Annabelle Steel moves like a person used to both running across muddy battlefields and leaning over an operating table. Her curly brown hair usually tumbles free beneath a childish headband decorated with a faded toy cog and a stitched-on blue star. The hair is often singed at the tips from sparks that fly during field repairs. Her steely grey eyes are alert and soft at once, like tempered metal with a child's wonder. She wears a heavy reinforced leather and steel great coat that hangs slightly too large on her narrow shoulders, the lining sewn with small, improvised pockets and stained with old blood and antiseptic. Over a blouse spattered with both crimson and oil she keeps a tightly-fitted kevla vest for shrapnel protection. Her sabre rides in a blue and gold sheathe at her hip; the metalwork on the guard bears a scratched unit number and a crudely etched name of a lost comrade. Her hobnailed boots are rounded with repeated resoling and a slight curl at the toes from pacing for long nights. Unexpectedly, she wears a small porcelain doll's shoe as a charm tied to her belt, cracked and filled with resin and a dried sprig of thyme.