For the first few years of Elizabeth Anne Messer's life, she was an ordinary child. Growing up in sunny San Diego, California, Liza was smart, bright, and full of life. Well-loved by her parents, her early life was idyllic. She was four when her mother died. It wasn't anything that could have been anticipated—a brain aneurysm. Her death was sudden and painless, but it left Donald Messer to raise his young daughter on his own.
Raised by her father, Liza was an easy enough child to raise. A child prodigy, she was dangerously smart, quick to learn, and adaptive. The transition from two parents to a single parent was difficult, but Liza took to it quickly enough. For someone who had lost her mother, she was surprisingly cheerful, upbeat, and hopeful. Liza and her father were close, and Donald's openness with his daughter allowed her to learn about the Company while in still in her childhood.
In middle school and high school, Liza proved herself to be a well-rounded kid, balancing her intelligence with her friendliness and bright demeanor. She was hard to dislike, with her open and generally caring attitude, but she still enjoyed retreating to the corner for books from time to time. Studious but excitable, she proved a bright spot in many lives in her youth. She was en route to great things, and her father always made it known to her that he was proud of her and that she'd make a great impact in the future.
Liza was still in high school when the bomb struck. While she was nowhere close to the bomb, it shook things up for everyone. Big changes were afoot, and the perky teen was adapting as she went. Around that time, she developed an interest in criminal justice and computer science, which she would later go on to study when she was accepted into Columbia University.
The Linderman Act and the revelation of the Evolved weren't much of a surprise for Liza, given the few stories that Donald had told his daughter in her childhood. Of all the things to happen that year, people knowing about the Evolved wasn't something that made an impact on her. Her father's death a few months later, however, was a huge change for her. In May of 2007, a raid on the Sullivan Brothers Carnival went catastrophically wrong resulting in the death of Donald Messer in the line of duty.
With Donald Messer's death, Liza was left with no family to care for her. Albert Rossling, Donald's partner in the Company, took Liza under his wing. Given her prior knowledge of the Company thanks to her father's openness, when Rossling recommended Liza be trained as an agent it was an easy call. The California native headed to Chicago for her training, finding herself a new family in the Company as she adapted to her new surroundings.
The dangerously smart Liza found the desk work, classes, and reading involved in her agent training a breeze. She ate up whatever material was in front of her, and it was her verocity for information that led her to the records of Veronica Sawyer, who had also hailed from California. Given her successes as an agent, Liza took Veronica's track record and set out to emulate the agent's work in hopes of being equally as successful and effective in her own training.
At the beginning of the year 2010, Liza and Rossling joined the Company's investigative department at the behest of Gael Cruz. Liza joined as an agent-in-training, coming along on assignments to see first-hand how investigations were handled. She also attended meetings and proved herself a bit of an asset thanks to her knowledge and hard work on the desk-duty side of things. Working alongside Agent Sawyer was a dream come true, and Liza had finally settled in to a happy life, treating the Company and its agents like her family.
On August 31st, 2010, Liza's world came crashing down, in some senses a bit literally. A normal day turned into a raid on the Company by the Institute and the United States Government. She watched her mentor and surrogate father Rossling sacrifice his life to make sure she and others got out, her idol, Agent Sawyer disappear, and the Company collapse almost entirely. Liza, who had managed to cling to a family of some sort throughout her life, had now lost everything semblance of that she had.