Post by Deleted on May 29, 2014 8:15:17 GMT
[PTabbedContent][PTab=GENERAL INFORMATION] CHARACTER INFO: NAME: ‘Tessa’ ALIAS: Apana [given name as child]; Sage; Tessa Niles; various other aliases AGE: Assumed to be 26; could be older or younger OCCUPATION: Fixer/Information Broker/Assassin/Spy MEMBER GROUP: Mutants POWERS AND ABILITIES Genetic Jumpstart: Sage’s jumpstart power allows her to sense the presence of mutants, scan a person for all possible mutations and abilities in their genetic code and trigger power manifestations which unleash latent mutant powers or can enhance and beneficially modify existing mutations in other people. Cyberpathy: Sage augments her ability to understand and catalogue genetic information from her primary power with a computer-like mind able to record everything she thinks and perceives, summon any stored data at will for total recall and kinetic memory, run multiple simultaneous thought processes, interact with computer mainframes at an equal-or-greater rate of computing, and perform highly accurate analyses of her surroundings, enabling her to anticipate and counter physical attacks on reflex or concoct elaborate conclusions and strategies with great speed. Telepathy: Sage possesses telepathic abilities to read and project thoughts, send out her astral form, cast illusions, and manipulate the minds of others; she can consciously close off her mind, which prevents her from accessing her telepathy but renders her mind immune to psionic probes and detection. This creates a defensive force that reflects any offensive mental action back at her attacker. PLAYBY: Astrid Berges Frisbey OOC INFO: PLAYER NAME: Alison AGE: 28 GENDER: Female TIMEZONE: GMT +10 OTHER CHARACTERS: Hannah White [/PTab][PTab=PERSONNEL ASSESSMENT] PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT: LIKES: South Asian & Middle Eastern culture Computers Knives Poetry of Central Asia Candlelight Good food World Music DISLIKES: Being outclassed or outgunned Idiotic people Bigoted Muslims Prejudice Fellow Hackers The Taliban Being interrupted when talking STRENGTHS: Polyglot Linguist – Tessa grew up moving most of her life, so she can speak over a dozen languages. Languages include French, Russian, German, Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Hindi, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Uzbek, Kazakh, Punjabi, Serb-Croat, Romanian and a little Romani. Weaponry: Sage is well-versed in many different weapons. Her strongest weapons are knives but she can also handle most classes of guns, can effectively use explosives if she has to and has learned how to use poison as a weapon. She also knows how to effectively brawl. Unnaturally Calm: Sage never loses her temper and can stay calm and cool under duress, a valuable skill especially when gathering intelligence information. WEAKNESSES: Emotions: Sage isn’t comfortable with displays of open emotion and has been compared by some to Skynet Terminators for the lack of emotion she gives out. This makes her exceptionally useful at gathering information but also scares and creeps people out. Secretive Liar: Tessa’s secrets have secrets. Even she is sometimes unsure of what exactly is true and what is not, or how deep her secrets and lies go. Impassionate: You’ll never see Tessa cheering for a sports team or marveling out loud at a beautiful sunset. She lacks the ability to translate excitement or enjoyment anymore. GOALS: Bring life into the world: Sage would like to be a mother, to have someone to carry on her genes and pour what little affection she can muster into. Destroy the Taliban: Sage lived under their thumb for part of her life and wishes her ‘homeland’ could be free of the men who rape, kill and persecute in the name of religion. FEARS: Tessa fears her past coming back to get her, so she will actively neutralize chances that it will. OVERALL PERSONALITY Tessa is very much a product of her own upbringing. The daily grind of life and the constant nomadic lifestyle she adopted when little more than a toddler, the lack of knowledge about her own past and family, the harsh climates of the places she lived in have all made her hard and cold. To her, life is hard and cruel and only the strong survive and the weak will pass away. The decision of the Professor to train her separate from the others has embittered her and helped reinforce the hard exterior. Now, she is cold and emotionless and cares little for others pain or anger. To the outside world, she is almost like an ice sculpture. She can look at you without blinking, as if staring into your soul, and you can almost feel ice creeping up your body. When she does speak, Tessa speaks with an innate sense of authority that will often quell others voices. She knows that she has the power over you, not even demanding that you listen to her, yet knowing that you will. She doesn’t flaunt her power, merely uses it to her advantage. When it comes to espionage, Tessa will use any skill she has in her repertoire. While she can be affectionate, she is not open or warm in a deeper sense. Too closed off to ever open up to anyone truly, she simply uses her power to satisfy her needs. This assessment of people as worthy only in terms of usefulness often translates to the rest of her outlook on life. Tessa sees people not as friends or enemies or lovers but rather their usefulness to her current objectives. Those who are not as useful are pushed aside in favor of those who are, and when the objective is complete, she will re-evaluate her views. Make no mistake, Tessa can be charming is she needs to be but that is nearly always a veneer for her true feeling. Tessa’s powers also make her dangerous, because she can compartmentalize the world into separate boxes at once. This allows her to complete several complicated tasks at the same time; an example would be playing a game of chess while at the same time writing a coded program. It also means that Sage has no illusions about a situation and can make the hard calls, seeing the logic in doing things such as sacrificing a member of a team to save the rest of them. It may not win her any popularity points but it’s what logic dictates. Logic is very strong in Tessa and she will often follow it rather than follow the emotional aspects of a job. This ‘machine-like’ mentally makes her doubly dangerous to deal with in a fight. She’s also not averse to fighting dirty. Tessa will kill, if the situation demands it. She’s killed a lot of people growing up, although that was mainly in an attempt to survive or right a wrong. Now, having been trained so well in espionage and use of her powers, Sage has no qualms about ending the life of somebody. She has no sense of blood lust or a fervent desire to kill, unlike some other assassins, but there is always a look in her eyes when she ends a life that could indicate that she enjoyed it. Tessa has killed with many different types of weapons; from a knife when she was younger to guns to opportunistic weapons like letter openers or poison. She’s also taken lives with her bare hands, snapping an odd neck or two. She doesn’t openly embrace killing but she will not shy away from it if she needs to. It could be said that all this is a cover for a deeply wounded and abandoned child, a small girl locked in the body of an older woman. Despite her seeming disdain for everything, Tessa does enjoy the odd reminder of her previous lives and will rejoice in a well-cooked pot of food from her homeland or a piece of folk music. Tessa considers herself to be Muslim since it is all she ever knew growing up. She doesn’t practice the art of veiling, doesn’t prostrate herself 5 times a day and pray. She does, however, attend prayers for special occasions such as Ramadan and will say a quick prayer under her breath at the appropriate times. Neither does she practice most of the customs, such as having no contact with people of the opposite gender. Despite her past with Charles Xavier, she holds a sort of fond nostalgia for the school and will visit without being forced to. Children also bring about a slightly softer side to her. She’d like to have her own child some day. She is not, however, ready to reveal any of this to anyone she knows. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: BIRTHPLACE: Unknown RESIDENCE: Sage lives wherever her work takes her. PARENTS: Unknown SIBLINGS: Unknown IMPORTANT RELATIVES: Unknown IMPORTANT PERSON: Unknown OVERALL HISTORY: Tessa couldn’t tell you when or where she was born, nor who her parents and family are. Nor could she tell you how old she is for sure, although she can guess. The first thing that she ever remembers [and she cannot un-remember it] is waking up alone in the middle of a desert. She remembers the sounds she heard, the feeling of gritty sand under her fingers, the heat washing over her young face but other than that, nothing. Knowing instinctively that she couldn’t stay there, the young child slowly made her way along the desert stopping to drink at the small pools of water she found along the way. It took days for her to even see anyone else, and she learnt hard lessons on the way. She learned that certain fruits gave you terrible stomach aches because they weren’t ripe, that strange smelling pools of liquid should be left alone and that at night the desert was cold and bleak. Eventually reaching a village, the girl knew that this was not her family: their skin was darker and their eyes and hair were different features but they had warmth and shelter and proper food. She lived with this family for a few years, until the Taliban came. It had been the first time the girl had encountered hostile people and the first time she shed blood, but it was of little use. They were driven away and the men killed, the women and children taken away but the soldiers didn’t want her and beat her bloody before leaving her in the middle of the burning village. Those injuries would fade and leave scars on her body, not the first and certainly not the last to mark her skin. The rest of her ‘childhood’ was disjointed and mixed, ranging from the Balkans to Afghanistan to as far as India. The world was never kind to her, at best seeing her as a small undernourished street child and at worst an object of lustful advances. At one point, she found herself taken for the harem of a man somewhere in Central Asia. It took months to escape that hell, not before losing her virginity and knowing the horrors of mens’ desire for domination over women. She took special pleasure in the escape, personally slitting the throat of her captors before fleeing into the wilderness. However, apart from her history and her uncanny affinity for surviving lay a third wondrous feature: mutation. It had always been present in her, even as the child waking up in the desert. She remembered everything she saw or heard, could see and hear things that others couldn’t and could reason with pure logic. Coupled with the uncanny look of understanding in her eyes, many who encountered her would shy away from that stare or avoid her altogether. The idea of mutation was unknown to her, but in hindsight she could see it as the thread connecting her memories. The girl blossomed as she wandered and it was during her occupation of a place in the Hindu Kush that she met the man who would change and widen her world: Professor Charles Xavier. The area was dangerous for many reasons: the influence of the Taliban, wildlife and the dangerous and inhospitable terrain. This was a place that was home to a thick community of customs and superstitions as well, the people of the area whispering of haunted caves and vengeful djinn lurking the crevices and caverns. The girl discovered one afternoon that they were haunted, yes, but not by spirits. She had been drawn there for some reason and had entered, then heard strange noises coming from deep inside. Carefully picking her way over rocks and around crevices, the girl found herself at the end of the caverns and facing a man with skin roughly the same color as hers once was, who couldn’t speak her language and was injured. Carefully dragging the debris away from him, she found his legs injured but otherwise just scraped and bruised. Then, he spoke inside her head and she fled, only returning when he begged her and promised that he wouldn’t hurt her. Sitting next to him, she asked him all sorts of questions and he explained to her what mutation was and who he was. Making him comfortable and giving him her cloak and hijab to use as a blanket, they spent hours talking both mentally and audibly as she learnt some words of his language and he of hers. By then, night had fallen and she knew that if she tried to move him then whatever wildlife came out after dark would pick them off easily and so she waited with him until morning. She let him sleep, singing him songs she had picked up over the years and letting him use her body as a pillow to make him more comfortable. The minute she judged it safe to move, she darted back up into the light and ran towards the nearest village for help. It was a long way and when she arrived, puffing and aching, they refused to come with her for fear of being attacked by whatever was haunting the caves. Knowing that the men would never come, she walked back to her new friend and half dragged, half carried the man through the cave system to the outside and then struggled along towards the village who had refused to help. It was torturous going, but they made it eventually and then the village men were eager to help. The injuries were too severe to treat there so she took the village wagon, with the injured man on it, off towards better help. As they slowly made their way through the Hindu Kush, with its mountains and cliffs, the girl would check his wounds regularly and apply the herbal remedies she had learnt to ward off infection. They also talked, Xavier dubbing her with the name ‘Tessa.’ As they made their way along, a grisly sight appeared ahead, that of a international aid convoy burning and the perpetrators drinking local liquor and laughing as the bodies of their victims lay around them. Many of the women had been raped. Coming to a stop, the girl accosted them in their language and learned the story as they boasted to her of what they had done. They didn’t boast for long. In the Hindu Kush, everyone carried a knife of some kind to ward off ravenous beasts and unfriendly humans and Tessa used hers that afternoon as she deftly sliced and downed man after man. Picking up their weapons, she executed them in cold blood for what they had done. Standing there with the blood of those men dripping off her, she turned silently and left them for the carrion to feed on. The two of them didn’t speak after that, Tessa ashamed of what she had done and how brutal she had been. Leaving Xavier at the nearest hospital, she disappeared back into the Kush. It would be a long time until they saw each other again, but he eventually came for her and took her to his home. There, she learnt English and learnt how to continue enhancing her original powers and the ones that had appeared after she had met him. Along with Jean Grey, Cyclops, Beast and others, she became his student – with one very specific difference. While the others in her class studied as part of a team, Charles kept Tessa from the rest of them and trained her as a spy. She understood why essentially, there was a need for mutants to take on a more active approach on several fronts. But she always wondered, deep down, why he had chosen her for this role and if she had been able to somehow avert or change it somehow. Once he had finished training her, Xavier sent her out into the world and Tessa literally disappeared. There were rumors that she had been seen in Hong Kong or somewhere in New York, whispers of a place called the Hellfire Club, but nothing concrete. Four years went by and then she resurfaced, settling down as a freelance information broker. For a price, she can find you information or items or people. For a higher price, she can use her particular ‘gifts’ to accomplish more delicate or immoral acts. Those who knew her when she had just arrived in the US would not recognize her without help, for she now has no accent of any kind nor is she wide-eyed and curious. Tessa is gone. Only Sage remains. [/PTab] [PTab=IMAGE][/PTab][/PTabbedContent={width:485px;border:0px;margin-left:-2px;}] |