He had been thinking of heading out there himself. Tierra took her savings for Los Angeles and rented a U-Haul and a little condo in Bear River. She packed up her life and her sister and headed out west, determined to get her little sister settled into a new life.