Tal

Description

A fairly tall, athletic woman approaching her thirties, Tal is dark of hair and eye, and has skin that has seen much of the sun.

History

Talya “Tal” Shoshani grew up transitioning between Tel Aviv and San Diego, her parents having divorced not long after she was born, and both too stubborn to be able to share the same continent. Her parents weren’t strictly religious, but they were adamant Zionists, as were her grandparents. On her father’s side her grandparents were holocaust survivors from Poland and on her mother’s side her grandparents had spent the war in America, supporting the war effort. She grew up hearing of her people's need for a homeland, the evil that had been wrought upon them for thousands of years while they wandered without one, and of the looming threats that their neighbors posed. The Palestinian uprising before the Oslo Accords only seemed to reinforce the danger her country faced, and she felt the shadow of war and conflict hovering over her childhood. When she turned 18, in 2005, she volunteered for the combat battalion Karakal (Caracal), determined to help defend her nation, her people, and to fight their enemies. She got her chance in 2006, when the Israeli-Lebanon war began.

Tal was deployed against the Hezbollah soldiers in southern Lebanon and this was her first true taste of warfare. The Hezbollah were equally well armed and well trained and they fought with coordinated tactics that rivaled the IDF’s. Talya saw some of her friends die and she saw civilians gunned down, by Hezbollah and Israeli bullets alike. She left the war feeling drained. Part of her knew that she had fought to protect her nation, but another part felt slick red liquid seeping into her skin. So many of the firefights had ended with civilian bodies littering the casualties, and it was impossible to tell just whose bullets were responsible for taking their lives...

...And it just got worse in 2008, when the Gaza War began...

Shaken, she waited until her contract with the government was up, but uncomfortable with the thought of abandoning the defense of her people, she joined up with the Magav Border Guard. She was accepted, though some of her time was spent simply training new recruits, using some of the special training she'd received after the Gaza Was. Eventually, however, she was transitioned into active patrols. The rest of her career with the Border Police was spent in the West Bank, where she had intimate contact with the people of Palestine, and saw first hand the oppressive conditions and injustice that they were forced to endure. The propaganda she'd been fed as a child was finally consumed, and she felt an oppressive shame at what her people were doing, the legacy that they'd truly embraced after the shadow of the third reich, and so she resolved to do something about.

Her good intentions aside, as soon as her sympathies were known, Tal found herself suddenly unwelcome, no matter what her service record looked like, and before long she felt herself getting pushed out of the Magav. Not that she felt particularly unhappy by that point, as most of her colleagues had transformed from people she'd gladly have watching her back, to people she despised. Unsure what to do, Tal decided that it was time that she took a sabbatical and traveled back to the US, to see her mother and other family and learn more about what she needed to know to truly make a difference.

Her homecoming was bittersweet, however, for her family's views, even in America, seemed to match those of her colleagues back in Israel, and it was a struggle to find a way to coexist among them while trying to change their minds. And it only got worse when she began to see things again. Things she hadn't seen since 2008, things that she'd thought were simply illusions created by chaos and stress, yet illusions which soon proved to be all to real when one of her cousins was found dead.

Finding herself suddenly enlisted in a new war, Tal took up a gun again and began to hunt. Though it turned out that she was not alone. Soon, she found others that had also stepped into the darkness, and with them, Tal started a new life.