#foster addison

I mean, first of all, she has to deal with Tann, an accountant who was, what, the EIGHTH link down the chain of command, basically trying to run the Nexus as his own private kingdom, that he's going around as if the other administrators should see him as their leader, when the structure of matters has him as a board member, that it's not his say-so that moves things but a collective agreement. That's gonna cause friction no matter how you look at it.

Then we move in to the fact that she's the head of Colonial Affairs, and for the year since she came out of cryo, there's been no way to establish the colonies - the Golden Worlds are a bust, the one that their people could reach, which is a radioactive waste, had the two sites fail, they're also dealing with the kett, who see all non-kett life as something to dispose of (until and unless they can harvest them and make them into kett as well, which *shudder*).

Then, of course, there's the Uprising, which depleted the reserves they had in terms of people as well - everyone who left the Nexus had a role to play in the Initiative, and now the people who were needed to serve these functions is either dead or exiled. Even acknowledging that the Initiative surely planned some margin for error in their assemblage, that's still a logistical headache.

When the Hyperion arrives, delayed by at least a year, to the point that people on the Nexus thought that the arks had been lost completely, Alec Ryder, the guy who sold a lot of the people in the Initiative on the project, is dead, and he named as his replacement not the trained second, the expected successor, in Cora, but his own kid, a decision that surely from her point of view looks like an act of sheer nepotism, that Alec was turning the position into some kind of hereditary thing, since Player Character Ryder is a smartass kid who's got like minimal credentials for the role - I repeat, they were not even in the line of succession for the role of Pathfinder, and Alec just gives them the position, and WE the audience also know that he did that at least partially because he was protecting Ellen Ryder's secret survival, there was no other reason for him to give Ryder the role of Pathfinder but those locks, he could have just given Ryder his helmet and passed the Pathfinder codes to Cora.

So her being antagonistic to Ryder, her hiring the Three Sabers, her overlooking Spender's misdeeds... All of this has to do with the avalanche of problems she's dealing with as she has a seat at the table for the Nexus turning into the largest mausoleum of Milky Way species, as the sleepers in cryo are left to suffer freezer burn and face the same hard calculus question as Vigil did with the prothean scientists and who to let die so others can live, because they can't come out of the pods until there's a legitimate source of food and supply (and we have it as a running gag that Suvi is struggling with Heleus plants being edible - at this point, their only source of food is what came with them and can be grown by them).

Her decisions are about what helps in the short term, because she can't depend on there being long term strategies - she doesn't even know if any of them will be around to suffer the long term consequences, because the game begins with the Initiative at a point where they could all die the next day. If Spender resolves issues before they hit her desk, that gives her time to focus on the bigger stuff. If the Three Sabers offer an alternative to the Pathfinder, there's something being done if and when the reckless kid gets themselves killed (and, let's face it, given just what Ryder has to do in the plot, there was every likelihood they WOULD have gotten killed). If Ryder finds her cold and off-putting and harsh, well, she's not there to make friends, she's there to keep people alive - as Ryder accomplishes things over time, she DOES noticeably thaw around them, as they prove that they're actually up to the task and getting results.