Welcome to Terressa's page! Terressa is the character that I have had the longest, and one of the ones that I have had the most fun playing. I started this character out in a different Weyr in July of 2001, but found that my enthusiasm with this character was not appreciated. As a result, I felt that Terressa had no chance of Impressing at all and thus pulled her out of that Weyr and brought her to Storm Fires.
Terressa has waist-length brown hair with an even amount of blond streaking. In the summer, when she gets a lot of sun, it looks like two heads of hair battled for her head, and finally decided to just be friends and settled for mutual territory. Almond-shaped pale green eyes hint at some interesting mixes in her ancestry, along with the golden tone that her skin always has even in the winter. At only 5'0", she's often towered over, except when she becomes truly upset, which is when her eyes flash a dark green, and she seems to grow in size about five inches. She has a slim figure that is well-muscled from her time as a dragonrider and her lips are generously curved. When she smiles her eyes light up and you can see her dimples.
Before she came to Storm Fires I did define a few things about her past. Her parents died in a local plague after she had a fight with them and stormed out to help her friend Alanya, who was also sick with the plague although Terressa didn't know that. She watched her friend die in her arms as Alanya told her to go out into the world and make something of herself. When she found her family dead upon her return, she was devastated, and became a recluse for a while, taking the odd job here and there as a Beastherder before she finally came out of hiding to take up a job at Kohen Weyr.
She made friends with a brownrider named Ch'tiron and a candidate named Kalen while she was there, and both of those characters found their way to Storm Fires as well, although Ch'tiron left to go to a different Weyr later on. Tess stood once for Impression at Kohen and once at Storm Fires before Impressing her queen Tilieneth on her third try on June 19th, 2002. Her friend Kalen Impressed a green at the same Hatching.
Soon after she Impressed her queen, Weyrwoman Teslin returned to the Weyr from which she had come, making Nadea the Senior Weyrwoman and Terressa the Weyrwoman Second. She met a man named A'der before she was finished with her training and fell in love with him, or so she thought. They became Weyrmates right after Tilieneth's first mating flight when A'der's bronze Xianeth won.
The relationship was doomed, however, because once thread started falling again Nadea left to head to the Northern Weyrs to train their Queen's Wings and did not return to Storm Fires, making Terressa the new Senior Weyrwoman. As the now leading pair, Terressa developed a lot of independence, and A'der resented taking a back-seat to her and felt as if he really didn't know her anymore. Terressa tried to make more time for A'der, but he was unwilling to free up time to get to know his weyrmate once again, and so she called it off and was free to look elsewhere for love.
She has adopted, or perhaps been adopted by, a black feline named Midnight, and the feline makes sure that she takes out enough time in her day for herself. She realized that the single Southern Weyr was not enough to keep the entire Southern Continent thread-free, and then managed to successfully lobby for the creation of a second Weyr for the Southern Continent since the inhabited land areas are expanding.
Although she is a solid leader, Terressa was fit to bouts of loneliness until I finally found someone else who was suitable for her in my estimation. He was a bronzerider and his name was D'rol. He actually Impressed at the same clutch that Terressa did, but left shortly afterward to go north with Teslin due to a dispute with the Weyrlingmaster. The only problem that Terressa had with this character was not her problem at all. It was Kalen's. You see, D'rol was Kalen's boyfriend before he left, and he hurt her badly by only leaving her a note upon his departure. That was Turns ago, game time (and years ago in real time too), and once D'rol came back, he found Kalen unwilling to talk to him for very long. So the two never really got to know one another as they are now, instead of how they used to be. When Terressa admitted her feelings for D'rol to Kalen, Kalen flipped out, although she is still friends with Terressa. However, that put Terressa in the unique position of having a weyrmate and a best friend who hated one another, and that situation never really changed. Still, the two were not constantly sniping at one other or about each other to Tess, so she was content enough with the situation.
One thing that helped Terressa in this situation was that she had been put in charge of a retirement Weyr named Serenity, so she and D'rol were no longer living at Storm Fires, where Kalen was. This was the only option that I had for Terressa when I decided to leave the writing group for a while. At that point, Ken, who was the writer for D'rol, was not in the group, but I still had contact with him for any questions I may have concerning D'rol. While I would have killed Terressa off, when I asked Ken about it, he outlined D'rol's reaction to her death, and it would have been more than I could in all conscience inflict upon him. The idea was that if Ken ever returned, then she and he could be written back into the storyline without too much fuss.
When I returned to the writing group, I picked up a new queenrider in the form of Lieyona, so I doubted that Terressa would ever come out of coventry at Serenity, but... well, things happen. I was happy trotting her out from time to time, but a little uncomfortable too, since when I did, I had to play D'rol's part as well. Since he was not my character, it's hard for me to think of how he might react to things. So her spotlights were brief moments from time to time. But then one of the queenriders over at Rising Dawn died, and the board of directors asked me if I would like to bring Terressa back and have her work at Rising Dawn. I was surprised, but pleased. However, this did create some other problems. I'd been doing fine with her and D'rol when I only trotted them out occasionally, but I didn't feel that I would be able to do an adequate job playing D'rol on a full-time basis. Ken had been gone from the group for more than five years, I no longer know how to get in contact with him, and it didn't seem like he was ever going to come back, so... I took a deep breath and did what I felt I had to. I killed D'rol off. It was not an easy decision, but I really felt that if Terressa was going to make a come-back, I had to.
I did it with some class though. He didn't die because he got sick, was bested in a brawl or was stabbed in the back by some crazy person, oh no. He died during one of Tilieneth's mating flights. Since Serenity was a retirement Weyr, there were plenty of older dragons participating in Tilieneth's flights, and they can be a lot of stimulation for an old man. I had one of the older riders have a heart attack during the flight, which caused his dragon to flail around and get caught up with D'rol's Toriboth while the man was in pain. Then, when the older rider died, his dragon went *between*, taking Toriboth with him. The strain of the mating flight and the sudden loss of his dragon was too much for D'rol's heart, and it gave out too and he died.
Terressa was heartbroken. She is still heartbroken over it, in fact. But that didn't stop events from going on. Tilieneth was then won by another dragon, which made that dragon's rider the new Weyrleader of Serenity. Terressa was really far from happy about this turn of events. Plus, she and D'rol had been happy together at Serenity, so everywhere she went, she had memories of him to deal with. As I've already established, Terressa is not good at dealing with grief, and her pattern is to run from it. So she made arrangements for her replacement and was prepared to leave Serenity when the tragic loss of a queen dragon over at Rising Dawn Weyr changed her plans at the last moment. I love being able to back-date your stories, and this was one time when it really came in useful. Using back-dating, all of these things had happened to Terressa before the other Weyrwoman's death, so D'rol had already been dead some several months before the tragedy at Rising Dawn. So Weyrwoman Minerva asked Terressa to come to Rising Dawn instead, which pleased Terressa much more than the idea of going to Ista Weyr, and she left Serenity.
So now Terressa is at Rising Dawn as their newest Weyrwoman. She's the oldest one there, but is quite happy not to be the one in charge. She's been the one in charge ever since she graduated, and it's a nice change not to be the Senior pair for once. Plus, since she's still trying to get over the death of D'rol, she doesn't really want to be in charge. Hopefully, she'll be able to make a good friend or two, and maybe even find someone who will make the pain of D'rol's death fade.
Back to the Home Page
Back to the Storm Fires Character Index
