Name: Aran Nykerius; this name is a well-kept secret and he is only known as Mirage.
Race: Turian.
Sex: Male.
Age: 31.
Class: Operative, extranet pirate, cyberterrorist and hacker. Responsible for monitoring all comms, be it friend's or foe's, and cracking cybersecurity or automated defense systems.
Appearance: Remarkably short for a Turian, Mirage reaches a pitiful 5'7” on a good day. His carapace and eyes are pale white, sporting a faint blue hue when exposed to sunlight – a result of his albinism. Mirage is not only short, he is also frail; he hides his pathetic, decrepit frame beneath scarves and a hooded robe made of black fabric. His most ghastly and eye-popping feature is the angular, black rebreather permanently attached to the lower half of his face, obscuring his mouth and nose. Horrific scarring disfigures his skin where the apparatus was crudely grafted into his jaw. If Mirage's appearance had to be concisely described, 'menacing weakness' would be the chosen words.
This is further amplified by the self-propelled anti-grav force chair Mirage uses to move around in, as he is now too weak to stand or walk around for more than a few minutes at a time. Like everything Mirage owns, it is matte black, except for the faint blue-purple glow of the mass effect field used to levitate the chair a foot above the ground.
Background: Born on Omega in a fiercely unhealthy environment to pathetically poor parents, Aran was heavily disadvanted from his very first breath. Struck by a miasma of genetic disorders, he was doomed to a life of weakness. Albinism made him vulnerable to sunlight, crippling asthma slowly asphyxiated him and a rare Turian defect known as Karthun's syndrome stunted his growth. His mother died giving birth to him and his father was a worthless, drug-addicted gun runner. Aran had one thing going for him, however; he was extraordinarily smart. He grew up in the underbelly of Omega and was always too weak to play and fight with the other juveniles of his neighbourhood, instead spending his time tinkering and reading.
Once he got his hands on a computer, this turned into exploring the extranet; the addition of an Omni-tool, given to him by his father in a rare moment of affection, expanded his capabilities. Aran amused himself by attempting to circumvent cybersecurity and listening in on private comms, skills he learned from other unsavory figures active on Omega's extranet.
Desperate for credits, Aran's father eventually fell in with the Blue Suns. This improved Aran's living conditions a little and they moved to a slightly better neighbourhood, away from the toxic fumes produced by the incessant mining operations on Omega. It came with risks, of course, as the life expectancy of a Blue Suns mercenary wasn't necessarily very high. Aran's father wasn't particularly good at the job and his drug abuse made him unpopular among his fellow mercs. Distracting himself, Aran delved even further into cybercrime, utilizing his fierce intellect and cunning to learn all there was to know. He met various people this way who became his first 'friends' (or something like that, anyway), including a salarian who called himself Twitch and a fellow turian named Astrovor. Together, the three of them were a veritable tech-savvy tag-team and they started using their talents for more nefarious purposes. This is where Aran's first experience with credit theft and information brokering came from.
Aran's life turned upside down forever when his condition worsened dramatically; Aran's asthma was finally killing him. In another one of those rare moments of fatherly responsbility, Aran's father spent all his credits and loaned a lot more to purchase a custom-made rebreather that would filter out every unnecessary compound; he also hired a back-alley surgeon to graft it to Aran's face and to perform bronchiatic surgery. Aran survived – barely – but his father was unable to pay back his loans... and we all know what happens when loan sharks don't get their credits. Twitch and Astrovor pitched in whatever they could but they were still young and their exploits had never managed to be very lucrative.
While Aran was still recovering, his father was shot in the back of the head in a dingy alley. Aran learned of this through his extensive monitoring of the Omegan extranet, with the help of his friends, and figured the Blue Suns would be coming for him next, seeking to repossess the rebreather to recoup some of their losses. A cold fury came over him, the likes of which he had never experienced before, and he vowed to avenge his father. Aran escaped, but not before boobytrapping his apartment with incendiary grenades. Three Blue Suns mercenaries were killed when they kicked down the door and triggered the trap.
Now very much a wanted man, Aran dropped his birthname and adopted the moniker Mirage. He used his tech skills to hack his way into safehouses, eluding the Blue Suns, and siphoned credits away from private accounts to fund his quest for vengeance. Twitch and Astrovor became his eyes and his ears in the field, pledging themselves to Mirage's cause. Over time, Mirage learned the identity of the asari merc who had ordered the hit on his father and turned the tables on her with a squad of Blood Pack hunter-killers. Mirage employed them in return for information about the Blue Suns that Astrovor had tipped him off to, sparking a bigger gang conflict between the two organisations – however, this wasn't enough to draw the heat away from Mirage, and the Blue Suns were determined to see the rogue turian dead. Worst of all, the identity of his father's executioner remained unknown to him.
Fuelled by hatred and blind to the enormous risks he was taking, Mirage went head-to-head with the Blue Suns in a proxy war that mostly took place between hired guns in abandoned warehouses and seedy nightclubs. Twitch and Astrovor slowly distanced themselves further and further from Mirage, afraid of the consequences he could bring on all of them, but Mirage didn't care. He employed the full range of his abilities to obtain credits and information as fast as he could spend it, buying new allies and currying favors with other gangs in an attempt to destabilize the Blue Suns entirely. He became the Blood Pack's informal in-house information broker while simultaneously avoiding his enemies, constantly on the move, operating from the shadows and refusing to meet anyone face-to-face – not even his friends. Orchestrating several ambushes and assassinations, Mirage managed to cripple the Blue Suns' effort to hunt him down and bought himself more time; time he was using to identify his father's killer. He would have his revenge and he would have it personally.
The house of cards came tumbling down when Mirage botched an information sale to the Blood Pack; he had tipped them off to a shipment of Eclipse tech coming into Omega, but the tech-savvy Eclipse operatives had picked up his surveillance and set up an ambush. The whole Blood Pack squad was slaughtered. Now, the Blue Suns, Eclipse
and Blood Pack wanted him dead. Twitch and Astrovor both sent him a final message to let him know they were done with him and Mirage finally recognized defeat. He wiped all of his data, deleted all of his contacts, rigged his latest hideout to blow and attempted to depart Omega.
Unfortunately, Mirage was cut off on his way to the spaceport and, for the very first time in his life, forced to engage in a firefight against a death squad of Blue Suns. The turian was woefully inexperienced with firearms and instead fled, using his contingency plans to detonate digital virus bombs within the comms networks and information relays of the Omega station's gangs. Under cover of his tactical cloak, Mirage figured he was almost out of danger when a contingent of Eclipse mercs and Blood Pack vorchas closed in on his position. With the Blue Suns still hot on his heels, the inevitable happened: the three mercenary companies turned against each other. Hiding, desperate to stay out of sight, Mirage contemplated his options and, at the height of the battle, Mirage took control of an Eclipse YMIR mech. Disrupting the unit's IFF system, it began firing its mass accelerator cannons and rocket launcher without discretion. Mirage fled the scene of the three-way fight and hurried to his escape vessel. He almost made it, too; within a stone's throw distance from the small salarian trader he wanted to steal Mirage was accosted by a Blue Suns merc who ambushed him from the shadows. Shot in the knees and sprawled on the floor, his firearm fallen out of reach, Mirage was defenseless. The expected shot to the back of the head didn't come, however, and Mirage was instead taken prisoner by the Blue Suns.
Over the course of the next few weeks he was gruesomely tortured and interrogated; his data servers might have been wiped but Mirage's brain was still full of secrets about the other gangs active on Omega. His interrogator turned out to be his biggest nemesis; his father's assassin, a drell, who took great delight in tormenting Mirage with descriptions of his father's death. The torments included ripping the rebreather-graft from his face, leaving him to asphyxiate in an extremely painful manner, before crudely stitching and drilling it back on. Repeatedly. While the turian had always possessed an iron will, he broke eventually and spilled all of his secrets, convinced his miserable life would soon finally be at an end.
Mirage's body would never recover from the horrific injuries inflicted on him during this time, already weakened as it was by Karthun's syndrome, and he remains a cripple to this day.
An extraordinary pact between the Blood Pack and the Eclipse mercenaries was forged when they learned of Mirage's captivity; he knew too much about both organizations and had to be recovered or assassinated. The resulting firefight inside the Blue Suns compound was fierce and chaotic, and in this chaos, Twitch and Astrovor managed to infiltrate the base and steal Mirage out from under the gangs' noses.
Unconscious for days, Mirage was smuggled away from Omega to Illium. Twitch and Astrovor plundered Mirage's credit accounts to pay for his life-saving surgery, but what's necessary is necessary. The turian spent months recovering on Illium but it eventually became apparent that he had hit a plateau and would never be his former self; a shadow of a shadow of a turian. Dismayed, Mirage fell into a deep depression and sent his friends away, wanting nothing but to be left alone. He contemplated suicide for a long time but somehow never found the conviction to go through with it.
After more than two years of moping around on Illium like a recluse, surviving off of the meager remains of his credit accounts, Mirage emerged from the dark recesses of his mind, determined to turn his life around. Spending the absolute last of his credits, he purchased an anti-grav force chair powered by a mass effect field, normally used to boost elderly mobility, and started exploring his options. Filled with a burning vigor that took him completely by surprise, Mirage responded to a classified on the extranet looking for specialists to become bounty hunters (or something of that ilk) and found shipment off-world, ready to face the galaxy again.
Equipment:- Anti-grav force chair powered by a mass effect field; hovers approximately one foot above the ground. Maximum speed is slightly below that of a human in full sprint, but significantly less agile. Operated via Omni-tool link. It's made of a durable alloy and painted matte black.
- 2x Serrice Council Savant Omni-tools. Very prized possessions. One is used to control the force chair and operate nearby machinery while the other keeps constant tabs on local comms and is loaded with decryption programs and the like.
- Standard turian outfit beneath black hooded robes. No armor.
- Custom-made matte black rebreather grafted to Mirage's face. Allows him to breathe without asphyxiating.
- M-3 Predator hidden in the force chair's seat for dire emergencies.
Powers:- AI Hacking
- Overload
- Tactical Cloak
- Neural Shock
- Energy Drain
Font Colour: Mirage reporting for duty. Achieved by using the code tags.
