OOC: An Infopost That Is Actually Not Gratuitous This Time
I will try -- TRY -- to keep it kind of succinct. Kind of. But yeah, this one is probably necessary. And includes multiple YouTube video embeds mostly because I wanted to.
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya (goforthe_optics)
Fandom: Mass Effect
Class: Junior
The Canon
(That's it, that's the canon.)
So yeah, Mass Effect. We've had a good number of characters pass through Fandom by now, most recently fly_so_serious, so most of you should be passingly familiar with the basic premise by now. Epic sci-fi video game trilogy with explosions and interspecies politics and various combinations of possible romance, and also Giant Mechanical Cephalopods of the Apocalypse Which Comes Every 50,000 Years. But I'll give a quick rundown of the first game, since that's most relevant to Tali in Fandom.
About 30 years after humanity first blundered onto the spacefaring galactic scene, what starts out as a simple shakedown cruise for a brand new human spaceship turns into a race to stop one guy from opening the metaphorical door and throwing a welcome party for the end of the world. Commander Shepard, the Normandy's XO, is just a career soldier who didn't ask to become a Galactic Council special operative (the first human Spectre, ooooh) in order to have the resources and leeway to chase Saren Arterius, also a Spectre who went rogue, all over the galaxy, but gets saddled with that anyway. There's political complications involved in that too. Galactic politics are a hot mess.
Along the way, Shepard picks up a few alien allies/squadmates, drives like a maniac while searching for mining resources, and occasionally gets asked to do random-ass things like break up a cult compound or find out what happened to someone's missing sibling halfway across the galaxy or search every monkey on a PLANET FULL OF MONKEYS to retrieve ONE SINGLE STUPID DATA MODULE of classified information. Oh yeah, and keep touching things and ending up in a mess. (ME1 side missions are ridiculous.) That's how this whole thing started, anyway, with getting zapped by a high-tech artifact from a 50,000 year old extinct civilization and having a vision of the galaxy being destroyed by the aforementioned apocalypse squid-things, but does this stop Shepard from wandering around other planets and poking at other alien technology and getting into yet another situation? No. No, it does not.
The rest of the trilogy goes on to deal with further attempts to stave off the Reaper invasion and get various alien races in the galaxy to work together on this whole not-ending-the-world thing, and finding out how the usually sadistically impossible choices Shepard has to make along the way eventually affect things down the line.
It's like putting your emotions in a sack and letting them get kicked around by stampeding cattle for a few hours, then tossing the sack into some whitewater rapids and down a waterfall so when you come along eventually to retrieve said sack, it's pitiful and broken and a sodden mess.
It's awesome.
The Character
"Please, Shepard, I'm a quarian. Give me a chunk of scrap metal, a circuit board, and some element zero, and I'll have it making precision jumps."
Which brings us to Tali, one of said alien squadmates that Shepard (who is female in Tali's timeline) picks up along the way. Tali is her given name, Zorah is her family name, and Rayya is the name of the ship she was born on. (Quarian names can be kind of weird.) Wait, ship?
Yeah, about that. The quarians are in general highly gifted with mechanics, but are not exactly the most popular race in the galaxy due to a whole situation where 300 years ago, they wanted more efficient manual labor, so they created these robots known as the geth ("servant of the people" in the quarian language, Khelish). They kept tinkering, accidentally turned the geth into a networked race of fully sentient artificial intelligences, which is completely illegal, and kiiiiiiiiiind of (understandably) freaked out about that. So they tried to erase their mistake by (not so understandably) wiping out the Cylons geth, and ended up not only stripped of Citadel Council status for their actions but exiled from their own homeworld when they lost that war. Among most of the other races in the galaxy, the quarians have a reputation of being shiftless and untrustworthy, and they're very much treated like outcasts.
Ever since then, they've been living on a massive flotilla of starships known as the Migrant Fleet, trying to find a way to take back their homeworld. Generations of living under extremely regulated environmental conditions wreaked havoc on the quarians' already fragile immune systems, and they now have to wear full-body environmental suits all the time. Even taking off their masks for a few minutes can leave quarians with a nasty fever, which explains why the most anyone is ever going to see of Tali's face is her eyes kind of glowing behind her faceplate.
The envirosuits are pretty fancy, though, and since quarians are pretty much stuck with them 24/7 they can have all kinds of systems installed, like music and theoretically air conditioning and . . .
Also, um. Neurostimulation programs.
A traditional rite of passage for young quarians is to go on Pilgrimage: they leave the Migrant Fleet and go off into the galaxy on their own, and they can't return until they bring back something (knowledge, technology, material goods, etc.) that will benefit the Fleet. As the daughter of the highest ranking member of the Fleet Admiralty Board, Tali was expected to come back from Pilgrimage with something especially spectacular, that might be key to the quarians retaking Rannoch. No pressure or anything. While she was out tracking geth, hoping to gain some insight into a way to defeat them, she managed to get a hold of some data that turned out to be clear proof that Saren was behind the recent attack on a human colony and was trying to bring the Reapers out of dark space to come and, you know, reap all the organic life in the galaxy. She decided someone needed to be warned and ended up getting pursued all the way to the Citadel by some of Saren's agents, where she eventually got rescued by Commander Shepard and joined up with the crew of the Normandy because hey, they were trying to convince the Council that someone needed to stop Saren, and Tali's recording could help them prove it.
From there on out it was battles and missions and Shepard's terrible driving until they finally managed to chase Saren all the way across the galaxy and back, got help from the Council races in killing his oh-sorry-did-you-think-that-was-a-ship Reaper puppetmaster, and at least delayed the end of the world for a while.
That's where Tali's coming to Fandom from, just after the events of the first Mass Effect game. There's a side mission that involves Shepard finding a large cache of encrypted data on the history of the geth. Tali asks to have a copy of the data, thinking it could give the quarians an advantage, and the player can choose whether to have Shepard let her have the data. If so, Tali can go back to the Migrant Fleet; if not, she decides to leave after they deal with Saren so she can continue her Pilgrimage, which is what happened for Fandom purposes even though I am physically incapable of ever actually making that choice. (I did it when I was doing my ME1 refresher playthrough for this app, then went back to a previous save point and let her have the data.)
And that's why she's in Fandom: it might be her best opportunity to find something really unique and useful to bring back to the Fleet.
And now, in bullet point form, the basics about who you'll be dealing with in Fandom:
And now, the quick re-summary of my other on-island girls! But I am too lazy to add pictures for them this time.
Euphrasie "Cosette" Fauchelevent (wildandbrave)
Fandom: Les Misérables, book canon
Class: Junior
Éponine Thénardier (filleauloup)
Fandom: Les Misérables, book canon
Status: Townie
There's also my two alums, brat_inslayage and weetuskenraider, but do you really need that info again?
And finally, me!
Shanie( @alwaysinhere on Twitter, throughtosunrise on Tumblr)
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya (goforthe_optics)
Fandom: Mass Effect
Class: Junior
The Canon
(That's it, that's the canon.)
So yeah, Mass Effect. We've had a good number of characters pass through Fandom by now, most recently fly_so_serious, so most of you should be passingly familiar with the basic premise by now. Epic sci-fi video game trilogy with explosions and interspecies politics and various combinations of possible romance, and also Giant Mechanical Cephalopods of the Apocalypse Which Comes Every 50,000 Years. But I'll give a quick rundown of the first game, since that's most relevant to Tali in Fandom.
About 30 years after humanity first blundered onto the spacefaring galactic scene, what starts out as a simple shakedown cruise for a brand new human spaceship turns into a race to stop one guy from opening the metaphorical door and throwing a welcome party for the end of the world. Commander Shepard, the Normandy's XO, is just a career soldier who didn't ask to become a Galactic Council special operative (the first human Spectre, ooooh) in order to have the resources and leeway to chase Saren Arterius, also a Spectre who went rogue, all over the galaxy, but gets saddled with that anyway. There's political complications involved in that too. Galactic politics are a hot mess.
Along the way, Shepard picks up a few alien allies/squadmates, drives like a maniac while searching for mining resources, and occasionally gets asked to do random-ass things like break up a cult compound or find out what happened to someone's missing sibling halfway across the galaxy or search every monkey on a PLANET FULL OF MONKEYS to retrieve ONE SINGLE STUPID DATA MODULE of classified information. Oh yeah, and keep touching things and ending up in a mess. (ME1 side missions are ridiculous.) That's how this whole thing started, anyway, with getting zapped by a high-tech artifact from a 50,000 year old extinct civilization and having a vision of the galaxy being destroyed by the aforementioned apocalypse squid-things, but does this stop Shepard from wandering around other planets and poking at other alien technology and getting into yet another situation? No. No, it does not.
The rest of the trilogy goes on to deal with further attempts to stave off the Reaper invasion and get various alien races in the galaxy to work together on this whole not-ending-the-world thing, and finding out how the usually sadistically impossible choices Shepard has to make along the way eventually affect things down the line.
It's like putting your emotions in a sack and letting them get kicked around by stampeding cattle for a few hours, then tossing the sack into some whitewater rapids and down a waterfall so when you come along eventually to retrieve said sack, it's pitiful and broken and a sodden mess.
It's awesome.
The Character
"Please, Shepard, I'm a quarian. Give me a chunk of scrap metal, a circuit board, and some element zero, and I'll have it making precision jumps."
Which brings us to Tali, one of said alien squadmates that Shepard (who is female in Tali's timeline) picks up along the way. Tali is her given name, Zorah is her family name, and Rayya is the name of the ship she was born on. (Quarian names can be kind of weird.) Wait, ship?
Yeah, about that. The quarians are in general highly gifted with mechanics, but are not exactly the most popular race in the galaxy due to a whole situation where 300 years ago, they wanted more efficient manual labor, so they created these robots known as the geth ("servant of the people" in the quarian language, Khelish). They kept tinkering, accidentally turned the geth into a networked race of fully sentient artificial intelligences, which is completely illegal, and kiiiiiiiiiind of (understandably) freaked out about that. So they tried to erase their mistake by (not so understandably) wiping out the Cylons geth, and ended up not only stripped of Citadel Council status for their actions but exiled from their own homeworld when they lost that war. Among most of the other races in the galaxy, the quarians have a reputation of being shiftless and untrustworthy, and they're very much treated like outcasts.
Ever since then, they've been living on a massive flotilla of starships known as the Migrant Fleet, trying to find a way to take back their homeworld. Generations of living under extremely regulated environmental conditions wreaked havoc on the quarians' already fragile immune systems, and they now have to wear full-body environmental suits all the time. Even taking off their masks for a few minutes can leave quarians with a nasty fever, which explains why the most anyone is ever going to see of Tali's face is her eyes kind of glowing behind her faceplate.
The envirosuits are pretty fancy, though, and since quarians are pretty much stuck with them 24/7 they can have all kinds of systems installed, like music and theoretically air conditioning and . . .
Click to viewAlso, um. Neurostimulation programs.
A traditional rite of passage for young quarians is to go on Pilgrimage: they leave the Migrant Fleet and go off into the galaxy on their own, and they can't return until they bring back something (knowledge, technology, material goods, etc.) that will benefit the Fleet. As the daughter of the highest ranking member of the Fleet Admiralty Board, Tali was expected to come back from Pilgrimage with something especially spectacular, that might be key to the quarians retaking Rannoch. No pressure or anything. While she was out tracking geth, hoping to gain some insight into a way to defeat them, she managed to get a hold of some data that turned out to be clear proof that Saren was behind the recent attack on a human colony and was trying to bring the Reapers out of dark space to come and, you know, reap all the organic life in the galaxy. She decided someone needed to be warned and ended up getting pursued all the way to the Citadel by some of Saren's agents, where she eventually got rescued by Commander Shepard and joined up with the crew of the Normandy because hey, they were trying to convince the Council that someone needed to stop Saren, and Tali's recording could help them prove it.
From there on out it was battles and missions and Shepard's terrible driving until they finally managed to chase Saren all the way across the galaxy and back, got help from the Council races in killing his oh-sorry-did-you-think-that-was-a-ship Reaper puppetmaster, and at least delayed the end of the world for a while.
That's where Tali's coming to Fandom from, just after the events of the first Mass Effect game. There's a side mission that involves Shepard finding a large cache of encrypted data on the history of the geth. Tali asks to have a copy of the data, thinking it could give the quarians an advantage, and the player can choose whether to have Shepard let her have the data. If so, Tali can go back to the Migrant Fleet; if not, she decides to leave after they deal with Saren so she can continue her Pilgrimage, which is what happened for Fandom purposes even though I am physically incapable of ever actually making that choice. (I did it when I was doing my ME1 refresher playthrough for this app, then went back to a previous save point and let her have the data.)
And that's why she's in Fandom: it might be her best opportunity to find something really unique and useful to bring back to the Fleet.
And now, in bullet point form, the basics about who you'll be dealing with in Fandom:
- While quarians are largely "humanoid," as it were, they have a much slighter build (though it's apparently physically more resilient than the human body) and noticeably bent legs. They also have three fingers/toes.
- There's a distinct electronic timbre to Tali's voice due to the envirosuit, and whenever she speaks you'll see the light on her mask filter blinking in rhythm with her voice.
- Her accent somewhat resembles an eastern European one.
- You may be able to make out the vague outline of facial features through her mask at close enough range, but for the most part all you'll be able to distinguish is her eyes. They do glow kind of white. Yes, it can be kind of creepy. Feel free to react accordingly.
- Quarians in general are very technically proficient; they have to be, since most of the Migrant Fleet is made up of ancient, scavenged ships and everyone is expected to help keep things running. As an engineer, Tali is exceptionally good even by quarian standards.
- Quarians (and turians, in the ME galaxy) can't eat human food. It's a whole mirror chemistry trope thing about dextro-amino acids, and I'm not even going to try to explain that because it's kind of wonky but at the very least it has no nutritional value for them and at the worst can make them extremely sick or kill them. Please don't let this stop your characters from trying to offer Tali food, though. Because I am a terrible person and totally want to put her in a situation like this. Please let me do that. Please please please. (Actually just watch that video clip, it's one of my favorite damn things in the entire Citadel DLC and I laughed myself sick.)
- Does not like or trust artificial intelligences or synthetic life forms. Super does not like or trust them, to the point of prejudice, due to the quarians' history with the geth. (Spoiler: the quarians' history with the geth is not as clean-cut as they claim it is, but she doesn't know that yet.) She'll get over it in time.
- In general, Tali's very sociable, and enjoys places full of people and sound. Personal space is pretty much nonexistent in the Migrant Fleet so too much quiet weirds her out. (Not being on a ship for a while is going to be really weird for her.)
- That said, she did once deal with being hunted by a mercenary by reprogramming a garbage incinerator to lock him in and then turn on. To be fair, he was trying to kill her.
- Also she spent the last couple of months running around the galaxy with Shepard, so she's pretty much used to impossible odds and thoroughly unreasonable expectations and constant mortal peril by now.
- All that said, I haven't actually decided yet what Tali will bring back to the Fleet from Pilgrimage, and am playing that by ear, but if anyone thinks they might have something to volunteer for that, I am totally open to ideas!
- Knows her (older) version of fly_so_serious.
- Also knows her (older) version of fewerexplosions.
- Knew her (younger) version of not_a_whiner, past tense because her Shepard chose to save Ashley Wiliams on Virmire, because I AM A HORRIBLE MONSTER, if you ask Len.
And now, the quick re-summary of my other on-island girls! But I am too lazy to add pictures for them this time.
Euphrasie "Cosette" Fauchelevent (wildandbrave)
Fandom: Les Misérables, book canon
Class: Junior
- Is from Paris in 1829.
- Is basically the nicest person ever.
- Is honestly a talking animal sidekick short of being a Disney princess.
- Was going to a convent school run by an extremely ascetic, strict order before Fandom, but is adapting pretty well to not being so sheltered any more.
- Has no idea her adoptive father is an escaped convict, or that his name is really Jean Valjean; as far as she knows he's Ultime Fauchelevent.
- Had a rough, abusive childhood with the Thénardiers before Valjean rescued her from that. She's largely healed from that, and isn't bitter about it.
- Is a gigantic nerd.
- Honestly doesn't get why people think she's attractive.
Éponine Thénardier (filleauloup)
Fandom: Les Misérables, book canon
Status: Townie
- Is from Paris in 1832, and a different reality than Cosette.
- Was spoiled by her parents until they lost everything, after which point her father had no compunctions about pimping out his daughters and turning them into petty criminals besides, or physically abusing them.
- Was badly wounded at the Rue de la Chanvrerie barricade in the June Rebellion (which is real, though this particular barricade is fictional), but survived and somehow managed to stumble into Fandom where allie_vamp and glacial_queen found her and saved her life.
- Works at the post office.
- Lives in the abandoned warehouse district, in a smaller warehouse that she's managed to turn into a pretty comfortable place by now, even if she did use blackmail to get the utilities working.
- Has a pretty shaky grasp of morality, though she's getting better about it; she tries to be a decent person but doesn't always know how to go about doing that.
- Has no idea why Cosette tries so hard to be friends with her, but lets her get away with it.
- (Okay, secretly she's glad.)
There's also my two alums, brat_inslayage and weetuskenraider, but do you really need that info again?
And finally, me!
Shanie( @alwaysinhere on Twitter, throughtosunrise on Tumblr)
- Lives in Los Angeles.
- Apparently requires canon to be made of ALL THE SADS. Because, well, Mass Effect and Les Misérables.
- Is really into archery, sports (particularly soccer, hockey, and baseball), languages, video games, musicals, and folk/bluegrass music.
- Is a pretty slow pinger but trying to get better at that!
- Is rarely on AIM any more but won't bite if you feel like talking via email or Twitter or what have you, honest.