✧let it lead me trembling, trembling

player.
NAME/HANDLE: xel
PERSONAL JOURNAL: piasora
ARE YOU 16 OR OVER?: sure am.
CONTACT: (aim.) love atroquinine; (plurk.) piasora
OTHER CHARACTERS: albedo piazzolla transcendent


character.
CHARACTER NAME: Commander Jane Shepard
AGE: Physically 30, technically 32. Two years were spent dead/unconscious.
APPEARANCE: default appearance.
BRIEF WORLD INFO:

Shepard: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Commander_Shepard
ME: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect
ME2: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect_2
ME3: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect_3

BRIEF CHARACTER HISTORY:

This will be expanded on in more detail in the personality section below, but the first thing I need to mention is that Mass Effect gives you some say over the origins of your Shepard. That said, it's necessary to provide a breakdown of the specific choices that this particular version of Shepard made over the course of her life.

The "Colonist" origin has her born on Mindoir, a quiet colony world. As a teenager, Shepard survived a raid and massacre of the colony by Batarian slavers, who either killed or sold everyone else living there. She was saved by an Alliance patrol and enlisted once she hit eighteen. Though she was effectively orphaned at this point, we're not entirely certain how she passed the two years between Mindoir and joining the Alliance Navy. Her psychological profile is "War Hero," which establishes her as having defended a colony from Batarian slavers "almost single-handedly" some years later. Lastly, her class is "Soldier," which makes her highly proficient with weapons and melee combat as well as completely lacking in biotic aptitude (Mass Effect's magic system, for the unaware).

Have a whole bunch of choices:

Mass Effect - chose to save the rachni queen, rejected the genophage cure and talked Wrex down from his subsequent rage, lost Kaidan during the attack on Virmire, elected to save the Citadel Council from the geth armada, romanced no one.

Mass Effect 2 - largely cooperative with the Illusive Man, saved Maelon's genophage data, killed Morinth, rewrote geth heretics, destroyed the Collector base. All squadmates survive. Romanced no one.

Mass Effect 3 - helped Mordin cure the genophage, negotiated peace between Quarians and the geth, Paragon Control ending. Romanced no one.

PERSONALITY:

Shepard’s a born leader. Miranda comments early on in her acquaintance with Shep that she has "that fire that makes someone willing to follow you into hell itself." (some other related quote goes here). And indeed, it needs to be pointed out that Shepard has solved just as many (if not more) of the major conflicts in her time with persuasive words than with military might. Granted, she has few qualms with using force to accomplish an objective, but her outlook is measured and pragmatic. She believes that sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices for the greater good—what Garrus terms "the ruthless calculus of war"—but it is not without misgivings and not without carefully weighing the options set before her.

As Mass Effect allows the player some freedom to choose Shepard’s background and general moral character, it’s necessary to go into some specifics to this particular version. Jane Shepard was born into a farming family on the colony of Mindoir. At sixteen, she survived a raid brought down on the colony by batarian slavers that history remembers as a complete atrocity inflicted on innocents. Rescued by an Alliance ship, she enlisted once she came of age. She took her military career seriously and quickly rose in rank. It’s reasonable to assume that her loyalty to the Alliance has roots in this history, but it’s also instilled in her a touch of cognitive dissonance: her survivor’s guilt has manifested in an unwillingness to involve innocents in the turmoil that unfolds around her, but she has nonetheless demonstrated a (reluctant) willingness to cooperate with that "ruthless calculus," to focus on the larger picture and see her mission through by any means necessary.

At the age of 22, Shepard made a name for herself for the first time during the Skyllian Blitz. While on shore leave on Elysium, she found herself singlehandedly fending off hostile batarian forces and other pirate troops while the Alliance rallied their defenses. Shepard has no strong love for the batarians as a whole, given her history and a slavery-endorsing culture that runs counter to her human sensibilities, but other species are simply a fact of life in her time and she believes progress is achieved through cooperation first and force or isolationism second. Protecting civilians is a strong priority for her and her decisions over the course of her career reflect this time and again. Viewed in this light, her victory on Elysium can be understood as a desire to rectify the tragedy of her past: she lost a colony to slavers once already. Never again. The decision to sacrifice a Batarian system to prevent the imminent invasion of the Reapers weighs on her as one of the hardest decisions she's ever made. But if the system had belonged to anyone other than the Batarian Hegemony, it might have weighed a little heavier.

Her tendency to prioritize the bottom line has, in fact, led her down some questionable paths before. Because she would prefer to do the "right thing" over the "lawful thing" any day of the week, she cooperated with Cerberus willingly and even a bit enthusiastically in the beginning. Although their methods were questionable in the eyes of the rest of the galaxy, they held the promise of getting the job done. The Illusive Man’s betrayals were not received by her kindly, and she ultimately turned her back on him just as quickly as she had once chosen to cooperate. Where the Illusive man is strictly self-interested and desires power for power's sake, Shepard fundamentally believes in using her power to protect others regardless of their origin, even going so far as to repeatedly urge him to join her fight. She can, on occasion, offer people multiple chances to see reason. If, after all that, they still refuse... well, heaven help you. Bluff or no, this is the lady who threatened to let the geth blow the Quarian fleet out of the sky if they didn't cooperate with the instruction to cease fire. Shepard is acutely aware of her own abilities and accomplishments and can tend toward overconfidence as a result. For this reason, the fall of Thessia knocked her bravado down hard.

Shepard’s not temperamental, per se, though she’s been known to call people out with a certain level of bluntness if she feels their actions are stupid or reckless or detrimental to the task at hand. She can certainly take a joke (which is good, because her attempts at dancing truly do invite ridicule) and is happy to treat her crew just as much like friends. She lost her family early, so it makes some sense that her crew has come to serve that purpose. This means that she would defend every last one of her people to the death. She’s a good friend to have. She’s a powerful friend to have.

Admittedly, there’s a little sliver of Captain Jim "T-for-Tomcat" Kirk in Shepard that deserves acknowledgement. While this particular Shepard never involved herself in romance, instead putting her responsibilities toward the galaxy at the forefront of her mind, she has had ample opportunity and interest and is not at all beyond flirtation. In theory, she would not have objected to the notion of casual sex, be it with a man or a woman, human or alien, but she has also remained acutely aware that further complicating the task her people have before them is a thing to be avoided. She is by no means as opposed to fraternization as the Alliance itself is, but will generally decline in spite of her personal feelings.

Though Shepard fought as hard as she could throughout the Reaper War and the time leading up to it to preserve as many lives and cultures as she could—saving the rachni, saving the Citadel Council, curing the genophage at the cost of salarian support, brokering peace between the quarians and the geth—in the end, she found herself facing down that bottom line again. She felt it was not her place or her right to force the synthesis of synthetic and organic life. She refused to destroy the Reapers outright if the price was tantamount to the genocide of all synthetic life. In the end, she chose to succeed where the Illusive Man would have failed and took control of Reaper forces by integrating her consciousness with them at the cost of her own life. For Shepard, this was the easiest choice because it asked everything of her and nothing of the people of the galaxy. With this choice, she felt she truly could protect everyone.

ABILITIES:

✧ general weapon and hand-to-hand combat proficiency
✧ ocular synaptic processors provide enhanced targeting speed and accuracy
✧ strong charisma tends to allow her to persuade and intimidate others easily
✧ synthetic enhancements to skin/muscle/bone offer protection from a great deal of damage
✧ limited but proficient hacking ability
✧ kinetic barrier protects from high-velocity objects

POSSESSIONS:

✧ n7 armor suit (x1)
✧ small shield generator (x1; built into armor)
✧ black widow sniper rifle (x1)
✧ m-11 suppressor heavy pistol (x1)
✧ handheld omni-tool (x1)
✧ medi-gel (x6)
✧ spare thermal clips (x12)
✧ casual crewman's outfit (x1)
✧ n7 hoodie (x1)

samples.
JOURNAL ENTRY SAMPLE:

( first person. )

THIRD-PERSON SAMPLE:

( 1. )



( 2. )