Jessica - Official Character Sheet

Jessica is a 28 year old meteorologist who specializes in the field of atmospheric currents and thermal convection. Her determined demeanor is often mistaken for a certain level of sternness, but beneath her ultra-focused exterior is someone who's slightly more laid back and often daydreams about flying through the very same things she spends her days studying. On more than one occasion, she's been known to go out of her way to travel down to a remote location, only to spend the next couple of days inflating weather balloons and watching them drift up into the sunset. Her hobbies include photography, beach volleyball, and fiddling around with data visualization artwork.

The last few months of her PhD in Atmospheric Science are particularily noteworthy as they garnered her a reputation for "having her head stuck in the clouds". At first, her final project was nothing more than a simple improvement upon the sensor platform used by many popular weather balloons across the globe. However, the more Jessica continued to work on the project, the more she began to realize it would never be enough. She had always hypothesized that the only way to truly understand certain weather phenomena would be to observe them first hand- but not from a plane or a helicopter, since the heavy machinery would likely produce far too much noise for any collected data to be made useful.

It didn't take long before Jessica's sensor project grew legs- quite literally. The entire project was rebased around an old military flight suit and the slightly incredulous idea of hoisting someone up into the sky. An intricate system of pneumatic tubing and electronic solenoids was devised, then expertly woven into the framework of the existing garment. A pair of helium tanks was added, followed by a set of large weather balloons tied off to the main pilot harness. All the deployable components were carefully stuffed into the back of a recycled skydiving rig, and finally the suit was ready to soar with the pull of a single cord.

Unfortunately, Jessica never got a chance to try out her project. While most of the faculty were happy to sit back and watch the spectacle unfold (with some even going so far as to place bets on when the project would collapse), the unversity's legal team was less than amused by the idea of someone drifting around a thousand feet up in the air, suspended only by a few dozen helium filled balloons. A decision was made to have the suit grounded, but not before it was openly recognized as being an incredible display of ingenuity and determination. After many months of hard work, the end result certainly wasn't what Jessica had imagined, but at least it still served as a solid closing for her master thesis. The paper was published and well received by her peers, although the ideas presented in the later chapters often landed up doubling as the punchline to several buoyancy related jokes within the scientific community.

A few years later, Jessica was sitting at her desk when a strange email appeared in her inbox. The message had no body, but rather a single line subject that simply read the following: "Found your paper. You sound like a dreamer. Have you ever dreamt of flying?". After a couple of messages back and forth, Jessica's curiosity was piqued enough to meet up with the mysterious individual sight unseen. What she saw- and was later offered- would change her life forever. Suddenly her innermost dreams and fantasies were not only proven to be possible, but placed well within her reach. All she had to do was agree to the stranger's request. She would continue to do what she already did best, only this time she would not be creating weather forecasts but rather calculating parabolic trajectories and atmospheric flight plans. A weather nerd now turned sky navigator; she would help her new friend to traverse the windy tides of the high seas and ride the air currents to wherever they may go.

In the end, Jessica landed up getting more than her fair share of first person observations up in the sky. Naturally, Vanessa was right by her side- or at the very least, trailing shortly behind at the end of a small rope. One might even say that the resulting friendship was a match made in heaven, and the sight of the two drifting off into the sunset together quickly became common to anyone within eyeshot of Vanessa's back yard.