App-- CDC

[boneitis]

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: Inky
✖ Contact: AIM or plurk: inkblotmeringue
✖ Are You Over 16: Yes
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: none

CHARACTER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Moreau, Jeff
✖ Canon: Mass Effect, just before the Thessia mission
✖ Character Appearance: Joker at the helm
✖ Character Age: 31
✖ Pick A Number: 314, 998

✖ Canon Setting:

The Mass Effect trilogy takes place in the Milky Way Galaxy between 2183-2185. All technology in this world is based on Element Zero—a fictional material that, when you run an electrical current through it, basically gives physics the finger and produces a field that can affect the mass of an object.

This field is called

THE MASS EFFECT

/title drop

In Mass Effect, Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance soldier extraordinaire, must take his/her ragtag team of misfits across the galaxy in their top-of-the-line, shiny spaceship SSV Normandy in order to save it from the Reapers, a billions-years-old race of sentient organic-synthetic starships that like to just bust in every 50,000 years or so and harvest all organic life. Along the way, s/he must overcome obstacles that include, but are not limited to, terrorist organizations, giant angry space spiders, your squad mates demanding that you listen to all their daddy issues, one of your squad mates being the daddy issue, obstructive bureaucracy, issues involving long-standing socio-politicial conflicts and systematic genocide, and remembering to feed your fish. There are several main groups that Shepard has to interact with while going on his/her space adventure:

THE SYSTEMS ALLIANCE: This is the human military organization that protects human interests throughout the galaxy. It was formed after humanity discovered prothean ruins on Mars and figured out how to work the Sol mass relay, which jumped technology forward a few hundred years and started a massive colonization spree. Eventually, this got the attention of the turians, and a war broke out: the turians called it the Relay 314 incident, while humanity knew it as the First Contact War. After the Council broke up the fighting and humanity joined the galactic community, they mainly interact with it through the Alliance. It's run in a parliamentary-style fashion, but Shepard mostly receives orders through Admiral Hackett throughout the games.

The Alliance is split into two main military branches: marines and navy. Both of these work together so often that it basically seems like they’re one military, because without orbital support the ground troops are useless, but they are still technically two different parts. Ranks go in the usual anglo-military fashion, from private at the bottom to admiral at the top. The Alliance also uses an alphabet-number system to denote career path and skill level; the letter is your career, the number from 1-7 indicates skill. The only mentioned letter vocation is ‘N’, which is Alliance Special Forces. Commander Shepard is an N7, indicating that s/he is at the highest level of his/her specialty.

THE CITADEL COUNCIL: Once Shepard is admitted into the SPECTREs, essentially the galaxy's equivalent of James Bond, s/he is beholden to the Citadel Council. This consists of representatives from the main galactic powerhouses: the turians, the asari, the salarians, and, after the first game, the humans. They govern most of the galactic community from Citadel Station, and therefore pretty much everyone wants a seat on it. It's extremely difficult, however, to get there, and most of the other races are resentful or suspicious of humanity's rapid ascent to power. Everyone who doesn't have a seat has to petition the Council via ambassadors, to greater or lesser effect. They are also notorious during the games for being extremely unhelpful, and most of the time Shepard spends his/her efforts on getting them to believe that there's a problem or working around them to solve the aforementioned problem. Being a SPECTRE agent, however, has its perks; since they answer only to the Council, which is the highest authority, they are licensed to do pretty much whatever they want within Citadel space and can get away with a lot even outside of it.

CERBERUS: Cerberus is a terrorist human-supremacy paramilitary group who serves as one of the main antagonists during the games. It's headed by the Illusive Man and tends to involve itself in anything that he believes will help humanity become a dominant force within the galaxy. In the first game, the group is something more of a side-issue, generally getting itself into trouble with experiments-gone-awry rather than being the main threat. The organization is known for having very few scruples when it comes to getting things done, and is more than willing to get involved with espionage, sabotage, human experimentation, and other unsavory acts to produce results.

In Mass Effect 2, Cerberus returns as a main player in the story, but instead as Shepard's ally; the organization is responsible for bringing Shepard back to life and outfitting him/her with a ship and a crew, in exchange for his/her help in investigating the disappearance of human colonies. By the end of the game, Shepard has cut ties with them again, taking the loyal crew and the ship with him/her. By the time the events of Mass Effect 3 occur, Cerberus has gone from being a force in the shadows to being a major military organization, capable of mounting large assaults on multiple fronts and putting serious research into Reaper tech.

THE REAPERS: These are the main antagonists of the game, and are a group of synthetic-organic starships who come from dark space every 50,000 years to harvest organic life from the galaxy. They are extremely powerful, technologically advanced, and highly intelligent, and are outfitted with a variety of tech to make them nearly unstoppable forces. Reaper capital ships are several kilometers long and have main cannons powerful enough to destroy a dreadnought-class ship in a single strike and can carry large numbers of ground troops. By implanting tech into corpses using tall spikes called Dragon's Teeth, they can create ground forces that are essentially cyborg zombies from the bodies of whatever civilization they're attacking, and living organics that remain in their presence too long, either by choice or by force, can be indoctrinated by a frequency they emit. Indoctrinated people become loyal to the Reapers and will obey them, though the more indoctrinated they become, the less autonomy and intelligence they exhibit. Useful sleeper agents have to be the right amount of indoctrinated and independent, but the Reapers have had billions of years to perfect this ability. By the beginning of ME3, the Reapers have invaded the galaxy and have attacked Earth, forcing Shepard to leave it in order to acquire enough allies and resources to retake the planet.

Character History: Jeff 'Joker' Moreau on the Mass Effect Wiki

PERSONALITY:

Jeff Moreau was born with moderate-to-severe Vrolik’s syndrome, also known as osteogenesis imperfecta, which has left many of the large bones in his body brittle and easily broken due to improperly formed collagen. For most of his life, he has had difficulty getting around, and had to rely on braces and crutches, as there is no effective cure for his disease. Because of this, he’d been judged for things he can’t do—running, lifting, shooting a pistol without cracking his wrist—rather than the things he can. Since he was a kid, he’d been overlooked and disregarded in favor of the more able-bodied.

There was one thing that he loved, though—ships. His mother was a civilian contractor on the Arcturus station, so Jeff grew up in a place where spacecraft was common. He was fascinated by them—both because they were damn cool, and because a ship’s pilot didn’t need their legs to fly. The moment that he was old enough to, Jeff signed up for the Alliance Navy to train to become a pilot.

It wasn’t easy getting through flight school—he got more than his share of remarks and shit for being the kid with the creaky legs and the crutches. But the more shit he got for it, the more determined he was to prove them all wrong, to show them all that having this disease didn’t mean that he couldn’t fly and didn’t mean that he couldn’t be a better damn pilot than all the rest of them combined. That was the reason that one of his instructors gave him the nickname ‘Joker’—because he was so serious about his training, working his ass off day in and day out, that he never cracked a smile. He learned damn well that if he wanted to succeed, he had to be the best pilot that ever went through those doors—so he was grim as hell all throughout his training, never showing weakness. At graduation, though, when he was top of his class and could out-fly even his instructors, Joker was damn well smiling. Coming out top of his class didn’t get rid of that chip on his shoulder, though, and won’t hesitate to make it very clear that his condition doesn’t affect his abilities as a pilot, nor has it stopped him from becoming one of—if not the most—skilled pilots in the fleet. One of the few ways to get on his bad side quickly is to insinuate that his physical state will somehow impair him in doing his duties.

Joker has lightened up a little since his flight school days, though, and often will make wisecracks and snarky comments from the helm, especially about the people that Commander Shepard brings aboard. He does take his job seriously, though—when push comes to shove and things get dangerous, the jokes stop and Jeff gets the job done, no matter how impossible it may seem.

Aside from being just his sense of humor, the snark is also something of a defense mechanism—after having enough people try to put him down, he’s learned to use his sharp tongue as a way to keep people at a distance. It’s that chip on his shoulder at work; he’s always had something to prove, so he always figures that he’s going to have to keep proving himself. His first assumption when Shepard first talked to him in Mass Effect was that s/he’d read his file and was trying to figure out if he was really a good pilot or if he’d just gotten the position on charity because of his disease. Joker gets defensive easily and won’t hesitate to react sharply when he feels threatened or questioned; it’s not a good way to make friends, but making friends hadn’t been high on his list of priorities when there had been a lot of people waiting for any opportunity to remove him from his position. His record has a lot of complaints in it about his attitude, but it has a lot of commendations for his incredible job performance—most of them placed by the same CO.

Despite that rocky start, he warmed up to Commander Shepard throughout their mission—Joker keeps a friendly sort of repartee going between himself and his superior, and obviously respects the commander greatly. He’ll follow Shepard to hell and back, and, between going after the geth, the Collectors, Cerberus, and even Reapers, probably has done just that. His loyalty towards Shepard is so apparent that Anderson, the admiral leading the resistance on Earth, tells him to make sure that he takes care of him/her, and he does his best to make good on that promise. Getting on Joker’s good side isn’t an easy thing, but once you’re there, he’s a damn good friend to have. He won’t always be too easy to get along with, but he’s loyal to a fault and will always have your back.

And speaking of ‘not easy to get along with’, Joker’s also a bit of a control freak; he’s big on always being in control of a situation and he doesn’t much like it when people start invading his territory. It’s one of the reasons that he was so heavily against EDI being a part of the ship at the beginning of ME2—not only was she a potentially dangerous AI, but she was a potentially dangerous AI who was taking over part of his job. He doesn’t like it when people try to take responsibilities from him or try to ‘help him out’, even if their intentions are genuinely good, since he views it as them thinking he isn’t capable of handling those tasks; he’s very independent and wants to do things his own way or not at all. He spent his whole damn life trying to prove that, no, he’s fine and he can take care of himself and be an awesome pilot, so mind your own damn business and let him get his job done.


Character Powers & Skills: Joker has no supernatural or otherwise special abilities; he's a normal human. Everything special about him comes from hard work.

SKILLSET:
Piloting: This is the only skill that Joker has that might border on the supernatural-- most people don't dispute the fact that he's pretty much the best pilot in the galaxy, and he can do things with a frigate that most pilots couldn't do in a fighter. He's so good that he can get away with some amount of insubordination and rule-breaking-- his beard is definitely not within regulations-- because he knows his value as a pilot is worth a lot more to the Alliance than his CO's feelings about professional courtesy.

Tech: Joker is fairly proficient with tech and programming, being that he was in charge of a highly advanced warship and needed to know how its systems worked. He can hack to a limited extent-- it's not his specialty-- and can fix, troubleshoot, and modify programs. Once again, it's not his specialty, but it's something that was needed as part of his main job. He also ran the communication systems and is good at processing and distributing data.

Firearms/Combat: Being an Alliance soldier, albeit flight crew, meant that Joker was required to learn basic combat skills. He knows how to shoot a gun and, on occasion, does so, though he greatly prefers to be in the pilot's chair. He is not a marine, however, so his combat skills are limited and though he's been in a few shootouts before, he's never been sent into active combat.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
First Person POV: Joker's Test Drive threads
Third Person POV:

Ever since Shepard had gotten reinstated and the Reapers had busted into the galaxy like the worst gatecrashers ever, Joker hadn't exactly had a whole lot of downtime. There was an entire galaxy that needed its head pulled out of its ass, and only one of Shepard to go around; they'd barely had time to come up for air in the past few weeks, and it was looking like just the start of a very long war.

Still, it was only a matter of time before Shepard had to stop back at the Citadel-- something involving Aria and mercenary gangs, and Joker had stopped listening at that point because that kind of shit was way above his pay grade-- so it was impromptu shore leave time for anyone who didn't get paid to follow Shepard around and get shot at. Joker had the cushy job that involved exactly zero getting shot at while not behind the Normandy's heavy-duty shielding, so he was golden in that regard.

And while he might've liked to have taken this time to check over the ship's systems, maybe run a few diagnostics, he had been all but ordered to get his crippled ass out of the helm. Which was, a.) rude, and b.) totally uncalled for. But either way, a direct order was a direct order, so here he was: sitting at one of the tables by a cafe on the Praesidium, looking at... the sights or something. It was pretty, he guessed, and everyone was walking around like there wasn't a war going on, which mostly pissed him off.

"Flight Lieutenant Moreau?"

He hadn't noticed that someone had walked up behind him until they spoke, and he twisted in his seat to get a look at them. One glance told him most of what he needed to know; formal Alliance uniform, standard-issue cropped hair, clean shaven, datapad in hand. Someone from the administrative side of things.

"Yeah?" he said, and after a second or two the reasons that an Alliance official would be tracking him down started to pop into his head-- someone was dead, something had been attacked, Shepard had gotten into a firefight in some classy side of town.

"I'm here to inform you," the official said, "that you've been reassigned. The details that can be disclosed to you at this time are on this datapad." He held it out, and Joker all but snatched it out of his hand to get a look at it.

"What do you mean, I'm being reassigned?" he started scrolling through the information; blah blah, standard Alliance bullshit, blah blah. "This doesn't even tell me anything. It's just where I'm supposed to go to get my orders. How am I-- Hackett authorized this? Are you kidding me?"

"I don't make the orders," the official said with a shrug. "I just get them where they need to be. By the way, I'm going to need a confirmation that you've received and accepted."

They couldn't take him off of the Normandy. Aside from the fact that she was his ship and he'd be damned if they stuck some asshole hotshot flyboy up at her helm, that was going to be a serious security risk for EDI, because valuable crewmate and otherwise awesome person aside, she was still an illegal AI. Not even to mention that he was the best damn pilot in the galaxy, and Shepard needed him in that chair.

"Let me see your credentials," he said, ignoring the annoyed look on the official's face. "I want to know who I'm talking to."

The annoyed look intensified, but he pulled up his Alliance authorization on his omnitool for Joker to see. He scanned it, looking for-- he didn't know what, exactly. Anything to be out of place, anything that might make him question that this is authentic. But who would have the balls to fake an Alliance ID and reassignment paperwork and official Alliance seals just to get him to a different post? Hell, even if it was legit, once Shepard heard about it, she'd just use SPECTRE authority to get him back on the ship. Or, at least, she'd damn well better abuse her power to get him back.

"Happy now?" the official asked, closing down his omnitool. "Look, I just need you to sign here, okay?"

There was a box at the bottom of the document, waiting for a signature. Joker grimaced but... hell, this guy was just doing his job. They'd get this sorted out later, once Shepard was back and could yell whoever was responsible into submission.

And a direct order was a direct order. He wasn't going to risk getting court-martialed for this.

"Yeah, fine." He signed in the box, and an automatic script sent a copy of it back to the official's omnitool. "There."

And the rest, as they say, was history.

CHARACTER ITEMS.
Pick a Team: Green -- This would be my first choice for Joker. I understand that this doesn't seem like the most obvious choice for him, but I'd like to take him out of his comfort zone and put him in something that will really test his resourcefulness and adaptability. Being able to see missions from the other side, since he's used to the support side of things, and in immediate physical danger will be a big change of pace for him and an opportunity for him to develop new skills.

Orange -- This would be my second choice for him, and would be the more obvious choice for his skillsets. Joker is generally a noncombatant and has spent most of his military career in a support-type role, so he would fit right in with this team.

Regardless of which team he ends up on, I'd like for his initial medical screening to partially fix his Vrolik's syndrome so that he can fully participate in missions; preferably, so that the physiological symptoms are fixed and he only needs a monthly nanite injection to manage his condition.


✖ Reason for Joining the CDC: Joker technically has no homeworld, since he was born on Arcturus Station (destroyed at the beginning of ME3) and not actually on Earth. He does, however, have his only remaining family on a small colony called Tiptree, which he would be very interested in protecting. This isn't the first time that he's worked with a questionable organization, either, since he joined Cerberus back during ME2, and keeping his family safe is arguably a better justification than the one he had for joining up with the terrorist group. While the idea of blowing up planets isn't exactly one that he relishes, when given the choice between having the people he cares about get blown up or have to do some planet-busting, he'll take the planet-busting nine times out of ten.
✖ Mission Freebie: The SSV Normandy, because his ship is his baby.
Personal Item or Weapon: A standard, military-grade omni-tool. Omni-tools function as computers, communication devices, and micro-fabricators.

Standard functions:
Flashlight
Scanner
Item repair
Medi-gel dispensing
Programming/hacking
Video/audio communication
Object manufacturing
Games
Military functions:
Melee weapon - omni-blade

If possible, I would also like for Joker to come with three (3) medi-gel units. Each unit is useable once and contains a mixture of pain-killers and coagulation agents and is capable of sealing wounds until broken up by an ultrasound. Medi-gel is used as an emergency treatment by paramedics and military personnel and can generally patch up any non-fatal injury. Multiple units may be required for particularly large or debilitating injuries.

Character Inventory:

One standard-issue Alliance uniform
One SR-2 hat, navy and gold
One set of standard-issue Alliance dog tags