1. Characters
  2. Tessa / Sage
Tessa / Sage
Super Name: Tessa / Sage
Real Name:
Nickname:
Universe: Earth-616
Tessa first Appearance: X-Men Vol 1 #132
Sage first Appearance: X-Men Vol 2 #109

As a young girl, also known as Sage, lived in a war-torn Balkan country. While she and other children were able to put the threat of landmines and snipers from their minds at times, her village was eventually invaded by enemy troops and she was forced to flee the only life she'd known.

As a young teenager, Sage hadn't escaped war. She found herself caught up in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. She had been forced to learn to fight to survive encounters with both soldiers and local bandits, and took weapons and equipment from the bodies of fallen combatants wherever she found them. One day, Sage felt herself compelled to enter a cave in the nearby Hindu Kush mountain range. There, she found the powerful telepathic mutant Charles Xavier, his legs crushed by a "demon". Initially wary of him, Sage rescued the critically injured mutant but soon after they encountered a Shaw Industries/United Nations aid convoy being attacked by bandits. Using her rifle, she picked-off the attackers from her hill-side vantage point. Down at the site of the attack, she briefly stood, horrified, over the raped body of a young female aid worker. Then, sensing she was about to be attacked from behind, she spun and shot one of the bandits. Unswayed as he pled for his life, she unsheathed her knife and killed him.

Hellfire Club:

Xavier would, in return, save Sage, sending for her when he returned to America. He had begun forming the first iteration of his team of teenage mutants, the X-Men. Xavier kept the presence of the warrior girl a secret, instead training her to capitalize upon her talents as his personal spy. Sage's mission was to infiltrate the social organization for the rich and powerful known as the Hellfire Club and to gain the trust of Sebastian Shaw, then Black Bishop of the New York branch of the Hellfire Club.

Sebastian gave her the name "Tessa", and she acted as his familiar, advising and counseling him in both his legitimate and illegal business practices, all the while gathering information for Xavier.

Sebastian Shaw had gathered mutants around himself, including Tessa, Emma Frost, Harry Leland, and his fiance' Lourdes Chantel. Initially he believed that White King's support of the Sentinel program would lead to the commercialization of mutant powers, but on one Christmas evening, Lourdes and Tessa advised him to consider the White King as an enemy. Minutes later, a Sentinel attacked Sebastian's beach house. Not dissuaded by Tessa's warning, Lourdes died to protect Sebastian. In response, Emma and Sebastian killed the entire leadership of the Hellfire Club as Tessa watched.

Powers:
--Mental Computation: Sage is a mutant with astonishingly advanced intellectual capabilities forged from a mind that works in the same way as a supercomputer would.
--Photographic Memory: Sage perfectly remembers everything she experiences. She can instantaneously retrieve every memory and any information she has perceived.
--Multitasking: Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task. For example, Sage can use her mind to replay a movie she had watched previously, play a game of internet chess, and focus on battling an opponent without any one task distracting her from another.
--Kinetic Memory: Sage can perfectly execute any skill she has had a single lesson in without the need for practice.
--Self Mastery: Sage has complete control over her body. She once consciously used her immune system to purge herself of mind-controlling nanites.

Biokinesis:

--Genetic Sight: Sage can perceive the DNA in cells, living or dead, within close range. Combined with her innate analytical capabilities, this allows her to determine familial relationships between people and to understand a person's current and potential abilities.
--Jump-start: After analyzing the DNA of another mutant, Sage is able to unleash latent mutant powers or enhance existing mutant powers. The process is irreversible and can often result in unpredictable side-effects. She can also restore mutant abilities lost due to injury.

--Telepathy: Trained by Xavier himself, Sage learned a great degree of telepathic talents that include detecting minds, mind-reading, projecting thoughts, astral projection, casting realistic mental illusions and a level of psionic defense unique to her.

--Firewall: Sage is capable of creating her own unique psionic protection against outside mental influence. By erecting a psionic "firewall" Sage is able to effectively protect herself from direct mental attacks, probes and detection of the mental variety while creating a defensive force that reflects any offensive mental action back at her attacker. The wall is effective in both directions, nearly eliminating her own psionic abilities while active.

Abilities:

--Gifted Intelligence: Sage's mutant intelligence makes her one of the smartest people on the planet through raw computational power and perfect recollection. This allows her to be an expert in every field that is well-documented or calculable, such as combat and technology, but less so for others, such as sociology and psychology.

Examples include:

--Expert Engineer: Sage has displayed remarkable technical aptitude for electronics and mechanics, though she typically improves on existing designs rather than innovating new devices. Examples include miniaturizing the advanced technology contained within her cybernetic sunglasses, familiarity with repairing components of the X-Men's Blackbird, and creating a solid-light version of an image inducer and an autonomous support artificial intelligence.
--Peerless Hacker: Sage has access to countless digital records, public and private. She claimed she had access to any data network on the planet. Her more impressive feats include gaining full access to the surveillance systems of a multiversal alien invasion force and retrieving information from the "black box" of a deceased Celestial.
--Hyperpolyglot: Sage is fluent in over 123 different languages.
--Master Martial Artist: Sage is skilled in the martial arts, and is a formidable hand-to-hand combatant due to her having complete conscious control over her own body.
--Weapons Expert: Sage is also self-taught in a wide range of firearms, which she can use with considerable skill and accuracy.
--Interrogator: Sage's cold demeanor and ability to detect lies through body language has proven so intimidating that thugs and soldiers give up information quickly.
--Pilot: Sage was seen to skillfully pilot the X-Men's Blackbird, and a space-mech.

Medical Expertise:

--Trauma Treatment: Sage treated Captain Britain after he was nearly killed by Rouge-Mort.
--Forensics Expert: Sage is able to instantly and expertly identify a type of wound by its blood spatter pattern, pinpoint a shooter's position from bullet holes and determine causes of death of corpses.
--Mutant Genetics Expert: Sage is able to identify all kinds of genetic material, human, mutant and alien and, to a limited extent, simulate the effects of changing a genome.

--Indomitable Will: Sage was born with an indomitable will and trained by Charles Xavier to enhance it further. This has allowed her to resist being controlled by nanites, usurp possession, and prevent telepaths from reading or influencing her mind.

Equipment:
--Cybernetic Sunglasses: Sage wears a pair of custom-built cyber shades that function as a wireless broadband computer network among like models. The shades provide an audio/video feed via an in-built computer system outfitted with miniaturized conventional microphones and cameras, and can also project a three-dimensional image into the visual field of the wearer that can be expanded to allow others to see with whom the wearer is communicating or information they are reviewing. The shades provide input by means of an augmented reality iconographic keyboard, and have an alternate visual input system for when a user’s hands are otherwise occupied. The shades can be interfaced with any external data network whether terrestrial or alien in origin. The shades also possess various sensors for detecting telepathic resonance patterns, tracking energy trails, and analyzing electronic circuitry, among others.

Weapons:
--Sage wields knives and a pair of handguns. She had a scoped rifle capable of holding stun ammunition, but she has yet to be seen firing it. Her accuracy was so precise, and her knowledge of anatomy so complete, that the X-Men did not object to her carrying guns, with the mutual understanding that she would not kill anyone while working with them.

Credit: marvel.fandom.com
1ST APPEARANCE
X-Men #109
Volume 2 • February 2001
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