Tessa "Matchstick" Wagner

=Before the Secret World...= "Once upon a time, Tessa was normal..." might be horribly cliche, but it fits the situation to a T. Her life before coming to London and the incident that ensued could only be described as horribly mundane. She had two parents who loved and doted on her, as they were her only child. She went through childhood with nothing more serious than chickenpox. No broken bones, life-threatening pneumonia or secret abuse went on. Even High School was comfortably boring. She wasn't one of the super popular kids nor was she one of the outcasts. She fit easily in with the rest of the kids who occupied neither extreme.

Now, that isn't to say she had no hopes or dreams. Quite the opposite. From a young age, Tessa had been fascinated with the stars she seen on the silver screen. As far as she can remember, whenever someone asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always had the same answer: "an actress!" She joined the Drama Club as soon as she entered High School and by the time she graduated she was already setting her sights on various colleges all over. All of them sounded so great that she had a hard time picking one in particular, so she decided to hand it over to fate. She applied for scholarships and other funding and decided to with whatever came back that would give her the least student debt.

Much to her surprise, she got accepted for funding across the pond. The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art had selected her for one of their scholarship programs and Tessa was ecstatic. Finally her life was going somewhere! Her parents, her mother especially, were hesitant to see their only daughter move so far away but she wouldn't be swayed. A whole new world was waiting for out there, and she was excited to dip her toes in it. With some heart-felt goodbyes, her stuff was packed and she was on the plane in time for the next fall semester.

=Awakening...= Things were going good for Tessa in her new home for a while. She had settled into a flat, gotten into the routine of her courses, and made some new friends. College was absolutely crazy. They try to prepare for you in high school, sure, but it turns the world upside down. She now had to master things like time management and a social life while also keeping up on her studies. It was a pain at times but she loved every moment. It all felt refreshing and new, like anything could happen. She occupied those moments before sleep thinking about breaking it big after she finished her degree. Graduation was off on the far horizon yet, but that didn't stop her from dreaming.

Unfortunately, fate has way of mucking up people's plans.

Everything had been fine until midterms hit. Suddenly she had so many presentations to memorize, rehearse and perform. She had enough enthusiasm, sure, but the rest of her was lagging. Every now and then something tickled the back of her subconscious, odd whispers of shrugging off her mundane life and embracing the truer power within. At the time she shrugged it off as a byproduct of sleepless nights and some sort of cold bug. She had been pressing herself hard to keep up, between little rest and fevers she was reaching her limit...But she was determined to see it through. She hadn't come this far to watch it all fade away.

So she ignored all the possible warning signs that she should probably try to reschedule with her professor and pressed on. When her turn came up, she steeled herself in front of her classmates and prepared her lines in her head. Yet no sooner had the first words left her lips did she sway. She felt suddenly light-headed and warm. Color faded from her vision and soon everything went black.

=Containment...= When she came to, she had no recollection of what had happened...And thus was all the more startled that she woke up in a Templar containment cell. More worrisome than that, the little itch in the back of her head had turned into a full-blown groan and the realization soon dawned that something else was in her mind with her. That scared the living daylights out of her. She couldn't get any proper answers from her captors either. She felt like a science experiment, if the science wasn't science at all. There were all sorts of instruments and mumbo jumbo that went right over her head. She remembered pleading for a long time, "please, I just want to know what's going on..." but it fell on deaf ears.

It wasn't until they finally let someone into the cell with her that she finally got some information. He was an older gentleman, with graying hair and large spectacles that gave him an owlish look. He pulled up a chair to Tessa's bedside and spoke calmly. It was a moment that's not likely to leave her memory any time.

"Ms. Wagner..." He started quietly as he adjusted his glasses. "I'm Hans Kaufman. And you may not believe this, but we're all here to...help you. You have some sort of external force hooked into you that's caused a small...accident. Do you remember any of this?"

She shook her head, dumb-founded.

"No, no...that's what we thought. That's probably why you're still here and not...hm...otherwise disposed. You could be useful to us, you see. We just need to puzzle out your...condition, and get control of it. We have very good men and women here working on your case, so there's no worries there. We just need your cooperation, alright?"

Tessa got the vibe that they would proceed with or without her consent and that Mr. Kaufman was only trying to be nice...So she nodded mutely, her brow furrowed as her brain tried to piece together the time she was missing.

"That's a good girl. You just listen to us and we'll take good care of you." Hans gave her a comforting smile that only partially reached his eyes and stood, turning to exit the cell.

Over the following weeks she was put through a litany of tests. If one could imagine it, she was probably put through it. From everything to seances to exorcisms, the latter being something she especially loathed, as it felt like her very soul was being ripped from her body. In the depths of her mind, the voice snarked through it all.

In the end, she had more questions than answers. The answers she did have were vague and more akin to theories than anything else. The few things she was told for certain were as follows.

One: She has the capacity to produce flame in living or formerly living organic tissue. This ability seems to require the presence of blood (or its equivalent) which has lead to the theory of blood being a possible fuel. She cannot set plants or man made structures on fire. She is also very flame/temperature resistant herself, and her body heat tends to fluctuate with high emotions. She can set parts of her body alight at will, which is useful when put up against something resistant to the above, as she can then punch them with a little extra oomph.

Two: This ability is connected to some sort of external force that now inhabits her body. She has heard Mr. Kaufman and his staff refer to it with various terminology: parasite, symbiont, spirit...It doesn't seem to be inherently evil (Kaufman assured her that if it was, she wouldn't be around still) but it does have a personality of its own and separate wants and desires from its host. It may be best described as amoral and interested first and foremost with its own interests. In this way it seems almost like a possession, yet exorcism has proved unworkable as it is so entwined with its host's life force that removing one from the other would kill them both.

Three: Controlling both the entity and the resulting fire manifestation is hard work. Tessa does her best but sometimes it's beyond her. For this reason, Kaufman and his staff have equipped her with a variety of ways to keep things under control. The first is a combination of alchemical elixirs that, when injected, act as a suppressant against her powers, which is administered throughout the day as needed. The second is a piece of jewelry that has been warded in such a manner as to act as a buffer if her surrounding temperature raises too high too quickly. She's also been told, very firmly, that should she ever become too much of a liability, there's a serum for that too. It's not something she likes to dwell on too often...

But the biggest thing she wanted to know was why...And that was something they couldn't tell her. There were plenty of ideas bandied about but no one could say for sure. Mayan curses, symbiotic possession, genetic anomalies...One day she hopes to find out once and for all why this happened to her.

=Field Testing...= Since her containment, she has been deemed stable enough to send out for field testing. Tessa has been deployed to Solomon Island to get some real life experience on how well the suppressing agents and trinkets Kaufman's team made work. It's where she spends most of her time now, even if she hates the codename that they gave her.