#i wish i could beam my character channel for her on discord into everyone's brain

[orokay]

I’m so curious about your OC Mallorie, what is her backstory? What does she do specifically for Cerberus?

Oooooh >:) I've both been hoping someone would ask abt her and dreading it bc I have information floating around in my head but not a lot of concrete stuff planned out on her background, especially the early stuff.

I know her mom passed away when she was pretty young and her dad was in the Alliance but did something that caused him to get dishonorably discharged. The pair moved to Omega when she was in her tweens, maybe a bit earlier, and her dad joined up with the Blue Suns. She spent a lot of time on her own since her dad did a lot of off world contract work and at one point he just never came back. She assumed that he'd been killed in action, but at some point she learns that he'd either come into a lot of money on a job or cut a deal with someone or something and just decided to start a new life elsewhere. As I said, this part is the most fuzzy for me because I have basic ideas for it, but I haven't ironed out exact details lol.

Growing up, her dad did the bare minimum (and often less) of parenting, but he and some of his buddies did teach her a bit on how to defend herself, mainly so she could defend their apartment while he was away. She put those skills to use to survive on her own once he disappeared.

It was the usage of those skills and her desperation for companionship that caught the attention of and made her easy prey for a Cerberus recruiter named Marina. Marina befriended and took in Mallorie when she was at her most vulnerable and when Mal was sufficiently dependent on her, she introduced her to Cerberus. By the time Mallorie realized what Cerberus was, she felt trapped. She was very young, had no support system outside of the group, and the only person who 'cared' about her was in the group. She didn't believe she'd be able to leave alive and if she did, she didn't think she'd be able to build up a life for herself, especially with the looming risk of Cerberus hunting her down. She kept those feelings close to herself and wasn't seen as a risk because of her dependent relationship with Marina.

IIRC, Phantoms are a new type of unit because they use a lot of reverse engineered reaper tech. I initially had her as a former Phantom, but because of that info, I'm thinking she was trained in a sort of Phantom prototype unit (maybe based off of N7 Shadows since they seem pretty similar) and those units went on to get 'upgraded' with reaper tech around ME3.

She was in Cerberus for seven years, a large portion of which was combat training, but also included low and high risk missions the further along in her training she got. Her conscience ate away at her the entire time but she still didn't think she could leave as the more she saw what Cerberus was capable of, the less she believed she could get out in one piece even with her acquired skill sets. During her time with them, however, she encountered an alliance agent that she began sending whatever data she could get her hands on in an attempt to alleviate her guilty conscience. Most of the stuff was likely junk, she wasn't ever important enough to access anything big generally, but she needed to do something. It was when she did stumble upon and send out data on something big that she was finally found out. She was tortured for information on her contact, but luckily the base she was being held in was raided by a Hierarchy patrol before they could kill her. She was brought to the Citadel for medical care and, wishing to avoid deeper questioning on why she was on the base to begin with, hitched a ride off station as soon as she was stable enough to not die in transit, ending up back on Omega.

I wasn't going to do this initially, but here's some stuff copy & pasted from a conversation about her that goes more into the context of her mindset that contributes to why she joined and stayed with Cerberus:

I think it manifests in self destructive behaviors like trying dangerous things on a whim or nearly picking fights with people who could definitely kill her by making stupid comments to strangers on Omega, or, going back further, joining a human supremacist group after her father abandoned her when it genuinely goes against who she is as a person. I definitely need to go back into her profile and see what I had that caused her to join Cerberus, but I think whatever it was was definitely helped by them swooping in when she was young and incredibly vulnerable and giving her a place to belong. I can imagine there are probably Cerberus recruiters who get people to join the same way people recruit for cults. I think the woman that Mal killed in that one short bit I wrote three billion years ago who was sort of implied to have been an ex of Mal's (I think I was still mostly closeted back then and the intention wasn't there, but when I reread it a year or so ago I was like "….the subtext…") was either the person who recruited her, or at the very least the person who kept her from really looking behind the curtain for a long time. Eventually her morality did win out (obviously) but she definitely stuck around longer than she would have because she didn't want to lose the only friend she had and kept talking herself out of seeing what Cerberus was until she couldn't anymore. In a lot of ways, Mal is extremely lonely and gullible in the sense that she'll do anything for a sense of connection. If you tell her you care about her, she'll do anything or be anyone to make sure you keep caring about her, because she's terrified of being left behind and doesn't believe that the person she really is is good enough to keep people invested. Literally brought a Vorcha into her home and nursed him back to health and then kept him around afterwards, when they're considered by most to be like… pests. I definitely think she did it because she's a genuinely good and caring person, but I also think that an underlying part of why she opened her house to him even after he could technically go out on his own is that she saw an opportunity for friendship. I think she gets less desperate to hold on to all of them and starts to relax once she realizes that the rest of the group genuinely cares about her and won't be going anywhere, but I think there was definitely a period at the beginning of her friendship w/ everyone where she would do anything to keep them around which probably manifested mostly in her doing dumb stunts to keep them entertained or like… always trying to pay for stuff or whatever.