[Outer Divide] App:

[standsentinel]

[- OOC Information -]

Name: Wyn
Do you play any other characters in Outer Divide? Nope!

[- Character Information -]

Character Name: Kaidan Alenko
Fandom: Mass Effect
AU or OU: OU
Canon Point: Post-Arrival DLC, a few days before the start of ME3.
Journal: standsentinel
Icon:

Appearance: Dark haired, dark eyed human male biotic in his mid-30s. Mixed heritage.

History: Kaidan's MassEffect wiki page This Kaidan's based off my main Mass Effect playthrough, where he survived Virmire and was romanced by Shepard in the first game.

Previous Game History: N/A

Personality:

At first glance, Kaidan is your stereotypical Canadian: polite and quietly competent. Bland, if you're not paying attention. Still waters, to borrow a cliché, run deep. Kaidan is quiet, but it's a quiet born of deep consideration, a cynical approach to politics and associated ideologies, and such formidable levels of self-control that they can wrap around from a gift into a curse.

Gift or curse, he'll tell you it's necessary. As a powerful human biotic, Kaidan is a living weapon, and has known since the age of 17 that he's a lethal one, at that. Control and consideration mean safety, for others and for himself. Control also provides a way to move forward, walling off past traumas and pushing on ahead into today. 100% functional human being, here, commander. He does not become intimate lightly or quickly, but is devoted when he does, as friend, family or lover. If angry or hurt enough by someone who's gotten in past the barrier walls of self-control he can take refuge in passive-aggression or ill-considered jabs, glimpses of the lost young teen hidden in the past of the carefully controlled man.

He's probably earned himself more than one solid punch in the face over the years as a result, and will undoubtedly earn more in the future.

He is an intensely loyal officer of the Systems Alliance, but his service is not in the cause of advancing humanity at the expense of others, and not even to please his retired Alliance father. Kaidan is that rare creature, a cynical idealist. He serves to try and leave the galaxy a better place, and knows that the military is one necessary part of doing so. That, and if the Alliance is keeping an eye on biotics anyways, he may as well draw a paycheque.

While the Alliance has his first loyalty and he's a proud son of Earth, Kaidan is notably free of xenophobia and other prejudices. Instead of taking his turian BAaT instructor's abusive behavior as an exemplar of his entire species, Kaidan has chosen to see it as proof that the different species are more convergent than divergent -- all have their jerks and all have their good people. This is an attitude that carries over into his dealings with aliens (and other strange beings) in general.

As he's matured over his years of service, particularly since the death and resurrection of Commander Shepard, he's found himself entering leadership roles that the Lieutenant Alenko of three years ago would never have considered. Still, while capable of leadership and decisively quick action on the battlefield, and while maturity and loss have brought a little bit of learning how to both cut loose and relax, he's still occasionally hamstrung in social situations (often by himself), particularly if his emotions have gotten involved more rapidly then he's had time to mull them over. While he's a bit of a deadpan snarker (I'm nice and didn't link to the TVtrope) and happy to banter with comrades and shoot the shit in soldierly fashion, he can still end up with an entertaining case of the stammers if he finds himself tipped headlong into a bog of innuendo.

His friends, naturally, have been known to take advantage of this. For Kaidan, despite some inclination towards solitary pursuits like reading, and a tendency to start tinkering with any tech left in his vicinity long enough, does enjoy the company of his friends and his crewmates. While he's respectful of his superiors, he doesn't stand on rank when it's downtime, and is all too happy to sit down to a round of drinks, or of Skyllian Five or some other poker-type variant. Occasionally, he even wins.

Powers/Abilities:


Alliance Officer: Sentinel class

Kaidan has been given the basic knowledge to handle a wide array of personal weaponry, although his focus is on heavy pistols and assault rifles, the lighter weight the better, so as not to hobble his use of biotic abilities. He is a sentinel, blending tech skills and biotic abilities in a very nifty futuristic package. Most recently, he's been involved in the establishment and training of the Alliance's first biotic special ops force, and holds the rank of major as a result.

He possesses standard Alliance military hand-to-hand, first aid and survival training, including xenoplanetary and microgravity environments. His combat class is a Sentinel, a blending of biotic and technical abilities rather than direct physical melee, although the recent development of ablative tech armour and shielding of the class offers them a greater utility for direct confrontation than their previous traditional role as a support class.

Biotic:

Kaidan is an L2 biotic, one of the doubly lucky ones who gained biotic abilities rather than tumours from their prenatal element zero exposure, and who then managed to survive the notoriously damaging L2 implant with only a case of horrific recurring migraines rather than insanity or neurological decay.

There are three general categories for biotic abilities, all linked to the manipulation of the element zero nodes contained within the biotic's body to create mass effect fields. Telekinesis relies on generating mass-lowering fields which can then be used to lift or hurl objects, or people. Mass effect fields can also be used to create kinetic barriers, or to immobilize objects or individuals. Finally, rapidly shifting mass effect fields can be used to generate singularities -- temporary spatial distortions similar to tiny black holes -- which tear apart anything too close to them.

Biotics channel the forces through their own bodies, resulting in a spiked metabolism and the risk of hypoglycemic and other crashes if their caloric intake drops too much or too suddenly, or if use is not met with refuelling. Most biotics carry emergency energy bars on them as a matter of course. Related to this, abilities cannot be used continuously, and there is a 'cooldown' period of a few seconds to a couple minutes before biotics can be used again, depending on the strength of the biotic force exerted. In terms of power scale, biotic abilities are effective on a person-to-person scale of combat (or more peaceful interaction) -- a strong singularity might devastate a group of three or four enemy soldiers, but it's not doing anything major to that tank over there.


Tech:

While many of his electronic intrusion and countermeasures skills are specific to his own time and setting and thus of more theoretical than practical use, Kaidan is able to use his omnitool to overload kinetic barriers or directly damage weapons or synthetic constructs with a straight-line burst of electrical energy. With higher levels of development, it can be used to deliver an incapacitating neural shock. In addition to this, his omni-tool can also be used to deliver a cryo-blast: a mass of supercooled subatomic particles that slows or temporarily freeze their target. His combat armour is equipped to generate tech shielding, an extra layer of ablative barrier that delivers an area-of-effect energy pulse if destroyed, stunning or injuring nearby foes.

In addition to handling the tech toys, Kaidan is trained in their maintenance and that of other technical systems. While he lacks the breadth of engineering knowledge and experience that a pure ship or systems engineer would have, and likewise the skills a purely-focused hacker would develop, he's a talented and inquisitive generalist, who, like most tech geeks, tinkers as a matter of course and gravitates to new sources of knowledge.

(N.B. For a more crunchy breakdown of what he can do, the wiki page includes links to more detailed explanations of how each of his powers and skills works. I've opted to bundle the original Mass Effect and ME3 sets together, because while removing, renaming and re-organizing skills makes sense from a balancing-the-party mechanic in the game, it seems silly that he'd spontaneously forget previous skills like first aid.)

Possessions:

Kaidan is arriving while in transit from Earth orbit to Systems Alliance headquarters in Vancouver. As a result, he's wearing his BDUs and has his usual complement of Stuff in their pockets, but he's also got a duffle bag with his gear. A list:

* One (1) M-5 Phalanx heavy pistol
* One (1) M-8 Avenger assault rifle
* One (1)Omni-Tool Contains personnel reports for spec ops group, limited personal files such as photographs, bookfiles, music playlists, etc.
* One (1) Standard Systems Alliance combat armour, with medi-gel interface. 5 units medi-gel
* One (1) Systems Alliance battle dress uniform.
* One 72 hour supply of ration bars. (4,500 calories per day.) (Horrible.)
* One (1) electronics repair toolkit. (Field sized, personal upgrade from Alliance standard.)
* One (1) small travel kit of personal toiletries. (Alliance issue)
* One (1) Deck of cards.
* One (1) bottle Serrice Ice brandy, bow (red, shiny) and personal card attached, ('Dad').

Arrival: Ship, please!

Reason for Playing: The idea of a reverse jamjar is awesome. I think Kaidan, with his background as both a career space marine and his history of being one of those dangerous and marginalized biotics, will be pretty interested in quietly fomenting some revolution, or at least helping people in the Outer Divide organize. He's unassumingly competent, has decent leadership skills (although they get a little overshadowed whenever Shepard's around.) and will run around poking at all manner of interesting things.

Also, he needs to hunt a dinosaur.


[- Writing Samples -]

First person:


[Transcript of personal logfile for Alenko, K., following return and debrief from Horizon colony mission. Original file audio only:]

Getting played by Cerberus, that I can expect. Hell, you don't name your top guy something like Illusive Man because he's open and up-front about his plans.

When it's your own people, though...

I've been through enough debriefs in my time to know when the people running one already know more about what happened than you do. This? Definitely one of those times.

I hadn't hit the Citadel since--

[sigh]

Well, not since that date with the doctor. So I guess it's maybe my own damn fault I got blindsided, at least in part. If I'd checked the Council's session records, or bought Udina a drink and gotten him bitching about Anderson, or... something.

Yeah.

So anyways, figured out after the fact that it wasn't just Anderson stonewalling me, it was the whole damn' Council. Hell, half the stores on Zakera Ward think they're her favourite right now.

Shit.

They knew she was back. Even handed her back her Spectre status. I guess a little thing like working with Cerberus isn't a problem for them, considering how much of a damn they gave about the shit Saren was pulling.

They knew. Anderson knew. And if parts of the Alliance brass didn't know, then I'm a bigger idiot than I thought.

[Another sigh. The sharp clink of ice in a glass and a gurgle of poured liquid make it into the recording.]

I'm a pretty big idiot.

If it's really true, if she was really dead, and Cerberus brought her back somehow, then the last thing she needed was me going off on her like that. But seeing her, holding her... and then those two Cerberus types standing at her six, watching it all go down.

If I'd just kept a lid on it, maybe I could've gotten through. Made her see.

Instead, she's off holding hands with the devil 'cause she thinks it'll keep all the rest of us out of hell.


[For a time, there's silence, broken by a creak of furniture and the ice rattling in the glass again.]


Got a meeting in the morning with Anderson. Some new Spec Ops project he thinks I'd be perfect for.

Part of me wishes I was out there with her instead, but like I said to her -- I'm Alliance, always will be.

Close personal log.

Third person: A Missing Moment style encounter on Omega .