Honor Regular Name Terrel Strong Age 24 Gender Female Race Hylian Place of Origin Resident of Darunia PWC 2/1/4 Treasures Crossbow Farore’s Courage Pictograph Box Sun’s Song Sense Song of Storms Fireshield Earrings Total Rupees: 70 Height 5’7” Weight 114 Pounds Residence Last seen in Darunia Equipment: Terrel’s equipment is nothing particularly special, carrying her own allotted treasures she’s picked up over time as well as some general things. Her weapon of choice is a crossbow made by the thieves near the lost woods; with a 200lb drawback, the weapon is capable of killing a man at about 75 yards. Her initials are carved into the sides and she keeps it well maintained. Apart from the weapon, though, everything else is mostly out of necessity or memory, having many of the things required for travelling effectively and living abroad. Appearance: Neither particularly tall nor short, Terrel stands with a modest build, fairly attractive for the standards around her. Her skin is a relatively dark shade, primarily from genetics, and her eyes and hair are brown to match it. Despite her mostly monochromatic visage, though, a fire seems to burn in those chocolate covered eyes unlike many other people. While perhaps not beautiful or unforgettable, her present figure explains much of her past trauma, dealing both with her own vanity and the lusts of other men. Beyond this, there is little to be said of use. It could be noted, however, that she does possess quite a lovely singing voice, despite typically speaking roughly with many people. Personality: Plunged through disaster and forged through pain, Terrel has come out as a curious individual on the other end of the cycle. Once no more than a pretty young girl who fancied any man who paid attention to her, now she finds herself sobered and matured by the calamity of her own life. While it has fostered a certain level of responsibility in her, the speed at which it came and the events that led it to caused a deep price as well. Quite certainly self-interested, the woman can be a belligerent tyrant in many situations, often not pausing to think or reason long enough before making a poor decision. Her choices are often rash, despite being carried out with all that she is, and it has led her into many difficult situations. At some of her better times she can be simply abrasive, but at worst the woman can be outright mean and even cruel. Above all, though, the woman is driven. While it doesn’t override every action with an unreal sense of urgency, ultimately she’s directed in a single location, even if the trail she follows has long since gone cold. Not necessarily against people but also not particularly favoring them, the woman can appreciate a good drink and a relaxing evening, though she hasn’t bothered to make any close friends in some time. This is only a starting point for the woman, though—a personality forged in pain and only now starting to cool. The rest of her tale is still unwritten. Backstory: How do we come about? Some people say we live because of the blood of our fathers, but if you think about it, wouldn’t it be the blood of our mothers? Both literally and figuratively. Once that blood has been shed, it never comes back, though, even if your body heals and replenishes itself. It takes part of our bodies, but surely it draws from our soul as well, tearing off a small piece and planting it in the ground, ready for growth. To lose that is surely as damaging, as lasting, as losing part of your own soul. Perhaps I can tell you the story of this, the story of one Terrel Strong, who found strength when she thought none left could be found. Twenty years and four prior, Terrel Strong was born to a family of two, located in a lower class home in Darunia. Her father a miner and her mother too frail to work, perhaps one could have called Terrel’s upbringing in the Strong family to be relatively normal. A constant undertone of fighting running through the family kept each member on their toes, usually brought up by the problems with rupees, the girl tended to try and stay out of the house when she could. She learned her letters and numbers, favoring a bit of archery when she could, but for the most part her life was relatively normal, by all modern appeals. As she grew older, her disconnect with her own family grew greater with her own adolescence. With her father gone much of the day to work and her relationship with her mother growing constantly more abrasive in her eyes, Terrel disappeared more and more often. The forest proved an enticing opportunity for a young woman to escape the boring small town she lived in to find a life with adventure and nature. Looking back, the woman would find herself nostalgic for the days she spent in the towns playing with the Goron children and chasing after rabbits, but as she hit the age of seventeen or so, her mind was enraptured by the woods. And then she met a boy. A young ruffian, though still four or five years her elder, the boy was, by all means, a bad influence. The family almost never saw him, though what they did was less than approvable in their eyes; perhaps the more troubling part was they began to see her about as often as they saw the boy. At least, that’s what they would have said. For Terrel, though, life had exited beyond the boundaries of her home into an exciting adventure in the woods, finding family closer with the group of thieves the boy knew. By the time she was eighteen, Terrel officially left home to a heartbroken family, saddened yet resigned to the fate that their daughter had been claimed by. It happened one day, though, that the world she thought she had finally left truly fell apart. Terrel wasn’t much of a visitor, at age 19, but when her mother fell sick she felt some obligation to at least pay her respects, though her father wanted practically nothing to do with his daughter at this point, all but disgusted at the lifestyle she had taken. Perhaps it was that, that pushed the man to action, or perhaps it was simply his wife’s worsening condition, but he broke one of the rules of Darunia and confronted the thieves. They were plenty known for pilfering off the carts of miners or making ridiculous tolls in the woods, claiming it kept out worse enemies and swindlers, but Terrel’s father was fed up to the point of breaking, and the man went into the forest to demand a sum equal to what he had paid in the last six months in tolls. The sum wasn’t particularly great in amount, but the action was apparently much to the offense of thieves. Joseph Strong’s body returned home in a cart, smashed into pieces by the hands of Goron thieves with a promissory note to deal with other troublemakers the same way. She hadn’t known the man very well, especially in the last ten years, but Terrel’s heart wept for him, and she fled into the forest, furious with one family that had destroyed her other family. The boy she lived with made promises he would get back at the monsters who had done this, but as weeks ticked by Terrel realized how little seemed likely to happen. To make matters more complicated, she was pregnant. For a flickering moment, the pain of the loss of her father vanished at the joy of perhaps being a mother. The father though, for there could only be one candidate, did all he could to disguise is horror at the situation, but Terrel could see through it in an instant. When he realized she would not relent on the thought of them having a family together, he gave her a small sum of money and left in the night, gone off to another part of the woods where he could hide from this accident. Hurt and suddenly ashamed for her lifestyle, Terrel returned to the family she had abandoned in search of an adventure years ago. Her mother was still sick, unfortunately, doing not much better than the last time they had seen each other; sobered by everything around her, Terrel spent every last rupee she had to keep her last member of her family from dying, unsure of what her life would be like completely alone with a child on the way. Perhaps the months to follow could be called peaceful, the most constructive time Terrel had experienced in years. Her relationship with her mother grew with the child on the way, and while they mourned over the loss of the man in the house, a few smiles arose neither of them thought possible. As Terrel birthed a son a few months later, the family felt nearly whole again. Peace could not last for long, though. She found herself faced with her father’s old problem. The issue with having a young child and a sickly mother is someone has to take care of them; what could a lone woman do, with no real profession or trade? Returning to her old masters was the only real opportunity, though this time she returned with nerves of iron. She didn’t have time to chase after another boy, but she found herself forced to trade ‘favors’ with some of them. She had not the lust for adventure to keep her spirit afloat with useless hopes in dreams. The forest that had once been her place of adventure, her place of freedom, became a job, and she resented it with all her heart. They began to resent her too, sadly. Maybe she was too aggressive or perhaps just not lovable enough for some of those in charge, but eventually she managed to step on the wrong toes too many times. Life in the woods became even more stressful than she remembered some of her days as a teenager. As she started receiving the short end of the stick over and over again, her increasingly explosive temper mounted a heap of threats on her head. Stubborn and refusing to yield and inch to the people who had effectively ruined her life. Finally, in a fit of rage one evening, she swore she wouldn’t do a single job for them again; she vowed to let Darunia officials know every dirty secret she could remember about the thieves of woods. The thrashing she received was nothing short of brutal, and when she finally came to, she hobbled her way home, cursing them every step of the way but mostly just concerned about her family. At the sight of broken windows and a destroyed door, though, her heart sank. The town had already been crowding around her home, weeping over the disaster. Her mother was dead. Her son was missing. Nerves of iron became forged into nerves of steel at that hammer blow, and her life began to lapse into a numb state for a period of months. Part of her knew that she should be chasing after the trail of her son. Part of her desperately wanted to. But the pain and the depression that filled her seemed unshakable. The most entertaining thing she found to do was sing away the days and nights in an instant, losing track of all time in the process. It reminded her of how her life felt, slipping away in an instant. She was so young—how had this happened? What had happened to her adventures, the prime of her youth? Had she wasted it all so freely? Courage comes in strange ways, sometimes. A man appeared one evening at her door. She had never seen him and never would again. Looking back, Terrel would often wonder if the man existed at all, but what he left behind was real enough. Somehow he seemed to know her story, though many people in town could have related it by now. He seemed strangely empathetic, though. What was more, he seemed very interested in putting her back on his feet. They spoke deep into the night, Terrel shedding a number of tears but ultimately just nodding in agreement with the man. Before he left, though, he taught her a song he called Farore’s Courage, to inspire those to be something greater than they were—to find strength where it seemed all had dried up. The tune stuck, and Terrel rose to action for the first time in what had actually been nearly a year, though she had passed most of it very quickly singing the Sun’s Song. Instead of singing a tune to waste away her days, though, now she sang a tune of courage and hope. Dusting off the pictograph box she hadn’t touched since her son had gone missing, she found the photos she had saved gave her strength now, overriding the pain of loss. She would not abandon him, even if the world seemed to strip everything from her hands. She would find her son, even if it meant finding a grave. She had courage to face that world.
