Teek Virtanen

Taika Helena Virtanen, known to all and sundry as Teek, is a youngish female human working in the Department of Mary Sues, and has been in the PPC since June 2008. She is written by Lycaenion.

Appearance
Teek is pretty much your average World One adolescent human female, roughly 5'3" in height and on the stocky side. Her eyes are a sort of mucky Generic Medium Brown; her hair, which is far more readily noticeable, is dark brown, thick, and wild, and has had bright orange streaks dyed into it, although these are now fading as her roots grow out.

Her clothing is never given much description, since she doesn't much care; she can, however, usually be found in cargo pants or jeans, and has a wide variety of Queen and Star Trek T-shirts.

''Note: Some people tend to infer that, since Teek is based somewhat off Lycaenion, her writer, they look (more or less) exactly alike. This is not, in fact, true, although Lycaenion's hair did once look slightly similar.''

Personality
Teek is an extrovert in the extreme; everything else is just details. She is usually quite friendly to new people, although the length of time in which things stay that way is variable. She will frequently greet strangers with the Vulcan salute, or perhaps a Monty Python quote. Her main weakness lies in her absolute lack of patience: she is rash and impulsive, and will say or act on whatever enters her head.

Being a teenager, she is capable of sulkiness at astounding levels, and is often more stubborn than she wants to admit. This has not, in the PPC, served her all that well thus far.

Her temper is mercurial and extremely short. Fortunately, however, she calms down with equal speed once things have been sorted out (not including the probability that she'll flare up again in five seconds or less). She tends to talk quickly when angry or excited, to the point of being unintelligible (she claims to have once topped warp five). She curses loudly and at the slightest provocation, using mostly Klingon and British swear words (her father taught her the former, her cousins the latter). Her epithets tend to be creative and often heavily fandom-influenced.

Teek does not hold well at all with arrogance; she hates few things more than being made to seem childish or stupid. She values honor and fair play to a large extent, but that's not to say she has always been entirely truthful, especially when in conflict with her parents.

She's a very devout Trekkie, though she also loves The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python. Her sole concessions to fantasy are Discworld and Harry Potter, the latter of which was her very first fandom.

For fighting and other related pursuits (including sporting activities), her most favoured strategy was to howl, flail wildly, and hope for the best; however, she has received considerable training by Rilwen Shadowflame and Russell Holston, which has focused her considerably, if not entirely calmed her down. Her weapons, which she will not hesitate to use or threaten someone with, are a lightsaber (red) and a mek'leth (a medium-sized Klingon blade weapon), both given to her by Beethoven Sonata when she promised to join the Flower Paranoia Society (don't ask).

Agent History
Like many agents, Teek is not blessed (or cursed) with much in the way of an eventful backstory. Harbouring increasing feelings of inadequacy compared to all the exciting residents of HQ, she no longer volunteers much about her past. It is known, however, that her father (who got her into Star Trek) was a college professor and her mother a marine biologist, that she is half-Polish, half-Finnish, that she once spent a year with her cousins in England (and there discovered most of her vocabulary, as well as the works of Terry Pratchett), lived in Madison, Wisconsin before joining the PPC, and that she disliked nearly everything about school except for biology class and the bits that involved reading.

As she tells it, around the age of thirteen, she had been allowed to play on the computers in the library at the college where her father worked, and inevitably discovered fanfiction whilst roaming the Internet. Subsequent attempts of her own ("for Harry Potter and Star Trek, and one time I tried both at once &mdash; that was the worst of the lot") were, for obvious reasons, not received all that well.

Her nature being what it is, after learning a bit of the difference between good and bad fic, she retaliated with flames of her own, and then went to seek out new targets among the rest of her hapless demographic.

After seeing the flame war that followed one of Teek's particularly savage attacks, an anonymous passer-by sent her a link to the PPC, with a simple note to the effect that her mindset could be put to better use.

Having no idea what the hell she wanted to do with her impending life, and throwing to the winds the fact that she was about to start her sophomore year of high school, Teek joined.

The rest, of course, is history.

Partners
Upon being released from Basic Training around late July 2008 HST, Teek joined the Department of Floaters and was partnered with Crebaina Aisenyeva, an eighteen-year-old from Lyra's world in the His Dark Materials continuum. The two experienced some difficulty working together, but had (almost) begun to establish a slight rapport by the end of their second mission.

Then, of course, said mission induced a sort of post-traumatic stress reaction in poor Crebaina, which led to her placement in FicPsych.

As a consequence, Teek was given a temporary partner, a Cardassian recently exiled from DMSE&R, by the name of Crelmos. To say that they did not get along is to say, for example, that absolute zero is "a bit on the nippy side."

After more than a year of this partnership, during which Teek's already volatile temper steadily frayed towards the mental approximation of the Chernobyl disaster, and both of them could have filled books with inventive ways to murder one another, the Flowers finally relented. Teek was then transferred to the DMS and partnered with Kayla Richards, a veteran agent who, although friendly, refused to put up with any of her acquired surliness. This situation persists as of now, and seems promising.

Mission Logs
Home: Response Centre #1764

Teek's missions with Kayla may also be found here.

Teek's currently published missions, organised by partner, are as follows.

Partnered with Crebaina

 * "It's the Internet, What Did You Expect?" (Harry Potter)
 * "[Insert Expletive Here ," Part 1,] Part 2 (His Dark Materials), with April Halloway (DMS)

Partnered with Crelmos

 * "To Boredly Go" (Lord of the Rings)
 * "And the Goddess Did Wangst, and Spake Annoyingly Unto the People" (Harry Potter)
 * "Inconceivable Conceptions" (Harry Potter)
 * Interlude: "PPC Interlude of Doom," with Cavan Shenn (DF)

Partnered with Kayla

 * Interlude: "Third Time's the Charm"
 * Teek is re-partnered with Kayla
 * Interlude: "Meeting the Squad," Part 1, Part 2
 * Exactly what it says on the tin: Teek meets Kayla's fellow Raiders.
 * "That Darn Cat" (Discworld)
 * Interlude: "A Cover Story"
 * Kayla and the squad help Teek with family issues.