Alicia Bauer

Alicia is five-foot-five and generally fit, as her hobbies include hiking and rock climbing. She has thick, shining dark brown hair, of which she is very proud. Her eyes are also dark brown and known for intensity. Her face is narrow and, in her opinion, more distinctive than pretty, with defined features and what her mother called a stubborn cast to it, though she often minimizes this by smiling a great deal. She prefers a relatively streamlined, slightly subdued mode of dress, with a few delicate pieces of jewelry to accent the whole rather than to draw attention. Her favorite color is purple, and it therefore appears a great deal in her clothing and more often than not on her fingernails, the latter specifically in the shade Regal Orchid.

The First Feast

When Alicia met Thad and Henny

MARS, September SA15

When Alicia met Cepheus

Alicia was born in Arizona, but spent most of her childhood in California with her mother and stepfather, only returning to Arizona for visits with her father. Said father is the child of magical parents, and his mother's family goes back further than that, albeit not through any particularly carefully cultivated lineages; his father, however, was the son of a Muggleborn wizard. This is something which has caused Alicia considerable stress in life, as she feels she was born to be a great witch, but was also born into the rigid American wizarding world, which would have made a woman work twice as hard as a man for the same rewards even without the great-grandfather that nobody talks about.

Alicia is the youngest of the three daughters Emily Layne had with her Sonora-years sweetheart Jacob Bauer, and is also the older half-sister of Isaac Douglas, Emily’s only child from her second marriage. Her cousins include, among others, Sonorans Lionel and Amelia Layne, the children of her mother’s youngest half-sister Lavinia. Her mother’s other half-sister, Helena Layne Whittington, left the country years ago, but Alicia is on at least comfortably cordial terms with her mother’s brother Geoffrey Layne, provided he doesn’t remark on how Alicia is the third member of the family, after her mother and maternal grandfather, to marry quickly after school, but so far the only one in the family who married quickly after school not to go through a very messy divorce. Her husband, Thaddeus Pierce II, is the object of a near-obsessive devotion, being one of the few people she will willingly put her own interests and opinions aside for. Another is her Sonora best friend, Cepheus Princeton, the person she largely credits with keeping her sane through their school years, as an accidental meeting ended in Alicia feeling relatively comfortable expressing genuine emotions around him.

After Sonora, Alicia took a year off to travel, apply to universities, and plan her wedding. Said wedding was a quiet affair, and Alicia thought her entrance to the Pierce family might have been missed altogether had it not resulted in yet another redistribution of the houses on Mt. Pierce, with Alicia and Thad claiming the old Third Son's House, which her new uncle Marcus and his family had previously occupied. Alicia took considerable pleasure in redecorating the house to suit her tastes, at least as far as could be done without breaking radically with Mt. Pierce's overall rural-gentry aesthetic, but overall found this period of her life unsatisfying; at university she felt socially estranged from the other students because of her marriage, and outside of it she was continually fighting for status, joining any Respectable Organization that would have her, campaigning for the causes and charitable endeavors of said organizations, and trying to ingratiate herself with her parents-in-law and grandmother-in-law.

After university, she was forced to conclude that either she had won some measure of Druscella's approval, that Druscella simply finds it amusing to watch all her grandsons and their wives sink into paranoia, or at least that Druscella has decided to acknowledge the unfortunate tendency of Pierce heirs to 'die' shortly before people strongly resembling them suddenly appear in Boston and how this tendency does make putting all the family's eggs in her 'nephew' Winston's basket a pretty risky proposition, because to Alicia's great surprise, everyone agreed she and Thad should try to have children after all. They were successful in this endeavor - indeed, moreso than intended, producing twins.

In the early stages of her pregnancy, Alicia resolved not to allow motherhood to change anything about her life. However, as the double pregnancy reduced her ability to live her life as she was accustomed to more and more, she found herself increasingly directing her complaints about the situation to her own abdomen when alone; as a result, by the time Alexander Thesius and Nicholas Diomedes were born, she already viewed them as people rather than simply as extensions of her will or even of their father. To her alarm, the number of people she loves has increased, to the point where she is terrified of what she might or might not do if the boys' interests ever came to conflict with her husband's.

In the hopes that their sons would choose to excel in different fields and therefore not turn on each other, Alicia and Thad named Alexander after a great conqueror (Alexander the Great) and Nicholas after the veritable constellation of great scholars and thinkers named some variant of Nicholas/Niccolo/Nicolas/etc. However, the middle names followed the opposite scheme, to cover all bases; Alexander's second name, Thesius, came from his grandfather, a researcher who very deliberately molded Thad into an Aladren as a child, but Nicholas received his after a figure from the Iliad, a soldier who injured multiple gods in one day and lived to tell about it, including no less than Ares himself, the god of war. Alicia is a loving mother who read all the books to figure out how to be a properly nurturing and supportive one, but also one who expects her sons to rise to the same standards of excellence she and their father held themselves to as young adults and beyond. After a brief stint in pastels, chintz, and chintzy pastels to try to look the part of a 'proper mum,' however, she finally did decide to cut herself slack in one small area, defining proper motherhood as being able to keep her family intact and safe no matter what, rather than strictly a matter of appearances.