Marie Curie Kjelstad (Bio)

Contributed by Anna N.:

Marie Curie Kjelstad, as an only child, spent copious amounts of time alone, and when not alone, was almost always in the presence of adults. As such, her ability to socialize with people her own age suffered.

Her mother named her Marie Curie, after the famous French scientist, and seemed eager for her daughter to be a scientific prodigy. Even the play always seemed to be purposeful. She would give Marie various doohickies and whizbangs, and time how long it took her to take them apart and put them back together. She pretended it was a game, but she never seemed like she was having fun. Marie's curious nature found a way to enjoy and thrive under this tutoring, but her relationship with her mother suffered.

Her father, on the other hand, was far more laid back. He spent a lot of his time on the construction site, and Marie loved to visit him there. Sometimes he would take her on hunting trips without her mother. It was on these trips that Marie was the most comfortable and secure. Her father never acted like it mattered whether or not she caught the fish, or shot the deer, or really, did anything perfectly. Instead, he just let her be herself. And herself was still her mother's daughter. Curious, experimental. She was more likely to take the gun apart and try to tweak it to shoot farther than she was to actually hit anything at any range. Her father, Pete, just smiled and listened to her jabber.

At school, Marie always did well academically. Socially she suffered. Even when she was very young, her bluntness made more enemies than friends.

In middle school, she made one close friend:

Alistair was the son of of the local Wiccans. As one can guess, there weren't many Wiccans in Elma, and it was considered unusual at best, Satanic and baby-eating at worst. As such, Alistair had also been an outsider from a young age. He was a year older than Marie, and for this reason, perhaps, they had never really talked in elementary school. But once she arrived at middle school and found herself in a class with him, they just started spending all their time together.

Alistair was an unusual child. Whether his parents experimental parenting techniques were the cause, or the bullying and scorn he received from his peers, or whether sometimes it's just in the genes, he was always a bit different. It wasn't his intelligence. No, he was very smart. But he just viewed the world different. He was prone to long rants about "them" and "they". Unlike Doug, he wasn't a conspiracy theorist, just an angry young man. He was prone to shouting "Do what ye will!" to just about anyone he interacted with... other than Marie. They spent hours together, doing homework, playing, planning and scheming their takeover of the world. Alistair believed that he would be better at everything than those currently in power.

In high school, Alistair's parents moved just a few miles, which put him in a different school district, but still close enough for Marie to spend time with him. Marie mostly went along with the "takeover the world" plans because it didn't seem real to her, and it was fun to plan things. After she left for the University of Washington, (Alistair went to the local community college, much to both her and his chagrin), an incident happened that shaped her deeply.

Alistair took one of her plans to cut off government communications, and with a few other young men, attempted to sabotage the Washington State Emergency Alert Relay Network headquarters in Olympia. This plan proved beyond foolish. He was armed to the teeth (as any good Elma boy would have been, Wiccan or not), but could not bring himself to shoot to defend himself, and was shot in the head by an FBI agent. Miraculously, this shot did not kill him, but he is currently chained to a hospital bed with permanent brain damage.

Marie was affected deeply by these occurrences. She had always heard "guns don't kill people, people kill people", and this event cemented that in her head. While Alistair wasn't technically dead, the technicality didn't matter much to her. He wasn't smart and funny and creative and interesting, all the things she had valued about him. And some asshole with a gun had taken all of this away from him because he was someplace he wasn't supposed to be. Alistair hadn't tried to hurt anyone. Ever. This might also be why Daniel's death threats and threats of violence affect her so severely.

Her strong reaction to Alistair's shooting might have been one of the reasons that she dropped out of the chemistry program, and then the physics program, and then the computer science program, and finally the electrical engineering program. It just wasn't fun. She missed having that partner. She was really good at the 'sidekick' role, and without it, it was even more boring than her mother's games.

So when she came back to Elma and found Doug, things finally started to feel fun again. As usual, Marie was not much bothered by ranting and unusual social behaviors. Doug is smart, and creative, and above all... interesting.