Jenna Wakeland

Name: Jenna Wakeland
Race: Human
Sex: Female
Age: 26
Alignment: Neutral Good





Looking at Jenna Wakeland, nobody would ever guess that this porcelain-pale redhead is actually biracial.  She is.  Her father was a uniquely dark-skinned man who just couldn't seem to overtake his wife in the genetics race, leaving daughter a clone of her mother.  So here she is.  Pale as swan feathers, except for the thick spread of freckles over her face, arms, and shoulders.  Her hair is an almost alarming shade of red, eyes -- the only thing she got from her father -- a deep, rich coffee black with three sugars.  She's also a tall young woman, standing fully 5'9" when she squares up, and her build is the athletic type one might expect from an avid outdoorswoman.




Jenna...has wandered alone for a long time, so her personality is in rough shape.  She tries to be spritely, and she tries to be clever.  Witty, funny, generally good-natured, benevolent when circumstance allows.  However she has developed quirks and habits from extended isolation that make her strange to be around.  She talks to inanimate objects and animals that lack the intelligence to speak back, or, alternatively, she may be in someone's presence for hours and forget to say a word.  Sometimes she reaches for words and can't find what she needs to say, others she tries to shut up only to find the spigot turned to a greater flow and more words pouring out.  She wants to be more social than she is, but she's long forgotten how.  In the interim, however, she does her best to remain hopeful and helpful, keen most on animal health and safety but not unconcerned for people.



Jenna Wakeland's world was a little like Earth, once.  Maybe it even was Earth.  Earth ravaged by the Apocalypse, perhaps, most everything struck down by a nasty plague that killed or mutated everything in its path.  The plague itself was not natural, but an engineered abomination released by an evil genius named Dr. Mors in the year 2020.  Jenna herself was cooped up in a research lab since 2025 until everyone else died and she became the last surviving conservationist in the effort to capture, cure, and conserve the planet's rapidly dwindling wildlife population.  She'd had mentors, parents, bosses...eventually either aggressive mutants or the plague itself finished everyone else off, and Jenna was left to her own devices.

In 2030, she grabbed all of the salvageable supplies from her training lab, hopped into a shuttle ship, and flew off to go start her glorious new conservation park!  ...er, no, actually, Jenna crashed the shuttle ship and barely walked away from the crash, stranded somewhere on the planet she could no longer identify.  The bones of a wildlife reserve were there, but they were long derelict.  She salvaged everything she could, even the garbage, and began working with tools made out of sharp rocks duct-taped to strong sticks.

Eventually she rooted out better tools from abandoned facilities and from there she was able to really entrench herself.



Given Jenna began her endeavor by crashing her shuttle and then getting mauled by gorehounds, she fully expected to die young and ugly.  But weirdly, day to day, she found she could handle it.  Salvage, reuse, repurpose.  Rebuild.  She'd found a compound hunting bow, and was able to create tranquilizer arrows to capture infected animals and take them back to the abandoned but still usable lab.  The native herbs allowed her to make the cure to purge the infection from the beasts, and then she was able to tame and home them at the sanctuary she was rebuilding.

She was actually able to rebuild a significant portion of the facilities and rescue a great many animals.  One step at a time, one day at a time, one reclaimed resource at a time, she felt like she actually stood a chance at playing Noah's Ark Pt. II and returning the world to a stable ecosystem.  Or a more stable ecosystem, at any rate.  She was becoming a skilled herbalist, animal behaviorist, and archer as well as a damn good manual laborer (she won't call herself an engineer or architect, no matter how much architecture and engineering she had to piece together the hard way).  

And then one day her hot air balloon, supposed to take her from one part of her shattered planet to another, simply went UP and never stopped until it popped out of an ocean somewhere, and Jenna found herself having to swim to shore through seawater that tasted like pickle brine.  Kosher, garlic dill, extra heavy on the mustard seed.  Life hasn't quite...been the same since.



Apocalypse Survivalist -- She may not have any fancy superpowers, but Jenna Wakeland is a study in stubbornness and ingenuity, as well as an immune system that seems capable of taking on a fungal plague that wiped out a lot of her home world.  Her world was GONE, but she was one of the tenacious few clinging to what remained and refusing to let it all die.  Jenna is tough, she's smart, she's observant, she's determined to survive, and has a way of taking problems apart one step at a time from the bottom until somehow, some way, they're solved.

Panic Isn't Helpful -- The bright side of watching everyone around her die and being thrown into a survival-of-the-fittest crisis blind, if there can be said to be a bright side to that, is that Jenna has lost most of the instinct to panic.  Her will to survive has choked off that counterproductive little voice and forced her sense of fear into a more disciplined response.

Too Long in Solitary -- The less bright side of watching everyone around her die and being thrown blind into a survival-of-the-fittest crisis is that Jenna spent days-weeks-months as her own only human contact.  She sees shadows move, she talks to trees and walls and rocks and her compound bow in ways that suggest she's having detailed conversations with them.  Detailed enough that the inanimate sometimes talks back.  Jenna hasn't lost her mind, but it is admittedly a little cracked.

Herbalist, Behaviorist, Mechanic, Fast Learner -- When Jenna first crashed her shuttle, she’d had minimal animal control training to augment her degree in botany.  Rudimentary education her instructors had died before completing.  But she had to learn the herbs (in practice!) to make the curatives and the antiseptics, she had to learn animal behavior to both track the sick ones and house the cured ones, she had to build her entire facility from scratch...Jenna is a quick study!  Mostly because her survival usually depends on it.

A Damn Fine Shot -- Jenna has a compound bow and a lot of practice with it, utilizing it both with tranquilizing arrows to subdue and with standard arrows to kill, because some things were too far gone to save and were better described as monsters than as animals.  She's also a deft hand with a shotgun or a sniper rifle or a pistol, although if you ask her, she vastly prefers her bow.