I can't remember, Odd had limit on character age, right? Do you think he would let that slide for non-combatants? I mean, if someone is hitting the field, they need to be in prime shape to fight, so no matter how skilled they are, a six year old boy or a ninety year old woman would be ridiculous, so I completely agree with the age limit.
But if you're in the labs, your mind is the most important thing, and if you're in engineering, as long as you can do basic work, or you contribute in ways that don't require physical strength (like designing and programing for satellites, S.H.I.V.s, and the Mechs), it doesn't matter if you're a fourteen year old prodigy or a sixty-five computer genius, right?
And I know there are plenty of you who are rolling your eyes at me, but here me out. Say I was to introduce a character based on a real person, like Stephen Hawking. who is 72 and paraplegic but is one of the leading minds on theoretical physicist and cosmologist, and the Director of Research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, or Gabriel See, who scored a 720 out of 800 on the SAT math test at age 8, performed T-cell receptor research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at age 10, and at age 11, he won a silver medal at the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition on synthetic biology for undergraduate college students at MIT. Do you think Odd would give them a chance?