[For Barrayar] App

[standsentinel]

OOC
Name: Wyn
Preferred pronouns: She/her
Over 16?: And then some.
Contact: minor_ramblings preferred.
Time zone: GMT -5

IC
Type: OU
Name: Kaidan Alenko
Canon: Mass Effect
Canon point: Post-ME3 Extended Cut, in a high-EMS Destroy ending. (Shortly after the Normandy has lifted off)
Age: 36
Appearance: A mid-30s man of medium-athletic build, with brown eyes, black hair starting to silver at the temples, of largely mixed European descent.

Personality:
At first glance, Kaidan is your stereotypical Canadian: polite and quietly competent. Bland, if you're not paying attention. It's true that Kaidan can be quiet, but it's a quiet born of deep consideration, a cautious 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. He does not form close bonds easily, but is devoted when he does. 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 verbal jabs, glimpses of the lost young teen hidden in the past of the carefully controlled man.

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.)

As he's matured over his years of service, he's found himself entering leadership roles that the former Staff Lieutenant Alenko would never have considered, and it's not all down to the accelerating effects of a galaxy-wide war for survival on one's promotion scale. 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 and when to cut loose and relax, he's still occasionally hamstrung in social situations, often by himself. 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 some poker-type variant. Occasionally, he even wins.

Background/AU details: Kaidan on the Mass Effect wiki

His particular playthrough is with a (romanced) Earthborn, Sole Survivor Infiltrator FemShep, who was mostly paragon in her choices, but occasionally felt the need to defenestrate a mercenary or two or yell at people until they stopped being stupid. Wrex and Eve in charge of cured krogans, peace made between the quarians and geth, and Shepard chose the Destroy option. He was in the party for the final run in ME3, so he's still mending a few of cracked ribs at this point.

Strengths & weaknesses:

Strengths:

Military: Kaidan holds the rank of Major within the Systems Alliance, and prior to the outbreak of the Reaper War was the commander of the very first biotics SpecOps unit in the Alliance. In addition to his specialization as a Sentinel, he's gone through standard Alliance basic and officer training, and is certified with assault rifles and heavy pistols.

First Aid: Kaidan has some skill in battlefield first aid, because there's no way I was playing through Mass Effect 1 without Neural Shock. This suffers somewhat from the fact that most first aid in Mass Effect begins and ends with 'put medi-gel on it', but I can't imagine he wouldn't have been taught What To Do When There Is No Medi-Gel because your commander forgot to buy that upgrade.

Genemods: Closely tied to the military, as Kaidan has undergone the genetic baselining that every Alliance soldier undergoes, correcting any underlying defects and enhancing his fitness and recovery capacity to peak human norms.

Tech: As a Sentinel, Kaidan can hack and overload systems and can both code and work with the physical side of electronics. Given that he'd be working with completely unfamiliar programming languages here, it would be a sharp learning curve but, like many Sentinels, Kaidan is a tinkerer.

Weaknesses:

Biotic metabolism: Due to the demands of a nervous system infused with element zero, Kaidan requires more food than average -- the standard Alliance ration for biotic soldiers is 4500 kcal daily versus 3000 for non-biotics. While this calorie requirement would be reduced in a situation where he's not able to actively draw on his powers, it's not erased -- he'll still be a stress on any quartermaster's stocks, over time.

L2 Implant: Due to complications from the early-model biotic implant in his brain, Kaidan suffers from frequent migraine headaches. While he's found ways to manage them through meditation, diet and lifestyle, there are times when what he really needs is some Really Good Futuristic Drugs and a dark, quiet room for a day or two. This is not always possible, even in his home setting.

Fish out of Water: While less of a weakness if he's with the Cetagandans, Kaidan's military specialization is as a Sentinel: one half biotic abilities and one have tech skills. He remains a soldier, but his specialized training is marginal-to-useless in this setting.

Depowering/humanization:

Kaidan is a human biotic, which basically means he's sci fi telekinetic: he can lift, throw, push and pull objects and people hands-free, create force shields, etc. His abilities are innate, due to the nodes of Element Zero distributed through his nervous system, and he accesses them using mnemonic gestures and biofeedback training, but he requires a functional biotic amp interfaced with the cybernetic implant in his brain to use them at their full strength and precision. The easiest way to depower him would be to have the amp knocked out of commission by whatever anomaly pulls people to Barrayar -- without it, the most he'd be capable of is making himself glow faintly blue, and possibly levitating something on the order of a handful of pebbles if he felt the pressing need for a migraine for the next few days.

Placement preference: Honestly? I'm on the fence -- I can see the character developing in either camp, and finding some delightful sources of internal conflict there too. He'd be less of a fish out of water technology-wise with the Cetagandans, but would eventually end up faced with moral quandaries over what they're doing with Barrayar, and what his culpability for it is. He'd be faced with finding out that most of his carefully-honed skills are useless to the Barrayarans, but the simple 'little guys standing up to the evil empire' appeal of their cause would be a draw... until he started running into things like the fundamental inequalities and horrors of life on Barrayar. (Infanticide? Scalp-taking? Seriously?)

Basically, put him where the numbers need him, I'll make it work.

Character goals: I think I started going into this in the placement preference, but basically what I love about pretty much any of Bujold's books is that either side of a conflict has its gods and monsters. Kaidan's fresh off the Reaper War, he's got a little more ability to see shades of grey than he used to, but he's still Captain Canada for all that, and having him deal with the realization that whatever side he's drawn into has its darker facets appeals to me.

There's also the fact that he's fresh from the Reaper War. Playing someone who's just survived a galaxy-wide conflict and has just found himself stranded in the middle of a single-planet guerilla war has interesting potential.

Sample: Because managing to get off on the right foot with Piotr should be immortalized.