Commander Jane Shepard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cmdreffingshepard) wrote2012-04-04 09:59 pm
cmdreffingshepard) wrote2012-04-04 09:59 pm
Application: ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
multiversal
Out of Character Information
Name: Froda
Username: (if applicable)froda_baggins
Are you over the age of eighteen? y!
Current characters in Baedal: N/A
In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Commander Jane Shepard - but everyone just calls her Shepard.
Username:cmdreffingshepard
Fandom: Mass Effect trilogy of video games
Played By: N/A
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/2918431/1586440
Canon Character Section
Physical Description: Shepard is 32 years old, and is pretty tall for a woman, about 5'10" in her combat boots, and approximately 140 lbs. She's slim, but well-muscled after over ten years of dedicated military training and active duty. She has quite a few scars of varying shapes and sizes scattered about her body, and red hair and green eyes - rare features in the 22nd century. She's used to standing out a bit because of that. She moves with the air of someone with authority, who knows where she's going and who knows how to kick your ass if you get in her way. She also has the impeccable posture of a career military person.
Sexuality: Canonically, Shepard is pretty open-minded, and can flirt with men, women and aliens of various genders. So I'd say pansexual. She can have casual sex - or perhaps more accurately friends-with-benefits, since most of her potential partners are members of her crew/team, people she trusts. She's also capable of developing deep romantic bonds and committing to one person.
History: Here is a wiki article that outlines the backgrounds which can be chosen for Shepard (Warning: if you scroll down, there are some major endgame spoilers for Mass Effect 3!) With those options in mind, I'll say that my Shepard has the Spacer background and the War Hero service record - she was born to a military family and spent her childhood on various space stations, and earned a bunch of recognition and awards for her role in the battle of Elysium. She's also a graduate of the incredibly hardcore spec ops N7 program, under the mentorship of David Anderson.
She was assigned as Anderson's XO (second-in-command) on the SSV Normandy, an experimental stealth-enabled Alliance frigate of turian-human design. She was also suggested as a potential candidate for the first human Spectre, which is sort of like James Bond in space - license to kill, very little oversight, answer only to the Council itself, etc. Unfortunately, her first test run, a mission to the human colony of Eden Prime, went terribly wrong when another Spectre - Saren Arterius - went rogue and killed Shepard's supervisor, Nihlus. The colony was also under attack by the geth - a race of AIs that turned on their creators (the quarians) centuries before and evicted them from their home world.
Shepard came to believe that Saren and the geth were working to bring an ancient race of sentient machines, the Reapers, into the galaxy from their hiding place in dark space in order to annihilate (or perhaps assimilate) all advanced organic life.
The powers that be were unconvinced, and Shepard was only able to prove that Saren had gone rogue, which led the Council to revoke his Spectre status. They named Shepard the first human Spectre and gave her the resources to track Saren down and stop him. Shepard then took command of the Normandy, assembled a motley crew of military types and alien misfits - including Garrus Vakarian, a former C-Sec officer, Urdnot Wrex, a krogan mercenary, Liara T'Soni, an asari archaeologist, and Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, a young quarian on Pilgrimage.
Together, they worked to stop Saren from enacting his plan (while at the same time trying to figure out what that plan was), but he was always one step ahead of them. Eventually, Shepard discovered that Saren's ship, Sovereign, was in fact a Reaper, and that it had indoctrinated (basically brainwashed) Saren into believing that alliance with the Reapers was the only way for organic life to survive the invasion. Sovereign led the geth fleet in an attack on the Citadel, the center of galactic political and economic power - because the Citadel itself was a gateway for the Reapers into the galaxy, a millennia-old trap placed there to allow them easy access when they invaded.
Shepard and company managed to defeat Saren, regain control of the Citadel, destroy Sovereign and stop the Reapers from getting into the galaxy - she also saved the Council.
Then, six weeks later, while on assignment clearing out pockets of geth resistance, the Normandy was attacked and destroyed by an unknown enemy ship. Most of the crew managed to survive, but Shepard was killed - asphyxiated in space.
Her remains were recovered through dubious means by a shady pro-human organization called Cerberus, led by someone known only as "The Illusive Man", and two years and billions of credits later, Cerberus successfully brought Shepard back from the dead.
Why did they do this? According to the Illusive Man, it was because he believed that Shepard was the galaxy's best hope for survival in the face of the continued Reaper threat. He asked Shepard to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a number of human colonies on the edges of the galaxy, and - despite her deep misgivings about working for Cerberus, as well as the Illusive Man's motives - Shepard found herself once again in command of a ship called Normandy (rebuilt, of course) and putting together a new team to stop a mysterious race called the Collectors, who were later discovered to be working to create a new human Reaper. Some of her old team members rejoined her, most notably Tali and Garrus. Shepard embarked on something of a cross-species liaison with the latter, ostensibly to "blow off steam", and they spent a single night together before the "suicide mission" to the Collector home world.
Once again, Shepard was able to save the day - she infiltrated the Collector base, destroyed the human Reaper and managed to get nearly everyone out alive. When the Illusive Man asked her to hand over the Collector base to Cerberus, she flipped him the bird and blew the thing up.
After the suicide mission, Shepard parted with most of her team, cut all ties with Cerberus, and did a few recon missions under the table for the Alliance. On one such mission, she stumbled upon an impending Reaper invasion and was forced to destroy a mass relay by driving an asteroid into it. The resulting supernova-sized explosion vaporized the entire star system, including over 300,000 batarians. In response to this, Shepard was forced to return to Earth to face an Alliance investigative committee.
She was incarcerated for six months, but then the Reaper invasion of Earth began.
Forced to flee Earth to gather allies to fight the Reapers, Shepard traveled across the galaxy, attempting to gain the support of species with longstanding conflicts between them. She reunited with Garrus, who once more rejoined her crew, and they resumed their romantic relationship as well.
Shepard successfully cured the genophage, a thousand-year-old bioweapon which had been effectively neutering the krogan for generations, thus gaining their support. She resolved the centuries-long conflict between the quarians and the geth, helping the quarians regain their home world, she clashed with Cerberus on multiple occasions, and then came Thessia.
Thessia, the home world of the asari and birthplace of Shepard's friend Liara, was being hit hard by the Reapers. Intel suggested Shepard would be able to find vital information on the creation of a superweapon, the Crucible, which had the potential to help destroy the Reapers.
But Shepard failed. Cerberus got to the information first, and got away with it. And Thessia fell to the Reapers.
At this point, Shepard had a moment of weakness. She felt real despair at ever beating the Reapers. After everything she'd accomplished, suddenly she had failed at a vitally important task. And she was going to have to explain her failure, not simply to her commanding officers, but also to her friend, Liara, who had now lost her home to the Reapers. In a moment of desperation, Shepard wished she could be somewhere else. Wished she didn't have to fight this fight, and suffer such loss.
This is the moment she was transported to Baedal.
Powers: I think here some wiki articles will be most informative. Shepard's class is Adept, which means she is a biotic - kind of like telekinesis, mostly used to throw people around with her brain. The adept article lists out the specific talents an adept Shepard has - I'll be going with the basic ones from ME2/3, which are warp - does some damage and staggers a single target; pull - does what it says on the tin, pulls the target up into the air and sets them drifting; throw - does what it says on the tin; shockwave - a series of energy bursts that can send multiple opponents in a straight line flying; singularity - which can pull two or three opponents toward its center, leaving them defenseless for a short period of time.
Beyond her biotics, Shepard also has numerous cybernetic implants, courtesy of Cerberus. They don't grant her any particular powers, but they do make her a bit stronger and tougher than most humans. She has better stamina and endurance, and she has a much higher tolerance for drugs and alcohol - so if someone wants to, say, sedate her, the dosage required is much, much higher than what would normally be expected for a human of her build.
Talents/Abilities:: In addition to the above, Shepard has all the skills that can be expected from an elite special forces marine with over a decade of training and experience - she's skilled in hand-to-hand combat, as well as firearms use in everything from pistols all the way up to flame-throwers and missile launchers. She's highly competent with tech gadgets and computers, she can hack door security locks when she needs to, though by 22nd century standards she's only 'highly competent', as opposed to 'genius grade'.
She also has good survival skills, as well as basic field medical training in human, turian, salarian and asari biology. She's a natural leader, and rose very quickly through the ranks of the Alliance to a position of authority. She's used to having soldiers under her command, and she knows the ins and outs of being in that position.
On top of all that, she's a great poker player, and can drink most organics under the table.
Personality: Shepard is, first and foremost, a soldier. She was born into a military family, was raised to that life and there was never any question that she would enlist. Her personality is pretty intimately connected with her career - she has a strong sense of morality and fairness, as well as self-discipline and the ability to both give and follow orders. Practically her whole life has been spent with military hierarchies, so she's used to having a chain of command - though that doesn't mean she particularly likes bureaucracy and red tape. She relies on her own judgment as often as not, and expects soldiers under her command to do the same. She'll bend or break the rules if she believes it's necessary - to do the right thing.
Shepard comes from a universe which is incredibly diverse, with numerous different alien species inhabiting the galaxy and attempting to govern it as best they can, despite deep-seated cultural and biological differences, ancient conflicts and blood feuds and prejudices and varying ideological perspectives. Shepard has high ideals, about the sanctity of life (organic, cybernetic, and everything in between), about the value of unity and cooperation and respecting each others' differences. Being forced, over the past few years, to work with people of all different species and backgrounds, has eradicated most of the underlying prejudices Shepard may have had, shifted her worldview considerably, and she's generally a very open-minded person, but that doesn't mean she always lives up to her ideals.
For one thing, she has no qualms about brutally killing people who harm or threaten to harm those she cares about. Shepard is passionately loyal to her crew and those under her command, particularly those who have been with her since the mission to defeat Saren. They are her family, the people she cares most about in the whole galaxy, and they've become her reason for wanting to stop the Reapers.
Still, under most circumstances, she'll try to solve conflicts using non-violent means if she thinks it's remotely possible. And generally, she's confident in her ability to solve problems, whether by talking or by shooting things. She's a bit of a controversial figure in her universe, beloved by some as a hero, and seen by others as unstable or insane, and she's had to spend quite a bit of time (especially recently) justifying many of her actions to those in charge. As such, she projects an air of confidence in herself, of belief that she is doing the right thing. And, for the most part, that's the truth.
However, recently, that facade of confidence has been starting to show a bit of wear and tear, cracking around the edges. Shepard has been suffering from nightmares, reminders of all the people she has failed to save, and she clearly feels a lot of remorse about leaving Earth while it was under attack from the Reapers - she knows it was the right thing to do, but it's difficult to really believe that when millions of people back home are dying or being enslaved while she skips around the galaxy hobnobbing with politicians.
Shepard is a natural leader, capable of inspiring incredible loyalty in those under her command - even people with deeply opposing ideologies, worldviews and prejudices. For instance, Garrus and Wrex - members of two species, turians and krogans, who traditionally hate each other and have a long history of conflict - eventually become friends through their mutual association with Shepard. A similar dynamic occurs in the relationship between Tali and Legion.
In conversation, Shepard is generally straightforward and to-the-point. With friends, people she feels comfortable with, and other soldiers she's often shown engaging in playful banter and ribbing. She exhibits a lot of compassion for the weak, and disgust for those who would exploit the weak. She also tends to not get along with politicians and bureaucrats, because she doesn't play their games. However, often because of this, she can be quite good at mediating and resolving conflicts. Shepard tells it like it is, and people have a tendency to listen to her.
Object: Her M-6 Carnifex heavy pistol + 1 thermal clip.
Reason for playing: I love Shepard because, as a blank-slate sort of protagonist, there's a lot of space for doing different things with the character. And now, Mass Effect 3 opened up even more possibilities, especially the possibility that Shep has some serious emotional issues for various reasons that I could easily tl;dr about, not least the fact that she's responsible for a lot of deaths; she herself was actually dead for two years and resurrected by a very shady terrorist organization (and implanted with cybernetics by said terrorist organization), etc. So while on the surface of it, Shepard can be seen as a very standard save-the-galaxy kind of hero, there's also some hints at darker/more complex issues that I think would be really interesting to explore in the context of Baedal!
And of course, I think she would fit right in with the darker, horror-like themes of the game. Her universe literally has alien robot zombies, after all.
Gods: Gediron is the obvious choice here, given Shepard's strong military leanings and her experience with battle and war. A secondary possibility would be Eliandre, based on Shepard's beliefs in justice, as well as her position as a mediator.
Writing Samples
First-Person Network Post: dear_mun.
Third-Person Arrival Post: It was the Dream. That Dream, the one she went to sleep dreading every night. The dark, murky woods, full of figures. The voices. The child. Trying, trying to catch up to him, unable to reach him. And then, finally, there he was.
The Dream ended differently this time. She caught up to the boy, and then - then the world went white, blinding her -
Shepard woke with a gasp, in a cold sweat, and it took her a moment to realize she wasn't in her bed, in her cabin, on the Normandy. She wasn't anyplace that she recognized. The last time she'd woken up in a strange place, it had ended up being a Cerberus lab, and two years had passed, and there had been an attack. Noise, voices, violence.
Now, everything was quiet and still.
She sat up, taking stock of herself and her surroundings. She wasn't injured that she could tell. She didn't feel drugged, or groggy, either. It was as though she had genuinely just been asleep. But she was in armor, not civvies, as though she'd been pulled from a battlefield.
On a table was a device, and her pistol, just as she remembered it, even down to the modded scope for more accurate long-range fire. The device was new, however. Well, new to her, though it looked incredibly old-fashioned. It was no omni-tool, that was for sure.
Shepard perched on the table, pistol at her hip, and started inspecting the device. If she could get it to work, it could be her way out of this place and back to her ship. Back to her crew. Back to the fight.
Third-Person Action Post: Shepard ducked for cover behind a pillar, checking the clip on her gun. They were being pressed hard, but they had to get into this compound to get the data Cerberus had stored here. They'd expected Cerberus troops, maybe even an Atlas mech.
What they hadn't expected had been the husks.
Tali was attempting to hack the lock on a door to get them to a shortcut, while Shepard and Liara held off the creatures. She saw Liara toss out a singularity, which swept two husks up into its field. Shepard aimed a warp at them, and the singularity detonated, sending out a shockwave which killed the husks, slamming the corpses into the ground with a meaty sound.
Shepard turned to her left, and threw a few more of the husks out of her way.
"Banshee on our six!" Liara's voice crackled into her ear, and Shepard turned just in time to see the creature charge right at Tali, grabbing her and lifting her off the ground.
She didn't have time to think about whether Tali's suit would be compromised, or where Liara was, or if a horde of husks were about to pull her entrails out. Her reflexes set in - her friend was in danger, seconds away from having the life squeezed out of her. She pulled her pistol, sighting the banshee's head in her scope. Time seemed to slow, and Shepard fired. The banshee's scream was cut off abruptly, the headshot killing it instantly in a spray of gore, dropping Tali as it fell.
Shepard was at Tali's side in an instant, making sure the quarian was still breathing, checking her enviro-suit for punctures, helping her to her feet. "Shepard, I'll be fine," she protested.
"I guess you will," Shepard said, assuring herself that Tali was unhurt.
"Is everyone all right?" Liara asked.
"Yes," Shepard said quickly. "We're fine. C'mon, let's get into that compound and get this over with."
Tali nodded, and got back to work. And Shepard said a quick thank-you to whoever or whatever might be listening, that she didn't yet have anyone to mourn today.
Misc
Other:
Name: Froda
Username: (if applicable)
froda_bagginsAre you over the age of eighteen? y!
Current characters in Baedal: N/A
In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Commander Jane Shepard - but everyone just calls her Shepard.
Username:
cmdreffingshepardFandom: Mass Effect trilogy of video games
Played By: N/A
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/2918431/1586440
Canon Character Section
Physical Description: Shepard is 32 years old, and is pretty tall for a woman, about 5'10" in her combat boots, and approximately 140 lbs. She's slim, but well-muscled after over ten years of dedicated military training and active duty. She has quite a few scars of varying shapes and sizes scattered about her body, and red hair and green eyes - rare features in the 22nd century. She's used to standing out a bit because of that. She moves with the air of someone with authority, who knows where she's going and who knows how to kick your ass if you get in her way. She also has the impeccable posture of a career military person.
Sexuality: Canonically, Shepard is pretty open-minded, and can flirt with men, women and aliens of various genders. So I'd say pansexual. She can have casual sex - or perhaps more accurately friends-with-benefits, since most of her potential partners are members of her crew/team, people she trusts. She's also capable of developing deep romantic bonds and committing to one person.
History: Here is a wiki article that outlines the backgrounds which can be chosen for Shepard (Warning: if you scroll down, there are some major endgame spoilers for Mass Effect 3!) With those options in mind, I'll say that my Shepard has the Spacer background and the War Hero service record - she was born to a military family and spent her childhood on various space stations, and earned a bunch of recognition and awards for her role in the battle of Elysium. She's also a graduate of the incredibly hardcore spec ops N7 program, under the mentorship of David Anderson.
She was assigned as Anderson's XO (second-in-command) on the SSV Normandy, an experimental stealth-enabled Alliance frigate of turian-human design. She was also suggested as a potential candidate for the first human Spectre, which is sort of like James Bond in space - license to kill, very little oversight, answer only to the Council itself, etc. Unfortunately, her first test run, a mission to the human colony of Eden Prime, went terribly wrong when another Spectre - Saren Arterius - went rogue and killed Shepard's supervisor, Nihlus. The colony was also under attack by the geth - a race of AIs that turned on their creators (the quarians) centuries before and evicted them from their home world.
Shepard came to believe that Saren and the geth were working to bring an ancient race of sentient machines, the Reapers, into the galaxy from their hiding place in dark space in order to annihilate (or perhaps assimilate) all advanced organic life.
The powers that be were unconvinced, and Shepard was only able to prove that Saren had gone rogue, which led the Council to revoke his Spectre status. They named Shepard the first human Spectre and gave her the resources to track Saren down and stop him. Shepard then took command of the Normandy, assembled a motley crew of military types and alien misfits - including Garrus Vakarian, a former C-Sec officer, Urdnot Wrex, a krogan mercenary, Liara T'Soni, an asari archaeologist, and Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, a young quarian on Pilgrimage.
Together, they worked to stop Saren from enacting his plan (while at the same time trying to figure out what that plan was), but he was always one step ahead of them. Eventually, Shepard discovered that Saren's ship, Sovereign, was in fact a Reaper, and that it had indoctrinated (basically brainwashed) Saren into believing that alliance with the Reapers was the only way for organic life to survive the invasion. Sovereign led the geth fleet in an attack on the Citadel, the center of galactic political and economic power - because the Citadel itself was a gateway for the Reapers into the galaxy, a millennia-old trap placed there to allow them easy access when they invaded.
Shepard and company managed to defeat Saren, regain control of the Citadel, destroy Sovereign and stop the Reapers from getting into the galaxy - she also saved the Council.
Then, six weeks later, while on assignment clearing out pockets of geth resistance, the Normandy was attacked and destroyed by an unknown enemy ship. Most of the crew managed to survive, but Shepard was killed - asphyxiated in space.
Her remains were recovered through dubious means by a shady pro-human organization called Cerberus, led by someone known only as "The Illusive Man", and two years and billions of credits later, Cerberus successfully brought Shepard back from the dead.
Why did they do this? According to the Illusive Man, it was because he believed that Shepard was the galaxy's best hope for survival in the face of the continued Reaper threat. He asked Shepard to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a number of human colonies on the edges of the galaxy, and - despite her deep misgivings about working for Cerberus, as well as the Illusive Man's motives - Shepard found herself once again in command of a ship called Normandy (rebuilt, of course) and putting together a new team to stop a mysterious race called the Collectors, who were later discovered to be working to create a new human Reaper. Some of her old team members rejoined her, most notably Tali and Garrus. Shepard embarked on something of a cross-species liaison with the latter, ostensibly to "blow off steam", and they spent a single night together before the "suicide mission" to the Collector home world.
Once again, Shepard was able to save the day - she infiltrated the Collector base, destroyed the human Reaper and managed to get nearly everyone out alive. When the Illusive Man asked her to hand over the Collector base to Cerberus, she flipped him the bird and blew the thing up.
After the suicide mission, Shepard parted with most of her team, cut all ties with Cerberus, and did a few recon missions under the table for the Alliance. On one such mission, she stumbled upon an impending Reaper invasion and was forced to destroy a mass relay by driving an asteroid into it. The resulting supernova-sized explosion vaporized the entire star system, including over 300,000 batarians. In response to this, Shepard was forced to return to Earth to face an Alliance investigative committee.
She was incarcerated for six months, but then the Reaper invasion of Earth began.
Forced to flee Earth to gather allies to fight the Reapers, Shepard traveled across the galaxy, attempting to gain the support of species with longstanding conflicts between them. She reunited with Garrus, who once more rejoined her crew, and they resumed their romantic relationship as well.
Shepard successfully cured the genophage, a thousand-year-old bioweapon which had been effectively neutering the krogan for generations, thus gaining their support. She resolved the centuries-long conflict between the quarians and the geth, helping the quarians regain their home world, she clashed with Cerberus on multiple occasions, and then came Thessia.
Thessia, the home world of the asari and birthplace of Shepard's friend Liara, was being hit hard by the Reapers. Intel suggested Shepard would be able to find vital information on the creation of a superweapon, the Crucible, which had the potential to help destroy the Reapers.
But Shepard failed. Cerberus got to the information first, and got away with it. And Thessia fell to the Reapers.
At this point, Shepard had a moment of weakness. She felt real despair at ever beating the Reapers. After everything she'd accomplished, suddenly she had failed at a vitally important task. And she was going to have to explain her failure, not simply to her commanding officers, but also to her friend, Liara, who had now lost her home to the Reapers. In a moment of desperation, Shepard wished she could be somewhere else. Wished she didn't have to fight this fight, and suffer such loss.
This is the moment she was transported to Baedal.
Powers: I think here some wiki articles will be most informative. Shepard's class is Adept, which means she is a biotic - kind of like telekinesis, mostly used to throw people around with her brain. The adept article lists out the specific talents an adept Shepard has - I'll be going with the basic ones from ME2/3, which are warp - does some damage and staggers a single target; pull - does what it says on the tin, pulls the target up into the air and sets them drifting; throw - does what it says on the tin; shockwave - a series of energy bursts that can send multiple opponents in a straight line flying; singularity - which can pull two or three opponents toward its center, leaving them defenseless for a short period of time.
Beyond her biotics, Shepard also has numerous cybernetic implants, courtesy of Cerberus. They don't grant her any particular powers, but they do make her a bit stronger and tougher than most humans. She has better stamina and endurance, and she has a much higher tolerance for drugs and alcohol - so if someone wants to, say, sedate her, the dosage required is much, much higher than what would normally be expected for a human of her build.
Talents/Abilities:: In addition to the above, Shepard has all the skills that can be expected from an elite special forces marine with over a decade of training and experience - she's skilled in hand-to-hand combat, as well as firearms use in everything from pistols all the way up to flame-throwers and missile launchers. She's highly competent with tech gadgets and computers, she can hack door security locks when she needs to, though by 22nd century standards she's only 'highly competent', as opposed to 'genius grade'.
She also has good survival skills, as well as basic field medical training in human, turian, salarian and asari biology. She's a natural leader, and rose very quickly through the ranks of the Alliance to a position of authority. She's used to having soldiers under her command, and she knows the ins and outs of being in that position.
On top of all that, she's a great poker player, and can drink most organics under the table.
Personality: Shepard is, first and foremost, a soldier. She was born into a military family, was raised to that life and there was never any question that she would enlist. Her personality is pretty intimately connected with her career - she has a strong sense of morality and fairness, as well as self-discipline and the ability to both give and follow orders. Practically her whole life has been spent with military hierarchies, so she's used to having a chain of command - though that doesn't mean she particularly likes bureaucracy and red tape. She relies on her own judgment as often as not, and expects soldiers under her command to do the same. She'll bend or break the rules if she believes it's necessary - to do the right thing.
Shepard comes from a universe which is incredibly diverse, with numerous different alien species inhabiting the galaxy and attempting to govern it as best they can, despite deep-seated cultural and biological differences, ancient conflicts and blood feuds and prejudices and varying ideological perspectives. Shepard has high ideals, about the sanctity of life (organic, cybernetic, and everything in between), about the value of unity and cooperation and respecting each others' differences. Being forced, over the past few years, to work with people of all different species and backgrounds, has eradicated most of the underlying prejudices Shepard may have had, shifted her worldview considerably, and she's generally a very open-minded person, but that doesn't mean she always lives up to her ideals.
For one thing, she has no qualms about brutally killing people who harm or threaten to harm those she cares about. Shepard is passionately loyal to her crew and those under her command, particularly those who have been with her since the mission to defeat Saren. They are her family, the people she cares most about in the whole galaxy, and they've become her reason for wanting to stop the Reapers.
Still, under most circumstances, she'll try to solve conflicts using non-violent means if she thinks it's remotely possible. And generally, she's confident in her ability to solve problems, whether by talking or by shooting things. She's a bit of a controversial figure in her universe, beloved by some as a hero, and seen by others as unstable or insane, and she's had to spend quite a bit of time (especially recently) justifying many of her actions to those in charge. As such, she projects an air of confidence in herself, of belief that she is doing the right thing. And, for the most part, that's the truth.
However, recently, that facade of confidence has been starting to show a bit of wear and tear, cracking around the edges. Shepard has been suffering from nightmares, reminders of all the people she has failed to save, and she clearly feels a lot of remorse about leaving Earth while it was under attack from the Reapers - she knows it was the right thing to do, but it's difficult to really believe that when millions of people back home are dying or being enslaved while she skips around the galaxy hobnobbing with politicians.
Shepard is a natural leader, capable of inspiring incredible loyalty in those under her command - even people with deeply opposing ideologies, worldviews and prejudices. For instance, Garrus and Wrex - members of two species, turians and krogans, who traditionally hate each other and have a long history of conflict - eventually become friends through their mutual association with Shepard. A similar dynamic occurs in the relationship between Tali and Legion.
In conversation, Shepard is generally straightforward and to-the-point. With friends, people she feels comfortable with, and other soldiers she's often shown engaging in playful banter and ribbing. She exhibits a lot of compassion for the weak, and disgust for those who would exploit the weak. She also tends to not get along with politicians and bureaucrats, because she doesn't play their games. However, often because of this, she can be quite good at mediating and resolving conflicts. Shepard tells it like it is, and people have a tendency to listen to her.
Object: Her M-6 Carnifex heavy pistol + 1 thermal clip.
Reason for playing: I love Shepard because, as a blank-slate sort of protagonist, there's a lot of space for doing different things with the character. And now, Mass Effect 3 opened up even more possibilities, especially the possibility that Shep has some serious emotional issues for various reasons that I could easily tl;dr about, not least the fact that she's responsible for a lot of deaths; she herself was actually dead for two years and resurrected by a very shady terrorist organization (and implanted with cybernetics by said terrorist organization), etc. So while on the surface of it, Shepard can be seen as a very standard save-the-galaxy kind of hero, there's also some hints at darker/more complex issues that I think would be really interesting to explore in the context of Baedal!
And of course, I think she would fit right in with the darker, horror-like themes of the game. Her universe literally has alien robot zombies, after all.
Gods: Gediron is the obvious choice here, given Shepard's strong military leanings and her experience with battle and war. A secondary possibility would be Eliandre, based on Shepard's beliefs in justice, as well as her position as a mediator.
Writing Samples
First-Person Network Post: dear_mun.
Third-Person Arrival Post: It was the Dream. That Dream, the one she went to sleep dreading every night. The dark, murky woods, full of figures. The voices. The child. Trying, trying to catch up to him, unable to reach him. And then, finally, there he was.
The Dream ended differently this time. She caught up to the boy, and then - then the world went white, blinding her -
Shepard woke with a gasp, in a cold sweat, and it took her a moment to realize she wasn't in her bed, in her cabin, on the Normandy. She wasn't anyplace that she recognized. The last time she'd woken up in a strange place, it had ended up being a Cerberus lab, and two years had passed, and there had been an attack. Noise, voices, violence.
Now, everything was quiet and still.
She sat up, taking stock of herself and her surroundings. She wasn't injured that she could tell. She didn't feel drugged, or groggy, either. It was as though she had genuinely just been asleep. But she was in armor, not civvies, as though she'd been pulled from a battlefield.
On a table was a device, and her pistol, just as she remembered it, even down to the modded scope for more accurate long-range fire. The device was new, however. Well, new to her, though it looked incredibly old-fashioned. It was no omni-tool, that was for sure.
Shepard perched on the table, pistol at her hip, and started inspecting the device. If she could get it to work, it could be her way out of this place and back to her ship. Back to her crew. Back to the fight.
Third-Person Action Post: Shepard ducked for cover behind a pillar, checking the clip on her gun. They were being pressed hard, but they had to get into this compound to get the data Cerberus had stored here. They'd expected Cerberus troops, maybe even an Atlas mech.
What they hadn't expected had been the husks.
Tali was attempting to hack the lock on a door to get them to a shortcut, while Shepard and Liara held off the creatures. She saw Liara toss out a singularity, which swept two husks up into its field. Shepard aimed a warp at them, and the singularity detonated, sending out a shockwave which killed the husks, slamming the corpses into the ground with a meaty sound.
Shepard turned to her left, and threw a few more of the husks out of her way.
"Banshee on our six!" Liara's voice crackled into her ear, and Shepard turned just in time to see the creature charge right at Tali, grabbing her and lifting her off the ground.
She didn't have time to think about whether Tali's suit would be compromised, or where Liara was, or if a horde of husks were about to pull her entrails out. Her reflexes set in - her friend was in danger, seconds away from having the life squeezed out of her. She pulled her pistol, sighting the banshee's head in her scope. Time seemed to slow, and Shepard fired. The banshee's scream was cut off abruptly, the headshot killing it instantly in a spray of gore, dropping Tali as it fell.
Shepard was at Tali's side in an instant, making sure the quarian was still breathing, checking her enviro-suit for punctures, helping her to her feet. "Shepard, I'll be fine," she protested.
"I guess you will," Shepard said, assuring herself that Tali was unhurt.
"Is everyone all right?" Liara asked.
"Yes," Shepard said quickly. "We're fine. C'mon, let's get into that compound and get this over with."
Tali nodded, and got back to work. And Shepard said a quick thank-you to whoever or whatever might be listening, that she didn't yet have anyone to mourn today.
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