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damned_institute
Apr. 26th, 2012 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mirrorimageSeries: Monster
Series' Medium: Anime. There's a manga too, which I haven't read.
Character: Nina Fortner. She’s also been called “Anna Liebert” at times.
Age: 21
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Major character, sided with the protagonist.
"Real" Name: Klara Krejci
[Some personal information-related questions cut out.]
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon: The circumstances surrounding Nina's birth were unusual, to say the least. No just unusual; in fact, they were downright bizarre. In the 1970s, when Czechoslovakia was under communist control, her parents were selected from among the top young people in the country to give birth to a child that would beget the next race of "superior" Aryan people. The man was in on it. The woman was not. A meeting between them was arranged without the woman's knowledge. Soon, the woman became pregnant. Everything did not go as planned. The man genuinely fell in love with the woman, and confessed to her the truth behind everything that had happened. The woman was horrified, and the two decided to run away together. They were stopped and forcibly taken captive by the people in charge of the experiment. What became of the man was never known, although it's likely that he was killed.
The woman was forced to give birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She wasn't allowed to name them, although she wanted to. The girl child would be called Nina Fortner, many years later.
Nina, her twin brother, and their mother lived in a room in an inn called "The Three Frogs" for several years. Eventually, men from the government experiment responsible for the twins’ birth came to take one of the children away, and demanded that their mother give one up. Both children were terrified and clung to their mother. Their mother didn’t want to give up either child and hesitated, offering first one child before flinging the other toward them. Both children were dressed identically; the boy wore girls’ clothes so that he would be indistinguishable from his sister.
It was the girl she gave up.
When she was taken to the Red Rose mansion, the nameless child was kept in complete darkness for many days and nights, able to keep track of time only by counting the meals she was given. One day, she was taken out of her confinement and brought before a crowd of people who cooed over her, only to begin to drop dead in front of her, much to the little girl’s fear and horror. The man in charge of the experiment, Franz Bonaparta, had had a change of conscience and murdered all his colleagues, the only people other than himself and the family (Nina, her brother, and her mother) who knew about the experiment, as a way to end it. He told the girl to run and said that she should forget everything that happened there, words she took to heart. The girl ran from the Red Rose mansion so quickly that she barely noticed she cut herself on the rose bushes outside, and she didn’t stop running until she had made it back to the Three Frogs. Once there, she told her brother everything that had happened to her, at his prompting. He took his sister’s memories as his own.
Soon after, a fire started in the Three Frogs. The twins were forced to flee on their own without their mother. They ran away together, only to be taken in by a kindly older couple with no children. But the poor old couple died violently under mysterious circumstances, and the seemingly unfortunate twins were left all alone once again. The two were found wandering at the border between Czechoslovakia and East Germany, nearly dead. They were lucky to be rescued by a general named Wolf.
Not only did he rescue them, but he gave them the names they had lacked until that point. The girl became “Anna”. The boy was “Johan”, which was a remarkable coincidence given that the boy had read many nihilistic storybooks while waiting for his sister, one of which, The Nameless Monster, prominently featured a character named Johan.
Soon after being rescued by General Wolf, "Johan" was sent to 511 Kinderheim, an orphanage intended to produce super soldiers via methods of intense psychological experimentation and conditioning. "Anna", however, was sent to an orphanage run by a stern but kind woman. Many of the people at the orphanage thought Anna was a sweet child, and the woman in charge would speak fondly of her many years later.
When the twins were ten, they were adopted by an East German couple, the Lieberts. At first, the couple only wanted Johan, but he refused to go without his sister, so they took in both twins. Mr. Liebert was a diplomat who had spoken out against the regime of East Germany, and as a result, got into political trouble with the government. The Lieberts sought asylum in West Germany, moving to the town of Dusseldorf. The night after the family arrived in Dusseldorf, tragedy struck.
Tragedy seemed to follow the twins everywhere, and until that night, Anna never knew why. But when she woke up to witness her brother murdering the Lieberts, the horrible truth hit her: Johan must have killed the first old couple that took them in, too. The reason tragedy and death followed them everywhere was partly because of their origin, but it was also because of Johan himself.
Horrified to realize what kind of monster her brother really was, and egged on by Johan himself who encouraged her to kill him and told her how to get rid of the weapon, Anna shot her brother and then threw the gun away, just like he had told her to. When the police arrived, the Lieberts were dead and Johan was critically wounded. Anna was unhurt but so traumatized that she could not speak, which meant that she was unable to tell anyone what had really happened, and the murders were assumed to be the result of a botched robbery, or perhaps political in nature.
Johan was rushed to Eisler Memorial Hospital, where he arrived minutes before a much wealthier, more prestigious patient. Dr. Kenzo Tenma, the hospital’s best neurosurgeon, was preparing to operate on Johan when he was ordered to attend to the other patient instead. However, Tenma refused out of the belief that all lives are equal. As a result, Johan was saved, the wealthier patient died under the care of less competent surgeons, and Tenma was demoted for going against his superiors’ orders.
Anna stayed at the hospital, as she had nowhere else to go. Traumatized, she wandered the halls in a fugue state, murmuring to herself. Whenever she saw her brother, she would run away from him screaming, but was still unable to tell anyone why she was so scared. Somehow, though, Johan convinced her to leave the hospital with him, and the twins escaped from the people who were supposed to be caring for them. In order to get away, Johan murdered several of the hospital’s higher-ups, all people that Tenma had motive to want dead due to his demotion. That meant Tenma was blamed for Johan’s crimes.
The twins, meanwhile, wandered for some time before eventually arriving at the home of another middle-aged, childless couple, the Fortners of Heidelberg. Johan soon disappeared again, leaving Anna, now called “Nina” by her new adoptive partners, in the Fortners’ care, but promising to return for her on her 20th birthday.
Nina recovered by repressing her traumatic memories, forgetting her twin brother and her early childhood. She lived with the Fortners happily for many years. But eventually her 20th birthday did come, and Johan came with it. It started out small, with cryptic emails that Nina believed came from a “secret admirer”, and a glimpse of Johan outside her school that caused Nina to faint. But it quickly escalated to something much more horrific.
Fortunately for Nina, Johan wasn’t the only person from her past to re-enter her life on her 20th birthday. Dr. Tenma, having since found out what kind of person Johan really was, was on the young man’s trail, determined to end the killing and clear his own name. On the night of her birthday, Nina was lured to Heidelberg Castle by Johan, where he intended to meet her. But Tenma, who knew about Johan’s promise to return for his sister, arrived before Johan did and took Nina from Heidelberg Castle with him.
Upon returning to the Fortners’ home, the two found Nina’s parents had been slain, along with a journalist Tenma had recruited to help. Upon seeing the grisly crime, Nina was horrified and traumatized not only by the deaths of the Fortners, but by the memories that were brought back by seeing their bodies. For the first time in years, Nina began to recall the details of the night the Lieberts were killed. She even remembered shooting Johan.
They were soon interrupted by two corrupt police officers, the very people Johan had recruited to kill Nina’s parents. The two men pretended to have no prior knowledge of what had happened and offered to take Tenma and Nina, who was catatonic from trauma, to the police station. However, when one of them accidentally revealed that he knew who Tenma was, Tenma realized they weren’t trustworthy, and he managed to escape with Nina to safety.
The next time Nina appears in the narrative, it’s been a year since the murder of the Fortners. Nina has hunted down one of the men who murdered her parents, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t tell her where she could find Johan. Terrified of her, the man tells her that she should go to a man called The Baby, a criminal who heads a right-wing, racist organization.
Posing as a prostitute, Nina repeatedly visits The Baby’s bar until she’s allowed to see him. However, instead of being lead to her brother, Nina finds out that The Baby and his cohorts don’t know where Johan is either and are simply using her as bait. The Baby wants Johan to lead his organization as “the next Hitler” although Nina tells him that such a thing would never happen, as Johan looks down on all of humanity. Despite that, Nina agrees to stay with them, in order to get the chance to see Johan.
While there, Nina befriends a young Turkish mother that The Baby’s thugs had taken hostage, and finds out The Baby’s gang is planning to burn down the Turkish district of the town they are in. Horrified, Nina breaks out of her confinement, determined to help save her new friend and stop the town from being destroyed. She is too late to save the Turkish woman, who is murdered by The Baby’s men. The Baby’s men are themselves murdered by Johan, though he disappears before he and Nina get to see each other.
This is also where Nina’s path intersects with Tenma’s again. Tenma too was taken hostage by The Baby in his search for Johan, although he is freed from his own confinement by General Wolf, the same man who saved the twins’ lives years earlier. Tenma likewise finds out about the plot to burn down the Turkish quarter, and with help from Nina and a young boy named Dieter who has been accompanying him, the potentially disastrous fire is averted.
Nina also sees a message from Johan while escaping The Baby's hideout. The message says the monster inside of him is getting bigger, and Nina thinks this means Johan has a split personality.
After questioning by police in the aftermath of successfully averting the destruction of the Turkish district, Nina is picked up from the police station by Mr. Rosso, a restaurant owner she used to work for in the year between her escape from Heidelberg and her encounter with The Baby. The good-natured man was once a ruthless assassin, and at first, Nina took the job in his restaurant because she hoped he could teach her to shoot. Ultimately, though, decided she couldn’t ask that of him, as it would be unfair to involve him in the business with Johan, and simply worked for him as a waitress instead. The two ultimately became close, though, and he did find out why she went to work for him at first.
After taking her out to eat, he sees Nina off at the train station and gives her some advice about killing, which Nina tries to take to heart but finds depressing.
The next time we see Nina is in Nice, France. She has been stalking the other of the two corrupt cops who killed her parents. Nina wanted revenge against the man for the murder of the Fortners, as well as information about Johan he had in his position, due to Roberto (one of Johan’s lackeys) posing as the man’s bodyguard. Unlike his partner, who became a pathetic drug addict and ended up dead, likely killed by Johan or an associate, the man had made out quite well for himself, living happily in a large house with his wife and the woman’s previous child from another marriage.
Nina gets the man had at her mercy but when he cries, realizing he will never see his family again if she kills him, Nina is unable to go through with killing him despite her rage at him. Later, Nina is kidnapped by Roberto, who lured her to him with the promising of seeing Johan. It was just a trap, though, and Roberto intended to kill Nina all along. Unable to kill someone who looks so much like Johan, Roberto leaves the task to several criminals in either his or (more likely) Johan’s employ. But Nina is not killed because the former police officer, whose life she spared earlier, comes to her rescue. He is shot while saving her and Nina, despite still hating him for what he did to her parents, attempts to save his life or at least get him back to his house in time to see his wife and stepson one last time before he dies. She is unsuccessful, though, and the man dies in the car en route to his home.
Nina’s pursuit of Johan next leads her back to Germany, this time to Munich. Although she doesn’t initially know it, Johan is in fact staying in Munich, attending the university while working as the secretary of a once-ruthless businessman named Schuwald, who he intends to eventually murder. While looking for Johan in Munich, Nina befriends Lotte Frank, a student at the same university as Johan who also knows Johan. When Johan passes out after seeing The Nameless Monster picture book, Lotte brings the book to Nina, who also has a strong reaction to the book, albeit not as extreme as Johan’s. That’s when Nina realizes that Johan is in fact in Munich, and finds out what he’s going to do. Instead of killing Schuwald, Johan has decided to start an enormous fire in an important library where Schuwald is going to speak.
Nina meets Dieter once again and runs into another of Tenma’s allies, Dr. Julius Reichwein. Tenma was in Munich, too, having camped out in the library the night before after also figuring out Johan’s plan. Nina breaks into the library while it’s on fire, and even finds her brother in the flames. The smoke and haze prevent her from getting a clear shot when she tries to kill him, though, and Johan escapes, leaving Nina behind in the burning library. Nevertheless, she escapes alive. Nina credits Tenma for this, but Lotte later tells her that Nina walked out of the library on her own, despite her injuries.
Nina was hospitalized for some time before going to stay with Reichwein. Though she was grateful to him for letting her stay with him, Nina didn’t stay there long. She soon departed to search for Johan again, this time taking Dieter with her, initially against her better judgment.
Soon Nina and Dieter found themselves in Prague, a place Nina had vague memories of, although she didn’t know she was born there. To Nina’s fear and surprise, many people seemed to know her, although they addressed her as “Anna” and not “Nina”. Johan was in Prague too, and he had been crossdressing, posing as “Anna”. This causes Nina a lot of mental distress, as she is already uncertain of her memories.
Eventually she and Dieter find Three Frogs. Nina goes back to the Three Frogs repeatedly despite the distress it causes her, because it triggers her memories and she wants to get them back. While trying to force herself to remember something in the Three Frogs, Nina is overcome by the fear her memories cause in her and she faints. She is rescued by a puppeteer named Mr. Lipsky, who takes her to his home so she can recover. While there, Nina is shown a picture book by Klaus Poppe, another pen name for the same author who wrote the book that caused Johan to faint in the library. Lipsky seems to have some link to the book’s author, although at the time, it isn’t precisely clear what. Nina and Dieter also visit the Red Rose Mansion with Lipsky, as Nina continues to try to get back her memories. The Red Rose Mansion is soon burnt to the ground, though, and unbeknownst to Nina and the others, the culprit was Johan himself.
After a discussion with Dieter about bad memories, and a fun time spent with Dieter and Lipsky “making happy memories” instead of trying to remember bad ones, Nina eventually returns to Dr. Reichwein’s home in Munich. There, she tries another method to recover her memories, by getting Dr. Rudy Gillian, a criminal psychologist and friend of Tenma’s, to hypnotize her so that she can fully recover her lost memories. This allows Nina to remember most of what had happened to her. She also says that she knows what Tenma (who had been arrested but escaped from police custody) is going to do, and that she could save him by doing it herself.
While she’s hunting for Johan, Nina’s home is invaded by two men employed by Peter Capek, a corrupt Czech government official and one of the few surviving people to be involved with the experiment conducted at the Red Rose Mansion. Capek believes Johan will kill him, and thinks that by taking Nina hostage, he may be able to prevent that. When Nina hears this, she agrees to go with Capek's men, thinking she may finally get to confront her brother.
When she arrives at Capek’s home, though, she finds that Johan has come and gone, and Capek is simply murmuring to himself about how “the sister” -- Nina -- will kill him. Nina, clearly traumatized and horrified, points a gun at Capek’s head but does not shoot. Despite the rage and hate she feels for his involvement in the experiment that created her and her brother, Nina does not kill him. Instead she makes him drive her out to an abandoned building. On the way, he tells her the full truth about her origin, and Nina finds out everything about her past, except her parents’ names, which Capek tells her are “not important”.
When she arrives at her destination, Nina finally gets to see Johan face-to-face. She plans to kill him and then herself. Johan talks to her about the things that happened at the Red Rose Mansion, revealing that he believes them to have happened to him. Nina tells him otherwise, saying that the child who was taken to the Red Rose Mansion was her, and the memories of being in darkness and seeing people die are hers. Nina has a mental breakdown, and is unable to shoot Johan. She is about to kill herself when Tenma finds her huddled on the ground with a gun to her head, telling her that there will be nothing left for him if she is dead. As Tenma comforts Nina, the increasingly erratic and paranoid Capek is killed by his own men.
Nina again winds up back at Reichwein’s home, although again she doesn’t stay there long. Soon she gets emails from Johan, and seems to know exactly what they mean. Agreeing not to carry a gun and to let Gillian accompany her, Nina heads to a small German town, Ruhenheim, where Tenma also is, and where Johan plans to set up a massacre before getting Tenma to shoot him. Nina, with Gillian in tow, spends some time wandering around Ruhenheim, going to the home of Franz Bonaparta himself. She enters another fugue state, speaking for both herself and Johan. Bonaparta, it turns out, is also Klaus Poppe and many other pennames. The man in charge of the government experiment responsible for Nina’s birth is the author of the picture books she and Johan had had such extreme reactions to.
Nina remembers the last thing Bonaparta said to her before urging to leave the Red Rose Mansion: that people can become anything they want to be, and that that’s why Nina and Johan must never become monsters. Nina begins to run through Ruhenheim, searching for Bonaparta.
Nina comes up her brother, Tenma, and a few others. Bonaparta has already been killed, shot by Roberto, who is himself dying as the result of wounds inflicted by Inspector Lunge of the BKA, who had been pursuing first Tenma and then Johan. Johan is threatening a small child named Wim in order to get Tenma to kill him.
Nina tells Johan that she forgives him, and that this is the last thing she can do for him. But Johan refuses to yield, insisting Tenma must shoot him.
Tenma doesn’t. Wim’s father, a drunk who hallucinates that Johan is a monster attacking his son, shoots Johan instead. Tenma and Nina try to comfort each other in the aftermath, and Nina tells Tenma that he did the right thing by refusing to shoot Johan.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's and why?: I'm taking her from Ruhenheim, right after Johan is shot by Wim's father, while she's sitting huddled with Tenma in the rain.
I feel like this is an ideal canon point to take her from for a game like Damned, because most of her trauma has effectively dealt with to the extent that such things can ever be, so it won’t be impairing her during the game. However, at the same time, she also hasn't completely returned to the rhythm of normal, civilized life, so it would make for the easiest adjustment to Landel's.
It also means that she'll know and recognize everyone she knew in canon, so there won't be any confusion on her end if one of her canonmates should arrive and claim to know her.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality: When we first meet Nina as an adult, she is a cheerful and happy girl. She is hard-working and determined but often spreads herself too thin, taking on multiple responsibilities without regard for whether she can actually handle them all at once. This tendency causes Nina to regularly be late for almost everything with an alarming frequency. She’s 13 minutes late to class, rushing to aikido lessons, behind on her pizza deliveries for her job.
Nina is able to somewhat get away with what otherwise would be an annoying habit by being charming and, more importantly, smart: she can spit out cases, laws, definitions and dates on demand when asked by her teacher, even when the rest of the class doesn't know. Despite being upset by her lack of childhood memories, Nina seems pretty normal and upbeat at first glance, laughing and joking with her adoptive parents and friends, and it's not hard to imagine she probably could have grown up quite normal in many ways had the circumstances of her birth and early years been different. In fact, even after Nina takes off on her journey to kill Johan, many people remark that Nina is pleasant and friendly. She presents a kind, easy-going exterior to the world and it's suggested that, had Nina been able to live a normal life, that is exactly the sort of person she would be through and through.
Nina wasn't really allowed to be normal, though, from the strange nature of her birth to the journey pursuing Johan that comprises the bulk of the series. It becomes more apparent as the series wears on that Nina is suffering from severe trauma in many respects and although she is tough and determined in many ways, she is very psychologically fragile in others, especially when certain memories are triggered and she is forced to relive the events of her past. If pushed into a certain frame of mind, Nina will forget her surroundings and be transported back to the day of the fire in the Three Frogs, even insisting that she is not "Nina" but "Anna". When reminded of things from her past, even if she doesn't go into a full-on catatonic state, Nina will frequently start to "shut down" emotionally and mentally, becoming fixated on her lost memories and her past.
Because both the memories themselves as well as the gaps caused by her lack of them are overwhelming, Nina isn't able to fully cope with them and may pass out. While she does gain more memories and ultimately comes to terms with herself over the course of the series, the traumas of her past and the amnesia it causes are sources of intense struggle and anguish for Nina, ultimately nearly leading her to suicide.
Nina seems to be quite resilient many other ways, however. She is rarely afraid of others, even when dealing with people much stronger or more powerful than she is. She is able to look dangerous people like mobsters and racists in the face and tell them plainly what she thinks. When not impaired due to trauma over her memories, Nina rarely hesitates, acting and thinking on her feet quite easily. She can also be very stubborn. When Nina has decided on a course of action, she will see it through to the end no matter what, as long as her own psychological demons don't overcome her resolve first.
Nina rarely uses unnecessary violence, despite her stated mission to kill Johan, and she clearly grapples with the reality of actually killing a person. Still, she is willing to use violence when necessary, such as when she uses her aikido skills to defend Lotte Frank from a man insisting that Lotte dance with him, and is willing to threaten people with harm or even death if she believes she has a good reason to. One the villains of the series, after Nina pulls a gun on him, says he believes she probably would have shot him if he didn't tell her what she wanted to hear.
One example of Nina's tendency toward moral ambiguity is her attempt to get revenge for the deaths of her foster parents, the Fortners, whom she still regards as her parents. One of the men who killed them died of a drug overdose; however, the other was living happily with his new wife and stepson. Nina watches him secretly from the abandoned house across from his, intending to eventually kill him to avenge her foster parents. She very nearly does, pulling a gun on him and threatening him with death.
Ultimately, Nina chooses not to kill him, partly because of his young stepson and partly because Nina deep down struggles with the idea of killing someone. She even ends up trying to save him when he is fatally shot, although it doesn't work. This shows both that, at heart, Nina is a good person, while making it clear that she has a darker side as well, such as going so far to stalk someone and plot revenge against someone who, although he behaved loathsomely in the past, was no longer an active threat to anyone. Also, even if her grief for her loss is an understandable motive, it still marks a clear moment when Nina did something wrong purely for personal reasons.
Nina is also able to lie easily and ably, although she typically only does so when she believes it's necessary. She usually goes by "Nina Fortner" but sometimes uses her former name, "Anna Liebert", when she doesn't want anyone to connect her identity to the Fortner murder case. She is willing to pose as someone or something she is not, such as pretending to be a prostitute in order to get information or infiltrate seedy gangs, and if she feels it is necessary, will also lie to someone to protect them. As with violence, Nina doesn't usually lie if she can avoid it, and sometimes will simply not say anything or avoid giving information atall rather than lie to someone; however, if pressed, Nina is willing and able to lie if she has to. This is both a comparison to Johan and a contrast: Whereas Johan is deceitful much of the time, Nina only does it when she needs to. However, both twins are willing to lie for their own reasons.
On the upside, Nina can be quite protective of others. This extends both to physically protecting others from harm or defending them from physical harm by intervening in a crisis herself if need be, as well as morally, psychologically, and legally protecting people from the consequences of their own actions, such as her attempt to stop Tenma from becoming a murderer by trying to kill Johan before he can.
She also seems to have a lot of compassion for people who are in bad situations or who can't stick up for or defend themselves, and will do whatever she can to protect or look out for such people. One example of this would be when Nina is lured into the home of a racist mobster with the promise of finding Johan (only for Nina herself to be used as bait for Johan). Nina discovers that a Turkish woman is being held there and tortured, and that the woman's neighborhood is going to be set on fire. Nina declares the woman her "friend" and vows to help avert the fire any way she can.
Initially, Nina seems to feel that the only way anything can be made right is if Johan is dead -- she even tries and fails to shoot him prior to her own suicide attempt -- but the end of the series she changes her mind about the necessity to kill Johan, becoming upset when it seems Johan might die, and telling that Tenma his decision to save Johan was the right one. In fact, this is significant not just because it presents a shift in the way Nina thinks about Johan, but a shift in morality: although she struggled with the idea of taking a life throughout the series, it was implied she would be willing to kill someone if she ultimately had to. This is when the belief that killing is always wrong is cemented both in Nina and, arguably, in the series of "Monster" itself.
At the end of the series Nina is seen happy and continuing with her education in the law, on her way to becoming a lawyer. This is significant because it suggests Nina was not broken by her experiences in the end and retains the ability to pick herself up and do something good with her life.
Please give us a physical description of your character: Nina is a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and dark blonde hair that falls to just barely past her shoulder blades. Other characters who are inclined to comment on such things say that she's a very pretty girl.
She seems to have a sense of personal style that tends to be both trendy and practical at the same time, seeming equally at home wearing a plain shirt and jeans or a cute skirt and top. Her body is somewhere between thin and average; she has noticeable curves, but is likely toned and athletic from years of aikido.
No official height for her has ever been given, but I'd estimate her to be close to 5'6" or 5'7" based on comparing her height to the other characters'.
You can see a picture here.
What kinds of otherworldly abilities does your character have, if any?: None.
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: N/A.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?: Yes. Nina has a few notable non-supernatural skills, which I will address point by point here.
* Intelligence. Nina is a very intelligent girl. I'm not comfortable asserting that she has a genius IQ (although her mother apparently did), but she is certainly above average. Her memory is especially impressive. She is able to quickly and easily recall many different details such as facts, names, dates, and case verdicts, or anything else she might need to remember. This holds true in both relatively low-pressure situations, like being able to spit out answers to questions in school on demand when her law professor wants them, as well as much higher pressure situations, such as being able to remember intricate details of Johan's crimes or crimes she suspects he was ultimately behind.
* Skill with guns. Nina is very comfortable handling a gun, able to take one apart and put it together as well as clean it and take care of it. She is also a skilled marksman, and she explicitly mentions how she never misses a day of practice, showing her dedication to being able to handle the weapon.
* Good physical condition. Nina is a very athletic person and appears to be in good shape. She runs quickly, is dextrous and agile, and is able to scale buildings, jump down from high places, and in general do a lot of vigorous physical activity without getting winded or hurt. This is because of years she's spent doing athletic activities, especially martial arts.
* Quick learner. While this somewhat goes along with being intelligent, I felt it deserves its own section. Nina seems to easily and quickly pick most things she attempts. This is doubtless in part because of her supreme dedication to things that she feels are necessary, but I think she also simply has some degree of natural aptitude for picking up new skills.
* Black belt in aikido. While it's never explicitly said how long Nina has been training in aikido, she is very good at it and even able to overwhelm stronger and bigger opponents with it if she catches them off-guard.
Series' Medium: Anime. There's a manga too, which I haven't read.
Character: Nina Fortner. She’s also been called “Anna Liebert” at times.
Age: 21
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Major character, sided with the protagonist.
"Real" Name: Klara Krejci
[Some personal information-related questions cut out.]
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon: The circumstances surrounding Nina's birth were unusual, to say the least. No just unusual; in fact, they were downright bizarre. In the 1970s, when Czechoslovakia was under communist control, her parents were selected from among the top young people in the country to give birth to a child that would beget the next race of "superior" Aryan people. The man was in on it. The woman was not. A meeting between them was arranged without the woman's knowledge. Soon, the woman became pregnant. Everything did not go as planned. The man genuinely fell in love with the woman, and confessed to her the truth behind everything that had happened. The woman was horrified, and the two decided to run away together. They were stopped and forcibly taken captive by the people in charge of the experiment. What became of the man was never known, although it's likely that he was killed.
The woman was forced to give birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She wasn't allowed to name them, although she wanted to. The girl child would be called Nina Fortner, many years later.
Nina, her twin brother, and their mother lived in a room in an inn called "The Three Frogs" for several years. Eventually, men from the government experiment responsible for the twins’ birth came to take one of the children away, and demanded that their mother give one up. Both children were terrified and clung to their mother. Their mother didn’t want to give up either child and hesitated, offering first one child before flinging the other toward them. Both children were dressed identically; the boy wore girls’ clothes so that he would be indistinguishable from his sister.
It was the girl she gave up.
When she was taken to the Red Rose mansion, the nameless child was kept in complete darkness for many days and nights, able to keep track of time only by counting the meals she was given. One day, she was taken out of her confinement and brought before a crowd of people who cooed over her, only to begin to drop dead in front of her, much to the little girl’s fear and horror. The man in charge of the experiment, Franz Bonaparta, had had a change of conscience and murdered all his colleagues, the only people other than himself and the family (Nina, her brother, and her mother) who knew about the experiment, as a way to end it. He told the girl to run and said that she should forget everything that happened there, words she took to heart. The girl ran from the Red Rose mansion so quickly that she barely noticed she cut herself on the rose bushes outside, and she didn’t stop running until she had made it back to the Three Frogs. Once there, she told her brother everything that had happened to her, at his prompting. He took his sister’s memories as his own.
Soon after, a fire started in the Three Frogs. The twins were forced to flee on their own without their mother. They ran away together, only to be taken in by a kindly older couple with no children. But the poor old couple died violently under mysterious circumstances, and the seemingly unfortunate twins were left all alone once again. The two were found wandering at the border between Czechoslovakia and East Germany, nearly dead. They were lucky to be rescued by a general named Wolf.
Not only did he rescue them, but he gave them the names they had lacked until that point. The girl became “Anna”. The boy was “Johan”, which was a remarkable coincidence given that the boy had read many nihilistic storybooks while waiting for his sister, one of which, The Nameless Monster, prominently featured a character named Johan.
Soon after being rescued by General Wolf, "Johan" was sent to 511 Kinderheim, an orphanage intended to produce super soldiers via methods of intense psychological experimentation and conditioning. "Anna", however, was sent to an orphanage run by a stern but kind woman. Many of the people at the orphanage thought Anna was a sweet child, and the woman in charge would speak fondly of her many years later.
When the twins were ten, they were adopted by an East German couple, the Lieberts. At first, the couple only wanted Johan, but he refused to go without his sister, so they took in both twins. Mr. Liebert was a diplomat who had spoken out against the regime of East Germany, and as a result, got into political trouble with the government. The Lieberts sought asylum in West Germany, moving to the town of Dusseldorf. The night after the family arrived in Dusseldorf, tragedy struck.
Tragedy seemed to follow the twins everywhere, and until that night, Anna never knew why. But when she woke up to witness her brother murdering the Lieberts, the horrible truth hit her: Johan must have killed the first old couple that took them in, too. The reason tragedy and death followed them everywhere was partly because of their origin, but it was also because of Johan himself.
Horrified to realize what kind of monster her brother really was, and egged on by Johan himself who encouraged her to kill him and told her how to get rid of the weapon, Anna shot her brother and then threw the gun away, just like he had told her to. When the police arrived, the Lieberts were dead and Johan was critically wounded. Anna was unhurt but so traumatized that she could not speak, which meant that she was unable to tell anyone what had really happened, and the murders were assumed to be the result of a botched robbery, or perhaps political in nature.
Johan was rushed to Eisler Memorial Hospital, where he arrived minutes before a much wealthier, more prestigious patient. Dr. Kenzo Tenma, the hospital’s best neurosurgeon, was preparing to operate on Johan when he was ordered to attend to the other patient instead. However, Tenma refused out of the belief that all lives are equal. As a result, Johan was saved, the wealthier patient died under the care of less competent surgeons, and Tenma was demoted for going against his superiors’ orders.
Anna stayed at the hospital, as she had nowhere else to go. Traumatized, she wandered the halls in a fugue state, murmuring to herself. Whenever she saw her brother, she would run away from him screaming, but was still unable to tell anyone why she was so scared. Somehow, though, Johan convinced her to leave the hospital with him, and the twins escaped from the people who were supposed to be caring for them. In order to get away, Johan murdered several of the hospital’s higher-ups, all people that Tenma had motive to want dead due to his demotion. That meant Tenma was blamed for Johan’s crimes.
The twins, meanwhile, wandered for some time before eventually arriving at the home of another middle-aged, childless couple, the Fortners of Heidelberg. Johan soon disappeared again, leaving Anna, now called “Nina” by her new adoptive partners, in the Fortners’ care, but promising to return for her on her 20th birthday.
Nina recovered by repressing her traumatic memories, forgetting her twin brother and her early childhood. She lived with the Fortners happily for many years. But eventually her 20th birthday did come, and Johan came with it. It started out small, with cryptic emails that Nina believed came from a “secret admirer”, and a glimpse of Johan outside her school that caused Nina to faint. But it quickly escalated to something much more horrific.
Fortunately for Nina, Johan wasn’t the only person from her past to re-enter her life on her 20th birthday. Dr. Tenma, having since found out what kind of person Johan really was, was on the young man’s trail, determined to end the killing and clear his own name. On the night of her birthday, Nina was lured to Heidelberg Castle by Johan, where he intended to meet her. But Tenma, who knew about Johan’s promise to return for his sister, arrived before Johan did and took Nina from Heidelberg Castle with him.
Upon returning to the Fortners’ home, the two found Nina’s parents had been slain, along with a journalist Tenma had recruited to help. Upon seeing the grisly crime, Nina was horrified and traumatized not only by the deaths of the Fortners, but by the memories that were brought back by seeing their bodies. For the first time in years, Nina began to recall the details of the night the Lieberts were killed. She even remembered shooting Johan.
They were soon interrupted by two corrupt police officers, the very people Johan had recruited to kill Nina’s parents. The two men pretended to have no prior knowledge of what had happened and offered to take Tenma and Nina, who was catatonic from trauma, to the police station. However, when one of them accidentally revealed that he knew who Tenma was, Tenma realized they weren’t trustworthy, and he managed to escape with Nina to safety.
The next time Nina appears in the narrative, it’s been a year since the murder of the Fortners. Nina has hunted down one of the men who murdered her parents, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t tell her where she could find Johan. Terrified of her, the man tells her that she should go to a man called The Baby, a criminal who heads a right-wing, racist organization.
Posing as a prostitute, Nina repeatedly visits The Baby’s bar until she’s allowed to see him. However, instead of being lead to her brother, Nina finds out that The Baby and his cohorts don’t know where Johan is either and are simply using her as bait. The Baby wants Johan to lead his organization as “the next Hitler” although Nina tells him that such a thing would never happen, as Johan looks down on all of humanity. Despite that, Nina agrees to stay with them, in order to get the chance to see Johan.
While there, Nina befriends a young Turkish mother that The Baby’s thugs had taken hostage, and finds out The Baby’s gang is planning to burn down the Turkish district of the town they are in. Horrified, Nina breaks out of her confinement, determined to help save her new friend and stop the town from being destroyed. She is too late to save the Turkish woman, who is murdered by The Baby’s men. The Baby’s men are themselves murdered by Johan, though he disappears before he and Nina get to see each other.
This is also where Nina’s path intersects with Tenma’s again. Tenma too was taken hostage by The Baby in his search for Johan, although he is freed from his own confinement by General Wolf, the same man who saved the twins’ lives years earlier. Tenma likewise finds out about the plot to burn down the Turkish quarter, and with help from Nina and a young boy named Dieter who has been accompanying him, the potentially disastrous fire is averted.
Nina also sees a message from Johan while escaping The Baby's hideout. The message says the monster inside of him is getting bigger, and Nina thinks this means Johan has a split personality.
After questioning by police in the aftermath of successfully averting the destruction of the Turkish district, Nina is picked up from the police station by Mr. Rosso, a restaurant owner she used to work for in the year between her escape from Heidelberg and her encounter with The Baby. The good-natured man was once a ruthless assassin, and at first, Nina took the job in his restaurant because she hoped he could teach her to shoot. Ultimately, though, decided she couldn’t ask that of him, as it would be unfair to involve him in the business with Johan, and simply worked for him as a waitress instead. The two ultimately became close, though, and he did find out why she went to work for him at first.
After taking her out to eat, he sees Nina off at the train station and gives her some advice about killing, which Nina tries to take to heart but finds depressing.
The next time we see Nina is in Nice, France. She has been stalking the other of the two corrupt cops who killed her parents. Nina wanted revenge against the man for the murder of the Fortners, as well as information about Johan he had in his position, due to Roberto (one of Johan’s lackeys) posing as the man’s bodyguard. Unlike his partner, who became a pathetic drug addict and ended up dead, likely killed by Johan or an associate, the man had made out quite well for himself, living happily in a large house with his wife and the woman’s previous child from another marriage.
Nina gets the man had at her mercy but when he cries, realizing he will never see his family again if she kills him, Nina is unable to go through with killing him despite her rage at him. Later, Nina is kidnapped by Roberto, who lured her to him with the promising of seeing Johan. It was just a trap, though, and Roberto intended to kill Nina all along. Unable to kill someone who looks so much like Johan, Roberto leaves the task to several criminals in either his or (more likely) Johan’s employ. But Nina is not killed because the former police officer, whose life she spared earlier, comes to her rescue. He is shot while saving her and Nina, despite still hating him for what he did to her parents, attempts to save his life or at least get him back to his house in time to see his wife and stepson one last time before he dies. She is unsuccessful, though, and the man dies in the car en route to his home.
Nina’s pursuit of Johan next leads her back to Germany, this time to Munich. Although she doesn’t initially know it, Johan is in fact staying in Munich, attending the university while working as the secretary of a once-ruthless businessman named Schuwald, who he intends to eventually murder. While looking for Johan in Munich, Nina befriends Lotte Frank, a student at the same university as Johan who also knows Johan. When Johan passes out after seeing The Nameless Monster picture book, Lotte brings the book to Nina, who also has a strong reaction to the book, albeit not as extreme as Johan’s. That’s when Nina realizes that Johan is in fact in Munich, and finds out what he’s going to do. Instead of killing Schuwald, Johan has decided to start an enormous fire in an important library where Schuwald is going to speak.
Nina meets Dieter once again and runs into another of Tenma’s allies, Dr. Julius Reichwein. Tenma was in Munich, too, having camped out in the library the night before after also figuring out Johan’s plan. Nina breaks into the library while it’s on fire, and even finds her brother in the flames. The smoke and haze prevent her from getting a clear shot when she tries to kill him, though, and Johan escapes, leaving Nina behind in the burning library. Nevertheless, she escapes alive. Nina credits Tenma for this, but Lotte later tells her that Nina walked out of the library on her own, despite her injuries.
Nina was hospitalized for some time before going to stay with Reichwein. Though she was grateful to him for letting her stay with him, Nina didn’t stay there long. She soon departed to search for Johan again, this time taking Dieter with her, initially against her better judgment.
Soon Nina and Dieter found themselves in Prague, a place Nina had vague memories of, although she didn’t know she was born there. To Nina’s fear and surprise, many people seemed to know her, although they addressed her as “Anna” and not “Nina”. Johan was in Prague too, and he had been crossdressing, posing as “Anna”. This causes Nina a lot of mental distress, as she is already uncertain of her memories.
Eventually she and Dieter find Three Frogs. Nina goes back to the Three Frogs repeatedly despite the distress it causes her, because it triggers her memories and she wants to get them back. While trying to force herself to remember something in the Three Frogs, Nina is overcome by the fear her memories cause in her and she faints. She is rescued by a puppeteer named Mr. Lipsky, who takes her to his home so she can recover. While there, Nina is shown a picture book by Klaus Poppe, another pen name for the same author who wrote the book that caused Johan to faint in the library. Lipsky seems to have some link to the book’s author, although at the time, it isn’t precisely clear what. Nina and Dieter also visit the Red Rose Mansion with Lipsky, as Nina continues to try to get back her memories. The Red Rose Mansion is soon burnt to the ground, though, and unbeknownst to Nina and the others, the culprit was Johan himself.
After a discussion with Dieter about bad memories, and a fun time spent with Dieter and Lipsky “making happy memories” instead of trying to remember bad ones, Nina eventually returns to Dr. Reichwein’s home in Munich. There, she tries another method to recover her memories, by getting Dr. Rudy Gillian, a criminal psychologist and friend of Tenma’s, to hypnotize her so that she can fully recover her lost memories. This allows Nina to remember most of what had happened to her. She also says that she knows what Tenma (who had been arrested but escaped from police custody) is going to do, and that she could save him by doing it herself.
While she’s hunting for Johan, Nina’s home is invaded by two men employed by Peter Capek, a corrupt Czech government official and one of the few surviving people to be involved with the experiment conducted at the Red Rose Mansion. Capek believes Johan will kill him, and thinks that by taking Nina hostage, he may be able to prevent that. When Nina hears this, she agrees to go with Capek's men, thinking she may finally get to confront her brother.
When she arrives at Capek’s home, though, she finds that Johan has come and gone, and Capek is simply murmuring to himself about how “the sister” -- Nina -- will kill him. Nina, clearly traumatized and horrified, points a gun at Capek’s head but does not shoot. Despite the rage and hate she feels for his involvement in the experiment that created her and her brother, Nina does not kill him. Instead she makes him drive her out to an abandoned building. On the way, he tells her the full truth about her origin, and Nina finds out everything about her past, except her parents’ names, which Capek tells her are “not important”.
When she arrives at her destination, Nina finally gets to see Johan face-to-face. She plans to kill him and then herself. Johan talks to her about the things that happened at the Red Rose Mansion, revealing that he believes them to have happened to him. Nina tells him otherwise, saying that the child who was taken to the Red Rose Mansion was her, and the memories of being in darkness and seeing people die are hers. Nina has a mental breakdown, and is unable to shoot Johan. She is about to kill herself when Tenma finds her huddled on the ground with a gun to her head, telling her that there will be nothing left for him if she is dead. As Tenma comforts Nina, the increasingly erratic and paranoid Capek is killed by his own men.
Nina again winds up back at Reichwein’s home, although again she doesn’t stay there long. Soon she gets emails from Johan, and seems to know exactly what they mean. Agreeing not to carry a gun and to let Gillian accompany her, Nina heads to a small German town, Ruhenheim, where Tenma also is, and where Johan plans to set up a massacre before getting Tenma to shoot him. Nina, with Gillian in tow, spends some time wandering around Ruhenheim, going to the home of Franz Bonaparta himself. She enters another fugue state, speaking for both herself and Johan. Bonaparta, it turns out, is also Klaus Poppe and many other pennames. The man in charge of the government experiment responsible for Nina’s birth is the author of the picture books she and Johan had had such extreme reactions to.
Nina remembers the last thing Bonaparta said to her before urging to leave the Red Rose Mansion: that people can become anything they want to be, and that that’s why Nina and Johan must never become monsters. Nina begins to run through Ruhenheim, searching for Bonaparta.
Nina comes up her brother, Tenma, and a few others. Bonaparta has already been killed, shot by Roberto, who is himself dying as the result of wounds inflicted by Inspector Lunge of the BKA, who had been pursuing first Tenma and then Johan. Johan is threatening a small child named Wim in order to get Tenma to kill him.
Nina tells Johan that she forgives him, and that this is the last thing she can do for him. But Johan refuses to yield, insisting Tenma must shoot him.
Tenma doesn’t. Wim’s father, a drunk who hallucinates that Johan is a monster attacking his son, shoots Johan instead. Tenma and Nina try to comfort each other in the aftermath, and Nina tells Tenma that he did the right thing by refusing to shoot Johan.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's and why?: I'm taking her from Ruhenheim, right after Johan is shot by Wim's father, while she's sitting huddled with Tenma in the rain.
I feel like this is an ideal canon point to take her from for a game like Damned, because most of her trauma has effectively dealt with to the extent that such things can ever be, so it won’t be impairing her during the game. However, at the same time, she also hasn't completely returned to the rhythm of normal, civilized life, so it would make for the easiest adjustment to Landel's.
It also means that she'll know and recognize everyone she knew in canon, so there won't be any confusion on her end if one of her canonmates should arrive and claim to know her.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality: When we first meet Nina as an adult, she is a cheerful and happy girl. She is hard-working and determined but often spreads herself too thin, taking on multiple responsibilities without regard for whether she can actually handle them all at once. This tendency causes Nina to regularly be late for almost everything with an alarming frequency. She’s 13 minutes late to class, rushing to aikido lessons, behind on her pizza deliveries for her job.
Nina is able to somewhat get away with what otherwise would be an annoying habit by being charming and, more importantly, smart: she can spit out cases, laws, definitions and dates on demand when asked by her teacher, even when the rest of the class doesn't know. Despite being upset by her lack of childhood memories, Nina seems pretty normal and upbeat at first glance, laughing and joking with her adoptive parents and friends, and it's not hard to imagine she probably could have grown up quite normal in many ways had the circumstances of her birth and early years been different. In fact, even after Nina takes off on her journey to kill Johan, many people remark that Nina is pleasant and friendly. She presents a kind, easy-going exterior to the world and it's suggested that, had Nina been able to live a normal life, that is exactly the sort of person she would be through and through.
Nina wasn't really allowed to be normal, though, from the strange nature of her birth to the journey pursuing Johan that comprises the bulk of the series. It becomes more apparent as the series wears on that Nina is suffering from severe trauma in many respects and although she is tough and determined in many ways, she is very psychologically fragile in others, especially when certain memories are triggered and she is forced to relive the events of her past. If pushed into a certain frame of mind, Nina will forget her surroundings and be transported back to the day of the fire in the Three Frogs, even insisting that she is not "Nina" but "Anna". When reminded of things from her past, even if she doesn't go into a full-on catatonic state, Nina will frequently start to "shut down" emotionally and mentally, becoming fixated on her lost memories and her past.
Because both the memories themselves as well as the gaps caused by her lack of them are overwhelming, Nina isn't able to fully cope with them and may pass out. While she does gain more memories and ultimately comes to terms with herself over the course of the series, the traumas of her past and the amnesia it causes are sources of intense struggle and anguish for Nina, ultimately nearly leading her to suicide.
Nina seems to be quite resilient many other ways, however. She is rarely afraid of others, even when dealing with people much stronger or more powerful than she is. She is able to look dangerous people like mobsters and racists in the face and tell them plainly what she thinks. When not impaired due to trauma over her memories, Nina rarely hesitates, acting and thinking on her feet quite easily. She can also be very stubborn. When Nina has decided on a course of action, she will see it through to the end no matter what, as long as her own psychological demons don't overcome her resolve first.
Nina rarely uses unnecessary violence, despite her stated mission to kill Johan, and she clearly grapples with the reality of actually killing a person. Still, she is willing to use violence when necessary, such as when she uses her aikido skills to defend Lotte Frank from a man insisting that Lotte dance with him, and is willing to threaten people with harm or even death if she believes she has a good reason to. One the villains of the series, after Nina pulls a gun on him, says he believes she probably would have shot him if he didn't tell her what she wanted to hear.
One example of Nina's tendency toward moral ambiguity is her attempt to get revenge for the deaths of her foster parents, the Fortners, whom she still regards as her parents. One of the men who killed them died of a drug overdose; however, the other was living happily with his new wife and stepson. Nina watches him secretly from the abandoned house across from his, intending to eventually kill him to avenge her foster parents. She very nearly does, pulling a gun on him and threatening him with death.
Ultimately, Nina chooses not to kill him, partly because of his young stepson and partly because Nina deep down struggles with the idea of killing someone. She even ends up trying to save him when he is fatally shot, although it doesn't work. This shows both that, at heart, Nina is a good person, while making it clear that she has a darker side as well, such as going so far to stalk someone and plot revenge against someone who, although he behaved loathsomely in the past, was no longer an active threat to anyone. Also, even if her grief for her loss is an understandable motive, it still marks a clear moment when Nina did something wrong purely for personal reasons.
Nina is also able to lie easily and ably, although she typically only does so when she believes it's necessary. She usually goes by "Nina Fortner" but sometimes uses her former name, "Anna Liebert", when she doesn't want anyone to connect her identity to the Fortner murder case. She is willing to pose as someone or something she is not, such as pretending to be a prostitute in order to get information or infiltrate seedy gangs, and if she feels it is necessary, will also lie to someone to protect them. As with violence, Nina doesn't usually lie if she can avoid it, and sometimes will simply not say anything or avoid giving information atall rather than lie to someone; however, if pressed, Nina is willing and able to lie if she has to. This is both a comparison to Johan and a contrast: Whereas Johan is deceitful much of the time, Nina only does it when she needs to. However, both twins are willing to lie for their own reasons.
On the upside, Nina can be quite protective of others. This extends both to physically protecting others from harm or defending them from physical harm by intervening in a crisis herself if need be, as well as morally, psychologically, and legally protecting people from the consequences of their own actions, such as her attempt to stop Tenma from becoming a murderer by trying to kill Johan before he can.
She also seems to have a lot of compassion for people who are in bad situations or who can't stick up for or defend themselves, and will do whatever she can to protect or look out for such people. One example of this would be when Nina is lured into the home of a racist mobster with the promise of finding Johan (only for Nina herself to be used as bait for Johan). Nina discovers that a Turkish woman is being held there and tortured, and that the woman's neighborhood is going to be set on fire. Nina declares the woman her "friend" and vows to help avert the fire any way she can.
Initially, Nina seems to feel that the only way anything can be made right is if Johan is dead -- she even tries and fails to shoot him prior to her own suicide attempt -- but the end of the series she changes her mind about the necessity to kill Johan, becoming upset when it seems Johan might die, and telling that Tenma his decision to save Johan was the right one. In fact, this is significant not just because it presents a shift in the way Nina thinks about Johan, but a shift in morality: although she struggled with the idea of taking a life throughout the series, it was implied she would be willing to kill someone if she ultimately had to. This is when the belief that killing is always wrong is cemented both in Nina and, arguably, in the series of "Monster" itself.
At the end of the series Nina is seen happy and continuing with her education in the law, on her way to becoming a lawyer. This is significant because it suggests Nina was not broken by her experiences in the end and retains the ability to pick herself up and do something good with her life.
Please give us a physical description of your character: Nina is a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and dark blonde hair that falls to just barely past her shoulder blades. Other characters who are inclined to comment on such things say that she's a very pretty girl.
She seems to have a sense of personal style that tends to be both trendy and practical at the same time, seeming equally at home wearing a plain shirt and jeans or a cute skirt and top. Her body is somewhere between thin and average; she has noticeable curves, but is likely toned and athletic from years of aikido.
No official height for her has ever been given, but I'd estimate her to be close to 5'6" or 5'7" based on comparing her height to the other characters'.
You can see a picture here.
What kinds of otherworldly abilities does your character have, if any?: None.
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: N/A.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?: Yes. Nina has a few notable non-supernatural skills, which I will address point by point here.
* Intelligence. Nina is a very intelligent girl. I'm not comfortable asserting that she has a genius IQ (although her mother apparently did), but she is certainly above average. Her memory is especially impressive. She is able to quickly and easily recall many different details such as facts, names, dates, and case verdicts, or anything else she might need to remember. This holds true in both relatively low-pressure situations, like being able to spit out answers to questions in school on demand when her law professor wants them, as well as much higher pressure situations, such as being able to remember intricate details of Johan's crimes or crimes she suspects he was ultimately behind.
* Skill with guns. Nina is very comfortable handling a gun, able to take one apart and put it together as well as clean it and take care of it. She is also a skilled marksman, and she explicitly mentions how she never misses a day of practice, showing her dedication to being able to handle the weapon.
* Good physical condition. Nina is a very athletic person and appears to be in good shape. She runs quickly, is dextrous and agile, and is able to scale buildings, jump down from high places, and in general do a lot of vigorous physical activity without getting winded or hurt. This is because of years she's spent doing athletic activities, especially martial arts.
* Quick learner. While this somewhat goes along with being intelligent, I felt it deserves its own section. Nina seems to easily and quickly pick most things she attempts. This is doubtless in part because of her supreme dedication to things that she feels are necessary, but I think she also simply has some degree of natural aptitude for picking up new skills.
* Black belt in aikido. While it's never explicitly said how long Nina has been training in aikido, she is very good at it and even able to overwhelm stronger and bigger opponents with it if she catches them off-guard.
