Fixed Shepard's birthdate (no access to canonical reference when this file was originally written). Also altered her choice of weapons to reflect her (by which I mean my) preference in Mass Effect 2, a rifle which was in a DLC I didn't have the first time around. --G. 20130212]

Babylon Project Galactic Database
Text Data Extraction Search: International Police Personnel Files
Personnel Data: SHEPARD, Virginia
SEARCH COMPLETE: JANUARY 5, 2410

Full name: Virginia Eve Shepard
Species: Human Detian (but see below)
Date of birth: April 11, 2154
Place of birth: Hospital Deck B, WDF Wayward Son (SDF-17), Rigel sector
Date of death: September 11, 2288
Place of death: WDF Normandy (SR-1), Centaurus sector
Height: 5'9"
Weight: 175 lbs.
Eyes: Blue-violet
Hair: Black
Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index: 167

Date of Return: N/A (see below)
Date of IPO Induction: October 16, 2406
Division of service: Special Assignment 11 (The Chief's Furies), SPECTRE
Test of Light administered: October 16, 2406
Other special qualifications/certifications:
- B.S. Starship Systems Engineering, Summa cum laude in cursu honorum, Wedge Defense Force Academy, class of 2172
- WDF Certified Combat Engineer
- WDF Fixed Configuration Pilot
- WDF Veritech Pilot
- WDF Destroid Pilot
- WDF Starship Pilot
- WDF Veritech Combat Ace (VF-1 Valkyrie)
- WDF Jump Infantry Badge
- WDF Surface Combatant Grade N7
- WDF Powered Armor Combatant (Front-Line)
- WDF Powered Armor Technician
- WDF Special Aether Service ("The Hammers") Selection Passed With Distinction
- WDF Advanced Hand-to-Hand Combatant (with Cyborg and Powered Armor Stars)
- WDF Expert Marksman (with all bars)
- WDF Starship Command Certificate
- Royal Salusian Navy Elite Autonomous Battleforce Award
- RSN Combat Driver, Grade 1
- RSN Honorary SPARTAN
- Valkyrie BT-760 Black Talon Badge (with Blood Cross)

Other grades/titles:
- Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the Star of Salusia
- Companion of the Zetan Order of Knights Eternal
- Commander, WDF (dcd.)
- Captain, Asgardian Navy Einherjar Fleet (ret.)
- Valkyrie

Description: Virginia Shepard is a human female who appears to be around 30 Standard years of age. She has pale skin, black hair, and eyes that are a peculiar shade of blue-violet. Though athletic, her physical build gives little forewarning of the great feats of strength and endurance of which she is capable. She is somewhat heavier than she looks owing to the density of various invisible cybernetic and bionic augmentations (though she does not weigh nearly as much as a comparably sized full-body conversion cyborg).

Notes: Virginia Shepard was a second-generation Wedge Defense Force spacer, the daughter of two serving officers aboard the mid-22nd-century Wayward Son. Apart from a six-month spell on Zeta Cygni II in 2160 when the SDF-17 was in drydock for an overhaul, she grew up almost exclusively aboard the fortress. Her parents and tutors noticed very early on that she was a highly gifted child, both intellectually and physically. Growing up in the relaxed, benevolently anarchic environment of a WDF starship seemed to suit Virginia's temperament as well as her gifts, allowing her to proceed at her own pace - which, to the occasional consternation of her tutors, could conservatively be described as meteoric.

It appears that she never thought of doing anything other than joining the WDF in her own right; she joined the flagship's Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps at 12 and graduated from Rosalind Franklin High School (The Fightin' Crystallographers) on M Deck at 15 before taking the WDF Academy by storm, graduating in three years with a grade point average of 4.11 (the highest mathematically possible GPA at the time). Because of her spectacular performance in both coursework and practical exercises at the Academy, she was commissioned senior lieutenant, WDF, immediately upon graduation. She immediately went to work as a member of Commander Robert E. "ReRob" Mandeville's engine room crew aboard the SDF-17.

Though she was by training and inclination an engineer, Shepard's restless intellect and thirst for physical as well as mental challenges led her to spend most of her spare time in the Academy and the first few years of her career accumulating ratings, certifications, and specialty badges that were unrelated to her actual job. For example, in 2171 she earned a jump infantry badge, taking the JI training course for no better reason than that there happened to be an opening in one that coincided with the Academy's summer recess. While her officer-candidate classmates were hitting the crystal beaches of Borastan, she was on Acheron with the enlisted personnel of the Tactical Division, jumping out of dropships wearing a thruster pack built by the lowest bidder - and loving it.

In most forces, this might have been taken for an inability to focus by superiors who concentrated on the restlessness and missed the relentlessly high standards of Shepard's work - whatever she happened to be working on. Once again, though, the freewheeling structure of the WDF worked to her advantage, as her superiors actively encouraged this penchant for polymathy. Her competence and adaptability were already starting to get noticed at the WDF's highest levels (which in those days were not so very far above her own) when the incident that would define her WDF career came along.

In 2175, after serving almost nonstop for the first 18 months of the Covenant War, Shepard was on mandatory leave on the remote Salusian colony moon Elysium (reportedly planning to try out storm surfing on the moon's gas giant primary, Phlegethon) when the colony was attacked by Covenant forces in a surprise flanking move. Though under no obligation to do so - despite her JI badge she was, at the time, not classified as a front-line ground combatant - she pitched in with the Royal Salusian Colonial Defense Force's efforts to fight off the invaders. Toward the end of the engagement, she found herself holding a strategically vital strongpoint single-handed. When the smoke cleared, Lieutenant Shepard found herself with two knighthoods (one Salusian, one Zetan), a list of decorations for valor, an interesting facial scar, the right to claim the Omega-2 retroviral treatment at any time, the personal attention of the WDF's top brass, and an unofficial license to try just about any damn job the Force had in its table of organization.

Her response was to try out pretty much every job in the TO. If, as the recruiting posters of the time boasted, there were 333 ways to be a spacer in the WDF, Virginia Shepard seemed determined to master all of them. Over the next decade she turned her hand to everything from weapons testing to a one-year detachment to the Armored Corps before finding herself, almost inevitably, as one of the long succession of Veritech pilots to hold the job of Eight-Ball Ten.

It was this particular career move that nearly got her killed for the second time: In 2183 her Valkyrie was shot out from under her in combat against Zentraedi Revenge Coalition forces at the Third Battle of Reflex Point. Shepard ejected from her wrecked fighter just before its fusion reactor went supercritical and narrowly escaped being vaporized by the explosion, but her CVR-3 armor had been damaged earlier in the fight. As a result, she was both exposed to vacuum and fatally irradiated by the supercritical reactor's dying gamma pulse. By the time Eight-Ball flight surgeon Ronan O'Meara recovered her, she was still alive but fading fast. Back aboard the Prometheus, without time even to get her to sickbay, O'Meara administered her unclaimed Omega-2 treatment and saved her life.

Back on flight status within a week, Shepard spent another two years with the Eight-Balls before continuing what she jokingly called her "gypsy career" with a transfer to the WDF's Exploration Command. There she found a more-or-less permanent home, organizationally if not occupationally. For the rest of her WDF career, except for a few special temporary detachments to the Royal Salusian Navy for [CLASSIFIED - SEE AN ADMINISTRATOR] operations, Shepard moved from ship to ship within ExCom, tackling any job that happened to be open, doing whatever particularly needed doing aboard whichever ship she joined. She was an assistant engineer aboard WDF Axalon, a gunnery officer in Delphinus, served as executive officer aboard the original Enterprise, was a stellar cartographer at Faraway Rock Station, and led a surface survey team of Marines and science personnel stationed aboard Itinerant.

In 2280, as part of what the WDF brass envisioned as a gradual build-up to develop the WDF into a true fleet-level operation (something that was not actually accomplished until the War of Corporate Occupation a century later, and which we now know was one of the conditions that caused GENOM CEO Maximilien Largo to launch Operation Götterdämmerung), WDF Reconnaissance Command commissioned its newest starship, WDF Normandy (SR-1). Built by the renowned Salusian firm of Royal Saenar Fleet Systems, Ltd., Normandy was an attempt to build a fast, capable scoutship using a new implementation of the Internal Emission Sink passive stealth technology originally developed for the Royal Salusian Navy. Shepard was selected to command the experimental ship based on her engineering background and wide-ranging talent - and, as Captain MegaZone of the SDF-17 put it in his official report, because "it's about damn time she had a ship of her own."

Normandy was envisioned as the lead ship of a new class of WDF scouting vessel. If successful, and had the 23rd-century fleet buildup continued as planned, Normandy-class starships would have replaced the smaller, much less combat-capable Vigil-class scouts that then formed the bulk of WDF ReCom's small fleet. With a squad from the Special Aether Service (better known as the Hammers) aboard, Shepard and her elite crew put the ship through her paces more vigorously than the designers could possibly have anticipated, carrying out everything from long-range patrols of the Cardassian Triangle to commando raids on Kilrathi shipyards to, in her very first mission, taking point in a straight-up full-dress fleet action with the RSN against an attack on the Homeworld by [CLASSIFIED - SEE AN ADMINISTRATOR].

Unfortunately, the Normandy project and Virginia Shepard's brilliant WDF career both came to an end in 2288, when Normandy was destroyed in a suprise attack by a GENOM battle group in the opening stages of Operation Götterdämmerung. Dedicated to the end, Shepard oversaw the evacuation of almost all her crew and prevented the GENOM ships from destroying the lifeboats before they could escape to hyperspace; but she was unable to save herself when the Star Destroyer Avenger dealt Normandy a final, devastating broadside from her main turbolaser batteries.

Finding herself in Valhalla, Shepard demonstrated her adaptability once again by taking the Einherjar by storm in the same fashion that she'd owned her career as a Wedge Defender. Most of the details of her career as one of the Fallen of Valhalla are unavailable, but it is known that she commanded the Einherjar phantom of Normandy in the Battle of the Final Day, covering the phantom SDF-17's right flank in the great pincer movement that destroyed most of the Jotun fleet. There are reports that she also led a surface operation that stymied a dvergar attack on one of the Golden City's postern gates, though it seems unlikely that a single person could've done both things in the course of a single day's combat.

Regardless, Shepard so distinguished herself in the Ragnarok that Skuld Ravenhair, goddess of the future and captain of the Valkyrior, personally recruited her to replace one of the Valkyrie slain in the defense of Asgard. This was the first time that one of the Einherjar had been selected for such an honor, and in accepting it, Shepard was automatically struck from the Book (actually a database) of the Dead and elevated to minor celestial status. Though she seems - biologically, she is - human, she is technically one of the dísir, the lowest-ranked goddesses of Asgard.

Among other things, this brought with it the privilege of freedom to travel throughout the Nine Worlds; since Einherjar promoted to celestial status are no longer officially dead, they don't have to go through the process of Return to leave Valhalla. Shepard remained there anyway, serving as a Valkyrie, until news of the Earth Alliance's 2406 crackdown reached her. At that point she decided that the mortal world needed her, or possibly just that it was where the action was likely to be in the immediate future, and requested assignment to Midgard. Once across the Rainbow Bridge, she considered rejoining the WDF, but ultimately chose to offer her services [[Not in that way? -LD] [Unknown; my interest in these things goes only so far. -V-]] to her old friend the Chief of the International Police instead.

As mentioned above, Virginia Shepard is a highly capable spacer and ground soldier whose experience and training are among the broadest to be found anywhere. Though her Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index falls just short of the Super-Genius threshold (175), she has a highly agile and retentive mind that she supplements with her great strength of will, putting what she has to more efficient use than many people with twice as much raw ability ever bother with. Her physical prowess is similar; though she possesses a number of WDF-era, Einherjar, and Valkyrie cybernetic and bionic modifications, including a dermal weave and bone reinforcement, most of her surprising strength, durability, and close combat ability comes from nothing more elaborate than hard work and good genes.

As an active-duty Valkyrie on detached assignment to Midgard, Shepard was obliged by Asgardian weapons export regulations to leave her standard-issue BT-760 Black Talon battle armor and the top shelf of her extensive personal arsenal in Valhalla. Most of the small arms she favors are of Midgardian manufacture - she's particularly fond of the "old" WDF's Morgan Arms M-96 Mattock marksman rifle - though she did smuggle out one gem from her Valhalla collection: an Asgard Armory Mk XCVIII Widow anti-materiel rifle. This is a devastatingly effective and startlingly massive weapon she calls simply "George".

Commander Shepard in typical battle dress - note George behind left shoulder. She dislikes helmets, claiming that they interfere with her peripheral vision.

Most military psychologists' guidelines would tell you that Virginia Shepard should be out of her mind with everything she's been through in her lives. Lots of old-time WDF officers lived through things like the Covenant War and Götterdämmerung, of course, but few living today can say honestly that they didn't live through the latter and are still kicking. At the very least, most people would find their personalities changed (and probably not for the better) by any one of the major experiences that signpost a timeline of Shepard's life; but somehow she manages never to let it go to her head. Those few still alive who knew her as a fresh-faced young Academy cadet testify that she's the same lovably snarky, compassionate-but-tough, cool-headed but occasionally hot-tempered firebrand she was back then. She's not sure herself how she's managed that, and she doesn't really care. She's apparently one of those people (compare SA1 operative Briareos Hecatonchires) who are just mentally unbreakable.

Along with this, or perhaps as another facet of it, Shepard is extraordinarily strong-willed. Before her Lensing, she repeatedly demonstrated a near-invulnerability to psychological and emotional manipulation, whether it be by technological or supernatural means. She can be unbelievably stubborn, with a single-minded ability to ignore pain, fatigue, filth - whatever unpleasantness has to be ignored to get the job done. She doesn't believe in no-win scenarios even when she's in one. It took the complete annihilation of her starship around her by the guns of an Imperator-class Star Destroyer to kill her, and even then she took an Interdictor and one of the Avenger's Victory-class escorts with her. Many who know her look on that as an oddly apt cosmic metaphor.

The thing that surprises people first meeting Shepard, when her reputation has preceded her, is her wit. They tend to expect her to be a grim, humorless and purposeful figure, the kind of silent, square-jawed military cipher who features in countless fictional accounts of exploits comparable to the ones she's really lived, and then they're shocked to meet instead a warm and cheerful (apparently-)young woman with a quirky smile, a fondness for the musical works of Luigi Boccherini, Stan Rogers, and Paul Oakenfold, and a singular gift for the dry one-liner. She has been known to style herself Commander Sir Virginia E. Shepard CKE KCSS, WDF (deceased) just to mess with people. Her generosity and compassion are as legendary among those who know her as her skill and courage are among those who only think they do, as is her loyalty to her friends and her willingness to go to great lengths to help them.

On the other hand, she has very little patience for certain types of people. She's willing to give almost anyone a chance, but those who throw that chance away don't have very good odds of ever getting another one. The legend still circulates in Asgard that she first came to Skuld's notice by suddenly, ruthlessly, and completely clobbering a drunken ulfhednar berserker in a Golden City pub the day after the Ragnarok when he wouldn't stop pawing at the vaettir barmaid. Witty, compassionate music lover or not, this woman is a battle-hardened professional soldier with fists like wrecking balls, and if you push her too far she will crush you like a bug.

Current assignment: Commander Shepard is a member of Special Assignment 11 and the IPO "superbranch" codenamed SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Terror Response and Enforcement). She conducts operations at the personal direction of - and sometimes alongside - the Chief of the International Police.

End of Text Data Extract
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Babylon Project Galactic Database

In any case, awesome seeing an adaptation of Mass Effect 2 here.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard

Master Chief: "I resemble that remark..."

I was wondering what role Shepard would have in UF. This is considerably better than I was thinking.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

------
Jon Helscher

That thing you burned up isn't important to me. It's the fluid catalytic cracking unit. It made shoes for orphans. Nice job breaking it, hero.

GLaDOS- Portal

"You DIDN'T."

*opens thread*

"You did. ^_^"

I was giggling the whole way through. Well done!

"They killed you once, but it only pissed you off..." seems appropriate here.

Also, Certified Combat Engineers in the WDF are basically trained as demolitionists, EOD techs and security hackers. They're distinct from the engineers who make ships work; their job is basically to remove obstacles.

And finally, the Blood Cross distinction on the Valkyrie Black Talon badge stems from one of those violent little traditions that outsiders to their corps usually find slightly disturbing about the Valkyrior. The only way to earn it is to draw blood from your instructor during your "final exam" in the Valkyrie equivalent of Selection - which is no easy task when your instructor is Brynhildr Silverspear.

(If you're curious, Shepard did it with a headbutt. They still talk about it in the Golden Hall. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oooooooh.

Last night I was fooling around with a graphic for something else and went off on a sudden jag of complete silliness. I ended up throwing together a couple of Borderlands-style title cards for UF characters. They don't really work, because the base images are in completely the wrong art style, and yet they amuse me a bit.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu76ofHYX1w

On-topic:

> For example, in 2171 she earned a jump infantry badge,

This part here, for some reason, superimposes Virginia Shepard onto the spacejump scene from the new Star Trek.

Except I imagine she wouldn't need Sulu to save her from a couple lousy Romulans. :D

> a fondness for the musical works of Luigi Boccherini,
> Stan Rogers, and Paul Oakenfold, and a singular gift
> for the dry one-liner.

My type of gal.

Anyway, the first thing that came to mind (quotes above notwithstanding) was the comment about her being second-gen WDF. It got me to wondering just who her parents were and what her childhood was like. Actually, it makes me wonder what childhood in general aboard the Wayward Son in the pre-Exile era would have been like.

I've always had a mental image of the WDF, and it was a cool image -- lots of anime-style spandex-and-leather-jacket uniforms, trenchcoats, an environment that looks like a cross between a college dorm and the troopship from Aliens, that sort of thing. It never had kids in it. But given the history, kids on board had to have been commonplace.

I'm drifting a bit here, but for some reason that phrase really leaped out at me. Is it something you've considered, or am I leaning too far into Examining Too Closely territory?

--sofaspud
--

The Mattock? Best damn gun in the game.