[h3]Character Description[/h3]
[b]Name:[/b] Nicola Hoffman
[b]Gender:[/b] Female
[b]Age:[/b] 23
[b]Nationality:[/b] German
[b]Appearance:[/b]5'6'' tall, reasonably slim, with dark hair and eyes
 [hider=appearance][img]https://i.ibb.co/fFmtf2n/nicolah.png[/img][/hider]
[b]Personal Effects[/b]: Suitcase of clothes and some cheap jewelry.
[hr]

[h3][b]Background:[/b][/h3]

[b]What is your job[/b] Stage Entertainer - assistant to Mr. Rudeanu

[b]Backstory[/b]: Nicola Hoffman was born into a middle class German family in 1900 in the border town of Mulhouse (or Mülhausen as it was then known).  Nicola's father worked on the railway and Nicola, a bright young girl, received the beginnings of a classical education.  The region was always somewhat fractious, though her family, originally from Bavaria, were loyal to the Kaiser and Nicola was sheltered from some of the worst goings on in the Province. And then the Great War broke out.

On 8 August 1914, the French army entered the city.  Only to leave again two days later.  A week later, on 16 August, the French were back and this time, with soldiers fighting in the city itself, the Hoffman family fled to Strasbourg (Strassburg) where they remained for the rest of the war, in part because the family home had been destroyed during the fighting.  Nicola's older brother, Felix, was drafted into the army, where he was killed only a few months later during the Brusilov Offensive.

Matters only got worse from there.  Alsace-Lorraine was annexed after the war.  Nicola's parents died during the Spanish Flu pandemic leaving Nicola with very little.  To make matters worse, at the beginning of 1921 she was deported from Mullhouse to Germany, a country she had never set foot in to that point, having been declared an 'Enemy Alien' in the Francization campaigns.  Which was when she first started seeing the man in the top hat.  A figure glimpsed occasionally who seems to disappear again when encountered, occasionally leaving the lingering smell of cigars in his wake.

Nicola moved back to Bavaria, initially staying with a spinster aunt before moving to Munich in search of work.  The man in the top hat continued to occasionally appear though never in any aggressive way.  

Pretty, resourceful and desperate for money, Nicola eventually fell in with Ciprian Rudeanu and while she had initially hoped he would prove the man in the hat to be simply a man, eventually she decided not to raise him, having come to regard the figure as a benevolent guardian.  It was a few days prior to Rudeanu that she received a mysterious letter...