Karen Connor

Willpower: 6

Background

Karen Conner grew up in South Los Angeles, California. She was raised by her Aunt Luna at the age of 6 after her mother had been killed by a drunk driver. Her mother had been going to school at night to become a nurse’s assistant when she died, and she decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps and honor her memory by becoming a nurse herself.

She received a partial scholarship to California State University to get her nursing degree while working as an EMT for a privately owned ambulance company which consisted more of playing an over glorified taxi driver after receiving her EMT Basic certification. She went on to work her way up through the ranks of being a paramedic to becoming a registered nurse and finally getting her Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing.

Karen has seen a lot during her time working in the emergency medical profession. She’s seen drug overdoses, heart attacks, gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and vicious animal attacks. She’s also heard stories from patients she’s treated.. things like supposed wolf attacks. And then there were two different, completely unrelated cases, both involving bite wounds to the neck made with the same jaw span of a human being. But the bite wounds were distinctively animal and fanged. These were the cases she didn’t like to think about too much.

So, after her Aunt Luna had passed on only a few months ago, she decided it was time to make a clean break of it and get out of Los Angeles and made the transfer from Los Angeles Community Hospital to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, AZ.

Or at least that was what she liked to tell herself. In those rare moments of self clarity, she knew she was running. Truth be told, she had seen too many things in her line of work that, quite honestly, she didn’t have good answers for. And she didn’t want to follow where those kinds of questions would take her. That was a rabbit hole she wasn’t willing to go down and wanted only to put those things behind her. But Fate, she would find, would have other things in mind for her.

Karen herself has not had direct experience meeting with any of the supernatural denizens of the World of Darkness personally, or at least none she’s aware of. But she’s seen enough in her personal career and spoken with enough people from doctors to medical examiners and morgue assistants to know that not all injuries can be so casually shrugged off as simply ‘exotic knife wounds’. She knows the difference between a tear and cuts from knife wounds, despite how many police detectives would try to tell her otherwise and to just ‘do her job and don’t ask questions’.

Karen sits on the precipice of knowing the truth of what really lurks in the Darkness. She’s seen enough to know that something lurks out there, even though she herself has not had a direct personal encounter with the supernatural. She’s not actively searching for answers… yet. But she’s learned enough to keep her ‘Reality Bubble’ more permeable than most people as a direct result of her years and experience.