The Feral Creature
Nova should have been fairly average - kind of sweet, in a shallow way, with a little spunk and a knack for getting what she wants. She should have been beautiful and happy.
Instead her perfect face is marred by scales, the manifestation of her different-ness, her wrongness, and she very closely parallels a feral animal. Trapped in a corner. With men with cold eyes and guns closing in on her. She's erratic and amoral and in it purely for survival. It's never occurred to her that anything else could hold any importance at all.
She will align herself with whoever seems most likely to cause her to survive at that moment. While upon first meeting her you may see that spunky, confidant, carefree girl she should have been, you will also see calculation in her eyes, calculation sterile of empathy and ridden with insecurity and fear and the all-consuming hate of my-survival-over-yours.
Whatever she can get hold of. The bigger, the badder, the better.
I developed Nova for, actually, my screenplay, which is about genetics experiments (no, it's not like Dark Angel. Don't compare it to Dark Angel. I am so tired of Dark Angel). I've never tried to use her for anything else, but I'd like to keep my options open.
If she's an experiment:
Captured and altered (or altered as a fetus, if you want to be all scientifical about it), raised in a brutal environment where failing a "test" involves getting killed by it. Became extremely good at not getting killed by the tests and developed a reputation among the experiments. Experiments break free. Nova aligns herself with Them (with a very capital T), the experimenters, for, obviously, a better chance of survival, but is not particularly loyal and doesn't especially care about Their mysterious cause.