Hee...and likewise I don't know your email, Jemal...but I don't think I care if it's a big secret or not, so sblocks it is.
[sblock=Tessa got Back! ...ground]Tessa was raised Southern, the daughter of an estranged pairing of high energy physicist and a conservative Baptist homemaker. It seems odd that her powers so closely matched the specialty of her father. He was involved heavily in research into gravitation and exotic matter and energy. Perhaps he was acting on urges from some unexpressed mutation himself, or perhaps his experiments changed his genetics somehow. Or maybe, in his long talks with his cherished and fiercely bright young daughter, he provided a channel for a power that had been broader in scope.
It's impossible to say.
Tessa's mutation manifested, as is so often the case, in defense of her life. She was present at a presentation of her father's. An attempt to create a stable wormhole. Unfortunately, something went wrong. The apparatus that generated the powerful pulse of energy that would form the 'virtual mass' that created the anomaly overloaded. Instead of a wormhole, the energy density collapsed and created a black hole. Tess, 13 years old, reacted unconsciously, smoothing out the gravity well before it could drag her in. Her father, and several other scientists and administrators, were not so lucky.
With only her mother to stay with, Tessa's life changed completely. Though her mother cared for her, she expressed this care by being stern; believing that doing so was the only way to 'save' her daughter. Tess found herself surrounded by rules; a litany of don'ts. Starting with Don't Do Anything Mutant. Though she learned to wear a pliable facade, her natural curiosity was too high to just leave it alone. As she came to terms with her father's death (though she insists stubbornly he -could- have survived), and with her new situation, she found private times and places she could experiment with her abilities.
She was sixteen when she became 'outed' as a mutant. She was in town with her mother, prim and proper as always, but seething with resentment over the farce she lived every day. She'd taken to a sort of rebellious packratting, sneaking little objects into her latest creation; the Tessaract. A multidimensional construct, sort of like a parallel universe. In reality it was just a 'blister' extending out into multidimensional space. It didn't DO much, but it could hold things like an invisible 'sack' that was always at hand. When she and her mother took a shortcut from the Christian bookstore they'd been in through an alley towards the car, they were stopped by a pair of young men, one of whom had a knife. They surrendered their purses, but at that moment a man happened to see what was happening, and shouted. As he started down the alley towards them, one kid fled but the other grabbed Tess and put the knife to her neck, trying to chase the man off.
Tessa, reacting rather naturally to this, panicked. A moment later the guy with the knife was gone. Terrified at what she'd done, and hideously guilty from the reactions of horror on the faces of her mother and this unknown Samaritan, she then found herself in her living room...vanishing effortlessly from the alley.
By the time the police showed up she'd calmed down some, and explained what had happened. She produced the mugger, who was frightened but unharmed. Things were getting back under control.
Then came her mother. The row they had was explosive. Even epic. Mortified by the attention her daughter's mutation drew, and wracked with the horror that even if her genes weren't the defective ones, others might think so, she forbade Tessa from ever again using her powers or face the ultimate punishment in her eyes; exile. But by this time, Tess had had a hard day. She was tired and angry and perhaps a touch emboldened by what she'd just done. Defiantly, she teleported again, stretching space to slide two feet to her right. Just to explain that she was exploring this and there was nothing her mother could do about it.
Faced with this, Tessa's mother still couldn't bring herself to just throw her out, despite her righteous rage. Instead she arranged to send Tess to a private school. One that would help with her behavioral problems.
Tess never made it there. She was intercepted by a rather charismatic older man who took it on himself to stop the bus...harmlessly...and ask her to get out. The fact that he stopped the bus while it was traveling full speed, and without apparently touching it, attracted Tesses attention. He was a mutant too, and was just recently alone in the world. And he needed her help.[/sblock]