APPEARANCE◢Solveig suffers quite terribly from what is known as "resting bitch face", meaning, that she is often found with a less than neutral, neutral expression. It's hardly lightened by the trademark sweeps of black eyeshadow and purple smudged waterline that frame her smoke-coloured eyes, always observing, always bright. Gaunt cheeks add to the sharp intensity to her face, and her pale, freckled skin speaks to her Scandinavian heritage.
Naturally blonde hair is turned black with dye, and worn unkempt in messy waves, and tightened into a braid across the side of her head, just above her ear - revealing heavy black and grey tattooing down her neck. The woman is tall and slender, standing at 5'7", taller still by a further 3 inches in the heavy heeled boots she opts to wear in her everyday activities.
When meeting Solveig, your eye may be persuaded at first by the arm. The silver cybernetic left arm. The alloy is shaped into prominent muscles. It doesn't quite suit the woman, and she regards it as an attached weapon, as opposed to a limb. Expertly crafted, and intimidating to look at for too long. What the arm has done...
What her appearance shows, betrays the nature she is desperately trying to unearth again - under her unintentional scowls, twitching nervousness, and shrinking posture is a warm personality, a kind heart, and a giving spirit - somewhere.
MOTIVATIONS AND OUTLOOK◢Solveig is a soldier, through and through. Motivated by justice, peace, and proving her worth. On the battlefield, her mindset is as solid as a rock and as sharp as a razor. To her, pain, stress, climate, and just about any situation can be survived and endured when victory is on the horizon, and victory is always glimmering on the horizon. There is always hope. She is incredible at her job, as an N7 Special Ops, she had to be.
Outside of the field, Solveig will over-analyse situations and holds an extremely critical eye on herself. Solveig will go through all possible elements of thinking before making a decision. One of those elements will be to consult her tarot deck, to literally look to the skies for an astrological reason. Perhaps, by looking up, she doesn't have to look ahead so much.
She is as supportive of people in her life as she can be from a distance. While near silent when in recreation, Solveig enjoys that silence, and her impressive skill affords her a break from the teasing for being so introspective. She is respected as she is, even if others do wonder who she really is.
Truthfully she cannot answer that question, she doesn’t know who she is either and so she is elusive when in personally confronting situations. She lacks the emotional intelligence her father was raising her to have, she oversteps boundaries socially because she does not know that they exist. She is awkward, impatient, tactless, and her energy can rub others the wrong way.
But she is trying, to be better.
BACKGROUND◢Solveig was born as Leo lay to the east, and Libra to the west. She came into the world under the sign of Virgo as the last strokes of summer melted away in Vaxjo, Sweden.
Born to a soldier mother, and a spiritual father, she was to be raised in the centre of two ideals. Her mother, who knew the stars to simply be stars; and her father, who knew the stars to be the pathway of humanity's past, present, and future. Solveig was born, as her mother described "wrong". The left arm smaller than the right, fingers too small and too few. To her father, his daughter was born perfectly as she was meant to.
Solveig, it seemed, fell to the view of her father. Her arm was never something that held her back, and even as a toddler, she managed just fine. She was intuitive in the ways that she would get around situations that otherwise would prevent her from reaching her goal. She had the precision focus of her mother, and the faith in herself that her father continued to pour into her. She was an unstoppable and unruly child. He loved that about her.
At night they would discuss the stars, mythology, philosophy and the ways in which the Earth could heal us - old ways that were becoming lost as the future continued to usher in answers for everything.
At 12, her father sat with Solveig to give her first reading; pulling the cards that would mark their way for her future. In her mind, she focused on what she should do - and who she should become. Slowly, she picked her way through that old deck carefully.
The High Priestess - her divine feminine. The High Priestess was how she saw herself, intuitive and conscious, attuned to her destiny and only in need of a guide to carry her forward.
The Hanged Man stood before her as the blockage. He who represented victimisation and emotional blackmail. He who held out the expectations she had to adhere to. Her mother, the shadow, always at play in her mind.
For her future, she had pulled Death. That at some point, an abrupt ending would come, followed by rebirth.
For years, Death hovered in her mind. She was priming herself to her mother's wishes. To join the Alliance just like she had. Her quiet nature and intense focus had meshed well to the line of Infiltrator. This had been a surprise to her mother, who was a powerful Soldier of the front line. Unrelenting in combat, still, she was proud of her daughter and becoming more and more impressed with her growth - even with the disfigured arm. Still, she was growing impatient. A soldier's whole body had to be primed for battle. Solveig was imperfect, and so she got to work.
By the eve of Solveig's 20th birthday, her mother had finished. A true feat of technology in the form of a cybernetic prosthetic solution to her daughter's disability. All silver and rippling with metal corded muscle, emblazoned with the Systems Alliance insignia.
In an event entirely orchestrated by her mother, Solveig found herself manipulated onto the operating table - her father had been suspiciously sent away on other errands days prior. As she lay on the table, and looked up at the glass ceiling, she saw in her reflection the image of The Hanged Man. The last thing that she saw as she was anaesthetised was the image of the card that had always been blocking her. It was too late to fight back.
She dreamt of being the greatest sniper in the Alliance. Her mother had promised her that with the arm she would become an N7 one day, that she could bring justice to those who needed her.
When she woke up, everything felt wrong. Suddenly, there was something that was now a part of her that hadn’t been before - and what had been a part of her was gone. Long gone. It took her weeks to be able to move the fingers of the arm. It was alien to have five on one hand. More alien to have ten altogether. It started with wagging them, and letting her nerves connect to the technology. Her own mind, the biggest block.
Some nights, she would feel searing pain within the new limb - like her actual arm was trapped and encased inside, bleeding into the prosthesis. She would wake up screaming, clawing at the arm to free herself from it. Only then did she find out the strength of the thing when she punched a hole through the wall in desperate frustration. Worse yet, she was stuck there - bleeding inside and stuck. She was claustrophobic in her own skin.
It took months longer to get used to it. The coldness of it, the weight, the sensations. But she did. She channelled her focus, and with the help of her father and his spiritual support, she overcame the challenge. She grieved for the loss of her body, for the agency she had handed to her mother. Slowly but surely she began to work with the arm, and not against it. It wasn’t a part of her - but it was her tool - and it was making her a better soldier.
Her trigger finger was faster, more precise, and more deadly. She began to climb the ranks at an alarming rate - an N5 by the time she was 27 and credited with over 60 successful assassinations.
A lone ranger. A ghost story. The Wraith.
When a team of good men couldn’t bring down a ring of slavers. The Alliance would send in their bionic staring machine.
This track record of success kept her going through her career, further isolating her from any kind of social life. She became one of the Alliance’s greatest weapons, indoctrinated for the pursuit of violent honour. Point and shoot. Rinse and repeat. Solveig forgot what it was like to be home, to be calm, to be present. To look up to the stars.
The silence of being off-mission haunts her. She thinks of all that she has done, those she has killed, and when the wonder and curiosity of the why of human existence became replaced with such a hunger for justice at any cost, and why she was always starving for it, no matter her successes.
At her cousin’s wedding, she read the palm of his new wife in a perhaps completely overzealous and awkward fashion. She thought about it for months afterwards, a cold shudder of cringe gnawing at her when she did. She didn’t think about such things in the field. Her skin didn’t crawl when she was crouched in hiding, set to kill. Solveig went back into hiding.
Only when she is with her father can she fully relax. Only in his presence does her true nature present itself and almost as if it were never buried to begin with. In following Tarot reads, The High Priestess has never again shown herself to Solveig.
During the Reaper War, Solveig was recruited into the N7 Special Ops - finally realised the promise her mother had made to her, even if it wasn’t quite the way it had been intended. The promise felt… Shallow now, transparently insincere.
Even as the Reaper War ended, Solveig knew there was much to do, much to fix and mend, systems to be rebuilt. As a weapon, she couldn’t do that. Knowing that she needed to find herself as the echoes of violence ran through her still, she reached out to her in-law, to the Sol Restoration Network. The cards and the stars told her to. The stars told her to humble herself and heal, and the cards told her that Katya was waiting.
She could shed her ghostly skin and find her heart again.
The arm grew heavier, the fingers felt numb, a black hole opened up inside like a wound. She could no longer be a lone ranger; humanity, and the galaxy, needed her for a mission more important than any other before it.
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