STATION 72 | app.

[chastised]

PLAYER INFO
Name: Marie
Contact: sharknado @ plurk
Are you over 18?: Yeah!

CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Malia Tate (Hale)
Canon: Teen Wolf
Canon Point: 4x04, prior to the full moon

Appearance:

Age: 17

Setting:

Teen Wolf is set in the fictitious town of Beacon Hills, during probably 2012 (it’s complicated). Typically the world is largely the same as with our own with the exception of (surprise surprise) supernatural creatures. blah blah more here

History: Malia Tate at the Teen Wolf wiki.
Personality:

❝ if hunting had been bad that season, i would eat her ❞

Malia has spent half her life as a coyote. There's no getting around that, and it's apparent from the get-go that there's something inherently off about the way Malia handles...just about everything, really. That isn't to say that she is completely underdeveloped emotionally, or that she completely lacks empathy, but certainly she could use a little polishing in some departments. Being friends with Scott McCall and company obviously comes with a heavy emphasis on the Power of Friendship™, and that's one of the social cues that Malia struggles with the most. She has friends - she went all the way to Mexico on a dangerous mission for no reason other than to offer a little more protection for these friends of hers - but it isn't such a priority to her that self-preservation goes out the window. She likes them, she does, and she feels an important bond between them - but in the animal kingdom things don't quite play out the same way, and Malia often needs reminding that taking the easy way out to save her own skin isn't always necessary any more. As Stiles puts it - "rules of the animal kingdom don't apply to friends".

Emotionally, she's so-so at best. Of course she isn't completely underdeveloped, she can do the basics as well as anyone else, but there is a noted lack of finesse about the extremes. When it comes to establishing things she truly feels passionate about, or handling her anger in a healthy way, that's where the difficulties start to shine through. The thing is, she's never had to learn how to process them before. As a coyote, anger management hadn't exactly been a huge priority, and while she'd obviously found preferences, obviously felt happiness and sadness, and she'd never stopped being a human that had turned into a coyote, there's a lot of lessons to be learned over nine years of emotional growth that she just hasn't had the same kind of access to. People are patient with her - perhaps more than she deserves at times - and doing their best to teach what they can over the short space of time that she's had these friends back in her life, but it isn't exactly like these developments are going to happen overnight.

❝ red means i have no clue. i'm mostly using red ❞

Social and emotional cues aren't the only thing she's struggling with, either. Malia's last standard schooling was at age eight, and catching up has been troublesome at best, intensely frustrating at worst. It's during these times that some of her worst qualities come out and her control even slips - being forced to publicly demonstrate that lack of knowledge on the blackboard for all to see results in her claws slipping out without her even noticing. She tries to bail on classes, ends up frustrated and angry at the lengths she has to go to while trying to match her classmates, and more than anything she shows herself as vulnerable.

This is important, if only because it's something you so rarely see in Malia. In any situation, Malia is all about a tough front. She's the epitome of hard candy with a soft gooey centre, with a steeled jaw and aggressive growl ready for any kind of confrontation. It isn't until she's faced with a problem that she can't fight, something that she can't punch or slash into submission, that we see the real vulnerable side of Malia. At the core of things, she's genuinely distressed at being perceived as stupid, genuinely distressed by the fact that she can't wrap her head around algebra, and it's a perspective that is only fleetingly displayed. For almost all other opportunities, she'll take fight over flight. Malia will almost always choose the path of aggression, and it's only when that option is taken away that we get to see anything else shine through.

❝ i'm a werecoyote who murdered her own family ❞

A lot of that aggression she feels is sourced in guilt. No matter how much time she's spent as a coyote, no matter how long she chooses to ignore the issue and refuses to deal with the emotional fallout of the car accident, for Malia there is no getting away from the fact that she feels utterly responsible for the deaths of her mother and sister. In her mind she is completely to blame, and the fear and guilt that comes with her is partly why she has yet to learn to control her shifting over the full moon. After all, if she hadn't been in the car (if she hadn't told her mom she wished they were dead) they'd still be alive today, and even though she had no way of knowing her true parentage and the family traits that came with that, she still considers both the accident and her animalistic urges to attack and eat her dying family to be proof that she is too dangerous to be around.

Ultimately Malia cannot let herself forget that night nine years ago, when her loss of control resulted in the death of two of the three of her family members. The guilt she feels has had a profound impact on Malia's ability to move on, even driven a wedge between her and her father. She no longer knows how to look him in the eye with the knowledge of her role in their family's death, especially given how little he knows. He's her last living relative - with the exception of the Hale family, though she doesn't know about her adoption yet - and she can't even bring herself to face him because of the shame she feels. Until she finds a way to forgive herself for the deaths of her family, Malia will likely always feel a call to return to being fully coyote.

❝ what if i hurt you? ❞

Obviously this lack of control poses a problem - particularly with Stiles, arguably the closest of her new found friends, who won't take no for an answer when it comes to assisting all areas of Malia's transition into were-personhood. That includes accompanying her during her shifts, but she still has to be chained up in Lydia's basement to ensure both his safety and the safety of anyone in the nearby vicinity. There's no way she believes that the rage that consumes her during the full moon can be controlled, no matter how much Stiles and Scott coach her in finding an anchor, and the evidence of that is everywhere in the deep scratches of the basement and tearing in her restraints.

She's scared. She doesn't let people see it, she tries to hide it behind a blunt and brash personality and an aggressive front, but Malia is scared. She's scared of being responsible for more people's death, she's scared of messing up again and losing more people she cares about. She's scared of letting people in, just in case they get too close and she ends up doing more damage to their lives than good. She's scared, as scared as any seventeen year old girl would be in her situation, and it's this that demonstrates just how human Malia really is. She may have spent half her life in an animal form, and she may have tried desperately to forget what it was like to be anything other than a coyote, but it's very clear that Malia Tate is painfully, intensely human.

Canon Abilities/Skills:

STRENGTHS
⇒ heightened senses; as a result of her being a were-creature, malia has exhibited heightened senses and smells - although it is not automatic. she does not yet have full control over this aspect of her power, and as a result has to concentrate or block out other external stimuli to be able to get any real use out of it (i.e. needing a very strong scent to track, having to try and block out other sounds to focus her hearing, etc.). when either incredibly near to a person or focusing hard enough, malia can use this heightened sense of smell to 'sense' things like fear and anxiety in a person.
⇒ healing; with the exception of fatal wounds, werecoyotes have an ability to heal on par with the other were-creatures on the show and most injuries heal within minutes/hours. as this is something that pretty much runs on autopilot malia hasn't needed to learn to control this, with the exception of particularly severe injuries/wounds, where it has to be consciously decided upon. as with the rest of the were-abilities, for the time being at least malia sucks at that too. incidentally this also means that she can't get drunk, and one would assume that drugs would be similarly useless.
⇒ strength; as with healing this is (for the most part) an autopilot style ability. she demonstrates a disproportionate amount of strength for her size/frame (like so) and when focusing can do things like snapping metal padlocks with her bare hands. there is also a marked increase in her agility and stamina to go with this strength, also an unconscious ability that she doesn't exactly need to train as such.
⇒ shifting; perhaps not a strength but certainly an ability, malia spent eight years of her life as a coyote, fully formed, with the only common trait between her animal and human form being the glowing blue eyes. since being forced back into a human state by scott she has only managed to get as far as a half shift brought on by the full moon, and no longer seems to be able to change into a full coyote.

WEAKNESSES.
⇐ full moon; given that malia has spent around half her life in a complete animal form, she has never had to learn control during the full moon. as a result she still has a lot of difficulty controlling herself and needs to be restrained during full moons to completely prevent any risk of her attacking someone.
⇐ wolfsbane + co; werecoyotes in this world seem to have all the same weaknesses as werewolves, two of those most notable ones being the substances of wolfsbane and mountain ash. mountain ash is usually used to prevent were-creatures from passing through areas or touching certain objects, as a kind of barrier. wolfsbane is a type of plant that can be administered in just about anyway (gas, laced into liquids, administered with weapons like bullets and blades, powders) and has a variety of effects based on the way in which they came in contact with the plant. traits common to the methods is that they seem to remove control over the shifting and cause unconsciousness and/or weakness, but consistency in mythology is admittedly not this show's forte, so differences in reactions could be chalked up to both methods and the writing inconsistency.
⇐ mortal wounds; although were-things can heal, there are some wounds they can't do much about. removal of the head, heart, setting on fire, pretty much any instant or quickly-fatal injury is something they can't recover from. this can be worsened by administering something like wolfsbane, or if the injuries have come from an alpha. it's essentially a race against time of injury vs. healing factor, and if the injury is severe enough, it will still kill her. werecoyotes aren't immortal.

ON STATION 72
Symbiote Specialization: IOTA
Symbiote Ability:
Inventory:
Inventory:

→ the restraints malia uses during the full moon
→ this outfit (blue sweater/pink t shirt/shorts/doc marten style boots)

SAMPLES
Samples: ONE. TWO. THREE.

Rescue Write-up: