it's time we took a step back and rediscovered our tracks;

[platanera]

Character Name: Marguerita "Maggie" Thomas
Fandom: Original Character
Played By: Zoe Saldana


Physical Description:

Maggie’s twenty-one and isn’t physically impressive as far as musculature is concerned, but she is mostly all leg. She’s on the slim side, though any extra weight she gains tends to settle around her hips and ass. Her eyes and hair are both a shade of the darkest brown and while her hair is naturally curly (think 3b on the hair type scale), she straightens it with the power of an epic roller set, a way too hot blow dryer, and a flat iron. As for clothing, she gravitates towards jeans and sneakers with an occasional foray into Timberlands. Dresses have no place in her closet, even though she owns one. It’s never been worn and it’s in a shade of black perfect for that unexpected funeral.

She does have a few childhood scars and a few adulthood ones, but they’re mostly small cuts from knives or burns from too hot pans. Nothing major that’ll make people point and stare or small children laugh.


Sexuality:

Sexuality? What sexuality? Okay, seriously, if asked, Maggie would declare she’s straight and she is. She doesn’t find herself attracted to women in the least. However, her issues with men have built up a wall thicker than any of Fort Knox’s between her and any potential mates. Yes, she may have kissed one or two of them, but that’s as far as any boy or man has gotten with Maggie. She’s very distrustful of men (people in general, but men in particular) as her mother has drilled it into her brainmeats that they cannot ever be trusted. They’re good for sex and paying your bills, but if you want an actual marriage or anything close to stability, you’re better off alone. Maggie has taken that bad advice to new levels as she won’t even let any close enough to sniff her for long. If one hits on her, she immediately insults him and probably his mother too and throws up one of those lovely walls. It’s like she goes LOL NO, but in actual words.


Talents/Abilities::

Maggie can practically make a dollar out of fifteen cents and then create a gourmet meal out of that. You want lobster thermidor? Hand her a lobster and a few basic instructions and sit back for an hour. You’ll have what you want and probably dessert on the side too.

On the flip side, Maggie has a learning disability known as dyscalculia which is the biggest barrier to her attending culinary school after just graduating high school by the skin of her teeth. Her cooking skills are fantastic, but throw in the exact measurements that baking requires and she loses all ability to covert the recipe she has lying in front of her into something that’s actually edible. There’s a reason why stovetop cooking is what she sticks to.

She also speaks fluent Spanish as well, if that counts for anything.


Personality:

On the outside, Maggie seems like a well-adjusted twenty-one year old with a perfect sense of maturity and responsibility. She never misses a day or work nor has she ever been late. She may even laugh at a corny joke. But inside, she’s silently judging you. Seriously. She people watches because she trusts no one but herself. She hasn’t let herself get too close to anybody, but sometimes, there’s a crack that a little something might slip there. The cracks grow as time passes because a human can only keep up the act but so long.

Her relationship with her mother could be accurately viewed as mere toleration. Marisol was never really interested in having children, much less in getting married, and having Maggie as living proof of doing two things she really regrets isn’t quite the reminder Marisol wants daily. Maggie has learned to only speak when spoken to by Marisol, to never expect any motherly affection except the mere basics for sustaining life until Maggie was old enough to get them herself. Of course with Maggie being Maggie, this has extended to everybody she comes across and she’s just now beginning to poke her head out like a scared turtle.

Taking after her dad in the temper department has always been the bane of Maggie’s existence. She dislikes being anything like him and being compared to him even more, but even she can’t deny that her tendency to fly off the handle when pushed too far is exactly like him. She will curse in everyday conversation, but multiply that by about twenty and you have her pegged when she’s angry. Be prepared to be cussed out in two languages as well.

On her own, Maggie has picked up a bad habit of easing her stress with alcohol since, you know, We Do Not Talk About Our Problems. She is a solo drinker, which leads to her tendency to take one cocktail and turn it into a facedown, passed out kind of night. She’s in complete and utter denial that she has a problem, but yeah, she does.


Reason for playing:

Maggie was created in a desire to see a character of color that was from an area I was familiar with. Not only that, I wanted to see one from or at least close to the same ethnicity that I am. There was a distinct lack of all these qualities in characters I’ve seen and I figured that if no one else was going to do it, I would.

Maggie is still very much a work in progress both as a character and as a human, and I want this to shine through my playing of her in Baedal. She won’t have the best responses to things and won’t be as educated or wordly as some other characters may be and that is just fine with me. She’ll learn, hopefully, just from her environment with time and maybe make a friend in the process.


World Information:

With her world being a fictional but normal present-day New York City, there are no werewolves, shapeshifters, and anything of that ilk in it. You could probably say ghosts exist as her religion o’ choice (Santeria) involves a belief in these, but that’s about it.


History:

Maggie’s life started out fine and normal, if not uneventful. The only child of Marisol (a Dominican immigrant) and Andrew (a born and bred New Yorker), she was born mere months after the ink dried on their marriage certificate. Oh yes, there was a shotgun wedding to be had. For the first nine years, everything seemed okay to tiny Maggie. Her parents worked—Andrew was a security guard and Marisol was a home health attendant—and they seemed to like each other. It was, in fact, an act for the rest of the extended family and Maggie herself. Behind closed doors, they fought over everything under the sun. Bills, money, her mother’s dislike of having children in the first place, her father’s penchant for other women’s beds, so on and so forth. However, there’s only so much a couple can keep secret and one night, Andrew decided he had enough of this life, leaving Maggie and her mother for good. That was the night Maggie realized her nice life was a complete lie and she was barely nine years old at the time.

Andrew seemed to have disappeared into thin air without even a card on Maggie’s birthdays and as money became tighter, the greater Marisol’s regret of Maggie grew. Moving to a new apartment seemed to prove this as it turned out to be a one bedroom place with only a sofabed for Maggie to sleep on. An act that small was the sign to Maggie that she wasn’t very welcome in her own house. Being in a single parent housejold meant that Maggie spent a lot of time being a latchkey kid, even overnight sometimes if her mother had to work overtime. Then came the pressure to turn out like Marisol from Marisol herself. The day Maggie got her first period, their conversation wasn’t about tampons verses maxi pads, but about how boys will look at her now and only want one thing. There were parts about how they’ll get her pregnant because she would be a dumbass if she let one close to her and how they’ll leave her anydamnway just like her father did thrown in for good measure. How could she deny this living without a dad and an environment full of single moms? Maggie had all the proof that this was the absolute truth right in front of her face.

The older she got, the more withdrawn Maggie became but it was also the more she found her true love. It wasn’t a boy, of course. That would just be outrageous. It was cooking. Maybe it was the long, lonely and boring days of being a latchkey kid that sparked her interest or maybe it was trying to find something other than a bowl of cereal for dinner, but whatever it was, Maggie knew she had something special when her knife first diced an onion into bits.

So life went on, as normal as Maggie considered it (any therapist worth their salt would wholeheartedly disagree.) She went to school, came home, did her homework and her chores, tinkered in the kitchen, and when she was old enough to acquire working papers, she got a job in a greasy spoon as a busgirl. As the years went on, her responsibilities grew to waiting tables and in a fit of what was probably insanity from the head cook, a promotion to prep cook where she can be found today, dreaming of culinary school.

Those finely diced tomatoes in your salad? Maggie does those. Respect her art, man.