A young Reign Vasquez looked over the landscape below her, eyes narrowed in disgust at the way her kind piled on top of each other. Houses with no yards, towers of apartments and condos, all choking the land it stood on. At fifteen she knew enough to understand she could never ever live like this, in so much squalor and disparity. Her family had no money to speak of, no goals, no aspirations, no desires...they just...did the same repetitive actions from the time they awoke in the morning until the time they went to sleep, day after day after day.
Reign couldn't stomach the thought of following in their footsteps; the hamster wheel wasn't for her. She sighed heavily, not sure if it was a sound of contempt or pity, and shifted her glare from the overpopulated Megalopolis to the skies above her. She couldn't see any of the stars, but she knew they were there. They were always there.
Once, in elementary school, her class had gone on a field trip to a planetarium in the mountains. There had been the usual boring educational presentation, but at the end, there was a special treat for the children. Their seats in the auditorium they were seated in slowly reclined so that the children could easily view the ceiling, where the astronomers had put on a holographic slideshow of different nebula clouds and star systems throughout the universe. Reign was immediately hypnotized , completely fascinated by the colors and their graceful formations. It was then that she had decided that she was going to see those very sights in person or die trying.
As she got older, she tried to figure out how to get up there, away from the cacophony of life around her and into the solitude of space. And not just the quiet of space called to her, but the promise of adventure. There were other planets to discover, other races of beings to meet, ancient ruins to explore, people to save, foes to defeat.
She discovered this need to be a hero when she was ten, during recess on one random average day. There had been a group of boys that were in a circle tormenting a younger boy with leg braces. Seeing the tears on the little boy's face pissed her off like nothing else, and her anger only grew when she realized that not a single person witnessing the emotional terrorism tried to stop it.
Reign had picked up a hand full of rocks and started running at them, throwing the projectiles at the heads of the tormenters, cutting a few of their heads up. The ringleader of the little bully gang turned to punch Reign, but she had already dropped to her hip while running and slid under his arms into the circle the older boys had made. She got her feet back under her quickly and smoothly when she was between the predator and his prey, one palm on the asphalt bracing her wide stance, the other arm flung out in an attempt to shield the younger boy. She bared her teeth and hissed at the older boy, a habit she'd adopted from her many feline wards, and glared at him, waiting for him to dare attack her...
The offender wasn't very smart, and easily enraged, so it was no surprise when he charged Reign, fist drawn back, yelling in wordless anger. The boy outsized Reign in more ways than one, except in tenacity. She answered his battle cry with a roar of challenge of her own, leaping from the ground onto the older boy's chest like a monkey, and pounding his face and throat with the sides of her fist. He went down with her still pummeling him, and she continued to pound, slam, shake and break as much as she could until the teachers finally broke the fight up...but the damage had been done. He went to the hospital on a stretcher, and she got expelled...but that never changed the fact that she was proud of the expulsion. It may have been her first fight, but it certainly was far from the last one.
She gained quite the reputation in just five years, but she didn't feel it was a bad one. It was known that Reign Vasquez could not and would not put up with any kind of bullying. She was a hero to those that seemed to have targets forever painted on their backs, and a bane to the existence of those that honed in on the targets of her flock.
She gave the hazy glowing sky a last loving look, and turned back to her bike to go home...
Many many years later, many many changes had found Reign. She had made it off Earth, out of the barrio...but she'd been forced to abandon her family, forced into a partial identity change, joined the Alliance Navy, under went Special Forces Training, completed the N7 Program, all to run away from the worst decision of her life. She knew she could never rectify the situation, but she knew that to keep that event from turning into a mistake instead of the horrid decision she'd made, was to make sure she didn't make the same decision. She was in the middle of contemplating these changes while standing behind the pilot of the ship that had become her home, the passing stars and shimmering glow of the mass effect shields protecting the ship's hull as they hurdled through the heavens putting her in a trance.
She realized the pilot was talking to her, and she shook her head in sudden confusion as her focus snapped back to the here and now.
"I'm sorry, could you repeat that for me?" She said, looking down at the seated man as his hands flew over a console.
"I said that Captain Anderson want's to see you in the CIC, Shepard," he repeated, rolling his eyes at her.
"Oh, shit, okay. Sorry I wasn't paying attention, don't rat me out, Joker," She hissed, rubbing the back of her neck in frustration.
"We'll talk about how much that is worth to you later, Commander," Joker muttered.