Name: Major Claire Moore
Race: Human
Call sign: 'Flatcap' to her face, 'She-bear' to her back.
Age: 38
Weight: 58.50 Kg
Height: 173 cm
Appearance: Claire has been through a lot over the last twenty years, and it shows. She still stands with the authority and commanding aura drummed into her over time, but she's starting to feel her age; her face is starting to bear the first signs of age, with wrinkles appearing around her mouth and eyes, and her limbs are getting stiff; she can still run as fast as ever, but she'll complain about it afterwards while she's trying to get all her bones to click back into place.Her hair, which is always held in a tight ponytail just between her shoulders, has long since given up trying to retain colour, and is completely white. Her steel-grey eyes are not as sharp as they once were, though it'd be a brave soul who would challenge her on it, & a large burn scar covers the left side of her forehead and cheek, the souvenir of an argument with a plasma round that Claire still insists she won. Occasionally, the fingers on her right hand will twitch, which Claire has marked down as another unfortunate reminder that she isn't a young woman any more.
While she is not exactly a great physical specimen, Claire can still enter a room and instantly silence it with a scowl crafted by many years of wrangling recruits through their first combat operations, and rarely smiles, though she frequently smirks and laughs at her own Northern sarcasm - while being shot at, if possible. The entirety of her left leg and left hand are synthetic, with a curved foot-plate and a deliberately mechanical aesthetic, the inner workings protected by a transparent layer of plastic, while the whirring of her synth-limbs is an ever-present noise. When bored, Claire will tap her fingers against her metal thigh, making her sound like some sort of ghastly rag-and-bone man, which probably fits her complexion; while she is as pale as you would expect of a Grimbarian, it's usually hidden under grease, waste omni-gel, burns, ash, or some other dirt - she's got too much to do to be worrying about how she looks, especially in combat,
Personality: Claire is, though she hates the term, a 'she-bear'. Brutal, merciless and unremitting on the soldiers under her command, the Major inspires fear in her subordinates at first, but in combat she is rather different - a consummate professional, Claire insists on near-silence and speaks only to give orders or request information. In her younger years, her brash approach to combat frequently lead to a lot of losses, but she prided herself on getting the job done, no matter the cost. As time has dragged on, the wisdom of age has tempered her enthusiasm, and now she leads from the front, taking a cautious but never slow course to victory. Taking each loss personally, Claire still knows the names, dates of birth, and the personal details of every soldier she has lost, and keeps their photographs in a small book that she carries with her everywhere she goes - a reminder of past glories, but also a bitter recollection of when her actions have caused kids just out of school to meet their maker through the barrel of a rifle or the burst of an artillery shell. This still weighs heavily on her mind, and every few months, a night of sleep is stolen from her as their ghosts haunt her - not an experience she enjoys. Because of this, Claire is deeply offended by gung-ho commanders who throw men into dangerous situations, and has a less-than-healthy scepticism of authority, both political and military.
Despite being a hard-ass during drills, Claire does care about her soldiers, and just like her moniker, she will happily die for them if asked; she insists on being the last one out of any combat zone, and whenever someone comes to her with a personal problem, they will always have her ear with a sort of motherly patience, probably to replace the children she never got around to having. She would have liked to leave the military some day, met a nice gent (or a lady, even) and set about raising a family, but it's too late now, another heavy regret. While she appreciates that at least nobody will be hurt if she is KIA, the whole idea of marriage and familial bliss was always appealing. Her synth-limbs are something of a sore point, which is why Claire never takes leave any more - out of a military setting, she feels unable to deal with living as a civilian, and twenty years of combat have made her twitchy and nervous when on her own at home - even though the last seven years of civil war have made her jaded and dissatisfied, killing is all she knows how to do, and the only way she's going to leave her profession is on top of a mountain of bodies. Finally, being a northerner, Claire has a sarcastic, fatalistic sense of humour, frequently self-deprecating and irreverent, though she no longer insults enemy combatants on their poor marksmanship.
Class: Soldier
Powers: "'Ahm a dead keen shot, so I am - can 'it t'eye of a cow from t'hundred yards if y'need, though what you've got 'gainst cows baffles me."
Biography: Born twelve years after the Battle of Earth in Grimsby, a fishing town in the north of the UK, Claire had about as safe a childhood as the post-reaper Earth could offer. Grimsby wasn't terribly damaged during the war, but relative poverty had always been a problem in that part of the Union, so the stars always seemed like a promising prospect for the young girl - her father had been in the Alliance navy during the war, & did have stories of a time he enjoyed serving aboard various vessels as an engineer, though the refused to talk about the Battle of Earth itself. Fascinating though life in the Navy sounded, Claire was never a great intellectual, so a technical career was not the way to go - instead, the officer academy beckoned, and after a shaky first interview where Claire's accent and her lack of technical expertise almost scuppered the entire plan, she was inducted into the academy and graduated in the top half of her class - she didn't quite set the world alight, but her leadership qualities and her knack for reading a situation in a split second saw her through.
Her first station was on the SSV Atlantis, an old cruiser which had been relegated to gentle anti-pirate activities in her later years, bearing the nickname 'Old Betsy'. Usually consigned to escort duties, the were a few occasions on which the marines had to be sent in, mostly in boarding actions or to flush out a base hidden on a moon somewhere, and on these circumstances Claire proved herself a more than able officer, taking a dashing, aggressive approach to combat which was messy, but effective; within six years, she had made Lieutenant, and when Old Betsy was finally decommissioned and allowed to retire as a converted freighter, Lieutenant Moore was transferred to a first-rate destroyer, the SSV Genoa, dedicated to supporting fleet actions and capturing enemy vessels. By the 40 A.B.E. Claire had established her reputation as the vessel's 'She-Bear' after taking a plasma round to the side of her face and still fighting & joking about how the enemy were bloody poor shots, frequently tasked with being in command of the first unit to head into combat or onto an enemy vessel. It was during an operation against a largely pirate-controlled planet by the name of Hesperu, in conjunction with a Taurian fleet, that Claire found herself leading a team of forty marines into a charge across a largely open field under artillery barrage; as much as she didn't like it, someone had to do it for the 2nd & 3rd companies to seize the local headquarters.
It didn't go entirely to plan; after about an hour of struggling across no-man's-land under heavy fire, with 15 soldiers either down or in no condition to fight, Claire ordered a charge at a gun emplacement, which was partially successful; the emplacement was seized with few casualties. However, during the first attack, an artillery shell landed about six feet to her left and sent her a considerable distance into the air before pesky gravity grabbed hold of her again and dragged her down to the floor. Before she blacked out, Lieutenant Moore saw her company pressing forward as per her orders, and felt that she was going to die with a sense of immense pride as the darkness pulled her away. When she woke, it was on the Genoa medical bay, with Dr.Siggurdsen informing her that the blast had peeled away most of her left leg and the fingers on her left hand, giving him no choice but to amputate. Her first question was on the state of the mission, and secondly how long it would be before she could get back to killing the buggers who had relieved her of a limb. Despite her CO's recommendation that she take an honourable discharge, Claire insisted on being put back onto active duty as soon as possible.
After being awarded the Purple Heart (a medal which always confused Claire - surely the powers that be should have been rewarding the soldiers that didn't get hit?), Claire accepted a transfer to security detail on a planet in the Terminus systems, as the local commander of the militia forces, and for a few years, it all went swimmingly; just before the civil war broke out she was promoted to Captain, and was on Mars personally delivering news about a casualty due to pirate raiders when the separatist war began - immediately, Captain Moore requested a transfer to a front line combat unit, and was awarded with the command of a battalion near the border between the factions; at first, she took a great deal of pride in her work, but over the last seven years, watching humans killing humans has sucked the enthusiasm from her - she still appreciates the hard work of the soldiers underneath her command, but her promotion to Major in 48 A.B.E. was not one of pride or excitement but the bitter realisation that she would have to send even larger groups of soldiers into the field where some of them would inevitably be killed. Refusing to stay behind a desk, however, she remained a field-operating commander, and was due to lead a major offensive on Thymus towards the rebel-held capital when the Council called, and despite all of her weariness of soldiering, she felt it was her responsibility to answer them and become a Spectre.
With luck, she might lose her other leg for a sense of symmetry.
Let me know if anything's wrong - it's been a while, and I've never actually played ME3 'cause I dislike the idea of giving EA money - I suggest anyone who's into CRPG to take a look at some of Bioware's back catalog while they were operating under Interplay.
