Cursed with a beauty akin to the Archons themselves. Tessa was born just fifteen years ago and already she had men of all races and some women too drawn to her. This was both a blessing and a curse for Tessa could do nothing to be hidden, quiet or stealthy.
One night, at the age of 12, after refusing to bed some Corporate desk clerk, she tried cutting her face. Repeatedly she brought the straight razor to her soft white skin of her left cheek. Feeling the cold steel of the blade caress her, she flinched and stopped, dropping her hand. Again she tried. For three nights. Three nights she failed.
“Curse you”, she whispered to her ancestors. “Curse you all. I choose not this face no this body. Why. Why have you done this to me? I just want to be left alone. To live. To die. To be normal.”
Tessa Jinx cried her self to sleep again that night.
As the years went by, her beauty blossomed even more. At the age of fifteen, most thought she was a young adult. Her beauty was unsurpassed on Kadash. While visitors were few, there were those that came to the underwater cities to barter for supplies and to sell other much needed gear to the Kaltorans who refused to forsake their home world.
It was on one such day that while Tessa and her ailing father were selling some of their food supplies, harvested from seaweed in the All-Sea, that a Corp, surrounded by what they assumed were just ‘lesser’ Corporates and two burly legion guards, happened to glance across the sprawling trading quarter and laid eyes on Tessa.
With one word, her future was all but sealed. “I must have her.”
Her father bravely refused the man’s advances. “My daughter is not for sale!” He bellowed out, loud enough for others to hear. “What world to you come from where one can buy another?”.
The Corp left. And so, that would have been that. Unfortunately one particular unscrupulous Kaltoran man with already greying locks of hair and only one living eye over heard the commotion, and the price the finely dressed man had offered.
That night, Tessa’s house was set ablaze and while the screams of others on the street and the wailing of auto-response fire drones drowned out her screams, Tessa was grabbed, tied up and gagged, thrown into the back of a two wheeled van which sped off to the docking port.
She was sold. The man gladly took his reward and vanished into the darkness of space, buying a ticket off of the world.
A short intro to a character I am working on
If you are wondering about the setting, its Fragged Empire. A roleplaying game that I was privileged enough to be part of the final stages of playtesting. Check it out on Drivethru RPG