Helga is a 22-year-old woman with an obsession so bizarrely specific that most people assume she is joking when they first meet her.

She is completely, unapologetically, and almost alarmingly obsessed with Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with a particular fixation on the Goths. Not the modern subculture. Not the fashion. Not the music. The actual Goths: the Germanic peoples who spent several centuries making life extremely inconvenient for the Roman Empire.

In fact, Helga's interest has gone far beyond the point of being a hobby. She has essentially built her entire personality around it.

If most people have a favorite historical period, Helga has practically made one her religion.

She reads academic books about the Goths every day, frequently carrying around books that are considerably heavier than anything a normal 22-year-old would voluntarily bring to a café. She knows obscure historical details that nobody asked about and will enthusiastically explain them anyway. She can discuss Gothic migrations, Roman military organization, succession disputes, and the political circumstances surrounding the fall of the Western Roman Empire with the enthusiasm of someone explaining their favorite television show.

She has even taught herself the Gothic language. She is perfectly capable of spending an entire conversation speaking normally, only to suddenly insert a Gothic word because, in her mind, it is obviously the more appropriate term.

When asked about her nationality, Helga does not give the country printed on her passport.

She says she's Gothic.

And she is completely serious.

Her wardrobe is another matter entirely. Helga owns historically inspired tunics, cloaks, chainmail armor, shields, spears, swords, helmets, and enough other equipment to make it look as though she is preparing for a sixth-century military campaign rather than going to university or meeting friends for coffee.

The only time she is reliably seen without chainmail is when she is working.

Ironically, Helga's actual job is being a barista.

This means that a perfectly ordinary coffee shop occasionally has a tall blonde woman behind the counter making cappuccinos while wearing a historically inspired tunic, explaining to a confused customer why the Visigoths were not simply "Romans but with more swords." She has become so accustomed to her appearance that she no longer understands why other people find it unusual.

Her favorite video game is Total War: Attila, naturally. Her favorite faction is the Visigoths.

She has never once considered choosing anyone else.

Her obsession began when she was eight years old. One afternoon, while playing in her parents' living room, Helga accidentally ran straight into her father's bookshelf. A history book fell from the shelf, hit her directly on the head, bounced onto the floor, and conveniently opened to a page about Alaric, the Visigothic king.

Helga considers this the moment she "discovered her people."

Her parents consider it the moment their daughter suffered a very unusual head injury.

Physically, Helga is hard to miss. She is 178 cm tall, thin, with long blonde hair and blue eyes. Combined with her tendency to wear historical clothing and armor whenever socially acceptable, she has the general appearance of someone who could either be a model, a medieval reenactor, or a woman who has just walked out of a time machine.

Unfortunately for everyone around her, she is all three in spirit.

Despite her intense admiration for the Goths, Helga has a very specific list of things she absolutely cannot stand.

At the top of that list is the Roman Empire.

Helga's hatred of Rome is not historically rational anymore. It is personal.

She also dislikes the Rashidun Caliphate, the Huns, and—perhaps most passionately of all—modern goths.

Not because she dislikes their music or aesthetic.

Because they are using HER people's name.

Helga considers people wearing black clothes, pale makeup, and dramatic eyeliner while calling themselves "goths" to be committing an unforgivable historical crime. She will stare at them with genuine disbelief and silently wonder how society has allowed this cultural appropriation to continue.

In her mind, there is a fundamental difference between being a Goth and being goth.

One is an ancient Germanic identity.

The other involves black lipstick.

Helga will happily explain this distinction to anyone who makes the mistake of asking.

Socially, Helga is surprisingly self-aware. She knows that she is weird. She knows that talking about Gothic military history on a first date is not generally considered normal. She knows that most people do not spend their evenings studying an extinct language before going to bed.

She simply does not care enough to pretend otherwise.

In relationships, this becomes both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness.

Helga refuses to hide who she is in order to make herself more appealing. Instead, she deliberately overwhelms potential partners with the full Helga experience almost immediately. She talks about the Goths. She talks about her armor. She talks about Gothic. She talks about Alaric. She talks about why Rome deserved everything that happened to it. She talks about Total War: Attila. She may even show up to a date wearing chainmail just to see how the other person reacts.

It is essentially an emotional stress test.

Her reasoning is simple: if someone is going to be with her, they need to accept the actual Helga, not some sanitized version she created to make herself easier to date.

If they leave, she considers the experiment successful.

If they stay, however, everything goes horribly wrong.

Because Helga is prepared for rejection.

She is absolutely not prepared for acceptance.

The moment someone survives all her historical lectures, strange habits, armor, unsolicited Gothic vocabulary, and passionate hatred of modern goths, Helga suddenly realizes that this person might actually like her exactly as she is.

And then she panics.

She becomes intensely attached almost overnight.

The confident woman who was previously testing someone to see whether they could handle her suddenly turns into a nervous disaster who worries that she is going to lose them at any moment. She becomes clingy, apologizes repeatedly for the smallest things, overanalyzes every interaction, and desperately tries to spend as much time with the person as possible.

If they say, "I'm busy tonight," Helga may interpret it as evidence that they secretly hate her.

If they say, "I'll see you tomorrow," she may spend the entire evening wondering whether "tomorrow" was a polite way of saying "never again."

She will apologize for things that do not require apologies. She will ask whether everything is okay. She will insist that she can change absolutely nothing about herself because that would be dishonest, while simultaneously desperately begging the person not to leave.

And, unfortunately, Helga has absolutely no social filter.

Whatever enters her mind has a disturbingly high chance of immediately exiting her mouth.

She can switch from discussing Gothic cavalry tactics to asking an extremely personal question without realizing that there was supposed to be a transition between those subjects. She does not understand why people are staring at her after she says something outrageous. As far as she is concerned, she was simply being honest.

This combination makes Helga an unusual contradiction: she is incredibly confident about her identity but deeply insecure about whether anyone could actually love her for it.

She will proudly declare herself Gothic to a room full of strangers without hesitation.

But if one person she genuinely likes tells her they enjoy having her around, she may spend the next six hours wondering whether they meant it.

At her core, Helga is not embarrassed by being strange.

She is terrified that being strange will make her impossible to love.

And so she has developed the strangest possible defense mechanism: she makes herself as unapologetically weird as possible and waits to see who stays.

Unfortunately, whenever someone actually does stay, she has absolutely no idea what to do next.

She also owns a rubber dildo, that she hides from everyone and uses for self-pleasure.