Character Name: Dr. Alanna Ellis
Affiliation: Foundation
Age: 37
Department/Position: Memetic Engineering/Chairperson
Qualifications:
- PhD., Memetic Engineering (Foundation Program)
- Master's, Linguistics (Pragmatics)
- BS., Mechanical Engineering
- Amnestic Use Certification III
- Mnestic Use Certification III
Clearance Level: 3
Physical Description: Average height, brown hair and gray eyes. Often wears a toolbelt, along with the requisite lab coat, white button-up shirt and gray slacks.
Role: Alanna's main "Base of Operations" are located at Site-43, but when required she regularly travels from Site to Site to deal with and study various memetic agents.
Background: Alanna lived a relatively normal life before her interaction with the anomalous. Showing signs of exceptional academic excellence as a child, she became interested in the possibility of truly human interactions with machines after going to a tech demonstration held by an up-and-coming robotics startup. This interest in human/machine interaction evolved into a curiosity about how humans communicate meaning, and she decided to major in linguistics – however, due to the requirements of her early uni access program, Alanna decided to go into engineering and later transferred into linguistics.
After her time at university, she was then recruited by Prometheus Labs to work on their natural language model for their artificial intelligences. Curious about the other operations Prometheus was working on, Alanna often attempted to get read into other operations with varying degrees of success. Foundation plants in Prometheus decided that Alanna could be a valuable asset in the Memetics Division due to her knowledge of pragmatics and decided to allow Alanna knowledge about the anomalous provided she act as a whistleblower. Stealing the code for the language model, Alanna was then pulled out of Prometheus to work at Site-47. She took up memetic engineering relatively quickly and studied several memetic anomalies, with much valuable knowledge being produced from those years. Presently, Alanna heads the Memetic Engineering Containment Team, where she is assisted by a team of researchers.
Profile: Alanna is a travelling salesman researcher, wandering from Site to Site wherever she's most needed. While she does have a "home base" at Site-43, she's always been a bit of a rambling soul, carrying most of her carry-able stuff in a single, well-worn suitcase with an almost anomalous resistance to wear and tear. This description as a restless soul fits her personality, too – a bit of a scatterbrain and yet another somewhat amoral eccentric in the Foundation's roster.
When it comes to hobbies, Alanna's developed her artistic skill to the point where she can mock up any device (made by herself, natch) with a pencil and a sharpener. She's a fan of various electro and rock bands with a general rule being "the more hardcore the better", and a longtime admirer of T.S. Eliot's poetry. People attempting to defame her liking of his works as "pretentious" and "chi-chi" have met with a collection of his work at various speeds.
Due to her always on-the-run job, Alanna rarely gets to make all that many friends at a Site, with her closest friends being her colleagues and underlings subordinates. Despite this, Alanna is a generally sociable, if somewhat grumpy, figure who's often seen haunting her resident Site's corridors at the weirdest hours. Whether she's discussing memetics, intra-researcher relations or just someone's poor taste in music, she'll often pull other people in for conversation and/or testing.
It's advised that if you see her with a thousand-yard stare, or forget why she's there or what she's doing, you don't ask "why". You generally don't want to know, and neither does she.