Emmanuelle Sharon

Captain Emmanuelle Sharon is a former soldier in the Systems Alliance Navy, who later became the head of security for NairidaCorp.

Early Life
Born in the Segonia township on Mindoir in 2154 CE, the future commander had a childhood that is a subject of debate; in public, she has spoken fondly of growing up on a collective farm, surrounded by relatives and neighbors, but Segonia has a reputation among conspiracy theorists for the experiments that supposedly took place there. Whatever the truth, her childhood ended abruptly in 2170 CE, when batarian raiders hit Mindoir in an attempt to drive the humans out of the Terminus Systems. Emmanuelle lost her entire family and her home, and she herself was captured and taken to a batarian space station, where she was subjected to The Box, a very small coffin-like box to which she was confined for two months.

The Box
The exact nature of The Box is one of the Batarian Hegemony's most jealously guarded secrets, and so exactly what Emmanuelle endured for those two months is unknown (Emmanuelle's later recollections of her time in The Box, obtained under hypnosis, were inconsistant), but she has suffered constant nightmares and night terrors ever since. Eventually, her screaming and pleading caused one of her torturers, Grivak Tarks, to begin having nightmares of his own. A former doctor who'd been forced into torture duty for disobeying his superiors, Tarks was already miserable after weeks of watching his peers torture victims for no reason. When he was assigned to personally adjust the settings on Emmanuelle's Box (and thus became directly responsible for her suffering), he became extremely depressed, until finally, in a suicidal fit, he decided to send a message to the Alliance informing them of the station's whereabouts. During the ensuing Alliance raid, Emmanuelle was freed and taken back to a hospital on Mindoir for treatment.

Emmanuelle hated living at the hospital, and tried to run away on more than one occasion. Initially, the doctors feared that she had developed Stockholm Syndrome, but one of the Alliance military administration staff, Pamela Nilsson, managed to get through to Emmanuelle and discovered that she'd developed strategies of her own to deal with what she had experienced and resented having a regime of treatment forced on her. Though Nilsson was not formally trained as a counselor, her superiors authorized her to begin one-on-one counselling.

With treatment, Emmanuelle Sharon became very independent and even began helping Nilsson to develop better strategies for treating the survivors of the batarian raids. She still suffered from persistant nightmare and night terrors, but was otherwise considered a fully functioning individual. Seeking new challenges for herself, she enlisted in the Alliance military at age 18. However, against Nilsson's advice, Sharon stopped seeking counselling for her sleeping problems, afraid that it would cause her to be held back.

Academy
For much of her time at the academy, she adopted a brazen, highly-confident attitude around other recruits, but otherwise tended to keep to herself. She did become extremely close to her roommate, a similarly-introverted medical student named Ofelia Hayes, to the extent that their mutual friends nicknamed them "Manual" and "Feely". At one point, Emmanuelle tried dating a classmate, Roger Emmerich, but he proved to be a particularly poor "beard"; his preference for other male recruits was so obvious that his peers christened him the "Human Torch".

During her training, her instructors were impressed with her determination to go beyond the minimum requirements of each mission, though some of them noted that she often focused on details at the expense of the "big picture".

SSV Ypres
When she graduated from the N7 special forces program, the Alliance brass assigned her to the SSV Ypres. Under the command of Captain Tawfiq Omar, the Ypres had been running a very swift and efficient operation, but the Alliance was concerned about Commander James Skinner, an Earthborn Sentinel with a penchant for breaking rules to get the job done. Skinner had been credited with ensuring the Alliance victory in the Battle of Antarok, but the Alliance brass had been deeply disturbed by the ruthlessness that he'd displayed there, and had transferred him the Ypres, which mostly performed military law enforcement. Sharon was assigned to replace Cmdr. Timothea Young, who'd been placed on maternity leave.

Though Sharon and Skinner disliked each other, they proved to be surprisingly effective, particularly during the "Oiwa Incident", in which an unauthorized VI took control of Nakamuraza Station and attempted to shut it down out of rage at being "rejected" by her programmer. Sharon managed to reason with the VI and convince it to let almost all of the station's inhabitants evacuate while Skinner supposedly introduced a virus that purged the VI from the system while leaving the station operational. Thanks to this strategy, the casualties were few, but Sharon's squadmate, engineer Akihiro "Jackie" Mifune, was badly wounded, and would end up paralyzed from the waist down as a result of his injuries.

SSV Hegra
Though the mission on Nakamuraza was considered successful and earned her a promotion to the rank of Commander, Sharon felt guilty about Mifune's injuries, as they had arisen as a result of her orders, and this guilt caused her sleeping problems to get worse. When her CO began to notice, Sharon filed a request for a temporary transfer to the Hegra, hoping to be reunited with her beloved friend Ofelia, who was now the ship's CMO. As it happened, the Hegra had a less-than-stellar reputation, and her CO, Capt. Charlotte Beauclaire, had been seeking a better Executive Officer to help reign in the largely-undisciplined crew. Hoping that the change of scenery would do her some good, Capt. Omar authorized her request.

From the start, Sharon's stint aboard the Hegra was troubled. For one thing, Ofelia was no longer there; she'd been transferred to an Alliance hospital. Meanwhile, Beauclaire made no secret of her attraction to Sharon. At first, the young commander resisted the captain's advances, but when the stress from her new position aggrevated her sleeping problems, Beauclaire offered a solution in the form of Bliviserene, a long-discredited drug that had been intended for treating PTSD, but which had been removed from the market after being found to cause cognitive damage. Desperate for relief, Sharon took the drug, and became Beauclaire's lover.

This proved to be a toxic relationship. Beauclaire's world was far from peaceful; her husband, an admiral, was abusive and manipulative, and nearly untouchable. Emmanuelle soon found that Beauclaire sought to use her to fulfill her own fantasies of control, and thus Sharon found herself doing things she would not have contemplated on her own. Eventually, though, Beauclaire felt guilty about how she was treating her lover, and, in perhaps the first sign that she actually cared for Emmanuelle's well-being, she unceremoniously dumped her and sent her back to the Ypres.

The Zak'kon Mission
Humiliated after being dumped by Capt. Beauclaire, Sharon returned to the Ypres in 2181 CE and began drinking heavily. Eventually, her commanding officer became concerned and ordered Sharon to take leave in order to "dry out" before the Alliance brass learned about her drinking problem. Though he had hoped she would seek out counseling, Sharon was too afraid that this might lead to her being compelled to discuss her relationship with Beauclaire or her earlier trauma, and thus she headed to Illium instead.

Though she initially began to fall back into her bad habits, Sharon felt guilty about deceiving her commanding officer, and tried to get clean. But one night, while out at a club, Sharon was approached by a young woman, Sylvia, who gave her a spiked drink. The drink was laced with stimulants and a hallucinogen, and triggered a near-psychotic episode in Sharon. Sylvia, unaware that the drink had been spiked, tried to calm Sharon, eventually resorting to taking her home and bedding her.

The next morning, Sylvia shepherded Sharon to meet her boss, the asari Matriarch Eumenia, who offered her a large sum of credits in exchange for a very special job. The Matriach's daughter, Siani, was a commando with the Livis company. The Livis had been sent to the batarian colony world Zak'kon to defuse a rapidly worsening skirmish between the Esan Liberation Army and the Batarian Hegemony, and had instead become pinned down, and thus Eumenia wished to hire Sharon to extract her daughter. Sharon refused and walked away. Meanwhile, however, Skinner's information broker had informed him that Fletcher was hiding out on Zak'kon. When he discovered about Sharon's job offer, he convinced her that she had a duty to rescue innocents, and so a few days later, they ended up accompanying a small army of asari mercenaries to Zak'kon.

Based on the information they had received prior to departure, Sharon believed that she and Skinner would easily rescue Siani. Upon arriving, however, they discovered that the batarians' numbers were nearly three times the number that they had been given. Furthermore, Siani was not at the camp; Sharon was informed that she'd been sent on ahead to the lost city of Nairida. Joining a group of Siani's squadmates, Sharon travelled to the city, but when they finally located Siani, they learned that Eumenia both them and Livis Company, intending to create an incident that would draw the Alliance fleet into the conflict, thus sparking a war that might force the batarians to give up the territory that they had captured from the asari centuries earlier.

Eventually, the batarians launched an offensive against Nairida, and only Sharon and Siani survived. For months, they were besieged by the batarian forces, and during that time, the two fell in love. Ultimately, unable to hold off the batarian forces, the two fled off-world and returned to Illium to confront Matriarch Eumenia. Another battle ensued, culminating in Sharon killing the Matriarch.

Not long after, Sharon, her confidence restored by her relationship with Siani, decided to try and salvage her career in the Alliance Navy, only to discover that in the intervening months, her affair with Admiral Beauclaire had come to the attention of Beauclaire's jealous estranged husband, Admiral Evelyn Gargosh, the head of the Office of Alliance Territorial Hegemony (OATH), a black-ops organization. Gargosh blackmailed Sharon into joining OATH, threatening to have her discharged and imprisoned if she refused. Unwilling to face the prospect of jail, Sharon agreed, and was assigned to the SSV Belgrade.

SSV Belgrade
Now under the uncomfortable scrutiny of her former lover's vengeful ex-husband, Sharon struggled to make do, unwilling to grant Adm. Gargosh the satisfaction of surrender. She spent three years hunting down deserters and traitors, but discovered that many of those she had captured were getting the same "offer" that Gargosh gave her. She also hated being away from Siani for long periods of time. Nonetheless, for most of her time in Gargosh's division, she was a model officer, and greatly respected by her crew.

But things eventually fell apart when Gargosh deployed Sharon to track down Maj. Maria de Wilden. Once a highly-decorated officer, Wilders had gone rogue, and was at the time tearing through Omega on a campaign to bring "justice" to the notoriously-corrupt station.

Exceptionally well-trained and utterly ruthless, de Wilden was a far tougher opponent than Sharon could handle, and her attempts to bring de Wilden in resulted in the "Mad Major" brutally beating and sodomizing her. Compounding her injury and humiliation, Sharon was left to take the blame for the damage caused by de Wilden's rampage, and spent several weeks in a Blue Suns jail. There, she was fortunate enough to make the aquaintence of Dr. Lorelei Mobious, a former Alliance scientist who had been working out of clinic on the space station before crossing the Blue Suns. Mobious treated Sharon's injuries, and in exchange, she helped Mobious to offer medical services to other inmates. Eventually, they were joined by two other inmates, Alvy Kristjansen and Gwen. When Alvy accidentally discovered that the amnesiac Gwen had cybernetic implants that had been damaged, the foursome formed a plot to escape, though in the end, only Mobious and Gwen managed to escape. Sharon was later bailed out by Siani.

Private Sector
After her brutal treatment at the hands of the Mad Major, and Gargosh's subsequent ouster from the Alliance brass, Sharon was granted the possibility of an early discharge, and at Siani's urging, she left the Systems Alliance Navy to serve as the captain of NairidaCorp's flagship, the NCSV Arine. Several of Sharon's crew, most notably Paul Barnes and Bethany Truman, followed her, causing some scandal in the Illium media, which suggested that the Systems Alliance was trying to install "plants" in an ostensibly private, asari-owned company, but these concerns faded as more asari joined the crew.

The Lirrax Invasion
The first year of NairidaCorp's efforts at "third-party conflict resolution" were turbulent. Jointly hired by Palias Security and Archon Detainment Systems to help curb inter-species violence at L'Shero Correctional Station, the Arine was forced to intervene when the nearby world Tamaris was invaded by the lirrax, a predatory species with an ancient grudge agains the asari. During the confusion, Maria de Wilden, who had since become a prisoner at the station, escaped and stole a drop shuttle, which she then accidentally crashed onto the planet's surface. Sharon managed to capture de Wilden's accomplice, a disgraced former Alliance soldier named Justine Marsters, but an ambush by the lirrax invaders caused her and Marsters to become separated from the rest of the NairidaCorp team.

Sharon and Marsters were brought before the lirrax High Queen, Vatra Alirr, whom they discovered had also captured de Wilden. Initially, Vatra intended to kill all three women, but de Wilden quickly managed to ingratiate herself with the invaders, and learned that their larger plan was to spike the planet's water supply with a drug that would cause mass insanity, and she suggested that they test the drug on Sharon.

Appears in

 * Mass Effect: Manipulation
 * OATH: Disgraced
 * The Diomedian Chronicles: Internal Maintenance
 * The Oath-Keeper's Tale
 * NairidaCorp: Bloodlust
 * NairidaCorp: Sleepers
 * The Diomedian Chronicles: Phantoms
 * Zana Squad: Containment
 * Zana Squad: Nos Morituri
 * Zana Squad: Completion
 * NairidaCorp: Pacified

Behind the scenes

 * Sharon's original portrait was modelled after actress Cote de Pablo (from the TV series NCIS).

From the creator:
"Emmanuelle Sharon was not the first Shepard that I created, but she's the one that I actually have affection for. After several playthroughs of both ME1 and ME2 with her, I have trouble envisioning anyone else as the Hero of the Citadel. Hell, I even kind of cried a little (just a little) when she was reunited with Liara at the end of 'Lair of the Shadow Broker'.

"Creating a Paragon-type character is easy enough - the pure Paragon will always do what is morally right. But you have to add some flaws unless you want to create a Dudley Do-Right with a stick up his ass. Sharon's flaw is a fear of sleep, the result of unadressed psychological issues stemming from that long-ago raid on her home. Of course, no widely-revered hero wants to admit to having night terrors, so she's developed strategies for hiding her problems that are a bit self-destructive.

"For those who are curious, her name came from the classic French movie theme Emmanuelle in the Mirror. When I actually started writing the story that would become Mass Effect: Manipulation, I knew that I wanted her to be a bit rough. Originally, in my head, the story started out with her staggering out of bed, hung over but trying desperately to pick herself up, with Emmanuelle in the Mirror playing in the background."