CIVILIAN. WESSEX, ALEKSANDRA

Female.

Hedonist.

Twenty-five.

April 15, 1987

British mutt. Three parts Welsh to one part French.

English and French.

Saundra.

0.5

N/A

N/A

None

11/18 by Mike

Alluade

No thank you.

BRING IT ON. I DON’T EVEN CARE. LET THE BURNING COMMENCE.

HAZUKI FERRARI from GALILEI DONNA

She’s firmly in the lower fringes of the middle class, just clinging on to the edges of a cheap one room apartment. Saundra has a credit problem combined with a shoe problem, added together with a love for Gucci and Prada. She drives a sad little Prius that’s barely big enough to fit her and her purse, much less her shopping habit. But she budgets well enough for just enough take-out to survive, utilities, and a little bit extra. No one said it was cheap to be fashionable. Saundra could be comfortably secure in the middle of the economic pack, but with her middle school English teacher’s salary tied up in her credit card debt she can only manage the fringe of middle class. She ghost writes on the side to keep her debt a bit more manageable, but most of her time is taken up with partying and teaching.

She’s a beauty in the classical sense of the word, all milky skin and soft edges. Her brown hair’s long and tied up in the back in a looping ponytail that drapes over her shoulders, all soft and silky strands that men would die to touch. Saundra has just enough curves in all the right places, holds it all with the dignity and grace a lady can be trained to have. She has an almost prissy look to her, doing her best to look professional even while still managing to be constantly ready for the hustle and bustle of everyday city living. Her suits are tailored to her form, her stiletto heels made of pretty steel and black satin. And her fishnet stockings are held in place by the widest rainbow varieties of lacy garters (her one odd allowed female vanity) that just barely peek out from her form fitting skirts when she sashays by. Saundra isn’t an idiot and switches out her skirts for pants when she has to stay late for detentions, but otherwise she has been known to live in pencil skirts and high heels.

Saundra in casual wear is a sight to behold, so far removed from her professional work appearance that it causes quite a few double takes. Long legs run free as slender arms enjoy the breeze, a wonderful side effect of a closet full of sundresses. She wears jeans and tank-tops with equal grace as she does her suits, lets her hair down and blends. Her heels sometimes get swapped out for sneakers and socks, but for some reason it’s far more appreciated when she doesn’t. Saundra’s glasses are functionally useless, merely kept to add a professional demeanor and to follow that amazing clause of reality where a single pair of glasses leaves you indistinguishable to even your closest friends.

Saundra could be summed up in one nice word: maternal. She is always rather serene and collected no matter the circumstances, and seems to have an inexhaustible source of patience. When angered, Saundra has a tendency to descend into a state of glacial consciousness that makes even her fellow Windsor White Fangs back up and reassess their value in life. Amazingly enough, Saundra is a cheerfully kind woman. She is very soft spoken, extremely polite, and goes out of her way to take care of others. At the same time Saundra tries her best to blend into the background and remain free of scandal and potentially harmful situations. Saundra’s aspires to become a person worthy of being a teacher and do her parents proud, regardless of the general hatred and pity her family has towards her.

Her teaching methods are professional, discipline just a bit shy of every little boy’s greatest dreams. Saundra will, and has a horrible reputation for it, raise her voice in a manner that honestly sounds like your mother when provoked. She keeps her doors open and maintains a careful neutral presence among the staff and students. But disrupt her class and there will be hell to pay later. Her lessons are swift and to the point, get the science of language out of the way as swiftly as possible so she can open up her classes for more fun pursuits with English. Shakespeare gets replaced with Harry Potter, Hemingway takes a backseat to whatever she finds interesting that day. Saundra doesn’t believe that classical education helps any and writes her lesson plans as such. Yes, you learn English. But the English you learn is the English spoken by the public, tempered with debates and an ‘English only’ rule. She tries her best and hopes that it’s good enough.

Saundra is known for always keeping her word of honor, lying and cheating only if very necessary, never attacking or harming an unarmed foe, never harming an innocent, does not use torture unless completely necessary for saving someone’s life (and even then does not enjoy it), never kills for pleasure, usually helps those in need, never betrays a friend even if it means taking the fall for them, and has an abnormally high regard for life and personal freedom. In short, Saundra is one honorable young lady. At the same time, she is incredibly open with relationships and serves as a level head in counseling anyone who comes to her. When she loses control of herself and gets truly aggravated, Saundra usually falls back on the old caveman style of ‘scream and hit until dead’.

Thoughts on the opposite sex:
There’s something terribly wrong with the opposite gender, at least in Saundra’s opinion. It’s like there’s not a one among them with a proper spine or enough common sense to keep her on her toes. Just once she’d like to be swept off her feet and treated like a proper princess, not drooled over like some common sex object. But since that’s not happening any time soon, you’ll have to forgive a lady some righteous moodiness.
“I’m a citizen of Britain dammit. So what happened to my knight in shining armor?”

Thoughts on the same sex:
Women are made of elegance and mercurial mystery. It’s fun to figure them out and be all chatty about it. Her own gender is all soft and sweet, make memory twist and her mind go off on holiday. Saundra gets how men find women appealing, but she gets how women like their romance. Oh, she’ll be the best confidante best friend a woman can ever find. But if push comes to shove, Saundra has no qualms about educating her friends on how proper romance goes.
”Hmm? I wasn’t supposed to send you flowers just because it’s Tuesday? Well… they reminded me of you.”

Dating:
The point of dating is to secure yourself a potential mate for life and keep them that way. Saundra, epitome of logic that she is, does not want to be so unencumbered in life. She prefers her evenings with soft jazz and good wine, followed by a single gloriously naughty night in bed. Her friends have benefits and she attaches herself to no one in particular, bides her time and waits for that perfect someone.
”Just because we’re not ‘together’ doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other’s company. All I ask is a little bit of discretion about it.”

Aleksandra Victoria Wessex was born in a busy metropolitan hospital in Washington D.C., the only child of Danica Margareta Wessex nee Carter and Edgar Andrews Wessex. She would have been destined to a normal life, but for her father’s burgeoning career as a lawyer and her mother’s stubborn refusal to immigrate to her husband’s home country of Great Britain. Saundra was a darling baby, all pudgy face and swaddled arms, and her parents doted on her very existence. She grew up smart as a whip and short as children years younger than herself, but Saundra was happy just learning from her mommy how to read the pretty book full of the interesting diagrams.

For her fifth birthday, Danica Wessex took Saundra to visit her parents down in Savannah. Edgar was too busy with work, head in his latest case and a bit more distant from his family than they would have liked. Danica and Saundra made it to Savannah General Hospital, but Danica had a one way ticket to the morgue. Head on collisions with concrete dividers while going at eighty miles an hour in the rain while you aren’t paying attention can have devastating effects. Saundra met her Grampa and Gramma for the first time while she was being fitted for her pretty hot pink casts on her left leg and arm, a blank stare on her face and the ever repeating inquiries of where her mother went. Instead of going to kindergarten like all the other little girls, Saundra got to spend her time in her father’s office, bones slowly healing as she perused her way through stacks of nonjudgmental books. A dictionary at her side, little Saundra decided to continue her dead mother’s tradition of cheerful learning.

Saundra and her father developed an interesting relationship over the next year, she kept quiet and out of the way and he brought home a new textbook every week.

When Saundra was eight, it was a well-considered move that made her father pack up and move them both back to his old hometown of Cornwall. Once in his country, Edgar quickly switched his daughter’s citizenship to the U.K., and promptly enrolled her in his old alma mater. She did well there, if one could count her quiet bookworm habits as ‘well’, and Saundra continued her studies in relative peace. Or at least she did until one rainy day at eleven years old where she got mixed up with a curious batch of new friends and their weird hobbies. A child on the outside and a quiet sort of adult maturity on the inside caused the gang of teens no end of problems. On the one hand the Windsor White Fangs were eager to include her in their larking about the countryside, traipsing about the ruins of Tintagel Castle and loitering about the beaches. Saundra was raised a country bumpkin on the coasts and fields of Cornwall, civilized only by the proximity to the flow of tourists coming to see the birthplace of King Arthur. Tintagel village was an awful place for a group of teens and their strange little follower, and Saundra grew up with a jaded view on being an adult.

Like most small town girls she strove to find a way out of that glass bubble of a life. Fourteen year old Saundra found it in her studies, reciting Shakespeare at the top of her lungs to the amusement of the seventeen and older crowd she still hung out with. They were a proper gang, as long as Saundra was back by eight and her schoolwork was all done, and she spent more time being a loud pain in the ass with her ‘gang’ than she did at home with her father. Fifteen and her friends considered her old enough to go about on their late night haunts, and suddenly the world exploded in potential. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have a powerful lure on disillusioned and rebellious youth and Saundra was no exception. She lost her virginity in the back of a van to a second year university student named Paul Jacobs, fifteen and not even the slightest bit in love. There was something she missed along the way, somewhere between the first beer and the fifth, and Saundra was desperate to rectify it.

Sixteen became a frenzy of inked words on increasingly aged paper, peace in the Wessex household by merit of scholarly devotion, and a combination of rapidly rising test scores and less late nights with her mates. The WWF understood that eventually little Saundra would grow up and encouraged her pursuits even as they branched out and lived their lives. They stayed in touch all through her A-levels and her resulting acceptance into Falmouth University, a motley assortment of oddballs from Tintagel that ranged across the world from the foggy nights of London to the glittering nights of Los Angeles. Aleksandra was a terribly bad girl in university, on a program to become an accomplished writer even as she slept off hangovers before class and wore shades to lectures. A bit of a diva, no one could really call her on her behavior. She showed up early to everything, always had her work done, comprehended her course load, and always had insightful questions to ask.

Twenty-two sees her with a degree in English literature, a portfolio that would make her a killer novelist, and not a single shred of ambition to write anything that is truly hers. So she packs up everything she has and moves to L.A. to crash on a fellow WWF member’s couch, and somehow gets talked into signing up for the UCLA teacher’s course. Two years and a certification later she goes to spread her wings with a kiss and a credit card problem. Getting a position as an English teacher in a middle school is almost ridiculously easy, the only problems Saundra has are keeping her checkbook balanced and her over-night habits out of her professional life.