Alice Band
First mentioned in the Assassins' Guild Diary, Miss Alice Band is a younger member of the teaching faculty at the Assassins' School, employed to expand the female teachership at a time when Guild membership was becoming more genuinely co-educational and new Houses (Scorpion House, Raven House, Black Widow House, and Tump House) were being established to absorb an influx of female pupils. In fact, she is House Mistress of Tump House, and therefore stands in loco parentis to her pupils, over and above being teacher to them. She teaches Traps, Locks and Climbing at the Guild, and is also a "stealth archaeologist". In Night Watch she sent trainee assassin Jocasta Wiggs on a very humbling training mission to target Sam Vimes after deciding that Ms Wiggs was an overconfident pupil.
Annotations
Interestingly, her likeness, as sketched by Paul Kidby in The Art of Discworld and for the relevant diary/yearbook as cited above, has odd echoes of Roundworld computer game icon Lara Croft. Just as Ponder Stibbon's pencil portrait has a strange distorted echo of a wizard called H***y P****r, we are certain that such likenesses are mere co-incidence existing only in the eye of the beholder. Even after taking into account the bit about her hobby being "stealth archaeologist".
An Alice Band is also a hairstyling method involving use of a wide hair-band to push the hair back high off the forehead. It is best seen on depictions of " Alice in Wonderland" (hence the name) and it was very much fashionable in the 1960's.
The Alice Band[1] are a girl-group from Canada who, among other things, did a cover version of that most Discworldian anthem, "Don't Fear The Reaper" . Was this the route that suggested a character name for a lady Assassin?
