Willa Lovelace

Backstory
I was raised in Steam City in a middle class household by father Lantor and mother Jofi: he builds and repairs mechanical contraptions and plays a clerical role in the city’s Engineering Guild, and she runs an in-home daycare and sometimes takes in orphans. I was born paraplegic. My parents cared for me deeply, with my father building mechanically-assisted crutches and wheelchairs as I grew so that I could keep up with my siblings.

When I was a teenager, corrupt municipal tax collectors and complicit aristocrats began to take more and more from my family. I never learned the details, but it always seemed like this went far beyond the usual light corruption. Whatever was motivating it, I’d had my first brush with economic violence. After conversations with my older, adopted brother Owen Lovelace, who’d recently begun to learn about workers’ rights, I was radicalized. I decided to fight back directly, working to improve on my father’s mobility devices and eventually building a functioning prototype of the mechanical suit I now wear. When the collectors next came to demand money, I scared them off. Owen, working behind the scenes through his union connections, kept them away.

I trained at Steam City University in the institution’s fledgling Mechanics Department, conducting independent research into engineering, flight, lighter-than-air gasses, and assorted other natural phenomena. This research was strong enough for the University to hire me as a junior professor. Irritated by my colleagues’ unreflective devotion to the gods and their conviction in magic, I began to work on a new hypothesis – that any and all apparently supernatural phenomena could be explained by small, unimaginably fast “animacules” given direction by the energetic output of friction. The church of Gond funded my research, despite my explicit atheism. When I was denied tenure – because my radical materialism threatened the very pillars of the entire institution, I claimed, and not at all because I had been unable to prove any of my hypotheses – the church of Gond suggested that I might relocate to Irontown to set up a technical college. I agreed.

Like any atheist libertarian anarchist, I can be irritating in my convictions about the simple truth of the world. There’s a bit of Richard Dawkins/Elon Musk going on. However, Owen helps me to reign in the worst of my eccentricities. At my best, I’m excited, passionate, and willing to acknowledge that I might not know literally everything.