The Casebook of Helena Wells

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Quinn
AGE: 32
PLAYER JOURNAL: quiverby
TIMEZONE: Eastern
CONTACT: quiverby
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Naoto Shirogane

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Helena Grace Wells AKA H.G. Wells
CANON: Warehouse 13
POINT IN CANON: Between "Reset" and "The New Guy"
AGE: Technically 144, but she seems about mid-to-late thirties.
APPEARANCE: Picture Helena is five-foot-seven inches tall with shoulder-length dark black hair and a slim frame.
CANON HISTORY: Helena's Wiki here I'll expand on the specific backstory I'm using for Helena in the AU section, as Warehouse 13 painfully contradicts itself many many times. A note: The historical HG Wells is her older brother, Charles. Her actual history parallels some of his, including the first books written under the HG Wells name.

CANON PERSONALITY: Helena Wells is one of the most confident people you will ever meet. She is an extremely brilliant woman, she knows it, and she won't let anyone forget that. A feminist in the constricting Victorian era, Helena worked hard to be her own woman, defying social convention by wearing trousers when she was doing her work for the Warehouse, and openly flirting with women at social gatherings. She was known in the Victorian Era as a woman with a slightly-dubious reputation. One of her co-workers asking if there was anyone in London she had not charmed. Her answer, off-hand as always, was 'Oscar Wilde, but not for lack of trying.' She is well aware of her sexuality, and is charismatic and confident enough to charm even some of the hardest of hearts.

However, under the not-always-proper Victorian exterior, Helena is a driven woman. She wrote science fiction novels in a time when science fiction hadn't even been conceived. She also has many various inventions, both practical and fantastic, even things that were not even possible with the technology she had access to. Each of these things she was quite proud of, using them as much as possible, both to help and to hinder those around her. She is also very proud of her writing, commenting off-hand at one point how much in royalties she would have gotten from a short story in a magazine.

All is not well with Helena, however. After her daughter was murdered, her determination, drive, and passions turned to a darker side to try to get Christina back. Helena is very capable of murder and destruction (and has done both) when something she loves is in danger. Also, spending over a century as a sentient bronze statue has left its mental scars as well. She is very broken, lost in a world not her own, where she is only truly beginning to find her feet again. While Helena was a statue, she was alone with her own darker and pained thoughts. For the entire century, all she had was to dwell on her failed attempts to rescue Christina even with the entire power of the Warehouse and her own mind at her back. The knowledge that there was literally nothing she could have done broke her confidence, making her believe, at least for a while, that there was no purpose to go on, that there was no reason for her to live again.

When she was debronzed, she had to find reasons to live again, to find things that made her whole again. She had decided that she wanted to end the world, but was talked out of it by people in the Warehouse. Those around her reminded her of all of the good things in life. While she is still broken, and still feels like an utter failure, she is more confident about wanting to live again.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: Warehouse 13, while excellent with actual history, is extremely poor at remembering its own history. I am using a timeline where Christina was born in 1891 and died in 1899. Helena wrote four of the main HG Wells canon books, as well as the original short story for When the Sleeper Wakes. The First Men in the Moon was Charles' work from some of her extensive notes. There are some contradictions in canon, but this is the backstory I'm working with. The party shown in "3 2 1", is the release party for Invisible Man in 1897.

Where Helena actually deviates from canon comes in the events of "Buried" and "Reset", the end of Season 2 of the show. In the show, Helena claims a trident from Warehouse 2, and runs off to destroy the world at Yellowstone. However, in this AU, Helena was waylaid before she could get the trident by a shawl connected to Demeter, which made her run off to try yet again to find a way to get her daughter back. The shawl (in addition to creating snow in June) sent her to find Claudia's brother Joshua, the only person alive who was working on time travel. Unfortunately, Joshua's research was not good enough for Helena, but he was able to talk her down and neutralize the shawl, negating its effect on her.

Instead of being fired from the Warehouse for her actions, Helena was re-instated, and is yet again a full Warehouse agent. This is where she gets pulled in to be a Traveler. The AU is more extensive, but I am taking her from early in it.

ABILITIES: Science-fiction author, inventor, electrical and mechanical knowledge, knowledge of time travel theory and some practice, Kenpo, marksmanship.
INVENTORY; Tesla, Farnsworth, Grappler, magnetic boots, locket with a picture of her daughter, trench coat, blouse and trousers.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Test Drive Thread
PROSE SAMPLE: She's not even sure why she campaigned for the ping in France. Perhaps time with Myka, perhaps she just wanted to get out, perhaps she wanted to see how she'd do. There was one thing, though, one specific place that she had to go.

Shaking off Myka was easier than she expected. Whether the other woman actually realized what she was intending to do or not, she let her go. Actually finding the place she needed was a bit of an adventure after losing her way, finding a parking lot, and finally being told that what she was looking for had moved half a century ago.

Walking into the mausoleum, she quietly scanned each crypt until she found the one she was looking for. Reaching out, she gently put a hand on the name. "Hello, my darling girl."

She was still standing there later, barely holding back sobs, talking almost nonsensically to Christina. She'd told her about Joshua, about what life in the twenty-first century was like, and that Wooley was back in her life. Time flew by, a few people wandered in, but left at the sight of her grief. This was her moment and her moment alone.

Eventually, she wiped the tears from her cheeks, standing up straighter. "Mummy loves you, my little girl. I always will." She pauses for a long moment, collecting her emotions. "Perhaps I can finally visit you on a regular basis. Perhaps it is finally that time."

For some reason, now that Wooley was back in her life, everything that she'd lost was coming back. Everything except one particular thing, that is, and that she was beginning to be able to let rest. She wasn't completely there yet, however things were starting to feel more settled than they had in over a century.

Today, though, as Joshua was off working on something in his lab, and everyone else was in various states of cases, she decided to lock herself in her room and write. Time Machine wasn't necessarily something she ever thought she'd revisit, however, it was still one of her favourites (technically second only to Moreau, but that was only because of Charles' lack of edits).

Writing, she found, was much easier with modern pens. She had tried ballpoint pens, but they felt funny and did not write as well. Modern fountain pens, much to her delight, were easier to write with and much easier to fill (no more damned eyedroppers of ink that got everywhere.) However, there was still something about ending up with ink on her fingers that was a refreshing memory, just like being covered in grease or solder or the faint smell of copper wiring.

The world was quite easy to find again, the characters' voices coming back easily. This time, however, she told herself, the narrator would be the woman she was meant to be, the original narrator's wife, certainly, but a woman nonetheless. Words flowed onto the papers like the tendrils of the Time Machine itself, and the longer she wrote, the happier she was.

Much to her own surprise, she finished the first draft before dinner, collecting all of the things that she'd written in previous days, and piling them together to edit tomorrow.

On the top, on a paper all its own, she wrote, clearly, strongly:

To Joshua, who showed me how to find my way home.

She looked at the pile with a huge grin on her face. There. The hard parts were done. Now for the editing.

It has been a long week, longer than Helena truly wants to admit. The only bright side to everything is that she was able to actually go on a ping with Steve. The Artifact wasn't too hard to snag, but anything in an investment banking firm would not be the place for Claudia even if she were available, or Artie in his latest childish mood.

Each night she found she was sleeping less and less well, even after she claimed Joshua's stuffed beer, and clung to it like it was a life preserver in the ocean.

This night was no different. She was sleeping fitfully, finally dozing off around midnight.

Helena has rather not been having a good time of it, lately.

Pete's moping about, not seeming to realise that they all miss Myka terribly, and yet he's the only one still so affected by her absence that he isn't functioning normally. Artie and Joshua are constantly arguing. Claudia's withdrawing into herself (not that Helena can entirely blame her; she knows that means of coping with stress quite well). Artie won't let her do anything more than work inventory and look for new cases, and that only grudgingly. Joshua's off at so many Regent meetings, what with the pending new hire, and so busy hiding in his lab the rest of the time, that she's barely seen him in a week and a half. If she doesn't get something more interesting to do soon, she's going to stop fighting the temptation to fall back on old obsessions (with a little help from Joshua's dissertation, this time, which is surely the last thing Artie wants to see).

So it's rather the last straw when she comes into their room for the night - only to find Joshua packing a bag. "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?"

She hadn't felt this way in years. Decades or a century, if it came down to it. There was something about Joshua, something about the way he listened, the way he interacted with her, that awakened something in her that she thought had died even before Christina was born.

Once they got back to the B&B and up to her room, everything seemed to blur. She barely got to the bed before she was on top of him, snogging, tearing off clothes (in retrospect, she should have made sure he had other clothes first) and losing herself in feelings, in passions that she hadn't truly felt in quite a while.

After the first, there was a second, and a third, and finally, she lay back in her bed, Joshua curled up beside her and just let out a deep sigh.

Helena disconnects Joshua's phone (to the faint sounds of Claudia swearing on the other end; she does hope she's not too put out) and weighs her options. She's probably best off tying him to the bed, just to be sure; she wouldn't want him taking off before she gets a chance to explain herself, after all. That decided, she makes short work of doing so (...what in the world is this... stuffed thing? Ah, well, it can just - rest on his chest, then).

When she's done, she settles in on the other side of his bed and waits for him to wake up.