Rachel Edwards

Rachel Edwards was a journalist who reported on Matt Nelson's Presidential campaign for the Sunday Herald. She also ran the blog radicalrachel.dreamjournal.com.

Biography
Before she worked for the Sunday Herald, she wrote a column in the New Progressive magazine, but she lost the job when they cut the page count. While she worked there, some "creepy blokes" started following her and sending her pictures of their genitalia. One of them sent her photoshopped pictures of her decapitated head with his penis in her mouth.

While she was shadowing the Nelson campaign, she started discovering strange emails on her computer that warned or threatened her about other girls near the campaign her age that had died, including Louise Perry and Joanne Nyman. Rachel tried finding the source of these emails, but they appeared to come from her own account. At the same time, Dave Larsen began leaving her voicemails about the pattern of dead girls. He tried to warn her once, but she threatened to call the police and he ran away.

After this, Rachel's friend Janine Hanning died, convincing Rachel that Dave was right about a serial killer inside the campaign. However, when she told the Sunday Herald editor John Lyman about her suspicions, he told her to focus on the campaign, so she quit the job to work full-time on researching the murders, promising to send them to the FBI after returning to London.

Rachel was bisexual. At one point, she met the girl of her dreams in a bar and went back to her room, but the Shift overwrote it because "the author's really no good at sex scenes". (PROSE: Head of State)

The year following the election, Rachel once again became involved in fantastical events when she was asked to do a story on a cache of books from the 18th century which had recently been unearthed and donated to the New York Public Library. These books had actually through from another universe where the war was fiction, an even included one, Head of State, which focused on her own adventures the previous year. The cache also contained the Book of Books, a mysterious tome which never ran out. While the books on the war were the envy of the war powers, the Book of Books attracted the attention of many people from the 10,000 Dawns, starting with the Arbiter of Knives, who bribed the member of the Firmament's counterpart species in this world to ignore any strange events relating to Rachel's causal nexus in the following days. As such, she, followed by the Great Assimilation and Strid operatives who also wanted the Book or books, repeatedly tried to kidnap Rachel starting on 11 November.

She eventually met up with Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, agents of Dawn who wanted to protect her and prevent anyone from the 10,000 Dawns from getting the books, fearing that the theft would cause an interdimensional war between the Firmament and the Houses. They explained the situation to her, with Graelyn also informing her that she was a big fan of Head of State in her own universe and the literary Rachel had been an inspiration to her growing up. Eventually, things came to a head on 14 November with Rachel going to the New York Public Library with Graelyn and Arch, and finding the Arbiter, Strid and Assimilationists already there, having taken out the war-power representatives. The Strid had the book, and intended to auction it off between the Firmament, the Assimilation and Dawn. However, Rachel managed to render this entire situation moot by threatening to kill herself and thereby expose the interdimensional interlopers. They accepted they'd been beaten, but, before she left, the Arbiter pettily warned Rachel that she would likely be tracked by the Houses and have her memory of these events erased. Disturbed by this possibility, Rachel made many flash-drive copies of her blog entries about these events, and printed out several more, hiding them in various places in the hope of stumbling back upon at least one if she did get her memory wiped. (PROSE: Rachel Survived)

Other realities
In Dawn 5, one of the universes in the 10,000 Dawns, Rachel existed both as a real person (to whom no science-fictional events ever occurred) and, by coincidence, as the protagonist of the book Head of State, which was coincidentally accurate in every detail to the life of the Totality's version of Rachel. The "real" Rachel was aware of the book in her lifetime but laughed off the coincidence, little suspecting that the book was an accurate depiction of her life in another universe. (PROSE: Rachel Survived)