Theodora "Tea" Cruz

!!!WARNING!!! This description contains excessive meta information and is advisable to not be viewed by players of TSRP!

Knowledge of the information contained on this page can heavily alter how a player naturally interacts with Tea.

## Background

Tea's mother, Bethany Wilson, had a troubled past and was a major drug addict. Her father, Rafael Cruz, loved her mother (they were never married), and spent many years trying to help her go clean, but in the end her addictions killed her a little over a year after Tea was born. Even more than that, her addictions majorly affected Tea's birth, causing her to be born prematurely, with partial albinism, and with hepatitis C. While her albinism is minor enough to be handled with strong sunscreen and avoiding too much sun, her hepatitis effects her liver in a way that causes alcohol and other recreational substances filtered by the liver to be very dangerous for her.

Her father did his best to raise her, but spent most of her childhood estranged from her in the same home, and escaping into alcohol. Socially awkward and with a strange appearance, Tea was heavily bullied through grade school in their small town. By the time she was a sophomore in high school she had developed a slew of psychological conditions including suicidal ideations and anorexia from her horribly twisted self image. After she came home one day with several bruises from a group of girls who made a hobby of bullying her, something snapped inside of her father and brought him out of his haze.

He became obsessed with teaching his daughter self defense, terrified that he would lose his daughter along with his lover. Having been an Army Ranger, he pulled her out of school and retreated into the wilderness to start putting her through a similar training regimen that he had gone through, even later paying for additional classes to train her in gymnastics as well. He had her study to earn her GED instead of finishing high school, and Tea's social awkwardness became further heightened while being both compensated and made worse by her father teaching her how to interact socially while keeping your guard up.

Her training continued past high school age, with her father isolating her and teaching him everything he could think of to defend her from the world, but ending up causing her to become highly disconnected from the rest of the world. The disconnection became so severe that she lost the ability to speak, which her father never really considered an issue as she merely needed to do what he said and had no need to speak with anyone else. As the years went on and her capabilities increased, her training become more and more intense, as well as more and more unwise. Stab wounds, broken bones, and torture resistance became mundane to her as her father's obsession with preparing her for "the world" became more and more unhinged from reality.

During this time, Tea also became rather unhinged from reality, and began erasing the trauma of her past in a very direct way. She developed a persona of a serial killer that was entirely artificial so that if crime profilers became involved it might throw them off some, and then proceeded to murder the people who bullied her as a child in cold blood.

Finally, after over a decade of training that had become steadily more inhumane, something snapped inside of Tea as well. During a recovery period after training to continue functioning through starvation and dehydration, she walked over to her father's cot as he slept and stabbed him through his eye, killing him in one deranged strike. She knew that she couldn't stay here since her father's body would be found eventually, so she grabbed whatever valuables and essentials she could find and fled, eventually ending up in Los Santos.

## History Since Arrival

Tea has a hatred of people who's mentality veers outside of normal. Not people with psychological issues, or even addicts, criminals, or sociopaths, but people who act like vaudeville characters. In her memories, she sees the girls who bullied her as nearly comical caricatures of mean high school girls, and anyone who begins to act in an over-the-top and stereotypical way begins to stir her deep rooted animosity and bottled up rage. In order to prevent these feelings from ever becoming so extreme that she could no longer keep them under control, she developed two disguises with distinct personalities: one to gather information where she couldn't and one to carry out criminal activity. These were PartyMonkey and Smiley respectively, with Smiley being intended as a copycat/admirer of smiles.

As she was unable to speak to others without wearing a mask and hiding her voice, she came to use a simple text to speech application she downloaded onto her phone in order to communicate with others. Since the application is incredibly simple, it is easy for her to quickly download onto new phones as well. While PartyMonkey does not speak as a part of the mascot-esque personality she developed for it, Smiley spoke through a voice filter imbedded in the mask, though she has since thrown the mask away.

After a bungled attempt to take a victim as Smiley, she abandoned the persona and created Cure, who would kill and leave cryptic messages that utilized the Chinese Zodiac as a key. Later, after Smiles abducted Chase for the second time resulting in her death, Tea decided to bring back the Smiley character as both a way to try and get closer to Smiles to kill him as well as to use as a diversion if needed.

### The Great City Closing of 2021

For the period in late August during which the city was closed to out-of-towners for over a week, Tea spent the time surfing the internet for leisure as well as to look through maps of Los Santos and serial killer history.

## Personality

Tea is incredibly uncomfortable not being in disguise. She feels exposed like a raw nerve letting people view the real her, and can be incredibly concerned with her appearance as a result (both physical and social).

"Perfect" people intimidate her and can even make her feel extreme anxiety (this is anyone she perceives as having a complete, healthy, successful life).

People who act like stereotypes both irritate and nauseate her, to the point that she feels the urge to be spiteful towards them. However, it's unlikely that she will do anything overt to them other than verbal abuse due to both her desire to not ruin her public life as well as her reserved attitude when not in disguise.

Those who act detached from reality and behave in a cartoonish fashion are the ones who she hates the most. People who talk about being robots, aliens, vampires, ghosts, reincarnated, or otherwise like they are from a work of fiction drive her to devise a plan to end their life. However, being confronted with solid proof of their words causes her confusion and to become even more reserved for an extended period of time due to shaking her sense of surety and self confidence. Due to being so confident that her view of the world is accurate and has no space for being expanded, she will stubbornly ignore or dismiss all but completely solid evidence, even when the evidence provided is sufficient for everyone else.

## Physiology

Due to both the "training" her father put her through, as well as the multiple injuries sustained since arriving in Los Santos, Tea's body is covered with scars. She uses makeup to hide anything that would be shown while wearing a dress, but only the parts that would be exposed. She can't imbibe alcohol (or donate blood) due to the hepatitis C she's had since birth. ~~Blood type O+~~ Blood type AB-.

## Major Events

After a few weeks in the city, Tea got an interview at Cab Co. However, after she was hired and was being shown the ropes, she, Teddy, and Nolan were approached by a masked robber with a gun. After he searched Tea and left her firearm on her, then was distracted searching the others, Tea pulled her weapon and a shootout occurred, ending with only the robber downed. Clip here

After sustaining a major injury falling from the roof of city hall while "performing" as PartyMonkey during a city meeting, Tea was taken to Pillbox and had the outfit pulled off revealing her identity to those there. After being treated and putting the outfit back on, she wandered the city while embarrassed, depressed, and disoriented from painkillers. During this time, she hatched the half-baked plan to draw Goldie into a trap (having targeted her due to her seemingly comical innocence). Driving while heavily inebriated from the painkillers, she found herself in an industrial area and was shot multiple times by locals while investigating the area. Under the Smiley account, she posted a selfie of PartyMonkey with gunshot wounds to try and lure her into a trap. She moved to a vantage point, but her bloodloss, fatigue, pain, inhebriation, and the heat from the city caused her to, disoriented, remove pieces of the Smiley outfit one by one until she was in her underwear, then finally passed out. She was found a few minutes later by police, who assumed that she was a third party caught up in the Smiley/PartyMonkey encounter, later discovering from Pillbox that she was the person behind PartyMonkey. While the truth of the event has never been revealed, Tea was so embarrassed and frustrated at everything that happened that she abandoned the Smiley persona and moved on to invent Cure.

Cure's only victim so far was the attempted murder of Donny Gaits, targeted for his charming demeanor as Twitter's cheesy bread and dumpster water selling hobo (which Tea found nauseating and despicable). After finding out Donny's birthdate through PartyMonkey tweets, Tea created an outfit for Cure alluding to him being born in the Year of the Goat, even calling him "little goat" repeatedly in person and later on Twitter. Unable to obtain a voice filter on short notice due to Donny partially being a kill of opportunity, Tea had to make do with only changing the voice on her text to speech app (something that caused Chase Doe to become suspicious of her). The following code was left behind, then later posted on Twitter:

EB AMUJT EGVB DMS G HMO

## Relationships

Tea has an odd relationship with Claire Turner that sometimes crosses past friends towards stalker.

## Trivia

- PartyMonkey first encountered Norm L. Guy completely on accident when he drove up on PM coming out from Michael's mansion after changing. Clip here

- Several members of Pillbox, and handful of the PD, as well as some of the people at Cab Co know that PartyMonkey is Tea. No one knows who Smiley is.

- Theodora Cruz, using the Chinese Zodiac for murders, and leaving encrypted messages are all references to Ted Cruz, the Zodiac Killer.

- The Blaine County Sheriff's Office wants to hire PartyMonkey as their mascot.