Meet the Characters of "The 11th Hour" Part 6: Babel

Name: Karalynn Anders
Age: 18
Job: Communications/Team Leader
Hair: Auburn
Eyes: Green
Place of Birth: The Once Lakes

Personality: Kara is very stubborn, but not to a fault. She is merely confident in her skills and refuses to back down when she knows she is right. She is a natural born leader and thus seems to feed off of stress. She seems to be a well of advice and compassion, and her fun loving nature makers her quite pleasant to be around. As many problems as the others may have with each other, none of them have ever had an issue with her.

Biography: Karalynn Anders was born in the second year of Nicolae, and is in fact the only of the 5 to have never breathed air that wasn’t under his control. Her parents’ were competitors for a living and, while they competed separately, it was her father’s dream to put together a team. It was almost an obsession with him. He had plans and theories about how it would work, but was never able to put it into practice.

Kara grew up knowing little outside this obsession. She proved to be very smart, reading by the time she was 4. As she grew, she began to discuss these theories with her father, helping him better old ones and create new ones. His obsession became hers, and she wanted nothing more than to help him see his dream lived out.

When she was 11, her father fell seriously ill and was no longer able to compete. Kara hated seeing him bed ridden, his crushed dream doing more damage than the illness. Her mother continued to compete, trying to keep food on the table, which meant leaving Kara to take care of her father, a decision she would come to regret later on. Kara was more than capable of taking care of her father, but she wasn’t quite as capable of letting him die before seeing his dream take shape which, given their decreasing funds, would happen very soon.

She spent 2 years on her theories and, when she was 13, she talked her father into signing a release form that would allow her to compete. On her way to register, she bumped into a young man that seemed to be concerned to see her out on her own. She was flattered but, more than anything, was greatly intrigued by the young man’s gift of persuasion. Being a fairly stubborn individual, she found it remarkable that it was so difficult to refuse him when he told her to leave.

Instead, she introduced herself and offered him the chance to help her realize her father’s dream. To her surprise, he accepted. About a month later, she heard about a young girl who was trying to use her photography to make a living. Kara made her the same offer she had made the young man and, again, she accepted. She knew she had the beginnings of something good, but also knew there was no way they were going to win that year.

Still, the results weren’t as bad as she thought they would be… however, they also weren’t good enough. The goal was to put together a team that could win as a benefit of team play. As soon as T11H ended, she began to hunt for more team members to fill in the spots. The most blatant problem at the time was their inability to collect intel quickly, and they needed a way to get information before anyone else. She knew that the T11H committee stored any and all intel online, but access to such things was prohibited for the Damned, and computers became impossible to find ever since Tatenko Tech stopped doing trades with certain parts of New America.

The rules of the game, however, had nothing against computers OR accessing the committee database, and if she could find someone who knew what they were doing, no one would ever have to know anyway. She put out a call for someone good with technology for “communicational purposes”. When none other than Tatenko Tech’s heir, Colin, answered, she almost thought Nicolae had seen through her plans.

Colin checked out, however, and was more than eager to join the team. He lacked his father’s business mentality, but was fantastic when it came to technologies. His hacking, among other things, gave them a much needed edge. Their intelligence pay out was much larger that year, but Kara learned one very important thing about her first teammate: Caleb was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a killer, and she needed a killer.

She returned to something that she had somewhat ignored in her hurry to build her team: her father’s notes. She spent majority of the off season pouring through them and comparing them with the stats from the previous few years of competition (which Colin had nabbed for her off the committee database). About a month before the registration deadline, she found someone.
The stats showed that, while each winner was a different person, there was one contestant – registered as a weapons expert – that had consistently gotten better and had almost won on her own the previous year. Kara knew they found their closer, and immediately tracked her down, practicing her pitch the whole way: if you’re this good on your own, think of how great we’ll make you. She had their team stats at the ready, but they were unnecessary. The young girl agreed to join the team with very little persuasion.

They took the title with surprising speed, setting and breaking a few records along the way. They also received the largest combined payout of any T11H in the history of the game, garnering them loads of attention, and sparking a new craze: Team play. None of that mattered to Kara, however: she had helped her father see his dream become a reality. That was enough for her.

Or at least, it should have been. It wasn’t until she achieved her goal that she realized she was using it – obsessing over it – to distract her from the truth: she was losing her father and there was nothing she could do about it. She was suddenly unable to sit in his room for long periods of time, and just the thought of him wasting away in that room brought her to tears. Her emotions were almost impossible to control, changing at the drop of a hat. She was worried about her father, devastated over the truth of the situation, angry about being Damned, hatred for the man that put them there, etc. She felt like she was at the end of her rope when she bumped into Caleb in the same bar they had met in 3 years prior. Unable to keep it inside any longer, she told him everything, and he listened. When she finally stopped talking and, subsequently, crying, he told her of his situation, and the grand prize he was reaching for: the chance to move up. The chance to be Blessed.

It had been her intention to quit competing once she gained her title, once she helped her father, but it dawned on her that she hadn’t truly helped her father, and the only way to do that was to win the grand prize. That meant competing – and winning – three more times, and it meant making a name for themselves. If they were going to do that, they were going to make themselves appear professional.

They entered the following year with a name – CHECK – and an actual plan. She had made the mistake of ignoring research in favor of building the team, but it was time to truly play her role. Everyone returned the second year with more official titles – Analyst, Interrogator, Technology Expert, Executioner, and Intelligence Expert – and took their second title with relative ease.
The third title earned them all enough to live comfortably, along with endorsements that paid them throughout the year, but they accepted it without batting an eye. Their reasons were different, there was no doubt about that, but their goal was the same. And while it was never spoken amongst them, they all knew it no longer had to do with getting Blessed, and everything to do with the man that would bless them…


Skills: Aside from being a natural leader, Kara’s brain functions on a higher level than most others. As a side effect, she views the world from a strategic standpoint, and is thus able to put together plans at the drop of a hat. She is also quite talented when it comes to cracking codes.

Flaws: Kara is extremely fragile. She has never received any type of combative training in her life, and the sickness that hit her father is very likely genetic. In any type of scuffle, she could easily be seriously injured.

Based on: Felicia Day