The not-space of her family home had always been a comfort, and visiting Grampas Lane through his own selection of constructed spaces filled her youth. Because her family are not only quite powerful entities, but spread among numerous dimensions, Teala has always been a well-traveled girl. Turquoise and Lexie don't seem like a typical couple, save for the fact that they enjoy quite a few pasttimes together. They'd only met after the Rookery was created, even though there was a bit of overlap when Repurposed Lane had been working at Carramba: most of the now-adult folks living on his native Earth only followed him out to the Rookery after the dragons came. Lexie spotted Turquoise easily, when he was visiting the construction site for their dragonry. A new energy signal to examine? Why don't mind if she did - Turq didn't mind, that's for sure. He was there when she was befriended by her Hivewing friend, she rooted him on when he participated in Carramba's Road Rally.
Turquoise's ability to create their own private 'home' in the Vortessence bled into their daughter, infusing her with Convocation-level energy. As granddads Keenan Lane and The Other Keenan Lane (that's how she calls them, and neither of them will stop her) noticed her sneaking around their private constructs, her powers would grow quickly... it was best that she learn how to manage them before she got lost in the multiverse. Unlike some of their errant descendants, Teala doesn't need to have a shard of a Xenian crystal to allow them to home in on her, she's bright enough as it is against the Vortal backdrop. When she enters one of their Constructs, most often they'll just watch from afar to see if she wants something in particular there, sometimes dropping in to have a conversation, or help her reach something, but usually she's in and out knowing exactly what to look for. The Bayou, Lane Mansion, a strange bunch of ruins of numerous Earth towns, the Grounds themselves, anything that one or more of the Lanes have moved from dimension to dimension, or created outright, are home to this energetic girl. She can go into one Construct and come out from another, in another dimension entirely, and even as a small child she seemed to know just where to go next.
She's one of the few kids among the Repurposed Earth group that didn't need Icarus treatments to boost her body or Vortal abilities. Given she has remarkably powerful ancestry, and her mother was treated herself, the benefits of that processing still show up in her. She's small, like her mother, and lean like her dad, she'll always be petite but don't let that fool you. The fact is she's extremely durable and hard to hurt, rebounds quickly from any real injury, and has the speed to make sure that those injuries don't occur very often. Her toddler years were spent in that loving family Construct, but still they would go to a number of locations, and typical childhood scrapes and bumps and the occasional bee sting were common. Lexie had been allowed to grow up at a normal pace, rather than being aged after her Icarus treatments, and everyone agreed that Teala would also benefit from this. All too many of her mother's peers had 'missed out' on childhood activities because they were needed as functional as possible after they were born (well, recreated, thanks to Melissa discovering their records).
With the birth of her little brother Leif, things didn't change all that much, save that now Teala had a partner in crime. Well, after he was able to stand up and rather abruptly run around. They can compete, but they'd both rather cooperate. She got to teach him how to open portals, which he took and ran with, or through - a valuable lesson learned early on was how to find her brother when he went through one of those open doorways and it closed behind him...
The much-needed break from the reality of reassembling a ruined landscape and collecting refugees wasn't over for Lexie and Turquoise, but they did on occasion have to retrieve one or both of their kids from the ruins of the Rookery. Delighted with these games of hide and seek, Teala made sure that she could see where he was thanks to her growing sense of energy. Not merely 'her brother's aura', but his Vortal shine mixed with his bioelectricity, she could more easily track him around the place based on that - where he was more apt to use his own early-blossoming aura masking ability to effectively hide.
Since there were few others their age at that time, they were home-schooled for the first few years and given some small amount of additional 'social skill' based downloads from the Rookery's databanks. They both entered Carramba High around the same time, with slightly different expectations.
Teala obviously concentrates her efforts on the high-tech aspect of life in the modern era. While she does like learning about the places she is capable of visiting from her Nexus Geohistory class, it's not really going to be her strongest point. Likewise, she's good with a crowbar and a thrown rubber duck, but her Improvisational Weaponry course only aids her if she sticks around a place long enough to get chased by wildlife or enemies. She does, in fact, occasionally dwell a while in places she's tried to map out for her Cartography class.
She spends a lot of time hanging out in the Hyperlabs, learning not just Technical Languages and Netiquette from the odd Matrix-realm instructor Charybdis, but assembling things and helping troubleshoot for the school on occasion. She really enjoys the artistic freedom that her Website Design course offers, and the Akita-robot version of Gordon Freeman (... not the same one as her Improv Weapons Freeman, this one's furry!) has relied on her for computer programming and debugging. He thinks she'd make a great teacher's aide, in fact.
Though he definitely tries not to play favorites too strongly, of course, Grandpa's course in Pocket Dimensions is her favorite. Not just because it's taught by the seemingly-stern Keenan Lane, but because she really does ace all their quizzes and gets around like a pro. She loves their field trips too!
It was on one such field trip that they were all introduced to his dragon (of course grampa has a dragon, it's all the rage! and why he started the Rookery!), the class as a whole got a good sniffing-over by another of the Carramba Dragonry search dragons. It wasn't just her and her brother that were searched that day, but it was very clear that Keenan was pleased how his grandkids were progressing.
And it was later clear why. Since he'd allowed that small black dragon of his to participate ('allowed'? the dragon scoffs) in a flight frenzy, they were looking for potential candidates to stand for hatchlings! Maybe one of them would be for the siblings. So before they headed out to Isla, both of them were encouraged to take extra credit course work in Carramba's dragonry. They would certainly get future credit for those classes, but more importantly they would learn how to deal with all manner of draconic issues. Teala figured she could be best with recordskeeping, given she could make notes on a data pad without even typing? She kept a large-volume (but thumb-drive sized) storage device on her at all times after being Searched, and has recorded her own notes on it ever since.
Zekiran
Teala Terrell
