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[OOC]
Your Name: Stacey
Contact: plurk - thepenguinred
Are you at least 16 years of age or older?: Yes
Current Characters(s): N/A

[IC]

Is this a re-app?: No.
Character Name: Commander Jane Shepard
Journal: sheshotfirst
Canon: Mass Effect
Canon Point: Post Mass Effect 3, synthesis ending (see below for details)
Species: Human
Age: 32

History:
The following links help give a general idea of Shepard’s background, but I’ll include more detailed information after each one to give a more specific idea of *this* Shepard’s history. There are many, many individual choices that can be made in the games, so I will only cover the major ones in order not to make this app 20 pages long. Overall, Shepard was a paragon with some renegade (a chaotic good) vanguard, so most of her choices will involve attempting to understand/help people, but usually through punching the enemy/lecturing until everyone shut up and hugged it out. In no win situations, Shepard picked the options that helped the most people, such as ending a terrorist plot to harm a world over saving a handful of hostages (more on all this in the personality section).

To make things less complicated for potential future castmates, Shepard went unromanced throughout the series.

Pre-game background.
Shepard is an Earth-born sole survivor. Quoted from the page above, this means she:

Was an orphan raised on the streets of the great megatropolises covering Earth. She escaped the life of petty crime and underworld gangs by enlisting with the Alliance military when she turned eighteen
During her service, a mission she was on went horribly wrong. Trapped in an extreme survival situation, Shepard had to overcome physical torments and psychological stresses that would have broken most people. She survived while all those around her fell, and now she alone is left to tell the tale.

Mass Effect 1
Major Choices:
Released The Rachni Queen
Convinced Wrex to join the fight
Sacrificed Ashley on Virmire
Saved the Council
Named Anderson as the human Council representative

Mass Effect 2
Sent Veetor to the Migrant Fleet
Allows Mordin to shoot his former colleague, convinces him to keep the data
Leaves Jacob’s father at the mercy of his remaining crew
Convinces Miranda to talk to her sister
Convinces Jack to let her fellow victim go
Convinces Garrus to let Sidonis go
Helps Samara kill her daughter
Gives Dramatic Speech to clear Tali’s name without getting Tali’s father exiled
Destroyed the Geth heretics
Convinces Zaeed to join with her, even though they let his target escape
Tells Kasumi to keep the greybox
Sends David Archer to Grissom Academy
Helps Grunt become part of clan Urdnot
All crew members survive mission
Destroys the Collector base

Mass Effect 3
Allows the reporter to join the ship
Sends Jack/her students to serve as support for troops
Sacrifices the Rachni queen
Stops Samara from killing herself
Helps Mordin cure the genophage
Shepard negotiates a ceasefire between the Geth and Quarians
Chose Synthesis, sacrificing herself to save the galaxy


Personality:
As a malleable protagonist, there are many directions Shepard can take in game while achieving the same end game. For this Shepard, her core personality traits can be summarized as: stubbornness, deep devotion to independence/taking responsibility for one's own choices, curiosity, high intelligence, charisma, and possessing an often interesting sense of humor. While the game divides things into ‘paragon’ and ‘renegade’ choices, the truth of the matter is that war exists in a moral grey state, and Shepard is first and foremost a warrior. Rather than falling into simplicities such as ‘murder bad’ or ‘humans good’, Shepard has developed her own firm understanding of what she considers acceptable (or good) and what she does not. She does believe in saving people and helping the galaxy, but she knows it’s not always that easy. Sometimes 100 people have to die to save 100,000, and she has stepped forward to accept the responsibility to make those choices. But in the end, she has to make them. Shepard doesn’t just accept orders blindly. Infact, her time as a spectre has emphasised an almost instinctive rebellion against many kinds of authority or any unquestioning obedience. While she generally can act slightly more polite when called upon, such as trying to be diplomatic with the Council, Shepard overall has no problem making her opinions abundantly clear regardless of the rank of the individual she is addressing. And then following her own choices, consequences be damned.

That she is willing to speak her mind and often go her own doesn’t mean Shepard is going to totally blow off orders for no reason, however. That wouldn’t have exactly made for a long military career. Rather, Shepard tries her best to collect evidence that she was right all along, and will not stop bringing an issue up until she is satisfied with the result. It’s only when she is absolutely ordered to go against a core belief that she will go rogue. But even then, the point is to convince people, not to just overpower them and force them to obey her. Even if she has rebelled, after the fact she’ll try to justify her actions. Shepard has a very high regard for independent thought- indeed, only really finding a person irredeemable when they actively take away the free will of others. Shepard has her ideas about the way things should be, but she arrived at these ideas on her own and believes others have to find their own answers as well. Overall, what she wants most out of individuals around her is for them to think rather than blindly follow this or that ideology.

Two other primary driving factors are Shepard’s high intelligence and intense curiosity. There isn’t a world Shepard traveled to in the game that she didn’t go out of her way to learn all she could about the history, people, and culture there, simply because she was curious. All this curiosity can lead to trouble, of course. She can often end up poking her nose into matters that are not her concern and, at times, which are over her head, simply because she wanted to know about them. This also leads to Shepard taking up a lot of time simply helping people with their personal, day to day problems, because once she’s sated her curiosity about what’s going on she can’t simply walk away and leave that soul to their plight. She’s acted as anything from a matchmaker to a hostage negotiator to a bounty hunter as a result of this need to be of use once she discovers a problem.

Shepard’s humor is also an important aspect of her character. This is because, no matter how bad things are, Shepard uses an often dry wit to keep the glass looking half full and herself, as well as her companions, sane in the face of at times overwhelming odds. She is capable of serious heart to hearts, but unless the situation is so dire as to call for them Shepard will usually respond to most any topic, even (or rather especially) while she’s being threatened, with quips or the occasional flirtation. Humor is a coping mechanism, and one that she’s prepared to lean on until she dies.

More directly related to her current post-death state, while Shepard still possesses the potential to be a great leader of men, the long war she has fought in, ending in (what she really hopes) was saving the galaxy and her death has spent most of her urge to act in any kind of ‘glorious leader’ gig. In her own galaxy, she knew what she was fighting for. In Atlas, things are clearly going to be much more vague. While she’ll still act as a dedicated soldier, Shepard will step back from the spotlight a significant bit and be content to lead her own small group, act alone, or serve in an advisory position. This doesn’t mean Shepard won’t seek to have impact on those around her and make her opinions known, however. Really, she can’t help but get tangled in every web that presents itself to her, but she has no desire to try and take control of a massive war again. Not until she has a real idea of what the hell is going on.


Powers & Abilities:
Street Kid
Shepard is not skilled at picking highly advanced locks or sneaking into things unseen. However, she did grow up in the street gangs of Earth and has some basic understanding of picking very simple locks, fencing objects, and how crime networks operate.

Soldier
Shepard has been as soldier for the whole of her adult life, both in the Alliance Navy and as a Spectre. In addition to the physical conditioning and weaponry knowledge this comes with, she is also a skilled tactician, having lead numerous battles and campaigns across her career.

Vanguard
Shepard is a fighting-focused biotic. She has some powers fueled by a biotic implant that help her take down enemies as quickly as possible with brutal force. This means she can focus and gain protection from her biotics, serving as a barrier or ‘force shield’ to protect her from low levels of damage. This barrier can also be used to crash into people with, causing physical damage as she rams into them or consciously forces her barrier to ‘explode’ to impact those within a few meters of her. She can also pull a single enemy/object towards her using this ‘force,’ or shove them/it away so an enemy will fall over using ‘shockwave.’

Misc: N/A

Sample:

While no individual thread reaches 10 comments from Shepard, here is my TDM thread. I’ve also included a different sample below.

“And there we go...”

The woman, crouched against one of the few rocky ridges in sight in the desert waste, tried to blink the sweat out of her eyes enough to focus on the delicate strip of metal in her hands. For the thousandth time since waking up she missed her nice, climate controlled N7 armor. And her shotguns. And grenades. And, oh, yes, and her whole damn ship full of crew and the ability to fly back to civilization-

But there’s no point in dreaming. Instead she should be focusing on the little fact that she’d never laid a proper trap before. Well, that’s only partly true. She’d set a strategic trap, sure. Enemy wanders in, troops close in. All kinds of strategic tricks and mind games. But a hand to god, actual metal trap to catch some kind of food source? This was a new one. Forming metal nooses from broken down pods baited with stale rations to catch the creatures that scavenged this world was a new skill set. One that the great Commander Shepard was, so far, practicing with less than promising results. But greater odds had been overcome. This wouldn’t be the thing that finally beat her. Another hissed breath, and she finally applied the pressure, twisting the metal just so-

“Son of a bitch!”

And the metal snapped back, one ragged end snapping off, making the whole attempt futile. Alright. Fine. The metal had won a small victory today, but it had hardly won the war.

She slipped the twisted metal and rations it back into the makeshift pack she’d fashioned. Tomorrow. She’d finally fashion the stubborn piece into a functional trap tomorrow. Hunger could be ignored for hours, days, even weeks, so long as she only ate the very bare minimum. For now she needed to scram before the hunter became the hunted. She’d have to climb to get back to the path she’d taken-

A path now blocked by a shuddering pile of leaves.

Well.

Damn.

At least no one was there to see her death by flora.