Fun Character Stuff: Scars
So because I tend to add details on my characters and then add or remove them without really thinking, I’m nailing down some fun headcanons I think are relevant to my Nerd Herd and their lives.
For this entry, we’ll be focusing on their scars and distinguishing marks.
Yvir’Reizh vas Vestira nar Inyrel
Yvir has a fair amount of blemishes for a quarian, having been shot at for most of his early life and then fighting in the Reaper War. His first came when he accidentally shot himself in the leg with his father’s handgun.
It left a jagged little mark on his left leg and the Inyrel’s doctor less-than-impressed with his marksmanship skills. From there, he would go on to get another mark on his neck, which he got during a search and rescue mission for a downed Alliance frigate when a Cerberus sniper shot him: the bullet impacted his helmet, fragmented and proceeded to slash down the right side of his neck.
Later in the war he would get a stab wound while trying to deflect the blade of a Phantom in a desperate bid to keep her from plunging it into his face.
All three times, he caught an infection.
Unlike others, he is incredibly self-conscious about them and will not remove the parts of his suit that cover them except under pressing circumstances.
Actiar Triuras
Actiar, my biotic turian doctor, has seen a fair amount of action which has given him a bevy of hair-raising stories to tell and a few marks on his physical person.
The largest and most notable of these is the missing chunk of his left mandible, which he lost in his early days serving the Hierarchy. The young Actiar had been placed in charge of a platoon responsible for peacekeeping on Aedlion, a turian colony wracked with newfound separatist sentiment after the Hierarchy had forced several towns to relocate when various minerals useful to weapon production were discovered beneath them.
They had gotten a tip from a local informant about the presence of a separatist weapon cache in the area when they were ambushed.
One of them knocked him to the ground and tried to stab him. As they were wrestling for control of the knife, Actiar decided that anything was better than getting hacked up by some psycho and pulled a grenade off the man’s armor and pulled the pin then dived out of a window as his attacker fumbled for the now live grenade at his feet. Actiar got away, but not far enough: As he turned his head, a large piece of shrapnel that just happened to be flying in his direction buried itself in the middle part of his left mandible, leaving it hanging limply from his face as they fought their way out of the ambush.
In a stroke of hubris unmatched by any know-it-all med student to date, he decided to operate on himself using just a hastily sanitized combat knife to cut off the mandible, figuring it could be easily replaced. Instead of healing properly as he’d hoped, his battlefield surgery had inadvertently caused the nerves to die, making it impossible to graft cloned tissue in place of the wound.
Nictea Gaellix
Nictea is easily the most scarred of my characters: a stab wound here and a gunshot there, and a few burn marks from dodging falling, flaming debris have marred her midsection. A shotgun blast shaved off a chunk of her left thigh during a bust that went bad. She also sports a knife wound on her right arm that she got in her first encounter with a Cerberus Phantom, that if she flexes in the right way, looks like a thunderbolt.
She also got shot in the “but-tox” in a still-classified operation that the Citadel Council refuses to reveal to the public. When asked, all that Nictea will mention is that it involved a pursuit through a research complex and a nervous Alliance marine on perimeter security that somehow confused her for a Cerberus operative.
