Samus Aran is something of an enigma to me, and the rest of the galaxy who only knows her as a legend probably feel the same. Her exploits are infamous, and I suspect slightly exaggerated, and sadly it is only from those accounts that I can piece together something of a profile on my fierce fellow bounty hunter.
Perhaps the most wide spread tale about Samus is the one of her first mission: wiping out the Space Pirate and Metroid presence on her home planet. She left a smoking crater and a destroyed Space Pirate vessel in her wake, making me puzzle at how exactly the dots connect between her initial objective to exterminate the hostile forces and the explosive method she employed. Was the infection simply so deep she had no choice, or would this end up becoming her modus operandi? Either way, having personally inspected the wreckage left behind on Zebes, I cannot help but shudder in my gears at the thought of what being on the receiving end of her wrath must have been like. Her continued exploits would only further my anxiety.
Following Zebes, Samus chased down the fleeing remnants of the Space Pirate forces to a planet of the Chozo, and the accounts of what transpired before she arrived are a mystery to all but Aran herself. Her report of her deeds there was a pragmatic recount about Pirate attempts to mine something called Phazon, and assurances that any threats of the toxins presence was cleansed from the planet. But what of the Chozo who had inhabited the planet? What were the Space Pirates motives, and from what grave did they dig up their leader to pit him against Aran yet again? And what exactly was Phazon? The answers to these, I suspect not even Samus knows, and if she does it is not information she is keen to share.
An underrated mission she undertook, perhaps, holds the most mystery; her assignment to the planet Aether to investigate a mission Federation patrol. She came back from the planet accounting the patrol had long been lost, as was all her objective entailed, but there was more to it than anyone could have suspected. Out of curiosity I investigated the planet and interacted with its inhabitants, an insectoid race of some sort who recounted Aran's real exploits on the planet, which boiled down to nothing less than the salvation of our dimension against an unstoppable force. This first hand recollection completely shattered any preconceptions I had towards Samus, and I'm forced to re-examine my feelings on her.
Before, I saw Aran as, well, a machine. Even more than that: she was a weapon. I knew of her connection to the Chozo, the unmitigated power of her suit, but I wondered if there was anything beneath the shell that remained human. I more than anyone know what it is like to sacrifice for the sake of functionality. I have given up more of my old body to the cold, but limitless possibilities of technology and the unparalleled good it could help me achieve for the galaxy. But I never sacrificed my humanity, my desire to help others even when it wouldn't be pragmatic to do so, and while I can look at my life and see it to the most calculated efficiency, but I will never lose what makes me who I am. For the longest time, I wondered if Samus had taken the opposite approach: abandoned herself to the destructive possibilities of her suit, with little more than a cold pragmatism to the outside world when it came to interacting with others and securing her own livelihood. But what I learned from the residents of Aether challenge this hypothesis with the theory that she inconvenienced and risked her own safety, for no reward, to save a people to whom she owed nothing.
If I know anything about Samus Aran now, it's that I don't know nearly enough. I will need more data before I can make anymore preconceptions. Fortunately I will soon be working with her personally on a group task force of sorts for the Federation, now that they've called myself, her, and two other bounty hunters for some emergency job or another. Perhaps when I meet the legend in the flesh I'll finally learn if there's more to her than that suit she wears.