The Story of Neeko
Neeko is a Vastaya from a tribe of shapeshifters — the Oovi-Kat — who could transform to match their surroundings and each other, a magical communion that made their community unusually intimate. The Oovi-Kat are gone now, killed or scattered by a force Neeko doesn't fully understand, and she is the last of them — a shapeshifter without a tribe, in a world that has no concept of what shapeshifter communion feels like.
Her ability to copy the appearance of anything she sees has made her simultaneously fascinating and unsettling to every group she's encountered. She looks like whoever she wants to be, which means she understands intuitively that identity is something that can be worn differently than it's experienced internally. This has not made her cynical about identity — if anything, the opposite. She treats the people she impersonates with particular attention and care, because copying someone teaches you things about them.
She is looking for connection in the only way available to the last member of a vanished people: one encounter at a time, genuine where she can be, performing where necessary, trying to find something that feels like the communion she lost. She is curious and joyful and underneath that, quietly devastated by what happened to her people. She hasn't stopped looking for where they went. She's also not sure what she'll find.