Jem was born to absurdly rich landed slave-owners on Davan, a Hegemony colony. They were set to become the richest family on the planet and ascend from Cloud caste to Heaven, his sister Ponna was already in the process of being betrothed to a grandson of the Hegemon. Davan itself was a world on the rise; nearly five decades ago the Oran Academy of Mass Technologies was founded, since then becoming reputable school for studying element zero, biotics, and mass effect fields, and only two decades past the Hegemony invested in expanding dockyards over the planet. Davan suffered no less than twelve eezo contaminations in the last century, many of the later ones probably on purpose, and as such the Oran Academy and the Office of Recruitment have had quite a few biotics pass into the fold.

Jem's entire family are biotics, and all have studied at the Oran Academy at one time or another. His parents own a significant portion of the campus, and as such he received most of his education there, but it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. A new batch of slaves arrived to work in the Academy, and one of the new younger ones broke a mug of tea with only Jem as a witness. Fancying himself rather enlightened and above such cruelty as beating a slave, Jem allowed the young Salarian to get away with it, simply taking responsibility for it when a professor came to investigate the sound. The slave, Molan, took that as a cue that they were now friends, and whenever the two were alone or passed each other by, Molan would give bright acknowledgements or cheerful chatter. Until something went wrong.

Mysina was the name of an Asari slave that shared quarters with Molan, and one day Molan came frantically in search of Jem, going as far as to wake him in the middle of the night by barging into his dorm room. Before he knew it he was in the slave quarters with Molan, Mysina, and two other Asari. The other slaves freaked at the sight of him, berating Molan, and one burst into tears, but Mysina was clearly having problems and could hardly focus enough to be aware of his arrival.

It rapidly became apparent she was pregnant, that no one else had caught on to that fact by some miracle, and there was some kind of complication with her contractions. The decision to help them was obvious, and he jumped into action to find a medikit and a medical grade omnitool from one of the science labs. Of course when he blundered into a security officer on the way back, it took some quick thinking and blabbing something about a minorly injured roommate to get him off the hook for being in restricted wings after curfew. He hadn't planned to keep it to himself, he wasn't exactly secretive with his peers about his fondness for Molan, but the severity of what he was doing put him on the spot.

Later he would decide that had definitely been the right choice, as the Asari slaves were forced to trust him and broke protocol to have very serious and frank discussions about what would happen to them all should he tell them about the baby, which led to longer talks about what slavery was actually like without the rose-tinted visors of being the slave-owner, and then further reinforcement where the Asari implied he'd be imprisoned for treason and never heard from again for undermining the values and laws of the Hegemony- a very believable threat, if untrue. The slaves didn't quite grasp just how rich he was and what it meant he could get away with, but that threat was the last straw that set him on his inevitable path.

In order to keep the secret of Rahya, Mysina's new daughter, the slaves needed his help. Eventually everything would fall apart, but for a short time Jem managed to keep it together. Having a secret and going against the rules was actually kind of exciting, but the longer it went on the more frustrated he became with the treatment his tentative friends were forced to endure.

Being of such a reputable caste and his parents’ influence in the Academy granted Jem a bit more leeway than other students, and he transferred mid year to entirely new fields with a radically different end-goal. Previously he’d studied mathematics and engineering, with a heavy focus on designing biotic implants in particular, but suddenly he had new priorities and swapped over to a more medical focus, focusing on the biology and development of biotics, and hiring a professor from Khar’shan to teach him the basics of medical care.

His family sent their children to the Academy purely for the prestige, hardly any of them actually ended up in careers the school was actually specialized for, instead all becoming sponsors, investors, and benefactors, simply handling their money to make more money, but Jem’s aunt Khotia was a core designer in service to the Hegemony, and she encouraged his interests in breaking away from the norm and becoming a doctor.

He was still young when Rahya was revealed, a random inspection of the slave quarters landed all the Asari on a ship to a re education facility for disobedient and willful slaves. Molan, the Salarian boy, was killed when he tried to intervene. Jem didn’t learn of it until hours later in the cafeteria, when some other students were gossiping about the incident. He dropped from school that night and returned to his family’s estate, eventually forgoing his grief and dividing his attention between his new tutors and half-heartedly searching for his friends through the extranet.

He carefully gained the trust of his own family’s slaves, many of whom were better off than the slaves of a lesser caste simply because their estate was so rich and pristine they could afford good working conditions and rewards for good behavior rather than punishments for failures. It didn’t make the practice any better, but it wasn’t as life-threatening and abusive as it might otherwise have been. Eventually one of them gave up the location of a re-education facility they’d been to before, even though they weren’t supposed to talk about them, and Jem was able to hire a hacker to splice a disposable omnitool into the system, from there he found a way to read the resident lists for all associate buildings and, nearly an entire year after the incident, he found a lead on Rahya.

He found her in a Salt caste school for the education of young slaves, and traced her path back to Davan, where he found the records that led him to the location of her mother and the others, luckily all on the same planet of Copril. With his wealth he easily made the necessary connections to fund a bounty on them, with the express orders that they weren’t to come to harm and that they were to be delivered to an escort on Ilium that he bribed to pick them up and return them to Asari space. Unfortunately, just after transfering the credits to bribe a nurse in the Salt caste school, Jem’s father caught on to something going on and vigorously scrutinized his activities for nearly a month, meaning he never got to check in with them after they were free- or even check to see if the plan had succeeded at all, or suffered any complications.

By the time he ascertained that they had at least been liberated from the facilities, the Reapers were appearing in Batarian space. The Academy and the Shipyards were some of the first places to go up, leading to massive eezo leaks that turned whole swathes of the sky a bright blue for weeks, poisoning large amounts of the population. Instead of distributing his estate’s supply of scrubber-masks to the city as his mother directed, he instead left the boxes in their slave dorms, and when a gap in the Reapers’ attack formed in the sky and his father ordered him to prepare their private yacht for a hasty escape, he warned and recruited the slaves to help so they wouldn’t be left behind and forgotten while the rest of his family secured their valuables in the vaults.

They ended up stranded on the space stations over Irune, the Volus homeworld, when the Relays went down, and his father was forced to release their slaves or else be arrested by a Turian patrol, much to the amusement of Jem.

Their inevitable return to their estate on Davan was a relief for most, especially to find only the fields and peripheral plantation complexes were looted and burned and not their more precious valuables in the estate proper, thus allowing them to maintain their wealth- and even advance it. Batarian society was shaken, many of the upper castes had been killed on Khar’shan, caught in the reaper invasion, and Jem’s family was on the short list to become fully fledged members of the Heaven caste, their only faults being the unfinalized marriage into the Hegemon’s direct line and their colony-based upbringing.

Jem couldn’t have cared less though; he’d had his first taste of the cosmopolitan freedom over the world of Irune, and it was a taste he had enjoyed immensely. Hegemony citizens were not allowed to leave Batarian space, and information was strictly controlled, but they were forgiven for their flight given their circumstances, their caste, and the fact that they had come back, even after being exposed to the wonders of the free extranet and all the treasonous ideas and information it held.

At eighteen years old Jem put a bounty on his own head under a pseudonym, and had himself kidnapped by pirates after visiting the library directly next to a spaceport, making it as easy for them as possible. Once outside Hegemony space he turned on his captors, equipping a light collapsible helmet for just this purpose, and using a mass-effect bolt-thrower he’d smuggled in his underwear to blow a hole into space on the bridge, and using the confusion and his mag-boots he ditched his kidnappers and escaped on their shuttle, after putting a few more holes in the corridors.

From there it was a hasty trip to the Terminus systems, and he never looked back.

Height: 2 meters
Active programs: 1464