Her existing form is a casualty of a magic ritual she interrupted as a teenager over spring break from college.

Hearing about folks from out of town "doing weird stuff" in an old abandoned church she thought to give them a scare using an old wolverine pelt her parents had.

She jumped down right as they were starting to strike the magic into being, so they both missed random pieces of the magic AND knocked her unconscious swinging the iron rod at her in surprise before fleeing, thinking they'd killed her AND realizing the magic was out of control.

The half-finished magic fed on her in addition to the other components present, at first seeming to just shred and scorch the wolverine pelt and the area around her. Her parents were not amused, but nobody in that town had experience with magic so they didn't know to look into it further and thought she'd been lucky to have snuffed out the squatters campfire so it didn't burn down the church.

Over the months afterwards her body changed, at first everyone thought it was puberty as hair grew in and her fingernails got stronger and grew faster, so she just filed them instead of getting acrylics, and started shaving, happens to everyone, etc.

Then she went blind one night.

The doctors thought it might be conjunctivitis so she got eye patches and eye cream. A week later things cleared up, but when they had her open her eyes that day... they were almost safety orange now and out of proportion.

Things went downhill from there, a "monster" kicked out of her home and running from the town as fast as she could, her years camping and growing up in the wilderness letting her survive. Nobody reported her missing, and while she didn't thrive over that winter the heavy fur and strong claws that came in made the winter manageable compared to a human.

Several reported sighting of a wolverine came in over the next few years, too large though in the photos taken, and attempts to trap the wolverine for tagging failed entirely. Nobody knew it was a college-educated one with near-human dexterity until someone risked a cellular trail camera. They caught footage of her methodically dismantling the camera from the tree and what looked like the storage card pulled out and bitten before the feed cut out as she pulled the batteries out.

Amadi was found soon after when they changed from stalking a wolverine to stalking a human, asleep in her makeshift home in a collapsed farmhouse. She'd dug the cellar into a full 'lair' modelled after how a beaver dam is built, having to climb under the wall of the house... then up over a constructed debris pile... then down into the actual lair so there was no angle light could be seen from the ground.