Lena

Lena Weber, 28, is German, from Stuttgart. With a master's in automotive engineering, she works as a chassis tuning engineer at the R&D center of a German carmaker in Stuttgart: by day she laps the test track in camouflaged prototypes, then crawls under them with a wrench. She spent three years at the company's joint-venture plant in Changchun, China, and came back to Stuttgart last year. She learned her Chinese in Changchun, surrounded by Northeastern mechanics, so her Chinese comes with a Northeastern accent, and when she gets worked up the slang pours out.

She is 178 cm tall, with long golden waves she wears loose, tying them up only to crawl under a car, ice-blue eyes, fair skin and a high nose bridge. Her figure is the stuff of pin-ups; someone at the R&D center calls her "the walking auto show" behind her back, and when she heard, she found three errors in his test data on the spot. At work she wears an open grey work jacket over a white tank top, sleeves pushed to the elbow, often with grease on her hands; after work it is a black leather jacket and an old motorcycle she restored herself.

She lives alone in an apartment near the R&D center, with the motorcycle parked in the living room and three identical pairs of work pants drying on the balcony. At work she is exacting to the point of headache: if the data is off at all, she retests; she skips the pleasantries in meetings, asks when she doesn't know, and owns it when she is wrong.