Lyra’Zae vas Cassius

Tech Assistant Apprenticeship.

**Lyra'Zae vas Cassius** is the daughter of Kara'Zae vas Idenna, the former member of the Migrant Fleet's Admiralty Board. She is a Marines Infiltrator and a member of the Council Recovery Corps.

## Biography

Lyra was born to Kara’Zae vas Idenna and Reeto’Zae vas Cassius aboard the Migrant Fleet’s most populated Civilian ship, Idenna, in the year 2163, 6th of October. Even before her birth, Kara and Reeto, her mother and father respectively, have already established themselves as notable members of the Migrant Fleet: While Kara governed the Quarian species as a member of the Admiralty Board, Reeto was the distinguished researcher for Quarian technological advancements in the Migrant Fleet’s science vessel, Cassius.

Her mother, Kara’Zae, is a vocal supporter of studying and regaining control of the Geth, whilst her father wanted to peacefully coexist with the Geths or, at the very least, find another planet to colonise and call home - which have made him detested by the Migrant Fleet residents who wanted to annihilate or control the Geths. Even with their contradictory opinions, her parents have surprisingly managed to maintain a healthy relationship together.

When Lyra was born, Kara had to temporarily step down from her position as the Admiralty Board member to take care of her until Lyra reached the age where she was no longer dependent on her mother’s immune system. When Lyra was old enough to be put inside Environmental units, Kara and Reeto were too committed to their work to take care of her, so they entrusted her to the care of Kara’s closest and most trusted friend, Captain Nara’Yilon vas Idenna. As Idenna’s former medic, Nara was kind and compassionate not only to Lyra but to others around her as well.

She often told stories of healing injured soldiers to Lyra and instilled in her the importance of supporting others in their time of need. Though Nara might not have been related to her by blood, she was the perfect parent figure that Lyra needed in her developing years that allowed her to grow into an empathetic young child. During her mid to late childhood, Nara began to introduce Lyra on proper Quarian etiquette and mannerisms. As the daughter of an Admiral, Lyra was expected by her peers and the society to uphold herself in a way that did not dishonor her mother’s name. Lyra struggled to follow Nara’s examples. She learnt to be polite and hospitable to her peers, which earned her the respect of her acquaintances, but she lacked the social charm or the winning personality to effectively traverse the difficult tides of diplomacy like Nara.

At the age of thirteen years, Reeto temporarily took some time off from his work to celebrate his daughter’s coming of age and helped Nara invest resources in the creation of Lyra’s first enviro-suit. Though Kara could not leave her Admiral duties for more than a span of a single day, she briefly visited her daughter and installed a simple beginner’s coding tutorial program in her omni-tool as a congratulatory present. Lyra was immediately taken with the introductory lessons of codes, dedicating most of her free time studying from her omnitool and developing her programming skills.

As Lyra was old enough to serve the Migrant fleet, the Conclave initially considered assigning Lyra to take on the role of a mechanic aboard Idenna but Nara disapproved of their decision as she had seen Lyra’s potential with programming and knew assigning her as a mere mechanic meant wasting her true potential. Nara, as Lyra’s Captain, held a meeting with the Conclave members and argued that Lyra was a natural at coding and the best way for her to serve the Migrant Fleet would be in a science lab where she would be trained and assigned to contribute to the advancement of Quarian technology.

At first, the Conclave was hesitant: much of the Migrant Fleet’s science projects were classified, due to their heavy reliance on their technology to continuously improve their nomadic lifestyle and their enviro-suits. If they allowed Lyra to contribute to their research, they would potentially expose her to most of their sensitive data when she had yet to prove herself in her Pilgrimage and legally obtain her adulthood.

After a lengthy debate between Nara and the Conclave, a compromise was found. Lyra would be apprenticed as a tech assistant in Cassius, one of their main science ships. She would not contribute to any research projects but she would be mentored and trained as a tech assistant under the guidance of one of their science researchers. She will only be promoted to the position of a researcher on the grounds that her mentor vouches for her excellent performance and she has successfully completed her Pilgrimage. In the year 2176, Lyra was transferred to the Fleet’s main science ship, Cassius, where she was apprenticed to Aren’Taal vas Cassius, a stern and no-nonsense head researcher of the Science ship.

At first, Lyra was overjoyed to be aboard a lab ship and eagerly anticipated opportunities to further advance her programming skills. But her enthusiasm was quickly squandered as Aren regularly disciplined her for the smallest mistakes - such as bringing him the wrong equipment or wiring the machinery in the wrong order. Aren expected flawless standards upheld in his ship and a trainee was no exception to his strict regulation. Reeto worked in Cassius but in different sections of the ship from his daughter: whereas Lyra assisted in the Equipment Room under the supervision of Aren, Reeto performed his research in the Lab Rooms. Lyra often bumped into Reeto after their work and the two had the opportunity to share the rare father and daughter bonding moments they never had during Lyra’s early years.

Reeto was a quiet but benevolent man. During Lyra’s apprenticeship, he showed her holographic pictures of the Quarian’s former homeworld, Rannoch, and tried to instill the importance of upholding peace with others, and to never answer hate with more hate. He was the role model in her life who inspired her pacifist personality and to exercise patience and precaution when dealing with direct confrontation with others. Once, when they were alone, he even confessed that he was the descendent of the Geth sympathists from the Morning War.

Though the Migrant Fleet never kept records of Geth sympathisers, Reeto taught Lyra that the Geths were more than simple machines - while true, they were originally created to serve the Quarians as Kara have vehemently pointed out, but they were, in their own mechanical way, the abandoned children of the Quarian species. Lyra quickly absorbed the lessons passed on from her father and promised him to always strive for diplomatic resolutions and build mutually beneficial relationships. When Lyra reached the age of 16, the inevitable tradition of Pilgrimage loomed over Lyra’s head. Kara grew concerned that, during her Pilgrimage, someone might discover that Lyra was the daughter of a Quarian Admiral and kidnap her to blackmail with the Flotilla. As a result, she asked one of her Quarian military instructors, Ren’Yelon vas Curah, who was fiercely loyal to her, to mentor Lyra in basic combat and weaponry training.

Lyra had to temporarily step out of her tech assistance duties to be transferred to the Migrant Fleet’s training facility ship, Curah. There, she learnt to take advantage of her vast technological expertise and synthetic programming to combat her opponents. She was constantly tested to her limits to break through Curah’s toughest digital security programs, before she was expected to reprogram Ren’s combat drone in a mock fight in a short span of time. Armed with her existing knowledge of coding, Lyra managed to impress Ren with her expertise and breezed through her assessments. In the next phase of training, Lyra was trained to endure difficult scenarios and enhance her physical capabilities.

Due to the Quarians’ limited resources and space for a full training facility and obstacle course, Curah deployed their military recruits on the icy planet, Haza, to train their infantry's’ endurance and agility. Haza’s freezing climate, paired with mountainous slopes and remnants of Quarian fighter ships, have made its landscape difficult to traverse for inexperienced travelers. While the Quarian soldiers were expected to survive Hara’s harsh weather with limited resources as part of their training, Lyra was considered too young to participate with the rest of the full grown recruits. Instead, she was fed and trained in the Quarian encampment, gently guided under the watchful eye of Ren’Yelon.

During their mock fights, it was discovered that Lyra was prone to panicking and retreating from her enemies as she did not fare well in close quarter combat or being up close with her enemies. Ren decided to teach her to become a competent sniper instead. He handed her a basic M-92 Mantis as a beginner’s introduction to sniping. Most of Lyra’s first few weeks of training consisted of her lugging the sniper with her across the vast rocky landscape of Haza. Each day, she was expected to beat her previous time of completing the course or she would need to restart the day’s training all over again. For a year, she endured the training with little to no complaints. Though she struggled to complete the course, she eventually grew more agile and fit, until she broke the Migrant Fleet’s records of traversing Haza’s agility course.

When Ren grew more confident that Lyra could carry her sniper comfortably around, he brought her back to Curah and began to teach her the fundamentals of aiming and firing at her targets in the ship’s shooting range. As Lyra turned 18 in the year 2181, the day of her Pilgrimage came. Families, friends and even the soldiers she trained with came by with gifts before her departure from the Migrant Fleet. Kara gave her an intricately designed scarf, Reeto packed her a full week’s worth of immunity-boosting injection kit, and Ren gave her a rare weapon: A Javelin sniper. She piloted a small transport ship and chose Noveria, a planet full of both legal and illegal data, as her first choice of destination to begin her Pilgrimage.

For weeks, she struggled to get by. She offered her machinery and engineering expertise to employers looking for workers, only to be turned away for being Quarian. However, a Salarian manager of Synthetic Insight saw potential in her, and offered to pay large sums of money for her services if she could remodel some of his software meant to be sold to the more scientific and engineering geared customers. Lyra spent the first few days adapting to the unfamiliar technology of the Salarian’s wares. But it was not long before she was able to tweak his software programming to increase its efficiency and functional usages, which gained them a larger market share.

Whilst she worked for Synthetic Insight as a means of scraping together enough credits to survive, Lyra took an interest in rumors of the company’s more morally grey areas of Synthetic research. During her shifts, she meticulously studied the security of the company’s computer system; when she was not at work, she shut herself in her apartment to program her own SQL Injection software and planted it within Synthetic Insight’s web server. This allowed her to gain administrative access to their database where she could gain full disclosure of the company’s data regarding robotics research.

When Lyra returned to the Migrant Fleet seven months later, she brought with her extensively compiled experiment files on artificial intelligence and new software to upgrade the Fleet’s existing technology. Most of her Pilgrimage gifts were immediately sent off to the science vessels of the Fleet. Aren was impressed with the amount of data his science department received and even offered to vouch for Lyra’s membership with Cassius should she chose to accept. It was then she earned her legal adult name ‘Lyra’Zae vas Cassius’.

For the next few years, Lyra used her newfound status as the Fleet’s researcher to study the compiled data from Synthetic Insight to deepen her understanding of Artificial Intelligence and initiated a joint project with the Migrant Fleet’s engineers to advance their species’ computational knowledge. Kara actively encouraged Lyra to extend her research on the military side of Synthetics, particularly on the Geth’s defensive tactics, to which Lyra ignored as it compromised her sympathy for the Geths.

In the year 2186, the Admiralty Board declared that the Migrant Fleet have officially formed a mutually beneficial alliance with the Terminus Confederacy. The Board believed that the alliance would bring greater inflow of resources that would benefit their nomadic lifestyle significantly. Lyra and her father, Reeto, had doubts that the Confederacy would stay true to their word, but they were committed to ensuring the Migrant Fleet came through this war resilient and strong.

Lyra was ordered by the Conclave to join the Migrant Fleet Marines as they believed that her expertise with programming and marksmanship would benefit the Fleet more if she was in the military rather than in the laboratory. She was transferred back to the planet Haza for further training before she was assigned to the Marines’ Infiltration Squad. She was one of the many Quarians who participated in the invasion of the Elysium during the Second Skyllian Blitz. Due to Lyra’s quiet and agile movements, she joined the Tactical Strike subdivision of her group, where she was responsible for quietly maneuvering around the enemy front lines and picking off key targets from the enemy’s flanks. At times, she was ordered to take down the commanding officers from her vantage point behind the enemy lines - out of twenty assigned VIP targets, she has managed to score respectable twenty kills.

For days, when Lyra was not in active combat, she questioned if what she did was the correct course of action. Her moral compass and her loyalty to the Fleet were constantly interlocked in internal conflict, causing her great duress in the war. She sought solace by attempting to convince herself that she was acting in the service of the Migrant Fleet’s future and desperately clung on to that belief for the entire duration of war. But despite the Migrant Fleet and the Confederate’s joint effort, the war did not turn in their favor. She and her crew were forced to retreat when their commanding officers declared that the combat was lost.

When the Migrant Fleet finally ceased fire with the Council in 2187, in preparation for the inevitable Reaper war, Lyra was reassigned to one of the Fleet’s main battle cruisers, the Scorpio, as its navigator and IT specialist. But the guilt of her military service against Elysium still remained and continued to reside within her in the coming few years. The Scorpio, along with its Quarian war ships, stood side by side with its newfound Council Space allies when the Reapers advanced upon their galaxy.

After the Reapers were finally destroyed by the Relay Network Weapon, Lyra was recognised by the Conclave for her faithful service to the Fleet and was offered the opportunity to become the Squad Leader of the Migrant Fleet Marines, to which Lyra refused as she had become quite tired of inflicting violence in unnecessary wars. She returned to her position as a researcher and continued her joint project to advance the Migrant Fleet’s technology.

For years, Lyra sought to repent for her killings during the invasion of Second Skyllian Blitz. At first, she dedicated herself to the Fleet by offering her research knowledge to ensure a more comfortable future for the Quarians. Then, she caught word of the Council Recovery Corps being formed to assist in the recovery of the galaxy. With permission for leave granted from the Admiralty Board, she boarded a small transport ship and headed towards the Citadel to sign up as a CRC operative.

## Personality

Despite being a distinguished markswoman, Lyra is a pacifist at heart. She detests settling disputes with violence or war, preferring to talk through her differences if diplomacy was a viable option. However, the safety and the well-being of the Migrant Fleet is always her first and her foremost priority at all times - a trait she picked up from her Admiral mother. If there exists dangers which threatened her species and her home, she would not hesitate to take up arms and fight back, applying her programming knowledge and marksmanship skills in the field of combat.

She actively avoids disruptive arguments with others when given the opportunity and she will remain generally passive and patient if she was verbally or physically confronted. Some have mistakenly summed this side of her as her fear of other people, which was not the case. The simple truth was that Lyra simply detests encouraging hostility and fails to grasp how to stand up for herself, therefore she deals with arguments by simply remaining patient and sympathetic.

When she isn’t on the receiving end of open hostility, Lyra is generally a gentle and genuine person. As a daughter of an Admiral, she grew up submerged in political discussion and lengthy debates. Due to the pressure of trying to uphold a good image and avoid disappointing her mother, she became quiet and reserved, rarely voicing her contradictory opinions out loud in favor of seeking common ground with others. This has often earned her comments from her associates that she would never make a great politician like her mother if she yielded too easily. Lyra, on the other hand, would rather not deal with the murky waters of politics. Instead, she is far more interested in burying her head behind a screen and programming the Fleet’s computers or compiling research data.

Her emotions are as clear to read even behind an enviro-suit. Whether it was her obvious body language or the way her voice quavers, Lyra is a terrible liar. She can not keep a calm and unassuming front when she is expected or required to be dishonest to her peers. The common symptoms of her attempt at lying are: heavy stuttering of her voice, tense shoulders, feigned nonchalance that is uncharacteristic of her and flimsy excuses to evacuate the room at the first opportunity.

In combat, Lyra can only fire sniper rifles and pistols with top notch accuracy. If she was given any other weapon types, her hit rate plummets to the level of an amateur. She can almost always be found on a high vantage point, behind a solid cover, with her sniper rifle pointing down to the terrain beneath her. She prefers to take down her enemies from a distance with her sniper or bypass her enemies through stealth alone. Armed with her Tactical Cloak and her training as a Quarian Infiltrator, she can infiltrate electronic doors and gain access to most, if not all, fortified compounds.

Her main downfall in a fight is her lack of awareness of her surroundings. Lyra pours every inch of her concentration in the scope of her sniper and carefully picks off her enemies at a distance. This has left her vulnerable to ambushes around her and any who manage sneak behind her can easily take her down.

Her second biggest weakness is defending herself in hand-to-hand combat. Though Quarians are generally not the best species at exchanging blows unarmed, Lyra is even more terrible at throwing a punch than an average Fleet Marine. Her strikes are clumsy, she flinches quite easily at a glancing blow, and have sprained her wrist more times than she have toppled a training dummy - an embarrassing secret which her former military squad mates never let her forget.

## Skills & Hobbies

* *In the blink of an eye:* Lyra is surprisingly fast and agile for someone wearing an enviro suit 24/7. She can silently maneuver around or over obstacles in less than half the time of an average Quarian, enabling her to narrowly avoid getting hit during combat or silently flank unsuspecting enemies and take down vulnerable key targets when they least expect it.
* *Bullseye:* Give Lyra a sniper rifle and she can produce a hit rate that is always true to its mark. No matter the situation, whether the target is behind cover or is fast moving, she can hit her mark with an accuracy that made her the distinguished infiltrator of the Migrant Fleet Marines. Unfortunately, her marksmanship does not apply to other weapon types except for handguns.
* *Hack 101:* Lyra is a professional when it comes to reprogramming synthetics or bypassing security terminals. With her expertise in coding and robotic engineering, she can turn synthetics against her enemies to turn the tides of combat and infiltrate advanced security systems with her own homemade software to access classified data within a matter of seconds.

## Physical Description

Lyra possesses a slender and lithe build with defined shoulders due to her years of carrying a bulky Javelin on her back at all times. She never forgets to drape her dark navy hood over her helmet and shoulders when venturing outdoors, which helps her avoid eye contact and avoid attracting attention due to her shy personality. An intricately designed blue scarf, with gold circled patterns, nestles comfortably around her base neckline with its ends trailing behind her when she walks. Her enviro-suit is painted in shades of dark and sky blue, with metallic rims of gold, and a bright orange visor on her helmet. Lyra also packs extra thermal clips and suit repair kit in her utilities belt strapped around her waist.

Lyra speaks with a soft, docile voice, which can make it hard for her to be heard in a noisy room. She possesses a distinct Quarian accent when she speaks, easily associating her to the Migrant Fleet with her voice alone. Her hands are often interlocked with each other and constantly fidgeting when she is nervous and her helmet is slightly angled downwards to avoid eye contact.

### Armament

* Javelin
* Sidewinder
* Omniblade

### Abilities

* Defense Drone
* AI Hacking
* Overload
* Tactical Cloak

## Addendum:

After being declared MIA in a CRC operation gone wrong, Lyra'Zae was reunited with Kara'Zae vas Idenna a few months later. Kara, who had relinquished her leadership position as an Admiral to search for Lyra, has decided not to return to her position within the Admiralty Board as she is content to lead Idenna's IT specialist department as a civilian.