Spoopy Scary

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

Ay buddy! As we’ve discussed, I’ll be coming out of retirement for one last rodeo now that the spring semester has just about ended. Looking forward to writing with some old buddies again and maybe making new ones!

Recollections: Magnanimous (Cancelled)

Basil Baker

"10-23 on the 10-5 at 16th and Shipper. I'll make this quick."

_______________________________________________ Basil A. Baker Male | 28 | Caucasian | 5’11” | 173 _______________________________________________ Dissonance _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents "Touch my kid and I will Liam Neeson your ass." ___________________________________ Skills and Talents Firearms and ACT Training ⫻ As expected of any person who graduates a police academy, he spent a minimum of 110 hours at the firing range and sparring floor, after a good 4-5 years on the force as a trooper and beat cop, Basil has spent countless more in maintaining those skills. Nowadays he’s a bit more idle so he may not be as sharp as he once was but remains very practiced compared to the citizenry. Other police training also includes perceptive investigation and driving ability. Street-Smarts ⫻ Okay, so Basil may not be an incredibly clever or well-read guy, but he’s got street cred, a sort of urban savoir-faire that lets him walk around the city with a sort of swagger and confidence that other officers wouldn’t have. What’s more, he knows the people on the streets. People who owe him favors, people he owes favors to, and people who both respect and are afraid of him. His under-the-table connections and contacts let him in on the know of things that his colleagues aren’t privy to. It’s not kosher or scrupulous, but it works. He has a mind for crime because he's been on the other side before. Fatherhood ⫻ Fuck the haters, ain’t no one in the world who can convince him that it takes chops to raise a kid. Chops he isn’t sure he has, but he’s trying his damnedest and he’s convinced it’s made him a better person too. He’s actually a good and nurturing father to his daughter, a testament to his commitment to being better than he was yesterday, to atoning for his past failures, and to raising her into becoming a good person. He's also gotten pretty good at braiding hair, making ponytails, and dressing Abby up in cute, clean clothes.

Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Yeah, I get it. I look like shit. Fuck off." He’s a pretty person to read insofar to his outward disposition; he’s kind of a scowling bastard with resting bitch face, an unshaven five o’ clock shadow on his usual day, clean shaving probably once a week. His brown hair and sideburns look similar unkempt and cut short for minimal maintenance. There are probably bags under his green eyes, and he probably smells like a mix of old ashtrays, alcohol, and coffee. Hell, by the pallor of his skin, it is probably safe to assume that it requires all three to keep him going. His ears have the tell-tale scars of having once been pierced and stretched, and he has plenty of scars from nicks on his lips and eyebrows to a shallow cut on his narrowed chin, and the multitudes of indistinguishable scars on his knuckles. It’s safe to gauge from these that he has seen plenty of scrapes. He’s not a giant, seemingly built more for dexterity than he is for powerlifting, but his height is nothing to scoff at. He might be an inch shy of six feet, a fact which he resents, but still puts him above average, and he’s solidly built after years of duty and physical conditioning from obstacle courses, drills, foot pursuit, and wearing twenty extra pounds of gear all throughout. His build can be inferred from this as physically fit and capable, perhaps even imposing if you’re someone who doesn’t work out regularly. If you’re looking at his arms though, it wouldn’t be his muscles that grabs your attention, but the intricate artistry of tattoo sleeves stretching from his collarbones to his wrists. They’re vividly colored, ebony branches dressed with green foliage and red pomegranates, some split open with their crimson seeds scattering across his arms almost like a splatter of blood. On each arm, a bronze colored snake coils itself around the branches, fangs hidden behind pursed lips. There's a scar on his left forearm from a dog bite that's hard to notice in the sea of ink. His choice of clothing is typically rather plain. Given that he has a career to think about, and doesn’t have that much money, he can’t exact go out with the apparel that’s a bit more his style like band shirts and leather jackets. Unimpressive t-shirts, tank tops and wife-beaters make up most of his wardrobe, shirts he got through working at his precinct, and some clothes he got from thrift stores like old, worn-out flannels. Jeans and work pants, and wears old black boots he got from old warehousing jobs or old boots that were worn out that were given to him by the precinct are worn as his off-duty clothes whenever the budget is renewed and he’s issued a new pair of boots. He’s generally always seen with a brown, weathered, woolen cadet cap that keeps his head warm. Matching it is a brown denim jacket that he’s always seen with, as if it’s the only one he owns. Naturally, he also has his black on-duty uniform and the windbreaker, but he tries not to brand himself if he can help avoiding it while he’s off-duty. He is markedly untouched by jewelry and most accessories, except for a digital watch he wears on his left wrist.

_{Psychology
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"If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

MAIN GOAL ⫻ Basil wants to turn his life around. He knows he’s been a piece of shit in the past, a mightily terrible person who doesn’t deserve forgiveness and he doesn’t ask for it, and there are problems with him he’s still trying to work out. But if for no one else, he wants to be better for his daughter and to keep her safe from it all so that she can grow into a genuinely good person. If that means finding a way to get her out of this town, then so be it.

PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Two things are simultaneously true: bad people can and do improve themselves and deserve the ability to do so, but even if they improve themselves, they are not entitled to the forgiveness or second chances of those they’ve hurt.

SEXUALITY ⫻ Heterosexual

FEARS ⫻ He's really just afraid for the safety of his daughter and the possibility that she might inherit the mistakes of her parents. This extends to him being afraid for his own life, because if he dies, then what does that leave for Abby? Also cockroaches. He fucking hates cockroaches.

REPUTATION ⫻ Among Araminta? Mixed, probably. He's on the good side of some people, on the bad side of quite a few. However, that's just on the east and west ends of town who know him as kind of a bastard, but also as a bastard you can bargain with. The folks on the North and South sides don't need as much policing and haven't seen him nearly as often and don't know much about them; and there's something to be said about the privilege of not having to interact with the police very often and the luxury of being able to greet them with a wide, happy smile. As far as the Vanburens? No personal connections with any of them except for Eve, who was estranged from the family. He doubts they have much of an opinion of him. It might be a sore awakening for them to find out he doesn't bend the knee to the family name.

THOUGHTS ABOUT FATHER ⫻ Well James ain’t his dad, so he ain’t got much reason to care for him aside from the man being Abby’s grandfather. The street says he’s good, Eve says he ain’t shit; neither one is necessarily a reliable source of information.

FLAWS ⫻ Basil’s just a piece of shit. Granted, he’s getting better. He’s a far cry different from the abusive drunk he was back in the day, but he still has issues with his temper, and he finds himself bending the rules and being far more morally flexible than he ought to be. He makes snap judgements about people, he’s difficult to befriend, has trust issues, and he relies on alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to get through the day. Just because he found his nurturing, softer side for his daughter doesn’t mean he wouldn’t put the fear of pain into someone if it meant getting what he wanted.

_{Backstory
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"Eve always did call me a real charmer..."

Basil was a runaway kid. A violently abusive and later absent dad and drug-abusing mother does not lend itself to a happy childhood. Apparently pops left a trail of kids in his wake, including a pair of half-sisters he didn’t know very well. Having to take care of himself while mom was high didn’t leave much energy for caring about his school grades, and he fled Maine, and ended up being picked up by officers in Massachusetts to be put into a foster care program when he was around 15 years old. He was a difficult kid to wrangle and get to behave, he had an attitude even when he was this young and he made it deliberately difficult for foster parents to take care of him because, in his experience, he couldn’t rely on authority figures and caretakers. The kids he associated with weren’t that different from him either; they all had troubles at home and hated being told what to do by adults who were ruining their own lives—what could they possibly know? So, when you’re told not to smoke when you’re 16 years old, you take that as a challenge and as an order to blatantly refuse.

Having teenage gangs skating downtown on skateboards who break into cars to steal shit they can pawn off isn’t a rare occurrence. Running interference for actual crooks was part of the gig. Basil wasn’t much of a brain for these types of ops, and he wasn’t much of a muscle; he was just one of the goons who was willing to do the stupid shit, like being a distraction or taking the fall for others. The very least he managed to do was study enough to get his GED, because as he started getting older, he had to have an actual job because foster agencies let you out on the street when you’re 18, and as reality began to sink in and hit him, it took at least a GED to get any decent-paying, braindead job. So, for a few years he managed to land a dockworker job driving forktrucks out in the cold and moving shipments back and forth. This was supplemented by his more illicit activities on the side, such as playing enforcer or thug for some slighted crook and collecting debts via intimidation, vandalism, or roughing someone up. Basil’s street smarts helped him here though, always being able to play the card of plausible deniability. The local cops knew of course he was no good, but without catching him in the act of having evidence of wrongdoing, they couldn’t arrest him for anything.

He never worked the same job for very long. Coming into work either intoxicated, shitty behavior, or simply not doing his work would find him fired after a few months, and he’d find someplace else that would take him. A warehouse or a dock of some kind since they pay better than most beater jobs with low requirements. He’d eventually find his way into the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania looking for work, eventually finding it in West Araminta when he was just a little older than 22 years old. The problem though with living the kind of life Basil has in a smaller town like Araminta is that people notice when you’re an outsider, and they notice quickly. One of the first of these people was one beautiful mistake by the name of Eve Vanburen. Apparently, she was one of the many kids of some big shot Basil didn’t know or care about, a man not so different from his own father, and she was estranged from the family for a very long time. She was a mixed woman about as inked up as he was, and at first it was simply a physical relationship. Then it went on to be his first long-term relationship. Then it became his worst relationship.

It turns out that putting two people together who’ve never had long-term relationships, both had family traumas, and unhealthy coping mechanisms, poor communications, and a reliance on soft drugs, it doesn’t lend itself to a healthy relationship. Full of yelling, manipulation, hurtful words and tears, stealing from each other, breaking up and hooking back up again—but it wasn’t physical then. Not that it made the relationship any healthier of course, they were both awful and spiteful people and perhaps they deserved each other in that regard. Besides that, the makeup sex was always pretty amazing. To think that they lasted year without throwing hands was a miracle.

The second time someone noticed him, after a life of being a professional piece of shit, he and a friend got caught stealing a package from someone’s porch. The po-pos start blaring their whoop-whoop horns. He takes the package to let his buddy get away, he gets tackled, and put in handcuffs. He’s been in them before, but he was a kid all those other times and they returned him home, to foster care, or let him off with a warning or something. The adult world was different—had consequences, and he spent the night in the city jail.

The third time someone noticed him was when he was approached by Lieutenant Kreese while sitting behind those bars. He kept asking Basil for the name of his buddy in exchange for going easy on him, but Basil didn’t budge. When asked why he wouldn’t turn in a good-for-nothing like the guy who left him behind, and why Basil would take the fall for someone who didn’t think twice about him, he answered it was because you don’t turn on a brother. This prompted a sympathetic nod of respect from the lieutenant, and it was then he learned that they ran his name through the system and found the trail of misdemeanors he left as a kid, but more importantly, Kreese was interested in the backgrounds of people like him. Found everything he could ever want on his parents—his father the abuser, his mother the vegetable stoner—and suddenly Basil found Kreese’s sympathy that he didn’t really deserve. Sacrifice was an admirable trait, he said, but only if it’s in service to something greater, and the past doesn’t have to define your future.

“I think you’re here because no one’s ever given you a chance,” he said, “and I want to be the one to give you that chance.”

It was probably the most memorable thing anyone’s ever said to him, and since the package as returned and no harm was done, he was offered to let this whole ordeal pass by without going on his record and personally appeal to waive his past misdemeanors as a kid if he made an attempt at attending the police academy. He didn’t even have to pass—just make an honest effort, and if he failed, he would at least walk away with a tempered discipline and self-respect, and if he failed, he’d have a promising career ahead of him. Either way, it was an opportunity to live honestly.

So, he took Kreese up on the offer. The report was basically thrown out, and Kreese would send a trooper out to make sure Basil attended the academy. Which he did as he worked his dockworker job. His relationship with Eve was as tumultuous as ever, the stress of what was basically two jobs weighing on, but before the year ended, he graduated the academy as a cadet. By no means was he the top of the class, and it was incredibly grueling, but he was already physically active and that gave him a slight edge relative to some other cadets. He finished out that year with additional training as an officer under sergeant Kreese. He stopped hanging around the bad influences of his life which helped his mental state and the camaraderie of the police force was a refreshing feeling for him—it was like having a family. There were some negatives of course; suddenly he wasn’t welcome at his regular haunts since he was the new bad guy.

Training drilled into his head a “me-versus-them” mentality against the citizenry, and he started off with a chip on his shoulder already, and here he was with a gun. Having been on the opposite side of the police, it was a moment of cognitive dissonance for him. He knew what it was like on being the other end of pepper spray and the like. His career began as a beat cop, where he’d walk around the poorer parts of town and getting to know the community, stationed at a different location from Kreese. He had a regular set of rounds, and here Basil’s street-smarts payed off, because he had an empathy for people on the west and east ends that other officers on the force didn’t have. The ability to make friends with even the slimiest meant he had his back covered, and if he needed something, he knew who to talk to. It wasn’t even a year into new career though did things begin to go south for him.

He was dispatched at night to answer an emergency call. Someone brandishing a knife broke into a woman’s house. Basil and his partner, Officer Dennings, were the first ones at the scene with sirens in the distance. The front door was broken down and there was a commotion inside, which meant that there might’ve still been someone inside. Hands on their guns, they approached, and Basil announced their presence, trying to coax everyone out. Only one man answered, and it was by sprinting around the corner, covered in blood, and lunging straight toward him. Hundreds of hours of muscle memory spurred Basil to drawing his gun and firing half of his magazine into the man’s body in a second before they were on top of each other, the former apparently unable to feel the pain. Basil barely managed to disarm him and throw him off with the help of his partner, and, driven by fear, adrenaline, anger, and a desire to survive the night, beat the man to death with his baton. Then came an inexplicable guilt. Even with all the adrenaline pumping through his body and emotions swirling onto him, he could feel as if something latched onto him. They later found out that night that the woman who called the emergency line was dead.

So that is when his life and relationship went from shit to worse. He was increasingly irritable and short fused, and the stress of policing was slowly taking its toll on him. He’d find ways to blow off the steam whether it was at the gym, tracking down suspects, or an increased use of force. At first it was on drunkards and thieves and the like—people he could get away with it on, with practiced plausible deniability and a culture of brotherhood on his side of the force to help him get away with it. “Those bastards had it coming,” they’d say. He had dozens of people behind his back, even if they understood him as the precinct’s resident “bad boy.” He was offered to be put on light duty, but Basil insisted he’d be too restless.

Worse yet, he’d come home and release his stress on Eve. As if following in the footsteps of his father, the fights intensified as he became physically abusive. It was a trend that became more frequent, and occasionally fueled by alcohol. She’d fight back too, sometimes even starting the fights, but never able to fend off Basil who was much larger than she was. Stealing and cheating became more frequent as well, which in turn fed itself into more fights. With either one too afraid to leave, this cycle of abuse would continue for two years. The number of times he’d walk into work with bruises on his face and been asked if he was alright and needed to be checked on, he lost track, but he always declined their offers and said everything was fine. Occasionally, he’d tell them it was a sex thing and that’d be enough to get those squares to shut up for a week or so. Mostly he just didn’t want them to see the sort of shape he left Eve in.

Then, of course, Eve got pregnant. It was enough to spook him, and he suggested to Eve that she should get an abortion, but she felt too afraid and too guilty to follow through with it. So, halfway through the pregnancy, Basil chickened out and bailed, leaving Eve to deal with the coming child on her own—just like his own father did with his own mother. To distract himself from that reality, he drowned himself in his work. He isolated himself from others to try to get a hold of his emotions now that it was clear that leaving Eve didn’t help him at all, and he was finding other people’s voices to be an irritating itch he wanted to scratch out. Being alone was the safest option, but in drowning himself in work, he managed to bring in a record number of criminals, getting him a reputation for being a VPD hound dog.

His previously built rapport with the community, including its rotten parts, meant people owed him favors for looking the other way over petty drug use, spray-painting a building. He was in business with some crooks who’d pay him to stay off their backs and occasionally thin out the competition with anonymous tips—his corruption ran deep. He had a nose for trouble, having been on the other side of the chase before, too. Also helping him was a liberal use of force, having brought in more than just a few guys with black eyes. He was as guilty of profiling as any other cop, and one of his chief strategies was making one of his suspects a living hell by writing citations, tickets, or even slashing tires (and when confronted about it, he simply told them to come down to the station and write a police report) until they finally gave him a confession or the information he wanted. Any one of the multitudes of Vanburen kids running around, still embittered by his relationship with Eve, Basil had a tendency for treating them worse than the usual citizenry.

A turning point in his life was when he received a call about a little over a year later. Eve Vanburen was in the hospital for drug-overdose, then currently comatose. Assuming she wakes up, she was to be forcibly admitted to a strict rehab facility. Leaving behind her a baby, barely a year old: Abby Baker. Apparently even after everything Basil’s done to her, she’d still rather the child have his name before her father’s, but more glaring to him was the chain of events that ran parallel to his own life: absent, abusive dad and a drugged-out mom. The guilt was… overwhelming, and now that life had finally caught up with him, it was time he faced some consequences and accepted responsibility. The child was to be under his custody, and he submitted himself to becoming a father at 25—not that the courts would’ve given him an option anyways.

The next three years had its ups and downs. Basil had no idea how to be a father while starting out, and he spent his only two paid vacations weeks that year trying to learn how to be one. He spent quite a few sleepless nights trying to do his research while Abby ate baby food from a little jar on top of his lap, carrying her everywhere he went before he learned to buy a stroller—but it was a long three years, and he had a lot of time to think about himself and his life up to this point. Becoming a father? It changed him. At least that’s what he wants to think. That guilt he remembers feeling when that child was left alone reminded him of himself, and if he didn’t do something about it, Abby could one day end up just like him.

So, even if fatherhood didn’t change him, he forced himself to change. Just because he was a piece of shit didn’t mean he had to pass that on to an innocent little girl. He grew to love her. That much was clear when he nearly had his head cleaned off his shoulders when he was dispatched to remove a fired worker refusing to leave company property while he was taking a joyride in a forktruck. Suddenly, he finally felt the fear of mortality since it would have meant leaving the kid behind. He was put on light duty ever since then and worked primarily as a dispatcher for the last two and a half years. He relies quite a bit on babysitters to take care of Abby while he’s at work, and he makes sure to let Abby visit Eve every week or two in the rehab facility, and although he still hated the woman and she rightfully hated him back, they were at least civil while in front of the child. He just couldn’t bring himself to forgive her, as hypocritical as it was, for leaving the child the way she did. He might’ve failed Abby, but he thought that didn’t give Eve the right to neglect her too in the way she did.

Some weird things happened a year ago though. It started with some strange reports—crime scenes that didn’t make sense. Stolen goods with no signs of forced entry and the store workers themselves having alibis. Crime scenes that left no clues. Arson without evidence of accelerants or electrical malfunction. People appearing in places they shouldn’t be in. The force was stretched thin and it was one of those rare occasions that Basil had to be put to work in the field again. All evidence pointed to an animal mauling, but there were no animals around here who could do that much damage. The only thing that came close was a black bear, but they typically came nowhere within city limits. Stomping through the forest to the east, it seemed he came across the suspect: there was a rabid dog covered with blood from its face to its shoulders. It lunged, and Basil discharged his firearm as it bit into his arm. From that moment, he felt something latch onto him. That was his first experience with an apparition.

He could see it whenever he gazed into a mirror. It looked like a dog… sort of. It was at least dog shaped. Whatever he was seeing, it didn’t go around hurting people around him, but he did feel something in himself change. Not bad or evil necessarily, just different. He was a bit hungrier, ran a little hotter, but he hadn’t felt so physically strong in a long while, if ever. He could eat just about anything, but vegetables never did sit quite right with him again. He has no idea what the hell happened to him since then, but it’s been nearly a year ago from today and things are just getting weirder in Araminta, and he’ll be damned if he lets anything happen to Abby. With this weird shit happening to the Vanburens suddenly turning to stone around the city limits, he’ll have to sit tight in town until he figures out a way to get Abby out of here. That is one risk he is not willing to take.

_{Abstraction
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"Listen, I don't know anything about this dumb 'magic' nonsense. All I know is that I could go for a big rare steak right about now."

TYPE ⫻ Affixed Aberrant

ABSTRACTION ⫻ Predation

ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Predation is a type of Abstraction where the apparition affixes itself to the aberrant and usually imbues them with rabid aggression and ravenous hunger; where seemingly anything can provoke and light the aberrant’s shortened fuse and cause them to violently lash out at others. This was seen when the apparition affixed itself to an animal, being attracted to adrenaline, hunger, and survival. It affixed itself to Basil the moment the dog was killed as it bit him, drawn to his own survival impulse. Being a human with greater control over his base instincts and impulses, Basil doesn't suffer the same consequences as an animal would, and he has learned how to managed his own aggression even before becoming affixed.

The Abstraction comes with a set of benefits too: The apparition imbues the aberrant with a highly corrosive digestive acid that can enable them to digest nearly anything, a stronger, break-resistant skeleton including his teeth to endure greater bite forces that can shatter bone, and a denser muscular system which grants greater power and speed. He also has a sharp sense of smell that is sensitive enough to detect and differentiate the differences in sweat. This essentially enables him to become an apex predator to hunt down prey, which is also useful for literally sniffing down criminals and suspects. On the flip side, he can't stomach fruits and vegetables like he used to, and anything that's overcooked tends to give him a stomach ache too. So, he uses drugs like alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to help him suppress his appetite. He can recover from injury faster if he eats raw meat or blood, but because the thought of it makes him gag, that's a facet of his abstraction he will likely never utilize.

AURA SENSING ⫻ Basil senses people by smell, and he smells people through fear and adrenaline. While ordinarily he could do this anyway, its usually a subtle difference. A change in acidity, slightly sour. But when that person has an aura, it is distinct, pungent, and nearly overwhelming. It weakens with distance, but he can smell a fearful aura from a half-mile away.

LIMITS ⫻ Predation is a curse that isn't inhibited by Emotional Fields in any way. Basil has similar abilities to that of predators with this abstraction. His muscular system makes him strong and durable as a grizzly bear and fast as a coyote (but on two legs, don't think too hard about it). He can also smell twice as good as a bloodhound. Basil's Affixation also drives him to hunger the longer he has gone without eating meat... a few hours at most before he can no longer ignore it. If he goes a few days then he's probably going to eat somebody alive.

WEAKNESSES ⫻ There isn't a particularly large amount of weaknesses of the ability, however Basil is more susceptible to poison or other such things if consumed.

^{Other
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"A cop listenin' to music about how all cops are bastards, imagine that."

Basil drives a shitty old beater car with a child seat in the back, and he likes to play music like...

Recollections: Magnanimous (Cancelled)

Who would've thought I finally ended up here??

Basil Baker

"10-23 on the 10-5 at 16th and Shipper. I'll make this quick."

_______________________________________________ Basil A. Baker Male | 28 | Caucasian | 5’11” | 173 _______________________________________________ Dissonance _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents "Touch my kid and I will Liam Neeson your ass." ___________________________________ Skills and Talents Firearms and ACT Training ⫻ As expected of any person who graduates a police academy, he spent a minimum of 110 hours at the firing range and sparring floor, after a good 4-5 years on the force as a trooper and beat cop, Basil has spent countless more in maintaining those skills. Nowadays he’s a bit more idle so he may not be as sharp as he once was but remains very practiced compared to the citizenry. Other police training also includes perceptive investigation and driving ability. Street-Smarts ⫻ Okay, so Basil may not be an incredibly clever or well-read guy, but he’s got street cred, a sort of urban savoir-faire that lets him walk around the city with a sort of swagger and confidence that other officers wouldn’t have. What’s more, he knows the people on the streets. People who owe him favors, people he owes favors to, and people who both respect and are afraid of him. His under-the-table connections and contacts let him in on the know of things that his colleagues aren’t privy to. It’s not kosher or scrupulous, but it works. He has a mind for crime because he's been on the other side before. Fatherhood ⫻ Fuck the haters, ain’t no one in the world who can convince him that it takes chops to raise a kid. Chops he isn’t sure he has, but he’s trying his damnedest and he’s convinced it’s made him a better person too. He’s actually a good and nurturing father to his daughter, a testament to his commitment to being better than he was yesterday, to atoning for his past failures, and to raising her into becoming a good person. He's also gotten pretty good at braiding hair, making ponytails, and dressing Abby up in cute, clean clothes.

Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Yeah, I get it. I look like shit. Fuck off." He’s a pretty person to read insofar to his outward disposition; he’s kind of a scowling bastard with resting bitch face, an unshaven five o’ clock shadow on his usual day, clean shaving probably once a week. His brown hair and sideburns look similar unkempt and cut short for minimal maintenance. There are probably bags under his green eyes, and he probably smells like a mix of old ashtrays, alcohol, and coffee. Hell, by the pallor of his skin, it is probably safe to assume that it requires all three to keep him going. His ears have the tell-tale scars of having once been pierced and stretched, and he has plenty of scars from nicks on his lips and eyebrows to a shallow cut on his narrowed chin, and the multitudes of indistinguishable scars on his knuckles. It’s safe to gauge from these that he has seen plenty of scrapes. He’s not a giant, seemingly built more for dexterity than he is for powerlifting, but his height is nothing to scoff at. He might be an inch shy of six feet, a fact which he resents, but still puts him above average, and he’s solidly built after years of duty and physical conditioning from obstacle courses, drills, foot pursuit, and wearing twenty extra pounds of gear all throughout. His build can be inferred from this as physically fit and capable, perhaps even imposing if you’re someone who doesn’t work out regularly. If you’re looking at his arms though, it wouldn’t be his muscles that grabs your attention, but the intricate artistry of tattoo sleeves stretching from his collarbones to his wrists. They’re vividly colored, ebony branches dressed with green foliage and red pomegranates, some split open with their crimson seeds scattering across his arms almost like a splatter of blood. On each arm, a bronze colored snake coils itself around the branches, fangs hidden behind pursed lips. There's a scar on his left forearm from a dog bite that's hard to notice in the sea of ink. His choice of clothing is typically rather plain. Given that he has a career to think about, and doesn’t have that much money, he can’t exact go out with the apparel that’s a bit more his style like band shirts and leather jackets. Unimpressive t-shirts, tank tops and wife-beaters make up most of his wardrobe, shirts he got through working at his precinct, and some clothes he got from thrift stores like old, worn-out flannels. Jeans and work pants, and wears old black boots he got from old warehousing jobs or old boots that were worn out that were given to him by the precinct are worn as his off-duty clothes whenever the budget is renewed and he’s issued a new pair of boots. He’s generally always seen with a brown, weathered, woolen cadet cap that keeps his head warm. Matching it is a brown denim jacket that he’s always seen with, as if it’s the only one he owns. Naturally, he also has his black on-duty uniform and the windbreaker, but he tries not to brand himself if he can help avoiding it while he’s off-duty. He is markedly untouched by jewelry and most accessories, except for a digital watch he wears on his left wrist.

_{Psychology
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"If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

MAIN GOAL ⫻ Basil wants to turn his life around. He knows he’s been a piece of shit in the past, a mightily terrible person who doesn’t deserve forgiveness and he doesn’t ask for it, and there are problems with him he’s still trying to work out. But if for no one else, he wants to be better for his daughter and to keep her safe from it all so that she can grow into a genuinely good person. If that means finding a way to get her out of this town, then so be it.

PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Two things are simultaneously true: bad people can and do improve themselves and deserve the ability to do so, but even if they improve themselves, they are not entitled to the forgiveness or second chances of those they’ve hurt.

SEXUALITY ⫻ Heterosexual

FEARS ⫻ He's really just afraid for the safety of his daughter and the possibility that she might inherit the mistakes of her parents. This extends to him being afraid for his own life, because if he dies, then what does that leave for Abby? Also cockroaches. He fucking hates cockroaches.

REPUTATION ⫻ Among Araminta? Mixed, probably. He's on the good side of some people, on the bad side of quite a few. However, that's just on the east and west ends of town who know him as kind of a bastard, but also as a bastard you can bargain with. The folks on the North and South sides don't need as much policing and haven't seen him nearly as often and don't know much about them; and there's something to be said about the privilege of not having to interact with the police very often and the luxury of being able to greet them with a wide, happy smile. As far as the Vanburens? No personal connections with any of them except for Eve, who was estranged from the family. He doubts they have much of an opinion of him. It might be a sore awakening for them to find out he doesn't bend the knee to the family name.

THOUGHTS ABOUT FATHER ⫻ Well James ain’t his dad, so he ain’t got much reason to care for him aside from the man being Abby’s grandfather. The street says he’s good, Eve says he ain’t shit; neither one is necessarily a reliable source of information.

FLAWS ⫻ Basil’s just a piece of shit. Granted, he’s getting better. He’s a far cry different from the abusive drunk he was back in the day, but he still has issues with his temper, and he finds himself bending the rules and being far more morally flexible than he ought to be. He makes snap judgements about people, he’s difficult to befriend, has trust issues, and he relies on alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to get through the day. Just because he found his nurturing, softer side for his daughter doesn’t mean he wouldn’t put the fear of pain into someone if it meant getting what he wanted.

_{Backstory
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"Eve always did call me a real charmer..."

Basil was a runaway kid. A violently abusive and later absent dad and drug-abusing mother does not lend itself to a happy childhood. Apparently pops left a trail of kids in his wake, including a pair of half-sisters he didn’t know very well. Having to take care of himself while mom was high didn’t leave much energy for caring about his school grades, and he fled Maine, and ended up being picked up by officers in Massachusetts to be put into a foster care program when he was around 15 years old. He was a difficult kid to wrangle and get to behave, he had an attitude even when he was this young and he made it deliberately difficult for foster parents to take care of him because, in his experience, he couldn’t rely on authority figures and caretakers. The kids he associated with weren’t that different from him either; they all had troubles at home and hated being told what to do by adults who were ruining their own lives—what could they possibly know? So, when you’re told not to smoke when you’re 16 years old, you take that as a challenge and as an order to blatantly refuse.

Having teenage gangs skating downtown on skateboards who break into cars to steal shit they can pawn off isn’t a rare occurrence. Running interference for actual crooks was part of the gig. Basil wasn’t much of a brain for these types of ops, and he wasn’t much of a muscle; he was just one of the goons who was willing to do the stupid shit, like being a distraction or taking the fall for others. The very least he managed to do was study enough to get his GED, because as he started getting older, he had to have an actual job because foster agencies let you out on the street when you’re 18, and as reality began to sink in and hit him, it took at least a GED to get any decent-paying, braindead job. So, for a few years he managed to land a dockworker job driving forktrucks out in the cold and moving shipments back and forth. This was supplemented by his more illicit activities on the side, such as playing enforcer or thug for some slighted crook and collecting debts via intimidation, vandalism, or roughing someone up. Basil’s street smarts helped him here though, always being able to play the card of plausible deniability. The local cops knew of course he was no good, but without catching him in the act of having evidence of wrongdoing, they couldn’t arrest him for anything.

He never worked the same job for very long. Coming into work either intoxicated, shitty behavior, or simply not doing his work would find him fired after a few months, and he’d find someplace else that would take him. A warehouse or a dock of some kind since they pay better than most beater jobs with low requirements. He’d eventually find his way into the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania looking for work, eventually finding it in West Araminta when he was just a little older than 22 years old. The problem though with living the kind of life Basil has in a smaller town like Araminta is that people notice when you’re an outsider, and they notice quickly. One of the first of these people was one beautiful mistake by the name of Eve Vanburen. Apparently, she was one of the many kids of some big shot Basil didn’t know or care about, a man not so different from his own father, and she was estranged from the family for a very long time. She was a mixed woman about as inked up as he was, and at first it was simply a physical relationship. Then it went on to be his first long-term relationship. Then it became his worst relationship.

It turns out that putting two people together who’ve never had long-term relationships, both had family traumas, and unhealthy coping mechanisms, poor communications, and a reliance on soft drugs, it doesn’t lend itself to a healthy relationship. Full of yelling, manipulation, hurtful words and tears, stealing from each other, breaking up and hooking back up again—but it wasn’t physical then. Not that it made the relationship any healthier of course, they were both awful and spiteful people and perhaps they deserved each other in that regard. Besides that, the makeup sex was always pretty amazing. To think that they lasted year without throwing hands was a miracle.

The second time someone noticed him, after a life of being a professional piece of shit, he and a friend got caught stealing a package from someone’s porch. The po-pos start blaring their whoop-whoop horns. He takes the package to let his buddy get away, he gets tackled, and put in handcuffs. He’s been in them before, but he was a kid all those other times and they returned him home, to foster care, or let him off with a warning or something. The adult world was different—had consequences, and he spent the night in the city jail.

The third time someone noticed him was when he was approached by Lieutenant Kreese while sitting behind those bars. He kept asking Basil for the name of his buddy in exchange for going easy on him, but Basil didn’t budge. When asked why he wouldn’t turn in a good-for-nothing like the guy who left him behind, and why Basil would take the fall for someone who didn’t think twice about him, he answered it was because you don’t turn on a brother. This prompted a sympathetic nod of respect from the lieutenant, and it was then he learned that they ran his name through the system and found the trail of misdemeanors he left as a kid, but more importantly, Kreese was interested in the backgrounds of people like him. Found everything he could ever want on his parents—his father the abuser, his mother the vegetable stoner—and suddenly Basil found Kreese’s sympathy that he didn’t really deserve. Sacrifice was an admirable trait, he said, but only if it’s in service to something greater, and the past doesn’t have to define your future.

“I think you’re here because no one’s ever given you a chance,” he said, “and I want to be the one to give you that chance.”

It was probably the most memorable thing anyone’s ever said to him, and since the package as returned and no harm was done, he was offered to let this whole ordeal pass by without going on his record and personally appeal to waive his past misdemeanors as a kid if he made an attempt at attending the police academy. He didn’t even have to pass—just make an honest effort, and if he failed, he would at least walk away with a tempered discipline and self-respect, and if he failed, he’d have a promising career ahead of him. Either way, it was an opportunity to live honestly.

So, he took Kreese up on the offer. The report was basically thrown out, and Kreese would send a trooper out to make sure Basil attended the academy. Which he did as he worked his dockworker job. His relationship with Eve was as tumultuous as ever, the stress of what was basically two jobs weighing on, but before the year ended, he graduated the academy as a cadet. By no means was he the top of the class, and it was incredibly grueling, but he was already physically active and that gave him a slight edge relative to some other cadets. He finished out that year with additional training as an officer under sergeant Kreese. He stopped hanging around the bad influences of his life which helped his mental state and the camaraderie of the police force was a refreshing feeling for him—it was like having a family. There were some negatives of course; suddenly he wasn’t welcome at his regular haunts since he was the new bad guy.

Training drilled into his head a “me-versus-them” mentality against the citizenry, and he started off with a chip on his shoulder already, and here he was with a gun. Having been on the opposite side of the police, it was a moment of cognitive dissonance for him. He knew what it was like on being the other end of pepper spray and the like. His career began as a beat cop, where he’d walk around the poorer parts of town and getting to know the community, stationed at a different location from Kreese. He had a regular set of rounds, and here Basil’s street-smarts payed off, because he had an empathy for people on the west and east ends that other officers on the force didn’t have. The ability to make friends with even the slimiest meant he had his back covered, and if he needed something, he knew who to talk to. It wasn’t even a year into new career though did things begin to go south for him.

He was dispatched at night to answer an emergency call. Someone brandishing a knife broke into a woman’s house. Basil and his partner, Officer Dennings, were the first ones at the scene with sirens in the distance. The front door was broken down and there was a commotion inside, which meant that there might’ve still been someone inside. Hands on their guns, they approached, and Basil announced their presence, trying to coax everyone out. Only one man answered, and it was by sprinting around the corner, covered in blood, and lunging straight toward him. Hundreds of hours of muscle memory spurred Basil to drawing his gun and firing half of his magazine into the man’s body in a second before they were on top of each other, the former apparently unable to feel the pain. Basil barely managed to disarm him and throw him off with the help of his partner, and, driven by fear, adrenaline, anger, and a desire to survive the night, beat the man to death with his baton. Then came an inexplicable guilt. Even with all the adrenaline pumping through his body and emotions swirling onto him, he could feel as if something latched onto him. They later found out that night that the woman who called the emergency line was dead.

So that is when his life and relationship went from shit to worse. He was increasingly irritable and short fused, and the stress of policing was slowly taking its toll on him. He’d find ways to blow off the steam whether it was at the gym, tracking down suspects, or an increased use of force. At first it was on drunkards and thieves and the like—people he could get away with it on, with practiced plausible deniability and a culture of brotherhood on his side of the force to help him get away with it. “Those bastards had it coming,” they’d say. He had dozens of people behind his back, even if they understood him as the precinct’s resident “bad boy.” He was offered to be put on light duty, but Basil insisted he’d be too restless.

Worse yet, he’d come home and release his stress on Eve. As if following in the footsteps of his father, the fights intensified as he became physically abusive. It was a trend that became more frequent, and occasionally fueled by alcohol. She’d fight back too, sometimes even starting the fights, but never able to fend off Basil who was much larger than she was. Stealing and cheating became more frequent as well, which in turn fed itself into more fights. With either one too afraid to leave, this cycle of abuse would continue for two years. The number of times he’d walk into work with bruises on his face and been asked if he was alright and needed to be checked on, he lost track, but he always declined their offers and said everything was fine. Occasionally, he’d tell them it was a sex thing and that’d be enough to get those squares to shut up for a week or so. Mostly he just didn’t want them to see the sort of shape he left Eve in.

Then, of course, Eve got pregnant. It was enough to spook him, and he suggested to Eve that she should get an abortion, but she felt too afraid and too guilty to follow through with it. So, halfway through the pregnancy, Basil chickened out and bailed, leaving Eve to deal with the coming child on her own—just like his own father did with his own mother. To distract himself from that reality, he drowned himself in his work. He isolated himself from others to try to get a hold of his emotions now that it was clear that leaving Eve didn’t help him at all, and he was finding other people’s voices to be an irritating itch he wanted to scratch out. Being alone was the safest option, but in drowning himself in work, he managed to bring in a record number of criminals, getting him a reputation for being a VPD hound dog.

His previously built rapport with the community, including its rotten parts, meant people owed him favors for looking the other way over petty drug use, spray-painting a building. He was in business with some crooks who’d pay him to stay off their backs and occasionally thin out the competition with anonymous tips—his corruption ran deep. He had a nose for trouble, having been on the other side of the chase before, too. Also helping him was a liberal use of force, having brought in more than just a few guys with black eyes. He was as guilty of profiling as any other cop, and one of his chief strategies was making one of his suspects a living hell by writing citations, tickets, or even slashing tires (and when confronted about it, he simply told them to come down to the station and write a police report) until they finally gave him a confession or the information he wanted. Any one of the multitudes of Vanburen kids running around, still embittered by his relationship with Eve, Basil had a tendency for treating them worse than the usual citizenry.

A turning point in his life was when he received a call about a little over a year later. Eve Vanburen was in the hospital for drug-overdose, then currently comatose. Assuming she wakes up, she was to be forcibly admitted to a strict rehab facility. Leaving behind her a baby, barely a year old: Abby Baker. Apparently even after everything Basil’s done to her, she’d still rather the child have his name before her father’s, but more glaring to him was the chain of events that ran parallel to his own life: absent, abusive dad and a drugged-out mom. The guilt was… overwhelming, and now that life had finally caught up with him, it was time he faced some consequences and accepted responsibility. The child was to be under his custody, and he submitted himself to becoming a father at 25—not that the courts would’ve given him an option anyways.

The next three years had its ups and downs. Basil had no idea how to be a father while starting out, and he spent his only two paid vacations weeks that year trying to learn how to be one. He spent quite a few sleepless nights trying to do his research while Abby ate baby food from a little jar on top of his lap, carrying her everywhere he went before he learned to buy a stroller—but it was a long three years, and he had a lot of time to think about himself and his life up to this point. Becoming a father? It changed him. At least that’s what he wants to think. That guilt he remembers feeling when that child was left alone reminded him of himself, and if he didn’t do something about it, Abby could one day end up just like him.

So, even if fatherhood didn’t change him, he forced himself to change. Just because he was a piece of shit didn’t mean he had to pass that on to an innocent little girl. He grew to love her. That much was clear when he nearly had his head cleaned off his shoulders when he was dispatched to remove a fired worker refusing to leave company property while he was taking a joyride in a forktruck. Suddenly, he finally felt the fear of mortality since it would have meant leaving the kid behind. He was put on light duty ever since then and worked primarily as a dispatcher for the last two and a half years. He relies quite a bit on babysitters to take care of Abby while he’s at work, and he makes sure to let Abby visit Eve every week or two in the rehab facility, and although he still hated the woman and she rightfully hated him back, they were at least civil while in front of the child. He just couldn’t bring himself to forgive her, as hypocritical as it was, for leaving the child the way she did. He might’ve failed Abby, but he thought that didn’t give Eve the right to neglect her too in the way she did.

Some weird things happened a year ago though. It started with some strange reports—crime scenes that didn’t make sense. Stolen goods with no signs of forced entry and the store workers themselves having alibis. Crime scenes that left no clues. Arson without evidence of accelerants or electrical malfunction. People appearing in places they shouldn’t be in. The force was stretched thin and it was one of those rare occasions that Basil had to be put to work in the field again. All evidence pointed to an animal mauling, but there were no animals around here who could do that much damage. The only thing that came close was a black bear, but they typically came nowhere within city limits. Stomping through the forest to the east, it seemed he came across the suspect: there was a rabid dog covered with blood from its face to its shoulders. It lunged, and Basil discharged his firearm as it bit into his arm. From that moment, he felt something latch onto him. That was his first experience with an apparition.

He could see it whenever he gazed into a mirror. It looked like a dog… sort of. It was at least dog shaped. Whatever he was seeing, it didn’t go around hurting people around him, but he did feel something in himself change. Not bad or evil necessarily, just different. He was a bit hungrier, ran a little hotter, but he hadn’t felt so physically strong in a long while, if ever. He could eat just about anything, but vegetables never did sit quite right with him again. He has no idea what the hell happened to him since then, but it’s been nearly a year ago from today and things are just getting weirder in Araminta, and he’ll be damned if he lets anything happen to Abby. With this weird shit happening to the Vanburens suddenly turning to stone around the city limits, he’ll have to sit tight in town until he figures out a way to get Abby out of here. That is one risk he is not willing to take.

_{Abstraction
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"Listen, I don't know anything about this dumb 'magic' nonsense. All I know is that I could go for a big rare steak right about now."

TYPE ⫻ Affixed Aberrant

ABSTRACTION ⫻ Predation

ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Predation is a type of Abstraction where the apparition affixes itself to the aberrant and usually imbues them with rabid aggression and ravenous hunger; where seemingly anything can provoke and light the aberrant’s shortened fuse and cause them to violently lash out at others. This was seen when the apparition affixed itself to an animal, being attracted to adrenaline, hunger, and survival. It affixed itself to Basil the moment the dog was killed as it bit him, drawn to his own survival impulse. Being a human with greater control over his base instincts and impulses, Basil doesn't suffer the same consequences as an animal would, and he has learned how to managed his own aggression even before becoming affixed.

The Abstraction comes with a set of benefits too: The apparition imbues the aberrant with a highly corrosive digestive acid that can enable them to digest nearly anything, a stronger, break-resistant skeleton including his teeth to endure greater bite forces that can shatter bone, and a denser muscular system which grants greater power and speed. He also has a sharp sense of smell that is sensitive enough to detect and differentiate the differences in sweat. This essentially enables him to become an apex predator to hunt down prey, which is also useful for literally sniffing down criminals and suspects. On the flip side, he can't stomach fruits and vegetables like he used to, and anything that's overcooked tends to give him a stomach ache too. So, he uses drugs like alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to help him suppress his appetite. He can recover from injury faster if he eats raw meat or blood, but because the thought of it makes him gag, that's a facet of his abstraction he will likely never utilize.

AURA SENSING ⫻ Basil senses people by smell, and he smells people through fear and adrenaline. While ordinarily he could do this anyway, its usually a subtle difference. A change in acidity, slightly sour. But when that person has an aura, it is distinct, pungent, and nearly overwhelming. It weakens with distance, but he can smell a fearful aura from a half-mile away.

LIMITS ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

^{Other
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"A cop listenin' to music about how all cops are bastards, imagine that."

Basil drives a shitty old beater car with a child seat in the back, and he likes to play music like...

Hello

yo what's up new guy??

Mass Effect: Caelestis

Omega

________________

“So, you uhhh, you work for the Asari then?” Came the voice of Lauren from in front as she weaved her way through crates and blockades - leading the way for the human engineer. “Always been curious about ‘em myself,” she added. Trying to fill their journey with idle chatter.

It wasn’t exactly a long trip there, just dangerous. Dangerous in that there were obstacles in their path. It wasn’t meant to be traversed by foot. It was just a long dumping round for trash, but it would take them to the back of the warehouse. Eventually.

“Yeah. Supposedly, at least.” Shy answered. “Grand total of five minutes.”

The latter wasn’t wearing their suit, opting to remain in their casual clothes. Being dressed in a black body suit like some kind of cyborg ninja wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and it would probably be easier to explain their presence looking like regular people working around a warehouse. While they were to be skirting around Blue Sun territory, it’d probably be easier to get closer without raising any flags, as well as easier to get out without looking like a retreating enemy combatant.

She wasn’t expecting her words to instill much confidence in their new client, in fact, that was hardly a consideration at all. It was idle chatter mostly to entertain herself if nothing else, and now barely an hour into her new job, she was wading through trash and junk. Part of her wondered how these clients of theirs got roped into such sticky business as drugs and Blue Sun entanglements, and perhaps a more socially attuned person would know better than to ask, though Shy’s hesitation to ask was more because she thought they might have already mentioned it and she probably wasn’t paying attention at the time. She wasn’t nearly as concerned about the character of the people she was working for or the awkward air a sob story might invite.

If her overall silence was anything to go by, she didn’t much abide smalltalk, even if she did so with banter.

She summoned the fluorescent orange hologram interface of her omni-tool, showing a simple map of the surrounding area and their current location within. The tunnel went a bit further on, but the map didn’t account for all of the debris cluttering the way.

“How much further?” Shy asked, sounding bored and annoyed as her foot caught the edge of some piece of junk that nearly tripped her. “If there is at any point the opportunity to utilize a console or remote access point, we should use it. No reason for us to be in the center of hell if someone raises an alarm.”

“It’s the next one over now,” Lauren answered, tampering now with a window. “If you’re after cover, if we can get inside, there might be an easier way across and you can help your team… With consoles,” she blinked over at Shy slowly. Her green eyes sparkled and a smile waivered. For all of the courage she showed earlier, she was showing less of it now.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this, by the way,” she said with an apologetic shrug before finding the pop in the window to draw it open. Every structure had its weakness. There was nothing but pitch black inside until she turned on a light from her jacket. It was just an office, long since abandoned.

“Don’t worry about it,” Shy answered flatly, “I volunteered, remember?”

“Come on,” Lauren gestured as she climbed inside.

This didn’t look so bad, Shy thought as her boots landed on the floor inside. An abandoned office, huh? A little bit of a mess, but there were plenty of computers with administrative privileges to utilize and furniture to hide behind if someone caught wind of them? Not so bad. She wondered about the probability of any of those gangster mercenaries crawling through the windows like they did, but Lauren and Shy were both small enough to do so, so it probably wouldn’t be their first plan. They’d probably rather take the front door, especially in their own territory.

“First things first, help me push one of these desks against the door. We should barricade the main point of entry in accompaniment of a multi-stage lock-out.”

With Lauren’s help, they were able to push the office furniture into place in front of the door, taking care to not drag it against the floor that might incur unwanted attention through the noise. As they were getting it into place, Shy was able to use her omni-tool to interface with the electronic functions of the door to keep it locked through a lockdown protocol as well as fashion a length of cable to physically secure the handle to the piece of furniture blocking the entrance. Tapping the orange interface on her omni-tool once more, two drones suddenly materialized before them, positioning themselves a few feet away from either side of the doorway.

“If worst comes to worst, we’ll leave the same way we came in. I’m keeping the main lights off so people don’t know we’re here.” Shy said shrugging, perhaps alarmingly nonchalant about the mess they were getting into. Sighing, she stretched her arms in the air as well as her neck and said, before seating herself before one of the administration console, “Welp, time to get to work I guess.”

Her fingers peppering the keys and interface of the console, mingled in with the mutterings of how archaic the hardware here was, she was also peppering Lauren with an assault of questions that she probably wouldn’t have had the answer to, even if she gave her the time to answer them. Shy seemed to uncover those answers as quickly as she was asking them. “Might you know where we are, what we have access to? Oh, there’s a map. Gozu district, we’re right there -- think the others should be travelling up this route, the captain and doctor up that way -- and the target should be… there. I have a feeling I won’t be able to reroute a defensive system from here if they have one, not very quickly, anyway. Cameras? Mm, probably, if we’re connected on the same network. Oh, yep, found them. Let me just rewrite my permissions… piece of cake. Hey, is that your brother?”

Pointing at the screen on her monitor, there was an image of a handful of Blue Suns mercenaries loitering around a room with a young man of skin and bones bound up in a chair. Scratching her head, she muttered to herself, “Well, they obviously aren’t feeding him any burgers…”

Lauren looked down at the screen and saw that it was true, her friend was bound in the chair. She couldn’t quite make out all of the details there, only that one of her captors was holding some kind of heavy machinery. A saw, perhaps. She cringed and stepped back from the screen. “You have to do something!, stop them! Please!” she said desperately.

Meanwhile, one of the secondary screens was showing something equally as exciting -- Both Naryxa and Satka appeared on the monitor, the Asari firing off a biotic charge at more guards, only a few doors away from the sick little torture chamber.

Shy’s face remained stoic even in the midst of Lauren’s outburst as she try to figure out a plan. There wasn’t exactly a weapons system in this place, not one that was on the same network as these offices at least. Think, think, think! What systems would they share? Emergency? C4I? Power? Maybe she could remotely turn off the power from here. She wasn’t exactly going through the proper channels though, and if they had a backup generator. Ugh, risks upon risks. This manual stuff was limiting her stuff.

“Uh, you might wanna sit somewhere safe, I’m probably about to set off some alarms.” Shy said, sounding annoyed. She aimed her omni-tool toward the main console, and for a few brief and alarming seconds, multiple windows branched out from her tool and the monitors in the room started flashing wildly as the omni-tool enacted a CNA protocol and began purging the information on the network and proxy server. Just as Shy expected, red lights and alarms were suddenly triggered, probably alerting nearly half of the district with a sound not quite unlike a krogan bashing your head in.

The young woman immediately turned back to the computer she was working on, watching as many lines of codes vanished before her eyes. Many of these were firewalls and restrictions that would’ve kept her from accessing certain elements and functions on the network, and without them or the proxy server, essentially allowed her unfettered access to anything that was on it. The Blue Suns in the chamber with the guy they were trying to save were clearly made aware that there was an unwelcome guest somewhere across the district and took their attention off of Lauren’s friend. As restrictions and firewalls dropped, she got access to more cameras -- one of them was focused on a warehouse also full of Blue Suns, and inside looked like a cache of weapons or something. Interesting.

“Looks like I got their attention.” Shy said. “I’m unlocking the door for the captain’s team, sending coordinates and footage.”

Shy drew her omni-tool once more and opened comms with the team with the turian and vorcha, which sounded like the setup to a bad joke. She said, “Hey, uh, forward team? Captain’s team making contact with the target shortly. I also discovered a Suns’ weapons cache near your location. If you’d like to, I don’t know, loot it, blow it up, or eat the guys inside or something… go ham. Take pictures? Unless it’s the third. Anyways, sending coordinates.”

Turning back to face Lauren, she said, “We should get going soon before they start searching these buildings. Unless there’s something else you’d like me to do first, like spying on an ex or something, don’t let the threat of mortal peril stop you or anything.”

“Let’s just get moving,” Lauren said. “By the time we get to them, things are either going to be over, or over” she sighed, clearly itching to move out if her shaking hand was anything to go by. “Come on, rendezvous will be this way…”

Mass Effect: Caelestis

Shy would probably go the route of option 1, since I'm assuming that is the group that will probably be retrieving the hostage and Shy can help the group reach them.

Mass Effect: Caelestis

When Shy first laid her eyes on the ship, the Caelestis, she might’ve drooled a little bit. Ship maintenance wasn’t necessarily her specialty, but she could work with the best of them, and she knew salarian engineering when she saw it: she was pragmatic, sleek, frugal and optimized. Clean of wanton sentimentality but not without careful and detail-oriented craftsmanship and advanced specifications. She wondered if she had read the posting correctly, that the captain of this ship was indeed an asari, but the captain was one such creature indeed. There was a hint of disappointment that there was no salarian on board, though her face did not show it, and she eventually found her quarters post the clipped and fleeting introductions. Asari, as captivating as they are, she understood -- as bounded as her ability to understand was -- to be perennial fixtures of their communities and less likely given to flights of fancy. Shy’s own established susceptibility toward transience all but guaranteed this voyage and her membership within to be nothing short of ephemeral.

What few personal belongings she possessed such as clothes and the like were placed onto a bed, but the rest of her belongings she hauled off to the cargo bay where she suspected most of her work would be done at her leisure. She didn’t expect to last long of course, and in this respect, just gave the cargo bay and the engine room cursory glances; pulley systems to lift heavy loads, how well ventilated the room was, where the power boxes could be found, the drive core, the workbench -- she didn’t expect to do much here, maybe a couple of tasks until Naryxa decided they didn’t like her for one reason or another. That being said, she hadn’t worked for an asari before, but that didn’t mean her hopes were up. If Citadel politics were anything to go by, they were apparently stricter than humans. Not exactly the type of people she’d want to get a face full of eezo exhaust for.

Her omni-tool beeped, notifying her of Naryxa's summons -- shit, were they telepathic too? No, it was apparently a crew-wide meeting. Unless they were telepathic and wanted to chew her out in front of everybody, but that probably wasn’t likely. Probably. Regardless, Shy sighed, picked up her bag of tools and decided to head back at her leisure so that she could properly lay her eyes on the interior of the ship to take it all in. If it meant getting to fiddle around with salarian tech, then on second thought, she might actually be a little eager to be working on the Caelestis.

What she was expecting to be a little group bonding exercise that everyone hated turned out to be a little different. When she was expecting to find a bunch of chairs in a circle where they would sit and talk about their favorite colors, she found instead Naryxa facing the crew -- one of which she found was an actual vorcha that made her spine crawl -- with a guest; a woman, a hungry looking thing whose smoldering eyes sung greater sorrows than she could dare express, cast a spell on the room that weighed the air upon everyone’s shoulders but was lost on Shy. She looked around with curious glances, apparently oblivious to the threatening and looming specter which imposed itself upon the crew.

Naryxa warned them of a skirmish and civilians getting caught in the crossfire, and Shy’s recollection of her last crew’s shootout with the Blue Suns came with crystal-clear clarity. If she wasn’t there, good at fighting or not, then they likely would’ve been killed right there and then. She made an entire career of automating dangerous tasks, and received accolades for her designs. Though she didn’t necessarily want to make enemies on the station, one of the only places where she could safely hide, she also wanted to work on this ship. There weren’t many opportunities for new jobs coming through these days, and Naryxa’s profile was one of the first new faces she’s seen in a while. Shy wasn’t sure if she could afford to lose it. Besides, the way she spoke was so--

“Sure,” Shy blurted out unexpectedly. Her affect was flat and tone slightly acquiescent. Her eyes traveled the room a bit, expecting their own upon her. Being a young woman, dressed in her casual clothing and being of slight build, she did not look the part of the soldier. “I’ve worked on Omega’s systems and power grid a lot,” she explained, “electrical, security, defense, comm networks… I can get you in without a problem. I can deploy two defense and combat drones to cover our backs, too. If you’re just going in to get someone out, it should be a cakewalk. So, yeah. Sure.”

The young engineer played with the corner of her shirt absentmindedly, expecting some kind of judgement from the others as she usually did. There was no doubt in her mind or lapse in confidence that this was something she could do. Whether or not she actually wanted to was a separate matter, but her options were kind of tight at the moment. If nothing else, it might help to cement her place on the ship, and if she's lucky, it might justify a bit of future procrastination and delegation of her duties. So, she just gave the others her best forced, awkward, and pursed smile she could muster as she awaited the verdict for their plan of action.

Mass Effect: Caelestis

C:\Users\Shy\Locations\Milky_Way\Shadow_Sea\Horizon>time
The current time is: one_week_ago_

Fireworks of sparks erupted through the still air of the Pretoria, a hot blue welding torch sending them scattering and dancing against the cold aluminum floor of the engine room, it’s screaming heat making the metal whine in terrible and macabre harmony with the screaming of men from behind. The figure hiding behind their mask stopped their work for a moment as if to appreciate their handiwork before resuming. The screaming continued. In the med-bay there were three people, two men and a woman, trying to hold down a fourth man writhing and squirming and agonizing on a sterile bed. The racket was cacophonous as the flailing pushed over racks and tables, tools falling over, and the cries of the injured begged for the pain to stop.

“God, oh God! Please! Get it off of me!”

That voice belonged to Adam. He was one of the people acting as muscle on board the ship. Relatively new, but had been around longer than the engineer. The man’s arm was covered in residue from an incendiary round shot at him in an earlier firefight. A corrosive and self-igniting gel adhered to his skin and continued to dissolve and burn his flesh. They finally got him strapped onto the bench and the ship’s medic immediately got to work on him. One of the men, the captain of the ship, was still out of breath and panting as he stomped out to meet the engineer working on one of the control panels. He was beet red in the face and furious.

“Shy!” He shouted from around the corner before zeroing in on her. He was a large man, fit and athletic. He used to be a soldier, and it was obvious by how he kept a tight ship.“Shy, what the hell was that? What are you fucking thinking?”

The engineer behind their welding mask didn’t respond, but continued their work with the torch in large insulated gloves that went up to her elbows. The Hawaiian styled print on their button-up shirt a stark contrast from their industrial appearance. The lights flickered as the ship began taking off the ground.

“We had it! The deal went through and we could have walked away with what we needed without any problems! What the actual hell were you thinking?”

Still, the only answer he got from the engineer was them turning off the torch and prying open a panel from the wall before they buried their hands into the wiring on the other side. They grabbed their tools and began going to work.

“Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a Goddamn selective mute.” He sneered, before his voice eventually resumed his full-throated shouting. “Well I hope you’re happy about this, starting the bloody fucking firefight that might cost one of our own his entire fucking arm! The least you could do then is learn how to pick up a gun yourself!”

The screams from the other room punctuated the captain’s shouting rant, but as the engineer silently resumed their work, his fingers were twitching for his sidearm. “God damn it Shy!” He screamed. “Give me a fucking answer before I jettison your weird, retarded ass into fucking space!”

Shy’s fingers moved deftly even in her gloves, and almost as soon as the captain shouted his threat at her, a distant voice called out from the cockpit, “Bishop, something’s wrong. We’re losing power to all systems!” Just as soon, the lights on board the ship blacked out, and the g-forces on board suddenly shifted upward. Shy hurriedly shoved the wires back into its compartment and leaped for the knife switch, using her weight to pull it down before she could fall away from it. A burst of sparks exploded from where she was working in a brilliant arc flash, and power was suddenly restored to the ship as the lights came back on and the ship’s automatic stabilizers kicked in. In the brief period of weightlessness that came with falling at terminal velocity, the much larger captain, Bishop, fell on top of Shy. The two were both groaning, Shy moreso as he rolled off of her.

“What the actual hell just happened?” He asked, wide-eyed and on edge, though he wasn’t expected an answer. This time he got one.

“They sabotaged the ship.” Shy grunted as she pushed herself onto her knees. Sitting down, she pushed the welding mask up. Soot marking the ordinarily fair tone of her face. Despite all that had happened and all that was said, her countenance appeared flat. “I could tell by the sound coming from the drive core. We should have enough power to sustain life-support and C4I services for now.”

The rage that was on her captain’s face softened, but his brows were furrowed and twitching. His eyes vibrating, not looking at any one thing in particular. Confused. He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering, “How long have we…?”

“After we landed.” Shy answered. “Must have been after we left to meet with the Suns.”

“And the shootout?”

“Drones.” She said, lifting up her arm -- and wincing from a burning pain in her elbow -- to show off her omni-tool. “They’re tied to my omni-tool and set up to automatically respond to threats. One of them must have detected movement and an energy spike in one of their weapons while it was aimed at us, so it reacted before it could be discharged. They were also responsible for laying down the suppressive fire that let us all escape.”

“Shy, I…”

“It’s okay.” She said, her tone clipped. She looked toward her elbow where she felt a burning pain. It was from that arc flash earlier, she realized. She held her elbow in her gloved hand and turned back toward the captain. “You can just drop me off at our next stop.”

---

C:\Users\Shy\Locations\Milky_Way\Omega_Nebula\Omega>time
The current time is: present_

Shy always did have something of a black thumb -- she was an engineer, not a gardener -- but Bishop kept a tight ship with the same crew for a long time, about a year or two, and a week ago she was the one link in the chain that made it all fall apart after a month. Part of it was because it was such a bad job that resulted in permanent bodily damage, but a bigger part was that the rest of the crew apparently recognized that they would’ve been dead without her and she got chased off the ship anyways. Never mind her mechanical expertise or the security detail provided by her tech that they learned to appreciate, her and the captain never got along very well anyways. That was just the way things went with her, and now she was back on Omega. The dead end of the galaxy with no way out.

She sat at a table in a club, which was probably one of the safest places she could be, even if it wasn’t necessarily safe for her credit chit. Everything she owned she was either wearing or was collected in a big duffel bag on her lap. With her feet on the table and leaning back into her chair, she was staring at a screen projected from the omni-tool on her wrist, scrolling along looking for jobs. A lot of faces she recognized, some were people she worked with in the past and people who eventually got rid of her. Some faces she recognized as people who turned her down. Sometimes it was for being human. Sometimes it was for being young. Sometimes it was for being a woman. Usually it was for “being weird.” They never had to say it out loud. She could remotely access their datapads. Eventually she learned to just stop doing that.

Most of the job listings were fronts for gang activity and that wasn’t a gig that she was about to get involved with. Others were from Citadel trade stations, and she wasn’t on good terms with those people either. Eventually, though, she found a listing asking for volunteers to investigate a distress signal in the Asgard system by an asari captaining a ship called the Caelestis. She sighed and applied for the offering. It’s not like she had any other options aside from getting poorer and poorer with every minute she spent unemployed on Omega. She wondered, at least, if the captain being asari meant they’d make any more sense than the last dozen or so employers she’s had.

If there was even a drop of salarian blood in them, maybe it’d be enough.

Mass Effect: Caelestis

Me trying to contain my excitement:

My Hider

Mass Effect: Caelestis

Shy Jung

_{CHEYENNE “SHY” JUNG
24 ⟁ FEMALE ⟁ HUMAN ⟁ ENGINEER}

"Yo."

_{A P P E A R A N C E}

---

“Nice hardware, right?”

Shy's Korean father and Scandinavian mother came together to create a blonde-haired half-Asian gremlin (presumably a woman) with trace amounts of other ethnicities from the last hundred or so years of Earth's global unity. She is not particularly imposing in either height or build, standing at 5'5" and weighing in at 115 pounds with a modest bust. Her skin is rather pale in only a somewhat unhealthy fashion that is not quite anemic, but mostly because of the two predominant genetic sources for that trait. Said skin is unblemished for the most part, save for a few beauty spots and a plasma burn scar on the far end of her left jaw. This is hidden by the end of her bobbed hair when its down, but it is mostly faded by now and is hardly all that noticeable anyway. While she has got some amount of muscle from her line of work, she's not cut by any means and tends to have other people do the heavy lifting for her, resulting in a little bit of squishy tissue over an otherwise skinny woman.

She has got the body of a woman who can do work but would prefer to lounge instead of actually doing it, and the only reason she isn't any heavier is due to an inexplicable metabolism. She has got a soft face that is otherwise laden with sharp, feline features. Such features include her slanted amber eyes and high cheek bones, and the angles of her diamond-shaped face makes a sharp turn from her cheeks to create a pointed chin just below her pink lips. Her nose, though small, is long and hawkish enough to make up the difference. The expressions typically shown on her face range from sardonic and bored stoicism to carefree or cocky, which gives away her general attitude and disposition without you even having to talk to her. This is only amplified by smudged, day-old or older makeup around her eyes that she never bothered to clean up, and sometimes the total lack of any makeup at all. It is a peculiar thing that no one ever seems to see it freshly applied.

Her blonde hair is short, hangs just above her shoulders, and is somewhat choppy in a stylish sort of way like it was cut by a razor, but it is also pretty uneven, which can only lead one to assume that she tried to cut it herself. Her bangs aren’t even or symmetrical with some strands being longer than the others, and it seems to gradually – just slightly – get longer toward the right side of her face, and if she keeps it down she's typically sporting a bed-head or similarly unkempt sort of appearance. Yet her hair is not particularly oily, so rather than being unwashed, it is probably just Shy's own neglect at brushing it. She prefers to tie her hair back in a short ponytail or tight bun, which her bangs are too short to take part in and one or two strands of hair always seems to get tugged out of her hair-tie. She can be seen pulling a strand or two out after putting her hair up as if it is the same few spots that always feels too tight and pinching, and the result always making her look a little frazzled.

For an inter-planetary mercenary/odd-job-hunter, she certainly does not dress the part. While most mercenaries are decked out in armor or other kinds of utility gear, Shy likes to hang out in casual wares with just a few odd gadgets on her person, and she does so with panache. It's clear that she is confident, as well as lacking any sense of style – probably inherited from her dad – opting for a button-up Hawaiian styled shirt (and she has a few of these, all in different colors, but yellow goes best with her hair) and a pair cargo khaki pants which are suitably baggy and comfortable, held up by a belt that might just be a size up from her, and some pricey looking work boots. Gadgets on her person includes the utility belt and what looks like a few watches on both her wrists, but on closer inspection are actually low-profile omni-tools. All that said, when push comes to shove, she probably has an old onyx light armored suit collecting dust in a footlocker somewhere, though she only really uses it for inhospitable environmental conditions.

She has a couple of accessories which is composed mostly of piercings. She has two piercings on her left outer brow, an industrial on her left ear, one tongue piercing, and two more piercings that nobody has any business knowing about. She has a colorful, vibrant tattoo sleeve of saturated watercolors depicting a floral pattern, and it extends from her left shoulder down to her elbow -- though so does the sleeves of her shirts, so the intense and beautiful (if a bit shallow) artwork isn't always in sight. There's another tattoo in black ink that goes around her neck that almost looks like a wired choker thanks to its thin, honeycomb-like design. There is one little tattoo on her right wrist of an inch-by-inch square that was done with a special kind of ink that interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum. Depending on the different wavelengths of light it is exposed to, it will either change color or have a faint neon glow of different hues.

_{H I S T O R Y}

---

"원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다."

Shy has lived a charmed life until recently. She had a functional family as a kid and was an only child born in a Mexican hospital during her parents' work trip during 2160CE. The timing of her birth was quite fortunate for her, because despite the First Contact War three years ago, it was the year the Systems Alliance was recognized in the interstellar community. This period of time opened up resources for her as a child unavailable to others born too many years before now. As well, her parents both had money, were both recognized engineers that had met each other in the field, and they had the resources at their disposal to give their daughter the same path to success. They were incredibly doting, providing whatever it was their little girl could want, which spoiled her terribly.

When Shy was around 7 years old, they thought that she started developing strange behaviors, but later a doctor clarified to her parents it wasn’t that she was developing strange behaviors, but that she wasn't learning the appropriate social behaviors and thought processes in her pre-operational stage of cognitive development. In other words, she was on the autistic spectrum. Yet, that barely changed anything regarding how they would treat their child. They continued to raise her as they would have but exercising a little more patience than they might have otherwise. This also meant tolerating more abrasive behaviors that the couple could have rectified before they became problematic later in life. Though Shy used to have a hard time understanding her dad's frequent use of sarcasm, she became accustomed to it and began to understand it better. However, she also developed the habit of speaking with a sarcastic tone of voice all the time, regardless of her actual use of sarcasm.

Shy had difficulty being understood by her parents, but she was sharp as a tack and latched onto mathematics as an easy system for her to interact with the world. So, they supported her decision to follow in their footsteps as an engineer and mathematician if she thought it would help her be understood. They gave her the best education they could afford, which meant an in-depth and engaging virtual program that she could access any time and from anywhere, and with a united global community, that also meant she was able to travel the world with her parents as they went on their work trips. This would expose her not just to all the great sights and cultures, but some of the greatest minds Earth had to offer and Shy absorbed all of their wisdom and intelligence like a sponge. In a confusing world of nuance, double-meanings, and perspectives, people were tricky, but calculus was easy. Calculus had rules and did not contradict itself all the time, and the great scientific minds who she met typically followed and appreciated those rules as much as she did.

She had the added bonus of learning mathematics in Korean because, like most Asian languages, it was better suited to learning math due to the language's structure and brevity, leading to a quicker understanding and remembering a longer sequence of numbers. She also had virtually unlimited access to labs thanks to her parents who would also assign her little projects to work on to keep her mind and hands busy, and also gave her experience with hardware and software. On special occasions, her parents would be invited to the Citadel to work on a project. Her first visit was as a teenager, and exposure to some of the greatest minds the entire galaxy had to offer was beyond lucky. Though since Shy considered other humans being tricky enough for her to understand, she never really put in the effort to bother even trying with alien races.

Of course, then she met the salarians, which did not take any effort on her part to get along swimmingly with. Likewise, one of them called her the only human they have ever met that made any sense. The asari, though confusing, were at least less emotional than humans most of the time and had a certain way about them that made her feel like she was understood. She was provided with everything she could hope for, which probably went a long way to developing her sense of entitlement.

It was not before long did Shy begin working alongside her parents and their colleagues as an apprentice at twenty years old. She was working on everything from virtual intelligence to sophisticated computer systems and defense technology. She did not just work on the software, either. She was turning as many bolts and screws as she was plugging numbers into computers and data pads, being as well versed in the mechanics and construction of applied engineering as she was in the theoretical. She also got to play with all of the “toys” she made, operating and testing them to make sure they functioned properly, and while she is no crack pilot, she can sit in the cockpit and knows how to get a bird off the ground and back on again.

Shy would later receive the equivalent of a futuristic master’s degree at twenty-two for her work on V.I., robotics, and automated systems. Though she received recognition and high credits for her work on weapons and defense systems, it was given to her because of her personal inventions. They improved convenience, quality of life, workplace safety, and automation, which reduced the risk of injury from maintenance of automated equipment by having a robot or computer do it instead. It was an automated motion-sensitive laser welder that could react to a malfunction or moving part in a piece of automation and instantly jerk back to avoid getting caught in a machine that could shear someone’s finger off.

She was already well on her way to being called a Doctor of Engineering within the next year, and she was working on a project with her parents and their now shared colleagues in a laboratory on Luna, Earth’s moon. Despite the Citadel ban on A.I. technology, the Earth Alliance did not have such rules at the time. Shy, her parents, and the rest of their team were contracted by the Alliance to secretly work on making the jump from V.I. to A.I. and the program was known as Hannibal. They made sure that the team working on the project was aware that what they were doing was highly illegal under Citadel-space law and that they would be prosecuted if knowledge were to be leaked out of the facility. All of them, Shy included, agreed to proceed despite the risks. It was here Shy learned how to work around hologram technology, as it was based on the Avina VI on the Citadel. A few months into their work, during one of their experiments, the program suddenly went rogue.

Shy was able to get away after finding her parents, though very few other scientists were able to escape. With their escape pod being one of the very first to eject, the rogue A.I. learned and adapted, sabotaging the other escape pods before the rest of the scientists could escape. It was the first time Shy experienced and witnessed death, and she didn't know how to process it. She had her own way of grieving, as difficult as it is for both her and anyone else to understand. She was saddened, but also confused, unsure of how to make sense of what happened what it means to be without certain people in her life. Despite Shy's conflict with her own emotions, what had happened on Luna did take its toll on her and she still feels a sense of burden and responsibility for what happened. She still thinks about it quite often, and, as someone who knew perfectly well about what was supposed to be going in and out of the A.I.'s programming, it didn't take long for her to come to the conclusion that the project was sabotaged by someone. She was not given a lot of time to give it further thought, because as the news spread, the Citadel acted. Her parents were arrested and brought into questioning, but Shy ran away and refused to accept responsibility for what happened. She didn't want to be labeled a criminal for what she believed was not her fault.

Evading arrest, she ended up making landfall on the cosmic shores of every criminal's paradise: Omega. There are only a few ways for a young girl like her to make money on Omega, and most of them were completely and utterly demeaning. Two options were left: make and sell tech on her own in a cutthroat business environment where others could easily take advantage of her and her lack of people skills, or find safety in numbers and use her smarts and tech to make easy coin. The choice seemed like an easy one to make. So, for the last year, she started doing freelance work by contracts. It typically began from doing everything from maintenance to engineering on Omega. These were her primary jobs, and she found them degrading as it essentially reduced her to being a common fixer. On the other hand, being so overqualified and her knack for engineering robotics to perform work for her made it a pretty easy gig. Though on the rarer occasions when she needed a lot of money fast – aside from time sensitive projects, she had a tendency of pissing off the wrong people – she would find herself being pressed into doing all sorts of unsavory-type mercenary jobs with all sorts of unsavory-type mercenary people.

Though the transition was alarming and harrowing at first, she was eventually able to find her niche after working a few jobs. Though resented by other mercs for her attitude, she was valued for her expertise with tech and got a reputation for fixing anything she set her mind to. She produced drones that would make short work of a job without anyone risking their own lives, and she could remotely access networks and bypass security systems that would have ultimately led to more bloodshed. So, to become a freelancer and survive a whole year, Shy figured that she must have gotten pretty good at it. Perhaps one day, she might be good enough to prove that what happened on Luna was one giant accident. Though she's highly confident in her abilities and is kind of self-righteous, she partially blames herself for not being even better and identifying the error in Hannibal's code before it went rogue, and she carries that burden with her everywhere she goes.

_{P E R S O N A L I T Y}

---

“Wait are you serious?” “No, never.”

Shy is a bit of an odd ball when you set her next to other mercenaries, her own peers comparing her to being more like a salarian than a human. She is a strange combination of intelligence, entitlement, and a casual laissez-faire attitude that would have her preferring to stay seated than do her job, and this combination is what makes her utterly disarming. She is an easy person to underestimate because of her lack of physical ability, temperament, and ambition, but she also has a chip on her shoulder that makes her seem as though she thinks she's better than most people. It drives others nuts and it drives her to compete with those who would slight her, and to do so as effortlessly as possible to prove herself. Indeed, she truly has little ambition to do much with herself or her life and her prime motivation seems to be spite. Spite drives her to surpass others, to tease and mock her enemies, and even just surviving. Do not let her nickname fool you. Shy is not shy by any means even if she usually seems uncomfortable and awkward around people. Though she typically is not super talkative, usually only talking at her own discretion, she speaks in flat, clipped tones and engaging in banter are among her preferred past-times. Getting a rise out of other people for fun is something most people would usually call a "bitch trait," but it's one of the few ways she knows how to get a consistent response out of others. It's the same satisfaction one gets when you have a theory, test it out, and find out you're right. That said, even with her lack of boundaries she is not the type of person who would keep pressing someone's buttons if they are clearly having a mental breakdown or something already (even if she wouldn’t otherwise know how to handle such a situation).

And yes, she comes across as remarkably entitled and lazy. That is what happens with you have rich, intelligent parents who can pay for your education and take you travelling all around the world and into the stars above. She has lived a rather charmed and carefree life, so in that regard she seems to expect a lot from others and is consequently let down when they don’t step up or meet her expectations, which can be unfairly high since she is used to working with fellow rocket scientists. This has developed her somewhat cynical, arrogant, and misplaced perspective on others that leads her to believe that most people are incapable. Yet on the other end of the spectrum, it’s almost as if she underestimates her own intelligence and tries to speak to people casually about high-level astronautical engineering and avionics and acts surprised when they don’t understand these “simple” concepts (it is only rocket science, not quantum mechanics after all). She also does not seem to have learned to treat dire situations with the respect they deserve. She doesn’t freak out or mishandle her emotions, but instead she comes off as too detached from dangerous situations.

Even during her career as a mercenary, when such things started becoming normal to her, you can find her acting casual and without a sense of urgency while in the midst of a firefight and not understanding why you're freaking out so much. She speaks with such a deadpan expression, but also a sarcastic tone of voice – all of the time, mind you – that you're never quite sure whether she's being sarcastic or not and she's too tone-deaf to realize it. On one hand, it would make you angry that she is not taking anything seriously, but on the other, it's nice that there's someone you can rely on to always have a clear head. This trait of hers also makes her seem absurdly brave and ballsy in the face of imminent danger, even when she probably shouldn't be.

This is not necessarily because she is overconfident (though she certainly is), but because she simply does not appear capable of fear or panic. It is as if she cannot properly process those emotions, or at least not in a way that is easy for neurotypical humans to understand. On the contrary, it is more because of her flat affect that she doesn’t transparently communicate these ideas, and though she is still quite brave and resilient, how she internalizes fear differs in that she is wired to view threats as problems in dire need of solving. It is the state of something being wrong, and as an individual concerned with right and wrong answers, she’s an individual who tries extremely hard to fix problems. This can be seen in how she has internalized the Luna incident and her dogged determination in solving that issue. Problems that are too difficult to solve or can’t be solved can result can wear her down and prompt emotional outbursts that seem random, but only because others were not able to see past her face for what brews beneath.

Make no mistake though, because despite her flaws Shy is a prodigy in her field. When she was only twenty years old, she was already working side by side with her parents and some of the greatest scientists and engineers Earth had to offer. She has spent at least half of her life working on and interacting with different forms of computers, robotics, and V.I. and is capable of reading computer code as if it was her native language. Her disinterested attitude seems to be present in all facets of her life except for computing and mechanical and electrical engineering. To her, computers are so much easier to understand than people are (though she would never admit to herself or to anyone that she finds people tricky.) That is because working with computers is like working with math -- there are right and wrong answers, there are rules, and if there's a hiccup in the program's execution, then you know to go back and change a variable. People and subjective concepts like art, morality, and the theory of mind – understanding another person's perspective – have no such rules, so she opts not to think about it altogether. The only exceptions she makes for works of art are pretty colors (a shallow definition of art) and the Blasto movies. Blasto the Jellyfish Stings is a classic and is almost as good as Blasto Saves Christmas.

There are unique distinctions in her interactions with others which are dependent upon the other’s gender. Even as someone who identifies as bisexual, she approaches men with more caution and is usually dismissive of their advances whether it was due to being harassed one too many times, or being repeatedly disappointed in them after a few failed flings in the past. Even if acknowledging that a man might be attractive, she is still quick to judge their character, capability, or doubt their intentions. Even outside of romance, she holds her ground whenever she is in conversation with men as she fully expects to defend herself and her credibility as a scientist. She does not judge people who are in or would otherwise engage in inter-species relationships, though she does not think she would ever partake herself – with, uh, exceptions, that is. She still finds herself with a predilection for asari despite the fact, even as she tries to convince herself otherwise, and she struggles with that cognitive dissonance. It is hard to judge quarians since she has never seen one outside of their suits before. She very much dislikes vorcha, but not for any particular reason (but honestly who really needs one). But none of them will ever compare to snacks. She plans on cashing in on the crewmates’ stashes just in case she runs out of her own.

As one could probably expect by now, Shy has issues with commitment that goes beyond her interests, whims, and fancies. She can work in a team if her history is anything to go by, but she was also surrounded by like-minded researchers who were all pursuing a unified goal. In an outfit of strangers, Shy would very likely be one foot out the door and ready to bail as soon as things start looking bleak, and maybe she’ll be lucky enough to find some other fools to fly with.

_{A B I L I T I E S}

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“Use more gun.”

• Combat Drone
• Defense Drone
• Sentry Turret
• Hacking AI/Sabotage
• Decoy

_{E Q U I P M E N T}

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• Customized omni-tool built from the Nexus model. It is basically deconstructed into two smaller tools with two-way communication. Though individually weaker than a single larger model, it improves their processing efficiency by dividing workloads like how a computer divides tasks between drivers. Their two-way communication means they can both put into work while Shy interfaces with just one of them, or they both work together to complete a task at the same speed if not faster, and break run tasks separately and simultaneously. This can allow for faster execution of tech abilities.
• The utility belt that can carry her tools, and she also carries with her a sort of toolbox that has a bunch of conventional engineering and maintenance supplies and a few crude inventions. An automatically unfolding reclining chair? Of course. A few power cells? Naturally. Some supplies for inventions, and so on.
• A scoped M-77 Paladin pistol in case of emergencies, though she mostly just uses it for the scope.
• She has a light onyx model suit somewhere collecting dust in those cases where she needs environmental protection.

_{S T R E N G T H S & W E A K N E S S E S}

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• A masterful engineer and mechanic specializing in computers, robotics, automation, and virtual and artificial intelligence. However, she is still highly capable in other engineering pursuits by translating her understanding of mechanical science across disciplines. Naturally this makes her a sharp mathematician too, and is capable of solving puzzles and creating plans in seconds.
• Possesses unshakable clarity of mind, capable of staying calm and focused in even the most dire and intense circumstances. Her detached observations of her environment means that she could witness someone’s… extreme misfortune and not be paralyzed by it.
• Lack of combat training; she only started learning how to shoot last year when she first entered the mercenary business, so her aim is far, far away from perfect. She prefers to let her drones do all the work for her.
• Socially inept; Shy cannot build up a rapport with others even if her life depended on it. She is too abrasive and functions too differently to quickly make meaningful connections with others, and her lackadaisical attitude can spark conflict with others.

_{G O A L S & R E G R E T S}

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• She wants to become a great enough engineer to crack the code behind the Luna incident to prove the innocence of her and her family. She also wants to live long enough to see the highly anticipated movie, Blasto 6: Partners in Crime.
• Tied in closely to her goal, Shy also regrets the events at Luna. Not to the extent that she’s willing to give up on the prospect of AI, since she does believe it is possible – the Geth are proof of that – but she regrets not being able to identify or prevent the mistakes that were made that led to the upending of her life. She also regrets not building up the courage to talk to that one asari shawty on the Citadel before she was exiled to the ass end of space.

Shy Jung's Spotify Playlist