OUT OF CHARACTER !
taryn !
twenty-one +
she/her pronouns.
fun (?) fact: was awake for a solid 72 hours straight this week bc of insomnia. love that for me
IN CHARACTER !
babe miranda, thirty-five, ward ranch manager.
formerly a ward wrangler, your local rodeo queen, and wild child (is that title really outdated?? just the child part)
your girlhood is exhibited on the floor beneath the passenger seat, a museum display of livelihood that rattles and shifts with each bend in the road and every twist in fate: emptied tin cans and flattened pennies engraved with carnival brands, flowers torn up from the roadside, guts ripped from dysfunctional scanners and overheated radars you rest your wet socks on. you spend this early life, without metaphor, as an accessory to the storm ā packed into your fatherās truck, running towards the things everyone else hides from. we chase storms, he tells you one night, so that one day there wonāt be any more running ā toward or away. weāll just stand there and let them pass over us, clean as a sheet.
babe grows up the daughter to a meteorologist and storm chaser, her life between the ages of six and twelve something nomadic and dangerous, home-schooled from the passengers seat by her eccentric father while they floored through cornfields to track a twister.
at twelve they roll into great falls, her father having anticipated a hurricane rolling through the area in the oncoming days. at the local gas station they meet a man who would invite them to dinner after hearing about their intentions in the city - a gesture theyād grown used to given babeās fatherās warm charm and the southern hospitality of the great plains. unexpected was the land they pulled up onto that evening - jim wardās ranch, sprawling as godās eyeline.
babe is instantly besotted by everything she sees and the promise of everything she canāt. by the end of dinner, jim ward is equally interest in the advantages of a storm-reader on his property. a guest house is offered for the weekend, and in the end they never leave. a few months later jim ward sees hector miranda appointed as a meteorologist for the town, allowing the two-person family to live on his lands. quid pro quo, that seems to mean he gets an extra early heads-up when disastrous winds are rolling through
she grows wild once sheās put roots down - not in the sense of a wayward child but in the sense of dandelions and weeds, rocketing up and around everything in sight. catch preteen babe in the fields by moonlight, watching the switchgrass curl in the wind, or wandering too close to the howls at the edge of the woods. moving from girlhood to womanhood sees that wildness turns from the kind of weeds to the sort belonging to foxes and coyotes and wildcats, slick and coy. invents shipās mast with the local boys, drinks whiskey with the old ranch hands, walks off from bush parties to skinny dip in the lake, etc etc.
dad expects her to return to their lifestyle after graduation, chasing degrees and then storms across the plains. jim ward offers her a job contract and a silent nod towards the hands cabin. nobody talks about the fact that this shouldnāt have been a choice she had to make. her father leaves down the dirt road and babe packs up and moves into an old cabin as the new wrangler. any stone the wards need turned, she throws her whole body into. itās how she got all these bruises.Ā
throw in an Incident in her early twenties wherein babe enters the woods wearing white and returns in blood, only for the wards to hand her a map, a pen, and some bleach...
undying loyalty to jim ward/the ward ranch as an entity, but someone should probably start to break that down. do you love it because you love it or do you love it because it was the manifestation of all the things you never had as a child or because you were pitted against your own father by the man who mentored you or because you feel you owe a debt ??? WHOSE TO SAY
promoted to manager of the biggest goddamn ranch in the country this year by a very sick old man and plans to do whatever necessary to ensure its continued success <3
too old for the wild child label, but still a Thoroughly Untamed Woman
WANTED PLOTS & CONNECTIONS !
if you want to plot pre-opening (pretty please w sugar on top??) you can find me at miss atomic bomb#3520 on discord !! im already obsessed w all your chars, please donāt mind me choking on my love in your comments
wild horses couldnāt tear me away / ride or die best friends. they fight frequently and occasionally pretend like theyāre calling it quits on one another, but itās never gonna happen. theyāre in it for life
you knew what you were doing / babeās first serious love and/or heartbreak, 10-15ish years ago.. and yet thereās still tension
by way of moonshine / drinking buddies, always lapsing into stories of the shit theyāve done
itās babe, not baby / ward ranch hands with a crush on the hot lady in charge, hi hello
whatās it to you / rivals from the hawthorne family/ranch !! babe takes a very āi donāt start shit but iāll be the one to finish itā approach
your name flat against the roof of my mouth / friends with benefits! a few angles to consider: longstanding fwbs with feelings they simply will not discuss; we used to seriously date and now we just hook up; drinking buddies who always swear its never gonna happen again; weād-be-in-hell-water-if-anyone-found-out
wear the brand on your upturned wrist / ward ranchers/cow bosses/hands etc that either got into serious shit and needed babeās help to get out of, of vice versa
weed in the garden / anyone who wants to challenge babeās authority on the ranch... vibrating eye emojis
like a glass bottle against the wall / a duo who used to get up to No Good together, back when they were younger and particularly wild - maybe shit went sideways or they just figured it was better they grow tf up. bonus points for messy romantic entanglement.
and all the other good stuff! exes, friends, enemies, found family, etc!
( @greatfallstemp )
