Character Profile: Tess Cygnus

Character Name: Tess Cygnus

Full Name: Tesni Louise Cygnus

Nick Names: Tess, Tessie

Gender: Female

Age: 18/19

Birthday/year: February 2, 1989

Marital Status: Single

Spouse: N/A

Hair: Tess has long, medium brown hair with some teal and pink highlights. It's a little bit wavy and can get frizzy in humid weather, but usually she just keeps it in a ponytail or a loose bun anyhow.

Eyes: Tess has hazel eyes which are a little more brown than green.

Origin: Tess was raised near Stanton, Kentucky until her mother died of cancer. Then she moved in with her grandparents in Dayton, Ohio for her last two years of high school and first year of college.

Language: Tess is a bit of a polyglot. She picks up language and people's pattern of speaking very easily. Her main two languages are English and a language she and her mother spoke which was a sort of bastardized version of English with touches of many other languages mixed in which is actually from thousands of years in the future. However, she can sort of understand most Latin-based languages with little trouble and some thought and she can figure out the Germanic languages given a bit more time. Asiatic languages, however, are a problem for Tess though she has picked up some Japanese.

Blood Type: AB+

Height: 5'6

Weight/Body Structure/Physical Faults: Tess is of medium/average height and weight. She has natural scars from growing up in the backwoods of Kentucky. Tess looks like an average girl of our time with no tattoos, just her ears pierced and nothing outwardly strange about her besides her hair which she likes.

Race/Species: Thought Tess is completely human with no hint of any other species in her, her mother was born 3,000 years in the future which means her DNA is a bit different from modern humans with different sequences coding for different traits in different ways, a naturally higher IQ, and she picks up the languages of others quite well. Also, Tess is a Child Lost in Time, Chrono-Child or what have you. In other words, she can remember timelines that no longer happened because something or someone changed them. She also knows that she shouldn't exists and can remember what the world and people's lives would be like if she weren't there. Through her father, she's All-American Mutt with mostly English and German heritage.

Parents/Elders/Guardians: Tess was raised mostly by her mother, Maia Cygnus, who was a time criminal from the future on the run from the Coalition with plans to retire into anonymity.  Unfortunately, Maia met Erik for a one-night stand and gave birth to Tess. Knowing the Coalition would do anything to get a hold of Tess and any child like Tess, she went further into hiding in the backwoods of Kentucky only associating with a select few and even homeschooling her daughter to keep Tess away from everyone. Sadly, Maia had developed cancer and died when Tess was fifteen/sixteen, leaving Tess in the care of her paternal grandparents, Louise and Thomas Anderson who live in Dayton, Ohio and encourage Tess to live up to her full potential, unlike her mother who just wanted Tess to stay safe and hidden.

Siblings: Tess doesn't have any siblings, yet. Though Dr. Erik Anderson will meet a lovely young Particle Physicist in a few years and they will have two children: Veronica and Thomas Anderson.

Friends/Allies: Tess is mostly a loner, not being used to social situations due to her upbringing and the fact that every person she meets leads her to the feeling that she doesn't belong in this time because she can see their lives without her and how it's changed with each word she speaks to them. However, her grandparents are  always in her corner even if they don't exactly understand what's going on in Tess's head. However, she does have a friend in Vincent Bentley, a classmate of Tess's when she moved to Dayton, Ohio who just wouldn't let her put him off. Vincent is a male who grew up with three sisters and always liked stealing their dresses and wearing them... same with their make-up. Tess and Vincent are best friends and occasionally act like "girl friends".

Enemies: Tess really doesn't have many enemies for the same reason she doesn't have a lot of friends. She doesn't associate much with others because she can't make too many changes to their lives and definitely not for the worst. There was a bully (Josh Turner) who picked on Vincent a bit, but Tess went by the "ignore him" philosophy. Her biggest enemy is herself.

Beliefs/Religion: Tess believes in a deity that created the world and still exists within the world and influences it and may even be the world itself. She believes and has solace in the idea that the deity has some purpose for placing her within a world where she knows she obviously does not belong.

Career/Past Careers: Tess is a nursing assistant at a nursing home where she basically tries to make people more comfortable in the time before they die. It's basically a dead-end job but she likes that she helps people with nearly no consequences to the timeline, but it's better than when she worked at a fast food restaurant when she was in high school.

Dreams/Life Goals:  Tess has two goals in life. Her biggest goal is she wants to find her purpose the reason she exists knowing the changes she makes to the world directly and knowing that she, herself, is an anomaly that shouldn't be there. Secondarily, she'd like to find a place where she feels like she belongs and she doesn't have to watch her behavior so closely because she isn't going to change things at all.

Hobbies: Tess loves to read speculative fiction. H.G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, Anne McAffrey, Andre Norton, and Douglas Adams: these are her favorite authors and she reads them religiously. She also enjoys C.S. Lewis, especially his Space Trilogy and feels he inspired her to work toward a better life. Tess also is learning and practicing Aikido which her grandfather helped her enroll in while she was still in high school along with her friend, Vincent. She's also a fan of watching Doctor Who, 4400 and she really liked Stargate until it ended. She never watched the spin-offs, however.

Likes: Tess is very much a loner and enjoys being alone and entertaining herself. She likes playing with numbers in her head and she and her mother used to go back and forth with number sequences where the other had to guess the last number in the sequence. She likes anything involving Alternate Histories, time travel, and space travel because they all parallel her life a bit. She enjoys sour and spicy food and any fruit she comes across except bananas. She also likes the sounds of rain and running water and listening to music with string instruments like violins, fiddles, cellos, etc.

Loves: C.S. Lewis. He really inspired her will his books... and H.G. Wells who was just a brilliant author with anything he set to write. She loves her calico cat, Susan, more than most living creatures and she just loves her weird cat. She loves strange ideas and possibilities like time travel, aliens, and dark matter/energy. She loves to drink fruit juices and teas (especially hot teas). Tess also dearly loves the movie, It's a Wonderful Life for obvious reasons.

Dislikes: Tess doesn't like anything carbonated and she isn't likely to appreciate anything with a lot of sugar in it unless it's fruit. Tess also doesn't like overly bright colors, preferring cool out neutral colors more. Tess has a strong inclination against organized religion and most tradition-based organizations. She also really doesn't like people who she feels take their perfectly happy and ordinary lives for granted.

Loathes: Bananas. Tess hates bananas. They're completely disgusting and gross and she doesn't understand how anyone can eat them. Potatoes meet a similar fate in her eyes. Tess despises all potatoes.  Tess also hates her father because he doesn't have time for her, and he's too caught up in his life and his love of science to even acknowledge he has a daughter he should care for instead leaving the responsibility to his parents. Tess really loathes people who don't live up to their responsibilities and things they should do.

Fears: Tess is afraid she has no purpose and she'll never have that sense of belonging she had when her mother was alive again and that those abilities she has will lead to Tess being locked in a mental institution. Tess is terrified of being alone in the world and there is no one else who wasn't "meant to be".

Strengths: Tess is a polyglot. She can pick up languages and people's ways of speaking very easily unless it's and Asiatic language though she's gotten better at those since she started taking Aikido. Tess is also highly intelligent and can usually understand ideas and concepts faster than most people. Tess has taken some Aikido for the past year, so she can fight a little and defend herself. Tess is also slightly precognitive, but in an odd way. She can see the way the future would have been if she weren't present and doing her own thing and how the future would be if she didn't change anything, but it's only the general gist of the future or, if she's focused on a particular person, it's only for that person. However, she doesn't know what her presence will do to the future unless she meets that person again at a later date. She can also see how others have tampered with the timeline in the past.

Weaknesses: Tesni may be a polyglot, but she does not understand other people at all. Being sheltered most of her life has left Tess fairly innocent and ignorant of how to communicate with other people. She just doesn't understand people and the way they're minds work or why they do the things they do. She also doesn't completely understand how to be polite or why that's important. She's very ignorant of social mores and how to really be a nice person. She just knows how to be herself and that doesn't always help her. Tess is naturally clumsy, but Aikido has helped with her being less physically clumsy, but she's still socially clumsy and blunders frequently.

Good Qualities: Tess really just wants to have her life cause as little damage to the universe as possible. She can see the way the universe is "supposed" to go and she doesn't want to make any changes for the worst, but she knows that little things can also have far-reaching consequences. The idea that she could cause harm to come to the world by her existence causes a lot of pain for Tess. What's the point of living if all she does is damage things and make them worse?

Bad Habits: Tess is obviously a high-stress personality who has a lot of little bad habits as ways to work through her stress. She has bitten her nails until they've bled. She regularly chews on her tongue and the insides of her cheek. She also has a pretty bad habit with chewing on or just plain eating beef jerky or any kind of jerky when nervous.

Turn Ons: Tess could only ever be attracted to someone who is of greater or equal intelligence to her. She's also more likely to be attracted to someone who also "isn't meant to be". Tess is not mindful of gender, exterior appearance, etc. Though she does like a person who takes care of themselves and showers regularly for the 20th century. It also helps if she knows the person in question isn't supposed to end up happily married to someone else, though.

Turn Offs: Tess could never be in any sort of friendship, let alone a romantic relationship, with a blatantly stupid and willfully ignorant person. She's also strongly against gross obesity where a person could take care of themselves and be better but instead chooses not to care and continue to eat unhealthy, fatty, terrible foods. Tess also has a thing about preferring people who shower at least once a week, keeps their hair combed, etc.

Normal Talents: Tess is a very intelligent girl who learns languages very easily. She also has some skill in Aikido or Aikijutsu due to having taken classes for about the past two years.

Supernatural Powers & Abilities: Tess essentially has the ability to see a past where time travel did not interfere or interfered in limited ways and to see a future where time travel also has no effect or a limited effect.  On one hand this is a helpful gift because she does generally know what to expect of the world. On the other hand, the future and past she sees doesn't include her and this scares her and concerns her because the future she sees isn't actually all that bad so she must discover for herself how to live her life without changing things for the worst while still improving that which can be improved for the better. She also can sense time travelers and others like herself with her ability.

Temperament: Tess is extremely introverted. She mostly lives in her head and doesn't interact with others very much at all. Her ming is always thinking about other things, ideas, and whatever's going on at the time. Tess has a lot of anxiety and that comes through because she things, over-think and rethinks any action she takes and how it could change things. Tess tries to be understanding of others, but she finds her lack of experience with people along with her special ability and what she considers to be her special circumstances pretty much makes such an understanding impossible. She tries to not let it bother her, but other people are so incredibly slow anyhow. Why would she want to interact with them? On the other hand, Tess is very lonely and she is glad of her one and only friend. Tess will do anything for Vincent... but have sex with him. So, Tess tries to be a good person, but she gave up on being nice a long time ago and she probably isn't going to start for anyone but maybe Vincent... if he asks nicely and stops chasing her with bananas.

Background: Tess's existence was a complete and utter accident made by one, Maia Cygnus, while the female time traveler was in hiding from the Coalition after retiring to our time from her job as a time criminal with as much money as she could manage without looking suspicious. One pregnancy test and a trip to the gynecologist later, Maia had a new mission in life: protect her one and only daughter with her life from the Coalition. So, Maia settled into a small house in the backwoods ("hollers") of Kentucky in the county of Powell. She made sure her daughter would have a wonderful, but isolated life with the hopes that she and Tess could remain under the radar and perhaps Tess could be one of the lucky children of her kind to not go insane or try to become a prophet and change the world and end up horribly dead. Maia was careful to make sure Tess knew everything she needed to get along in the 20th and 21st centuries as well as a few extra things here and there.

Mostly, she just taught Tess her (Maia's) native language so the two could always privately talk even if they weren't alone. She put it about that she was of gypsy lineage just to keep people away. Maia even home-schooled Tess because she didn't want to risk someone in-the-know finding Tess's school records and putting it all together.

Then, when Tess was fifteen (and pretty much phoning it in on the home schooling thing), Maia discovered she was dying of a rare form of cancer only seen in those who time travel. Knowing there was nothing modern medicine could do, Maia immediately began preparing Tess for living in a world where she didn't exist, including putting Tess in contact with her father and paternal grandparents. When Maia died May 27, 2004, Tess went to live with her grandparents, a very angry and upset and confused girl.

Suddenly she was expected to go to high school and associate with people.

And no one spoke the private language she and her mother spoke.

And she was the only one who didn't belong.

Her grandmother and grandfather immediately realized that Tess was holding herself back in school, but there were other problems as well. Tess would get into fights with people and then go home crying, inconsolable and no one could figure out why. A lot of those fights were with a boy named Josh Turner who kept picking on the school gay. Grandpa finally had enough and got both Tess and her friend enrolled in an Aikido class taught by a friend of his from his time in The War (don't ask him which one; he always lies) and made Tess get a job in fast food. After that, Tess and Vincent ended up the best of friends, but nothing the grandparents could do would convince Tess to put her full effort into school and she graduated in the upper 20th percentile, but not as high as they would've liked. She also didn't apply for any colleges and instead enrolled in the local community college, became a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant), and got a job at a nursing home of all places. Grandpa keeps trying to get Tess to at least get a degree in nursing, but Grandma is more demanding, wanting Tess to become a medical doctor or a surgeon or a physicist like her father. Tess, however, has other ideas. Mostly, she plans to stay under the radar for the rest of her life.

Sadly, she doesn't really know who or what she's hiding from and they may have already found her.