EARLY LIFE Helena Elanore Wilkes grew up in Greer, South Carolina. Her childhood was largely uneventful save a bad bout of chickenpox at eleven. She performed moderately well in her classes all through high school and married young. She moved to Ohio with her future husband, Lindsey Birch, for university and kept her last name after they were married in 1987. In University she went the mathematics route and ended up with a degree that propelled her into a masters program and then ultimately her PhD.
CAREER Wilkes spent several years bouncing around private labs. Her work in Meta and Astrophysics attracted a laundry list of project managers with questionable funding and frequently found her position swept from underneath her during backroom dealings and hostile takeovers. She spends years engineering experiments that ultimately lead to a lot of profits for the companies she worked for but leave a bitter feeling in her mouth.
PERSONAL LIFE Wilkes’ Husband passed unexpectedly. He is one of the souls on the moon when Tot Fox destroys both it and the Sun. Unlike many of those who perished there that day however, he is on a three month work rotation to the Lunar Scientific Outpost. The life insurance and workplace settlement offer Wilkes enough time away from work to mourn. By the time she feels like she can return to work, she no longer desires employment by anyone but herself. After some financial shoring up, Wilkes finds she can live a comfortable if meager life waiting for the perfect opportunity. One morning she reports turning on the television to have her coffee and watch some of the news and when the splorts segment comes on ith breaking news. Something about a breach in the universe? She doesn't follow blaseball really. She doesn’t understand why ground-breaking physics are being reported on during a sports segment. Lindsey was a huge Boston Crabs fan but she had only seen a few games in passing. Wilkes reports a surprising amount of excitement and anticipation upon learning this.
DIRECTOR OF NASWA
Wilkes learns of a new organization starting a few towns over, in the home city of Ohio’s new Blaseball team The Ohio Worms. She becomes aware that they are looking for an experienced person to help oversee the creation of a large scientific community. They specifically seek someone with ample lab time and an education that intersects the very real with the very hypothetical.
When she is inevitably accepted as the director of NASWA, she makes the availability of information one of the primary goals and distributes the findings of their experiments for free.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORMS
Wilkes is constantly after a wormhole highway license and everyone who is issued one knows that if she gets her hand on theirs, they will be barred from using the wormhole highway again. Wilkes has been known to try deception, disguise, bribery, burglary, and accidently, once, arson in an attempt to get her hands on a license.
Wilkes has free access to Althio after overhearing Xandra Pancakes and Vessalius Sundae argue about the password to the pocket dimension. The Worms decided it was ok to loop her in on the information regularly after her excursions lead to the creation of the orbital launcher.
Wilkes and Scoober Toast are often found locked in heated discussion, both furiously taking in and divesting information in turns. The two became fast friends after Toast’s addition to the team and rarely go long without checking in on another
Muse Scantron and Wilkes are often spotted together working in the labs that pepper the NASWA campus. They seem to enjoy working in a companionable silence, only communicating when one needs direct help from the other.
RELATIONSHIP WITH SANDY LOAM
Wilkes and the Ohio Worms team manager, Sandy Loam, are known to be close consorts. Wilkes is often thought to be the only person with solid knowledge about Loam’s whereabouts though she has never once divulged any information about the former’s locations, or intentions