Tess!
Part 1: Phage-Likes
Tess is the character I created for my YouTube channel. They're my self-insert persona guy, and my channel mascot. "Tess" is also my nickname/username. I am Tess, but at the same time, Tess is a character I created. They are a phage-like, and mostly human. Phage-likes are a very broad category of drawings I do, basically any creature that has phage-like characteristics. They are usually upright, but everything else can vary. Sometimes their face is very human, sometimes they have a ring of 6 eyes and a mouth at the top of their head. Sometimes they have six legs and no arms, and sometimes they have three legs and nine arms. The segment count and way their arms and legs bend is also completely variable. Here's a collection of some of my favorite phage-like drawings. (That aren't of Tess)
I've been drawing these guys for over 101 years. I've always had an affinity for radial symmetry, and spike/claw like legs, but these interests were heightened and focused when I saw this video for the first time, when I was like 1001 or 1010 years old. I really like bacteriophages.
I've got a kurzgesagt bacteriophage poster in my room (at least at the time of typing this) and for halloween 2024 I spent a lot of my free time making a bacteriophage costume. A lot of my games feature bacteriophages, like Void Warrior. Well I guess that's just the one. Still, I like bacteriophages a lot. I crave the strength and stability of a quadropedal form.
Out of all the phage-like variants, I decided to go with this one for Tess. Kind of ironic as its the most human, but I like it.
Isn't the form just beautiful?? I love phage-likes. Humans should genetically modify themselves to look like Tess. If they don't... I will.
Part 2: Choosing a Name
My favorite numbers (in decimal) are: 2, 4, 6, 16, 24, 36, 120, 216, 256, 360, 65,536... I could really go on but then none of them would be special. My favorite three are 2, 6, and 16, though, which are special to me.
The greek word for four is "tessera" and 16 is 24 and 42, so tess just kind of feels like the number four squared, even though it really means four. Also, there was an ancient roman game called "tesserae" that was played with cubic dice, so "tesser" works really well in the word "tesseract", meaning 4-cube. Well done Charles Hinton, you chose a name that's actually really good and that I have zero issues with! Really rare that someone names something perfectly, and naming things is surprisingly diffuclt. Hats off to you dude.
Getting off topic here, this is not a page about 4D or Charles Hinton. Anyway, I like the number 
, and "tess" kind
of means that. Also one last reason is that a tesseract has 16 vertices, so everything just kind of fits.
It's actually good that it doesn't quite mean that, because that would mean the SEO would be a lot
worse. Also, I call hexadecimal tessimal, and that's where my full username comes from! Wow, I'm a huge
fuckin nerd.
One last thing: "Isn't Tess a girl's name?" as I was researching trying to find a new name to replace 10 year old me's "Z53 INCOMING", I realized at the end that Tess, was, in fact, a traditionally feminine name. It does sound kind of feminine. But I don't mind, I'm more non binary than male and "Tess" feels like a pretty mathy/unisex name to me. This is entirely because I've never met anyone named Tess or seen the name used anywhere.
Part 3: Tess's Story
Here's the part where I pretend to have a backstory for my character, but in reality they were just a name and body for me to project myself onto and puppeteer until this point!
Tess is from an alternate history of Earth, where instead of the super class tetrapoda, we got hexapoda. And instead of humans evolving into something birrin or centaur like, they evolved into phage-likes! Tess lived as an engineer and loved tinkering with vehicles, higher dimensional space, and physics. Eventually he figured out parallel universe hopping and now he jumps from reality to reality, meeting strange creatures, going on cool adventures, and exploring higher dimensions.
Tess has a six legged cat named Tiger, and is best friends with a simplexian. Here's a blender render I did of their 3 dimensional name. It's pronounced /pəlki/, or if I were to spell it in English, pullkey. (My friend says that that's wrong and it should be spelled "polki", though) The left right axis of the image is the write/read direction (they use left to right and a capitalization system), and the up down axis is like the up down axis on a 2D page. The forward back axis is the fourth dimension, or the W coordinate. It's usually like a left/right axis, but since they write left to right, and this is perpendicular to that, it's more like another up/down axis in this context. Though they are still pretty different.
Tess wears a suit for traversing four dimensions. The suit keeps all of their organs on the inside, stabilizes their atoms, and helps keep him on his feet and to not blow away in the wind, though it still happens sometimes. It's basically a space suit, but with two completely solid space suits nanometers away on either side in the W axis.
It's very heavy, but it's still not quite enough to not blow away in the wind, so there are hemi-hyperspherical anchors on each foot. To avoid folding, there are 8 spherindrical metal rods that run down either side of the suit, 4 on one side 4 on the other, two for each leg. The rods connect to the head and go down to the hips, where they have an axle joint that only rotates spherically (but can't rotate into and out of the fourth dimension). There's another axle at the knee and ankle. Together these make him pretty sturdy, save for his arms and outer torso. So there's more rods that branch off to handle that. It doesn't restrict him much at all, since they're full freedom spherical joints, but in 4D, a sphere joint is not full freedom.
There's also a few very thin metal plates in parts of his suit where it would be difficult to get rods and its very important to have be in the same slice. Mainly Tess's hands, head, and feet. These are quite heavy, as they are solid 3D metal.
The suit also has wheels in the hemi-hyperspherical feet, so that he can strafe ana and kata, twirl, and turn ana/kata. Lastly, the suit has some hand wavium physics generator thingies so that his atoms stay perfectly flat. It uses powerful electromagnetic fields or some shit idk.
Why does it matter that his atoms stay 3 dimensional? Well chemistry works very differently in 4D than in 3D. I have a friend who knows a lot about this stuff, but they didn't really know what would happen if a human were transported to the fourth dimension. I heard somewhere that one common element in the human body becomes the 4D version of fluorine, which is fun. For those not in the know, fluorine is very dangerous.
Overall, this suit works decently well but is very heavy, so he doesn't like using it for too long. He eventually built a remote controlled drone so that he can do things in 4D for longer. It has arms!