Tannin
Tannin | Background | Magick | Awakening

Background

Family

father: Dan Kildara, alcoholic and abusive. Worked physical labor jobs, scrap metal yard, lumber yard, junk yard. He changed jobs frequently while Tannin was at home.
mother: Joie Trenten Kildara, drug addict. No job. She mostly sat around at home, watching TV, or, more frequently, staring at the walls or the ceiling, completely oblivious to her surroundings. She only left at night, to find more drugs. She spent most of Dan's money on drugs.
siblings: Tannin had three younger siblings.
Sarah was born in 1982, and is four years younger than Tannin. She was a troublemaker and frequently left the house for days at a time.
Jakob was born in 1985, and is seven years younger than Tannin. He was very intelligent, but he was also very quiet. Only Tannin could get him to talk or play.
Alice was born in 1987, and is nine years younger than Tannin. She was quiet, and mostly followed Tannin or Jakob around the the house. She rarely spent any time alone.

History

Alanna Kildara was born January 12, 1978 to Dan and Joie Kildara.
Dan was an alcoholic, and treated his children to every form of physical (including physically sexual) abuse imaginable. Joie was usually spaced out on the couch, on whatever drug she had gotten a hold of that week. They lived in a very bad neighborhood in Chicago.
Alanna, as the oldest, felt responsible for her younger siblings, and cared for them as much as she could, trying to be a mother for them.
Alanna also did what she could to deflect most of her father's attention away from her siblings, which usually meant attracting his attention and getting the bulk of the abuse herself.
At fourteen she called Social Services, identifying herself as a concerned relative. She knew Social Services would split up her siblings, and that she would no longer be able to protect them. She ran away from home, rather than going to a foster home herself.
She lived on the streets and ended up getting into every drug imaginable. She got pregnant three times, but miscarried each time, as her body was too malnourished and generally sick to accept a growing fetus.

Awakening

When Alanna was eighteen, she got pregnant again. For whatever reason, this child held on much longer than any of the others, determined to be born. She got scared, and got a back-alley abortion.
The man pulled the baby out, but she was sick, malnourished, and completely wasted. He left her in the alley to bleed to death.
As Alanna lay dying, she Awoke to the possiblities of Reality, to the Magick of life. Artemis came to her, healed her, and began taking care of her. Artemis also began bullying Alanna into cleaning up her life.
Alanna learned religion from Artemis, who taught her that the city is every bit as wild and full of magick as the forests. Artemis also helped her choose the name Tannin.

Present

Artemis' crash course in recovery has helped Tannin greatly, but Tannin is far from being functional. She doesn't own very many tangible possessions and she lives on the streets more often than not (although she does make use of the Chantry showers more often than some full-time residents). She does hold a part-time job at the Chicago Women's Art Center, teaching women's self-defense classes two days a week.
Tannin also turns to drugs or compulsive sex whenever life is handing her a raw deal, whenever she's in non-physical pain (physical pain she learned to deal with on her own the first fourteen years of her life). She's attracted to abusive men. She has learned from Artemis how to recognize bad relationships early on and how to get out of them, but not yet how to avoid them altogether.

Call me a bloody bitch, I am all that and more. But I can look in the mirror and say that I have lived. Can you, with your illusions of comfort, say the same?