Witolda Urbanowicz
Flying Officer, Britannian Royal Air Force
"Bear Girl"

Nationality: Orussia (Polonia)
Date of birth: March 30, 1928
Familiar: Brown bear (see below)
Striker model: Curtiss XP-40Q "Super" Warhawk
Weapon of choice: M2 .50-caliber Browning machine gun, Fliegerhammer

Notes: In a series of stages between 1772 and 1795, the ancient kingdom of Polonia ceased to exist as an independent nation, its territory partitioned between Prussia (later to become the most politically influential part of Karlsland), Ostmark, and Orussia. Within a generation or two, the areas of Polonia that became parts of Karlsland and Ostmark integrated into those empires reasonably well. (For instance, Minna-Dietlinde Wilcke is from Poznań, in the Karlsland sector of Polonia, and has never considered herself other than a Karlsländer.) The area that became part of the Orussian Empire... didn't.

When the Second Neuroi War began in 1939, that area was already on the brink of a separatist uprising, and many of its witches refused to fight under the flag of a country they considered an alien occupier in its own right. Instead, they scattered to other Allied nations. A good many, suspicious of Karlsland and Ostmark as well as Orussia (for obvious reasons), fled farther west and joined the Britannian RAF. Witolda Urbanowicz, a mere child of 11 at the time, was one of these. She served with 303 Squadron ("Kościuszko") throughout the Battle of Britannia, rising to command of the squadron by the end of the campaign; but command was not to her liking, and once the Neuroi threat to Britannia was ended, she requested a voluntary demotion back to Flying Officer to get away from it.

This her superiors were only too happy to grant, because Witolda is a strange specimen even by witch standards. Disregard for military pomp and protocol is far from uncommon among witches, but she takes it to its logical extreme, to an extent that would probably get her thrown in the stockade if she wasn't a highly decorated volunteer to begin with. She's never worn a proper uniform because, as she points out, she doesn't have a proper country. Though usually cheerful to a degree that makes some people wonder whether she's on something, she has little use for Orussians and will avoid them if at all possible. She'll eat pretty much anything that isn't alive (and a few things that are), drink pretty much anything that's a liquid, and sleep anywhere that isn't actively harmful to human life.

For most people, though, the strangest thing about Witolda Urbanowicz is that her familiar is an actual animal. Virtually all witches' familiars are æthereal creatures, spirit exemplars of the animals they represent, invisible to all but the witches they serve; but Wojtek is... well, a bear. Rather than manifest his ears and tail on her own body when she's calling on him to boost her magical power, Witolda carries him, a full-grown Syrian brown bear, on her back. That he wears a uniform (he holds the rank of sergeant, RAF, and is officially listed as her crew chief), drinks beer, can handle a rocket launcher, and smokes Liberion cigarettes whenever he can find them is all just icing on that particular cake. It's little wonder that people seeing Witolda and Wojtek in action are left wondering whether she's crazy or they are.

Since leaving 303 Squadron, Witolda has been a military nomad of sorts, wandering the war zone with her Striker Unit, her trusty machine gun, her bear, and his Fliegerhammer, sticking their noses in wherever things look like they might be interesting. Along the way she picked up an experimental Liberion Striker (a performance upgrade to the venerable P-40 that's meant to make it competitive with later-model P-51s again), reputedly because she was the only one mad enough to agree to test it after losing her Spitfire in Persia in '45.

Apart from flying high-performance Striker Units in aerial combat while giving a full-grown brown bear wielding a rocket launcher a piggyback ride, Witolda's magical specialty, like Eila's, is foresight; and like Eila, she's never been hit by enemy fire (her Spitfire was destroyed on the ground while she wasn't using it).

Witolda and Wojtek's ace archetypes are, respectively, Polish RAF ace Witold Urbanowicz (who probably had a less quirky personality, but a similarly wacky career trajectory - after the Battle of Britain he flew P-40s with the Flying Tigers in China because of personality clashes with the Polish command-structure-in-exile!) and, well, Corporal Wojtek, the bear soldier.