holloways application
Name: wicke Bananerr.
Age: 18
Journal: munchacha
Contact: you guys already have these :P
1. Character's Name: Jane Shepard
2. Fandom: Mass Effect (game trilogy)
3. Time Frame: Post Shadow-Broker DLC, Paragon path
4. Age: 29, physically. Counting the two years she was “out of action”, 31.
5. Background: (MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ME1 AND ME2)
The Mass Effect universe is basically a futuristic sci-fi world. Interstellar travel is common, alien races generally recognize the importance of maintaining galactic stability and alliances, and most systems have their own means of functioning. The Council - an alliance of intergalactic species -- controls its own portion of space. There are other areas without governing bodies, but the Council is the central authority for many people. The Spectres, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance forces, serve as the Council's... less scrupled agents. They have opposition and support in equal measure.
Everything the uplifted races (turians, asari, salarians, quarians, volus, hanar, drell... the list goes on) in the Mass Effect universe have, they owe to a mysteriously disappeared predecessor race, the Protheans.
Jane Shepard was born in the Earth slums, April 11 in the year 2154. Her childhood was... rough. To avoid being trapped in gang culture (and at the time, to escape the Tenth Street Reds gang she was already in) and poverty she enlisted in the Alliance military literally as soon as she was eighteen. A decent soldier, not too long after completing her marine-exclusive special forces N7 training and doing her first series of missions did things go straight to hell.
It was here she survived and excelled where her entire unit fell during a brutal thresher maw attack on the planet Akuze. She faced and overcame physical torments and psychological stresses, scarred but did not break-- and made it to the landing zone. While it wasn't something Shepard liked to talk about, period, the incident became common gossip among Alliance recruits.
The rest of her service went comparatively smoother. The Alliance eventually assigned her as Executive Officer to the SSV Normandy, a state-of-the-art frigate capable of utilizing stealth technology unique to the vessel. On a supposedly routine shakedown run they picked up a turian Spectre, the first of several warning signs that their mission to test-drive the new technology on a colonized planet was more than routine. Right before they landed on the planet named Eden Prime for its paradisaical quality, Shepard learned that the Spectre (Nihlus Kryik) was accompanying the run to a) monitor a Prothean relic that might contain advanced tech info and b) to review her candidacy for Spectre status. The ensuing conversation was interrupted by a distress call from Eden Prime as an unknown enemy laid siege to the colony.
The enemy turned out to be geth, a race of artificially intelligent synthetics created by the quarian for manual labor that rebelled and won their freedom, led by a rogue Spectre named Saren Arterius. Saren killed Nihlus, used the relic for the Prothean vision of destruction it contained, and left. Shepard led her team minus a recruit and plus a surviving marine that had survived the attack to its location. One of her squad activated it by accident, and after shoving him out of harm's way, she had the same vision Saren experienced forced into her mind.
After recovery the SSV Normandy traveled to the Citadel, the Council's base. Her initial accusations against Saren were rejected, but after a successful investigation led by Shepard herself, his Spectre status was revoked-- and the Council named her the first human Spectre. Her first orders after being given command of the Normany were to hunt down Saren and stop him from fulfilling his then-unidentified scheme. During her time on the Citadel Shepard managed to build her squad further; a quarian (Tali'Zorah nar Rayya), a turian (Garrus Vakarian), and a krogan (Urdnot Wrex) joined the Normandy's crew before leaving.
She started with three leads: the planets Noveria, Feros, and Therum. As the asari Matriarch Benezia was revealed to be allied with Saren during the investigation, her first move was to locate the mining world Therum to search for the Matriarch's daughter, scientist Liara T'Soni. After retrieving her Shepard discovered not only was she NOT in cohoots with Saren, but she had a theory regarding the Protheans implying they were not the first civilization to vanish without a trace. The asari offered to join minds with Shepard to decipher the Prothean vision, but to no avail. She stayed on the Normandy and joined Shepard's ragtag crew.
Next stop was Noveria, a frozen terrestrial planet outside of Citadel Space and the subject of geth interest. With the assistance of undercover Internal Affairs agent Gianna Parasini, the initially troublesome entry into Noveria was eased and Shepard allowed to keep her weapons. After finding out that Benezia had been on the planet, she requested from the resident administrator Anoleis permission to leave the port, but was refused. Consequentially Shepard had to jump through several messy but ultimately irrelevant hoops before she could leave to follow Benezia to Peak 15.
Once there, she faced more obstacles in the form of having to repair Peak 15 as the rachni (an insectoid race experimented upon by the company Binary Helix) had wrought bloody havoc across the facility. Shepard then arrived at the Peak's rift station, where survivors of the rachni uprising had grouped together. Through interactions with them she gained access to the Hot Labs, and Benezia.
From the Matriarch, Shepard and co. began to comprehend that Saren, who was no real threat, was instead the tool of the machine he'd rode into Eden Prime on. Its name was Sovereign, a Reaper, and those who stayed aboard it for extended lengths of time were all indoctrinated to serve its purposes. Benezia herself had only joined Saren to try and stop his insanity, but ended up virtually enslaved like the Spectre. She came to Noveria with the intention of interrogating the rachni queen imprisoned there and extracting the location of the Mu Relay (mass relays being transit devices to quicken space travel for specific locations) for Saren. Unfortunately for her and Liara, the Matriarch couldn't be saved from her indoctrinated mind and had to be put down.
As soon as Benezia had been killed, the rachni queen communicated with Shepard through a dead asari commando. From it she learned enough to realize that killing the queen there would effectively be the genocide of an entire species, made violent in Peak 15 because of Binary Helix's actions and not by malevolence. Shepard let the queen go, to build anew, and returned to the Normandy.
The colonial planet Feros was next on the list after Saren had sent his geth to attack. Shepard's objective, to figure out why, led to a geth attack almost immediately on arrival. Through the resulting firefight she maneuvered her landing squad to where the Zhu's Hope colonists had holed up to stave off the geth. From them she reassigned her first priority from investigation to helping the colonists restock and stabilize; after accomplishing such she headed to the ExoGeni company headquarters stationed nearby, hoping to find answers there.
Which she did. It turned out ExoGeni had unleashed the Thorian, a sentient thousand-years-old plant, upon Zhu's Hopes and had been observing the indoctrinating effects it inflicted on the colonists. The geth were on Feros by order of Saren, sent to destroy the Thorian. Naturally soon after Shepard had realized the gravity of what was happening the Thorian made the colonists begin to claw at the Normandy's hull. She had to act, and so she did, fast-- using nerve gas to incapacitate without killing the colonists. The plant-creature unsurprisingly was more difficult to kill... but worth it. A Sovereign-indoctrinated asari left to the Thorian by Saren as a “gift” informed Shepard (before AND after destroying the Thorian) that it had the ability to lend the “Cipher”, or understanding of what the Prothean relic's vision meant, and so it had done for the rogue Spectre.
Her name turned out to be Shiala, formerly in the service of Benezia. As Saren knew Shepard to be on his tail by the time he questioned the Thorian, he'd tried to eradicate it himself and remove the possibility of her discovering the Conduit he, and his Reaper vessel Sovereign, sought. The Conduit would turn out to be a 'back door' onto the Citadel, heart of the galaxy and key to extinguishing the organic races' resistance. The Protheans had vanished so long ago because of similar ploys made by the Reapers.
Shepard allowed her to live on the condition she help Zhu's Hope rebuild. With the colony on the road to recovery, she and the Normandy left Feros.
The Council contacted Shepard with yet another lead involving a static-filled mission-critical transmission from a salarian espionage team on the planet Virmire. They'd been investigating Saren's activity there; after Shepard had met and been updated on intel by the salarian in charge, Captain Kirrahe, they collaborated on a plan to shut down the krogan breeding facility Saren had been using to construct an army. Her squadmate Urdnot Wrex took offense at Shepard's willingness to destroy his species' cure to the genophage, a salarian-engineered bioweapon crippling krogan reproduction, but by some miracle she managed to talk him down.
It turned out for the best, as Shepard and co. found the facility to actually be a research center for studying Soverign's indoctrination effect on those who served it. She found another Prothean beacon in Saren's private lab, gaining her another vision... and then they met a hologram of Soverign, not a ship but a true Reaper. The back-and-forth between commander and Reaper wasn't illuminating, per say, but she got the very real sense that it would not stop until every organic had either been obliterated or enslaved. More fuel to her fire. She nuked the facility and made a hard choice between saving one of two loyal squadmembers, deciding on Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko and leaving the other at the facility as it exploded. Before it did, Saren made a last-ditch effort to convert Shepard before she refused, fought him, and had to accept that she couldn't save everyone as he escaped and she had to depart.
Aboard the Normandy, Shepard collaborated with Liara to fully interpret her visions, and together they discovered they meant a distress call to warn post-Prothean races of the Reaper threat. Liara pinpointed the location of the vision's landmarks to be on Ilos, a Prothean planet accessible through the Mu Relay. Shepard, told the Council was finally putting effort toward facing Saren, returned to the Citadel only to be told they didn't believe her about the Reapers and forbade her from going to Ilos herself. Due to her 'alarmist theories' and persistence, the Normandy was locked and blocked. Her pre-Spectre XO Anderson committed treason, helped her regain control of the frigate and off Commander Shepard went to save the galaxy.
She chased Saren and his geth to Ilos, followed them into a bunker and thanks to the assistance of a Prothean VI, learned that the Citadel was in truth a huge mass relay linked to dark space, where the Reapers laid in wait to assault the galaxy. She followed at Saren's heels all the way through the Conduit and to the Citadel where he'd begun his assault from inside and out.
What happened next became known as the Battle of the Citadel. Shepard and two squadmembers fought their way through rampant geth and indoctrinated krogan until they reached the Council Chambers, where Saren worked at transferring control of the Citadel to Saren. Shepard didn't attack him straight off the bat as he seemed eager to talk, to to boast. The conversation escalated to the point where he slung off the indoctrination, thanked her, and shot himself in the head. She had time to give the Alliance Fleet the order to protect the Council against geth/Sovereign siege before another fight with a revived Saren leading to his final death.
Shepard had her cake and ate it, too. The Council expressed their gratitude, and she nominated Captain Anderson for the first human Council representative. She left soon after on the Normandy to keep looking for a way to stop the Reapers.
A month later on patrol to locate/destroy remaining geth, the SSV Normandy came under attack by an unknown vessel. Shepard got the rest of the crew to escape pods but after she had saved her crippled pilot Jeff “Joker” Moreau was blasted off in a second set of explosions. He and they survived, but Shepard, her air supply dwindling, asphyxiated and died as she entered the atmosphere of a nearby planet.
The pro-human and ambiguously anti-alien organization Cerberus took her body and began the Lazarus Project, reconstructing the one person the man in charge of the organization (known only as The Illusive Man) thought could ultimately protect humanity. She awakened, fully functional, in the year 2185 on a research station. Cerberus agents Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor assisted her in escaping, then took the resurrected Commander to their headquarters.
The Illusive Man informed her of her revival and upgraded body (most of the construction work done during the two years involved cybernetic implants and enhancements for functionality), as well as his purpose in doing so. While it unsettled her to owe a debt to an extremist mastermind, she had to acknowledge she needed his resources to combat a new threat to humanity. Colonies on the outskirts of the Alliance were disappearing, and she needed to find the reason why.
Her first foray to the recently-attacked colony of Freedom's Progress, in the Terminus Systems, saved no colonists but led to an important lead. Shepard learned that an insect-like species known as the Collectors was responsible for the attacks and took the intel to the Illusive Man. She earned command of the Normandy SR-2, a larger, newer model based on the original Normandy. Her old pilot, Joker, stayed on the crew as she launched what she thought would be a suicide mission to recruit a new team and stop the Collectors.
After gaining six squadmembers (Garrus from her old team, the salarian Mordin Solus, a 'perfect krogan' dubbed Grunt, a mercenary-for-hire known as Zaeed Massani, the master-thief Kasumi Goto and a criminally biotic psychopath named Jack), the Illusive Man contacted her again to tell Shepard that another colony had been attacked by Collectors. If she wanted to intercept an attack, the time was then, and therefore she seized the opportunity. While half the humans on Horizon were abducted, Shepard saved the other half from the Collectors' grasp and had a tense talk with the squadmate she saved back on Virmire, who'd been stationed by the Alliance on the colony.
A conversation with the Illusive Man enlightened Shepard considerably-- he'd leaked the information that Shepard was alive and kicking to the Alliance, freely allowing the Collectors to intercept the intel. They confirmed his suspicions that they were targeting Shepard specifically when they attacked Horizon, where Kaidan Alenko was stationed. Though unhappy at having her name thrown around like this, Shepard buckled down and recruited three more squadmembers: the asari justicar Samara, the drell assassin Thane Krios, and Tali, a returning teammate.
She later boarded what the Illusive Man told her was a disabled Collector ship. The foray revealed the Collectors to be genetically modified ex-Protheans who now had no will but of the Reapers, empty collector pods, and dead human colonists. Lots of dead humans. Upon locating the ship center and seeing the millions of empty pods it contained, Shepard realized Earth itself would be targeted to fill them. The excursion turned out to be a Collector trap -- as the Illusive Man well knew - and the way onto the Normandy was hard-fought.
Shepard had fierce words with him, who didn't pretend he had done no wrong, to his credit, but claimed it to be necessary and the information they now had worth the risk. He talked her down to relative calm and told the irritated marine EDI had gathered data on a viable means to duplicate the Collectors' method of traversing the Omega 4 Relay. They needed to acquire a Reaper IFF system to safely navigate the infamous relay. He gave Shepard the location, aboard a derelict Reaper.
Knowing the unlikelihood of her survival, she dedicated the rest of her time to taking care of business and went above and beyond the call of duty. Shepard made certain that every member of her squad had no remaining baggage; she helped Grunt through what was essentially krogan puberty, lent aid to Samara in order to kill her sociopath serial-killer daughter, let Jack blow up an abandoned Cerberus facility, and more of the same for all the others. In return for her painstaking assistance, she had their loyalty.
Onto the derelict Reaper they went, searching for the IFF and discovering along the way that it didn't matter if a Reaper was “dead', the indoctrination effect remained in place. Being “dead” also did not stop the Reaper from automatically activating its shields when they took the IFF and forcing Shepard and her squad to destroy the ship's power core, hopefully escaping before it crashed and burned. Along the way a single, curiously non-hostile geth (capable of speech and apparently willing to lend bullets) trailed them to the core and assisted again before indoctrinated husks approached it from behind and disabled it. She engaged them and the core in a firefight, but took the geth aboard the Normandy in a last-minute decision.
After taking security precautions in case it got treacherous ideas, Shepard reactivated the geth who would be dubbed “Legion” by EDI, the Normandy's artificial intelligence. It explained itself to her sufficiently enough that she accepted his explanation of the split geth forces: those who followed the Reapers, or “Old Machines” according to them, were heretics. The geth who wanted to forge their own path of freedom, Legion among them, did not approve. Shepard allowed Legion to join her squad against the Collectors.
The installation of the IFF took some time, EDI warned, so Shepard took her squad on a shuttle to take care of a heretic geth virus Legion warned her about. While they were elsewhere EDI announced to Joker her discovery of a hidden signal in the IFF, broadcasting the location of the Normandy in yet another Collector trap. The Collectors boarded, capturing the entire crew but for Joker. He'd have been taken if he had not made the decision to give ship control to EDI, who expelled the Collectors herself and free the Normandy.
Shepard on returning to an empty frigate did not look back. She gave the order to head through the Omega-4 relay with only her squad, pilot, AI, and upgraded vessel.
The run was successful and they fought off multiple attacks from Collector defenses. The explosion from one such vessel bashed the Normandy good, sending it crashing on the outer surface of the base. From there she took her team and commenced the attack, fighting long, hard, utilizing their individual assets from phase to phase. They saved the Normandy crew and reached the heart of the station and found what the Collectors had been constructing from the captured colonists. A human-like Reaper composed of their genetic material hung from feeding tubes in its own version of synthetic reproduction. This was the abomination Shepard resolved to destroy, along with the base as a whole, unwilling to let it fall into the Illusive Man's hands and to hell with any advantage it would give humanity in the coming war against the Reapers.
She killed the abomination, escaping to the Normandy as the station collapsed, miraculously without casualties. Shepard and the Illusive Man traded harsh words, and she told him flat-out she would stop the Reapers whether or not he supported her.
Her first steps toward taking an advantage were passing along intel to Liara T'Soni, who had not rejoined her squad but remained on good terms. Together, they uprooted the Shadow Broker (an infamous and shadowy information broker with fingers in every galactic pie), and replaced him with Liara herself. Shepard now had a deadly and influential friend who owed her a life.
6. Personality: Shepard is a soldier, through and through. She's a chronic problem-solver whose methods forbid procrastination, tomfoolery or ineffectual action. If there is a mission, come hell or highwater, she will get it done... though recklessness is not among Shepard's vices. She recognizes the value of diplomacy and adaptability, analyzing a situation to figure out the “who” and the “what” rather than shooting first and asking questions later. Pacing one self and (grudgingly) acknowledging her limits are part of what makes Shepard formidable aside from her grim focus and cool head. A natural leader that, according to a crew-member, has "that fire that makes someone willing to follow her into hell itself."
Despite a tendency to collect aliens and criminals like ducklings, Shepard is a good judge of character and knows the value of trusting her gut instinct. If it can be avoided, she will do her damned best to never compromise her moral integrity for a mission success; minimize casualties, look after her people, keep an open mind. Even if it gives her the advantage, she will not violate her individual code. The ends do not justify the means for her.
Seeing someone bully the people around them into submission provokes the Mama Bear temper in Shepard that's largely responsible for when she does have lapses in judgment, like anybody else. Her gut instinct is usually only half-right. Shepard worries, cracks jokes, has pride and petty annoyances in spades, gets restless, is ignorant of a great many things, and overall is aware that she's neither immortal nor capable of accomplishing half as much as she does without her crew. The pressure of expectation - hers, and of the people around her - is a constant weight on her shoulders. She doesn't always know if she can live up to that expectation, and it hounds her.
8. Appearance: Shepard's of medium height and a solid, streamlined build, neither excessively curved nor twig-thin. Caucasian. She has the muscular density one would expect from a cybernetics-enhanced space marine on active duty. Her hair is cropped short and kept out of her face for convenience's sake. Depending on the light, it can be a dusty brown or the color of reddish dirt. Her eyes are a cool green, and while she'll never be model-material, Shepard is comfortable in her body and strength, which lends her some charisma.
She has scars like any soldier, some from the thresher maw attack on Akuze, others from miscellaneous missions. They're as much part of her as her arms and legs.
9. Abilities: Nothing supernatural, but since being resurrected with cybernetic implants her weight, strength and endurance have been mega-amplified. She can and has headbutted heavily armored aliens without flinching. Comparing her tackles to the force of a charging bull wouldn't be inaccurate.
10. Languages: English, but she's got a sub-dermal implant for real-time translation of other languages. This extends to all Earth languages and is up to date on many alien languages, but something like Star Ocean 3's Elicoorian would not translate as linguistics have not integrated the machine translation for it.
11. Items: Suit of armor (the fabulous futuristic kind), as well as the shields and health-regulating installations that come with it. Give it a week or two before it runs out of power.
12. Weapons: A grenade launcher, a shotgun, a modified Collector assault rifle, a pistol, and a sniper rifle. Everything on entry but the grenade launcher causes second-degree burns, and the launcher shoots bean-bag rounds. (There's a slot for all of these weapons on her armor.)
13. Writing sample - Third Person Prose:
Shepard pulled a strict left-turn out of the oncoming traffic. Liara made a noise like a choking gerbil and clutched the sides of the taxi. Maybe she should have been worried that the drell in the back had been suspiciously quiet, but the Commander found she appreciated his silence more than she would have his protests at her steering technique.
Which, despite what the hyperventilating information broker sitting next to her believed, would serve them better than tip-toeing around Illium and hoping the crazy asari fleeing their stolen taxi would kindly slow down. Very rarely did she meet a mass-murderer who would surrender quietly and without the fuss of collateral damage. There were people being caught in the cross-fire that very second, and she'd end it as soon as she could.
Liara grabbed Shepard's right shoulder and found her voice. “Truck!”
“I know,” said Shepard, calm as you please. She banked and barrel rolled into a tunnel when her quarry dropped a proximity bomb. Doubtless it would ruin some other vehicle's day. Isaac Newton really was the deadliest son of a bitch in space.
”Truck!”
“I know,” Shepard said again, sharper this time and unimpressed by the penchant for backseat driving Liara was prone to. The explosion ahead would encompass the tunnel in its entirety, halting any traffic and succinctly cutting off the chase. Just as planned for the target. In a remarkable display of skill (and, though she wouldn't say anything out of concern Liara might try to wrest the wheel from her and make matters worse, fiendish pleasure) she maneuvered the abused taxi into the tiniest of debris-free spaces in the upperhand corner.
Liara might have screamed, Shepard couldn't be sure. She grunted eloquently and bull-rushed the fleeing asari. A bash or six and she'd have the woman on the ground.
14. Writing sample - First Person Prose:
If this is common knowledge already, sorry to be the ass pointing it out, but someone's decked the chickens out in knit sweaters.
[Shepard is inclined to think she's hallucinating. It wouldn't be horrifically far-fetched, all things considered. The question foremost in her mind (after 'why do these chickens have knit sweaters' ) was why it was barnyard animals and not, for example, a thresher maw. She almost expected her subconscious to give her a thresher maw wearing a balaclava.
Why chickens? You hardly ever see those anymore.]
… And if anyone has something to add, I'd appreciate it. Nothing else important taking up my time, that's for damn sure. I mean it. Let me know.
15. Tattoo: Under her left foot!
Age: 18
Journal: munchacha
Contact: you guys already have these :P
1. Character's Name: Jane Shepard
2. Fandom: Mass Effect (game trilogy)
3. Time Frame: Post Shadow-Broker DLC, Paragon path
4. Age: 29, physically. Counting the two years she was “out of action”, 31.
5. Background: (MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ME1 AND ME2)
The Mass Effect universe is basically a futuristic sci-fi world. Interstellar travel is common, alien races generally recognize the importance of maintaining galactic stability and alliances, and most systems have their own means of functioning. The Council - an alliance of intergalactic species -- controls its own portion of space. There are other areas without governing bodies, but the Council is the central authority for many people. The Spectres, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance forces, serve as the Council's... less scrupled agents. They have opposition and support in equal measure.
Everything the uplifted races (turians, asari, salarians, quarians, volus, hanar, drell... the list goes on) in the Mass Effect universe have, they owe to a mysteriously disappeared predecessor race, the Protheans.
Jane Shepard was born in the Earth slums, April 11 in the year 2154. Her childhood was... rough. To avoid being trapped in gang culture (and at the time, to escape the Tenth Street Reds gang she was already in) and poverty she enlisted in the Alliance military literally as soon as she was eighteen. A decent soldier, not too long after completing her marine-exclusive special forces N7 training and doing her first series of missions did things go straight to hell.
It was here she survived and excelled where her entire unit fell during a brutal thresher maw attack on the planet Akuze. She faced and overcame physical torments and psychological stresses, scarred but did not break-- and made it to the landing zone. While it wasn't something Shepard liked to talk about, period, the incident became common gossip among Alliance recruits.
The rest of her service went comparatively smoother. The Alliance eventually assigned her as Executive Officer to the SSV Normandy, a state-of-the-art frigate capable of utilizing stealth technology unique to the vessel. On a supposedly routine shakedown run they picked up a turian Spectre, the first of several warning signs that their mission to test-drive the new technology on a colonized planet was more than routine. Right before they landed on the planet named Eden Prime for its paradisaical quality, Shepard learned that the Spectre (Nihlus Kryik) was accompanying the run to a) monitor a Prothean relic that might contain advanced tech info and b) to review her candidacy for Spectre status. The ensuing conversation was interrupted by a distress call from Eden Prime as an unknown enemy laid siege to the colony.
The enemy turned out to be geth, a race of artificially intelligent synthetics created by the quarian for manual labor that rebelled and won their freedom, led by a rogue Spectre named Saren Arterius. Saren killed Nihlus, used the relic for the Prothean vision of destruction it contained, and left. Shepard led her team minus a recruit and plus a surviving marine that had survived the attack to its location. One of her squad activated it by accident, and after shoving him out of harm's way, she had the same vision Saren experienced forced into her mind.
After recovery the SSV Normandy traveled to the Citadel, the Council's base. Her initial accusations against Saren were rejected, but after a successful investigation led by Shepard herself, his Spectre status was revoked-- and the Council named her the first human Spectre. Her first orders after being given command of the Normany were to hunt down Saren and stop him from fulfilling his then-unidentified scheme. During her time on the Citadel Shepard managed to build her squad further; a quarian (Tali'Zorah nar Rayya), a turian (Garrus Vakarian), and a krogan (Urdnot Wrex) joined the Normandy's crew before leaving.
She started with three leads: the planets Noveria, Feros, and Therum. As the asari Matriarch Benezia was revealed to be allied with Saren during the investigation, her first move was to locate the mining world Therum to search for the Matriarch's daughter, scientist Liara T'Soni. After retrieving her Shepard discovered not only was she NOT in cohoots with Saren, but she had a theory regarding the Protheans implying they were not the first civilization to vanish without a trace. The asari offered to join minds with Shepard to decipher the Prothean vision, but to no avail. She stayed on the Normandy and joined Shepard's ragtag crew.
Next stop was Noveria, a frozen terrestrial planet outside of Citadel Space and the subject of geth interest. With the assistance of undercover Internal Affairs agent Gianna Parasini, the initially troublesome entry into Noveria was eased and Shepard allowed to keep her weapons. After finding out that Benezia had been on the planet, she requested from the resident administrator Anoleis permission to leave the port, but was refused. Consequentially Shepard had to jump through several messy but ultimately irrelevant hoops before she could leave to follow Benezia to Peak 15.
Once there, she faced more obstacles in the form of having to repair Peak 15 as the rachni (an insectoid race experimented upon by the company Binary Helix) had wrought bloody havoc across the facility. Shepard then arrived at the Peak's rift station, where survivors of the rachni uprising had grouped together. Through interactions with them she gained access to the Hot Labs, and Benezia.
From the Matriarch, Shepard and co. began to comprehend that Saren, who was no real threat, was instead the tool of the machine he'd rode into Eden Prime on. Its name was Sovereign, a Reaper, and those who stayed aboard it for extended lengths of time were all indoctrinated to serve its purposes. Benezia herself had only joined Saren to try and stop his insanity, but ended up virtually enslaved like the Spectre. She came to Noveria with the intention of interrogating the rachni queen imprisoned there and extracting the location of the Mu Relay (mass relays being transit devices to quicken space travel for specific locations) for Saren. Unfortunately for her and Liara, the Matriarch couldn't be saved from her indoctrinated mind and had to be put down.
As soon as Benezia had been killed, the rachni queen communicated with Shepard through a dead asari commando. From it she learned enough to realize that killing the queen there would effectively be the genocide of an entire species, made violent in Peak 15 because of Binary Helix's actions and not by malevolence. Shepard let the queen go, to build anew, and returned to the Normandy.
The colonial planet Feros was next on the list after Saren had sent his geth to attack. Shepard's objective, to figure out why, led to a geth attack almost immediately on arrival. Through the resulting firefight she maneuvered her landing squad to where the Zhu's Hope colonists had holed up to stave off the geth. From them she reassigned her first priority from investigation to helping the colonists restock and stabilize; after accomplishing such she headed to the ExoGeni company headquarters stationed nearby, hoping to find answers there.
Which she did. It turned out ExoGeni had unleashed the Thorian, a sentient thousand-years-old plant, upon Zhu's Hopes and had been observing the indoctrinating effects it inflicted on the colonists. The geth were on Feros by order of Saren, sent to destroy the Thorian. Naturally soon after Shepard had realized the gravity of what was happening the Thorian made the colonists begin to claw at the Normandy's hull. She had to act, and so she did, fast-- using nerve gas to incapacitate without killing the colonists. The plant-creature unsurprisingly was more difficult to kill... but worth it. A Sovereign-indoctrinated asari left to the Thorian by Saren as a “gift” informed Shepard (before AND after destroying the Thorian) that it had the ability to lend the “Cipher”, or understanding of what the Prothean relic's vision meant, and so it had done for the rogue Spectre.
Her name turned out to be Shiala, formerly in the service of Benezia. As Saren knew Shepard to be on his tail by the time he questioned the Thorian, he'd tried to eradicate it himself and remove the possibility of her discovering the Conduit he, and his Reaper vessel Sovereign, sought. The Conduit would turn out to be a 'back door' onto the Citadel, heart of the galaxy and key to extinguishing the organic races' resistance. The Protheans had vanished so long ago because of similar ploys made by the Reapers.
Shepard allowed her to live on the condition she help Zhu's Hope rebuild. With the colony on the road to recovery, she and the Normandy left Feros.
The Council contacted Shepard with yet another lead involving a static-filled mission-critical transmission from a salarian espionage team on the planet Virmire. They'd been investigating Saren's activity there; after Shepard had met and been updated on intel by the salarian in charge, Captain Kirrahe, they collaborated on a plan to shut down the krogan breeding facility Saren had been using to construct an army. Her squadmate Urdnot Wrex took offense at Shepard's willingness to destroy his species' cure to the genophage, a salarian-engineered bioweapon crippling krogan reproduction, but by some miracle she managed to talk him down.
It turned out for the best, as Shepard and co. found the facility to actually be a research center for studying Soverign's indoctrination effect on those who served it. She found another Prothean beacon in Saren's private lab, gaining her another vision... and then they met a hologram of Soverign, not a ship but a true Reaper. The back-and-forth between commander and Reaper wasn't illuminating, per say, but she got the very real sense that it would not stop until every organic had either been obliterated or enslaved. More fuel to her fire. She nuked the facility and made a hard choice between saving one of two loyal squadmembers, deciding on Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko and leaving the other at the facility as it exploded. Before it did, Saren made a last-ditch effort to convert Shepard before she refused, fought him, and had to accept that she couldn't save everyone as he escaped and she had to depart.
Aboard the Normandy, Shepard collaborated with Liara to fully interpret her visions, and together they discovered they meant a distress call to warn post-Prothean races of the Reaper threat. Liara pinpointed the location of the vision's landmarks to be on Ilos, a Prothean planet accessible through the Mu Relay. Shepard, told the Council was finally putting effort toward facing Saren, returned to the Citadel only to be told they didn't believe her about the Reapers and forbade her from going to Ilos herself. Due to her 'alarmist theories' and persistence, the Normandy was locked and blocked. Her pre-Spectre XO Anderson committed treason, helped her regain control of the frigate and off Commander Shepard went to save the galaxy.
She chased Saren and his geth to Ilos, followed them into a bunker and thanks to the assistance of a Prothean VI, learned that the Citadel was in truth a huge mass relay linked to dark space, where the Reapers laid in wait to assault the galaxy. She followed at Saren's heels all the way through the Conduit and to the Citadel where he'd begun his assault from inside and out.
What happened next became known as the Battle of the Citadel. Shepard and two squadmembers fought their way through rampant geth and indoctrinated krogan until they reached the Council Chambers, where Saren worked at transferring control of the Citadel to Saren. Shepard didn't attack him straight off the bat as he seemed eager to talk, to to boast. The conversation escalated to the point where he slung off the indoctrination, thanked her, and shot himself in the head. She had time to give the Alliance Fleet the order to protect the Council against geth/Sovereign siege before another fight with a revived Saren leading to his final death.
Shepard had her cake and ate it, too. The Council expressed their gratitude, and she nominated Captain Anderson for the first human Council representative. She left soon after on the Normandy to keep looking for a way to stop the Reapers.
A month later on patrol to locate/destroy remaining geth, the SSV Normandy came under attack by an unknown vessel. Shepard got the rest of the crew to escape pods but after she had saved her crippled pilot Jeff “Joker” Moreau was blasted off in a second set of explosions. He and they survived, but Shepard, her air supply dwindling, asphyxiated and died as she entered the atmosphere of a nearby planet.
The pro-human and ambiguously anti-alien organization Cerberus took her body and began the Lazarus Project, reconstructing the one person the man in charge of the organization (known only as The Illusive Man) thought could ultimately protect humanity. She awakened, fully functional, in the year 2185 on a research station. Cerberus agents Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor assisted her in escaping, then took the resurrected Commander to their headquarters.
The Illusive Man informed her of her revival and upgraded body (most of the construction work done during the two years involved cybernetic implants and enhancements for functionality), as well as his purpose in doing so. While it unsettled her to owe a debt to an extremist mastermind, she had to acknowledge she needed his resources to combat a new threat to humanity. Colonies on the outskirts of the Alliance were disappearing, and she needed to find the reason why.
Her first foray to the recently-attacked colony of Freedom's Progress, in the Terminus Systems, saved no colonists but led to an important lead. Shepard learned that an insect-like species known as the Collectors was responsible for the attacks and took the intel to the Illusive Man. She earned command of the Normandy SR-2, a larger, newer model based on the original Normandy. Her old pilot, Joker, stayed on the crew as she launched what she thought would be a suicide mission to recruit a new team and stop the Collectors.
After gaining six squadmembers (Garrus from her old team, the salarian Mordin Solus, a 'perfect krogan' dubbed Grunt, a mercenary-for-hire known as Zaeed Massani, the master-thief Kasumi Goto and a criminally biotic psychopath named Jack), the Illusive Man contacted her again to tell Shepard that another colony had been attacked by Collectors. If she wanted to intercept an attack, the time was then, and therefore she seized the opportunity. While half the humans on Horizon were abducted, Shepard saved the other half from the Collectors' grasp and had a tense talk with the squadmate she saved back on Virmire, who'd been stationed by the Alliance on the colony.
A conversation with the Illusive Man enlightened Shepard considerably-- he'd leaked the information that Shepard was alive and kicking to the Alliance, freely allowing the Collectors to intercept the intel. They confirmed his suspicions that they were targeting Shepard specifically when they attacked Horizon, where Kaidan Alenko was stationed. Though unhappy at having her name thrown around like this, Shepard buckled down and recruited three more squadmembers: the asari justicar Samara, the drell assassin Thane Krios, and Tali, a returning teammate.
She later boarded what the Illusive Man told her was a disabled Collector ship. The foray revealed the Collectors to be genetically modified ex-Protheans who now had no will but of the Reapers, empty collector pods, and dead human colonists. Lots of dead humans. Upon locating the ship center and seeing the millions of empty pods it contained, Shepard realized Earth itself would be targeted to fill them. The excursion turned out to be a Collector trap -- as the Illusive Man well knew - and the way onto the Normandy was hard-fought.
Shepard had fierce words with him, who didn't pretend he had done no wrong, to his credit, but claimed it to be necessary and the information they now had worth the risk. He talked her down to relative calm and told the irritated marine EDI had gathered data on a viable means to duplicate the Collectors' method of traversing the Omega 4 Relay. They needed to acquire a Reaper IFF system to safely navigate the infamous relay. He gave Shepard the location, aboard a derelict Reaper.
Knowing the unlikelihood of her survival, she dedicated the rest of her time to taking care of business and went above and beyond the call of duty. Shepard made certain that every member of her squad had no remaining baggage; she helped Grunt through what was essentially krogan puberty, lent aid to Samara in order to kill her sociopath serial-killer daughter, let Jack blow up an abandoned Cerberus facility, and more of the same for all the others. In return for her painstaking assistance, she had their loyalty.
Onto the derelict Reaper they went, searching for the IFF and discovering along the way that it didn't matter if a Reaper was “dead', the indoctrination effect remained in place. Being “dead” also did not stop the Reaper from automatically activating its shields when they took the IFF and forcing Shepard and her squad to destroy the ship's power core, hopefully escaping before it crashed and burned. Along the way a single, curiously non-hostile geth (capable of speech and apparently willing to lend bullets) trailed them to the core and assisted again before indoctrinated husks approached it from behind and disabled it. She engaged them and the core in a firefight, but took the geth aboard the Normandy in a last-minute decision.
After taking security precautions in case it got treacherous ideas, Shepard reactivated the geth who would be dubbed “Legion” by EDI, the Normandy's artificial intelligence. It explained itself to her sufficiently enough that she accepted his explanation of the split geth forces: those who followed the Reapers, or “Old Machines” according to them, were heretics. The geth who wanted to forge their own path of freedom, Legion among them, did not approve. Shepard allowed Legion to join her squad against the Collectors.
The installation of the IFF took some time, EDI warned, so Shepard took her squad on a shuttle to take care of a heretic geth virus Legion warned her about. While they were elsewhere EDI announced to Joker her discovery of a hidden signal in the IFF, broadcasting the location of the Normandy in yet another Collector trap. The Collectors boarded, capturing the entire crew but for Joker. He'd have been taken if he had not made the decision to give ship control to EDI, who expelled the Collectors herself and free the Normandy.
Shepard on returning to an empty frigate did not look back. She gave the order to head through the Omega-4 relay with only her squad, pilot, AI, and upgraded vessel.
The run was successful and they fought off multiple attacks from Collector defenses. The explosion from one such vessel bashed the Normandy good, sending it crashing on the outer surface of the base. From there she took her team and commenced the attack, fighting long, hard, utilizing their individual assets from phase to phase. They saved the Normandy crew and reached the heart of the station and found what the Collectors had been constructing from the captured colonists. A human-like Reaper composed of their genetic material hung from feeding tubes in its own version of synthetic reproduction. This was the abomination Shepard resolved to destroy, along with the base as a whole, unwilling to let it fall into the Illusive Man's hands and to hell with any advantage it would give humanity in the coming war against the Reapers.
She killed the abomination, escaping to the Normandy as the station collapsed, miraculously without casualties. Shepard and the Illusive Man traded harsh words, and she told him flat-out she would stop the Reapers whether or not he supported her.
Her first steps toward taking an advantage were passing along intel to Liara T'Soni, who had not rejoined her squad but remained on good terms. Together, they uprooted the Shadow Broker (an infamous and shadowy information broker with fingers in every galactic pie), and replaced him with Liara herself. Shepard now had a deadly and influential friend who owed her a life.
6. Personality: Shepard is a soldier, through and through. She's a chronic problem-solver whose methods forbid procrastination, tomfoolery or ineffectual action. If there is a mission, come hell or highwater, she will get it done... though recklessness is not among Shepard's vices. She recognizes the value of diplomacy and adaptability, analyzing a situation to figure out the “who” and the “what” rather than shooting first and asking questions later. Pacing one self and (grudgingly) acknowledging her limits are part of what makes Shepard formidable aside from her grim focus and cool head. A natural leader that, according to a crew-member, has "that fire that makes someone willing to follow her into hell itself."
Despite a tendency to collect aliens and criminals like ducklings, Shepard is a good judge of character and knows the value of trusting her gut instinct. If it can be avoided, she will do her damned best to never compromise her moral integrity for a mission success; minimize casualties, look after her people, keep an open mind. Even if it gives her the advantage, she will not violate her individual code. The ends do not justify the means for her.
Seeing someone bully the people around them into submission provokes the Mama Bear temper in Shepard that's largely responsible for when she does have lapses in judgment, like anybody else. Her gut instinct is usually only half-right. Shepard worries, cracks jokes, has pride and petty annoyances in spades, gets restless, is ignorant of a great many things, and overall is aware that she's neither immortal nor capable of accomplishing half as much as she does without her crew. The pressure of expectation - hers, and of the people around her - is a constant weight on her shoulders. She doesn't always know if she can live up to that expectation, and it hounds her.
8. Appearance: Shepard's of medium height and a solid, streamlined build, neither excessively curved nor twig-thin. Caucasian. She has the muscular density one would expect from a cybernetics-enhanced space marine on active duty. Her hair is cropped short and kept out of her face for convenience's sake. Depending on the light, it can be a dusty brown or the color of reddish dirt. Her eyes are a cool green, and while she'll never be model-material, Shepard is comfortable in her body and strength, which lends her some charisma.
She has scars like any soldier, some from the thresher maw attack on Akuze, others from miscellaneous missions. They're as much part of her as her arms and legs.
9. Abilities: Nothing supernatural, but since being resurrected with cybernetic implants her weight, strength and endurance have been mega-amplified. She can and has headbutted heavily armored aliens without flinching. Comparing her tackles to the force of a charging bull wouldn't be inaccurate.
10. Languages: English, but she's got a sub-dermal implant for real-time translation of other languages. This extends to all Earth languages and is up to date on many alien languages, but something like Star Ocean 3's Elicoorian would not translate as linguistics have not integrated the machine translation for it.
11. Items: Suit of armor (the fabulous futuristic kind), as well as the shields and health-regulating installations that come with it. Give it a week or two before it runs out of power.
12. Weapons: A grenade launcher, a shotgun, a modified Collector assault rifle, a pistol, and a sniper rifle. Everything on entry but the grenade launcher causes second-degree burns, and the launcher shoots bean-bag rounds. (There's a slot for all of these weapons on her armor.)
13. Writing sample - Third Person Prose:
Shepard pulled a strict left-turn out of the oncoming traffic. Liara made a noise like a choking gerbil and clutched the sides of the taxi. Maybe she should have been worried that the drell in the back had been suspiciously quiet, but the Commander found she appreciated his silence more than she would have his protests at her steering technique.
Which, despite what the hyperventilating information broker sitting next to her believed, would serve them better than tip-toeing around Illium and hoping the crazy asari fleeing their stolen taxi would kindly slow down. Very rarely did she meet a mass-murderer who would surrender quietly and without the fuss of collateral damage. There were people being caught in the cross-fire that very second, and she'd end it as soon as she could.
Liara grabbed Shepard's right shoulder and found her voice. “Truck!”
“I know,” said Shepard, calm as you please. She banked and barrel rolled into a tunnel when her quarry dropped a proximity bomb. Doubtless it would ruin some other vehicle's day. Isaac Newton really was the deadliest son of a bitch in space.
”Truck!”
“I know,” Shepard said again, sharper this time and unimpressed by the penchant for backseat driving Liara was prone to. The explosion ahead would encompass the tunnel in its entirety, halting any traffic and succinctly cutting off the chase. Just as planned for the target. In a remarkable display of skill (and, though she wouldn't say anything out of concern Liara might try to wrest the wheel from her and make matters worse, fiendish pleasure) she maneuvered the abused taxi into the tiniest of debris-free spaces in the upperhand corner.
Liara might have screamed, Shepard couldn't be sure. She grunted eloquently and bull-rushed the fleeing asari. A bash or six and she'd have the woman on the ground.
14. Writing sample - First Person Prose:
If this is common knowledge already, sorry to be the ass pointing it out, but someone's decked the chickens out in knit sweaters.
[Shepard is inclined to think she's hallucinating. It wouldn't be horrifically far-fetched, all things considered. The question foremost in her mind (after 'why do these chickens have knit sweaters' ) was why it was barnyard animals and not, for example, a thresher maw. She almost expected her subconscious to give her a thresher maw wearing a balaclava.
Why chickens? You hardly ever see those anymore.]
… And if anyone has something to add, I'd appreciate it. Nothing else important taking up my time, that's for damn sure. I mean it. Let me know.
15. Tattoo: Under her left foot!