Niko Kuna

Behind large, square-framed glasses, Niko has brown eyes and black hair cropped to about her neck. In her early years at the institute a chain looped across her head and dangled along the left of her face and ended in a small tuft of hair, and she wore the standard black uniform beneath a white lab coat.

A century on, that single chain has given way to shorter ones hanging at either side of her head, each tipped with its own little tuft, and her hakama no longer shows past the hem of her thigh-length coat.

A veteran of the labs, Niko comes across as quiet and considerate. When Urahara sat troubled in his office over the vanished Ninth Division, she paused at his door to wish him goodnight and left with a worried, sympathetic look. In the years since she has remained an unruffled fixture of the institute, trading routine observations with colleagues like Akon as the Seireitei lurches through one crisis after another.

Niko signed on with the Research and Development Institute when Urahara first established it and never left. She was at her bench the night the Ninth Division's spiritual signatures winked out, and told a frantic Urahara that Hiyori Sarugaki had already gone to investigate. Later she delivered Rukia Kuchiki's captured Gigai to the labs, only to be unnerved on learning its maker was no longer anywhere in Soul Society.

Like most of her peers, she declined to volunteer for the perilous mission against the Arrancar in the living world. During the Wandenreich war she welcomed a battered Akon back to the institute, noting their captain had shut himself away since the fighting, and later stumbled upon the leftovers of the Nemuri experiments, which prompted Akon to recount that grim project's history.