Amelia Gordon

As the sixth of eight children born to the Gordon family, and the only daughter, Amelia grew up feeling out of step with her whole family. Her father, Callaway Gordon, ran a horse ranch, and was a rough and tumble no-nonsense kind of man. Victoria, his wife and Mellie's mother, was much the same, especially with so many rambunctious children on her hands. While Amelia was energetic and ran wild with the boys, she was never truly close to them, and spent much of her time with the horses instead.

One summer when she was 15, Mellie and a stablehand working on the farm fell in love. It wasn't the kind of thing her parents would approve of, and was kept very hush hush. The stablehand was another girl, Marion, two years older than Amelia and working on the ranch to help support her sick parents. Amelia felt she had much more in common with Marion than anyone else, and they grew close. It was a sweet romance, until the pair of them were caught kissing by Amelia's father and oldest brother. They violently disapproved, and in the ensuing scuffle, Callaway Gordon shot Marion dead. Amelia fled the scene, running north to New York City, and never returned to the ranch again.

Living alone in New York City as a young teenager was a difficult experience for Amelia. Right at the start of the second World War, the atmosphere was tense, but it made it easy to slip under the radar. She found work at a munitions factory to support herself, and started saving money. Amelia wanted to go to school, and to study science. It was the subject that had always interested her the most at school, and she knew she was smart. More importantly, she was extremely determined. Amelia worked hard, and was finally accepted into MIT.

If she were to trace back her life to its most important moment, it would be when she met Mary Virginia Luther. The other woman was her lab supervisor at MIT, and the pair of them became friends. Unfortunately, for Amelia, her feelings were never just friendship. It started out as a crush on Virginia, who was beautiful and intelligent and interesting. But Virginia didn't show any signs of returned interest, or of even being interested in women. Eventually, Virginia married a man named Jack, and Amelia was the maid of honour. During the wedding, Amelia realized exactly how deeply in love she had fallen with Virginia.

As difficult as that was, Amelia knew she couldn't spend her entire life hung up on Gin. She focused on her studies more, getting a double major in biology and physics. For her graduate and post graduate studies, Mellie continued studying physics, specifically the fields of acoustics and telecommunication. One of the early highlights of her career was an internship at Bell Labs, where she later got a permanent position aftr graduation.

That position didn't last for too long, however, because Virginia reached out to Mellie with an offer to recommend her to an open position at the labratory where Virginia was working in Riverhollow. In some ways, it was a difficult decision to make. At the time, it was illegal for lesbians to work in official positions, which made her employment an always precarious thing. And Oregon was awfully far from where she was living in New Jersey. But Amelia accepted, and there is no universe amongst the many hundreds of universe where she didn't accept. Because, in the end, Virginia asked her, and Amelia would never say no.

Moving to Riverhollow was strange for Amelia. She had lived in the rural countryside, and she had lived in the big bustling city, but she had never lived in a small town. It did have one benefit over the city, though, and that was that it had plenty of undeveloped land. As a well paid employee in STEM, Amelia naturally made a fair amount of money, and early in her stay in Riverhollow, she bought a plot of land on the edge of town and slowly built a small barn and pasture, where she keeps a few horses.

CONTENT REDACTED DUE TO NDA VIOLATIONS

CONTENT REDACTED DUE TO NDA VIOLATIONS

At the end of her time at the lab, shortly after Virginia left in the wake of her daughter's death and her divorce, there was a serious equipment malfunction when setting up for a new project that Amelia had been involved in. An electrical short caused by incorrectly calibrated machines led to an explosion in the lab, and Amelia was at the center of the blast.

Her injuries were serious. She had burns, lacerations from shrapnel, and a severely broken leg from where a portion of a machine fell on it. Amelia came out the other side with many scars, mostly along the left side of her body, and nerve damage and scarring to her leg that made it sometimes difficult to walk. Unable to fathom returning to the lab after that, Amelia left for good.

For a year or so, Amelia simply recuperated at home. While Mellie was usually a social woman, involved in community events and such, she withdrew much more after her injury. Recovery was tiring, and she was frequently in pain. Gradually getting used to movement again took a lot of time, and eventually, she was ready to head back out to look for employment. She eventually came to work at Riverhollow's high school as a science teacher.