Tabitha

Information

Player: Valkoinen

Character Full Name: Tabitha Oliver

Character In-Game Name: Tabitha

Nickname(s): None.

Association(s): Loyal to the Alliance and to Stormwind, though no official affiliation.

Race: Human

Class: Warrior

Skills and Abilities: Specializes in longswords, two handed swords, and shields. Skilled with a longbow, though not an expert.

Age: 19

Sex: Female

Hair: Black hair, kept neat and short.

Eyes: Chocolate brown

Scale/Height: 1.02 [5' 08" (1.73m)]

Weight: 168 lbs (76.2 KGs)

Appearance

Usual Garments/Armor: Tabitha favors heavy plate armor, with chain links at joints such as the knee, shoulders, and elbows. She has two usual sets of said type of armor, one silver with a light blue tint, the other a hard steel with copper inlay, giving it a brown tint.

Personality

Tabitha, in another life, would have made an excellent soldier for the Stormwind Army, and would have served the alliance well. Unfortunately, her father's less than stellar disposition left her feeling inadequate due to her age, and has lied about her age for so long, sometimes she herself forgets she's only nineteen, rather than the Twenty-Six she tells people. She tends not to get exceedingly close to many people, due to her common deception when asked about herself. Though she will certainly make a friend out of someone, her lies make it difficult to fall into a romantic relationship, and as such, she does not actively pursue one.

Tabitha is very respectful to her peers, whether they be her superior or otherwise. Until instructed otherwise, she will often address a stranger or acquaintance as "Sir" or "Ma'am",or when given a name to work with, Mister and Miss. Although oftentimes, she will forget that someone has told her to just call them by name, and will call them by the honorific again, without thinking.

In combat, Tabitha is more than willing to kill a hostile, but when it comes to one on one combat, she is more of the type to try to disarm, or even capture an enemy, rather than drive a blade through their throat. That is not to say she does not like killing. She simply believes that more can be done with a living, albeit wounded enemy, than with a dead soldier. Stacking this with an unknown situation on the soldier's side, and she certainly prefers to wound, disarm, and capture. You never know whose father you're slaughtering. Whose husband, whose little boy.

This mercy does not extend to the undead. After Lordaeron, Tabitha began harboring a distaste for the Scourge. She will slaughter the mindless undead, the creatures of the Scourge without a second thought to mercy. The only thing that will hold her back from charging the Undead hordes would be sheer improbability. If Tabitha knows that engaging multiple targets is going to get her killed, she is not going to charge in. That much restraint she still has when dealing with even the most vile of undead creatures.

There is also an obvious distrust of even the intelligent undead. The Forsaken, as well as the Ebon Blade, are not high on Tabitha's list of friendly people. The Forsaken especially so due to their alliance to the Horde. Though she does extend mercy and courtesy to them despite this. This is most likely a result of the fate of Tabitha's mother, Andrea, who fell to the Scourge in Lordaeron and was raised, only to be freed with the Forsaken.

Alignment: Neutral Good

History

Tabitha was born in Lordaeron to Jonathon and Andrea. Jonathon was a patroller in the Lordaeron city guard. Andrea was a nurse, who often tended to wounded patrollers. She has one older sister, Tara, three years older than herself.

Being the daughter of a militant father and a mother who essentially worked closely with the military, Tabitha was brought up in a militaristic style. She has memories, both fond and repressed, of combat training with a rather brutal father, since she was very young. Something she remembered, and that has stuck with her throughout her life, is that she was never allowed to address her father as “Dad, father, daddy,” or anything of the like when speaking to him. He was always “Sir”. An infraction on this rule would be followed by a hard slap to the face and a reminder that he was a superior, not just a family member. Tabitha hated this, but grew used to it, and after a few months of it, never once forgot to call her father sir again.

All this was not, however, enough to prepare a nine year old for the invasion. When the Scourge attacked Lordaeron, Tabitha knew nothing of the Undead, save for ghost stories told by schoolmates. Ones she never believed in. Beyond all else, she grew to be a rational girl, not putting much stock in the piety of the Light, though she would never admit it to her parents. But these stories of phantom restless dead did nothing to make Tabitha ready for the endless hordes of undead that attacked Lordaeron.

Tabitha was at home when it started. She knew something was wrong when her mother came to collect her and rushed her back inside the house. She was not scared right away. Simply confused. All she knew was that she and Tara were told to stay inside until their father came home. Tabitha and Tara were in their room for the duration of this ill-fated attempt at avoiding the fight they had no idea was happening. Left to their own devices while Andrea awaited the return of her husband, who gave no indication of the size of what was about to happen.

The next thing Tabitha knew, there was a scream from the entryway of her home, and when she and Tara ran out to see what it was about, there was some unspeakable horror standing on top of a grotesquely disfigured mass of bleeding flesh that only later Tabitha would realize was the corpse of her mother. On top of the sickening pile of flesh was the creature of a nightmare. Its skin was pale, dry, and showed more bone than it did muscle, looking like a deathly malnourished person. Instead of hands of meat, tubes, and bone like a normal person, there remained only the skeletal frame, the bones sharpened into claw-like appendages. This was the first exposure to the true undead that Tabitha ever had. It is sharply ingrained into her mind to this very day.

The creature did not live long after that, as a soldier wearing the colors of Lordaeron followed the creature inside Tabitha’s home and brought a mighty Warhammer down upon it, caving in its skull and utterly destroying any functioning part of the wretch’s brain. Tabitha recognized the man as a paladin that her father often spoke to, and was friends with. With the undead disposed, the nameless Paladin took his Warhammer in one hand, and held out the other to Tabitha and Tara. “Come on, we need to get you somewhere safe, now!” Tabitha was closer to the man, and took his gauntleted hand in her own rough fingers, which felt a chill at the touch of the cold steel the paladin had adorning his hands.

The paladin took Tabitha from her home, Tara immediately behind them. Though he was fully armed and capable, the paladin kept low and avoided engaging any undead, even though several civilians were being slaughtered in plain sight. It was not long before they were escorted to a small bar. There, the paladin threw down his hammer and shoved his shoulder against one of the cabinet tables with all his might. The cabinet pushed away, revealing a trap door in the floor that was covered by the cabinet. The paladin threw the door open, and reached inside, retrieving large crates marked with different alcoholic distributor’s marks. He threw the crates aside, likely wasting the liquor, and once the cupboard space in the ground was empty, forced the children inside, and looked down at them from the floor. “Sorry girls.” He said, putting his hand back on the door, readying to close it. “But this is for your safety.” The door closed above the girls, and they could hear, and feel a rumbling directly above them. After a few moments, they heard what sounded like someone walking on the floor above them, the heavy footsteps fading away slowly as they became further away. Tara and Tabitha both tried to push the door open in their youthful foolishness, but the impossibility of the doors weight made it apparent their savior had placed the cabinet back on top of the door, hiding it and sealing them in.

The storage space was impossibly small, only a few square feet, leaving the the girls uncomfortably cramped, but safe nonetheless. With nothing at all to do, the minutes faded into hours, and hours into a time they completely lost track of. By the time they realized that they’ve been in there for a serious length of time, they were growing rather hungry. They felt starved, as their family’s minor wealth never left them hungry a single day. Their three meal a day routine left them spoiled, and felt disproportionately weak compared to how long they were left alone. After a few hours alone, Tabitha had located one thing the paladin had not thrown away. A small case of plain water was in the storage space. This was the only sustenance they received for their time in the crawlspace.

When the door finally opened, and Tabitha and her sister finally saw the face of their savior again, they did not know how many days it was. When they asked, the paladin simply shook his head. They asked what happened, what that thing in their house was, why people were being hurt and killed. These questions only warranted the same response, a shake of his head. Lordaeron was in ruins, buildings burned, homes razed, and corpses of both the humans and the undead littering the streets. The stench of death permeated into every orifice on Tabitha’s body, and even her clothes. What truly horrified her was how similar many of the undead on the ground looked to that thing that had killed her mother. So that thing wasn’t just some monster of nightmares, unique only to itself. They were, for lack of a better word, their own people.

The children, physically unharmed, were brought to a shelter while casualties were measured, and survivors found. Tabitha and Tara feared the worst for their father, assuming he shared a fate with their mother. To their surprise, mere hours after they were taken to their shelter, their father pushed open the door, his torso and shoulder covered in bandages, left arm in a sling. His survival was the first good news they heard in a long time, and was all they’d get for a good while.

Tabitha’s family moved into Stormwind shortly after, taking up residence in a barely passable house in the Old Town district of the city, a short ways away from the Pig and Whistle. Tabitha and her sister Tara grew steadily apart, until Tabitha couldn’t tell someone what it was her sister did on a day to day basis. Once he was fighting fit again, however, Tabitha’s father resumed the old routine of teaching Tabitha how to fight. It seemed he had a renewed vigor since the invasion of Lordaeron. Tabitha seemed to be more focused on it too. When she moved on from rudimentary defense to attacking with a weapon, she surprised her father with savage strikes full of ferocity that tore apart the target dummy set before her. Jonathon took note of this raw talent, and untapped potential, and set Tabitha to a daily routine of physical strength building exercises.

By her late teens, Tabitha’s exercise regiments and training had turned her into an athletic woman, ready to run a marathon. Coupled with her father’s combat training, Tabitha was shaping into a true warrior. All the while, every combat simulation, every target dummy, the only enemy she saw was that skeletal undead that slaughtered her mother. This was the one motivation she never told her father. Despite all the rigorous training, and preparation for combat, he always told her never to go looking for a fight, and to certainly never charge an enemy without good cause, and better chances of survival. If Tabitha told her father that her motivation was the slaughtering of the Scourge, he’d only scold her, and give her another lecture about caution. This was Tabitha’s first instance of dishonesty.

The next one was telling her father she joined the Alliance Army. She never intended to join up with them. She knew how it worked. They stick you with a regiment and assign you to some location, be it the front lines of the assault on Icecrown Citadel, or some backwater in Theramore with too many crocolisks lurking about. Cliché as it may be, she decided to, in essence, go freelance. Though she would never consider herself a mercenary. She never wantonly accepted money for any job to go harass or bully someone, or stab Sally Jones and her four children just for giggles and a few silver. If anything, she’d work beneath the law, but towards the same common goal.

She also started lying to others about her age, and a past in the military service. To her, she was still just a child, though she was legally an adult now. She started claiming to be five years older, and that she had previously toured with an Alliance Army regiment she devised in her head. The 25th Damned Regiment. Though she’d leave this particular detail out of a conversation with someone still actively with the military, in order to avoid the fake regiment being called into question. Even now, at the age of 19, she claims to be 26, and a retired soldier who left for more personal goals. Though recently, she’s started looking up to the Argent Crusade, and wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea to seek them out and join up with their cause.

Tabitha barely visits her father any more, and never sees Tara. She lives in less money than she’ll ever admit to her father, oftentimes sleeping outside in the wild, favoring her coin for maintenance of her arms and armor. She takes money from whatever she can when working. She still will not take a job she deems to be immoral, but takes coin for the jobs she does take. As much as she wishes it didn't, the world still runs on currency, and she can’t live on a budget of nothing.