Jennifer Tiffany was raised in a somewhat lower middle-class household with her single father, Pierre-Wayne Tiffany. In the 90s and early 00s he ran a successful video store, often selling bootlegs and other random things in the back of the store. After a while he made the transition to pawn shop/shady bootleg store. Tiffany worked in the store since she was old enough to talk, like many children in families with small urban stores often end up doing.
She learned about bootlegging, not asking questions when people have something to sell, and to scam at every opportunity. She did pretty bad in school, her father simply didn't prioritize it, and she ultimately dropped out in high school to work in the store full time. But she aspired to be rich, somehow. She often stole things herself to shove into the pawn shop, and bootlegged high ticket products despite her father's warnings not to do something so risky that may potentially put the shop in danger.
Jen was only 13 when Midtown happened. It was terrifying and she ultimately didn't even know what to think of it. She thought maybe it was a terrorist attack, something she could vaguely remember from when she was a kid. But the revelation of Evolved people gave her a bit of wariness of those around her. She was already someone who had trouble trusting people from a young age, given all the criminal activity she was exposed to and people trying to scam her as much as she tried to scam them. But her father tried to reassure her that things weren't any less safe than they were before when people had guns and bombs, and it mostly took her time to adjust, even if she had some long-term anxiety over the idea of dangerous abilities.
During the 2010 riots, Jen and her father's store was looted, though they were safe. This forced her father to have to take out a loan for repairs, and she started to steal and scam even more than normal, due to the desire to help her father's business recover faster. Like usual, he didn't want her to put herself at risk, but she didn't listen. She became increasingly comfortable with criminal behavior, which often caused arguments between the two, but the unfortunate truth was that without her criminal behavior, the business wouldn't have been able to recover. He never spoke to her about his mixed feelings, he just tried his best to make things better for her in the future.
Right before the war, at around 18 years old, she noticed the world changing more. She never particularly cared about politics, and she'd become comfortable with the idea of SLC-E people. But the camps and registration just seemed kind of extreme, even if she wasn't exactly going out there to help anyone out. She was far more focused on survival and keeping the family business afloat. But the Cambridge Massacre gave her even more of a wariness of law enforcement and the government than she'd had before, because so many of the awful things that happen in the world rarely truly have much context for her. She got the jist of the news, but was never one to dig deeper into what she saw as political things.
She went to prison for a number of charges. The credit card fraud and identity theft of a fairly rich and powerful man, assaulting an officer when they arrested her, and assault with a deadly weapon, due to the butterfly knife she stabbed the officer in the leg with. There was just a lack of willingness to risk dealing with anything to do with the government and law enforcement after Cambridge. She was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison, but between the war and good behavior, as well as a hell of a lot of snitching in jail, she got out in 7.
She stayed in a relatively low security prison, and mostly made enemies with white collar wine moms. She'd of course heard of the war going on, and eventually it reached her prison. There were prison riots even though she was in a low security situation, and she mostly just tried to keep herself from getting killed. Contrary to when she got captured, she didn't want to end up in prison even longer for escaping, or something worse in these war times, so she tried to find people to turn herself into. Of all things, thinking barely understanding the state of the world, she found what she thought was a cop who could take her back to her minimum security prison once things blew over. But this was an officer and his family about to head out to Detroit, to try and escape the fighting, and he ultimately let her come along with him.
She had no way to get to her father through all the fighting, and mostly just had to hope she could come back. When they couldn't make it to her father, she realized just how bad this war was. The drive to Michigan in this NYPD patrol car with an unfamiliar family, it wasn't easy. They did their best to avoid the fighting, though there were skirmishes the officer helped them through. He mostly talked to other cops on the radio to find safe passages, until finally they found their way to Michigan.
In Detroit, the officer helped her explain the situation to the local government, and eventually she ended up on some kind of parole, as the war made her particular crimes not nearly extreme enough to waste resources on. So she ended up doing community service and being on house arrest in a halfway house in Detroit for the rest of the war.
When the war ended, she was finally able to return home. Her father unfortunately died during all of this, killed as collateral damage during one of the many battles in New York. Their shop was in fairly okay shape, even if mostly looted, but she dedicated that next year of her life to getting it fixed up and stocked, just like during the riots. She used her scavenging and scamming skills to rebuild her father's business, but adjusting to some kind of normal life in this wartorn version of New York isn't easy, a constant grind to scam and rebuild her father's business that she now owns, to the best of her ability.
