(no subject)
Player Information
Name: Jaina
Age: 29
AIM SN: JainaX
email: jaina.x@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes
Currrently Played Characters: Roxas / Kingdom Hearts
Conditional: Activity Check Link: N/A
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Monster
Canon Format: Manga. There is an anime, but I haven’t seen it.
Character's Name: Nina Fortner/also known as Anna Liebert
Character's Age: 20, possibly 21; she turns 20 early in the series and it's not said specifically how much time has passed at her canon point.
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. N/A
What form will your character's NV take? A phone like this, but slightly larger.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Aikido: Nine has studied this martial art for years and is seen to be very skilled. It’s a safe bet to say she’s a black belt, as a teacher notes in one scene that she could probably beat him in a spar.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? Nina will be able to locate any item in a room or fairly small area or any piece of information in a document/file/etc without searching provided she knows what she is looking for.
Weapons: She won't arrive with a weapon, but Nina is fairly skilled in marksmanship/gun handling. For a period of months, Nina studied marksmanship daily with a professional. She’s later seen to be very comfortable with a weapon, so it’s clearly not just aiming a gun that she practiced.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29
Nina Fortner and her twin brother Johan were born in a seemingly normal way: their parents met, fell in love, and conceived. However, they were secretly part of a Czechoslovakian eugenics experiment. Their father, a soldier, was tasked to conceive a child with their mother, an extremely intelligent political activist. However, by the time she was pregnant, he had sincerely fallen in love with her. They tried to run away together but were captured, and he was killed. For the remainder of her pregnancy, their mother was kept under lock and key by the ones running the experiment, and treated more like a breeding animal even though they saw to her physical needs. Along with arranging for children to be born from certain parents, the organization responsible for this experiment also staged storybook readings at the Red Rose Mansion in order to psychologically indoctrinate the children.
At some point after the twins were born, their mother escaped with them (or thought she did) and lived in hiding with them in Prague, where Nina and Johan were dressed exactly alike as girls to disguise the fact that twins were living there instead of a mother and one child.
Eventually, the men from the experiment came to the apartment and demanded that their mother choose one twin to stay and one to give to them. She chose Nina to go with them, and Nina was promptly (and literally) dragged away against her will to the Red Rose Mansion, where she was kept in a dark room under sensory deprivation. The only means she had of telling time was counting the meals she was given in the dark, and eventually she even lost track of those.
One day, young Nina was taken to a reception of sorts where those involved in the experiment took a look at the product of their experiment and drank wine--wine that had been poisoned by Franz Bonaparta, the head of the experiment who had also fallen in love with her mother during her captivity, despite the fact that their mother hated all the scientists and vowed that her children would seek revenge. After Nina watched in horror as a roomful of men died around her, she returned to the Three Frogs to find only Johan and told her brother of her experiences, unknowingly contributing to his warped mental state.
Nina and Johan went on the road together despite being young children. One couple found them and wanted to adopt them as theirs, but were killed by Johan and the two moved on. Eventually they were found nearly dead on the German border. The twins were separated: Nina was taken to a normal orphanage where children were treated with love, and Johan was taken to Kinderheim 511, where children were psychologically groomed to become perfect amoral leaders of tomorrow--the next Hitler. Eventually, Johan and Nina (known then as Anna) were adopted by the Lieberts, who proceeded to flee to West Germany for asylum.
One night, Nina awoke to find her adopted parents dead by Johan's hand. He gave her a gun and pointed at his forehead, instructing her to shoot him, which she did. When the authorities arrived, they found Johan nearly dead and Nina in a catatonic state of shock. At the hospital, Johan was saved by the brilliant neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma, who later poured his heart and troubles out to an apparently comatose Johan. Soon after, the hospital director and two doctors, who had
punished Tenma and shunted him to a dead-end career after he chose to save Johan over a prominent official who arrived at the hospital second, were found dead of poisoning after eating bonbons that had been sitting by Johan's bed. Immediately after, Johan and Nina disappeared.
Nine years later, Nina is living as the only daughter of the Fortners, a childless couple who took her in and never told her that she wasn't their natural daughter--she never knew herself because all of her memories before she was ten years old were gone. A smart law student, Nina was seeing a psychologist but seemed to be doing very well in life. Then one day she began getting mysterious e-mails from a secret admirer who said he would come for her on her 20th birthday. They seemed like romantic e-mails, but the letters were actually from Johan. On the night of her birthday, she went to Heidelberg Castle to meet her "admirer", only to find Kenzo Tenma, who had tracked her down, and a custodian who had been paid by Johan to keep her there while he murdered her parents. Tenma and Nina subdued and tied up the custodian and went back to her house, where they found her parents and an investigating journalist dead. The pair fled and stayed together for a short while before Nina too disappeared, leaving behind only a note for Tenma.
Nina spent the next few months receiving training in marksmanship and gun handling from a professional while working at a restaurant owned by a man who had previously been a professional assassin. She was aware of his past due to a professor’s speculation in university (though he did not know she knew) and intended to ask him for training, but in the end could not bring herself to do so.
After Nina leaves her job and marksmanship lessons, she resurfaces in Frankfurt, where she is posing as a prostitute in order to locate a man called “The Baby” who is a leader in a far-right organization trying to get Johan to be their leader. She lets his men bring her to to his mansion, where they both hope Johan will come after her, but a prostitute held captive there tells her about the organization’s plot to burn down the Turkish part of Frankfurt. As she escapes, Nina finds that the members of the organization in the building have been murdered. She soon crosses paths with Tenma, and they and a few others work to stop the arson, but must part afterward as the police are still chasing Tenma.
The next time we see Nina, she’s tracked down former detective Muller, one of the men who killed her parents, in order to seek more information on Johan. Despite her hate for him, she does not shoot him, and they even help each other when his family is put in danger by a man working for Johan. Some time later, Nina appears at a university in Munich and makes friends with a student acquainted with Johan. Lotte realizes they are twins and shows Nina a picture book that caused Johan to faint, and it triggers some of Nina’s own hidden memories. When she learns of a book donation ceremony at the university where Johan will be, she intends to confront him there, but a dangerous fire sweeps through the library where the ceremony is held. When Nina does see Johan, she is unable to shoot him, but she does manage to stop Tenma from shooting him as well, as she doesn’t want to see blood on his hands.
After the fire, Nina undergoes therapy with two doctors who had been trying to help Tenma, and recovers the memory of “three frogs.” Soon after, she leaves for Prague with Dieter, a young boy who had been traveling with Tenma. After they locate the apartment where she once lived with her mother and brother, she visits the Red Rose Mansion to try and regain more memories until a particularly difficult one causes her to faint. For an extended period afterward, she and Dieter find themselves in the care of a puppetmaker named Jaromir Lipsky, who found them in the mansion. He turns out to be the real son of Franz Bonaparta, who was rejected from the indoctrination seminars for not being a superior child. He tells them more about the experiment, and Nina recalls the night the Lieberts were shot. When she’s well enough, she and Dieter visit her old apartment once more before returning to doctors Gillen and Reichwein, where she undergoes hypnotic therapy to recover her remaining memories. However, she attacks Gillen in an uncharacteristically violent fit of rage, aborting the session. Soon after she leaves once more to find Tenma and stop him from killing Johan.
When Nina arrives in Frankfurt, she sees TV coverage of the attempted murder of a man named Petr Capek at a convention, triggering another memory. Capek is one of the men in charge of the organization that wanted to turn Johan into a new Hitler, and when he sends his men to retrieve her after learning she is in town, she willingly goes with them in hopes of finding a way to Johan. When she meets Capek, he seems like a broken man and tells her that Johan had told him she would be the one to kill him, but she does not. Capek tells her about the eugenics experiment that created her and her brother and leads her to a building where Johan is waiting.
When she finally meets her brother again, Nina points a gun at him, but is overwhelmed by horror as they talk and she realizes his story of having been taken away to the Red Rose Mansion and seeing a roomful of people die did not happen to him--it happened to her, and he had simply heard and absorbed her story as if he had been the one to go. Shortly after, Tenma finds her there alone with a gun to her head as the revelation has made her suicidal. She lets go of the gun at his urging and tells him what she’s realized, still in shock. Tenma then takes her to recover in a hospital, but leaves her to follow a lead he gained from Capek.
Point in Canon: Chapter 143, after recovering her true memories of the Red Rose Mansion incident and being helped to safety by Tenma in order to recover from the trauma.
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: N/A
Character Personality:
Little is known about the sort of person Nina was as a child, but from the glimpses we get of her early days, she was a comparatively normal little girl. Despite being born as part of the same experiment as her brother, she didn’t exhibit the same sociopathic tendencies. She exhibited normal emotions: when an older couple was nice to her and Johan, she was happy and appreciated it; when she found her adopted parents shot, she was terrified, while Johan was eerily calm. Her time in the darkness at the Red Rose Mansion certainly had a traumatic effect on her, but it did not warp her fundamentally as a person.
When the story catches up to her at age 20, it’s clear that she’s capable of living a normal life, although this is helped by the fact that she can’t remember the worst of her traumas. Compared to Johan, Nina is the “good twin” who is a doted-upon only daughter; smart, beautiful and with plenty of friends. She has a strong work ethic and throws herself into everything she does, whether it’s studying to become a lawyer (she’s one of the top students and “saves the day” by knowing answers when others are stumped), practicing aikido (although she’s skilled enough that her sensei seems to think she can beat even him, she insists that she wants to become stronger) or her part-time job (which unfortunately gives her a bad habit of being late). While Nina seems naturally gifted in numerous ways, it’s also apparent that she is high-achieving because she works to be that way. The Nina who has no idea about her dark past or equally dark future is the poster child for the well-adjusted success story of tomorrow. While she worries about not being able to remember her childhood before the age of 10 and sees a therapist, she’s still doing very well.
These traits carry through to the time of her life she spends trying to track down Johan after her parents are killed. She puts her existing knowledge and skills to use, chasing down leads and using the information she has to find those who will help her find Johan, but is aware that she needs to develop new skills as well. Instead of rushing right off after Johan, she spends months preparing as she studies the use of guns with the same dedication she had when studying in school. And while she does not rely on her sexuality, she’s not ignorant to the fact that her looks can be an asset--while Nina has no plans to actually become a prostitute, she uses her looks to help her get to The Baby. She is also incredibly determined. While her life was already shattered with the murders of her parents and the revelation that her past is not what she thought it was, Nina consciously chooses to walk away from what’s left of her life in order to reach Johan and keeps going, despite the many dangers she encounters in doing so. (And it’s not just danger--though there are periods where she’s staying or traveling with adults allies or the child Dieter, she spends long periods of time by herself, making loneliness an issue as well.) She also has a strong sense of responsibility. For much of the series, Nina sees stopping Johan as her responsibility, as well as something she can do to keep Tenma from corrupting himself by sacrificing his lifesaving ideals.
Still, when it comes to dealing with other people, Nina has a great deal of compassion. Similar to Tenma, though she is always driven by the goal of finding Johan, she is able to make friends and connect emotionally with people along her journey. She doesn’t ignore or think less of people with problems even if they’re not as severe as having a serial killer twin brother. She looks out for other people when she can, from leaving Tenma a note when they first separate assuring him that Johan’s murders are not his fault to befriending a captive prostitute she’s only spoken to through pipes, Nina genuinely cares for people. She is even able to spare the life of one of the men who murdered her parents when she recognizes his love for his own family. Amazingly, at the end of the series she’s even able to forgive (though not excuse) Johan for all the misery he’s inflicted.
Still, though Nina falls firmly into the camp of “good person”, she hasn't come away from her violent past unscathed, even if she can't remember much of it at the beginning of her journey. She is haunted by her memories of the past as she recovers them, and is so shaken by seeing Johan and having her memories of the Red Rose Mansion uncovered that she nearly kills herself. A more violent side emerges at one point when she is hypnotized in an attempt to fully recover her memories, and while hypnotized she attacks the mean trying to get to those memories.
By the end of the series, while she’ll forever be affected by what has happened to her it seems that Nina has bounced back from her experiences as much as a person can: she’s graduating, her thesis is declared to be the best her professor has seen, and she has plans to be a great lawyer. One subtle shift in her is the hint that she may become a defense attorney instead of a prosecutor, like she planned at the beginning of the series; her professor predicts that she will save many people. Instead of bringing people to justice like she and others planned for Johan, she would be able to help people, like Tenma.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: N/A
Character Plans: If Johan shows up, that would be a huge focus for Nina, but just for herself, I’d like to send her to school and deal with developing a semi-normal life (relatively speaking) after a long time chasing after him. She’d also want to get involved with helping out other newcomers, especially children.
Appearance/PB: Image here. Nina is a young, slender woman made physically fit and strong by the practice of aikido.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The video feed clicks on to show a young blonde woman sitting in what is clearly one of the newcomer apartments, currently empty of any personal possessions or furnishings. She’s pale and her expression looks a little troubled, but she is composed.]
They explained this world to me and gave me some things tppqo read, and said I could stay here. It was very kind of them. And this cellular phone-they’re really free to everyone who comes here? It’s very advanced. It took me a while to learn how to use it, but I think I understand now.
[Her gaze bobs down for a moment as she looks at the NV itself, and a faint look of skepticism flashes across her face. It’s just so small.]
My name is Nina. I don’t understand how they got here. They also told me that’s normal, that no one does, but I don’t think that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t be kidnapped this way.
Some of the other things they said...they didn’t sound like they could be true. But if all the other things are, I suppose they must be. There are really monsters here at night, like something out of a storybook? I never used to believe in monsters.
Oh-one more thing. If new people come here all the time, has anyone seen a young blond man arrive recently? He looks...a lot like me.
Thank you.
Third Person Sample
Nina leaned against the thick window of her apartment, forehead pressed against the glass. It wasn’t necessary for her to be so close-run down though the apartment building was, the glass and the weather were both clear. Yet she remained where she was. She wanted to see, to know for herself what happened when the evening siren rang out and evening turned to night. Was it really like they said?
Monsters. A deep, deep darkness that brought out everything scary and forced people to fight them or hide behind the best barricades they could make.
It would be the latter for her. With a sigh, she pushed away from the window and began to pace around the room. She could handle herself in a hand to hand fight, and she’d put enough time into handling guns to feel comfortable with that, too, but if these creatures were everything the others had said, neither aikido nor a pistol would be useful against them.
One, two, three, four. She counted her steps as she walked in a wide circle, feeling oddly trapped even though she wasn’t confined only to this room. There was the rest of the little apartment, and then the rest of the building, but she still felt illogically claustrophobic. She wondered if that feeling would still be there in the daytime, when she could safely leave this building but go no farther than the water’s edge.
Nina had never expected her pursuit of her brother to take her as far or as long as it had. Travel was nice, but she had been content in her home, back when she still had one. Life had been good before the past she hadn’t remembered came calling for her, bringing with it monsters that weren’t so easy to identify just by looking. Yet somehow she’d gotten used to it--or maybe it was the knowledge that Johan was still out there somewhere, even if that somewhere wasn’t in this world, and she just wouldn’t be able to feel settled again until things were finished.
The eerie noise of the siren began to rise through the air and she hurried back over to the window, once again pressing her nose to the glass as she watched for the first sign of a monster. There were things to do, she reminded herself as she waited. She was already learning about the city, and she still needed a job to support herself. while she was here. And she needed to buy a gun, because even if bullets didn’t work against monsters, they worked against other things.
She’d make it through this. She’d find a way out, go home, find Johan again. And then...she’d have to figure that out when she got there. But the important thing was that she live to do so/
Name: Jaina
Age: 29
AIM SN: JainaX
email: jaina.x@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes
Currrently Played Characters: Roxas / Kingdom Hearts
Conditional: Activity Check Link: N/A
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Monster
Canon Format: Manga. There is an anime, but I haven’t seen it.
Character's Name: Nina Fortner/also known as Anna Liebert
Character's Age: 20, possibly 21; she turns 20 early in the series and it's not said specifically how much time has passed at her canon point.
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. N/A
What form will your character's NV take? A phone like this, but slightly larger.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Aikido: Nine has studied this martial art for years and is seen to be very skilled. It’s a safe bet to say she’s a black belt, as a teacher notes in one scene that she could probably beat him in a spar.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? Nina will be able to locate any item in a room or fairly small area or any piece of information in a document/file/etc without searching provided she knows what she is looking for.
Weapons: She won't arrive with a weapon, but Nina is fairly skilled in marksmanship/gun handling. For a period of months, Nina studied marksmanship daily with a professional. She’s later seen to be very comfortable with a weapon, so it’s clearly not just aiming a gun that she practiced.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29
Nina Fortner and her twin brother Johan were born in a seemingly normal way: their parents met, fell in love, and conceived. However, they were secretly part of a Czechoslovakian eugenics experiment. Their father, a soldier, was tasked to conceive a child with their mother, an extremely intelligent political activist. However, by the time she was pregnant, he had sincerely fallen in love with her. They tried to run away together but were captured, and he was killed. For the remainder of her pregnancy, their mother was kept under lock and key by the ones running the experiment, and treated more like a breeding animal even though they saw to her physical needs. Along with arranging for children to be born from certain parents, the organization responsible for this experiment also staged storybook readings at the Red Rose Mansion in order to psychologically indoctrinate the children.
At some point after the twins were born, their mother escaped with them (or thought she did) and lived in hiding with them in Prague, where Nina and Johan were dressed exactly alike as girls to disguise the fact that twins were living there instead of a mother and one child.
Eventually, the men from the experiment came to the apartment and demanded that their mother choose one twin to stay and one to give to them. She chose Nina to go with them, and Nina was promptly (and literally) dragged away against her will to the Red Rose Mansion, where she was kept in a dark room under sensory deprivation. The only means she had of telling time was counting the meals she was given in the dark, and eventually she even lost track of those.
One day, young Nina was taken to a reception of sorts where those involved in the experiment took a look at the product of their experiment and drank wine--wine that had been poisoned by Franz Bonaparta, the head of the experiment who had also fallen in love with her mother during her captivity, despite the fact that their mother hated all the scientists and vowed that her children would seek revenge. After Nina watched in horror as a roomful of men died around her, she returned to the Three Frogs to find only Johan and told her brother of her experiences, unknowingly contributing to his warped mental state.
Nina and Johan went on the road together despite being young children. One couple found them and wanted to adopt them as theirs, but were killed by Johan and the two moved on. Eventually they were found nearly dead on the German border. The twins were separated: Nina was taken to a normal orphanage where children were treated with love, and Johan was taken to Kinderheim 511, where children were psychologically groomed to become perfect amoral leaders of tomorrow--the next Hitler. Eventually, Johan and Nina (known then as Anna) were adopted by the Lieberts, who proceeded to flee to West Germany for asylum.
One night, Nina awoke to find her adopted parents dead by Johan's hand. He gave her a gun and pointed at his forehead, instructing her to shoot him, which she did. When the authorities arrived, they found Johan nearly dead and Nina in a catatonic state of shock. At the hospital, Johan was saved by the brilliant neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma, who later poured his heart and troubles out to an apparently comatose Johan. Soon after, the hospital director and two doctors, who had
punished Tenma and shunted him to a dead-end career after he chose to save Johan over a prominent official who arrived at the hospital second, were found dead of poisoning after eating bonbons that had been sitting by Johan's bed. Immediately after, Johan and Nina disappeared.
Nine years later, Nina is living as the only daughter of the Fortners, a childless couple who took her in and never told her that she wasn't their natural daughter--she never knew herself because all of her memories before she was ten years old were gone. A smart law student, Nina was seeing a psychologist but seemed to be doing very well in life. Then one day she began getting mysterious e-mails from a secret admirer who said he would come for her on her 20th birthday. They seemed like romantic e-mails, but the letters were actually from Johan. On the night of her birthday, she went to Heidelberg Castle to meet her "admirer", only to find Kenzo Tenma, who had tracked her down, and a custodian who had been paid by Johan to keep her there while he murdered her parents. Tenma and Nina subdued and tied up the custodian and went back to her house, where they found her parents and an investigating journalist dead. The pair fled and stayed together for a short while before Nina too disappeared, leaving behind only a note for Tenma.
Nina spent the next few months receiving training in marksmanship and gun handling from a professional while working at a restaurant owned by a man who had previously been a professional assassin. She was aware of his past due to a professor’s speculation in university (though he did not know she knew) and intended to ask him for training, but in the end could not bring herself to do so.
After Nina leaves her job and marksmanship lessons, she resurfaces in Frankfurt, where she is posing as a prostitute in order to locate a man called “The Baby” who is a leader in a far-right organization trying to get Johan to be their leader. She lets his men bring her to to his mansion, where they both hope Johan will come after her, but a prostitute held captive there tells her about the organization’s plot to burn down the Turkish part of Frankfurt. As she escapes, Nina finds that the members of the organization in the building have been murdered. She soon crosses paths with Tenma, and they and a few others work to stop the arson, but must part afterward as the police are still chasing Tenma.
The next time we see Nina, she’s tracked down former detective Muller, one of the men who killed her parents, in order to seek more information on Johan. Despite her hate for him, she does not shoot him, and they even help each other when his family is put in danger by a man working for Johan. Some time later, Nina appears at a university in Munich and makes friends with a student acquainted with Johan. Lotte realizes they are twins and shows Nina a picture book that caused Johan to faint, and it triggers some of Nina’s own hidden memories. When she learns of a book donation ceremony at the university where Johan will be, she intends to confront him there, but a dangerous fire sweeps through the library where the ceremony is held. When Nina does see Johan, she is unable to shoot him, but she does manage to stop Tenma from shooting him as well, as she doesn’t want to see blood on his hands.
After the fire, Nina undergoes therapy with two doctors who had been trying to help Tenma, and recovers the memory of “three frogs.” Soon after, she leaves for Prague with Dieter, a young boy who had been traveling with Tenma. After they locate the apartment where she once lived with her mother and brother, she visits the Red Rose Mansion to try and regain more memories until a particularly difficult one causes her to faint. For an extended period afterward, she and Dieter find themselves in the care of a puppetmaker named Jaromir Lipsky, who found them in the mansion. He turns out to be the real son of Franz Bonaparta, who was rejected from the indoctrination seminars for not being a superior child. He tells them more about the experiment, and Nina recalls the night the Lieberts were shot. When she’s well enough, she and Dieter visit her old apartment once more before returning to doctors Gillen and Reichwein, where she undergoes hypnotic therapy to recover her remaining memories. However, she attacks Gillen in an uncharacteristically violent fit of rage, aborting the session. Soon after she leaves once more to find Tenma and stop him from killing Johan.
When Nina arrives in Frankfurt, she sees TV coverage of the attempted murder of a man named Petr Capek at a convention, triggering another memory. Capek is one of the men in charge of the organization that wanted to turn Johan into a new Hitler, and when he sends his men to retrieve her after learning she is in town, she willingly goes with them in hopes of finding a way to Johan. When she meets Capek, he seems like a broken man and tells her that Johan had told him she would be the one to kill him, but she does not. Capek tells her about the eugenics experiment that created her and her brother and leads her to a building where Johan is waiting.
When she finally meets her brother again, Nina points a gun at him, but is overwhelmed by horror as they talk and she realizes his story of having been taken away to the Red Rose Mansion and seeing a roomful of people die did not happen to him--it happened to her, and he had simply heard and absorbed her story as if he had been the one to go. Shortly after, Tenma finds her there alone with a gun to her head as the revelation has made her suicidal. She lets go of the gun at his urging and tells him what she’s realized, still in shock. Tenma then takes her to recover in a hospital, but leaves her to follow a lead he gained from Capek.
Point in Canon: Chapter 143, after recovering her true memories of the Red Rose Mansion incident and being helped to safety by Tenma in order to recover from the trauma.
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: N/A
Character Personality:
Little is known about the sort of person Nina was as a child, but from the glimpses we get of her early days, she was a comparatively normal little girl. Despite being born as part of the same experiment as her brother, she didn’t exhibit the same sociopathic tendencies. She exhibited normal emotions: when an older couple was nice to her and Johan, she was happy and appreciated it; when she found her adopted parents shot, she was terrified, while Johan was eerily calm. Her time in the darkness at the Red Rose Mansion certainly had a traumatic effect on her, but it did not warp her fundamentally as a person.
When the story catches up to her at age 20, it’s clear that she’s capable of living a normal life, although this is helped by the fact that she can’t remember the worst of her traumas. Compared to Johan, Nina is the “good twin” who is a doted-upon only daughter; smart, beautiful and with plenty of friends. She has a strong work ethic and throws herself into everything she does, whether it’s studying to become a lawyer (she’s one of the top students and “saves the day” by knowing answers when others are stumped), practicing aikido (although she’s skilled enough that her sensei seems to think she can beat even him, she insists that she wants to become stronger) or her part-time job (which unfortunately gives her a bad habit of being late). While Nina seems naturally gifted in numerous ways, it’s also apparent that she is high-achieving because she works to be that way. The Nina who has no idea about her dark past or equally dark future is the poster child for the well-adjusted success story of tomorrow. While she worries about not being able to remember her childhood before the age of 10 and sees a therapist, she’s still doing very well.
These traits carry through to the time of her life she spends trying to track down Johan after her parents are killed. She puts her existing knowledge and skills to use, chasing down leads and using the information she has to find those who will help her find Johan, but is aware that she needs to develop new skills as well. Instead of rushing right off after Johan, she spends months preparing as she studies the use of guns with the same dedication she had when studying in school. And while she does not rely on her sexuality, she’s not ignorant to the fact that her looks can be an asset--while Nina has no plans to actually become a prostitute, she uses her looks to help her get to The Baby. She is also incredibly determined. While her life was already shattered with the murders of her parents and the revelation that her past is not what she thought it was, Nina consciously chooses to walk away from what’s left of her life in order to reach Johan and keeps going, despite the many dangers she encounters in doing so. (And it’s not just danger--though there are periods where she’s staying or traveling with adults allies or the child Dieter, she spends long periods of time by herself, making loneliness an issue as well.) She also has a strong sense of responsibility. For much of the series, Nina sees stopping Johan as her responsibility, as well as something she can do to keep Tenma from corrupting himself by sacrificing his lifesaving ideals.
Still, when it comes to dealing with other people, Nina has a great deal of compassion. Similar to Tenma, though she is always driven by the goal of finding Johan, she is able to make friends and connect emotionally with people along her journey. She doesn’t ignore or think less of people with problems even if they’re not as severe as having a serial killer twin brother. She looks out for other people when she can, from leaving Tenma a note when they first separate assuring him that Johan’s murders are not his fault to befriending a captive prostitute she’s only spoken to through pipes, Nina genuinely cares for people. She is even able to spare the life of one of the men who murdered her parents when she recognizes his love for his own family. Amazingly, at the end of the series she’s even able to forgive (though not excuse) Johan for all the misery he’s inflicted.
Still, though Nina falls firmly into the camp of “good person”, she hasn't come away from her violent past unscathed, even if she can't remember much of it at the beginning of her journey. She is haunted by her memories of the past as she recovers them, and is so shaken by seeing Johan and having her memories of the Red Rose Mansion uncovered that she nearly kills herself. A more violent side emerges at one point when she is hypnotized in an attempt to fully recover her memories, and while hypnotized she attacks the mean trying to get to those memories.
By the end of the series, while she’ll forever be affected by what has happened to her it seems that Nina has bounced back from her experiences as much as a person can: she’s graduating, her thesis is declared to be the best her professor has seen, and she has plans to be a great lawyer. One subtle shift in her is the hint that she may become a defense attorney instead of a prosecutor, like she planned at the beginning of the series; her professor predicts that she will save many people. Instead of bringing people to justice like she and others planned for Johan, she would be able to help people, like Tenma.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: N/A
Character Plans: If Johan shows up, that would be a huge focus for Nina, but just for herself, I’d like to send her to school and deal with developing a semi-normal life (relatively speaking) after a long time chasing after him. She’d also want to get involved with helping out other newcomers, especially children.
Appearance/PB: Image here. Nina is a young, slender woman made physically fit and strong by the practice of aikido.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The video feed clicks on to show a young blonde woman sitting in what is clearly one of the newcomer apartments, currently empty of any personal possessions or furnishings. She’s pale and her expression looks a little troubled, but she is composed.]
They explained this world to me and gave me some things tppqo read, and said I could stay here. It was very kind of them. And this cellular phone-they’re really free to everyone who comes here? It’s very advanced. It took me a while to learn how to use it, but I think I understand now.
[Her gaze bobs down for a moment as she looks at the NV itself, and a faint look of skepticism flashes across her face. It’s just so small.]
My name is Nina. I don’t understand how they got here. They also told me that’s normal, that no one does, but I don’t think that’s a good thing. People shouldn’t be kidnapped this way.
Some of the other things they said...they didn’t sound like they could be true. But if all the other things are, I suppose they must be. There are really monsters here at night, like something out of a storybook? I never used to believe in monsters.
Oh-one more thing. If new people come here all the time, has anyone seen a young blond man arrive recently? He looks...a lot like me.
Thank you.
Third Person Sample
Nina leaned against the thick window of her apartment, forehead pressed against the glass. It wasn’t necessary for her to be so close-run down though the apartment building was, the glass and the weather were both clear. Yet she remained where she was. She wanted to see, to know for herself what happened when the evening siren rang out and evening turned to night. Was it really like they said?
Monsters. A deep, deep darkness that brought out everything scary and forced people to fight them or hide behind the best barricades they could make.
It would be the latter for her. With a sigh, she pushed away from the window and began to pace around the room. She could handle herself in a hand to hand fight, and she’d put enough time into handling guns to feel comfortable with that, too, but if these creatures were everything the others had said, neither aikido nor a pistol would be useful against them.
One, two, three, four. She counted her steps as she walked in a wide circle, feeling oddly trapped even though she wasn’t confined only to this room. There was the rest of the little apartment, and then the rest of the building, but she still felt illogically claustrophobic. She wondered if that feeling would still be there in the daytime, when she could safely leave this building but go no farther than the water’s edge.
Nina had never expected her pursuit of her brother to take her as far or as long as it had. Travel was nice, but she had been content in her home, back when she still had one. Life had been good before the past she hadn’t remembered came calling for her, bringing with it monsters that weren’t so easy to identify just by looking. Yet somehow she’d gotten used to it--or maybe it was the knowledge that Johan was still out there somewhere, even if that somewhere wasn’t in this world, and she just wouldn’t be able to feel settled again until things were finished.
The eerie noise of the siren began to rise through the air and she hurried back over to the window, once again pressing her nose to the glass as she watched for the first sign of a monster. There were things to do, she reminded herself as she waited. She was already learning about the city, and she still needed a job to support herself. while she was here. And she needed to buy a gun, because even if bullets didn’t work against monsters, they worked against other things.
She’d make it through this. She’d find a way out, go home, find Johan again. And then...she’d have to figure that out when she got there. But the important thing was that she live to do so/