Introductions
I guess I'll start at the very beginning. My name is Eris Jane Shepard, and I was born April 11, 2154 in the med bay aboard the SSV Curie. My mother, Admiral Hannah Shepard, named me Eris presumably because it is the planet she conceived me on while she was doing a tour of duty in the outer rim of the Sol system.
I had a father, obviously, since wasn't cooked up in a lab—at least not originally. Though I never knew him as a child, for better or worse, I supposed he was also with the Alliance, or maybe he was working on the same station as my mother, either way it's not important because you can't miss what you never had. My mother told me once that she regretted not having a second parent around for me to learn from, but she explained that emotions were high, and everyone was just doing crazy things with the discovery of the Charon Relay…herself included.
Being raised a 'Spacer' meant that home was tagging along with my mother on Alliance space craft, orbital stations, or remote military posts on remote enterprising colonies, but never on Earth. There were too many new worlds to claim, interests to defend, and resources to discover for a naval officer with my mother's skills to ever receive orders back to the Sol System.
In the early years of intergalactic space flight many military personnel and colonists were accidentally exposed to Element Zero dust or EEZO. It was first discovered by our species within a Prothean ruin on Mars in 2065, and was found to be the key in unlocking advanced space travel. Anyway, limited exposure usually yielded minimal side-effects, if any, but those who had more concentrated exposures sometimes developed EEZO poisoning, which always resulted in a slow and painful death. On the other hand, those who were not poisoned but had heavy exposure saw the EEZO manifest in other ways, such as their children being born with defects including: cancers, intellectual deficiencies, physical malformations, or on a very rare occasion, biotic nodules. To simplify it, biotic abilities can be utilized with techniques derived from the Element Zero nodes in the skin that produce micro mass effect—or dark energy—fields which allow the afflicted individual to manipulate the energy in any environment through a type of focused telekinesis.
As a result of my mother's exposure to EEZO dust with inadequate protection while working on space-flight technology during the early years of Faster-Than-Light travel, I was among some of the first humans to be born with biotic abilities. I suppose being one of only a handful of human biotics at the time wasn't all that bad, and for all intents and purposes it could have been much worse than it was. A lot of children back then who were subject to the unwanted side effects of EEZO exposure, underwent gruesome treatments and experiments. I assume my mother's position with the Alliance Navy protected me from many of the terrible realities that biotic children faced back then, she knew exactly what she needed to protect me from, and she did her best to see it happen.
Anyway, humanity was stretching our legs with FTL travel, and my mother was on the front lines, paving out the frontier. She was a veteran of the First Contact War where she picked up her commission by taking out a Turian fighter with just small arms fire, while repairing the main cannon on the dreadnaught she was serving aboard. She was just as much a hero as anyone in that senseless xenophobic war, but nevermind my bias.
Humans as a race, are inherently suspicious of any differences, even among ourselves—though the Systems Alliance supposedly changed all that with the consolidation of power and military resources on a species-wide scale, but that is the precipice to our peaceful achievements given our long and bloody history of killing one another for usually petty reasons. This 'Humanity First' position was permanently solidified with the introduction of a formidable avian threat in the turians, which were not particularly fond of our differences either. I think it is because we're so much alike in other respects, but I will get into that later on.
Being the representative multi-species amalgamation of galactic cooperation, The Citadel Council finally intervened by delivering a peace-treaty with Systems Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy, in order to end the First Contact War, and welcome us to the interstellar community. Some would argue that their primary motivation for inviting us into their sphere of influence was for access to the technology in our Prothean archives on Mars, though most did not care about the true motive and monopolized on the conditions of joining Citadel space for shared technology, thus gaining advanced tech from other species that expanded human interests exponentially.
The galactic front eventually accepted that we were there to stay, though we didn't make it easy for them despite the treaties and confederations made. In fact, there were some that resented the diplomatic agreements as opposed to all-out war—alien and human alike. In the Citadel's efforts to include humans in galactic allegiance, they sent out representatives for many years, to assist with humanity incorporating Citadel doctrine, and to get acquainted with humanity as well.
As a result of The Citadel's intervention, I met my first alien, and this individual ended up being one of the most influential people I ever encountered in my life.