Heather Alder

Heather Alder is a character in The Calamitous Campaign

Equipment:
Nothing! …Well, a purse. She has a purse with nail polish, makeup, two bottles of perfume, a notepad and pen, her cell phone, hairspray, a screwdriver, a crumpled-up sheet of physics homework, about $40 in cash and loose change, an iPod and a modified car battery (but you’re not supposed to know about that).

Abilities:
Decent at baking. Good note-taker. Majoring in robotics at Harlan Tech. Took kickboxing once, but she had to quit when her instructor was nearly killed in a freak accident involving his upper half and a wall.

Description:
A regular 19-year-old girl with about average-good looks. She could probably look cuter if she ever wore anything besides long, baggy, unflattering clothing, but she doesn’t seem to own any other kind. Her hair is long, dark and straight, and it reaches neatly down to the middle of her back, covering everything below her neck. She regularly double-checks to make sure it’s all in place. Surprisingly enough, she doesn’t hide her face behind a pair of glasses, even though it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d do.

Usually if someone asks her about her unusual choice of clothes (which she maintains even in the dead of summer), she panics and says that she’s allergic to sunlight, but she’s obviously lying. If she really was, then she’d have to wear a hat, which she doesn’t. No one has the heart to call her out on it, though; she probably just has body image issues. They’re pretty common among girls her age, you know.

She often covers her mouth with her hand or sleeve when she talks – though it’s not like she has weird teeth, or anything. In fact, it’s a habit she’s hardly even aware of, so stop asking, it just makes her self-conscious. What if she only does it because she’s shy? You’d just make things worse.

Heather very strongly favors her right hand, and hardly ever seems to use her left at all. She also walks with just the slightest of limps, suggesting some kind of nasty injury that’s only mostly healed. Don’t ask her about it, that’s rude. If she were in a wheelchair or inside an iron lung, would you confront her about it? You terrible person.

When she was abducted for the battle, she was wearing a black-and-white striped shirt with sleeves so long that they cover her hands, an olive green vest, baggy jeans that almost reach the floor, and an ordinary pair of sneakers.

Heather is evasive and jumpy, and she’s often lost in thought. Her body image is clearly awful, and nothing bothers her more than strangers staring at her. Animals avoid her like the plague, dogs bark at her in the streets, and plants tend to shrivel and die around her, but I’m sure her perfume is just too strong or something. She sure does wear a lot of it.

She’s kind of a worrywart, which means she never gets onto planes, she cuts her own hair, and she never goes swimming, but really, that’s a good quality for a robotics major to have anyway. It means that she always double-checks and catches her mistakes. She must be under a lot of stress.

Kids these days, right?

Biography:
Nothing terribly notable. Heather was born in Tarley, East Dakota, a smallish American town where the only thing anyone over 40 ever talked about was the Meteor Crash of 1862, the last recorded interesting thing to happen there before or since.

After an entirely uneventful childhood, she decided to put as much distance between herself and her hometown as possible and went to Harlan Tech, an engineering school in the middle of the Southwestern Seaboard.

Heather avoided meeting other people on her own, always preferring the company of her friends and the people they were friends with, which leads to a rather interesting chicken-and-egg paradox once you think about it. She didn’t always seem to fit in, though everyone just assumed it was because of her accent. College students are supposed to be a little eccentric anyway.

Sure, people swapped the occasional theory about her (she’s a child prodigy who invented the internet, she’s actually performing a lengthy psych experiment, she’s got a killer figure underneath all those baggy clothes, etc), but between a combination of general politeness and slight pity about all her nervous habits, people avoided talking about her behind her back.

Even when she stopped attending class altogether.