#(no spoilers as long as you've made it off habitat 7 and to the nexus)

[dearophelia]

3, 10, 15 for Tori, please!

[Ryder questions]

3: Do they have any piercings, tattoos, or notable scars? Do they dye their hair, or is it a gene mod?

She has two holes in each earlobe, in which she wears tiny gold mismatching studs: a crescent moon, a star, a hamsa, and a triangle. In her right ear, she has a silver spiral helix piercing; it’s an arrow. She has a blue Star of Life (without the rod in the middle) tattooed on her inner left wrist, a Rod of Asclepius down her spine (literally all the way down, it’s a fairly large piece; it’s mostly black, and the snake is shaded dark blue), and a small black omega symbol just below the first knuckle of her right index finger.

Victoria has utterly neon orange-ombre-to-yellow hair (x). Her natural hair is dark brown; she first bleached and dyed it on Omega, and she liked it enough that it stuck. The upkeep is A Lot, so she eventually shelled out for a cosmetic gene mod.

10: How have they dealt with the aftermath of Habitat 7? How deeply does this affect them?

Victoria is, in many ways, emotionally modeled after me (I am not projecting, I am not projecting). 

So she has an incredible capacity to just pack shit away and not have it affect her at all until it reaches some critical mass and everything falls apart very dramatically. At the beginning of the game, she’s at 0% capacity - her tank is empty, ready for shit to happen and fill it up. Because they weren’t close (they are very similar, but they were not close at all), her father’s death goes right into that tank with no problem, and she keeps going. She feels the loss of a parent, but it isn’t particularly sharp, and not something that’s going to stop her in her tracks.

SAM kinda freaks her out, but - again, because Victoria is me - she reaches a point of “Okay, I’m kinda tired of being freaked out by this, I actually cannot spend any more emotional energy on this particular problem, so it is time to sit down and figure a few things out.” 

Becoming Pathfinder is the biggest trauma of all, actually. I’ve mentioned this in a few other memes, but Victoria is not A Leader. Scott is the leader. Victoria does In Charge very well - she is bossy, demanding, and assertive as hell and gets shit done. If Pathfinder were just “go to planets, fight kett, find home,” she could do it no problem. But it’s more than that - it’s represent the entire Milky Way, make decisions that affect not only us but the native residents of Heleus, play nice with Nexus leaders, make everyone happy, etc. 

She internalizes it for a while, pretends she can handle it, pretends that she isn’t drowning (I am not projecting), fakes her way all the way through Eos and Havarl and halfway through Voeld - fake it until you make it - before it finally hits her. No, she can’t do this. Not in a despair “I can’t do this!” kind of way, but an actual “I actually am incapable of this, I have zero training, zero context, I am a doctor, you guys” sort of way.

There’s an email from Tann that comes in - relatively innocuous in content and request, actually - and it is just The Last Thing. So - again, because Victoria is me - she has the “I cannot continue as things currently are, what do I need to make this suck less” conversation with herself (and SAM, SAM very quickly becomes a good sounding board for her). But, unlike me, it doesn’t take her four months to work up the courage to say something about needing help to someone who can provide it! She marches herself down to the bio lab, plops herself down on a storage crate, and says to Cora, “I am about ten feet below water right now, and I’m sorry my dad chose me over you for this gig, but I really need your help.”

Cora happily assists (this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship). And when she sees just how much Victoria is downplaying how overwhelmed she is even with Cora’s help, she nudges Victoria in Lexi’s direction. Lexi takes one look at her and says “Yeah, you should’ve been on anxiety meds like a month ago, let’s start now. Also, stop trying to solo this. You don’t have to talk to me, but you should open up to someone on this ship - we’ve all got your back.”

15: What was their reaction to the angara and the Exiles? How did learning there was a whole new species in Heleus affect them? How did news of the rebellion affect them?

(sidebar: “angara and the exiles” is the name of my new rock band)

She’s not terribly surprised about the angara. Given the number of species in the Milky Way, and that Andromeda is bigger (at least I’m assuming, given the relative quantity of systems in one single cluster in Andromeda), she’s not surprised there’s another species. If she’s surprised by anything, it’s that they’ve only found one native sentient species.

(though the kett and exaltation could easily explain that)

Initially, the emotional honesty of the angara is very jarring to her. Victoria is an open, emotional person…with friends. She’s genuine (…usually), yet reserved as fuck around strangers, acquaintances, colleagues, and people like Tann. She can’t deny the benefit of it (hug or punch - or hug and punch - your way through things from the start, and you save a lot of hurt feelings and fallout at the end), it just takes some getting used to. Having Jaal aboard, and getting used to it with one angara instead of all of them at once helps immensely. 

I, uh. Honestly, I get the Collective, the Rebellion, the Resistance, and the Outcasts kind of mixed up. I can tell the difference between humans and angara, obviously, and if I think hard enough about it I can figure out which group is which…but I haven’t read a lot of codex entries (because I can’t, why the fuck is this font so small Bioware and Microsoft), and my auditory processing is on the shaky side these days even when I’m trying, so I’ve lost a lot of the Sub-Groups And Pre-Game Events Of Heleus plot.

Regarding the Rebellion and Exiles, she’s kind of the shrug emoji about it. When you’re only presented with shitty options, you’re going to make a shitty decision. It’s all you have, it’s all you can do. She doesn’t fault anyone for the uprising (rebellion, whatever) or its results. She does think that maybe there should be a better judicial system in place than Director Tann Made A Choice, but she’s a doctor, not a lawyer, and keeps her nose out of it - she has enough to worry about without getting involved in that can of worms.

She loves Kadara Port, and she gets along really well with Sloane Kelly. Kadara is not Omega and Sloane is not Aria, but there are enough similarities that she goes “Yes, I know how to do this.” (Vetra and Drack are suitably impressed)