(no subject)
Name: Tandy Bowen
Aliases: Dagger
Age: 19
Profession: part-time barista, part-time clerical worker at Holy Ghost Catholic Community Center. Occasional crimefighter.
Appearance: Long, wavy blonde hair, blue eyes. Tandy danced ballet for years and is still built like a dancer, slender and muscular. Favors a slightly bohemian style, with dangly earrings and bell-sleeved blouses.
Abilities: Tandy produces an excessive amount of psionic "life energy," which she can manifest as both a general burst or as solid daggers of bright white light. These have the capacity to stun a target, as well as purging the target's system of any drugs or other foreign compounds. If she doesn't regularly release light, it will make her ill. She's also a skilled hand-to-hand fighter and acrobat, utilizing her training in dance.
Personality: Friendly, intelligent, and compassionate, Tandy is that girl who will listen to anyone's trouble and then do her best to help solve it. She can come across as overly thoughtful or serious, but she does love to have fun -- it just takes some coaxing sometimes. Like a lot of 19-year-olds, Tandy is still figuring out who she is (in her case, a problem complicated by figuring out who she is without Cloak) but she's slowly gaining ground on building her own identity. Being left alone by the people she loves is her greatest fear, and as a result she doesn't trust people very easily (after all, if you don't let them in to begin with, they can't leave you later) -- but this doesn't keep her from forming superficial friendships and casual acquaintances. She tends to try to hide her hurts and her flaws as much as possible, and it can take prodding or direct questioning to get her to talk about her past; she's used to people thinking of her as a bother and doesn't want to burden them with her troubles.
History:
Then:
In the beginning, she was just Tandy, and she had a normal life.
As normal as life could be, anyway, for a teen ballet prodigy with an absentee supermodel mother and a father who went AWOL chasing enlightenment in India. Tandy was pretty, she was privileged, she had everything a sixteen-year-old could have - including an aching, soul-deep loneliness. The boy she thought she’d found to take away that loneliness took everything else instead, and left her alone again. So Tandy did what the movies said all brokenhearted, unloved girls should do, and hopped a bus for New York City.
That’s where she met Ty. Ty was Tandy’s polar opposite; poor, black, used to having nothing. Ty was just like Tandy, because he was alone.
In another world they would have been friends, or lovers, or strangers; but in this world, they became something much more. The two of them were abducted along with a lot of other runaways, experimented on by mobsters trying to engineer the next big street drug. Nobody else survived. Ty and Tandy changed.
Ty lost his body, replaced with a doorway to a dark dimension full of shadow and hunger. He could teleport using that dimension, disappearing and reappearing anywhere, and he could send other people through it . . . or swallow them up into it.
Tandy gained an inner light that shone brighter than any star - light she could turn into daggers to hurl at her enemies, shocking and purifying them when they struck. Light she could use to feed the terrifying hunger that gnawed at Ty from that darkness within him.
So Ty and Tandy changed, becoming Cloak and Dagger - but they stayed the same, too, in that they still had nobody else. And now, more than ever, they needed each other. For more than a year the two of them lived and fought together, using their new abilities to strike back at the people who’d hurt them and others like them. And much as Tandy hated what they’d become, as much as she longed for the normal life she’d lost, she couldn’t leave Cloak - not for good. Not when her light was all that kept him from being eaten by the darkness.
So they stayed together, symbiotically bound by Cloak’s hunger and Dagger’s light. They were still teenagers, somewhere under the trappings of superherodom, and they sometimes squabbled and often misunderstood one another - but they were a team, and more than a team. Cloak was Dagger’s other half; her confidant, her anchor, her one fixed point. The one person who loved her and would always be there to fill her loneliness.
Until the day Cloak woke her up in the middle of the night, teleported her to a junkyard without explanation, and left her with the parting words "You will be safe here. I must leave you now. I may never return. I love you."
Tandy might have had more time to wonder what he meant, if an enemy named Night hadn't been waiting in the junkyard to ambush her. The fight was brutal, and Tandy almost lost -- but when Night inadvertently used her powers to supercharge Tandy's own, Tandy was able to gain the upper hand and defeat her for good. Figuring that Cloak must have gone after Night's boss, Mister Jip, Dagger tracked him down -- and she defeated him, too, her greater powers giving her an advantage over their old opponent.
But she didn't find Cloak.
And in the two years since that night, she still hasn't.
Now:
Tandy still lives in New York City, in the studio apartment at Holy Ghost Church that she used to share with Cloak. Her uncle Mike, a priest, has taken the church over and (with Tandy's help) converted it to a community center, offering career placement, temporary shelter for the homeless, and addiction counseling in addition to being a place for the locals to hang out. Tandy works part-time doing clerical work for the center, and also has a job as a barista.
Her well-meaning but often bumbling stepdad, Philip Carlisle, left her mother shortly before the events of That Night, and moved to the City to be closer to Tandy. Their relationship has been rocky -- Phil wants to coddle Tandy and can't quite understand why she insists on paying her own way and living alone -- but she does love him, despite that.
Tandy's attempts to find Cloak have all failed; even calling on her few acquaintances in the superpowered community has produced no results. She has no way of knowing where he is, or even if he's still alive; this lack of closure haunts her. She often has dreams about being unable to find Cloak, and can't quite shake the guilt that living a normal life without him produces.
The super-charge that Night gave Tandy's powers still lingers, with the result that Tandy must "vent" her excess light or risk becoming gravely ill (starting with dizziness and muscle aches, progressing to a high fever and convulsions). She sometimes does this by simply retreating to a secluded spot and letting go. At other times, she finds herself once again hitting the streets at night to use her daggers against criminals. Tandy can't quite decide why she does this. It might be because she can't get rid of what she's become. It might be because she hopes she'll find Cloak doing it. It might be because she feels obliged to protect the helpless. Or it might just be because stopping means admitting Cloak is really gone.
It's just Tandy, now. And despite her best efforts, her life is no longer normal.
But she's trying.