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OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: lyn
Are you 16 or older: y
Contact:

chanterie
Current Characters: n/a
Tag: commander shepard (au)

IN CHARACTER
Name: Commander Shepard
Canon: Mass Effect
Canon Point: Post-Destroy ending.
Age: 32

History: Wikia link, and her specific in-game choices.

Personality:

Shepard is many things--a soldier, a commanding officer, a survivor, a friend. She is not all things to all people, though people have tried to make her that, but she is many things and each of these things reveals a bit more about her.

As a Shepard with the colonist background, she learned pretty young the value of sacrifice. Of fighting and refusing to give in. When Batarian slavers attacked her home on the planet Mindoir, Shepard was one of the few survivors. Her family and friends were all slaughtered, a tragic loss for a girl of sixteen. But she fought and hid, and was eventually rescued by an Alliance patrol. Mindoir taught her a lot of things. How to survive by the skin of her teeth, for one. How anger can keep a person going when hope seems all but gone, and pure determination can hold out after that. How there is a time for everything, and there is always time for practicality.

She is, to borrow a term from TVTropes, a Determinator. Give her a job to do and by god she will do that fucking job. No matter what it takes. Her life? She's a soldier, she died once already and it only managed to piss her off, to quote one of her crewmates. The life of one of her crew? Innocents? She'll try to find a way around it, but there are sacrifices that sometimes need to be made for the greater good. The needs of the many and all that. Even when she's injured and possibly dying for a second time, the words "We need you" get Shepard moving and pulling herself up, because the woman does not know how to give in.

It's this determination and drive to get the job done that made her famous. She was the only one of her squad to survive a horrific attack by an acid spitting space worm. When she was tasked with tracking the big bad of the first game down, she did whatever it took to nail that sucker--gleefully going rogue and later (with much more solemnity) sacrificing some of the biggest names in the galaxy to make sure that the asshole's sentient ship was brought down. It came back to bite her in the ass later, but it seemed like the best idea at the time.

Which, in all honesty, is something of a theme with Shepard. She's a bit of a shoot first, ask questions later kind of gal. A short temper, an inability to deal with bullshit, and a slightly skewed moral compass combine to make her the kind of woman that shoves a merc out a hundred-story window This is Sparta-style when pushing him for information isn't going well. (Hey, they were gonna have to kill him anyway, right? Right?) Someone's making snide remarks about her? Time to whip out the pistol and make threatening dick jokes. Lieutenant pissed off and seeming to have a death wish? Let's get in a fist-fight and give him a bloody nose while reaming him out. Because that's great problem solving.

It's luckily not all bad. Her ruthless problem solving, while occasionally pissing people off and losing her allies, does mean she gets shit done. When she does it on the behalf of her crew, it makes them as loyal to her as she is to them.

And she is loyal. Shepard may have a somewhat negative view of people, but individual persons? She likes them. Her crew are her family in all the ways that matter. They're the ones that get to see the softer side of her--the side that checks up on them after every mission, makes sure they're doing alright, and does whatever she can to keep them that way. In her own odd, "I will order you to take downtime, so help me," way she looks out for them. Beyond that, she will fight, and kill, and die for them without a second thought, and god help you if you get in her way. It's that devotion that gives her the charisma she needs to make the crazy alliances she does in the third game. A track record only goes so far, after all. Especially when that track record includes working for a terrorist organization and refusing to apologize for it, and then killing hundreds of thousands of people and refusing to apologize for that, either.

(Look, it was necessary, okay? And it's not like she had fun doing it. Sure, she likes to fight, but no one likes mass murder. It was just the best option and she's can deal with that. Just don't fucking get up in her face about it when she was doing it to make sure your sorry ass had a little bit longer to live and prepare for the war that came not long after. She doesn't have time for that bullshit.)

When she's not on a mission where the fate of the galaxy rests on her shoulders (or when she's inexplicably on shore leave in the middle of said mission) she's not actually an exasperated killing machine like it may sound. Shepard's kind of a dork, actually. She likes hanging out with her crew, getting to know them, and bantering with them. Giving people shit is one of her favorite pastimes, right next to poker and modding the hell out of her guns. There's a reason people like her even when she does questionable things, and that's because she's a person who cares, who makes an effort to show that to the people that matter, and makes sure her crew is having fun and some stress-free time when they need it. Even if that means they give her shit right back. Hell, maybe especially then. It keeps her grounded and reminds her why she's doing the things she does. It's for them. For the people she can look in the eye and talk to every day. Those people don't deserve what the world would be like if Shepard didn't make the hard decisions she does. So she's going to do whatever the fuck it takes to make sure they've got the kind of world they do deserve.

Contracts:

While Shepard would be skeptical both of the people who greet her and their explanation she'd accept their offer to work on the Moira. She doesn't have another way home, and if they're telling the truth, cooperating might just get her back where she wants to be. And if they're lying? Well. How's that old saying go? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Abilities/Skills:

Shepard is a very capable soldier, and is thus trained in various forms of combat. She usually sticks to sniping things, but she can use a number of guns, is good at hand-to-hand combat, and can also use a blade on her omnitool damn well. Thanks to the project that brought her back from the dead, she also has cybernetic implants. These make it much harder for her to break her bones, make her quicker to heal, and quicker to burn through drugs/alcohol. They also, unfortunately, make her hackable. Yes, hackable. The downsides of being a cyborg.

Strengths/Weaknesses:

+ tech things such as hacking and programming
+ guns
+ punching people
+ miraculously making people get along by yelling at them??
- politics
- holding her temper when dealing with people who are annoying
- driving/piloting anything seriously don't let her do it
- dancing

Items:

- 1 (one) jacked up set of armor
- 1 (one) set of dogtags
- 1 (one) military-grade omnitool
- 1 (one) subdermal translator

SAMPLES
Network Sample:

Is it just me or are there a lot of humans here? I'd bet you good money (if we had money) that I could name every non-human on this ship. All those planets and galaxies, all those alternate universes out there... and the ship with the malfunctioning, transdimensional teleportation device grabs a whole bunch of humans.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Are humans the majority when you add all the numbers up? Or is the Ingress a little racist?

[ why, yes. yes, she is fucking with everyone because she's bored. why do you ask? ]

Prose/Action Sample:

The drumbeats echo through her. She feels them in her bones, reverberating with the bass line as she pops the heat sink on her rifle. It's a moment to reload, line up her shot and--she breathes. Looks at the shimmering kinetic barriers around her target through her scope. One drum beat, two, a breath in, and on the third she presses down on the trigger. The round slams into the target on the other end of the shooting range. Two more follow in quick succession, each timed with a thump in the music she's piping into the room.

Headshot. Heart. Groin. Clean shots, all of them. And right where she wanted them.

With a crash of cymbals and sputtering synths, the song ends. Shepard reloads. Another song, one with a faster beat this time, starts up and the cycle starts again.

She wonders idly, lining up her next shot, what it says about her that this is how she relaxes. It's not like she really needs the practice. Nearly every day is filled with shooting things in the head. Usually Reapers, but occasionally Cerberus operatives too. But that's... that's different. The heat of battle has a different flow to it than her, alone with her sniper rifle, picking off targets while old club tunes blare loud enough that she wonders if anybody in the embassies can hear it. In battle she has to worry about the outcome of whatever mission she's on. Here? Here she can do what she's good at without any worries--shoot things. Watch as kinetic barriers sizzle and fall, and take pride in her good shots.

Not that she doesn't do that on the battlefield. Oh, she keeps track of the nice ones, a smirk pulling at her lips when there's a particularly tricky shot she pulls off. But on the range she can savor the accomplishment.

Another three shots. Another popped heat sink. It continues until the next song winds to an end and the alarm on Shepard's omnitool beeps. Another meeting in fifteen minutes. She sighs and starts packing up her things. Time to go try and play nice with the politicians. If she doesn't punch anybody out, she'll call it a good day. And if she's looking forward to seeing if anyone else is going to make a face at her like they just smelled spoiled milk, well... She needs to keep herself entertained somehow, right?