Riley Stern

Riley is slender for a former Alliance solider. Barely reaching 5’ 6” outside of armor, she’s often frustrated with looking up to others, either human or alien. She tries to mitigate this with her footwear, and by almost nearly always standing straight up at attention. She prefers to talk to people sitting down, and separated by a table, to lessen her small size. Aside from that, she is reasonably muscled, but Riley favors light armor and small guns. Her preferred armor is a set of light, custom-made and modded Colossus armor, which is white with orange accents, not the best when not trying to draw attention to one’s self during a firefight, but she rarely wants to leave cover in the first place. Her weapon of choice is a heavily modified Stiletto pistol, although she does also carry a submachine gun she changes out almost constantly depending on her moods.

Outside of armor, Riley tends to just look like a scruffy human. Her shoulder-length dirty blonde hair is haphazardly cut most of the time, and pulled to the back of her hair in a pony-tail, when she hasn’t shoved it in her helmet. Her face is mostly devoid a make-up, unless someone counts numerous unknown smudges as such. She has a small, high placed nose, but her most distinguishing feature is her large brown eyes, which aren’t even that notable. Her appearance is mostly inconspicuous. She considers herself rather average looking, which is fine by her, and coupled with her small height and stature, which she does hate, does lend to her being largely unnoticeably most of the times . . .

Unless she’s specifically trying to draw attention to herself.

Riley likes to say that an old friend best described her as: A person with a million complexes and the unquenchable desire to prove every single one wrong.

She is extremely intelligent, at least she once considered herself to be. She says she then grew up and realized the world was much bigger than her. She was expected to follow in her father’s footsteps and become an Alliance Marine, and she failed. She was expected to use her technical skills for the greater good, and here she is wasting them on Omega. She was expected to follow her older brother’s example, and set one for her younger brother, and failed at both of them. She begrudgingly sees her past as a pattern of failures.

As such, Riley keeps to herself. She likes to keep things with other people at surface level detail. Riley portrays herself as a one-time hire human engineer, and once the job is done, she’s done with you. That applies to most of her interactions with most other people: everything to her generally works out as a onetime thing. She does have a few drinking buddies on Omega, but they tend to know her well enough to avoid certain conversation topics.

To strangers, Riley is rather falsely friendly and happy, and though she’s unlikely to stab her current team-mates in the back for one reason or another, she’s not going to go out of her way to mingle. She can follow orders, as long as she deems them reasonable and not likely to kill her, and she knows how to work in a team. However, if she sees someone as a threat or they’re doing something she doesn’t agree with, her working relationship with them is likely to end very quickly.

Morally wise, Riley doesn’t see herself as inherently good or evil. She’s seen enough shit in her life that she tends to just want to leave encounters alive. If that can be done with all participants left alive, then all the better. She carries her gun for a reason, though she has always considered her omni-tool the more deadly part of her arsenal.

To her few friends, or more accurately, drinking buddies, Riley can be happy, bubbly, or giggly, though that may be due to the alcohol more so than any sort of camaraderie. Relaxed, she can be rather approachable, although that shouldn’t be mistaken for trust.