return of the backstory?
Althea Hilary Bristow is 20 years old - very nearly 21 - and a rising senior at Ohio University, majoring in journalism and minoring in history. She has curly brown hair that she tends to keep long and braided, and light brown eyes. When out in the sun, thanks to mostly-Irish ancestors, she freckles, then burns, then tans, and the red highlights in her hair become more pronounced.
She grew up just outside of Dayton, and has always had a knack for pulling the truth out of several people's recollection of events and writing it down. Her talent with articles (accompanied by a pressing need to get the hell out of Athens, where there's nothing to do but watch people party) has led her to interning with the Washington Post for the third year running; she'll probably come back for good after she graduates. She writes a lot, and reads just as much - mostly nonfiction, though a few friends have passed some satire her way that went over well. (The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything being forty-two just made sense.)
She had something of a personal revelation during her senior year of high school, when her boyfriend decided he was going to attempt taking another girl to a dance without informing Althea. It didn't work, and in the process of dumping him, she said, "Your heart could outweigh an entire flock of geese. I don't see how you ever expect to manage against a feather."
Or, well, someone using her mouth said it. When she had time to think the incident over later, the responsible corner of her brain introduced itself as Maat, the former Egyptian goddess/embodiment of truth. Althea had to think that one over for a while, but in the end she decided that it really explained quite a bit about herself, and that they could share the same body with minimal fuss if it had worked so far. And it has.
Althea is a fairly good judge of character. She can pull the real truth out of anything that comes her way, whether the end result is what anyone else expects it to be or not. Once she has made friends with someone, it takes a serious betrayal to get her to change her opinion.
She does not suffer deceivers lightly - even fools can know better, sometimes - and holds people to very high standards; getting close enough for Althea to call you a friend takes some doing. She also has severe difficulty lying, and usually has to fight her better instincts to keep information that hasn't yet come to light out of articles. Her talent for occasionally contradicting the official story has also run her into some... interesting discussions with history teachers. While she does have some sense of humor, she tends to take life as a whole seriously.
(Maat's biggest role in Egyptian mythology seems to have been her involvement in judging the souls of the dead - that whole 'weighing the heart against a feather' thing? She provided the feather. As for the Answer, there were 42 judges that ran a soul through interrogation before it got weighed. Given Maat's involvement, she'd know about that, and probably find the number cropping up in British space comedy quite entertaining.)