Olasa Draik

*”Don’t lay your hands on me unless you’re hell-bent on losing them.”*

## Dossier

Olasa Draik is a member of the RIFT fireteam stationed in the Abrudas Wing.Olasa is a proverbial fireball of a woman, as passionate as she is defiant. It’s difficult to determine what she’s thinking, because she doesn’t get too emotional in public. She tackles depression as a result of her own personal losses, and as a result tends to move away from social occasions, only attending them when she deems it necessary. She denies that she needs help, and never seeks it out, despite her obvious issues with mental health.

Olasa is lean, muscular, and quick. Her line of work as an assassin has trained her to be quick, quiet, and lethal. Her small stature, dark armor, and tactical cloak all help her accomplish this goal as they have in the past. She doesn’t rely on one form of combat, being adept in close-range and long-range combat. She’s precise with her shots, as well as with her sword. On her collarbone, she wears the brand of the Black Rose, which was the assassin title she inherited from her mother. The brand itself is burned into her skin, permanently marking her and serving to remind her of the lives she’s taken.

Olasa is a part of the RIFT fireteam. She goes on missions for the fireteam, and acts predominantly as a combat operative in these missions. The skills she’s developed for RIFT include but are not limited to stealth, close-range combat, long-range combat, and scouting. As a result of her more combat-driven skills, she’s been stationed in the Abrudas Wing.

## History

Olasa Draik was born to Iriyo and Shaeto Draik on the Citadel, and was raised in an apartment within the Bachjret Ward. Her mother was an ex-assassin, and her father was a weapons merchant. She lived a childhood full of happy memories, the most notable of which being the friends she made, the time she spent in school, and the shenanigans she’d get into with her friends. She was always a curious child, wanting to see more of their neighborhood. She’d constantly get a slap on the wrist for wandering off, but that didn’t stop her from doing it, despite the precautions taken to prevent her from such an act.

As she grew older, her protective mother started teaching her how to defend herself in the event of an attack. They started with simple self defense, but that quickly evolved into advanced combat techniques, and finally moved into melee weapons training. The weapon she was predominantly trained with was her mother’s sword, which was an heirloom that had been used by her family for many generations, before being passed to her mother. Iriyo made no effort in keeping her past a secret. She told Olasa about her life as an assassin when she was young, but never explained the deeper details until Olasa had reached eighteen, and was able to understand the weight of what she was being told.

Before becoming a mother, Iriyo went under an alias, The Black Rose, and had a particularly good reputation due to the number of contracts she’d completed. She also made it very clear that she only took contracts against those who deserved it. However, she’d retired years prior for reasons unsaid. Despite the darkness around her mother’s profession, Olasa admired the strength that was displayed, and considered herself lucky to have such a person in her life. She felt a small desire to follow in the footsteps, but more so due to the idea of hurting those who deserve it as opposed to simply seeking an easy credit.

There were many things about her life that Iriyo told Olasa, but her enemies were not one of them. She didn’t want her daughter to be paranoid about one thing or another, but also failed to think that those enemies could eventually find their way to her. And they did, but rather than attack Iriyo directly, they did something exponentially worse. A small group of individuals kidnapped eighteen-year old Olasa off the streets one night, and demanded Iriyo’s presence, unarmed. While they provided proof of life, they didn’t hold back from torturing the young woman. When Iriyo found her daughter in a derelict apartment, she found that Olasa had been subjected to lacerations and beatings. The reunion was interrupted when the captors entered the apartment and ambushed the ex-assassin. She fought them off, killed them all, but suffered multiple severe wounds, such as broken ribs, gunshot wounds, and a laceration from a blade. When they got home, Iriyo made the decision to take her family and hide out with one of her trusted friends, a drell under the name of Kokum. He’d frequently worked with Iriyo before she retired from the assassin life.

There was a line that Iriyo had drawn in regards to training Olasa that was ultimately erased when the kidnapping occurred. While she trained her daughter in advanced combat, she never trained her to use firearms or kill. She’d only trained her daughter to defend herself and maim others in that process it necessary, but never to kill. But Iriyo realized she’d not always be there to protect her daughter, so she worked to train Olasa in more lethal forms of combat. Kokum loaned his Executioner pistol to them for small firearm training, and her father pulled some strings to obtain a Saber for similar use. They set up a makeshift shooting range and spent the next few months in training. When she wasn't training with firearms, Olasa was working out or keeping her combat knowledge refreshed with Iriyo and Kokum, who eventually hopped in to help with the training.

Two years after moving in with Kokum, Olasa’s abilities were much more honed. The firearms she used became her own, due to sentimentality and urges by her mother to have more means of defending herself than the blade. Life seemed to be simpler. She worked out and kept her abilities honed weekly, and managed to balance her studies out and graduate from online school, since public schools wielded more risks than rewards. However, her back-to-normal life suddenly took a downturn when an assassin was sent to track them down. They didn’t find Olasa or Iriyo, but Shaeto insisted upon working despite the threat. He wanted to keep the family supported, and as a result, the assassin found him at work one day. To send a message to Iriyo and Olasa, the assassin took Shaeto and tortured him mostly to death before depositing him near the local clinic. By the time Olasa and Iriyo had reached the clinic, it was too late. There was nothing to be done, except for the message Shaeto was instructed to deliver.

‘Come find me.’

Iriyo left Olasa with her weapons, too paranoid about the assassin to take so much as the sword. She wanted Olasa to be as safe as she could be, but to maintain that, Iriyo needed to deal with this assassin before they found their way to the apartment. She got ahold of a Carnifex from Kokum, and he insisted on escorting her away that night. After she left, Kokum made it a point to keep training Olasa, enforcing what she’d learned and building off of it. The two started building a bond from the lessons, and she started to see him less as a family friend and more as family. Her mother was gone for a full year, and whenever Olasa expressed the desire to go search for her, she was swiftly shut down. Kokum would always assure her that Iriyo could handle it. But then Olasa started to notice something. Kokum started seemingly random nighttime departures from the apartment. While they seemed random, he always did it once a week, which didn’t add up. His demeanor started to change as well. Suddenly the training was more lethal forms of combat, like he was training her to kill and at the same time, attempting to desensitize her to the idea of killing.

Olasa chose to follow him one night, and he managed to go quite far, entering a derelict apartment in the Wards. What she saw shook her confidence. Her mother was beaten bloody and restrained in the confines of a small room. The conversation she overheard, however, was even more troubling. Kokum had captured Iriyo with the intent of handing her to a mysterious third party. An unrecognized turian assassin, who had been Kokum’s partner in this endeavor, informed Kokum that their associates would arrive for Iriyo shortly, and Olasa couldn’t just watch her mother get handed off to unknown benefactors. Fueled by irrational emotions, she lashed out and attempted to rescue Iriyo on her own once the benefactor made an appearance. What Olasa didn’t know was that the ‘trade-off’ was actually a ploy to draw out one of Iriyo’s most dangerous adversaries. When she attempted her rescue, she recklessly placed herself in danger, and Kokum was forced to rescue her. Then their problems got bigger as the adversary, whose race was indeterminate due to their armor, attacked Kokum and his partner. Iriyo and Olasa barely made it out alive, while Kokum and his ally didn’t make it out at all. The look in Kokum’s eyes as they left, calm with a flicker of betrayal, haunt the drell to this day. She’d never see or hear from him again.

Olasa bore a lot of guilt for her actions. Kokum had provided Iriyo with cuts, but they weren’t too severe. They were merely meant to trick the assassin. The real damage came from the adversary, who delivered many blows to Iriyo while she was protecting her daughter. Iriyo suffered a severe injury to her leg. She couldn’t reprise her title as the Black Rose, much less go after the mysterious assassin who tortured her. Instead, Olasa chose to do this. Despite Iriyo’s detestment to the idea, she couldn’t do much to convince her of otherwise. And the injury to her leg prevented her from physically stopping her daughter from the course of action chosen. Since she couldn’t stop Olasa from leaving by verbal or physical means, Iriyo chose to give her daughter a better chance of survival through information. She identified the adversary as a dangerous assassin known as The Crimson Flame. She provided Olasa with the name of an old contact, and allowed her to take on the mantle of The Black Rose. The night before they went their separate ways, Iriyo branded her daughter with the Black Rose. Olasa departed the following day on a personal year to avenge her father, her mentor, and to protect her mother from this threat.

But what was she protecting her mother from? Olasa wasn’t given the full story. In fact, her mother knew vastly more about the Crimson Flame than she’d originally let on, due to the great shame she held for her actions. The Crimson Flame, a turian better known as Manilio Caedus, was once the heir to his father’s fortune. His father, Marnus, was a businessman turned corrupt. He worked in the business of pharmaceuticals, and made a living selling medical supplies to legal and illegal consumers. Whenever someone caught wind of this shady activity, they’d have tragic bad luck and disappear. However, someone who was silenced had gotten his story to his wife before he met a tragic end a few days later. Driven by vengeance, a contract was placed on Marnus’ head by a grieving spouse who didn’t want him to face justice, simply death. Iriyo accepted this contract, and upon discovering the turian’s actions, took him out. As she was pulling her blade from Marnus’ chest, his son, who had been interning at the company, had walked in and witnessed this act. There was no time to console, and Iriyo couldn’t bring herself to kill a teenager, so she fled the building, forever haunted by Manilio’s panicked screams as he cradled his dead father. This was why Iriyo had eventually retired from her life as the Black Rose. The Flame’s hatred was burned so deeply into his brain that he couldn’t be consoled. Iriyo created this monster, and her husband paid the price for it.

Iriyo gave Olasa the means to get in touch with a hanar that she’d frequently worked with back in her assassin days, and provided her with enough credits to rent an apartment. To keep her mind off of her mother, Olasa focused more on the work she had ahead of her. She contacted the hanar under the guise of the Black Rose, even showed proof of her brand, as well as her weapons. The hanar, Selyndor, worked with an organization that specialized in this sort of work, so Olasa was given a steady amount of contracts for targets in her general vicinity. Aside from the contract the Flame had taken on Shaeto, Olasa had no leads. Her mother didn’t provide further information on the Flame,  so Olasa decided to take some contracts to pay for her personal expenses, and see if any of them pointed her in the right direction. The investigation was put on the backburner, but whenever Olasa obtained a small piece of the puzzle, she’d keep track of it. For her contracts, she ended up taking the time to investigate them and ensure that they deserved what was coming to them, which narrowed down a few of the contracts. Kokum’s training taught her how to block out personal feelings when on the hunt. She convinced herself she was doing this for the right reasons. She saw an evil similar to what she saw in the Crimson Flame in all of her targets, and found it easier to kill them with that in mind. Over the next year, she used her hatred towards The Crimson Flame as a means of coping with her actions. She envisioned every target as a grotesque monster, a manifestation of how she saw her enemy, and convinced herself she was purging the world of these beasts.

After doing local contracts for a while, Olasa was given a sudden contract all the way in Omega. She didn’t want to travel there for a single contract, so she took on multiple small ones in Omega to make the trip more profitable and worthwhile. While she was there, she met an Asari in Afterlife under the name Kelixa T’vare. She was a dancer there, and the two started to hit it off. They became good friends through the month that she was there. Kelixa never judged Olasa for what she did, and Olasa never judged Kelixa. They’d both done things they weren’t proud of, and despite the vast difference of said actions, it never became a problem for them. As this friendship continued, something deeper started to bloom. Even when she wasn’t on contracts, Olasa stayed in Omega for a few more weeks to see Kelixa more often. When Olasa returned to the Citadel, she found herself missing the company of the asari. They stayed in touch online and called fairly often, but she still felt like something was missing. Kelixa expressed general distaste for her work, and Olasa offered her a place to stay if she wanted to find work on the Citadel. Kelixa eagerly moved in with her about a month later, and shortly found a job as a bartender in Purgatory. Despite being roommates, there was always a heat between the two that didn’t blossom until they’d been living together for a few more months. When they finally got together, nothing necessarily changed, short of their bond growing.

Olasa was twenty three at this point, and Kelixa was two-hundred-and-three. It became a joking point between them about how well she wore her age, especially when Olasa looked like the more mature one of the couple. They grew closer as time grew on. The years became a blur of more of the same things. Olasa would leave for a week to do a contract, Kelixa would tend to the bar, and they’d spend time on dates together. Occasionally, Olasa would have to leave for larger periods of time when a contract dictated more travel. It became understood that Kelixa was never to ask about work, because Olasa had numbed herself to what she was doing, and asking about it broke her facade a bit.

Olasa’s investigation into the Crimson Flame had been minimized for a while, due to a lack of leads. However, when she started digging more, she started getting followed by an unknown tail. When confronting them, she found that it was a lesser turian assassin, likely sent by her target, who attempted to kill her on the spot. This was her warning sign to be more careful. The last thing she wanted was for an assassin or attacked to be sent after Kelixa, so despite her vengeful desires, Olasa took the more subtle route and kept herself off the Flame’s radar. She took smaller contracts and kept her head low, even followed Kelixa to and from work due to her paranoia, before she did a less attention-grabbing investigation. She managed to establish a general vicinity of where the Flame operated from, based on a localization of the contracts they’d taken. She then started taking contracts in randomized parts of that area, hoping it could keep her foe off her back. But she’d never feel safe until the Flame was defeated. It was weeks of dancing around her enemy before Olasa came face to face with her father’s killer.

There were multiple cases being investigated, but only a handful fit the category that Olasa had narrowed the Flame’s style into. They left little to no evidence of foul play, chose torturous ways if dying, and always liked to leave a scar, incision, or some noticeably distinct mark on their victims. The most recognizable of these markings was a brand on the target’s body in the shape of an ember. It was the same with her father, and in this case, worked in her favor. She was able to narrow the search down to a smaller collection of buildings, and grew closer to her target. Before she could investigate which buildings were occupied, and end this her way, the killer came to her. They confronted her midway into her investigation and caught her by surprise. She fought the Flame with all the strength she could muster, and would’ve won if he hadn’t gotten away. When it became clear they could lose this fight, the Flame fled the scene, leaving Olasa to assume she had been the victor in this battle. During their fight, the Flame started spouting out about how she had killed his father, demanded why she did. Olasa couldn’t provide an answer to a question she didn’t know, and found herself puzzled after he had fled. She confronted her mother about this, and Iriyo inevitably caved and told Olasa everything which occurred. She didn’t hear of cases similar to her rival, but she kept her ears to the wind in case her enemy returned.

She and Kelixa lived a chaotic life on the Citadel. Olasa’s enemies would occasionally be a problem, and eventually they moved into a different apartment, but that's as far as it escalated. They spent years together, not discussing their jobs but instead their relationship. They joked about marriage, kids, and settling down but in reality, they knew it wouldn’t be possible with the line of work Olasa was in. These talks had a more profound impact on her than they would’ve before, and she made the choice of stepping away from the life. She’d saved up plenty of credits in her time working to let them live tame lives for a while. Kelixa made Olasa want to strive to be a better person. She made everything easier. Then, the Reaper War put a damper in this simple life. Olasa had never liked to involve herself in the events outside of her own personal life, but that changed when the battle was brought to her. The Reapers attacked her home, and despite her desire to fight his invader, she needed to protect the ones she loved. In the midst of the chaos, she went back for her mother, but found nothing in the apartment she’d left her in. She trusted Iriyo to find some safety, and instead took Kelixa, along with essential supplies, and went to find a shuttle to escape in.

Civilians were turning on their friends, and everything was going insane. But regardless of the chaos, they seemed to be finding their way through. Everything was looking up, until Kelixa fell victim to the same insanity which plagued other civilians. She attacked Olasa, who didn’t fight back at the fear that she’d hurt her lover. As a result, Kelixa ended up beating the drell severely. But before she could do irreparable damage, Kelixa fought back against her controllers. In her last act, she seized Olasa’s sword and plunged it into her chest. She died in Olasa’s arms, begging the one she loved to go on without her, and Olasa did.

She boarded an empty shuttle and fled the Citadel alone. She spent months in the shuttle on the brink of insanity, living off the food and water she’d packed for herself and Kelixa. What kept her from ending her own life was the fact that her mother, father, and even lover had all sacrificed so much for her protection. It would be selfish to waste their efforts. She was stranded on her own for two months before an Alliance ship found her. When she was found, she was shortly placed with some refugees. Shortly after, she was contacted by some organization that called themselves RIFT.

The Reaper War took everything from her, and the time after Kelixa died was a blur of attempting to seek refuge in a controlled location. But when she was contacted with the opportunity to avenge the woman she loved, Olasa didn’t hesitate in accepting it.