Elms: mercenary marine and hidden psychic

Elms was a terran mercenary marine and an undeclared psychic, marked by a robotic arm and a scarred face. She sold her rifle to whoever paid, serving the Kel-Morian Combine early in her career and later a band of renegade Terran Dominion officers, and she trusted no employer further than the contract in front of her. That instinct saved her life on Adena, where a zerg brood ambushed her salvage crew and a broodmother marked her psionic mind for infestation. Elms carved a path off the planet, unmasked the officers who had left her to die, and crossed paths with Nova Terra and her Covert Ops Crew, refusing the ghost's offer of a place among them because she would be beholden to nobody but herself.

Early Service on Luria IV#

Early in her mercenary career, Elms took work with the Kel-Morian Combine on the contested world of Luria IV, where her unit was assigned to restore the peace. The posting taught her the trade's arithmetic in blood. During the operation a marauder fighting nearby was killed, and as Elms sheltered behind cover her mercenary leader hauled her to her feet and told her the work was cut and dry: you either lived and got paid, or you did not and you died. The lesson stayed with her for the rest of her life, and years later, standing over crates of stolen crystal, she still measured her choices against it.

Soldier of Fortune#

In the years that followed, Elms befriended a fellow mercenary named James "Sirius" Sykes. The two eventually went their separate ways, though Sykes would often say that he "owed her." At some point after they parted, Elms lost her arm and her face was scarred. The cybernetic replacement gave her phantom pain, flaring whenever something did not "feel right" to her. She attributed the sensation to being in bad places. In truth it was the stirring of psionic power, a talent that came and went unpredictably and that she chose never to mention to the soldiers around her.

The Battle of Adena#

Some time after the One-Day War, Elms was hired by a group of renegade Terran Dominion forces as part of a salvage crew sent to the planet Adena, tasked with recovering stockpiles of jorium crystals from an abandoned mining outpost. The operation sat inside the Daelaam demilitarized zone, and protoss forces under Admiral Urun watched the landing closely. Unknown to the crew, the commanders of the operation, Captain Hogarth and Commander Naderi, intended to keep the crystals for themselves. Elms balked at climbing into her CMC Powered Combat Suit, telling the others she had a "bad feeling about this place," but her commander demanded the crew suit up.

On the surface the team found eighteen crates of jorium, and Elms found something else: creep inside the outpost. The zerg of the Niadra Brood attacked moments later. The broodmother Niadra sensed that Elms was psionic and directed her broods to take her alive, intending to bring her into the brood. Elms felt the zerg coming in turn and readied her team before the wave hit. Her squad was surrounded until Urun arrived on the surface and drove the zerg back. The admiral confronted her and was surprised to discover another psionic. Elms told him she had tried to warn her people and that she had known the operation was a trap, then offered him a choice: hide, or ally together and kill the queen leading the zerg.

The combined forces held the line until Elms sensed zerg massing in the caves behind their position. She led her soldiers inside over their protests that she was only a mercenary, telling them plainly that her one goal was to leave the planet alive. In the caverns a group of infestors tried to implant larvae into the squad. Elms killed her attacker, but one larva slipped unnoticed into the suit of a marine named Gary. Pressing deeper against Gary's objections, the squad found a mass of zerg lying in wait and fought back to the surface, where Elms revealed the truth about Hogarth and Naderi and their scheme to enrich themselves. The soldier Yong collapsed the caverns behind them to cover the escape. Above ground, Elms reached Urun psionically. He told her what Niadra was and pledged his forces to buy the terrans time to flee.

As the squad ran for the nearest dropship, Elms felt Urun die. The marine Carter contacted Captain Hogarth, but with no jorium in hand the captain cut the channel and left them all to die. The zerg killed Carter at the dropship, and Elms, saying he had deserved better, spent the last of her ammunition holding the creatures back. The survivors cut through a structure to reach the far landing site, fighting off infestors along the way. When Yong wondered aloud whether the zerg were tracking Elms herself, Elms conceded the point: she was the only psionic among them, and if she could sense Niadra, the broodmother could sense her. She added that she would rather die than be infested, and Yong promised she could count on her if it came to that. In the final sprint a zergling brought Gary down, and Elms killed it with her C-14 rifle swung as a club. Aboard the dropship Niadra struck at her telepathically, wracking her with pain, and Yong knocked her unconscious and flew the ship off Adena.

Flight to the Last Junction#

Elms woke hours later to news broadcasts blaming her group for the battle and confirming them all dead. A Terran Dominion battlecruiser was soon firing warning shots at the dropship while a squadron of vikings tried to bring it down. Elms told the survivors she knew a place to sell the jorium, answered Gary's accusation that she meant to steal it with a punch to the gut, and plotted a course that shook the Dominion pursuit.

At the Last Junction she sought out Sykes, fighting through headaches and interference the jorium was working on her psionics. Her old friend promised to find a buyer, then shot and killed her companion Turan when he tried to contact their ship. Elms passed a coded warning to Yong, telling her to split the haul three ways, then attacked Sykes and broke his neck. The bad news compounded: Gary had been infested and was loose on the outpost. Elms tracked him through the corpses he left behind and found him in a bar, where she seized a flamethrower from a dead patron and burned him. Gary died shouting that the Swarm would rise with or without her.

A stranger then appeared behind her with a gun drawn, saying he was impressed she had survived Adena, and offered a buyer for the jorium. Back at the ship the man's employer uncloaked: Nova Terra, who wanted the entire stockpile. Contreras, believing Elms had betrayed them, fired on her, but Nova crushed the weapon and completed the deal, her associate Reigel handing over datapads with access to shell accounts. Nova then contacted Elms psionically, offering her a place in the Covert Ops Crew and a way to control her powers. Elms refused. She was a mercenary with her own path, she said, and would be beholden to nobody but herself.

Before she could part from Yong and Contreras, three reapers attacked the ship, sent not by Nova but by someone after jorium that had already been sold. One detonated a demolition charge that brought the dropship down. Elms feigned death in the rubble, then rose and shot one reaper while Yong and Contreras ambushed the others. She stopped her crew from killing the last attacker and probed his mind, learning that Captain Hogarth had hired them to bury every witness to the Battle of Adena. When the reaper reached for his gun, she shot him. Yong and Contreras argued that the killing would never stop until Hogarth was dead, and that they needed Nova's help to reach him. Knowing it would cost her a measure of her freedom, Elms agreed to talk to Nova.

The Assault on Aspar#

Nova outfitted the three with equipment and a cloaked liberator. A few weeks after the events at the Last Junction they struck Hogarth's base on Aspar, with Reigel supporting them from orbit over communications. Elms wanted to avoid casualties, and the team swept the halls to the captain's office, only to find it empty. Hogarth sprang a trap that electrocuted and stunned her, then turned his marines on Contreras and Yong, presuming Elms dead. A shot to the chest wounded Yong. Elms rose and unleashed her psionic power on Hogarth and his soldiers, killing them, and Nova arrived to retrieve the survivors. Meeting Nova aboard one of her ships afterward, Elms said that she, Yong, and Contreras would go their own way and that she would not train with the Covert Ops Crew, though she allowed that she might take another job in the future. The three parted ways with Nova's crew.

Personality and Abilities#

Elms came across as abrasive and callous, a soldier who had once drunk heavily before giving up the habit, and who claimed not to care who she hurt in pursuit of a contract. She was fiercely independent, refusing to be beholden to anyone and avoiding attachments to the people around her, though over the course of the Adena affair she warmed toward Yong and Contreras and chose to keep traveling with them. Her psionic gifts included telepathy, psychic attacks, and the ability to sense psionics, at least where the zerg were concerned. Because the powers came and went, she did not speak of them, letting the phantom ache of her cybernetic arm stand in for the warnings her mind delivered. Reigel, who saw her survive Adena, the Last Junction, and Aspar in turn, regarded her as "quite resourceful."