Race: Human
Sex: Female
Age: 34
Profile: Vanguard
DOB: 2151 CE
Homeworld: Earth
Appearance: Firuzeh stands at about 176cm with a muscular but at first seemingly softer frame that, while not exactly that of a seasoned soldier, shows she is no stranger to exertion. She has relatively smooth olive skin, occasionally marred by scarring and other damage - bullet wounds, miscellaneous damage from an eventful life. If one were to closely examine where skin meets synthetic material on her right shoulder it would become plainly apparent that her decision to have the arm replaced was not an unnecessary one - the tissue is distorted and ugly, almost burned in appearance, with heavy duty connections visible protruding from her skin and connecting to the arm. A closer inspection would reveal to an experienced technician that the initial installation was rushed, much of the skin around the prosthetic having died off, leaving the latter improvements and additions exposed for all to see.
Her right arm has been replaced in its entirety, including the shoulder, with a
high quality cybernetic, carbon nanotube muscle fibers plainly apparent where laminated graphene plates do not cover. Rather than hide the appearance of the bionic limb, she flaunts it proudly, even going so far as to have laser etched one of the plates covering the area her bicep with her initials and various other designs. The cybernetics are present elsewhere in her body, but are all subcutaneous and far less overt in their effects, primarily skeletal reinforcement to prevent her from breaking her own ribs with the power of the arm. Her current model is externally similar in appearance to the original, but three months before embarking upon the Ark, she called in every favor available to her, replacing the entire arm replaced with a model on the bleeding edge of development.
Firuzeh keeps her hair in a tight braid tucked away while on the job, but in her free time she leaves it loose and flowing. Her hair is dark, wavy, and thick - reaching well past shoulder length. Her left eye is of a minty green hue, warm and friendly for the most part, but years of misfortune have taken their toll, and the mania of her time in the milky way before departure for Andromeda is visible. Her right eye is prosthetic, part of the eye socket replaced with dark grey composite material, the skin noticeably absent over it. A small scar runs the distance from her lower lip to her chin, a greater scar - evidently a burn - mars the left side of her neck, and her nose is bent at a permanent angle.
Background:Firuzeh was born in Isfahan, Iran, to a family with a long and illustrious history of working in the medical profession, with accomplishments ranging back centuries, and a few relatives even popping up in medical history books. In fact, joining the medical profession had become such a universal career in her family, with a few black sheep now and then choosing to become generals, inventors, or kebab merchants in Tehran, that the usual response to a baby on the way was to speculate on what discipline the child would enter, rather than the sex or personality of the baby.
From day one, Firuzeh was gently pushed towards medicine, and while she took to the subject fairly well, most children would have had they been steeped in the medical world since the day they could walk. Every family reunion was marked by questions into prospective fields she wanted to enter, if she wanted to visit her aunt’s workplace for a day, or the occasional excessively detailed retelling of a particularly grueling surgery.
But moreso than medicine, she took to history in her early life, from a young age rushing to explore the ancient ruins of past civilizations that dotted the landscape of Iran, near obsessively engrossing herself in books about the civilizations that used to dominate the land, ancient battles that dictated the fates of empires, and more. Far more than any of the numerous attempts to pull her deeper into the medical profession, this love for history engendered a love of learning - about anything - in her, alongside a fierce thirst for adventure and exploration. Exploring the insides of someone’s diseased heart was interesting, but she felt the lure of the unexplored galaxy. When news reached her of the First Contact War, it drove this lust for exploration into overdrive, and for a time she completely abandoned any pretense of wanting to be a doctor, instead boldy proclaiming she would be the galaxy’s best explorer - in ten years at any rate. Throughout all of the exitement, she lead a mostly normal life like most any other child, reading, learning to cook, making friends, and playing games of all sorts.
As she grew older, she was faced with a decision. Deep inside she still longed to explore, but the reality of the world had settled on her shoulders, and she no longer thought exploring the galaxy would be something she could do. She was a city girl with a rich family who’d been groomed for medical work her entire life, not fit to fight in a galaxy chock full of danger and machine guns pointed her direction. Eventually, she followed her family’s lead and was admitted to university a year early, a classic overachiever, having decided (with some sadness) that she would become a scientist.
Despite her misgivings, she handled university as well as could be expected, earning a PhD in cybernetic neuroscience, a master’s in bionic technology, and her bachelor’s in biomedical engineering. Upon her departure from university, she had at least three job offers in prestigious earth based medical firms. However, she was not content to stay put, and when an opportunity presented itself - a field research opportunity on the colony of Elysium, she jumped at the chance.
She made her way for the colony, eager to begin work that seemed right up her alley. They were there to test out a new generation of cybernetic enhancements on any willing colonists - ordinarily there would have been a push to find colonists willing to undergo augmentation, but the colonies held few transhumanists, and primarily they studied a group of colonists already sporting cybernetis. It was an assignment she was greatly excited over, and coupled with the beautiful scenery of Elysium, and it was nearly perfect.
She even met nonhumans there, with the occasional turian or Asari popping up, and she forged a friendship with a quarian on her pilgrimage, nearly driving her insane with incessant questions about life in the migrant fleet, and anything she’d seen on her pilgrimage. With said quarian as a mostly voluntary guinea pig, she figured out how to adapt dextro food paste, and actual dextro foods, to Persian recipes she’d learned from her black sheep kabab merchant of an uncle. It wasn’t an exact copy, or anything close to it, but the fact that she could cook with dextro ingredients excited her to no end, like most every other new thing she encountered.
Then the Skyllian Blitz began.
Initially, she tried to stay out of the fighting, hunkering down in the research lab with the other scientists, happy to let the professional fighters hold off the pirates and slavers. However, her patience wore thin, and as the defenses wore thinner she snapped one day, seizing a Carnifex off a dead pirate who had made it a little farther than most and rushed to aid in whatever way she could. Whenever the pistol overheated she would compensate with biotics - having never recieved more than rudimentary training, she had little fine control, but plenty of power - at times her target would barely notice, at others her biotics would render a pirate into a fine paste. The bloodshed shocked her at first, but as the fighting wore on she began to take a liking to it, near the end of the blitz taking an almost disturbing joy in killing her fellow living beings. At some point she acquired a Mattock, and developed a fondness for applying the butt of the weapon to the face of any pirate unfortunate enough to close to melee range with her.
However, her luck ran out one day. A particularly well hidden batarian sniper packing a Kishock landed a hit squarely on her, thankfully missing her vital organs, but sundering her right arm and shoulder from her body. She still doesn’t remember much of the incident, beyond a dull impact on her shoulder, and waking up two days later with an arm significantly less fleshy than before. Her colleagues had saved her life, at great personal risk, with her quarian friend risking heavy machine gun fire to bring her bleeding body into the lab, where they grafted the cybernetic to her in an emergency surgery, as well as replacing much of the shoulder it had to attach to.
Despite her own better judgement and the desperate attempts of the lab staff to stop her, she had dragged herself outside again to continue fighting. She didn’t have the energy to run from place to place, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t shoot at anything stupid enough to pop its head up within her sights.
In an ironic twist, her foolhardy decision to continue fighting rather than resting saved her life. Something, she didn’t know what, hit the lab, leaving it a smoldering ruin strewn with body parts and priceless equipment. She thought the deaths of countless soldiers and pirates had hardened her, but the loss of everybody she had come to love and care for over the months on Elysium hit her like a sledgehammer, and she collapsed next to the burning wreckage, what little energy she had left evaporating in an instant.
She didn’t move from the area for a whole day, when an armored gauntlet grabbed her by the shoulder. Expecting a Batarian, she accepted her fate, dropping the rifle she had been clutching, only to be faced with a tired looking Alliance marine.
Miraculously, she had survived, despite everything. But she had nothing left. No job, no friends - only dull ache and the same thirst for adventure - though it was more a thirst for vengeance now. She had spent a few days recuperating, trying to come to terms with the loss of everyone she had come to know - but it never came. Burying her grief, she staggered out of the ruined colony on a packed shuttle, but unlike the rest of the shuttle’s occupants she was not returning to earth - far from it. Something had awakened on the planet, a more bloodthirsty side of her. She enjoyed burying a bayonet into the jugular of a slaver, revelled in the violence. But also a sense of fear over returning home. Her work was destroyed, she had nothing to show for it.
And so she did the only thing that seemed illogical, putting out feelers for any freelance work, be it legal or otherwise. She had nothing to call home beyond a planet now light years away, a planet that offered nothing but safety and comfort - and dull mundanity.
So, on Elysium she stayed - after a brief foray into orbit, helping with the rebuilding and taking whatever odd jobs came her way. That changed one night, inebriated and bored, she came across some crewmembers of a run down, questionably functional old ship and joined, in spite of whatever good sense might have otherwise dictated.
She spent three years on that ship, given the dubiously affectionate name of ‘Jalopy’ - and she spent those three years with the ramshackle ship’s equally ramshackle crew. Criminals, outcasts, oddballs, and other misfits crammed into the small confines of the Jalopy, barely scraping by, serving triple duty as a close quarters combatant, chef, and maintenance for crew cybernetics. There were times the crew as a whole went hungry, missions going poorly, customers reneging on contracts, and they were the three least comfortable years of her life, at one point she lost an eye which had to be replaced with a prosthetic - but she loved every second of it. The thrill of being out within the wider galaxy, the excitement and adrenaline, the joy of a fight, the satisfaction of killing… she struggled with her until recently latent bloodthirst, going through phases of normalcy and phases where she kept herself locked away, terrified of her own mind. But with every brush with death, every new battle scar and war story, she found herself bonding tighter with the crew, coming to see them as a second family, her adoptive kin among the stars. She stuck with the crew, the Jury Riggers, through thick and thin, right up until the end when, burdened by loss of members, increasing costs, fewer contracts they were forced to split up.
Firuzeh returned to earth for a time, at a loss for what to do. She couldn’t fit back in with her family, many of whom thought she had died in the Skyllian Blitz, and her purposeful lack of contact left a rift between them that would never truly heal. She missed the daily thrill of a new challenge every day, sights unseen before, and the rush of combat, the visceral satisfaction of fighting and killing. She sought therapy for a time, trying to reintegrate herself, to suppress the bloodlust that had awoken on Elysium - nothing worked, and she drifted listlessly for a few months between research positions, and at one point taking a job with a private military contractor in the Attican Traverse.
For a year and a half she lived as the CQC specialist of a security team hunting pirates, defending ships from pirates - general activities involving the shooting of pirates. Building up a reputation for themselves, the team began to be assigned to heavier and heavier duties, eventually deployed in strike teams to counter the attacks of Eclipse, Blood Pack, and other mercenary groups. The experience culminated in half of the team being wiped out, a company Eclipse, far bigger size nearly overwhelming the strike team. Firuzeh herself nearly died as well, suffering a collapsed lung when a bullet penetrated her armor, and losing her right eye to another bullet. Miraculously, she survived, and spent a month in intensive care, unceremoniously discharged from the PMC and sent to earth to recover.
For another year, she spiraled into a mire of depression, unemployed and living with family. She was healed within a few months, but her mind was not. She even fell into homelessness in the end - unwilling to dip into her savings, family unwilling to accomodate her.
It was on Nowruz that she was finally set back on course by none other than her uncle, the black sheep street food vendor of her otherwise upper class respectable family. He took her to a fire temple in Yazd to pray and to… simply think. He took her to all the old archaeological sites she had loved when she was younger, to therapists who did not try to convince her something in her needed fixing - she knew, deep down, there
was something wrong with her - most people
didn’t respond to hellish combat conditions with glee, they shouldn’t enjoy the act of killing another thinking, feeling individual - but it was something she became confident she could control, even if that fragement of her mind continued to haunt her thoughts.
Once more she began to find real work, first a simple research job in a biomedical lab right in Isfahan, but one of her job applications bore fruit, and it was with renewed vigor and passion for the fields she had spent years learning to study that she ascended the steps to a ship bound for the Citadel, a promising biotechnology firm having gotten hold of some visionary grad students and a small chunk of money with which to begin research. It was a refreshing change of pace for her - no long built up networks of nepotism, just the boundless energy of young scientists pushing forward, sleepless nights subsisting on energy drinks and fatty foods supplying an edge of their own where other labs would have had experience on their side. They got their start by latching on to old projects that, while they had shown promising results, were impractical to produce on a commercial scale - or streamlining and modernizing the cast-offs of prior research, applying modern innovations to older concepts and prototypes. The team had already made leaps and bounds in the field, and Firuzeh eagerly joined in, applying her own repetoire of knowledge and her extensive firsthand experience with using cybernetics.
Firuzeh began to feel herself settling into a comfortable routine, and despite the lack of adrenaline surges, the dearth of death defying dashes from munitions depots and flaming wreckage, the old thrill of learning and pushing the boundaries of her own knowledge and skill filled her with enthusiasm for the challenges of each day she had not truly felt in three years. Over the two and a half years she worked with the lab, she personally tested of many of the devices they themselves were prototyping, or had developed and had yet to receive approval for larger scale implementation from the bureaucracy of council legislation. Some she applied experimentally, confident in their safety but distrustful of the ability of comparatively uneducated subjects to provide feedback, whilst some were all but finished products. Some were intended to boost performance in stressful situations, moderating heartrate and nervous responses to optimize performance in combat - but the ones that drew her interest were those intending to prolong human life even further. Injections to strengthen the myelin sheaths over nerve cells, implants to optimize the heart and keep it pumping strongly for longer, some implants attempted to store copies of relatively undamaged DNA and counteract accumulated damage over time, and some were purely for vanity - keeping skin softer, wrinkle free. Any implant that showed promise and no side effects she eagerly applied to herself - whether or not they would give her any benefit she didn’t know, but she went with them anyway.
It was in the midst of this she learned of the Andromeda Initiative, and it sent her old wanderlust into overdrive. Now, more than anything, she yearned to be one of the pioneers - not to some old part of the galaxy that someone else had discovered but couldn’t be bothered to colonize. No, she could go to frontiers and environments never before seen by human eyes, to stand upon the precipice of discovery and adventure unrivalled since the age of exploration. First contact had enthralled her - but the galaxy was a known quantity, the other species inhabiting it, while fascinating, held star charts and data on all of it. This… this was true discovery, pushing the boundaries like never before, like she had dreamed of as a child, the prospect filled her with excitement.
Eagerly, she applied.
And was denied.
And then applied again, and again, determined to make it aboard the Initiative. She resorted to everything within her means and within the bounds of the law to be accepted, taking classes in every single concept she could imagine might make her a more enticing prospect for a spot in the Ark Hyperion. Normally, she gathered, she would have been accepted right away - someone with combat experience and great skill in cybernetic technology would be a boon. At the same time, someone with the documented psychological issues she had on her profile was less desireable. It was an uphill battle, but at last, six months before scheduled departure, she was accepted, along with the small portion of her family she had persuaded to join her, some had come for religious reasons, some for the same sense of adventure as Firuzeh herself, and in the case of her Uncle, allegedly because he was bored.
Firuzeh was one of the first of those asleep on the Ark to be awoken, her expertise in cybernetics a direly needed skillset in the aftermath of mutiny - that there had been one at all millions of light years from home shocked her. She set about her task with diligence, but working what amounted to maintenance duty threatened to send her into another slump - there was no exploration or excitement in fixing the neural connections in someone’s arm. The Pathfinder was out on her ship, attempting to find them a home - but it was minimal comfort to Firuzeh.
With the miraculous activation of Remnant technology on Eos, the world became habitable, and Firuzeh leaped at the chance to get off the Nexus, fighting through the ‘requests’ of those higher up that she remain on board, and managed to join an APEX team. They had the beginnings of a home in the new galaxy - and nothing enticed her more than the thought of killing the ones who wanted to push them from it.
Personality:Firuzeh is an inquisitive but introverted woman, not openly social with those she is unfamiliar with unless inebriated - . When comfortable with those around her, she is energetic and playful, eagerly injecting herself into conversation or otherwise. She harbors a free-spirited rebellious streak, and chafes under the control of another - she will follow instructions readily enough if she sees the wisdom in it, but considers ‘obedience’ to be all but a dirty word.
In spite of this, she becomes a wholly different person in a fight - it is not merely the rush of adrenaline she enjoys, but the bloodshed, the visceral sensation of driving a knife into the stomach of another. Firuzeh enjoys fighting and killing, she harbors a bloodthirst that, while under control, still scares her to contemplate.
Reason for being awoken from Cryo (Specific jobs, skills, and Initiative Application): Firuzeh is an experienced cybernetic scientist, and was awoken to attend to the maintenance requirements of the Initiative’s many cybernetically enhanced individuals. In addition, she boasts impressive combat skills, though arrived too late to contribute to suppression of the mutiny, in the war against the Kett her skills will be well used.
Equipment:
- M-6 Carnifex - It’s a Carnifex.
- M-76 Revenant or M-23 Katana depending on mission
- HyperGuardian Armor set
- Savant Bio-Amp
- Logic Arrest Omni-Tool
Powers:
- Biotic Charge
- Lance
- Nova
- Omni Grenade
- Concussive Shot
- Flak Cannon
Font Colour: None
FCybernetics and Effects: Firuzeh has a profound weakness to EMP and electrical weaponry, while such weapons will not permanently injure her beyond that of a normal person if she is not subjected to them for long, such an attack will leave her cybernetics temporarily disabled, and she will become all but useless for a minute or two as her systems reboot. Additionally, the plethora of hardware she has installed into herself gives her a metabolism to be feared, and she must consume a prodigious amount daily to keep herself running. She has skeletal reinforcement, primarily in her upper body, enabling her to use the full power of her cybernetic limb, as well as greatly increasing the resistance of her upper body to skeletal damage. In addition to the obvious benefit of her arm, capable of handily outclassing any normal human’s in feats of strength though lacking in miscellaneous features - designed purely for dynamic strength and durability as a combat cybernetic - Firuzeh has implants that modulate her heart, lungs, adrenal glands, and nervous systems, enabling her to respond to combat and general stress more fluidly than normal. Her eye is capable of viewing the world in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums, and possesses telescopic capabilities, enabling her to focus on targets further away than normal, albeit at the cost of needing to keep the second eye closed. Additionally, her arm has had eezo nodes installed at key points, mirroring those of her own nervous system, enabling her to utilize the prosthetic for biotics as she would her natural arm.
Only time will tell if her implants to slow the process of aging will have any effect, however.
Items brought to Andromeda:
- One copy of the Avesta
- One small stone, taken from ruins of Persepolis shortly before final departure from earth, suspended in clear plastic
- E-reader, with extensive library of recipes, personal notes on cooking, and anything else conceiveable in relation to food
- Shiraz grape seeds, for cultivation upon approval
- Saffron seeds, also for cultivation upon approval
- Her computer
- Miscellaneous small items
Member
kapuchu
Eventua
Sylvan
dwyer austin
Fading Memory
FourtyTwo
Shoe Thief
Tortoise
Keyguyperson
Apollosarcher
