Appearance

Physical Description

Astrid is a business professional and dresses accordingly. She often wears dressier clothes, business dresses and some suits with a slight fashionable flourish. She's known to have a fairly extensive wardrobe and a fair habbit of frequently acquiring new clothes for it. She aims to always present herself in the best looking light for her business work. In that line of work, she's all smiles to business partners and occasionally flaming rage when someone tells her a deal fell through.
 
Around the pack, she wears jeans and a cheap T-shirt. She's had to shift far too often while still dressed, torn far too many clothes. She has a few drawers just full of 'disposable' clothes because she doesn't expect them to last long. A fight or something will come up and she'll need something to wear.
 
As a wolf, she's a touch above average for the girls in the pack, coming in just over 8' tall. She's bigger than Daisy, better able to go one on one in a fight of straight, brute force. Years of training has helped her improve her fighting abilities, making her a decent adversary in a hand to hand battle. Her fur is a lighter brown with darker patches around her shoulders.

Mentality

Personal history

Astrid's life started out pretty well. She was born into a loving family and well cared for during those first few years. She was four when she got a little brother. Five when she got two sisters, twins. Seven when there came twin brothers. Nine when she got an adopted brother and sister. Her dad's best friend had died on deployment as the war in the Middle East started up, and her dad was the Godfather. Their mom drank her pain away, a little at a time shortly after his passing. There was nothing for her dad to do but care for the kids, a promise he'd made and one he'd keep.
 
The calm, loving atmosphere of her toddler years was replaced by absolute chaos. None of them got the attention they deserved from either parent. After the terrorist attacks, her Dad was forced to pull fourteen hour shifts on base. Her mom was forced into longer and longer hours at the base hospital. They were already treating soldiers sent home from the war. Some were being treated through the Veterans Administration. Others were active duty soldiers recovering from extensive, but not immediately lethal injuries. They were having surgery to remove shrapnel, losing limbs, and so on.
 
At first, young Astrid did her best to help Mom and Dad around the house. As she moved into her teenage years, she grew to be more and more a replacement for them. Her sweet sixteen was celebrated driving a hummer and a few days later followed up with her learners permit. She was chauffeuring her brothers and sisters to sports, ballet, and all before she even had her license. Illegal, sure, but her parents weren't available. It really is remarkable that she was never caught. She thinks the MP's turned a blind eye.
 
A little over 17 and she got bit. Her youngest sister had to do a walk in the woods and gather some random, unrecognized plant for them to identify in biology class. It was an Army base, it was assumed generally safe, and a parent would be going with them. The soldiers all knew the woods on and around base. There couldn't be anywhere safer. In principle, anyway. The reality was slightly different.
 
Astrid took her to some woods near a park and a playground, base housing was a halfmile down the road. There had been talk on base of a bear wandering close to the housing area, but she really wasn't worried. The car was right there, they weren't going deep in the woods. Bears were pretty easy to scare off with loud noise. She even had a pie pan or two in her backpack to make some noise. What she wasn't ready for was a werewolf.
 
The fight started out with her turning her back to find a man, trying to abduct her sister. Any argument of an Army base being safe was ended there. It wasn't safe. She charged on him, her sister fell, and she screamed for her to run. The man was unarmed, it was a fist fight. Astrid wasn't necessarily helpless, but fighting was not her field of expertise. She retreated, stepping back, just trying to distract him long enough for her sister to run, then she would run. Maybe she wasn't a fighter, but she was decent at running. Years of taking care of everyone without having the luxury of a car had paid off.
 
When she ran, he couldn't keep up. Not on two legs anyway. He couldn't afford witnesses. He shifted and came after her. She went down, torn to shreds. His only real mistake was assuming she was dead. He left her body there, while slowly the curse spread and healed her. Her sister's screams eventually got the MP's, the Military Police's attention. They found Astrid on the brink of death and rushed her to the base hospital. She had bruises from the brief fight with the man, but a later investigation refused to consider this anything more than a bear attack. It could have been a cover up. There's no way to know now.
 
Astrid was still in the hospital when the full moon came. She broke out that night, slipping out the door. Her first shift came in the woods, alone. By morning she was found, naked and curled up at the back door of her home. There were three more animal attacks that night. She isn't sure, even to this day, but she believes only two of them were her own doing. After the break out, the hospital put guards on her, eventually determined she needed mental care, and transfered her to an out of state hospital. At least by then, her siblings could mostly handle themselves.
 
A few transfers and break outs later, a doctor, Ben, with the Philadelphia Pack learned of her condition. He managed to discretely get her transferred to his care. A few years of work and they got her under control. She misses her family terribly, but they never call her. She's called them a few times, but it always seems they're eager to get her off the phone. They offered her no support when she needed it most and now? They've cut off contact for the most part.

Education

Astrid has a GED and a Bachelors in Management. While she recovered with the pack, she managed a dual-enrollment program with her online schooling. She would take High School classes in the morning and college classes in the night, before transitioning her focus solely on college. The management courses all came easily to her. She's put it all to work running businesses for the pack and keeping all their finances in perfect shape. A few have pushed her to pursue a masters degree, but it seems pointless to her. She already has the knowledge and she has no intentions of working for an ordinary employer any time soon.

Mental Trauma

Astrid's childhood still haunts her. She never had a chance to really just be herself, never had time for hobbies or dating or interests of any kind. The past nearly 20 years has been nothing but one breathless sprint. She ran from thing to thing for her little brothers and sisters, then proceeded to do the same in the wolf pack. She's a person who almost isn't a person. She has her skill and talen, but there's nothing in her, about her, that is actually for her. Over the years, the pack has tried to get her to slow down, relax, and find out what she really likes, what she wants to truly do, but it's never worked. She's always running, and perhaps, always will be running, from one meaningless task to the next.

Intellectual Characteristics

Astrid is potentially not as smart as she seems. She has incredibly well developed skills for processing, numbers, and organization at large, but that's it. She doesn't have applicable knowledge or much interest in it. She might know that Shakespear was great, but the magic in his words is completely lost on her. She might know that something is important, she might know why it's important, but not the how. The werewolves' silver-cure is important, she knows to use it, it saves lives, but she could never wrap her head around how it works. She sits at the center of complex webs where she can understand the politics of what's going on around her, but stands no chance of ever replacing any of her underlings. She's a beaurocrat to the death.

Morality & Philosophy

At the end of the day, Astrid probably has no true morals. She will do whatever it takes to protect and save the pack. In application, this can make her more willing to take someone out altogether rather than spare them. If negotiating will achieve the same goal as a more violent act, but take longer, she might go for the more violent act. What morals she seems to display, come from the pack. Through her connection to them, she can feel more of their emotional unease when she considers a drastic action. She can feel their reluctance and hesitance.
 
Probably her softest spot is when she encounters other wolves in a bad situation. She will consider adopting them, taking care of them. This plays a role in why she was gentler to Ashlynn than to Alex Winship. One was a wolf and the other wasn't. Alex was in need of something to eat and somewhere safe, he was perhaps even more compatible to the wolves' chatoic-good morality, but she didn't see him as anything but a threat to remove, immediately.

Personality

Social