Vetra Nyx

Vetra Nyx was a turian smuggler and fixer who joined the Andromeda Initiative and crossed the void to the Heleus Cluster in search of a better life for herself and her sister. Surviving the rough worlds of smugglers and mercenaries had taught her cunning, adaptability, and the value of someone to watch your back, and in Andromeda she put all three to work as the jack of all trades of a Pathfinder team. She kept the team supplied, fought at its side, and brokered the deals that kept it moving, equally at ease with the lawful and the lawless.

Early life#

Vetra was born on Palaven, but she was never formally recognized as a citizen of turian society, having never entered the military training expected of her people. Her mother cared chiefly for advancing her own rank, while her father kept questionable company, and the two fought constantly. Her father eventually took Vetra and her younger sister Sidera, barely a year old at the time, away from Palaven, settling for a while in a mining colony in the Minos Wasteland. Two years later he abandoned them both, his troubled past having caught up with him, and he never returned. Vetra dared not go back to her mother, aware that whatever her father had done had made them unwelcome on the homeworld.

Left to raise Sid herself while still little more than a child, Vetra took the dangerous construction jobs no one else wanted, then learned to shoot and moved into smuggling and mercenary work. The work never made her rich, but it let the two sisters live comfortably. In time she fell in with a small mercenary and smuggling outfit, and after being caught stealing from the krogan Nakmor Kesh she bargained her freedom in exchange for her services. The arrangement proved mutually beneficial, and Vetra became a provisioner for Kesh during the early stages of the Initiative. Growing suspicious of the cargo she was moving, she pressed Kesh for answers, learned of the Initiative's purpose, and signed on.

With the Andromeda Initiative#

Vetra and Sid were enlisted into the Initiative on Kesh's referral and arrived in Andromeda, where Vetra threw herself into keeping a Pathfinder's vessel stocked and ready. She introduced herself as the Initiative's wrangler, provisioner, and gunner, and argued that her talent for finding supplies and her rapport with the crew made her indispensable. She made her quarters in the ship's armory, though she was as often found tending to business elsewhere or among the contacts she maintained across the cluster.

Her value lay in her web of connections and her willingness to deal with anyone. On the world of Kadara she conducted business among the exiles cast out after a failed uprising, untroubled by the legality of it; there were no written laws to break on the frontier, she reasoned, and survival came before such concerns. She carried a modified Cyclone rifle into the field and proved a reliable hand in a fight. Off duty she often kept company with the old krogan Nakmor Drack, with whom she shared an easy friendship.

Sid and the cost of the life#

For all her hard edges, Vetra's life turned on her sister. She had given up everything she might have wanted in order to raise Sid, and she meant to spare her the dangers she herself had known. That resolve was tested when Vetra discovered that Sid had been quietly using her older sister's name and voice to help indentured people escape a smuggling ring and build new lives in the Andromeda outposts. The deception drew Sid into danger, and Vetra found herself racing to protect her when a captor seized her sister as a hostage. The crisis ended with Sid saved and the outlaws dead, but it left Vetra shaken and angry, scolding Sid for the risk she had taken and admitting how much she feared losing the only family she had left.

The discovery that the Initiative's enemies forcibly remade other beings struck Vetra hard, for she could not bear to imagine Sid suffering such a fate. Through it all she remained a constant presence on the team, and to a Pathfinder she could become more than a comrade, the two of them coming at last to speak of building a home together.