Player Name: Amber Username: battlestar Current/former characters: None
Sleeper Character: Commander (Kathryn) Shepard Username: humanparagon Canon: Mass Effect Canon point: 2186, between ME2 and ME3. After the events of the "Arrival" DLC, Shepard has been arrested, incarcerated and relieved of duty pending investigation into her involvement in the destruction of the Bahak system and the resultant death of 300,000 batarian colonists on Aratoht. Only the intervention of her former commander, David Anderson, has kept her from court-martial. Age: 30 physically, 32 chronologically Appearance: Shepard is about 5' 8" or so, fair-skinned, with eyes of a color somewhere between blue and violet and dark red hair cut in a chin-length bob. She's roughened and scarred from years of combat, though the worst of it is usually hidden by her clothing, and her frame is lean and muscular. She's most at home in body armor or her military uniform, but on the few occasions she wears civilian clothing, she usually opts for simple styles in dark colors or neutrals. Her overall demeanor is one of strength, confidence, and determination.
Personality: First and foremost, Shepard is a soldier. She has never known any other life but that of the Alliance military, raised as a Navy brat and having joined the military herself on the day she came of age to do so. Trained in the Alliance's most intensive special forces programs, she is not afraid of combat or any of its hardships, and fighting in the defense of humanity runs in her blood. Her parents inculcated in her a sense of honor, duty and courage, virtues that as an Alliance officer she strives to uphold. She is a very focused woman when it comes to any missions she's been assigned, and all other concerns fall second to getting the job done and doing it right.
Shepard is a natural leader, and has been since she proved herself in the Skyllian Blitz. People tend to flock to her, drawn by her charisma, her strength, and her determination. While people fall behind her banner easily, and some of those who work with or under her seek to get close to her as a person, Shepard isn't one to easily let her guard down. She likes people, and as something of an idealist she genuinely believes most people have some good in them at the heart, so that isn't the issue. What is, as stated above, is her intense focus on her work. Stopping the Reapers is all-important to her, and she simply can't allow personal feelings or relationships to get in the way. With time, she certainly can allow herself to open up, as demonstrated by her romantic relationship with Kaidan and her friendships with her closest squadmates from her fight against Saren and the geth — Garrus, Liara, and Tali, primarily — but forming these relationships took time and a great deal of trust. When it comes down to the wire, she's still a commander first and foremost, and she expects everyone around her to understand that.
Going back to the fact Shepard's a little bit of an idealist — I've played her as more 'Paragon' than 'Renegade', meaning she puts a lot of stock in things like honor, nobility, and compassion. She wants to help others when she's able, though circumstances mean she sometimes needs to prioritize who to help, and the safety of her ship and crew always come first. She genuinely believes most people are essentially good (not all, as she's had proven to her before) and that it's possible to solve some situations without resorting to armed conflict. She's a fairly good speaker, and she has a tendency to have the right words at the right moment to persuade people to see things her way without ever having to fire a shot. She prefers to work within the system when possible, whatever system that may be, though she's not averse to breaking some rules to get the job done if need be and she's well aware that some systems of rules and governance are imperfect. However, again, she's a soldier, not a politician or a diplomat, and when she's determined she needs to go in guns blazing, she goes in guns blazing, end of story. If you can't be talked out of getting in her way in circumstances like this, sorry, she's going to have to shoot you. Her tolerance and patience are good, but not limitless.
She is fully aware that she has an intense amount of responsibility riding on her shoulders, and a great many lives, and this affects how she conducts herself, too. Knowing the odds against her success in fighting the Reapers, Shepard has had to force herself to appear strong and capable, even when deep down she realizes just how bad things are. Any worries or concerns are bottled up and kept suppressed. There's a tiny handful of people who can coax her into talking about her feelings, but for the most part, attempts to pry beneath the game face she puts on are tersely dismissed. Practically the only time she visibly shows distress is when members of her squad or crew die on her watch — it's happened before at least twice now, and every time, she feels as if she should have been able to do something to save them, even if she did everything she could. She still feels guilt over Ashley's death, for example, even though that was three years ago; things like that are the sorts of things she dwells on when she can't sleep at night and her thoughts chase themselves around in her head. The easiest way to get under her skin is to imply she's gotten people killed through negligence or through incompetence; you'll never see her get angry more quickly.
When she's not fighting for her life and the lives of every other person in the galaxy, Shepard allows herself to become warmer and more relaxed. She has a sense of humor, if a bit of a dry one, and in moments of downtime she enjoys things like having a drink or playing cards with her crew. Everyone knows, however, that the minute it's time to focus back on the mission, they had best straighten up and act professional.
As a commander, Shepard is tough, but fair. While she makes sure the chain of command on board ship is respected and followed, she also expects her crew to come to her with any concerns they may have, and she certainly doesn't expect all of them to agree with her decisions. She has never made a habit of following bad orders herself — she has an especial loathing for the excuse that someone was 'only following orders' — and she has done her level best not to give an order that she herself would be incapable of following in good conscience. The stability of her crew is vital, and she makes sure that each and every one of them knows she is always available, even for seemingly minor issues.
History: For reference, this Shepard has the Spacer/War Hero background, outlined here (and detailed below, though some of this is headcanon). I've also collected a summary of her ingame decisions and the assignments she's completed here.
Kathryn Morgan Shepard was born on April 11, 2154, on board the Systems Alliance cruiser SSV Berlin, where her mother was stationed at the time. Her parents, Hannah and Joseph, were both officers in the Alliance Navy, and as such Shepard spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence moving between ships and space stations as her parents were reassigned. Wherever her parents were was home, and she grew up never really experiencing a strong attachment to place as children born planetside might have. Earth was 'home' only in the sense that it was the homeworld of humanity, and she was a young adult by the time she first set foot on its soil. Her parents were often busy, frequently assigned to different postings, but between the two of them they did their best to instill in her the virtues that the Alliance military was intended to embody: courage, duty, honor, strength.
When Shepard was sixteen years old, both her parents were posted on ships that responded to a distress call from the human colony of Mindoir, which was under attack by batarian slavers. Her father was part of the ground force sent in to rescue the besieged colonists. Unfortunately, he was killed in action, and decorated posthumously for his heroism in sacrificing his life to ensure some of the colonists were able to make it to the Alliance rescue ships.
It was two years later, on her eighteenth birthday, that Shepard enlisted in the Alliance military herself — partly to honor her father's name and partly because the military was the only life she'd ever known and the only occupation she could even dream of holding. She distinguished herself early, passing her courses at the Alliance Naval Academy with flying colors and demonstrating herself to be capable of intuitive thinking, self-discipline and creativity. However, the true test of her abilities came four years afterward. Twenty-two-year-old Shepard was on shore leave on the colony of Elysium in the Skyllian Verge when a coalition of pirates and slavers attacked the planet, intending on destroying it — an event that would later famously become known as the Skyllian Blitz. While the Alliance Navy engaged the pirates' ships in orbit of Elysium, a scant ground force of marines and a civilian militia was forced to hold off the attack on the planet itself. The fighting was brutal and lasted many hours, and eventually, the pirate forces broke through a weak point in the colony's defenses. It was Shepard who single-handedly rallied the civilians and held off the pirates until reinforcements arrived, at which point the pirates turned and fled. For her actions on Elysium, Shepard was awarded the Star of Terra, one of the Alliance's highest honors and the mark of a hero of humanity.
Following her actions during the Blitz, Shepard was offered special forces training with the elite Interplanetary Combatives Training program, also known as the N7 program after the military vocational code awarded to its graduates. The program was known for its harsh requirements and the intensive levels of strength, focus and talent required to succeed; many candidates failed the initial courses, and others dropped out, realizing it was too much to take. Shepard, however, was determined to make it through, and she survived the brutal training all the way to the end.
A few years after her graduation from the N7 program, Shepard was serving as executive officer on board the newly-commissioned SSV Normandy SR-1, commanded by Captain David Anderson. First of her class, the Normandy was built as a collaboration between human and turian engineers, intended as a gesture of unity after the brutality of the First Contact War many years before. Normandy was on a shakedown cruise — standard procedure for a new ship, except for one anomaly: the presence on board ship of an agent of the Citadel's Special Tactics and Reconnaissance group, or Spectres, an elite group dedicated to maintaining stability in the galaxy and entrusted with the resources to do that by any means necessary. The Spectre, a turian named Nihlus Kryik, had kept quiet about what he was doing on board the Normandy, but eventually revealed to Shepard that he was there to evaluate her candidacy for the position of the first human Spectre, her previous achievements having distinguished her above a list of other possible candidates. The Normandy wasn't simply on a shakedown cruise; she was headed to the colony of Eden Prime, where a team of scientists had uncovered an ancient beacon supposedly built by the Protheans, a civilization that was destroyed 50,000 years ago. The Alliance wanted Shepard to lead a team to recover the beacon, anticipating the kind of information it might contain; Nihlus would accompany her, using her actions during the mission to evaluate whether or not she was ready to join the Spectres. As Shepard was conversing with Nihlus and Captain Anderson about the mission, their discussion was interrupted by a distress call from Alliance marines stationed on Eden Prime — the colony was under attack.
Landing on Eden Prime, Shepard and her team found the colony being attacked by the geth, a machine race created by the quarians, who hadn't been heard from since their war with their creators hundreds of years ago. At the head of the geth army was Saren Arterius — one of the Council's most talented and celebrated Spectre agents. Shepard managed to stop Saren from blowing up the colony, but by the time she reached the Prothean beacon, Saren had already accessed it and the information it contained and managed to escape. Inadvertently, one of Shepard's squadmates, Kaidan Alenko, was inspecting the beacon when an invisible force began to drag him toward it. Throwing herself at Kaidan to push him out of harm's way, Shepard accidentally activated the beacon herself, and the ancient artifact burned a vision into her mind — a vision of war, death, destruction. Not only did Shepard fall unconscious as a result, but some sort of feedback caused the beacon to self-destruct, rendering it useless.
commander shepard | mass effect | reserved | 1 of 3
Name: Amber
Username:
Current/former characters: None
Sleeper
Character: Commander (Kathryn) Shepard
Username:
Canon: Mass Effect
Canon point: 2186, between ME2 and ME3. After the events of the "Arrival" DLC, Shepard has been arrested, incarcerated and relieved of duty pending investigation into her involvement in the destruction of the Bahak system and the resultant death of 300,000 batarian colonists on Aratoht. Only the intervention of her former commander, David Anderson, has kept her from court-martial.
Age: 30 physically, 32 chronologically
Appearance: Shepard is about 5' 8" or so, fair-skinned, with eyes of a color somewhere between blue and violet and dark red hair cut in a chin-length bob. She's roughened and scarred from years of combat, though the worst of it is usually hidden by her clothing, and her frame is lean and muscular. She's most at home in body armor or her military uniform, but on the few occasions she wears civilian clothing, she usually opts for simple styles in dark colors or neutrals. Her overall demeanor is one of strength, confidence, and determination.
Personality: First and foremost, Shepard is a soldier. She has never known any other life but that of the Alliance military, raised as a Navy brat and having joined the military herself on the day she came of age to do so. Trained in the Alliance's most intensive special forces programs, she is not afraid of combat or any of its hardships, and fighting in the defense of humanity runs in her blood. Her parents inculcated in her a sense of honor, duty and courage, virtues that as an Alliance officer she strives to uphold. She is a very focused woman when it comes to any missions she's been assigned, and all other concerns fall second to getting the job done and doing it right.
Shepard is a natural leader, and has been since she proved herself in the Skyllian Blitz. People tend to flock to her, drawn by her charisma, her strength, and her determination. While people fall behind her banner easily, and some of those who work with or under her seek to get close to her as a person, Shepard isn't one to easily let her guard down. She likes people, and as something of an idealist she genuinely believes most people have some good in them at the heart, so that isn't the issue. What is, as stated above, is her intense focus on her work. Stopping the Reapers is all-important to her, and she simply can't allow personal feelings or relationships to get in the way. With time, she certainly can allow herself to open up, as demonstrated by her romantic relationship with Kaidan and her friendships with her closest squadmates from her fight against Saren and the geth — Garrus, Liara, and Tali, primarily — but forming these relationships took time and a great deal of trust. When it comes down to the wire, she's still a commander first and foremost, and she expects everyone around her to understand that.
Going back to the fact Shepard's a little bit of an idealist — I've played her as more 'Paragon' than 'Renegade', meaning she puts a lot of stock in things like honor, nobility, and compassion. She wants to help others when she's able, though circumstances mean she sometimes needs to prioritize who to help, and the safety of her ship and crew always come first. She genuinely believes most people are essentially good (not all, as she's had proven to her before) and that it's possible to solve some situations without resorting to armed conflict. She's a fairly good speaker, and she has a tendency to have the right words at the right moment to persuade people to see things her way without ever having to fire a shot. She prefers to work within the system when possible, whatever system that may be, though she's not averse to breaking some rules to get the job done if need be and she's well aware that some systems of rules and governance are imperfect. However, again, she's a soldier, not a politician or a diplomat, and when she's determined she needs to go in guns blazing, she goes in guns blazing, end of story. If you can't be talked out of getting in her way in circumstances like this, sorry, she's going to have to shoot you. Her tolerance and patience are good, but not limitless.
She is fully aware that she has an intense amount of responsibility riding on her shoulders, and a great many lives, and this affects how she conducts herself, too. Knowing the odds against her success in fighting the Reapers, Shepard has had to force herself to appear strong and capable, even when deep down she realizes just how bad things are. Any worries or concerns are bottled up and kept suppressed. There's a tiny handful of people who can coax her into talking about her feelings, but for the most part, attempts to pry beneath the game face she puts on are tersely dismissed. Practically the only time she visibly shows distress is when members of her squad or crew die on her watch — it's happened before at least twice now, and every time, she feels as if she should have been able to do something to save them, even if she did everything she could. She still feels guilt over Ashley's death, for example, even though that was three years ago; things like that are the sorts of things she dwells on when she can't sleep at night and her thoughts chase themselves around in her head. The easiest way to get under her skin is to imply she's gotten people killed through negligence or through incompetence; you'll never see her get angry more quickly.
When she's not fighting for her life and the lives of every other person in the galaxy, Shepard allows herself to become warmer and more relaxed. She has a sense of humor, if a bit of a dry one, and in moments of downtime she enjoys things like having a drink or playing cards with her crew. Everyone knows, however, that the minute it's time to focus back on the mission, they had best straighten up and act professional.
As a commander, Shepard is tough, but fair. While she makes sure the chain of command on board ship is respected and followed, she also expects her crew to come to her with any concerns they may have, and she certainly doesn't expect all of them to agree with her decisions. She has never made a habit of following bad orders herself — she has an especial loathing for the excuse that someone was 'only following orders' — and she has done her level best not to give an order that she herself would be incapable of following in good conscience. The stability of her crew is vital, and she makes sure that each and every one of them knows she is always available, even for seemingly minor issues.
History: For reference, this Shepard has the Spacer/War Hero background, outlined here (and detailed below, though some of this is headcanon). I've also collected a summary of her ingame decisions and the assignments she's completed here.
Kathryn Morgan Shepard was born on April 11, 2154, on board the Systems Alliance cruiser SSV Berlin, where her mother was stationed at the time. Her parents, Hannah and Joseph, were both officers in the Alliance Navy, and as such Shepard spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence moving between ships and space stations as her parents were reassigned. Wherever her parents were was home, and she grew up never really experiencing a strong attachment to place as children born planetside might have. Earth was 'home' only in the sense that it was the homeworld of humanity, and she was a young adult by the time she first set foot on its soil. Her parents were often busy, frequently assigned to different postings, but between the two of them they did their best to instill in her the virtues that the Alliance military was intended to embody: courage, duty, honor, strength.
When Shepard was sixteen years old, both her parents were posted on ships that responded to a distress call from the human colony of Mindoir, which was under attack by batarian slavers. Her father was part of the ground force sent in to rescue the besieged colonists. Unfortunately, he was killed in action, and decorated posthumously for his heroism in sacrificing his life to ensure some of the colonists were able to make it to the Alliance rescue ships.
It was two years later, on her eighteenth birthday, that Shepard enlisted in the Alliance military herself — partly to honor her father's name and partly because the military was the only life she'd ever known and the only occupation she could even dream of holding. She distinguished herself early, passing her courses at the Alliance Naval Academy with flying colors and demonstrating herself to be capable of intuitive thinking, self-discipline and creativity. However, the true test of her abilities came four years afterward. Twenty-two-year-old Shepard was on shore leave on the colony of Elysium in the Skyllian Verge when a coalition of pirates and slavers attacked the planet, intending on destroying it — an event that would later famously become known as the Skyllian Blitz. While the Alliance Navy engaged the pirates' ships in orbit of Elysium, a scant ground force of marines and a civilian militia was forced to hold off the attack on the planet itself. The fighting was brutal and lasted many hours, and eventually, the pirate forces broke through a weak point in the colony's defenses. It was Shepard who single-handedly rallied the civilians and held off the pirates until reinforcements arrived, at which point the pirates turned and fled. For her actions on Elysium, Shepard was awarded the Star of Terra, one of the Alliance's highest honors and the mark of a hero of humanity.
Following her actions during the Blitz, Shepard was offered special forces training with the elite Interplanetary Combatives Training program, also known as the N7 program after the military vocational code awarded to its graduates. The program was known for its harsh requirements and the intensive levels of strength, focus and talent required to succeed; many candidates failed the initial courses, and others dropped out, realizing it was too much to take. Shepard, however, was determined to make it through, and she survived the brutal training all the way to the end.
A few years after her graduation from the N7 program, Shepard was serving as executive officer on board the newly-commissioned SSV Normandy SR-1, commanded by Captain David Anderson. First of her class, the Normandy was built as a collaboration between human and turian engineers, intended as a gesture of unity after the brutality of the First Contact War many years before. Normandy was on a shakedown cruise — standard procedure for a new ship, except for one anomaly: the presence on board ship of an agent of the Citadel's Special Tactics and Reconnaissance group, or Spectres, an elite group dedicated to maintaining stability in the galaxy and entrusted with the resources to do that by any means necessary. The Spectre, a turian named Nihlus Kryik, had kept quiet about what he was doing on board the Normandy, but eventually revealed to Shepard that he was there to evaluate her candidacy for the position of the first human Spectre, her previous achievements having distinguished her above a list of other possible candidates. The Normandy wasn't simply on a shakedown cruise; she was headed to the colony of Eden Prime, where a team of scientists had uncovered an ancient beacon supposedly built by the Protheans, a civilization that was destroyed 50,000 years ago. The Alliance wanted Shepard to lead a team to recover the beacon, anticipating the kind of information it might contain; Nihlus would accompany her, using her actions during the mission to evaluate whether or not she was ready to join the Spectres. As Shepard was conversing with Nihlus and Captain Anderson about the mission, their discussion was interrupted by a distress call from Alliance marines stationed on Eden Prime — the colony was under attack.
Landing on Eden Prime, Shepard and her team found the colony being attacked by the geth, a machine race created by the quarians, who hadn't been heard from since their war with their creators hundreds of years ago. At the head of the geth army was Saren Arterius — one of the Council's most talented and celebrated Spectre agents. Shepard managed to stop Saren from blowing up the colony, but by the time she reached the Prothean beacon, Saren had already accessed it and the information it contained and managed to escape. Inadvertently, one of Shepard's squadmates, Kaidan Alenko, was inspecting the beacon when an invisible force began to drag him toward it. Throwing herself at Kaidan to push him out of harm's way, Shepard accidentally activated the beacon herself, and the ancient artifact burned a vision into her mind — a vision of war, death, destruction. Not only did Shepard fall unconscious as a result, but some sort of feedback caused the beacon to self-destruct, rendering it useless.