Lillian Kjelstad
XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Supporting_Cast
Lillian Kjelstad (nee Marie) is the wife of Peter Kjelstad and mother of Marie Curie Kjelstad. She is 52 years old, and was 31 when her daughter was born. She is tall and attractive for her age, having an athletic build that keeps her looking young.
For nearly two decades Lillian has played the part of a substitute teacher in the Elma School District. This career gave her plenty of time to follow her true pursuit: Custodian of Project Covenant's Pacific Northwest observation and civil defense outpost. This outpost took the form of a large dome underneath her family home in Elma. Lillian Marie was actually a CIA operative in the eighties, and was brought in by the founders of Project Covenant based on some counterintelligence research she was conducting on a cold-war terrorist group known as the Red Hand.
Her new agency hooked her up with an up-and-coming engineer by the name of Peter Kjelstad. To keep closer tabs on him and covertly feed him research, Lillian married him, and had a child with him to make sure he wouldn't stray (talk about commitment!). When Lillian learned more about the origin of the Red Hand and its founder, Vladimir Gurov, she hatched a plan and devised to use her own child in this experiment.
Gurov was a brilliant Soviet scientist. Captured by the Germans during WWII, he was the source of much of Werner Von Braun's pioneering work in rocketry. After the war, Gurov was then liberated from the Axis labs, but was not repatriated to his home country. He found a place as one of the founding fathers of Project Covenant. Gurov's problems arose in the 70's, when he turned rogue, stealing research and resources from the Project and disappearing. All evidence suggested that too many years of exposure to the alien technology they had recovered (or improper exposure to the wrong bit of tech) somehow corrupted Gurov's mind. This loss set Project Covenant back for many years; not only had they lost much in the way of resources, but now they had to be especially careful during their research in fear of duplicating the "Gurov Destabilization." The kicker to all of this was that Gurov was the only one of Covenant's scientists that seemed to be making any headway in understanding the alien technology (keeping in mind that this reverse-engineering was being done in an age bereft of useful computer technology).
Therein was the core of Lillian's hypothesis. She would expose her own daughter in a limited, controlled fashion to aspects of alien technology to see if it fostered an innate understanding. By any sane standard, this is bad, irresponsible science nearly at its worst, but Lillian was not a scientist. She was somebody in charge of getting the job done.
