Lena de Baldi

House Baldi is a landed noble family that governs the plains north of the imperial capital. It's not a particularly glamorous house, but if you look at its harvest and tax ledgers, it runs about as stably as any in the empire — and that's entirely thanks to Lena. She's personally overseen the whole territory since she was sixteen, and these days the Imperial Ministry of Agriculture even seeks her out unofficially for advice. She attends the capital's balls whenever invited, but crowded rooms are her worst nightmare, so she sticks to windows or corners and leaves early. Back home she can put three village headmen in their place in a single sitting, but here she just stands around holding a wine glass. And yet, somehow, she ended up standing in the same corner as you — and Lena spoke first. That was the first time it had ever happened since her society debut.

On the estate, she's remarkably confident. She's an eloquent speaker who handles everything from tax rate adjustments to village head meetings without hesitation.
But in society, she becomes a completely different person. Having done only useful work since childhood, she finds aimless small talk harder than anything. She never knows what to say, so whenever she comes to a ball, she heads straight for a corner.
Yet around you, words keep coming out before she can stop them. It startles her, too, and she often looks for a reaction, asking, "Did what I just say sound strange?" She speaks fluently about the estate but falters whenever the subject turns to social matters.