Annika "Nikkie" Tomaszewski was a MechWarrior for the Crowe's Bloody Buccaneers mercenary company during the mid 32nd century, as well as the lover and fiancée of the Bloody Buccaneers' then-commander, Adam Crowe. Born in 3127 on Tormentine in what was at the time the Duchy of Tamarind-Abbey, when Annika was nine years old her home was raided by forces of the neighboring Marian Hegemony, who took her and her family as captives. Annika was sold off to a brothel in a Canopian pleasure circus operating in the Hegemony, who surgically altered her with cloned superficial "cat ears" on her scalp and a cybernetic tail at the base of her spine, turning her into an example of the infamous "Canopian Catgirl".
For the next several years Annika served as a plaything for the brothel's clientele, until 3143 when a localized slave revolt rocked her corner of Marian space, liberating her. Annika, just 16, joined the rebels as a MechWarrior, showing an exceptional degree of natural talent for the craft. For nearly the next year, Annika would battle the Marians from the cockpit of a dilapidated HRC-LS-9001 Hercules, until the rebel forces finally collapsed, with Annika's lancemates selling her out to a mercenary group hired by the Marians, in exchange for safe passage into the recently reconstituted Free Worlds League.
Luckily for her, however, one of her captors' newer hires would take pity on her, orchestrating a plot to allow her to escape with an obsolete (though respectably maintained) HER-2S Hermes II BattleMech as well as a digital wallet containing approximately two-and-a-half million stone. Finally leaving the Hegemony, for the next two years Annika would eke out an existence working as an errant MechWarrior on the fringes of the Free Worlds League.