Liara T'Soni: Asari Researcher and Shadow Broker

Dr. Liara T'Soni was an asari researcher and archaeologist who held a doctorate in the anthropology of the Prothean era from the University of Serrice. Born on Thessia in 2077, she spent the first decades of her adult life studying the Protheans and the cause of their extinction, until she was drawn into Commander Shepard's pursuit of the rogue Spectre Saren Arterius and the war against the Reapers. She would end her account of those years not as a scholar but as the most powerful information broker in the galaxy.

Daughter of Benezia#

Liara was the only child of Matriarch Benezia, one of the most prominent figures among the asari, and was raised by her mother alone. She was a pureblood, the child of two asari, and knew little of her second parent. From an early age she was fascinated by the Protheans, and she chose a career in archaeology partly to indulge that interest and partly to escape the pressures of being Benezia's daughter and the expectation that she would follow her into asari politics. Her work kept her in long stretches of solitude, a habit that left her shy and uneasy around others.

Therum and the hunt for Saren#

By 2183 Liara's research had brought her to a Prothean ruin on the mining world of Therum in the Artemis Tau cluster. When geth forces arrived on the planet, she sealed herself inside the catacombs behind protective barriers but accidentally suspended herself in an energy field, unable to free herself. After Benezia's involvement with Saren came to light, Commander Shepard traveled to Therum to find Liara and learn what she knew. Shepard's team freed her, and she joined the Normandy's crew, taking up residence in the labs behind the medical bay.

Liara proved a formidable combatant, fighting almost entirely through biotics, but her greater value lay in her knowledge of the Protheans. She had come to believe in a cycle of extinction, that the Protheans were only the latest in a long line of civilizations cut down at the height of their power, and she accepted Shepard's account of the Reapers as the cause. As Shepard gathered fragmented Prothean visions, Liara used her ability to meld minds to help interpret them, eventually piecing together that the Conduit lay on the world of Ilos.

Confronting Benezia#

During the mission to Noveria, Shepard learned that Benezia had traveled to Peak 15. The matriarch had been indoctrinated by Saren's ship beyond any hope of recovery and had to be put down. If Liara was present, she received a few words of pride and lucidity from her mother before Benezia died, hearing for the last time the childhood name "Little Wing." Liara chose to remember Benezia as she had once been rather than as she had ended, taking what comfort she could in the knowledge that her mother had tried to oppose Saren.

The search for the Shadow Broker#

Two years later Liara had become an information broker on Illium, harder and more ruthless than the scholar Shepard had known. The change stemmed from a single obsession. After the destruction of the original Normandy, the Shadow Broker had arranged to sell Shepard's body to the Collectors, and Liara, working with a drell named Feron, had fought to recover it. Feron was captured in the process, and Liara had spent the years since determined to destroy the Broker and free her friend.

When Shepard rejoined her, the two tracked the Broker to a hidden ship, fighting through the Spectre Tela Vasir, who had been working for him, and through his agents. They discovered that the Shadow Broker was in fact a yahg, a member of a species otherwise shut out of galactic society, who had killed the original Broker and assumed the role. After a hard fight, Liara and Shepard killed the yahg. Rather than dismantle the operation, Liara stepped into the Broker's place, freeing Feron and vowing to turn the network's resources against the Reapers.

The new Shadow Broker#

As the Shadow Broker, Liara searched for any means of stopping the Reapers and came into conflict with the human organization Cerberus, whose agents crossed paths with hers. Through patient work she traced the existence of a Prothean blueprint, archived on Mars, for a device theorized to be capable of destroying the Reapers. That device became known as the Crucible, and the plans would prove central to the galaxy's war effort.

When the Reaper invasion struck Earth in 2186, Liara was on Mars recovering the data as Cerberus assaulted the archives. She reunited with Shepard there, escaped, and relocated her entire operation to the Normandy SR-2, running it from a reprogrammed office on the crew deck with the aid of the salvaged drone Glyph. Through her network she supplied the war with intelligence, contacts, and resources. On the Citadel she also encountered Matriarch Aethyta, who revealed herself to be Liara's other parent, and the two slowly reconciled.

Thessia and the war#

Liara insisted on accompanying Shepard to Thessia during the hunt for the Catalyst, distraught at the Reaper invasion of her homeworld. There she learned an unsettling truth, that the Protheans had interfered in early asari development, and she witnessed a Prothean beacon hidden in an asari temple. The Cerberus agent Kai Leng arrived, stole the beacon's contents, and brought down the temple, and Liara could do little but pull Shepard from the wreckage. She blamed herself bitterly for the fall of Thessia until Shepard reminded her of the warning she had given her people over four years.

Liara also prepared for the possibility of defeat. She assembled a time capsule containing a record of her cycle, including knowledge of the Reapers and the Crucible, and seeded copies across many worlds in the hope that, should the galaxy lose, a future cycle might use the information to free itself. In one possible future in which the Crucible went unused, a record of Liara survived to narrate her cycle's history to a people who succeeded where hers had not. In the accounts where the Crucible was activated and the galaxy's forces proved sufficient, Liara lived on to honor the fallen at the Normandy's memorial wall. Whether she survived at all depended, like so much else, on the choices Shepard made in the final hours of the war.