Nadra
Email: nawlins_sweetheart@yahoo.com
Age: 18
Height: 5'5
Weight: 129 lbs.
Eyes: Black
Hair: Black
Ethnicity: Kenyan and Ghanaian
What are you?: Evil mutant
Physical Markings: She has thin purple, raised, scar-like marks all over her body.
Powers: Nadra has the powers of a Medium. She originally only used her abilities to communicate with the spirits of dead loved ones for her grandmother's business, but after she channeled her first mutant, her powers expanded. In lesser mutant spirits, she can control the form that she projects and can keep it from becoming corporeal, but in stronger mutants there's a slight danger of her losing control. Also, due to her expanded powers, she can speak to the dead now herself, not only channel them for others, and she has a degrees of clairsentience, the ability to 'feel' things, usually around old battle sites and places where people died or were murdered, and psychometry, the ability to gain information through objects. However, the information she gains through her psychometry in only in images, brief flashing ones, nothing that is too telling unless it involves someone's death, then its stronger. Her psychic powers have also bled into those of her voodoo priestess powers. She has had success in raising the dead and creating zombies to a degree, but nothing more than animating the corpses, she hasn’t figured out how to place the spirit back in the body.
Origin: Nadra was born in New Orleans, only at the insisting of her aunt, her mother's sister, who had moved there nearly ten years before she was born. Her father had died during a trip back to Ghana to tell his mother that he was going to have a child, so her aunt Mukami begged her younger sister, Njeri, to join her in the states so she wouldn’t be alone for her first birth, and so that the child would have the benefits of being a US citizen, but Njeri didn’t know that was part of her sister's plan. Mukami had planned on telling her sister the real reason she wanted her to give birth to her child in the US before it was born, but Njeri went into labor a month before she was due and was brought to the hospital by a neighbor since Mukami was at work. Before Mukami was able to get to the hospital, Njeri had given birth to a daughter, named Nadra for their mother, and was hemorrhaging. She begged her sister to keep her mother-in-law away from her child, knowing that the woman practiced black magic from her husband. She knew her husband would have wanted their child to know his mother, but she didn’t trust the woman. She died minutes later.
Mukami wasn’t about to mess with a woman who practiced dark voodoo, so she kept her promise. She had planned all along to convince Njeri to stay in America once her child was born, knowing the kind of life it would have there, but now she didn’t need to, she could raise the little one however she wanted. She wasn’t the least ashamed that she had not been born in America, but she wanted her niece to grow up with all the advantages that an American child would have. Unfortunately for her, Nadra's grandmother, Awusi, showed up one day a few weeks after she was born, demanding to see her grandchild. Mukami didn’t have much choice in the matter, she couldn’t let her stay out on their lawn performing blood rituals until she caved in, could she? Awusi sent her out of the house that first day so she could meet her granddaughter properly. As she was leaving, Mukami noticed that Awusi was pulling things like chicken bones and jars of different herbs out of her bag and almost kicked the woman out of the house, she was going to perform voodoo! Awusi looked at her though before she was going to say anything…and gave her such a look that she ran from the house. Mukami stayed out for only an hour, and when she came back, she was relieved to find her niece still in one piece. Awusi put the baby to bed, and had Mukami sit down with her. She explained that she had known the moment her granddaughter was born, and didn’t blame Mukami for wanting to keep Nadra away from such things, but it was out of her hands now. The girl was destined to take her place as the greatest capalta priestess, a priestess of dark voodoo, in Africa, but she was willing to stay in the states with her, so she would have the best education she could get…Awusi was no fool. She soon worked it out with Mukami that she would live with her and the baby, taking care of her while Mukami was at work. Awusi assured her that money would be no problem, knowing perfectly well that a priestess as herself would have no shortage of business in a place like New Orleans, and she was right. Mukami still worked during the day for household expenses, while Awusi put her earnings to good use as a comfort zone for them, as well as setting up a trust for Nadra, which soon went into the 6 digit figure. Business was good in the 80's. She made sure not to practice or teach Nadra while Mukami was in the house…her gift needed to be cultivated in private. The girl had a remarkable talent for going into trances to channel spirits….
As the years went by, Awusi slowly brought the child over to her way of thinking and living, having less and less to do with her Aunt until Mukami was afraid to leave her room after dark…the sounds they made while they worked frightened her too badly. Fortunately for Nadra, Mukami died from a stray bullet during a robbery of the store she worked at, leaving Awusi to care for Nadra, who was only fourteen, and teach her all she wouldn’t while Mukami was in the picture. It was shortly after that that Nadra's medium powers fully revealed themselves, while she had been channeling the spirit of a man her grandmother had killed who's blood had been very potent. He was a mutant with a bit of electrical powers, reviving the animal they had just slaughtered and going into convulsions that made her body spark and char the ground. That night, her first purple scar-like mark showed up on her leg.
Awusi was delighted; her granddaughter would prove to be one of the most powerful vaudan priestesses ever! She did not follow the news or really understand what a 'mutant' was, so she couldn’t grasp that Nadra's powers weren't of voodoo nature, even though they affected her abilities. She brought Nadra back to Africa, so they could go deeper into her education, and on her 15th birthday, Nadra was given her first 'white goat'. White goat is slang for human sacrifice.
On her 18th birthday…the day her scars stopped showing up, Nadra went under her last test to become a full-fledged capalta voodoo priestess…she went against her grandmother. After four hours of intense psychic warfare and voodoo rituals that required them to both open veins, Awusi's heart failed, making Nadra her successor and the new capalta priestess in their town. She was soon declared too questionable in her practices and was exiled from Ghana. She returned to New Orleans to set up shop, and has yet to be connected to the rash of ritual killings of known sex offenders and murderers of the area.