Beatrice Taylor [finished]

[beataylor]

Beatrice Meredith Taylor




"Leave me alone, I’m lonely.”

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Alias: Twirl
Other Characters: None
Rewritten City Found Via: Laz
Contact: Pm, please
Comments: "No, you see the way it works is, I say something mean to you and then you say something me to me and we continue on in that manner until you can't come up with anything else to say."
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00I. full name Beatrice Meredith Taylor
0II. canon or original Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing
III. years of age 37
0IV. orientation (optional) Not interested. She is focusing on her career right now.
00V. social statusMiddle Class
0VI. occupation Reporter, currently part of a twenty-four hour national news network's team.

00I. play by Katee Sackhoff
0II. body type She is fairly muscular, spending a good portion of her time taking care of herself. She likes to run, she likes to lift and she likes to hit things, so for a woman her shoulders a somewhat more broad than what Hollywood seems keen on perpetrating. She also does not worry about what she eats, not so much in looks as in health, so a few added pounds here or there can be spotted. Beatrice is certainly not overweight, but there is an undeniable fullness about her.
III. height 5' 6½"
0IV. eyes color A bright blue that holds intelligence about as well as it does her stubborn pride.
00V. description Beatrice is more than a little rough around the edges and she shows it. Her blond hair is almost always ragged and varies in styles as she gets sick of it and chops it. She is not thin, as a girl who enjoys a steak at her leisure, but nor is she overweight. Beatrice keeps a healthy medium, through daily morning runs and time spent at the gym, but she is not going to change her body to appeal to a man's sensibilities of woman's beauty. Beatrice carries herself with a confidence that is undeniable in her posture and stance as she ensures that she gets her way. She is also on the shorter side, especially in comparison with come of her male colleagues, but she makes up for it in terms of presence. Her jawline, hard and definitively set, and her quickly narrowed eyes can communicate displeasure and intimidation as well as sheer physical presence can. When Beatrice glares, it is not a dainty, womanly thing. She flicks her gaze around with the force that one might a whip and she wields her tongue in the same manner. She tends to wear suits over dresses, though she is no stranger to skirts. Her shirts vary in style but rarely color, Beatrice preferring the dark primary colors over anything else when it comes to work. Given the choice, she would wear jeans and some ratty old t-shirt to work, but that would not be professional, especially not when she's on camera.

00I. overall personality Beatrice is generally a little rough around the edges. A girl born to well off parents, Beatrice never really figured out when or how to keep her mouth shut. She has no problems voicing her opinions and those opinions seem to range in breadth as well as scope, but her favorite target bar none is the whole concept of marriage and love. How silly, sad and pathetic need one be to believe in everlasting love? She did. She likes to logically pick apart the arguments of others and applauds the decision for some to marry simply for tax or citizenship reasons. At least they're being honest. There is no white horse riding mystical man coming to sweep women off their feet and it's a waste of time to wait around expecting that.

Beatrice, in a word, is prickly. She spurns those she knows with a spite in her tongue, but does not always mean the sarcastic remarks she says. Sometimes, she means them good naturedly and only speaks them out of love or out of sheer opening. Beatrice will reel in her tongue for a select few and heeds the word of some she respects when she feels like it. She does enjoy having a good time, though she would much rather take her drinks at some seedy bar rather than go clubbing, and likes to joke with people who can keep up with her. Beatrice's standard setting when dealing with the world is just shy of problematic, but she is more than happy to let her hair down with those she cares about. Granted, though, it does tend to take a lot of work to get into her good graces and even then those aren't free of her tongue. Hero is about the only person she will willingly censor herself around, though even a censored Beatrice is an outspoken Beatrice.

She can be and generally is incredibly bitter, even for the caliber of professional woman she is aiming to be. She is a general sort of workaholic, in that she doesn't really have anyplace else to go, but will spurn work in favor of her own little projects. Beatrice resents human interest pieces, where she has to paint a smile on her face and pretend to be gracious for the sake of the camera, so she has endeavored to keep herself from doing them as much as possible. On camera, she may smile but she is no less easy on those unfortunate enough to be interviewed by her. Off camera, that same smile gets a little more of a sarcastic edge to it. She likes to keep people at arms length, as much as possible. She doesn't want to reveal her fears or her insecurities to anyone, often believing that they will use them against her, so she stays cynical. She stays sarcastic and says she is waiting for a man to catch up to her level.
0II. strengths Beatrice is very driven, which is what has helped her to excel in what she sees as a man's world. She enjoys picking apart puzzles and does not mind whose toes she must step on in order to do so. Beatrice also enjoys rocking the boat, a skill she has perfected over the years of many increasingly more scandalized faces. Beatrice is a woman who understands what is proper to say in correct company and then says the opposite anyway, simply to see the reactions. She does know how to be diplomatic, though she saves that ability for only the most special of occasions. She is as intelligent as she is eloquent and if she were less so she perhaps would be less abrasive.
III. weaknesses A prideful, outspoken woman, Beatrice can let her tongue and her temper rule her. She is loathe to forgive wrongs, not matter how well or by whom they are justified, and similarly will not tolerate incompetence. She has a habit of making enemies with her tongue and is sometimes unclear as to how she has done so. She always speaks her mind, even to her detriment, and that has kept her from certain advancements over the years. Though she puts up a brave and often cynical, scornful front, Beatrice is afraid to be truly vulnerable with another human being, man or woman. She fears being controlled, she fears being manipulated and she has been burned one too many times and much too well, so Beatrice has endeavored to keep everyone at arm's length, for all she fears what that could do to herself down the line.
0IV. goals Right now she'd love to convince her boss, Leo, that she is the perfect candidate for the anchor's position that she knows, she just knows is going to be up for grabs soon. Doing thirty second bits on national television is great and all, but she has other ambitions. Other than that, she can't think of a damn thing. Perhaps to move from her horrible little apartment and forget about a certain someone who used to frequent it but aside from that, she really can't fathom what else.

00I. notable family & friends
Henry and Meredith Taylor, parents, killed in a car accident when she was seventeen.
Leo (Leonato) _____ The man has been like a father to her since her own parents passed and he is one of the few men that Beatrice respects enough to listen to. Most of the time.
Hero ______ The innocent little one, at least from Beatrice's perspective, whom Beatrice considers like the little sister she never had.
Benedick _____ The Mistake, so much so that he deserves every bit of scorn in that capital letter.
0II. overall history
From the time she was small, her parents had lamented the fact that she'd not been born a boy. It was certainly where she seemed to thrive. As a young girl, Beatrice did not want to play dolls and dress up with the other girls, she had always preferred the louder games with the boys, such as the one where they pretended to sword fight with sticks and she would always win. She played baseball on the boy's team up until her early preteens, when she was informed that girls would no longer be allowed. She could try softball instead. Beatrice reacted to this as maturely as a scorned twelve year old could and quit the sport entirely.

Why did the two genders have to be divided along such lines? Beatrice Taylor never understood why society kept up with the social divisions that, clearly, no longer applied. Stay at home dads and working mothers were already common. Women could excel at anything that men could do and women did not have the monopoly on perfection in domestic tasks either. In middle school Beatrice took up chess and made a few female friends, though the relationships were rarely close and tended to be short. She just did not understand this obsession, the whole bloody-minded distraction of falling in and out of love in the space of a phone call. True love, that she could understand. An equal partnership. But the relationships she had in high school were hardly that. Either the boy wanted to bend to her every will, letting her every whim be his whole world, or the boy expected the same from her. Bored, Beatrice stopped dating altogether.

Just before she'd have to leave for college, Beatrice lost her parents to a drunk driver. She took a year off to recuperate with her Uncle Leo, who worked as a director for a news station. He inspired her to look at journalism as an option and when Beatrice finally made it to college, she declared it as her major almost instantly. In college, she found an outlet for her outspoken tongue in the school paper. Quickly, she clawed her way up through the ranks until she was the editor-in-chief come the second half of her sophomore year.

She started at a little local news outlet in internships when she was still in school. From there, the local station hired her and in no time at all she was on camera more times than the anchor himself. Beatrice wasn't interested in settling down behind a desk, not just yet, so after a few years on the local circuit she moved to New York to look for a job. She got her first job as a reporter at another local station, waiting for a position to open up at a national news network and as soon as one did, she jumped on it. Beatrice produced the National Nightly News for a year before she was allowed back on camera, and by the time she was she was already past thirty.

It was then that she met Benedick. He called her Bea, something that should have annoyed her but didn't for some, unfathomable reason. She wasn't so young, not entirely, but she was stupid and naive and ate up his bullshit as if he were spoon-feeding it to her. She fell in love. For a time, she was happy. More than happy, she was ecstatic. Perhaps she married too much responsibility, too many hopes to this one man, perhaps she was setting herself up for the fall, but whatever the reason she was in love. Stupidly, blindingly in love. Her natural defenses fell and though they sparred verbally, Beatrice kept the majority of the venom from her voice. She had always been at least polite but now she had become almost pleasant. Anniversaries she'd never before experienced were on the horizon and on one of those she sat, waiting, in an expensive restaurant for him to show.

Her own bitterness has tinted what came next, so much so that she cannot remember if he was truly so evil or whether it was just her imagination justifying his actions. Though, in her mind, there is no justification for leaving her alone, on their anniversary, waiting for him to show up to dinner and to only send the waiter with, "The mousier said to tell you, 'nothing personal'." She has since decided that she would like to kill him, though after the third bottle of wine she couldn't afford, it has settled to simply wishing to make his life a living hell. Since he was unavailable, she took it out on everyone else.

Three years have passed and, dammit, she is no more better off than she had been when she was with him. For all she has opted to focus on her career, she's still at the same network working the same kind of stories and doing the same kind of reports. The reports vary in subject matter and it is a daily fight to keep her off of the more "girly" human interest topics, but she is still doing the same damn thing. If she had made anchor by now, then she could have rubbed his face in it should she ever see him again. Beatrice has tried her best to convince herself that she doesn't think about him, but there hasn't really been anyone since him to distract her. Mostly, she spends her time trying to convince herself that she can be an independent woman for the rest of her life, though in light of a stalling career it is a somewhat difficult sell. The rage has diminished, but only in so far as she hasn't seen or heard of him since.
III. sample post

"Tim, back to you."

Beatrice waited until a count of ten to forcibly remove the smile from her face, letting it fall away from her lips as she unhinged her jaw from the damnable position. She hated doing human interest pieces, though doing them live was far better than prerecording them. If it was live, then Leo couldn't tell her to act nicer or do it again "but really smile this time!" If he wanted to waste his time talking about a feel-good economic conference that would do about jack squat for actually changing things, then he could do it. See how he smiled when they spiral into the worst economic depression of recent times.

She lifted her arms so that the cameraman could unhook her from the mic and holding out her earpiece, stepping down off the small box he'd had her up on so the back of her head was against the pristine looking building and not a hot-dog stand. Oh, the glorious life of broadcast journalism. "Thanks, John," she said, because she was not entirely without manners, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. It was long now, but she had a feeling she would not be able to keep it that length for too much longer. Not at this rate. She tussled her hair until it was mussed and hung far more naturally, then looked up at John. The man was a weasel, for all he was a damn good cameraman, but the constant looks to her ass when he thought she wasn't looking meant that she felt no guilt for simply giving him a wave and on her way out tossing him a, "See you back at the station!" It wasn't like she could help him take his stuff down. Cameramen got finicky when reporters tried to touch their stuff.

Her heels clicked against the pavement as she made her way down the street, intent on some kind of horrible pastry-like substance as a reward for the piece she'd just done. Of course, she had gotten on television so she really shouldn't be complaining, but she would much rather have been doing something that let her actually use that lump three feet above her ass that some would call a brain. Leo owed her at least one apple tart off the company credit card.

Her feet had only just begun to throb out their protests to how much force she was putting into walking when she entered a little side cafe. It was crowded and Beatrice made a small face, not slowing her pace any as she weaved in and out of the people. So intent was she on getting to the nice person behind the counter that she didn't notice that she was on a collision course until she collided with someone else. Her initial snapped reaction of "Watch it!" quickly turned into a calmer, guiltier, "Shit." Her elbow had quite successfully knocked the person's food out of their hands, where it landed jam side down on the floor.

"Buy you another?" she offered, because it was easier than saying she was sorry. Reaching into her pocket, she held up a card with two fingers and gave a small, hopefully disarming smile. "Company credit card."

SYR INTEGRA of CAUTION 2.0 created this, modified by Yols with Shakespeare lines.

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ACCEPTED!

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Oh Beatrice, Beatrice. Easily one of my absolute favorite Shakespeare creations (so proclaims the feminist in me). Prime example of an incredibly strong, progressive, female character with too sharp edges, but a certain vulnerability at her core. You've definitely captured her essence exquisitely here. That fire, that wit, that fixed cynicism and her indomitable spirit are certainly aspects of her to be admired and they are all present in that sample. Great modernization. Can't wait to see how she gets on around here. ^^