Nick was born an only child to a mother and father who were both masters of the Ripple, and from a very young age began practicing the martial art alongside his parents whenever he could, at first being placed into very difficult situations to draw out his Ripple potential, and then actually being trained in its use. And yet, for reasons he couldn't quite understand, his family always encouraged him to keep quiet about their capacity to utilise the Ripple, and to never use it on his fellow students even if they attacked him first. Some children might have accepted these mandates without complaint; these children would not have been worthy of the martial art, and after a while, the constant reminders not to do these things turned Nick into the sort of child who went out of his way to deliberately disobey orders given to him by others, regardless of how high their authority went.

This tended to get him in trouble a lot at school, and in spite of his parent's best efforts, his progress through the education system beyond the age of ten was consistently hampered by the fights he got into, wherein he would end up picking another student who bullied students weaker than them, only to beat the bullies to a pulp in a way that baffled teachers for how much damage was consistently dealt out without a scratch on his body. His claims of knowing "a martial art better than all the others" were generally ignored, and he seemingly meant well enough throughout any given beating, so he was simply written off as a problem case by the teaching staff at his schools, plenty of whom succeeded in manipulating him into doing what they wanted by getting him to do something completely unrelated to the task everyone else was set, thus ensuring that he would actually do a much better job at the actual task than many of his fellows.

His parents, by contrast, got more and more frustrated with how rebellious their child was on a regular basis. Though users of the Ripple must be strong of will as a prerequisite, there is only so much annoyance a human being can take before they snap, and at about the age of nineteen, Nick was kicked out of his home and told to get a job. This proved harder than anticipated - nobody really wants to hire somebody with a less-than-stellar record for violence - and he ended up on the streets for a while, primarily practicing his own skill in the Ripple, until he eventually wandered into a less reputable part of town and wound up in a street gang called the Kaisers, led by none other than some guy he'd never heard of. Same-said guy, a large and strong fellow born to German immigrants to the town, claimed his real name was Simon Baines, though to all others in the gang he was simply called "The Kaiser Chief"; he was feared not just for his size, but also for his vicious nature and harsh leadership policies, wherein if his orders were disobeyed, the one disobeying them got an arm or leg broken, with death as the penalty if all four limbs were broken at once.

Nick hated him instantly. He hated having to follow the Kaiser Chief's orders, he hated how cruel he was, and his personality was rather lacking beyond wanting to steal things and break people. Less than a week passed before Nick did something the Chief didn't like, and his arm was restrained by other gang members in preparation for a metal bat to be brought down upon it. Naturally, the restraints were insufficient: timing it just right, Nick broke free just before the bat was brought down, caught it, sent a pulse of the Ripple through everybody next to him at that moment to knock them out, then took the bat to Simon's entire body, beating him with it until he ran with his tail between his legs. Nick promptly installed himself as the new Kaiser Chief, spending the next couple of years reforming the group (by force if needed) into a community that actually helped improve the state of the local area rather than harming it further.

This goal was marred somewhat by the return of Simon Baines a few weeks before Nick's twenty fourth birthday, during a particularly dark night. It seemed that the former Kaiser Chief had returned as some strange undead being akin to a vampire, capable of draining people's blood through his fingers; every person he drained entirely of blood returned to life as a zombie under his command, increased his capacity to kidnap and drain others, further increased the size of his undead army, and it wasn't surprising that the unpowered humans of the Kaisers couldn't fend off the ever-growing horde of superhuman monsters, leading to the death and conversion of nearly half the gang in just a few minutes. Nick, however, was nothing if not superhuman himself: his very first punch to one of the zombies completely disintegrated its skull and much of its upper body, and it was like this that he learned the true purpose of the Ripple, to slay the undead with his focused life energy as though exposing them to the Sun itself. He tore through many of his former comrades like a scythe through wheat, only momentarily halted in this regard by Simon himself. Though he was rather faster and stronger than his minions, he was no more capable of resisting the Ripple's effects, and with his death, the zombie horde's morale was broken, shortly followed by their bodies.

Since then, Nick's main goal other than continuing his gang's work has been to revive the damaged prospects of the Kaisers, many of whom see him as almost godlike for his actions that night. Alas, though he has offered to help train others in the Kaisers in the Ripple, none of the surviving or new members have so far presented any aptitude in the art, and he worries that another vampire attack could lead to the group's destruction outright; thus, part of his reformation drive involves searching out those who might be capable of utilising the Ripple so that they can be trained to help protect themselves and others from any undead which may choose to present themselves.