Character
Biography
Name: Anselle Tarn
Alias(s): Ansa (Sajun Enclave nickname), Elle (...)
Species: Atoan
Occupation: Jedi
Rank: Padawan (Technically)
Gender: Female
Eyes: Blue-grey
Hair: Dark Brown
Height: 5' 6"
Weight: 124lb
Force Sensitive: Yes
Physical Description
Anselle Tarn is a fairly unremarkable-looking woman. Lean is the operative word, or fine-boned if you like describing birds.
Her face is a long oval, pale and composed, with high, flat cheekbones; a firm, defined jaw; a straight nose; and deep-set, hooded eyes that are blue in good light and grey in the dark. She gives the distinct impression of being younger in the face but older in the eyes; a face that has been somewhere, and that somewhere was not in the sunlight. Her hair is "styled" in a dark brown bob, chin-length and is often tucked behind an ear, or both and usually escapes. She has a couple of small moles on her left cheek; this isn't important, but for some reason I've written it down.
The leanness continues down into the body. A long neck, narrow shoulders and hips match a slight body, with long limbs to complement it. She is fit, rather than hard, conditioned to a degree that suggests less focus on combat and more on stamina. It is a fast body, a light body, and it is her body.
She dresses herself formally in ash-grey and oatmeal robes, worn and mended time and time again. There's nothing new about them, but as far as Jedi robes go, they are some of the cosiest around. This choice of clothing extends to her casual wear: wrapped tunics, hooded cowls, fleece leggings, and close-fitting sleeves all feature, and you cannot beat a good pair of thick, warm socks. The boots are practical, plain, and have seen some hard time.
Personality & Behaviour
The first impression one might get of Anselle is that she's kind, sociable and easy to like. That's not untrue; she's a pleasant woman who doles out warmth equally. The second impression is that she is reasonably sheltered, wide-eyed in the sense of somebody who has only read about the galaxy and never seen it. Anselle finds a bookish delight in the mundane and spectacular in near equal measure, which is understandable when one has spent more of their existence in an underground Jedi Enclave on a frozen tundra world.
With initial impressions over, Anselle Tarn is one woman made up of two moving parts. The first is ordinary; a friend comfortable with her would find a competitive woman with a rare dry humour. She betrays the Jedi Consular stereotype in friendly competition: Dejarik, racing, anything with a score, and it is the only time she'll swear (albeit in the manner your grandmother might swear). She knows it's unbecoming. The humour isn't bombastic; it's mild, late. A strong, dry line in an awkward situation among friends.
Then there is the other moving part. The Jedi core. Anselle is a devout traditionalist who holds herself to the Jedi Code. She is no longer as strict with other Jedi, saving most of her moralising for herself, and that moralising comes down to one element. Passion. She firmly believes love is compassion and shouldn't be anything else, at least where Jedi stand. Attachment is passion. Attachment is emotion. They will lead to harm. She does not have a sense of what ordinary love looks like, the kind where nobody dies. She gets flustered when she sees affection between others, or when flirted with. Anselle can take a compliment just fine; she can't cope with anything deeper.
When it comes to the Sith, she believes in dialogue first and dialogue early as a preventative measure before words stop working. Rehabilitation when possible is the ideal outcome. She does, however, acknowledge that there is a time when words are useless, and the only option is definitive action.
She shouldn't still be a Padawan, but she is content to remain one in title for reasons she doesn't disclose.
Strengths and Weaknesses
[+] Nothing but Heart - Anselle is an Atoan. She doesn't have one main heart; she has thousands of tiny hearts across her body, which means she has a superior circulatory system to baseline humans. As a result, she is faster and stronger than a comparable human of her size. The other organs are run-of-the-mill, however.
[+] Sure-footed - When you have thousands of tiny hearts across your body, you learn to be somewhat careful. Anselle is very dextrous, trained over her lifetime to avoid bumping into things. As a result, she has great balance and precision. No clumsy woman is to be found here, only safe hands.
[+] Buffs in the Backline - Her main Jedi focus is supportive. Barriers, shields, and meditation are her core; she trains this relentlessly. Her best use is covering others, and it's not even in question.
[+] Words words words - She looks, she talks, she listens. Probably the most reasonable head in her current company, her diplomacy is earnest, and she wants to help. Anselle's warmth is genuine, her intentions are real, and the hope that she can change a mind without escalation is earnest.
[-] Glass Cannon - Thousands of hearts. Anselle is extremely vulnerable to certain kinds of damage, particularly anything that causes bleeding, whether inside or out. Things that burn or cauterise are preferable to vibroblades and blunt-force trauma. A hard blow that humans could sleep off is potentially fatal for her. She carries a specialised medical kit for this exact reason.
[-] Haunted - The events of the Enclave are deeply embedded in her. It fell, she fell; Anselle did not. She is not sure that she deserved to.
[-] Rusted - Anselle has rejected the blade and chosen the Force. Once a confident lightsaber duellist, she has neglected that discipline over the past five years. This means that she is well-placed on the backline in a support role, but is very vulnerable if targeted or alone.
[-] Wide-eyed - She doesn't know the galaxy. She's read about the galaxy, but what's available in an isolated Jedi Enclave's archives isn't an expansive guide to it. Not fully naive, Anselle is still easily swindled.
History
Anselle Tarn does not know her own origins.
She was dropped off at the Jedi Enclave on Sajun around age two, before any memories could form, and was named there. The circumstances of her birth, the identity of her parents, and her original homeworld were withheld on principle, and much, much later the records that held that information were destroyed. Anselle is at peace with that.
The Jedi did not build the Enclave; it was there before them, carved beneath the earth, beneath the tundra with volcanic bones, basalt walls, and an underground hot spring. Harmony between nature's hands and the original builders. It was a small community, never more than forty living in the Enclave at a time, its core purpose being to shelter and train Padawans until they were ready to go out into the galaxy and bring forth aid, hope, and peace.
Soon after her arrival, the Enclave had to learn quickly how to keep an Atoan alive, and Anselle grew up as a child never allowed to get hurt. She was not deterred, even in her youngest memories, by the fear of getting hurt. Instead, she became sure-footed and fast, confident in her abilities and determined not to be placed into a metaphorical bubble. Some said she was reckless at times, and they probably had a point when she took a bump and needed compression wraps and coagulant.
She was apprenticed to Corwen Sael, a permanent fixture of the Enclave as a training Knight. An all-rounder who was the right balance of protective without tipping into suffocating. A kind man, gentle in his teaching of the Jedi Code and with a dry sense of humour. Anselle only learned one of those traits from him.
When she was around seven, Kassus, a mountain of a Nautolan Knight with the temperament of a teddy bear, returned from duty with a Togruta girl the same age as Anselle.
Tahli Oru.
She was gifted, quick-tempered, and yet a careful lid sat atop her temper. She was slow to warm up to anybody at first, isolated in a room full of children who already knew each other, but in time Anselle's warmth found her, and beneath was a girl who was all-or-nothing, fiercely loyal and before long, a best friend.
Over the years, they did everything together. They studied, they sparred, they competed. Tahli was the carefulness to Anselle's recklessness, and the former even built a trauma kit to have on hand for Anselle's physiology, because she refused to limit her friend and would help stop a bleed instead. Their competition made them better, and closer. Tahli was the better straight duellist, but Anselle always got the first strike in sparring. Climbing, sprinting, and footwork were all Anselle's. Endurance, blindfolds, and hide-and-seek were the Togruta's realm. Anselle had a head start on the lore and could recite texts Tahli hadn't even finished yet, while Tahli knew things about a world beyond the Enclave.
The pair of them kept score.
They would stay up late in the dormitory and just talk, about nothing and about everything. They ranked their lessons from dullest to most exciting. They ranked the Knights and Masters based on who gave the best hugs (Kassus, obviously). Tahli told her about the galaxy she knew, about things her friend had never seen. Anselle ranted about being Atoan, and how some of the others treated her as if she were made of glass. Tahli spoke about her parents, how much she missed them, and how often she still thought about them.
As best friends sometimes do, they argued too. Anselle took the Jedi Code more to heart than Tahli ever did, extolling the virtue of emotional harmony and moralising about the cost of attachments. Tahli did not subscribe, she saw love not as passion but as the natural way of living, as something to be embraced and nurtured because without love they were just 'droids in pyjamas'. Sometimes their arguments ended in a day or two of not speaking to one another properly; other times they were simply hearty philosophical debates. It did nothing to separate them.
Before long, they were eighteen and inseparable.
It was more than friendship.
A kiss in the open-air hot springs on the surface. Unbidden, not unwanted. Anselle, through the wanting, saw it for what it was: passion. She knew exactly what Tahli saw it as; they'd debated it a hundred times.
Anselle withdrew, citing the Jedi Code with a seriousness that was not up for discussion, and while she remained warm and friendly to Tahli, as she was with everyone, the closeness ended. She'd shut the door. She told nobody, not about the kiss, not about the wanting. She kept it to herself and changed her focus to her training.
Tahli changed, withdrew in her own parallel way. The Togruta withdrew into serious discipline and did little else but train relentlessly. The Masters took it for maturity; they were not long off their own trials and potential Knightings. They were young women on the cusp of bearing a great responsibility. It made sense. Yet something felt wrong to Anselle; she couldn't say what. There was no evidence of anything truly amiss. Just a gut feeling, and a person she could not approach about it. Approaching Tahli was forbidden by her own standards, and approaching the Masters meant confessing the kiss.
She said nothing.
Then came that night; she was twenty. They were twenty.
Anselle woke to an empty bed across from hers and an unfamiliar heat in her chest. Close, like pressure. Tahli. She could feel her across the Enclave, loud and blazing after two years of quiet discipline. There was a second when she thought her old friend had found herself again. A second of relief. A liar's second.
She was up and running through the Enclave in her nightclothes, lightsaber hilt in hand. She wasted minutes, going to the places where she thought Tahli might have been. The infirmary. The training hall. The columns where they practised form and footwork. She did not find her friend; she found bodies. She found the archive's roof caved in, with death beneath the rubble. She found her own Master, Corwen's body, struck down by a blade. The Togruta's presence was everywhere, screaming and wounded.
Then Anselle found her, standing in a room scorched by blade and lightning. Lightsaber in one hand, and something in the other. Anselle would later learn it was a Sith Holocron, kept locked away for millennia, with the Enclave built to guard it. She felt the weight of Tahli's hurt, the way it suffocated to stand in the same room as her. She heard the Togruta speak, her voice wrong, like a chord with a dissonant note. The hurt was hers. The power was not.
Anselle pleaded. Not with the words she wanted, but with the words she'd drilled into herself since she could read:
The Jedi Code.
Tahli met her plea with the Force and threw her into a wall of flowstone that broke on impact. A slow killing blow for a woman whose insides would bleed without intervention. Adrenaline lifted Anselle, and with her blade lit, she had Tahli's back. The first strike was hers. A clean opening; she had the skill, and she didn't take it.
She froze.
Then she fell.
Anselle could not say how much she remembered of Kassus' arrival. She could not say if she watched the entire fight from the rubble, or if she created a fiction in her head that was easier to swallow. She would tell herself a lot of things about that night, about the two years that preceded it, about the kiss.
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