Vera LeBlanc

Pre-outbreak:

Vera is not exactly the average nineteen year old college freshman. This is for multiple reasons. Before the outbreak she tore through gifted student programs like they were tissue paper and was on the fast track to membership in MENSA. While not born to particularly wealthy parents, the fact that the social infastructure of Arklay rightfully assessed her intellect and connected her to the proper resources has given her the set-up she needed to get ahead in life at a young age. Things are for the most part looking up for Vera. The exclusive boarding school she was placed into at around fifteen was supposed to be a place where she could not only intellectually blossom, but socially blossom. The social portion of this journey did not come as naturally to her as it had the rest of the students. They were all gifted students, but almost everyone was better than her in interpersonal contexts and became the "weird" one almost immediately. Still, she flourished intellectually. Infact, she was finishing up her Ph.D in Bio-engineering and her MA in Physics by the time her graduation rolled around.

She is complete shit socially. She's tried to high-five blind people (multiple times). She's reacted overtly to deformities. She has made babies cry with her mishandling. In all scenarios, she's always regretting whatever she says because she has almost zero social functionality. Somewhere inside herself, she hoped that graduation would lend her some social bravery and grace with the potency of saying "I have this degree, behold".

Then the apocalypse happened and just fucked that whole plan up.

Post-Outbreak:

Needless to say. It did not help her social standing. Early on the boarding school went into a lock-down state where students had to wait for their parents to pick them up. She realized ahead of the curve that the food stored on-site wouldn't last the population more than a week and by then it would be too late to avoid the hordes of starving people, looters, or undead from overcoming the shitty defenses.

She and a few friends decided to sneak out and make their way off the island. This clearly did not succeed. One by one friends either split off in desperation, died, or found themselves joining other groups, in the end leaving Vera alone and a bit hungry. She spent her nineteenth birthday in the parking lot of an old Waffle-House. It sucked.

With no escape, Vera is looking to survive until tomorrow. If she can find a place to call home, she might start scavenging the things she needs to make a homemade electron microscope, the Holy Grail of what she needs in order to begin working on a way out of this mess. That's the little bit of faith she's holding onto, that unrealistic dream of curing it all.