Neyda Dartanis (NPC)

N  ame : Neyda Dartanis

 Age : 137

 Role : Copilot

 Race : Asari

 Affiliation : Freelance Mercenary

 Physical Appearance : Short, square-jawed, almost “manly” Asari with a disconcertingly feminine voice.

 History : Neyda came from a military family. A mixed military family: h er “father” was Turian Navy lieutenant Coliseas Arisiran and her mother was Kermoda Dartanis, senior quartermaster of the Destiny’s Ascention. This gave young Neyda a lot to live up to when she joined the Asari Navy sixty-five years ago. She distinguished herself in Navy flight school, earning top marks in formation flying and close air support maneuvers. Her performance “above the boundary” was good enough to qualify her as an exoatmospheric pilot, and as a result, Neyda spent sixteen years at the helm of the Asari destroyer-escort Sharsa, later “graduating” to larger vessels like the over-powered cruiser Cybaen and the state-of-the-art fighter carrier Lusia’s Shield.

It was while piloting the Lusia’s Shield that Neyda made the first, and last, mistake of her naval career. During a close flyover of the colony for which her ship was named, their navigator had misjudged just how much drag force the odd-shaped hull would experience in the planet’s thermosphere, and plotted an orbit that took them within six hundred kilometers of the surface. The vessel’s orbit began to decay rapidly after they hit perigee. Neyda tried to correct, but the ion engines had insufficient thrust to overcome aerodynamic drag. They were dropping below the N’Marak boundary. The Admiral was screaming at her. It was too much too fast. She knew she should have just ditched the carrier in the ocean: the loss of a thirty-two-billion credit spacecraft and a few thousand Asari was nothing compared to the destruction of a colony. But Neyda thought she could save the ship and the Monoi colony. So she did something that was risky for a smaller warship, and potentially disasterous for a capital ship. She used her mass effect FTL drive inside the N’Marak boundary. The resulting distortion of Lusia’s gravity well uprooted forests, destroyed entire suburbs, devastated wildlife, and killed and wounded an estimated sixty-seven thousand colonists. Although the Shield’s navigator was ultimately found to be at fault, Neyda was still “asked” to leave the service. Two weeks later, right on the heels of her dismissal from the Asari Navy, a Matriarch from Nevos had offered her the chance to fly again, on a private vessel. That chance was all Neyda ever wanted. Of course, the money didn’t hurt either.