Niqua Jackson

Description
Nique appears to be a gaunt young african American woman with close cropped curls. She wears heavy makeup and sunglasses rather than waste blood pretending to be human when she is out and about (although she is also usually obfuscated). She says very little, even to Jenny, although she often seems thoughtful or judgemental of expression.

While she is never without her bowie knife, the rifle is only used for hunting, and the encrypted laptop is usually kept in the fireproof bolthole under the coffeeshop's back room.

Jenny's wavy dark hair and light mocha skin make her ancestry indeterminant. Although she was selected for being ordinary looking, she has much more life and happiness in her than her master ever had the luxury of expressing.

History
1885 was not a good year for a girl to be born of a poor black prostitute in Atlanta. Of course, there aren't many good years for that kind of life beginning. Niqua Jackson never knew her father, and didn't much care for her mother, although the woman looked out for her the best way she knew how. In any case, she refused to follow in her mother's footsteps, choosing instead to carry a knife, and make a living lying, stealing, and cheating the best way she knew how.

Her teenage years were very, very hard. She learned a great deal about the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, and her own. But although she did not inherit her mother's grace and attractiveness, she had a great cunning and sharp, if uneducated mind. She learned how to sneak, break, or walk into the homes of those who lived like kings compared to the squalor of her neighborhood, and take things back that she could sell safely.

No amount of cleverness would have preserved her life for long, as she was balancing between the ruthless thugs of her neighborhood, and the unfeeling enforcers of privileged law who valued the life of a young black woman just slightly less than a clump of thick mud. As luck would have it though, the inhuman resident of her 13th successful heist snatched her young life before either branch of humanity could.

She broke into a darkened house in the wee hours of the morning, cunningly bypassing locks and uncovering secret doors, thinking she had found a great treasure, when she fell right into a darkened room. Her youthful eyes straining to see, she felt around for a light, and then felt cold, strong fingers clamp suddenly upon her throat. Although she took no further living breaths she was fortunate that the master of the house (and soon to be her master) had recently come upon the idea for a very promising line of inquiry into the nature of the vampiric condition, and was happy to have an experiment volunteer so close at hand.

The next night she arose chained in a stone box, panicked, starving, and entirely strange to herself. Her master soon arrived, slaked her thirst and gave her a brief crash course in an extremely narrow subset of his research. She sullenly resisted him, convinced he was some horrible slaver or pervert, a mood that persisted for another night before she suddenly realized how carefully he was preparing her for an amazing opportunity to serve him beyond the death she had apparently failed to notice.

With the Viniculum serving to motivate her, and the clever blood of her Mekhet master in her veins, she struggled mightily to master the techniques of meditation and physiological control he was pushing upon her. In just another day or two, he was satisfied with her progress, and staked her precisely as she meditated.

It was a full dozen years before she arose again, her master desiring to check the results of his experiment. She was bitterly disappointed not to be able to recount for him all of her memories, as so many seemed to have been lost as she slumbered in torpor. But he waved her regrets aside as inconsequential, he had new techniques and theories, and she spent a blissful few more weeks with her new master, being tested, and training for the next leg of his experiment.

In this way she spent the next century.

Training intensely for a few weeks or months, then carefully slumbering for years, forgetting some or much of what she had learned. She had no idea that her master had moved across the country twice as she slept, fleeing inhospitable human or vampiric politics, carefully transporting his slumbering experiments.

Although she was only one of a dozen slumbering neonates he was working on, she discovered nothing about that until one day she awoke with a feeling like something was missing from her heart. Her master was not there. Her master was no more.

It was a new millenium and some arcane vampiric vendetta had torn her master from his life's work... from her... she felt... nothing about this? A proctor from Ordo Dracul explained that they were unaware of her master's experiments, and that they might not have been completely ethical, given his lack of published results. In any case, it had been decided that membership in the master's scholarly organization, the Ordo Dracul, could be offered to those who were interested, as they all seemed to have been provided with some extensive if selective training in their master's research.

Like most of her previously unknown "siblings" Niqua accepted. It was not that she was sure that her master's goals were truly as critical as he had seemed to think. It was more that everything else she knew so much more distantly, like a memory of a memory. With the Order's help, the sleepy childer learned or relearned what basics of life outside the laboratory their master had neglected to keep fresh in their skills, and poured over his notes about where they were found and what their "Initial conditions" were.

Niqua remained a clever and quiet girl, despite a century of training and slumber, and she did well in Ordo Dracul. She earned a little status for her thoughtful analyses of her masters experiments, and her own original ideas on that subject. She mastered one of the first secrets of the order, named the coil of blood, which allowed her to go longer between having to acquire food. This was important to her not just for the time savings, but also for making it easier to avoid the messy and ugly process of feeding from strangers. After feeding almost exclusively from her master for so long, feeding without love felt... wrong, like sullying the most beautiful act she knew.

There were several in the order (and tons out of it) who ridiculed her position, but also a number of like minded masters, including the one who had steered her towards mastering that coil. He helped her select a woman who could be a stalwart ally and reliable friend to bond through blood. She traded a small section of her own power to make this woman not only religiously dedicated to her wellbeing, but also immortal.

With her new best ghoulfriend forever, Niqua learned other ways to get blood without sullying the human connection. Animals, while not beloved, also didn't strike her as immoral to feed upon against their will. Her vampiric powers of stealth were such that she could pass unnoticed into a farm and feed upon cattle, or pass right by a game warden carrying the corpse of her latest kill to skin and sell. (Hunting seemed no longer to be a valid profession in the new millenia, but it was at least a respectable hobby).

She was well established in her waking unlife when she heard of a mysterious event which had struck down all vampires (and possibly some other creatures) in her place of birth. Feeling the lack of anything interesting to investigate recently, she took her savings (including a small gift from the estate of her master) and bought Jenny a building there, to serve as their base of operations for the vampiric or mundane business they would try their hands at.

She moved down, met briefly with the local prince to swear to stay out of his business utterly, and helped Jenny establish two businesses out of that single building near the courthouse. A small bail bondery and a cofeeshop. It seemed to do Jenny good to have employees, and Niqua was not above pitching in to help when her studies and hunting did not conflict. Although she hunted to the south of the city, she heard rumors of odd goings on to the north. She eventually decided to hunt that interesting beast, a hunt that was fruitless the first few times, until fortune favored her with a tipoff of it running amuck on the highway not too far from the cofeeshop.

Sheet: Niqua_Jackson