Memento Vivere

NAME: Tessina Calogera
Nickname: Tess
AGE: twenty-six
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Bisexual

❖ Appearance ❖
Tessina has a pale complexion and dark brown hair. While her name is Italian, she is of indeterminate European heritage. Her eyes are a deep pine green color and she favors the color red on her lips stains, gowns and cloaks. All colors of crimson and scarlet bring out the alluring tone of her soft, white skin.

❖ Personality ❖
Tess seems headstrong, but her heart often pulls the marionette strings. Because of her upbringing around her playwright father, she can be histrionic and over-dramatic at times. She enjoys winning and does not like to be outplayed in anything. If she finds herself outwitted, she is likely to hold a grudge.

❖ Likes ❖
❖ Being a secret and silent patron of the arts;
❖ Theater and drama;
❖ French culture and literature (she is a secret French sympathizer);
❖ Solitude (not always but sometimes); A fine meal

❖ Dislikes ❖
❖ Staying in one place.
❖ Venice is her home now but likely not her final destination;
❖ Trappings of wealth and nobility;
❖ Lateness and procrastination;
❖ Rain or water (which makes it difficult in Venice);
❖ Being outwitted

❖ Hopes ❖
❖ To avoid a prison cell, and
❖ to retire to a life of luxury;



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Born in Verona to an Italian playwright and minor dramatist, Tessina was his only child and did not know her mother. According to her father, her mother, likely a courtesan or prostitute that was her father's muse, presumably died in childbirth, but Tess always had her doubts about that story as her father loved tall tales and making up fictional endings to ordinary outings.

She also remains suspicious of her mother's heritage due to the sheer amount of French literature in the household when she was growing up. When Tessina was a youth her father used her to help him with his play writing, and they acted out many Greek scenes together, therefore the Veronese native has a histrionic streak and is prone to using emotion over reason.

As a teenager, Tess was fascinated by the writings of the French writers and she constantly daydreamed that her mother was a French intellectual, the kind that could help over throw a kingdom.

When she was twenty-one, her father fell into debt, exacerbated by drinking and Tessina took a job as a courtesan to help pay the family debts. He died one year later of pleurisy and during this dark time, the young Veronese courtesan soothed her grieving heart by first falling in love with a French patron and second, becoming and assassin for him, paid to murder Italian merchants who were found to be embezzling or stealing from him.

Eventually Tessina escaped to Venice after her French lover began to exhibit signs of psychosis. She found her home in a loose organization of female assassins known as the Lucciole di Morte (Fireflies of Death), a cult of executioners who are rumored to have originated in Rome during Augustus's reign. While Tessina will insist she works alone, another rumor that follows her is that she works in a duo, alongside a man as cruel and shadowy as she is.

(((Should you wish to rewrite Tessina, it is quite alright... as long as she stays an assassin and dirty deeds done cheap. She will be working with Lucca Arcasian on occasion, and may, should the assuming writer wish it, to have Tess in a relationship with the man.)))