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| Sage; 'Tessa Niles' | |
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| Topic Started: April 29, 2015, 9:24 pm (213 Views) | |
| Alison | April 29, 2015, 9:24 pm Post #1 |
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SAGE![]() Full Name: Tessa Niles; Nousha [adopted name]; Tsura [birth name] Code Name: Sage Age: Appears 27, biologically in her mid 30s [actual year unknown] Gender: Female Physical Description: Tessa has darkish hair reaching just shy of her buttock. Her eyes are a greenish colour and are often blank in emotion, giving the impression that she is staring right through you. She has skin littered with scars, including a pattern of whip marks across her back and a puckered scar starting at her middle left rib and reaching around her stomach to match with the right. It could almost be an appendectomy scar, except it’s a little left of where that would normally be. Sage has the kind of body only formed from regular intensive exercise – muscular, well-defined, while at the same time feminine. Tessa likes to wear practical garments that are easy to move in, mostly in neutral muted colours. She holds a soft spot for the traditional clothing of her adopted region and will sometimes choose to wear them in public, but mostly she can be found in things that are easy to move in, modest and comfortable. When in private and on religious holidays, she will often wear a loose fitting scarf over her hair as a veil. Playby: Hiba Abouk Personality Overview: Tessa has been shaped by hard experiences, making her fatalistic. To her, life is hard and cruel and only the strong survive. Tessa rarely shows what she’s thinking to other people, preferring not to let others know exactly what she feels for fear of providing them with leverage against her. She can look at you without blinking, as if staring into your soul. When she does speak, Tessa speaks with an innate sense of authority but rarely raises her voice, letting her words speak for themselves rather than bring emotion into it. Tessa also has no illusions about a situation and can make the hard calls, such as sacrificing a member of a team to save the rest. It may not win her any popularity points but Tessa believes that she was not put on this earth to make others happy, but to bring about a new world. She doesn’t openly embrace killing but she will not shy away from it if she needs to and if the situation demands it. Now, you may imagine that all these things have created a cruel and cold person, a cyborg if you will. That is far from the truth. While Tessa doesn’t laugh out loud or hug others, she is surprisingly a somewhat nice person. She can appreciate a well-told joke and can often be found drinking a beer with others or offering someone a piece of Turkish delight. She can be emotionless and hard but is never intentionally mean, taking each person as they are. She’s certainly not the cyborg that people imagine her to be. Tessa also enjoys 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 thanks to her background in the Middle East, although she is not entirely devout. Powers: DNA Scan - Sage can sense the presence of mutants, scan a person for all possible mutations, 'see' a person's genetic code and, in many cases, understand how their powers work more thoroughly than they themselves do. Sage is not able to actively alter the genetic structures of mutants and may never be. Computer Mind - Tessa can understand and catalog information, record everything she thinks and perceives, summon any stored data at will, run multiple simultaneous thought processes, perform highly accurate analysis of her surroundings and tactically anticipate and counter physical attacks on reflex. The sheer speed of her thoughts augments her analytical ability so that she is able to make snap decisions about her surroundings. As such, Sage is able to track the probability of an event by piecing together stored data. She is also able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task. Telepathy – Sage possesses telepathic abilities that allow her to read minds, communicate with others over a distance and create mental illusions. Telepathic Protection Shield - Sage can protect herself from mental attacks and reflect the attack back on their originators, but can only achieve this state when she shuts off her telepathic powers. Sage cannot control computers with her mind, a common misconception about her powers. In order to use them, she must be connected in some way through items of technology, such as an interface or AI. History: The woman known to the world as Tessa was born to a family of Roma, traveling through the Balkan regions, having set down in Transylvania for the birth. For the first two years of her life, the group wandered around the region, constantly moving for fear of being attacked by those who disliked or hated them. Violence against those of the Romani culture was widespread and rarely punished, so when their family was set upon in Serbia, nobody from the surrounding area so much as raised a hand to help. A rumour had gone around the area that the group of Roma were stealing children away from villages they camped nearby, the rumours were untrue but that didn’t matter to the incensed villagers. Late one night, the camp was attacked by a group of men and set fire to. Many of the Roma were killed or driven away from their carriages and homes by the locals and in the confusion and emotion, one of Tessa’s cousins snatched the toddler and ran. Tessa remembers nothing of this. The first thing that she ever remembers is waking up in the middle of a desert, with the body of a woman next to her. 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 through the desert. It took days for her to even see anyone else. Eventually reaching a village, the girl knew that this was not her people: their skin was darker and their eyes and hair were different features but they had warmth and shelter and proper food. She lived with a family in the village for a few years, until an epidemic of influenza swept through the village and robbed her of her adopted family when she might have been about 11 years old. The few villagers that survived the epidemic choose to move away from the village and start again but Tessa left of her own accord. Once she left the last vestiges of what she knew behind, she grew up wandering the world. Instead of progressing in a linear pattern, Tessa jumped around. Sightings of her can be seen in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Central Asia and even the Indian Subcontinent. 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. Since she doesn’t know her exact age or the year of her birth, Tessa thinks she might have been about 14 at the time. It was during her occupation of a place in the Hindu Kush that she met someone from the western world. The area was dangerous for many reasons: the influence of tribal law and somewhat hostile tribes, the influence of the Taliban, deadly wildlife and the dangerous and inhospitable terrain. This was a place that was home to a thick community of customs and superstitions, 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 who was injured. pinned under a rock fall. Carefully dragging the debris away from him, she found his legs injured but not permanently damaged. Then, he spoke 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. His name was Shinobi Shaw and he was American, a tourist climbing mountains for thrills. She chose to use the name her adoptive mother gave her, Nousha. Making him comfortable and giving him her cloak and hijab to use as a blanket, they spent hours talking 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 commandeered a village wagon and began the slow, long trek througg the mountains with Shinobi. 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, the man dubbing her with the name ‘Tessa.’ When she asked why, he told her that he liked it better than Nousha. The trek through the Kush took days, Tessa hunting and foraging as they went. When they reached the outskirts of Peshawar, Tessa got him to a hospital and left him there. Believing that the Kush was unsuitable, she elected to trek back to Afghanistan. Settling down to take employment as a translator for the occupying NATO forces, Tessa chose to also covertly spy on the Taliban at every opportunity she could. Because she was fluent in the languages and customs of the country, she could slip in and grab intelligence for the troops stationed there. It was while she was in Khabul that she received a visitor one afternoon, a man in a wheelchair who wished to talk to her about a matter of great importance. Deciding that a foreign army base would be more suitable than venturing out into the streets, she agreed to see the man and listen to what he wished to say. Nobody is quite sure what the two of them talked about over the next few hours, save that when the talk ended and he returned to wherever he had come from, Tessa had been offered a place at a 'mutant sanctuary' called Utopia. She accepted. Optional Information Likes: South Asian & Middle Eastern culture, computers, weapons, poetry, candles, music, books Dislikes: Being outclassed or outgunned, stupidity, prejudice, xenophobia, the Taliban, being interrupted when speaking, cats Fears: Her past, death Goals: Destroy the Taliban to the last man, find her real family Family: Camlo [biological father; status unknown]; Asena [biological mother; status unknown]; extended Romani family/tribe [status unknown]; Adopted family [status unknown; members presumed deceased or missing] Skills: Polyglot [speaks over 25 languages]; weaponry; computers; staying calm; mechanics; stealth |
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7:17 PM Jul 10