Born in Blackhawk, Colorado in 1857 during the early days of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, Becca grew up a child of the Rockies. Her mother, Susanna, died of pneumonia when she was just 8, but was close with her father and brothers. Her father was a gold prospector and she and her two older brothers worked deep in the mines together. Children were highly valued workers, as they were small and could fit into tight crevices.
Though the mines were a dangerous place, Becca learned how to place explosives deep in the mines and became expert at it. In her teens, her father decided she was now too grown for such dangerous work, and while her brothers kept on mining with the other men, she was sent up top to do the woman's work of housekeeping for her family, while taking in some extra money doing laundry for some of the mine's managers.
Her father and brothers were killed in a collapse that devastated her emotionally and financially. She started working as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Denver, the Blacks, becoming a trusted member of that family for several years. She even became engaged to the family's butler, George Harker. The pair were an exceptional team who understood and respected each other as colleagues and always put the family's needs before their own. What started out as a partnership in work soon blossomed into deep love.
But it was not to be. Becca was walking home unescorted one evening from the market with food for the following day's meal. It was dark when a gentleman whom she knew to be friend of the family she worked for stopped his carriage, asking if he could offer her a lift to the house. Since he claimed to be headed that way anyway, she accepted the offer, a move she later regretted.
She grew suspicious when he began to steer the carriage off of the main roads, claiming he had a package to pick up from a friend who was watchman at a nearby rock quarry. That set off alarm bells for Becca, who had a hard time believing that a wealthy man had any connections with a quarry watchman. They pulled up by the unlit guard shack, and he advanced towards her. She tried to run, but he quickly caught her and this only seemed to fuel his fire. He beat her and dragged her to the shack, where he raped, strangled and killed Becca, slitting her throat.
She was found still dead late that night by the night watchman, and she was shipped to the morgue as the police notified the Black family and George of her murder. She came to around three a.m. in the dark of the morgue's examining table. She stumbled out into the streets, wrapped only in a sheet from the morgue, and made her way back home, confused as to why she had been left alone in a morgue after such an attack. Out of habit, she went to the servant's entrance, where she was greeted by George and Mrs. Wilkes, the scullery maid, with shocked disbelief. Mrs. Wilkes was terrified, thinking she'd seen a ghost, and George didn't know what to think. She was bloodied, but had no visible wounds. The police were called and they were stunned, swearing up and down that her throat had been clearly cut and no pulse was found.
Though she informed the police of who was responsible, no arrest was made. The police wondered if she had played a horrible prank on them, and soon those in the neighborhood decided that must have been the case. Even George seemed to doubt her story.
Bitterly disappointed that all her dedication had bought not one bit of true friendship or loyalty, Becca left in the night the next week with all she had saved over the past years. It didn't get her very far and it wasn't until she started working at an inn up in Breckenridge that she learned about immortals from a British man who was passing through town. He did not stay to teach her, but he did at least pass on the basics of what she needed to know. He advised her to learn to fight with the sword, but to avoid running into other immortals when she could.
And that's what she did. She kept moving around and as the world aged and she did not, she saw a lot of progress in women's rights. In World War II, she enlisted in the WACs, though with her fighting skills she started working secretly for the government as a spy. They shipped her to Russia to work with the Soviets against the Nazis, and this work not only improved her fighting skills, but gave her an opportunity to gain the power and respect of the men who just sixty years earlier had accused her of lying and making up harmful tales.
Becca kept working for the US government after the War, and when the CIA was formed, she stayed on as an operative in Poland. Of course, eventually she knew she would have to leave the agency, as her age on paper was far greater than what she appeared. In the early '60s, she faked her own death in Poland before going to the UK. She laid low for about twenty years before resurfacing in Poland at the American Embassy with doctored papers that stated she was her own grand-niece. She hated changing her name, but took the name Sylvia Black, which had been the name of one of the children of the family in Denver. She sought employment at the embassy, and over time became a trusted worker who had a way of coming up with useful information from the border. This got her new employment by the CIA under Reagan, who was feeding an intense nuclear arms race with the Russians.
Over the next fifteen years, Sylvia Black earned herself a reputation as a skilled and dedicated espionage agent, gathering information and getting it to the right people in order to help keep lines of communication open between those in East Berlin and those in West Berlin. She smuggled key informants and even families across the border. When the wall came down at last, she decided it was time to return to America.
Becca took up her old name once more and by 1998, had retired to Estes Park, Colorado. She was an avid hunter and bred workhorses on a small tract of land in the valley surrounded by mountains. That's where she was when the superflu came, wiping out most of her horses and much of the nearby wildlife in addition to all the people. She experienced no dreams, except for those that told her of a settlement in nearby Boulder. She did not trust her dreams, however, and chose to stay in her home even though all but two of her horses were still alive.
In July, she felt a quickening of another, much older immortal nearby, and went to her porch with her sword to await their arrival and see what sort of person was coming her way. Would it be someone seeking her head, or someone uninterested in adding to an already very strong quickening? Luckily for her, it turned out to be the latter - an immortal named Cassius Aurelius. They agreed that with so few people left in the world, it would serve no one to try and kill each other, and came to a verbal truce.
Neither Becca nor Cass had intended to remain together for long, but it was a pleasant change for both to be in the company of another immortal and not have to hide what they were. They would tell stories to each other in the evenings of adventures over the years, each avoiding telling the true horror stories from their own lives and sticking instead to the ones that made for good stories. Cass told her of his dreams of the conflict brewing between Boulder and Vegas, and of his own reluctance to get involved. She decided it was easier to stay out of it as well for now, although the spy in her was intrigued. They were just beginning to build a trusting friendship that might have moved on to become more, when their paths crossed with those of two mortal men who proposed moving into the Stanley Hotel.
At first, Becca wanted to stay behind at her ranch, choosing instead to just visit at the hotel, but she did miss the company enough to move herself and her two horses to the Stanley's grounds. She pretty much took over the Manor House, a smaller adjunct to the main hotel originally built for single male guests visiting in the early 1900s, back when it was improper to have families with women and children staying in the same building as bachelors. She guards her privacy there and prefers not to allow visitors inside there she instead comes to the main hotel during the day.
Neither she nor Cass have explained immortality to their mortal companions, not seeing any reason to complicate things' yet.
