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Teresia Martel
Noble Tineye
Name/Handle: Lyrebon
Contact:
Name: Teresia Martel
Type: Noble
Age: 20
Gender: Female
Place of Origin: Northern Dominance
Occupation: Gossip
Relationship Status: Single and looking
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Type of Powers: Misting
Metals Used: Tin
Degree of Skill: Advanced
Status: Known
Teresia has a flamboyant fashion sense and it reflects in her personality, sporting audacious outfits that turn heads, with hairstyles to match, taking upwards of an hour to style. Despite wearing the barest of make-up Teresia has a natural charm to her that has people sometimes overlooking her eccentricity. Of all her features her smile and full lips stands out the most. What people might notice more about her are her less-than-feminine bushy eyebrows. Although her natural fiery red hair is of a colour most women in Luthadel would be envious of.
Her voice is richly deep in conversation, which she uses to display a unique and surprisingly pleasant singing voice, rather than the mousy noise that comes out under excitement or if something – or someone – has hyped her up. She is petite at 5’4” but is generously curvaceous and pleasant to admire. Her height has never been an issue for her - in fact it takes people more time to realize her presence, which is an advantage for a known Tineye.
Teresia is an insatiable flirt and she’s also intelligent - far more than most people suspect. Nobody knows who the real Teresia is because she makes a convincing act of being a harmless chatterbox to the majority of people, except maybe Ferrah Brehaut who might have already seen through the double-facing. Interestingly, she can also act drunk reasonably well. She also has a giddy addiction for knowing other people's business that is not strictly meant for public ears.
Teresia is convincing with her deceits, able to lie with innocent features and a silver tongue, weaving lies on the spot effortlessly. She tells herself that false-facing is enjoyable, and while putting on an act for those around her is beneficial in getting something she wants, she’s also trying to convince herself that the hedonism of youth is not an excuse to bury emotions and memories that might overwhelm her.
And what better way to false-face confidence by prying from the young wealth of boys their secrets and their breeches. Teresia has no sense of grey, nor even black and white, in her morality: you either tell the truth or you lie, but either way you hurt someone and sometimes it’s someone you love. Similarly she judges other actions with the same weight and has no concept of a degree of good and evil – everything just is, whether for your benefit or for others. Despite that, she feels guilty for hurting her sisters and wonders why she enjoys these theatrics so much, if they have the power to harm her loved ones.
She's managed to convince herself that providing ruin to others will also prevent her from hurting her sisters, because if her attention is absorbed by other matters she won't have time to concoct tales that unintentionally belittle or harm her siblings.
With Ferrah it might be that Teresia can be as close to honest with herself without giving too much up. She’s unaware of Ferrah’s suspicion but finds her company pleasant enough to drop the naive act a little. The real Teresia is lonely and desires a soulmate whom she can confide in, and although she doubts Ferrah’s true intentions, Teresia feels like she wants to trust her despite her grey morality.
Special Skills: Deceit, spying, acting, strong memory.
Strengths: Teresia likes to gossip, but she is acutely aware of the nature of her gossip; in public it’s mostly harmless rumours, maybe a defacing comment dropped near someone who might use it, but the truly damaging secrets she gleans from private conversations are between her and the clique, or with her uncle in good faith as a Martel lady.
Ever since getting close to Colette she's used her deceit to feed Colette information in an effort to simultaneously investigate Hasting for herself, both as a distraction and to fuel her lust for secrets. Her effectiveness as an informant is partially due to her memory: Teresia is able to recall, in great detail, a scene or conversation as long as they leave an impression on her and stand out. She’s not eidetic and she’s not a savant; however, her penchants have taught her to train her mind to retain certain details about people and as a Tineye she learnt how to observe.
Weaknesses: While she drops gossip about Hasting and Martel to belay suspicion, any scrutiny of her gossip could reveal the insubstantiality of their claims.
Even though she is a convincing actor it also places great strains on her psyche to maintain. Teresia wants to be seen by her sisters as supportive by hurting them the least with her facade. Given her grey morality she cannot reconcile with her sisters through honesty, and while she might be able to fool most people in society, she has trouble fooling Odette. She's frightened that they will only ever know her for the mask she wears, and she’s even more scared of being alone.
Public knowledge of her Allomancy forces people to be cautious around her, even when at a distance no normal person could overhear from. Her status as an Allomancer comes from an altercation in which Elodie, quite loudly, declared that her sister could easily crush a group of bullies with her powers. Even without a demonstration it was believed and the rumour began, although it was thought that she was a Pewterarm because of her sister’s words, but an incident involving a waiter, a stone floor, and a heavy metal tray causing quite a raucous made those who witnessed her covering her ears in pain re-evaluate that.
As good as she is at observing people, she knows little about politics, economics, or even how to apply the knowledge she has. She relies on other people to create agency from her information. She has never had to do it herself except where maintaining her own deceptions were needed.
In 898, Alec and Claudine Martel welcomed their second child into the world. Alec was a soft-hearted man, and with a daughter he was compelled to make changes to his family policies. This change would play a pivotal role in Teresia's life and was the dissolution of the Snapping ritual for women. Teresia was an attentive child who rarely spoke back against her parents. Spending most of her time at her parent’s manor in the north, she spent much of her time reading or studying long after her personal tutor had left. With an interest in literature her studies led her to the theatre, which her tutor was in favour of to educate Teresia in etiquette and the arts.
Growing up, Teresia didn’t remain the studious girl for long; once she hit her teens the rebellion came tenfold, and many tutors were dismissed as unsuited to controlling her temperament - something her mother had neglected to do as a parent and blamed the hired help for this shortcoming. Her father was always swamped with work and rarely took time off to spend it with all but his eldest child, Andre, who would one day inherit the house title. Alec adored his daughters even if he didn’t express it, and because he spent so little time with Teresia he clung to the childhood impression of her even when she was chasing boys, albeit she’d made an art of being discreet about it.
Her rebellion further widened the rift with her mother, especially when Claudine dismissed the tutor who had introduced her to theatre. To gte revenge, Teresia went to her father, tears welling up in perfect mock stage acting, and played the innocent daughter. Teresia was on the offensive the moment she stepped foot in her father’s study. Alec took the side of his sweet, precious daughter, and wound up in an argument with Claudine over it who accused him of not realising that his daughter had long since grown past the stage of innocence. The important declaration of Alec’s almost thirteen years ago was about to play its role in the ever increasing feud between Teresia and her mother.
Andre had undergone, and failed, his Snapping ritual one year prior to the sacking of Teresia’s favourite tutor. Claudine argued about the disproportionality of three daughters and the odds if they tested them. She eventually swayed Alec by getting him to realize that Teresia wasn’t a little girl anymore, and that she could benefit from some firm discipline. So, at the age of thirteen, Teresia was dragged to and beaten in their basement. Although, this did not serve as the stimulus for Snapping Teresia as the appointed Seeker indicated. Her sisters being dragged in and beaten beside her certainly had the desired effect, however. Even to Claudine the punishment was cruel, but she had always been a practical woman; why not test all her daughters for Allomancy at once?
Rage at her mother and the utter inability to protect her sisters pushed Teresia over the edge and she Snapped. She was the only child of four to show any positive results.
Her sisters, Odette and Elodie, were the only ones Teresia remained close to during her teenage years. But even between Odette the gap widened day by day after Odette found reason to blame their ritual on Teresia’s immaturity. It was Teresia’s duty, as eldest sister, to look out for and protect the other two, a job Odette had been de facto of since Teresia decided chasing boys and taking jabs at their mother was more important. Odette spared no words telling Teresia this and blaming Elodie’s trauma on Teresia. This possibly marked a turning point for Teresia, when she started developing personas to hide behind. The truth that she was responsible for her sister’s suffering weighed heavily on her. She began spending more time with Elodie, trying to be friendly with and being rejected by Odette, and altogether just staying free of their mother’s ire.
Later in life, only Elodie would openly support her sister and wouldn’t blame her for the Snapping ritual, while Odette still feels sour, even if she still loves both her sisters deep down. Odette’s mistrust is a constant reminder that her selfishness does have consequences. Teresia still feels guilty and sought ways to make it up to them, though she unintentionally hurt Odette more by lying to her.
At the age of sixteen she was regressing and became severely depressed. It was at this time she decided to appropriate her vast knowledge of theatre to fully complete the personas she’d started months ago. She ventured out into public as different people, people who were not depressed or guilty of their past. She found it remarkably easy to assume her creations and it felt exhilarating to act out a facade, to perform in public without the audience knowing they were really an audience. Starting small, like a book-shop, or a restaurant, she’d practice and totally absorb herself in the magic of performance. The sum total of all of Teresia’s characters could fill out a few literary works of her own, if she actually had the patience to write.
It was at one particular small-time ball that she realized her art could be applied to more endeavours than she’d previously known; she found that acting the person someone wanted her to be got them to open up to her, letting slip details that they would otherwise not want someone like her knowing. From observation most would say Teresia had a silver-tongue but she was unaware of her own talent.
It felt good to possess information that little knew about and could be damaging to others if they heard. She finally had a reason to redeem herself in the eyes of Odette and her father. When Teresia first brought to her father a secret she’d “overheard”, he first questioned how she knew. Finally managing to convince Alec of her sincerity he wanted to see how she’d managed it in the first place. And, fortunately, he’d been invited to a ball the coming weekend. He’d has his eyes on a merger, one to benefit Martel hugely in the legal market, and he wanted information on a suspectedly corrupt partner of the man he was about to sign the contract with. Teresia employed a character, ad-libbed on the spot, when meeting the man - Hanig - much to her father’s shock at how quickly she’d altered. After the initial pleasantries she got Hanig alone and convinced him that she was against her father’s deal after a hint that Hanig had other plans once the merger was complete. She offered to be instrumental in whatever plans he had and actually charmed him into revealing the coup he’d planned to take over the business and destroy his partner’s credibility with.
Returning to her father with this information he then told his business partner and they both schemed to oust Hanig from the contract. Hanig was sacked shortly after the merger was complete, and Alec had his own femme fatale at his disposal. Though one thing remained about Teresia that would prove to be a problem in time: she was infatuated with boys.
An incident when Teresia was nineteen lead to a series of events that forced Alec to send his daughter to Luthadel, away from the pressures and scandal up north. Getting caught in the bed of a man betrothed to another woman wasn’t easy to settle down. Under the guise of a special education, she arrived at her uncle’s place within the Hasting family estates and quickly sought the fruits of the secrets hidden within its society. This led her to Colette and an opportunity.
Claudine’s renege of old house policy, proclaimed at dinner that evening, had a thirteen year old Teresia dragged kicking and screaming to the basement not long after dessert was taken away. Three stocky men pulled her into the depths of the manor, one actually yanking her along by a fistfull of hair while another two ensured she wouldn’t run away. Her mother lead the pack, holding open the door to the stairs beneath the manor.
There in the blank dampness the man holding her hair all but threw Teresia down the steps, pulling her back at the last moment which brought tears to her eyes and, she was sure, a fistfull of her hair. One of the toughs came carrying a torch, which would have looked odd given it’s diminutive size in comparison had Teresia had more than panic clouding her mind right now.
They beat her black-and-blue for nearly an hour. In that time, a cloaked man had appeared and stood beside a victorious Claudine who shook his head after the men finally stopped hitting Teresia. With the hope that it was over and more pain than she’d ever felt in her entire life she spat out a wad of blood and began to push herself up before realising her muscles wouldn’t support her weight. She fell back down onto a tender shoulder that drew in her breath sharp. She moved her head to look up at her mother from her odd angle on the floor, the man with his hood up conversing with a sideways woman of fading gold hair and a look of disappointment. Though that was quickly replaced when she looked back at Teresia and their eyes met. A smile bloomed as she beckoned one of the toughs upstairs. He did as commanded like a dog and returned a few minutes later with company. It seemed he didn’t have to drag both of them down as he held onto Elodie’s neck, a flustered Odette at his heels pummeling the large of his back and demanding to know what the man was made of to wrangle them out of their studies so early.
Elodie was sobbing as though she couldn’t understand what she’d done wrong but upon seeing Teresia she burst into tears, crying out her sister’s name through Odette’s exclamations of what in the Lord Ruler’s name have you done here? Upon seeing their mother Odette choked back further admonishment, her eyes instead going wide as understanding set in. Claudine’s proclamation earlier had ended a decade long restriction on testing female family members for Allomancy; having three daughters made it seem a logical argument that Alec hadn’t objected to it, even if he had devised the rule himself when Teresia had been born. The sudden retcon had Teresia thinking at dinner that Claudine had sunk her nails in enough to tire him from their argument and he’d relented. Or maybe he actually believed the stories of Teresia’s exploits despite her efforts to turn them into someone’s fantasy. But why would her mother go through these lengths if the latter held up? Wouldn’t her father have confronted her with these rumours?
Claudine used Teresia’s apparent lack of Allomancy to take her punishment a step further by having Elodie and Odette dragged onto the basement’s stone flagged floor and beaten beside her. That did it. Whatever it was that broke inside her, seeing her sisters in pain had over-compensated its tension and it snapped in twain. Sparks of heat and light lingered in the pit of her stomach like a flood of sulfur igniting from a dropped match. A visualization of her rage even as she was unable to move. The anger on her face must have frightened a sharp gesture from the cloaked man and even made the bullish men hesitate. Her senses felt alive, every nerve twitching with more pain than before that made her screams half-anger and half-agony. When the cloaked man whispered to Claudine, Teresia thought she could her the man’s voice just faintly. Claudine smiled and indicated the men to continue beating Elodie and Odette. Their screams and shouts more piercing than before, filling Teresia’s ears with so much more than she could bear that she was now sobbing audibly on the cold floor. She couldn’t even look up at her mother who was now flashing a triumphant grin at the weeping girl, nor did she hear her mother telling her that naughty girls don’t go unpunished, especially lying ones. All Teresia heard were the screams of her guilt.
