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Post by Henry Sinclair on Mar 3, 2013 21:43:25 GMT -5
HENRY SINCLAIR ryan, 18, a few years
You know the typical fairy tale, the one in all the classic holo-vids. The one where everything always seems to find a way to work out for the main character; the one where they are magically granted a chance to attend the ball; the one with a happy ending. As much as I hate to admit it, my story isn’t like that at all.
“I know you were dealt a bad hand, son, the kind where most people would fold as soon as they get it. You have a choice to make. Do you let it break you? Or do you let it make you?” My uncle would tell me almost every day until he was killed. He and his clan were the only family I had growing up. I never knew my real parents: my mom died when I was just a baby and my dad was the bastard who walked out on her.
At least, that’s what I was told.
Seeing no other options, my uncle took me into his custody, much to the chagrin of his wife. She hated me, my Aunt Kara. She was already busy taking care of their son and daughter, they couldn’t take care of some bastard child. Whenever Uncle John was on leave, those are words in the argument I would overhear too often.
There was only one person that hated me as much as Aunt Kara: her beloved son Isaac. Just two months older than me, he made sure I knew it. He beat the shit out of me any and every opportunity he had. Our dear mother looked the other way and would twist her husband’s arm if he tried stepping in. “Boys will be boys.” John made sure I learned how to defend myself when he came home and found me with a black eye, broken nose and bruised rib cage. It was after an especially bad beatdown because Isaac caught me making friends with his sister. That was a no-no.
My uncle was a good man, an Alliance soldier through and through. He himself taught me almost everything I knew about hand to hand combat, just as he had taught both my cousins. He was in the middle of the First Contact War, did you know that? He was on Shanxi when Turians attacked it. I think he told us that he would have nearly died if the Occupation lasted any longer. Heh, I remember this story that he would tell us of how he somehow managed to blow up a Turian’s comm buoy with a rock and a fire containment system. With the Sinclair natural ability of breaking things, I can believe it. He died when I was 15. You want to know how? The frigate he was serving on was attacked by a band of pirates. There were no Alliance survivors. My uncle deserved more than some fucking raiders.
That’s when life at home began to crash around me.
Have you ever had to live in a place where almost everyone hates you’re sheer existence? My aunt and her son made my life a living hell and I was on my own. That doesn’t do it justice. Take everything they put me through before, and crank it up to 10. Suddenly, I was the whipping boy for everything I was doing, wrong or otherwise. There was one day where I just had enough of all the shit. When Isaac started giving me his daily beating, I lashed out. As it turned out, I was, and still am, biotic. It was a surprise to a lot of people when I started to glow blue. Isaac was probably more surprised than I was. The look on his face as he flew across the room was priceless. Within the week, Alliance troops were at the door and dragged me off to Gagarin Station for Biotic Training.
I was dropped off at Jump Zero. At the time, I thought it was probably one of the greatest things that happened to me. It got me away from my loving family and helped me learn about my new found powers. By that, I mean they helped me learn how not to hurt myself with my abilities. Until they brought in the Turian instructors, that’s really all they could do. My opinion on the situation quickly changed with the new instructors.
Everything we did was a drill. We were not allowed to use our hands to move anything until we couldn’t use our biotics anymore. It was glorified torture. Students around me were dropping dead from either accidents or exhaustion . It was a nightmare… and yet I found it better than what I left behind. I was even selected to receive the experimental L2 implants during my time there. Brain Camp didn’t last much longer. One of the other students actually killed the Turian in charge and managed to cause a big enough political shit storm that closed the place down. Since I was old enough by that time, I enlisted into the Alliance.
I’m not normally this… depressing. My childhood is a bit of a sore subject for me.
For a time, I wasn’t very noted within the Systems Alliance. I kept my record clean, my scores as high as I could and worked my way up the ranks to the best of my abilities. The real turning point in my career would have to be in 2177. I was part of a recon unit to search for a lost Pioneer team on a colony planet. We had found the colony abandoned, yet intact. At dusk, we started to camp out for the night, hoping to continue the search in the morning. I was the first to fall asleep. My L2’s were flaring up some migraines and I needed to sleep it off.
I awoke to the sounds of heavy gunfire, shouting and the most ungodly shrieks I had ever heard. I grabbed my equipment and rushed outside to be greeted by the sight of slaughter. These giant creatures were shredding my unit apart. It wasn’t long until the commanding officer had ordered a full retreat to the extraction zone. Those… things were mindless killers and effective at their jobs. We had thrown everything we had at them and yet we couldn’t even take one of the bastards down. When I finally got off the rock, I was told that I was the only one to survive. If I ever go back to Akuze, it’ll be too soon.
Following my encounter, I started to get noticed within the Alliance. I was even selected to undergo Special Forces training at Interplanetary Combatives Training in Rio for “surviving impossible odds.” I accepted the offer, yet I never felt like I deserved it. I was just lucky. Training for my N1 qualification was hell, but I had been through worse. I passed, earning my first N designation. For the next few years, I trained heavily under ICT guidance, working my way up to N6.
Earning my N7 hit close to home. I was part of a small squad sent to investigate a small planet on the edge of Alliance Space that was reported to be host to suspicious activity. Touching down, we were greeted with gunfire from Cerberus agents. They were quickly dispatched and the presence of an underground facility was swiftly discovered. We had managed to clear the area of Cerberus presence to discover their twisted experiments. Those sick bastards were using the facility as a biotics factory. They would take pregnant single women from the slums of Alliance Space with promises of compensation for “experiments” and then overload them with eezo to produce biotic capable children who would then be trained as Cerberus agents, a practice going on for decades. A stray datapad revealed that the facility wasn’t the first, nor was it the last.
It was a fate I would have shared if not for a special ops team putting a stop to the factory my own mother was held in.
Within the month, the Geth attacked the Citadel. It was a fucking mess. Lucky for the Council that they had an N7 on the station. I was on Grissom Academy at the time. They wanted to monitor my continued use of my L2 implant, keep tabs of the effects prolonged use had on the human body. At the time, I was only suffering from the occasional migraine, now I deal with… more than just that. The mental degradation from the continued use caused me to have occasional bouts of psychosis.
In 2184, I was on leave on the Citadel, the first time I was ever on the station. I wanted to see the seat of our galactic government and how the repairs of the Geth attack were coming along. Long story short, I saved Councilor Anderson and he put my name forward to be considered for Spectre. Believe it or not, I was selected to be one of the first human Spectres.
The following year, my cousin Rachel suddenly was back in my life. She had gotten a medical position on a freighter, helping to maintain and care for the health of the ships inhabitants. It was a rough job, but someone had to do it, she told me. It’s strange though. She was serving on the MSV Estevanico when it went missing in the Horsehead Nebula.
I had gone to her funeral.
One of my first missions as a Spectre had me chasing an Eclipse drug trafficking ring throughout Council Space. Not exactly as exciting as investigating the theft of economic reports from the Ministry of Finance or hunting down a rogue spectre, but it was important work, especially since I found evidence implicating several important Salarian figures as having their fingers in the profits.
I was actually on Earth when this whole fucking thing started. Rachel, my dead cousin, somehow convinced me to go back to Earth and check in on the family. It was a bad idea. Both Aunt Kara and Isaac still hated my guts and yet I was back to say hi or something. It was going very well, especially when I broke my cousin’s arm. It was self-defense.
Then came the Batarian… things.
They swarmed the house in an instant, capturing everyone but me. They were dragged through the mud and the dirt as I fended off as many as I could. There was no way I would last another attack. If there was one thing I learned from Akuze, it’s to know what a lost cause was. I got the fuck out of there.
If we want to save this galaxy, we’re going to need a lot of guns.
| [atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style,border-radius: 0px 0px 20px 20px;]Character Name. Henry SinclairAge. 37Gender.MaleRace. HumanHeight.6’1”Weight.211 lbsSexuality. HeterosexualFaction or Allegiance. Galactic Council, AllianceOccupation. Spectre; Former Alliance N7 SoldierMoral Alignment. NeutralMajor Skills and Abilities. - Throw: Uses mass effect fields to hurl a target away from the user with damaging force.
- Pull: Generates a mass-lowering field which levitates enemies into the air. While aloft, enemies will slowly drift towards the user
- Lift: Causes enemies to float helplessly in the air, making them more vulnerable to attack
- Warp: Creates rapidly shifting mass effect fields to shred a target apart
- Barrier: Generates a Mass Effect Field to protect a user from damage
Weapons, Armor, and Belongings. - N7 Piranha: The N7 Piranha is an assault shotgun designed for the Reaper war. When the N7 program began training alien resistance forces, the lighter-bodied species wanted a low-recoil weapon with a wide pellet spread for dealing with hordes of husks. The result was the Piranha, which hit a sweet spot in close-range firepower. Its rapid-fire capability tears apart not only husks but most opponents unlucky enough to be in its way.
- M-6 Carnifex: A highly accurate and lethal pistol. The Carnifex is a favored sidearm of mercenary leaders and Eclipse mercenary tech specialists. An expensive but powerful weapon, its marketing materials feature a charging krogan with the slogan "Don't you wish Carnifex was at your side?"
- N7 Armor: This armor is designed to augment tech, biotic and weapons damage as well as provide additional health and shield strength.
- L2 Implants: The results vary wildly - some L2s are hardly stronger than an L1, others are strong but unstable, while a few are powerful and stable enough for combat, though they usually suffer some discomfort from their implants. Henry has been lucky enough to receive strong L2s, but his continued use has began to take it's toll.
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