Profile

This is Tally Youngblood, protagonist of the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. Currently, she is being used at thewake_rp.


Some useful notes on Tally:

Tally is a Special. She is more than pretty; she has what's described as a "cruel" beauty, with sharper facial features, razor teeth, and black eyes. Back home, she would be in such contrast to the normal, soft Pretties that she'd scare the shit out of anyone she came into contact with. In Nautilus...not so much, when you have giant robots, a singing murderer, and Pyramid Head.

Tally is illegal. The Special operation so alters the mind and body that Tally is more a robot than a person. Her emotions are exacerbated and warped to the point where she is either extremely angry or extremely calculating. All the time. She also has "morphological violations"--the addition of superhuman reflexes, infrared vision, sleeper darts in her fingers...she is basically a war machine.
All the shit Tally has in/on her body, some of which I probably forgot: sleeper darts in her fingers. Skintenna. Flash tattoos (spin to her pulse, visible in icons). Chips in her fingers that, when pressed to solid objects such as windows, channel sound into her skintenna (great for spywork). Infrared vision, and probably other visions that never got mentioned (x-ray?). Razor teeth. Will add more when I think of it.

Tally is working to change. From where I pulled her in canon, Tally has just left society, working with her friend David to keep the newly-liberated cities from pushing out into the wild. David is an ugly and therefore difficult for Tally in her altered state to deal with. She is trying to rewire her mind, but her bouts of anger and frustration usually crop up.


Some useful notes on the Uglies society:

Some three hundred years prior to Uglies, a scientist created a bacteria that ate the world's gasoline. This somehow caused all the Rusties to die. Don't ask me; I didn't make this shit up. Anyway, soon enough, city-states began to develop.

Tally's city (unnamed in the books, but which I have named "Haven" for the sake of convenience, and which is located near Death Valley) and others like it began the operation--a complete overhaul of a person to make him or her stunningly pretty. This erased prejudice, jealousy, and all sorts of other things that the new societies reasoned had something to do with humanity's previous disasters.

But it also changed the mind, by putting lesions in key parts of the brain. So it wasn't that evolution (as Tally's society taught) was being beaten by having everyone look the same, so much as it was people were mentally incapable of being petty, jealous, or anything but conforming.

Outside of the cities, a wilderness camp called the Smoke was created. Smokies lived like regular people, without the operation. David was their leader, and his parents had left their city (Haven, as it turned out) because they felt the lesions were unethical. They cured each other and raised David outside the city.

There was also Special Circumstances. Haven was the only city to have these. They acted mostly as border patrol, keeping uglies and new pretties from leaving the city. Or, as Tally puts it, "keeping the uglies down and the pretties stupid." Most people think Special Circumstances is a myth. So does Tally, until she meets them.

Uglies who don't want the operation sneak out of their cities to join the Smoke. Dr. Cable, head of Special Circumstances, primarily uses her Specials to keep this from happening. Later, she uses the Specials to keep David's lesion cure from getting into the city.


Some slang to get used to hearing from Tally:

bubbly -- the state of being in a clear mind, of beating the lesions (used for pretties)
icy -- the state of being in a clear mind (used for Specials)
bubblehead -- a pretty
Cutter -- the group of Specials to which Tally belonged. Cutters use--you guessed it--cutting to get their icy clarity
Rusty -- anyone pre-disaster. Typically derided for being environmentally destructive and unreasonable
Smoky -- a member of the Smoke
littlie -- a kid
crumbly -- an old person


I'm usually in thewakechat if you have questions.

DISCLAIMER: It's not my fault Tally's a Sue. It's Scott's. :/