Tess Varnum

Tess has a lean, wiry build honed from years of dodging volatile machinery and navigating the chaos of active workshops. Her agility is exceptional, allowing her to move swiftly around dangerous prototypes and collapsing equipment with practiced ease. She is highly adept at handling heavy weapons and performing physically demanding tasks, from lifting massive components to bracing herself during explosive tests. Her body bears the marks of her career. Minor burns, scars, and singed hair are common, serving as badges of survival and testament to a lifetime spent at the edge of controlled destruction.

Tess grew up as the daughter of a minor inventor and a mechanical salvager, wandering the ruins of pre-Fall infrastructure in the Wastelands as a child. Her early fascination with explosions and machines quickly outpaced her ability to follow conventional instruction. After a failed apprenticeship in mechanical engineering, Tess found her true home among the Scorchbringers, where her reckless creativity was both tolerated and celebrated. Over decades, she became both a protector of the Engineers and a living cautionary tale of fire, intellect, and chaos intertwined.

Tess identifies as female and expresses her identity through a mixture of practical attire, technical insignia, and personal flair. In the hyper-pragmatic world of the Engineers, gender is incidental to skill; her identity informs her interactions but is rarely a focus outside personal expression and occasional banter with peers.

Tess is romantically and sexually fluid, engaging with partners regardless of gender when mutual curiosity and consent align. Her sexuality is secondary to her obsession with invention, but she maintains close personal connections with trusted collaborators and protégés within the Engineers.

Tess received no formal higher education. Her learning came from failed apprenticeships, field experimentation, and hands-on tinkering with pre-Fall machinery. Every failure, explosion, and near-death incident became part of her self-taught curriculum.

Tess's career began in chaos: a single experiment gone catastrophically wrong produced a fireball that leveled her makeshift workshop, drawing the immediate attention of the Scorchbringers. Rather than reprimand her, they recognized her combination of skill, audacity, and resilience as perfect for their line of work. She was recruited into the Scorchbringers, where her natural aptitude for handling volatile inventions and creating controlled destruction was honed into a profession. Over the years, Tess rose through the ranks by proving her ability to protect the Engineers’ workshops, survive impossible mishaps, and turn near-disasters into pioneering lessons in both firepower and safety.

Tess has earned her legendary status through a combination of daring innovation and unwavering dedication to the Engineers. She pioneered the self-adjusting power harness, a nearly fatal creation that nevertheless redefined how energy could be harnessed and controlled. Beyond her inventions, Tess has maintained safety amid countless catastrophic experiments, preventing disasters from claiming the lives of fellow engineers. Her journals are filled with detailed diagrams, warnings, and enthusiastic explosion doodles and they have become essential reading for apprentices and Scorchbringers, inspiring a new generation to embrace controlled chaos. Through these feats, she has come to be recognized not just as a master engineer, but as a living symbol of innovation, daring, and the unpredictable brilliance that defines Camp Hope’s scientific frontier.

Tess is as infamous for her spectacular failures as she is celebrated for her achievements. Early in her career, a prototype test obliterated her first workshop, earning her a reputation for reckless ingenuity. In one particularly disastrous week, she accidentally ignited three separate district buildings, cementing her status as both hazard and legend. Over time, multiple projects were deemed “too dangerous for use,” resulting in temporary bans from faction workshops and a cautious wariness from colleagues. Yet these failures, rather than diminishing her standing, became integral to her legend. Proof that true innovation in Camp Hope often dances on the edge of catastrophe.

Tess carries the weight of having witnessed near-fatal accidents and the loss of colleagues during experiments. She experiences occasional flashbacks of explosions, but her obsessive focus on creation and tinkering functions as both coping mechanism and protective ritual.

Tess possesses a genius-level engineering intuition that allows her to see solutions where others see only chaos. She excels at rapid problem-solving, particularly under conditions that would overwhelm most minds, turning volatile situations into opportunities for discovery. Her capacity for rapid ideation and improvisation enables her to adapt designs on the fly, often in the middle of experiments teetering on disaster. Even amidst destruction, Tess can recognize patterns and underlying principles, deciphering the logic of machines, energy flows, and catastrophic sequences in ways that make the impossible feel inevitable.

Tess operates on a personal philosophy that knowledge and progress justify controlled risk. She believes failure is a teacher and fire is a tool, one that can create as much as it destroys. Ethics are contextual: saving engineers is vital, but collateral damage is a tolerable consequence of discovery.

For Tess, the greatest sins are those that stifle creativity and innovation. She refuses to tolerate the deliberate suppression of new ideas, viewing any attempt to halt experimentation out of fear as both shortsighted and morally wrong. Authority that imposes rigid control over the inventive process is another line she will not cross, believing that genius cannot flourish under strict oversight. To Tess, rules are guidelines, failures are lessons, and curiosity is sacred. Anything that hinders the pursuit of discovery is anathema to her philosophy and her life’s work.