Edith Skuld

Edith Skuld is a highly intelligent German scientist and engineer.

EARLY LIFE
Edith was born in southern Germany shortly after the first world war. She grew up in a poor family; her mother died when she was just a child and her father raised her to be a mechanic and engineer. As she grew up, she mustered enough money to go to Humbdolt University in Berlin where she excelled in engineering, physics, biology, mathematics and archaeology. After uncovering a UFO crash in the Black Forest in 1936, she went on several expeditions around the world where she discovered technology and knowledge left behind by ancient aliens.

WORLD WAR II
Before the Second World War broke out, a group of aliens from Alderbaran came down to Germany to share their knowledge, try and prevent war and promote peace. Edith joined a Nazi occult society in order to learn their secrets. When World War II began, the aliens left Earth in shame. The Nazi military tracked down Edith and had her to use her knowledge to build wunderwaffe for them. In late 1943, a Scottish scientist named Fergus MacNeal infiltrated Edith's laboratory. He was captured and held prisoner by Edith but the two developed a sort of romantic relationship and was set free. Fergus decided to stay with Edith for a little while before eventually getting rescued by his brother Alistair.

DIE GLOCKE
Her time with Fergus caused her to step back and look at what she was doing with her life. She had originally set out to better the world with her knowledge, but instead it was being used to wage war. This eventually came to a climax in 1944 when she decided to turn against the Nazis, destroy her research, and dismantle her inventions. In an act of attempted suicide, she took off into space in her craft Die Glocke.

A NEW CHAPTER
Crashing in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, Edith returned to Earth in 1965 without hardly aging a day due to time dilation. She then began to travel the world to try and fix her mistakes and hide dangerous knowledge from world governments.

In 1967, she tracked down Alistair in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the hopes of finding Fergus and some of her research only to discover Fergus had passed away since she had been gone. She agreed to help Alistair investigate the presence of the Silencers in the area in exchange for Fergus' documents.

TRIVIA

 * Edith's surname is named after the Norn / Valkyrie in Norse mythology whose name means "debt" or "future". This is a reference to how she traveled into the future and is on a mission to settle her debts.
 * "Die Ingenieur" is sort of a German/English pun - "ingenieur" translates as "engineer" and also sounds like the English word "ingenious"; both words describe Edith's character.
 * Besides science, occultism and engineering, Edith also has an interest in BDSM.
 * Edith wasn't originally going to be in Flotsam, but instead be in a separate spin-off comic I planned on doing after I was finished Flotsam called Machinations. However I loved the character so much I decided to introduce her in Flotsam.