Jack [subject zero] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fuckcerberus) wrote2012-12-03 04:56 am
fuckcerberus) wrote2012-12-03 04:56 am
Entry tags:
+ application {ataraxion}
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Trace
OOC Journal:enables
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope.
Email + IM: untraceably at gmail, amxire on aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Aidan Waite (theheretic)
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Jack (or 'Subject Zero')
Canon: Mass Effect
Original or Alternate Universe: Original.
Canon Point: Just before the end of Mass Effect 3.
Number: 165
Setting: Here's the Codex, which has info on most of the races, worlds, and technology.
History: (Complete with occasional wiki links for better explanation.)
Jack was born in 2161, 24 years before the events of the game. She doesn't remember her birthplace, and if it's on any official records, she hasn't seen them. Things don't get interesting for another four years, anyway. In 2165, she's abducted from Eden Prime by Cerberus Operatives. Why? Because of her newly-discovered potential for biotics (blue badass matter-warping abilities, we'll get to that later), caused by being exposed to element zero in utero. Her mother, however, was told that she died from complications with the element zero exposure, a lie crafted to keep the abduction under wraps.
Over the next couple of years, Jack became pretty much the star experiment in Cerberus's Teltin facility on Pragia. (Which isn't as great as it sounds, trust me.) They were trying to increase the biotic potential in humans (asari do it better, as a general rule), and they'd do whatever it took to achieve that. Jack went from Jennifer (her birth name) to Subject Zero, and she was treated both the best and the worst. On the plus side, she only received the successful biotic enhancements--there were dozens more biotic kids in that facility, but they were basically lab rats and guinea pigs, given untested enhancements one after the other to make sure the enhancements were fit for Subject Zero. Many died. Too many. Biotics are incredibly dangerous to tamper with. So in that sense, she was fortunate. Too many lived incredibly short lives in that facility, whereas they were careful not to give her anything that proved lethal in the past. That right there, though, was the extent to which 'fortunate' had anything to do with it. They tortured her (physically and mentally) pretty regularly, to test how things like stress, pain, suffering, misery, et cetera affected her biotics.
The older she got, though, the more dangerous the situation became. "Turns out, mess with someone's head enough, you can turn a scared little kid into an all-powerful bitch." She says that to Shepard in Mass Effect 2, and boy is it ever true. As she got older, her fear of her captors turned quickly to hatred, culminating in an incident where she killed one of the staff. Biotically threw them against a wall, easy as pie. They were more careful with her after that.
The other students, naturally, quickly grew to hate her despite most of them not even knowing who she was or what she looked like. They just knew this 'subject zero' was the reason they all were suffering and dying, and that's enough to make you hate anyone, really. On the rare occasion she got to see any of the other students (once she was old enough, anyway), it was when she was pitted against them, arena-style. The reasons for this were twofold. One, as another way to monitor her, to test her. And two, they injected her with narcotics during the fight so she associated killing with euphoria, and just as planned, those battles only served to solidify her love for killing as a whole.
Then one fateful day, a long while down the line, the children decided they weren't going to die today. So they mutinied, used their biotic powers to riot, and in the resulting chaos, Subject Zero was freed. Freed, and unstoppable. What happened then is unclear on all fronts. She says the entire rest of the facility teamed up to try to take her down, the staff and the kids and everyone, so she had to kill them all. According to evidence found in Teltin later, however, it was just as likely that the other kids either tried to kill her for some sort of twisted revenge for all of their pain and suffering or tried to get as close to her as possible and hope the staff's orders not to hurt Subject Zero would protect them. Either way, she had so much pent up rage by this point that her release more or less flipped a switch. She killed almost every single person in the entire facility, then hijacked a shuttle she didn't know how to drive and flew off into a neighboring system, where she was picked up by another ship. (True to her life so far, the crew skipped straight past 'let's help her!' to 'hey, let's use her for sex and then sell her as a slave!'
(As a note, Cerberus refused to acknowledge that the experiments were even endorsed by them. The Cerberus leader himself tried to say the Teltin facility had "gone rogue" and done their own thing, and that the brutality was that facility's staff rather than Cerberus as a whole. Jack calls bullshit.)
That was when she took the name 'Jack', because never again was she going to be called 'Subject Zero', as far as she was concerned. (Little did she know, fff.) And, as you'd expect, her life was pretty much a trail of blood and bodies from then on out. Her exploits over the next couple of years include but aren't limited to:
- gang activity with a few different gangs
- becoming a pirate
- becoming wanted for vandalism on top of everything by crashing a space station into I think it was a hanar planet or moon?
- she was even in a cult at one point, which explains the shaved head she had all through ME2. (Well, it kind of explains it. That's why she shaved it to start with, why she kept it is more a matter of taste.) She grew it back eventually, but... yeah.
At some point she was captured, god knows how, and sent to Purgatory, which is what amounts to a mafia-run prison set up by the merc group called the Blue Suns. (Basically, they store incredibly dangerous prisoners for an annual/monthly/idk fee, and if the fee isn't paid, they release the prisoners back onto the world they were removed from, but at an undisclosed location and without warning. No bueno.) Not only did they manage to capture her, but a few of the guards somehow got it in their heads to take advantage of her just like the crew of the ship that picked her up fresh off of Pragia. Their triumph was very short-lived, because she turned around and killed them all brutally and with no remorse. (Probably with a grin, actually--remember the euphoria?) So the Warden got pissed that she slaughtered his guards and he locked her in cryogenic stasis.
Until Cerberus decided she'd be useful again. This time, to join the crew of one Commander Shepard in her attempt to save the galaxy. So Cerberus bought her freedom, and after an exchange of goods and cash that didn't go quite as planned (Jack broke free and busted everything all to shit, basically), she reluctantly agreed to join Shepard in exchange for access to all of Cerberus's files.
Over the next few days, Shepard basically proceeded to confuse the fuck out of Jack. She actually seemed interested in Jack on a personal level, which is something Jack has never actually experienced before. Most people seemed interested for science or for a means to their end, but Shepard actually legitimately wanted to get to know Jack. That made her incredibly suspicious and even defensive, but combined with the fact that Shepard followed through with her promise to let Jack into the Cerberus files, it was the beginnings of the first almost-trust Jack had experienced in an incredibly long time. So when Jack found the coordinates for the Teltin facility, it was Shepard she told. Asked for help, in fact. She wanted to put a bomb in the center, right in her old cell, and blow that whole fucking place sky-high. Shepard was on board, obviously (who wouldn't be?) so they headed for Pragia.
So she walks Shepard through her old home, or what's left of it anyway. The place is a mess, much like her emotions surrounding it. She tells Shepard everything, even the shit she wasn't sure she'd ever tell anyone. Shepard had earned it, though Jack wasn't quite sure how. They find another former experiment in her old cell. Aresh. Aresh wants to restart the facility, because if it was worth experimenting on kids for it must have been important, in theory. Jack shoots him, as a step to try and sort out everything wrong in her own head. It doesn't work.
In the final mission, Shepard asks Jack, of the squad's three main biotics, to be the one who shields the squad from the onslaught of enemy drones. That fifteen minute walk, holding up the dome over their heads, was the first time Jack had ever used her biotics to the fullest to defend someone else rather than herself. This is a breakthrough of sorts, and largely to blame for at least inspiring the changes you see between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.
And by 'changes' I mean big changes. Appearance-wise, she was wearing like 500% more clothing (yes, that first one is just three straps for a top. #lifechoices)and 1000% more hair. Personality-wise, she'd actually matured a whole lot since Shepard last saw her. She blamed it on Shepard, said she 'rubbed off on her'. As it turns out, sometime after the final mission of ME2, the Alliance military had approached her and offered her a position at Grissom Academy training young biotics. She accepted, and Grissom is where she and Shepard reunited after the Normandy received word of an attack on the Academy. Though Jack was still very much herself (she greeted Shepard with a punch to the face), she'd found in her students the purpose she was always lacking, not to mention the pseudo-family she never had. Together with Shepard and her squad, Jack and her students fought off the Cerberus soldiers, which told her that her students were ready for the front lines after all.
From there, she and her students joined the war effort, fighting as an biotic strike unit and kicking some serious ass. (Though that saddled Jack with a hell of a lot more paperwork than she would've preferred. It's a tribute to how much she'd changed that she didn't just nuke the datapad on sight.) Just before the final battle, Shepard contacts her one last time. Jack lets her know that they're doing good, that the students are still kicking ass, etc. Her canonpoint is sometime directly after that call.
Personality:
overview.
The short version: Have some very accurate tropes.
The long version: Where do I even start? Jack is literally just a whole big bundle of problems strung together by threads of sanity. Mass Effect 3 shows her with quite a few more of those threads, thank god for that. She's gone from unstable and filled with rage to finding her purpose and achieving some sort of stability through it. And sure, she's still a wreck inside of her head, but it's a work in progress instead of a fact of life like it used to be.
outlaw.
From the first she can remember, the people in charge have always wronged her. Hurt her. Fucked with her. In the Teltin facility for the first fifteen-or-so years of her life, she was in isolation and misery because of them. The only time she wasn't miserable was when she was fighting the other students, and that was because the euphoria was drug-induced anyway. Then she escaped, and as it turned out, the real world was ready to fuck her just as hard as the scientists did. The captain of the ship who picked her up abused her and tried to sell her as a slave. Gang leader after gang leader fucked her over. Not to mention the actual authorities, C-Sec and the planetary equivalents. They never got off her case. In the same way that most people grow up learning to avoid the thugs and criminals who'll hurt you and take what's yours, Jack grew into the realization that the so-called 'good guys' would do just that. As such, she learned to have a really skewed view of authority in which the people with power are always the bad guys. Shepard was an exception, which opened her up to the possibility of further exceptions (like Alliance, who gave her the job at Grissom after she helped Shepard), but this is still a hard viewpoint to shake.
rage.
"How long can hate hold a thing together?" I tripped over that question not long ago and it struck me quite how thoroughly that describes Jack. More than any other character I've ever seen, Jack is absolutely fueled by hate. Hate, rage, violence. Blame. Nothing's her fault, see. Everything that's happened in her life so far has either been a choice she doesn't regret or has been something someone else has done to her. Sometimes both. She blames Cerberus for who she is, how she was raised. She blames all of the ship crews and gangs and even just couples or small groups she's encountered for her refusal to trust anyone and even for their own deaths, because they tried to use her. She finds something to blame everyone for, every single person, so she can find a reason to be pissed off at them too. Because rage is the closest things he has to a coping mechanism, to a way to handle when something hurts her, wrongs her, angers her, saddens her, or even makes her uncomfortable. It's pretty much the catch-all reaction, occasionally supplemented by smearing the walls with her transgressors. In her eyes, violent fury is the polar opposite of 'weak', which she loathes being and feels the need to overcompensate for every time it seems like that's a thing that might even remotely be happening.
twisted.
Because let's be real here, even when she's not smearing the walls with the blood of people who've fucked up her life, she's often tempted to kill people anyway. Sometimes, she openly looks for excuses, pushes buttons, goads them into one wrong step so she can kill them and say that one learned their lesson too. It's not even just that she's savage, which in a sense she kind of is. It's because killing is the only time in her life that she's ever felt truly happy. Her captors in the Teltin facility made it so, giving her narcotics to cause euphoria when she killed and zapping her when she hesitated. To this day, she still "gets warm feelings inside" when she kills someone, and has been seen getting twitchy as if experiencing physical discomfort when she almost kills someone but Shepard calls her off. On top of that, she has a long long list of crimes she's so proud of, and when she rattles them off, it sounds like she had entirely too much fun committing them. It's a rush. Getting shot at's a rush, getting chased by the cops is a rush, causing damage and destruction is a rush. Danger itself is a rush, though the feelings she get from killing are significantly more intense, being the lingering affects of what amounts to a lifelong narcotic addiction. But still. it makes her feel powerful and free and she loves it.
unstable.
Jack is a borderline psychopath with an unpredictably violent nature. Even when you're playing the game as Shepard where there's usually a well- and poorly-received answer for everything (paragon and renegade answers, the latter generally being an insufferable dick), you can never tell when you're talking to Jack which options will have her telling you to fuck right off or even threatening your life. Boredom is incredibly dangerous for her--the more time she spends bored, the more time she has to think, and spending quality time with the inside of her head is one of the last things she wants to do. But despite that, her trauma is an integral part of her. She wouldn't have a clue how to function without it. In a sense, she may hunt down trouble or situations she knows will be trauma-inducing all on her own, because despite being terrible, it's familiar. Not comforting, nothing really comforts Jack, but it's something she knows how to handle.
trust.
Oh my god, Jack has so many trust issues. Before Shepard, her ability to trust had been physically and emotionally beaten out of her by every single person she's ever spent more than an hour with. Jack never hid what she was capable of, but maybe she should've, because even after Teltin there wasn't a single person who wanted to do anything but use her. Use her body, use her powers, use her reputation. No, I lied--there was one person. But he up and died for her, so she obviously couldn't trust that asshole to stick around either. Even with Shepard, who was straightforward from the start and came through on her word right off the bat, Jack spent a good five or six major missions and the conversations in between a mix of pissed off and confusion because she just plain couldn't figure out what Shepard wanted from her. (In a male!Shepard playthrough, she assumes he wants sex so she isn't so confused about it--the confusion starts if he says he doesn't, that he wants to get to know her as a person. She's from a female!Shepard verse, but that still says a lot about her outlook on people.)
abrasive.
In every way, Jack is a scarred and war-painted product of her past. Because of how many people have fucked with her, she's become somebody nobody dares to fuck with. In every aspect of her life, this shows through, from her appearance to her attitude. She's absolutely obsessed with being the strongest, the most badass, the most fearsome, the one without any weakness. The one people see and run screaming. She's gotten a new tattoo for every time major shit went down in her life, so the amount of ink she had was directly proportional to how much she fucking hated the entire galaxy. She kept the shaved head after her stint with the cult because she realized how much it did for her image, just one more thing to make people hesitate before they start any shit. And then there's her language, cruder than anyone else on the ship by far. Not to mention the fact that she's not afraid to tell you how much she'd enjoy tearing you apart. Or tell you all about the people who've fucked with her, what they did to her, how bad she made them suffer for it. In a weird way, she's incredibly proud of what she's become, of how she looks and of everything wrong in her head because it's why she's alive and why she's considered the most dangerous biotic in the galaxy.
conflicted.
As certain as I've sounded about all of these points, almost every single thing I've said so far is the dominant half of another of Jack's internal conflict. Because really, she has so many things going wrong inside her at any given time and she has zero healthy methods to express this fact. She feels unbalanced--everything feels unbalanced. She has so many scars she didn't earn and so few that she should've earned but didn't. Her tattoos aren't just a symbol of what she's accomplished... Nobody can touch her long enough to scar her anymore, so the tattoos are the only real substitute. Like, the faces on her arms? Those are fallen comrades, murdered gang 'sisters'. That hurt her worse than any wound, but she walked away without any scars to show for it. Like it had never happened. That drove her nuts. And then there are times when what her life's becoming doesn't mesh with the instincts she has. Like at one point (right here, for reference, because her tone says a lot), Shepard says something that would normally piss her off but it's Shepard and she trusts Shepard. So she says, "I've turned people inside-out for a hell of a lot less. What are you doing?" Almost like 'don't make me do this :C' Not even a threat, really, more like she's obligated to turn Shepard inside-out if she keeps it up, no matter what she wants. She also has a shocking amount of survivor's guilt buried way the fuck down. Guilt over all of the kids who were basically lab rats in the Teltin facility, used only to test the fatality of biotic enhancements before they got to her, and guilt over the one person pre-Shepard who didn't screw her over, but proceeded to sacrifice himself to save her life. On top of that, despite how lost she'd be without trauma of some sort, there's a part of her that desperately wants to get rid of it. It may have been the latent vulnerability sparked by returning to the place where she was scared and isolated as a child, but when she was about to shoot Aresh (who wanted to restart the Teltin facility), she said, "I-... shit. Is this right? Will killing him fix my head?" Almost hopeful-sounding. And then, most conflicted of all, there are times when it really seems like she wants to be the good guy in a situation. But then as soon as she realizes that's what it seems like, when she realizes she's actually being a decent human being, she shuts you out. As if she's scared to even try to be good because she already knows she's unstoppable at being bad.
progress!
Jack's made a shocking amount of progress, since the second game when all of the above was 100% true. It's still who she is on the inside, that's not something a person can change (especially in the span of six or seven months). And really, though protecting Shepard with her biotic shield on the Collector ship was the breakthrough that inspired it (it was the first time she'd ever used her biotics to their fullest to protect someone else's life), being handed a dozen bumbling teenaged biotics was what made a world of difference. All of a sudden, here were a group of kids who looked up to her instead of feared her. Jack had never been looked up to before. Over the next few months, she threw herself into teaching these kids. Into preparing them for the war ahead. Into protecting them, when she needs to. Jack didn't think she could ever care about anyone the way she cares about these kids, and that makes her a very fierce sort of protective. They're her kids, and anyone who fucks with them will regret it. And through these kids, she's found her place. Her purpose. She's matured, because that's what the kids needed. She's lost a lot of her recklessness because it's not just her life on the line anymore. And sure, she's still abrasive as fuck with the mouth of a sailor, but she is the best she could possibly be for these kids. (Think about this: In order to have this position under Alliance observation, she can't have killed anyone recently. Which means she more or less kicked what amounts to the after-effects of a lifelong narcotics addiction cold-turkey just for these kids. She forced herself to stabilize for them. That says so much.) All of the above sections are still true, in essence--if she lost her job and her kids, it's almost guaranteed that she'd revert almost completely. But it's progress. And that's more than anyone but Shepard really expected from her.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
abilities.
⇉ BIOTICS.
I'm always so terrible about explaining biotics, so have a wiki link. But in essence, they're pretty much incredibly versatile blue-tinted matter-adjusting super-ability thing. They're a combination of 1) being exposed to element zero in utero, and 2) an implant at the base of their skull so that the individual can utilize these abilities. Jack is questionably the most powerful biotic in the known galaxy (and if she isn't, she's in the top two), due to the years and years she spent undergoing experiments to enhance her abilities and potential. I've heard it compared to the Force from Star Wars, in that it can push/pull/crunch/flatten/etc. objects and people from up to something like fifty or seventy-five feet off (though it obviously works better up close).
⇉ FIREARMS.
Though she's not nearly as versatile as Shepard is, she can raise all kinds of hell with just a heavy pistol or a shotgun. Her training in these was self-taught and there's nothing even resembling proper technique present, but you won't exactly have time to tell her she's kind of holding her shotgun wrong before she takes your head clean off with it.
⇉ HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT.
Also self-taught. Also lethal. Also pretty questionable re: actual technique. She's no stronger than is plausible for your average human (though god does she pack a punch), but unless you're some sort of superhuman, the odds are pretty good that she's going to kick your ass by way of sheer ruthless tenacity. This is a woman who's had to fight for everything she's ever had, and fight hard. She will take you down.
⇉ SURVIVAL.
Surviving is something she knows how to do, and do well. She has been in more than one 'whatever it takes' situation, believe you me, and she's triumphed through all of them.
⇉ SOMEHOW A CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR.
I'm not sure what tests she had to pass for them to let her anywhere near the young and impressionable, but somehow she did it. And since then, the students she's had have responded incredibly well to her teaching style.
weaknesses.
⇉ HUMAN.
Despite being a biotic, it's like I said--she's no stronger than your average badass human. And though she can usually win a fight through sheer tenacity, her strength alone is nowhere near that of a krogan or turian (different races in their galaxy), or even quite as strong as Vega (a burly member of Shepard's crew).
⇉ IMPULSIVE.
This is definitely a weakness. Even at her best, she's only barely passable at anything resembling strategy, and the only reason she's passable there is because her strategies have to be simple enough for a group of teenagers to understand. Without her kids around, she almost always leaps first and asks questions later, and would prefer to hit walls with bodies long before she sits down to talk anything out.
⇉ PSYCHOTIC.
Because let's face it, her kids were her real link to stability. They were her motivation, her inspiration. Here on the ship without them, especially a ship that feels entirely too much like another experiment out to fuck with her head, the odds of her keeping her level head are slim to none.
Inventory:
⇉ her clothing, one outfit.
⇉ M-22 Eviscerator shotgun + two fresh thermal clips.
⇉ her omni-tool.
Appearance: right here. tattoos all the fuck over, partially-shaved head (with the rest generally tied up), revealing shirt under ahighly-overcompensational studded leather jacket with camo cargo pants. lean but muscular, sharp facial features. I'm so bad at this part, lmao.
Age: 25, at her canonpoint.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
From deep unconsciousness, Jack awakens abruptly and is instantly on high alert. She can't move--both arms and legs jerk outward, a defensive maneuver that only makes it as far as the narrow walls to her sides. It's dark, so much so that she can't tell if her eyes are open or closed, and she's thoroughly encased in what feels like gel, cold and invasive. And above all, she's choking. Something large and unyielding, jammed straight between her teeth and down her throat. She can feel the chill of the gel in her nose as well, and all at once she's not just choking, but suffocating too.
All of that's assessed in an instant. In the next instant, her hands close to fists and she's slamming them into the walls, a choked roar of desperate rage fighting its way up around the tube in her throat to disappear uselessly into the gel. It doesn't even reach her own ears, and she hates that, hates how helpless it makes her feel. The next one's not a roar, but a furious scream, as she shoves her palms into the front wall with all of her strength. There's nothing quite so instinctual and dangerous as a trapped animal, and in this moment, that's what Jack has become.
But all at once, there's a faint click, a vibration in the gel. And then it's leaking, emptying slowly. Not fast enough, nothing's fast enough. In the absence of gel, she can't tell if she's left with oxygen or just an ever-growing suction, but it feels like the latter, dragging a ragged cough out of her throat. Enough of this shit. Enough of this goddamn motherfucking--
Another roar, one she can actually hear, and she's shoving the front wall with the full force of a biotic shove. The front wall flies clean off, clattering across the floor, and though the tube's already retracting from her throat, Jack wastes exactly zero time in jerking it out the rest of the way.
But her legs won't hold her, not without the gel. All at once, she's on her knees on the floor, coughing hard and then letting out a low throaty growl of frustration, as if to conclusively show herself that she's no longer choking. Her eyes dart to the front wall (which, as it turns out, is a door) lying dented on the floor, then back to whatever the hell she fell out of. A stasis pod? That doesn't make any sense.
Unless this is Cerberus.
All of a sudden, Jack doesn't care about the ache in her throat. She doesn't care that she's naked, or that she's still slimy with goo. All she cares about is that Cerberus doesn't see her weak. Not this time.
"Ha ha. Real fucking funny," she calls, her voice just short of a snarl, as she stands up now. Fuck, the kids. If Cerberus has her, they have her whole damn strike squad. Her hands run through her loose strip of hair, slicking it back out of her eyes until she can find some kind of band to hold it, then drop down to her sides as fists that crackle with the blue of barely-restrained biotics. "I know you assholes are listening. If you hurt a single one of them, I'll tear you into more pieces than the fucking salarian could put back together."
Comms Sample: A couple of sample threads right here.
Your Name: Trace
OOC Journal:
enablesUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope.
Email + IM: untraceably at gmail, amxire on aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Aidan Waite (
theheretic)C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Jack (or 'Subject Zero')
Canon: Mass Effect
Original or Alternate Universe: Original.
Canon Point: Just before the end of Mass Effect 3.
Number: 165
Setting: Here's the Codex, which has info on most of the races, worlds, and technology.
History: (Complete with occasional wiki links for better explanation.)
Jack was born in 2161, 24 years before the events of the game. She doesn't remember her birthplace, and if it's on any official records, she hasn't seen them. Things don't get interesting for another four years, anyway. In 2165, she's abducted from Eden Prime by Cerberus Operatives. Why? Because of her newly-discovered potential for biotics (blue badass matter-warping abilities, we'll get to that later), caused by being exposed to element zero in utero. Her mother, however, was told that she died from complications with the element zero exposure, a lie crafted to keep the abduction under wraps.
Over the next couple of years, Jack became pretty much the star experiment in Cerberus's Teltin facility on Pragia. (Which isn't as great as it sounds, trust me.) They were trying to increase the biotic potential in humans (asari do it better, as a general rule), and they'd do whatever it took to achieve that. Jack went from Jennifer (her birth name) to Subject Zero, and she was treated both the best and the worst. On the plus side, she only received the successful biotic enhancements--there were dozens more biotic kids in that facility, but they were basically lab rats and guinea pigs, given untested enhancements one after the other to make sure the enhancements were fit for Subject Zero. Many died. Too many. Biotics are incredibly dangerous to tamper with. So in that sense, she was fortunate. Too many lived incredibly short lives in that facility, whereas they were careful not to give her anything that proved lethal in the past. That right there, though, was the extent to which 'fortunate' had anything to do with it. They tortured her (physically and mentally) pretty regularly, to test how things like stress, pain, suffering, misery, et cetera affected her biotics.
The older she got, though, the more dangerous the situation became. "Turns out, mess with someone's head enough, you can turn a scared little kid into an all-powerful bitch." She says that to Shepard in Mass Effect 2, and boy is it ever true. As she got older, her fear of her captors turned quickly to hatred, culminating in an incident where she killed one of the staff. Biotically threw them against a wall, easy as pie. They were more careful with her after that.
The other students, naturally, quickly grew to hate her despite most of them not even knowing who she was or what she looked like. They just knew this 'subject zero' was the reason they all were suffering and dying, and that's enough to make you hate anyone, really. On the rare occasion she got to see any of the other students (once she was old enough, anyway), it was when she was pitted against them, arena-style. The reasons for this were twofold. One, as another way to monitor her, to test her. And two, they injected her with narcotics during the fight so she associated killing with euphoria, and just as planned, those battles only served to solidify her love for killing as a whole.
Then one fateful day, a long while down the line, the children decided they weren't going to die today. So they mutinied, used their biotic powers to riot, and in the resulting chaos, Subject Zero was freed. Freed, and unstoppable. What happened then is unclear on all fronts. She says the entire rest of the facility teamed up to try to take her down, the staff and the kids and everyone, so she had to kill them all. According to evidence found in Teltin later, however, it was just as likely that the other kids either tried to kill her for some sort of twisted revenge for all of their pain and suffering or tried to get as close to her as possible and hope the staff's orders not to hurt Subject Zero would protect them. Either way, she had so much pent up rage by this point that her release more or less flipped a switch. She killed almost every single person in the entire facility, then hijacked a shuttle she didn't know how to drive and flew off into a neighboring system, where she was picked up by another ship. (True to her life so far, the crew skipped straight past 'let's help her!' to 'hey, let's use her for sex and then sell her as a slave!'
(As a note, Cerberus refused to acknowledge that the experiments were even endorsed by them. The Cerberus leader himself tried to say the Teltin facility had "gone rogue" and done their own thing, and that the brutality was that facility's staff rather than Cerberus as a whole. Jack calls bullshit.)
That was when she took the name 'Jack', because never again was she going to be called 'Subject Zero', as far as she was concerned. (Little did she know, fff.) And, as you'd expect, her life was pretty much a trail of blood and bodies from then on out. Her exploits over the next couple of years include but aren't limited to:
- gang activity with a few different gangs
- becoming a pirate
- becoming wanted for vandalism on top of everything by crashing a space station into I think it was a hanar planet or moon?
- she was even in a cult at one point, which explains the shaved head she had all through ME2. (Well, it kind of explains it. That's why she shaved it to start with, why she kept it is more a matter of taste.) She grew it back eventually, but... yeah.
At some point she was captured, god knows how, and sent to Purgatory, which is what amounts to a mafia-run prison set up by the merc group called the Blue Suns. (Basically, they store incredibly dangerous prisoners for an annual/monthly/idk fee, and if the fee isn't paid, they release the prisoners back onto the world they were removed from, but at an undisclosed location and without warning. No bueno.) Not only did they manage to capture her, but a few of the guards somehow got it in their heads to take advantage of her just like the crew of the ship that picked her up fresh off of Pragia. Their triumph was very short-lived, because she turned around and killed them all brutally and with no remorse. (Probably with a grin, actually--remember the euphoria?) So the Warden got pissed that she slaughtered his guards and he locked her in cryogenic stasis.
Until Cerberus decided she'd be useful again. This time, to join the crew of one Commander Shepard in her attempt to save the galaxy. So Cerberus bought her freedom, and after an exchange of goods and cash that didn't go quite as planned (Jack broke free and busted everything all to shit, basically), she reluctantly agreed to join Shepard in exchange for access to all of Cerberus's files.
Over the next few days, Shepard basically proceeded to confuse the fuck out of Jack. She actually seemed interested in Jack on a personal level, which is something Jack has never actually experienced before. Most people seemed interested for science or for a means to their end, but Shepard actually legitimately wanted to get to know Jack. That made her incredibly suspicious and even defensive, but combined with the fact that Shepard followed through with her promise to let Jack into the Cerberus files, it was the beginnings of the first almost-trust Jack had experienced in an incredibly long time. So when Jack found the coordinates for the Teltin facility, it was Shepard she told. Asked for help, in fact. She wanted to put a bomb in the center, right in her old cell, and blow that whole fucking place sky-high. Shepard was on board, obviously (who wouldn't be?) so they headed for Pragia.
So she walks Shepard through her old home, or what's left of it anyway. The place is a mess, much like her emotions surrounding it. She tells Shepard everything, even the shit she wasn't sure she'd ever tell anyone. Shepard had earned it, though Jack wasn't quite sure how. They find another former experiment in her old cell. Aresh. Aresh wants to restart the facility, because if it was worth experimenting on kids for it must have been important, in theory. Jack shoots him, as a step to try and sort out everything wrong in her own head. It doesn't work.
In the final mission, Shepard asks Jack, of the squad's three main biotics, to be the one who shields the squad from the onslaught of enemy drones. That fifteen minute walk, holding up the dome over their heads, was the first time Jack had ever used her biotics to the fullest to defend someone else rather than herself. This is a breakthrough of sorts, and largely to blame for at least inspiring the changes you see between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.
And by 'changes' I mean big changes. Appearance-wise, she was wearing like 500% more clothing (yes, that first one is just three straps for a top. #lifechoices)and 1000% more hair. Personality-wise, she'd actually matured a whole lot since Shepard last saw her. She blamed it on Shepard, said she 'rubbed off on her'. As it turns out, sometime after the final mission of ME2, the Alliance military had approached her and offered her a position at Grissom Academy training young biotics. She accepted, and Grissom is where she and Shepard reunited after the Normandy received word of an attack on the Academy. Though Jack was still very much herself (she greeted Shepard with a punch to the face), she'd found in her students the purpose she was always lacking, not to mention the pseudo-family she never had. Together with Shepard and her squad, Jack and her students fought off the Cerberus soldiers, which told her that her students were ready for the front lines after all.
From there, she and her students joined the war effort, fighting as an biotic strike unit and kicking some serious ass. (Though that saddled Jack with a hell of a lot more paperwork than she would've preferred. It's a tribute to how much she'd changed that she didn't just nuke the datapad on sight.) Just before the final battle, Shepard contacts her one last time. Jack lets her know that they're doing good, that the students are still kicking ass, etc. Her canonpoint is sometime directly after that call.
Personality:
overview.
The short version: Have some very accurate tropes.
The long version: Where do I even start? Jack is literally just a whole big bundle of problems strung together by threads of sanity. Mass Effect 3 shows her with quite a few more of those threads, thank god for that. She's gone from unstable and filled with rage to finding her purpose and achieving some sort of stability through it. And sure, she's still a wreck inside of her head, but it's a work in progress instead of a fact of life like it used to be.
outlaw.
From the first she can remember, the people in charge have always wronged her. Hurt her. Fucked with her. In the Teltin facility for the first fifteen-or-so years of her life, she was in isolation and misery because of them. The only time she wasn't miserable was when she was fighting the other students, and that was because the euphoria was drug-induced anyway. Then she escaped, and as it turned out, the real world was ready to fuck her just as hard as the scientists did. The captain of the ship who picked her up abused her and tried to sell her as a slave. Gang leader after gang leader fucked her over. Not to mention the actual authorities, C-Sec and the planetary equivalents. They never got off her case. In the same way that most people grow up learning to avoid the thugs and criminals who'll hurt you and take what's yours, Jack grew into the realization that the so-called 'good guys' would do just that. As such, she learned to have a really skewed view of authority in which the people with power are always the bad guys. Shepard was an exception, which opened her up to the possibility of further exceptions (like Alliance, who gave her the job at Grissom after she helped Shepard), but this is still a hard viewpoint to shake.
rage.
"How long can hate hold a thing together?" I tripped over that question not long ago and it struck me quite how thoroughly that describes Jack. More than any other character I've ever seen, Jack is absolutely fueled by hate. Hate, rage, violence. Blame. Nothing's her fault, see. Everything that's happened in her life so far has either been a choice she doesn't regret or has been something someone else has done to her. Sometimes both. She blames Cerberus for who she is, how she was raised. She blames all of the ship crews and gangs and even just couples or small groups she's encountered for her refusal to trust anyone and even for their own deaths, because they tried to use her. She finds something to blame everyone for, every single person, so she can find a reason to be pissed off at them too. Because rage is the closest things he has to a coping mechanism, to a way to handle when something hurts her, wrongs her, angers her, saddens her, or even makes her uncomfortable. It's pretty much the catch-all reaction, occasionally supplemented by smearing the walls with her transgressors. In her eyes, violent fury is the polar opposite of 'weak', which she loathes being and feels the need to overcompensate for every time it seems like that's a thing that might even remotely be happening.
twisted.
Because let's be real here, even when she's not smearing the walls with the blood of people who've fucked up her life, she's often tempted to kill people anyway. Sometimes, she openly looks for excuses, pushes buttons, goads them into one wrong step so she can kill them and say that one learned their lesson too. It's not even just that she's savage, which in a sense she kind of is. It's because killing is the only time in her life that she's ever felt truly happy. Her captors in the Teltin facility made it so, giving her narcotics to cause euphoria when she killed and zapping her when she hesitated. To this day, she still "gets warm feelings inside" when she kills someone, and has been seen getting twitchy as if experiencing physical discomfort when she almost kills someone but Shepard calls her off. On top of that, she has a long long list of crimes she's so proud of, and when she rattles them off, it sounds like she had entirely too much fun committing them. It's a rush. Getting shot at's a rush, getting chased by the cops is a rush, causing damage and destruction is a rush. Danger itself is a rush, though the feelings she get from killing are significantly more intense, being the lingering affects of what amounts to a lifelong narcotic addiction. But still. it makes her feel powerful and free and she loves it.
unstable.
Jack is a borderline psychopath with an unpredictably violent nature. Even when you're playing the game as Shepard where there's usually a well- and poorly-received answer for everything (paragon and renegade answers, the latter generally being an insufferable dick), you can never tell when you're talking to Jack which options will have her telling you to fuck right off or even threatening your life. Boredom is incredibly dangerous for her--the more time she spends bored, the more time she has to think, and spending quality time with the inside of her head is one of the last things she wants to do. But despite that, her trauma is an integral part of her. She wouldn't have a clue how to function without it. In a sense, she may hunt down trouble or situations she knows will be trauma-inducing all on her own, because despite being terrible, it's familiar. Not comforting, nothing really comforts Jack, but it's something she knows how to handle.
trust.
Oh my god, Jack has so many trust issues. Before Shepard, her ability to trust had been physically and emotionally beaten out of her by every single person she's ever spent more than an hour with. Jack never hid what she was capable of, but maybe she should've, because even after Teltin there wasn't a single person who wanted to do anything but use her. Use her body, use her powers, use her reputation. No, I lied--there was one person. But he up and died for her, so she obviously couldn't trust that asshole to stick around either. Even with Shepard, who was straightforward from the start and came through on her word right off the bat, Jack spent a good five or six major missions and the conversations in between a mix of pissed off and confusion because she just plain couldn't figure out what Shepard wanted from her. (In a male!Shepard playthrough, she assumes he wants sex so she isn't so confused about it--the confusion starts if he says he doesn't, that he wants to get to know her as a person. She's from a female!Shepard verse, but that still says a lot about her outlook on people.)
abrasive.
In every way, Jack is a scarred and war-painted product of her past. Because of how many people have fucked with her, she's become somebody nobody dares to fuck with. In every aspect of her life, this shows through, from her appearance to her attitude. She's absolutely obsessed with being the strongest, the most badass, the most fearsome, the one without any weakness. The one people see and run screaming. She's gotten a new tattoo for every time major shit went down in her life, so the amount of ink she had was directly proportional to how much she fucking hated the entire galaxy. She kept the shaved head after her stint with the cult because she realized how much it did for her image, just one more thing to make people hesitate before they start any shit. And then there's her language, cruder than anyone else on the ship by far. Not to mention the fact that she's not afraid to tell you how much she'd enjoy tearing you apart. Or tell you all about the people who've fucked with her, what they did to her, how bad she made them suffer for it. In a weird way, she's incredibly proud of what she's become, of how she looks and of everything wrong in her head because it's why she's alive and why she's considered the most dangerous biotic in the galaxy.
conflicted.
As certain as I've sounded about all of these points, almost every single thing I've said so far is the dominant half of another of Jack's internal conflict. Because really, she has so many things going wrong inside her at any given time and she has zero healthy methods to express this fact. She feels unbalanced--everything feels unbalanced. She has so many scars she didn't earn and so few that she should've earned but didn't. Her tattoos aren't just a symbol of what she's accomplished... Nobody can touch her long enough to scar her anymore, so the tattoos are the only real substitute. Like, the faces on her arms? Those are fallen comrades, murdered gang 'sisters'. That hurt her worse than any wound, but she walked away without any scars to show for it. Like it had never happened. That drove her nuts. And then there are times when what her life's becoming doesn't mesh with the instincts she has. Like at one point (right here, for reference, because her tone says a lot), Shepard says something that would normally piss her off but it's Shepard and she trusts Shepard. So she says, "I've turned people inside-out for a hell of a lot less. What are you doing?" Almost like 'don't make me do this :C' Not even a threat, really, more like she's obligated to turn Shepard inside-out if she keeps it up, no matter what she wants. She also has a shocking amount of survivor's guilt buried way the fuck down. Guilt over all of the kids who were basically lab rats in the Teltin facility, used only to test the fatality of biotic enhancements before they got to her, and guilt over the one person pre-Shepard who didn't screw her over, but proceeded to sacrifice himself to save her life. On top of that, despite how lost she'd be without trauma of some sort, there's a part of her that desperately wants to get rid of it. It may have been the latent vulnerability sparked by returning to the place where she was scared and isolated as a child, but when she was about to shoot Aresh (who wanted to restart the Teltin facility), she said, "I-... shit. Is this right? Will killing him fix my head?" Almost hopeful-sounding. And then, most conflicted of all, there are times when it really seems like she wants to be the good guy in a situation. But then as soon as she realizes that's what it seems like, when she realizes she's actually being a decent human being, she shuts you out. As if she's scared to even try to be good because she already knows she's unstoppable at being bad.
progress!
Jack's made a shocking amount of progress, since the second game when all of the above was 100% true. It's still who she is on the inside, that's not something a person can change (especially in the span of six or seven months). And really, though protecting Shepard with her biotic shield on the Collector ship was the breakthrough that inspired it (it was the first time she'd ever used her biotics to their fullest to protect someone else's life), being handed a dozen bumbling teenaged biotics was what made a world of difference. All of a sudden, here were a group of kids who looked up to her instead of feared her. Jack had never been looked up to before. Over the next few months, she threw herself into teaching these kids. Into preparing them for the war ahead. Into protecting them, when she needs to. Jack didn't think she could ever care about anyone the way she cares about these kids, and that makes her a very fierce sort of protective. They're her kids, and anyone who fucks with them will regret it. And through these kids, she's found her place. Her purpose. She's matured, because that's what the kids needed. She's lost a lot of her recklessness because it's not just her life on the line anymore. And sure, she's still abrasive as fuck with the mouth of a sailor, but she is the best she could possibly be for these kids. (Think about this: In order to have this position under Alliance observation, she can't have killed anyone recently. Which means she more or less kicked what amounts to the after-effects of a lifelong narcotics addiction cold-turkey just for these kids. She forced herself to stabilize for them. That says so much.) All of the above sections are still true, in essence--if she lost her job and her kids, it's almost guaranteed that she'd revert almost completely. But it's progress. And that's more than anyone but Shepard really expected from her.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
abilities.
⇉ BIOTICS.
I'm always so terrible about explaining biotics, so have a wiki link. But in essence, they're pretty much incredibly versatile blue-tinted matter-adjusting super-ability thing. They're a combination of 1) being exposed to element zero in utero, and 2) an implant at the base of their skull so that the individual can utilize these abilities. Jack is questionably the most powerful biotic in the known galaxy (and if she isn't, she's in the top two), due to the years and years she spent undergoing experiments to enhance her abilities and potential. I've heard it compared to the Force from Star Wars, in that it can push/pull/crunch/flatten/etc. objects and people from up to something like fifty or seventy-five feet off (though it obviously works better up close).
⇉ FIREARMS.
Though she's not nearly as versatile as Shepard is, she can raise all kinds of hell with just a heavy pistol or a shotgun. Her training in these was self-taught and there's nothing even resembling proper technique present, but you won't exactly have time to tell her she's kind of holding her shotgun wrong before she takes your head clean off with it.
⇉ HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT.
Also self-taught. Also lethal. Also pretty questionable re: actual technique. She's no stronger than is plausible for your average human (though god does she pack a punch), but unless you're some sort of superhuman, the odds are pretty good that she's going to kick your ass by way of sheer ruthless tenacity. This is a woman who's had to fight for everything she's ever had, and fight hard. She will take you down.
⇉ SURVIVAL.
Surviving is something she knows how to do, and do well. She has been in more than one 'whatever it takes' situation, believe you me, and she's triumphed through all of them.
⇉ SOMEHOW A CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR.
I'm not sure what tests she had to pass for them to let her anywhere near the young and impressionable, but somehow she did it. And since then, the students she's had have responded incredibly well to her teaching style.
weaknesses.
⇉ HUMAN.
Despite being a biotic, it's like I said--she's no stronger than your average badass human. And though she can usually win a fight through sheer tenacity, her strength alone is nowhere near that of a krogan or turian (different races in their galaxy), or even quite as strong as Vega (a burly member of Shepard's crew).
⇉ IMPULSIVE.
This is definitely a weakness. Even at her best, she's only barely passable at anything resembling strategy, and the only reason she's passable there is because her strategies have to be simple enough for a group of teenagers to understand. Without her kids around, she almost always leaps first and asks questions later, and would prefer to hit walls with bodies long before she sits down to talk anything out.
⇉ PSYCHOTIC.
Because let's face it, her kids were her real link to stability. They were her motivation, her inspiration. Here on the ship without them, especially a ship that feels entirely too much like another experiment out to fuck with her head, the odds of her keeping her level head are slim to none.
Inventory:
⇉ her clothing, one outfit.
⇉ M-22 Eviscerator shotgun + two fresh thermal clips.
⇉ her omni-tool.
Appearance: right here. tattoos all the fuck over, partially-shaved head (with the rest generally tied up), revealing shirt under a
Age: 25, at her canonpoint.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
From deep unconsciousness, Jack awakens abruptly and is instantly on high alert. She can't move--both arms and legs jerk outward, a defensive maneuver that only makes it as far as the narrow walls to her sides. It's dark, so much so that she can't tell if her eyes are open or closed, and she's thoroughly encased in what feels like gel, cold and invasive. And above all, she's choking. Something large and unyielding, jammed straight between her teeth and down her throat. She can feel the chill of the gel in her nose as well, and all at once she's not just choking, but suffocating too.
All of that's assessed in an instant. In the next instant, her hands close to fists and she's slamming them into the walls, a choked roar of desperate rage fighting its way up around the tube in her throat to disappear uselessly into the gel. It doesn't even reach her own ears, and she hates that, hates how helpless it makes her feel. The next one's not a roar, but a furious scream, as she shoves her palms into the front wall with all of her strength. There's nothing quite so instinctual and dangerous as a trapped animal, and in this moment, that's what Jack has become.
But all at once, there's a faint click, a vibration in the gel. And then it's leaking, emptying slowly. Not fast enough, nothing's fast enough. In the absence of gel, she can't tell if she's left with oxygen or just an ever-growing suction, but it feels like the latter, dragging a ragged cough out of her throat. Enough of this shit. Enough of this goddamn motherfucking--
Another roar, one she can actually hear, and she's shoving the front wall with the full force of a biotic shove. The front wall flies clean off, clattering across the floor, and though the tube's already retracting from her throat, Jack wastes exactly zero time in jerking it out the rest of the way.
But her legs won't hold her, not without the gel. All at once, she's on her knees on the floor, coughing hard and then letting out a low throaty growl of frustration, as if to conclusively show herself that she's no longer choking. Her eyes dart to the front wall (which, as it turns out, is a door) lying dented on the floor, then back to whatever the hell she fell out of. A stasis pod? That doesn't make any sense.
Unless this is Cerberus.
All of a sudden, Jack doesn't care about the ache in her throat. She doesn't care that she's naked, or that she's still slimy with goo. All she cares about is that Cerberus doesn't see her weak. Not this time.
"Ha ha. Real fucking funny," she calls, her voice just short of a snarl, as she stands up now. Fuck, the kids. If Cerberus has her, they have her whole damn strike squad. Her hands run through her loose strip of hair, slicking it back out of her eyes until she can find some kind of band to hold it, then drop down to her sides as fists that crackle with the blue of barely-restrained biotics. "I know you assholes are listening. If you hurt a single one of them, I'll tear you into more pieces than the fucking salarian could put back together."
Comms Sample: A couple of sample threads right here.