Special Operations Directorate Official Profile
Core Profile
Species: Human
Gender: Female
Height: 5'9"
Age: 34 ESY
Skin Hue/Racial Morph: Black (Earthborn turned spacer, raised in Jamaica)
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Glowing blue/silver, similar to the Illusive Man's.
Class: Sentinel
Known Equipment & Gear
L95 "Liberator"
A sturdy, reliable and lightweight assault rifle, the 7x40mm L95 is the weapon of choice for both Union forces, and others across the Milky Way, including the human Systems Alliance's military. Developed by Black Star to provide a flexible, reliable and easily mass-produced weapon for the Union's military forces, what the Liberator lacks in power and accuracy, it makes up for in dependability, magazine capacity, and sheer numbers.
Easily modified, the Liberator is composed of an upper and lower receiver assembly, which can be swapped out at will to adapt the weapon to any given mission. Common modifications include replacing the upper receiver with particle beam emitter and swapping the standard 100 round magazine for a particle cartridge/expanded battery pack for space combat, applying a shorter upper assembly to create a compact Personal Defense Weapon for pilots and vehicle crews, swapping magazine and barrel to allow for the firing of 18.5mm (12g) disintegrating shot-cups to create an automatic shotgun, and switching the lower receiver for one with an integrated 25mm semi-automatic smart grenade launcher.
Cerberus Retrofitted Phantom Armor
Image Below
http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-21/art/me3-phantom.jpg
Created by The Illusive Man's engineers during the Reaper War, the Phantom Armor was originally made for highly modified biotic humans to move around the battlefield very quickly and focus biotic attacks through the palm. Its wearers were nicknamed 'Phantoms' for their biotic and acrobatic prowess. Operative Marie admired the design and mobility of this armor and salvaged a set off of a dead Phantom. This design has been repurposed to also support tech attacks the same way it supports biotics. Layla also made the helmet removable, which it wasn't previously to hide the nightmarish husk faces of the Phantoms. It acts as a fully functioning spacesuit when the helmet is equipped.
Reaper Tech Enhancements
Operative Marie became obsessed with the Reapers as soon as she grew old enough to understand them. Even though their remains may be scarce or forbidden nowadays, she has gone to great length to track down even the tiniest bits of Reaper technology to understand it better. When she does figure out just what she has bought, she will sometimes try and integrate it into her own body. The most significant artifact she bought on the batarian black market was supposed to belong to Harbinger himself, although Layla's tests show it being considerably younger. It was a "brain" fragment of sorts, just a minuscule component of what made the Reaper tick, but even such a small amount of the Reaper's data was near incomprehensible to a human. Against every recommendation she heard, Operative Marie integrated the fragment, already a synthesis of organic and synthetic life, into her own brain. It heightened her combat ability, reflexes and boosted her intelligence to near genius levels. It also began to taint her body. Some of her veins on her torso and hands turned dark blue/black, her eyes began to glow, and she has nightmares virtually every night about the Reapers, and an ancient avian race that she suspects was harvested to make the particular Reaper whose data she integrated. She swears that she sometimes hear whispering in the back of her mind, too.
Physical Profile
Layla Marie is average height and build. She is very proud of her hair, which she tries to maintain despite the hard conditions she often finds herself in. Her eyes are obviously a concern to some, and she finds herself wearing sunglasses in public if just to avoid annoying questions. Otherwise, she is proud of her 'mark' of Reaper tech.
She agrees to wear whatever is protocol, out of combat, but she has stitched the Cerberus symbol into the chest of her clothing.
Psychological Profile
Operative Marie is, above all else, dedicated. She will kill or be killed before she admits defeat. She has a strong passion for understanding the universe around her. She has her masters in xenobiology and has studied hands-on on many different planets. She also is beyond obsessed with the Reapers, and has published many papers on them and their origins. She used to be a respected, if junior, scholar in the field, until she implanted the Reaper tech into her brain. After that, the scientific community blacklisted her as an unstable fanatic who was using the Reapers to farther her own self interests.
She is a very ambitious woman and always shows what she wants. She has spent so much time alone that she will have trouble readjusting to having a social life of any kind aboard a spaceship. She also has never been in such close quarters with others and feels anxious around too many people, especially aliens. She adopts a pragmatic stance when dealing with mission objectives that may seem cruel to some, but efficient to her.
Her dedication to Reapers and life on a spaceship has granted her an appreciation of technology, and she can claim to understand it and manipulate it better than the average person. She is also a biotic, but with more advanced technology she suffers relatively few drawbacks. Her parents wanted her to study biotics with the asari and become an adept, but Layla always preferred technology.
While she has a fascination with other planets and species, she does recognize that humanity needs someone looking out for its special interests. Layla's great grandfather, Simeon Marie, was one of the first members of Cerberus when it was a black ops group and he served very closely with the Illusive Man. Simeon was killed when he tried to oppose the Illusive Man's indoctrination, but ever since the Maries have been staunch supporters of the original idea of Cerberus: humanity's watch dog among the stars. Cerberus has always held a very special place in Layla's heart.
Historical Profile
Layla was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised there until she was 18, where she enrolled in a prestigious college on the Citadel. During her childhood Layla was relatively well off. Her mother raised her while her father was an operative for a Cerberus splinter group trying to gain power and restore the good name of Cerberus as indomitable allies of humanity and watchful friends of aliens. He was killed just days before Layla's high school graduation by the "remnants" of the Illusive Man's Cerberus. Layla's mother always had a fascination with the asari and wanted Layla to study among them. Up until her father's death, she was going to Thessia to learn under the apprenticeship of Matriarch Oridalya. That changed when her father was killed, and Layla took a year off to help her mother and then went to the Citadel to study xenibiology and intergalactic relations. She knew that she couldn't run away from her destiny. As a Marie, she was Cerberus through and through.
After graduating with her masters in xenobiology, Layla largely became an independent scholar. She bought her own ship and learned to pilot it herself, and she went to many remote and unexplored planets to study their flora and fauna. She believed that in order to support humanity's role in the galaxy, she needed first to understand what role it could play. She traveled to several capitol planets of other aliens, including Tuchanka, Thessia and Sur'Kesh, in an attempt to learn about the people there. During her travels she became knowledgeable of technology, capable of using skills such as incinerate, cryo blast and neural shock. She also practiced her biotics and was fond of defensive abilities such as barrier, stasis and lift.
Simultaneously, she became involved with Cerberus, or rather the traditionalist splinter group that called itself Cerberus. This group boasted around 2,000 members, mostly political activists and scientists pushing the boundaries of humanity's knowledge, like Layla. She eventually rose in the ranks and by age 30 became its leader. She knew the dangers brought on by the association to Cerberus by those ignorant of her cause and playfully referred to herself The Illusive Woman to hide her identity. She became an information broker for the Alliance, trading secrets and information about other species to give humanity an edge. She found that the Alliance was willing to pay more from a human source than the Shadow Broker, so Layla would buy from the Shadow Broker and other aliens and sometimes make a profit selling to the Alliance. Layla is a known Cerberus advocate but nobody knows of her position as the so-named Illusive Woman.
Always obsessed with the Reapers, coming into power of the Cerberus network didn't help her addiction. She began to use the resources of Cerberus to buy any Reaper artifact she could find, including the brain fragment. She was a known scholar on the Reapers and the way they operate, as previously noted, until she was ostracized from the community by implanting the brain fragment into her own brain. She felt betrayed by this, and it further drove her into the arms of Cerberus. She did what she did in the name of advancing the cause of humanity.
By the time she turned 34 she had realized the strength of the Union. Her network had grown into around a billion credit operation; only a fraction of what Cerberus was, but it was a start. Most of the credits went towards her information network, but a large subset was set aside for buying Reaper tech and experimenting with it. Layla decided to support the Union over the Council, and The Illusive Woman declared her support of the Union to show that Cerberus really had changed. She forwarded her identity, her actual identity as the head of this group, to Xander O'Tarin in a show of honesty and transparency. Hours later, she received a request to join the S.O.D. Layla's real goal here is strategic; much of her Cerberus's resources are spent buying information. She hopes to make connections in S.O.D. and actually get in the business of getting information from its source, freeing up credits to go to rebuilding Cerberus.
Misc. Notes
She actively opposes any other Cerberus branch, calling them heretics and defilers of Cerberus's name, although she would die before seeing her own branch of Cerberus destroyed or dismantled.
She doesn't neccesarily agree with all of the Union's ideals, but rather allied herself with them for political reasons. Her views on aliens are very similar to the "human sics his beloved dog on a bear to escape" metaphor of Ashley Williams.