...that I don't know anything about Renegade Reinterpretations. I should really read that, shouldn't I? Many thanks for the link, I'll be sure to check it later.

Since I can't determine if your characters fit well into the AU without having read the source material, I can only make broad comments on their personalities from an outsider's perspective.

Gul: he sure fits the bill for a Not Nice guy, you've made that clear. My only gripe about this guy is his lack of military service: Turian social structure basically revolves around the army, so the fact that he dodged the draft or something is very curious. Doubly so because he's a biotic: he would possess incredible potential for destruction if that talent could be refined and applied for military purposes.

Ren: I see what you did there. Moving on: I like him and I'm not saying this because I'm a quarian fanboy! I think you've managed to capture the "amoral techie" character quite well. I really like the fact that he takes time to do family things during his workload. That's something stereotypical Not nice characters don't usually do.

Teron: not much to go on here. She sounds like a fairly generic experienced hired gun to me.

Teron Argovigian

Female turian

~48 (20-30 equivalent?)

Teron is Rillek's primary muscle, a seasoned special operations fighter and (very briefly) Blue Suns merc. She's one of the less-developed characters in terms of tangibles. I'm not 100% sure where she came from or why she works for Rillek- I think she was a part of the Cerberus alien infiltrator program who somehow managed to get the equivalent of an “honorable discharge” and signed up with Rillek because she has nowhere else to go, but I really don't know.

She's essentially a walking action movie in terms of capabilities, and personality as well- if an area has Teron Argovigian sent to it, things will blow up before she's done. She's neither subtle nor particularly concerned with collateral damage, and quite ruthless in terms of interrogations, etc. It's possible that Rillek was originally grooming her as a successor, before abandoning that when it became clear she was a blunt instrument with no head for politics (which begs the question of just who Rillek's successor is, since he definitely expects this to be a decades-long operation and Ren will leave as soon as the paychecks stop). I don't think she really enjoys killing people or “the thrill of the hunt” per se, so much as she just likes doing really awesome things against really horrible people.

One thing I'm sure of is that Tron does not like asari. Not sure why, or even if there is a reason, but the concept of aliens that can get inside her head remotely inspires what can only be described as pure terror, and not used to being afraid of pretty much anything she channels that into general rage.

Ren'Zalgo vas Orpheon

Male quarian

~56 (40-50 equivalent, may change as quarian lifespan is poorly established)

“Gul Rillek... Strange man, I'm not entirely convinced he doesn't just want to declare himself Primarch and take over the rest from there. But he pays well.”

Since Gul Rillek has all the technical skill of my grandmother on acid, he's hired a quarian engineer to be his combination bodyguard and technical adviser. Ren'Zalgo vas Orpheon is there to, among other things, manage Rillek's wide variety of research and development projects, explain those projects in words a military linguist cum political operator can understand, and remind said linguist that you need to click “save” before turning off the omni-tool, it doesn't just “write things down” automatically.

Ren cares little about Gul's long-term goals, although he does take a quiet professional pride in how far his assistance has advanced them. Largely amoral in his professional capacity, he's mostly concerned with maintaining the large paycheck that he sends back to his family on the Migrant Fleet. There's a sort of middle-class dignity to him quite at odds with what he often participates in: wake up too late, skip breakfast, identify possible Reaper indoctrination methods, business lunch with the ExoGeni representatives, video call with the kids, review systems analysis of geth body parts, send message to that ex-Teltin doc, eat dinner thinking of your wife, keep Gul from deleting his hit list again, make travel plans to visit the Fleet next time it's near a relay, go to bed early.

And good Gods, what he does for a living. Gul Rillek sees Council restrictions on AI, genetic augmentation, and other fringe technologies as pointless, is enamored with human Upbringing and Reaper indoctrination, and actively pursues advanced conventional technologies for leverage and outright personal use. Since he works with Cerberus and even less savory operations, that results in a helluva lot of weird and dangerous things going on, and Ren oversees all of it.

There's too much research occurring for Ren to get involved personally with much of it, and the Rillek operation can't afford to do much of it in-house. Therefore, Ren's primary research function is to act as a go-between with a lot of corporations and outside actors, including Salarian academic bodies, major defense contractors, and Systems Alliance military research groups.

While not wearing a labcoart on a day-to-day basis, Ren is still a highly competent technician, and can use those abilities to defend himself in a fight. As a result, he is often sent to particularly important operations to oversee them personally, generally those with a strong technical component but also anything requiring precision or careful planning, things that Teron is incapable of properly executing. There's little business-related information that Ren keeps from his boss, or his boss from him- while neither has the time or energy to fully understand what the other does, they try to provide the most salient points to prevent chain-of-command screwups. Over all, their working relationship is good- Gul's estate has seen a friendly visit from the Zalgo family on at least one occasion.

Gul Rillek

Male turian

~82 (50-60 equivalent)

“You're saying that we should have let the humans take Kar'shan?” “I'm saying we should have finished the job ourselves.”

Although this venture would very much be about Gul Rillek and his goals, I don't really see him as the protagonist so much as he is the prime mover, much more G-Man than Freeman. Rillek is a wealthy Palaven-based.... I guess you could call him a combination industrialist, crime boss, and political lobbyist. He has some very... “interesting” ideas about aliens.

Rillek is a hard-line Assimilationist. According to him, most of the galaxy, from asari to krogan, are culturally degenerate, and only being subsumed into a massive new Turian Hierarchy can “fix” them. The fact that the current Hierarchy is (in his view) a watered-down puppet state of the Council is just one more obstacle to overcome, really just one more alien race to absorb or exterminate. When confronted with the Systems Alliance, he didn't see the same Borg-like nightmare the Council saw- since his idea of the ideal Hierarchy already was a Borg-like nightmare, in the humans he found a race of mechanized, militarized, red-blooded turians. Hence the idea of using the humans to accomplish his goals . They're culturally almost identical to turians, they're militarily powerful, and most importantly they have yet to suffer the “creeping sclerosis of the Citadel” that turned the real turians into simpering errand boys for the asari. Rillek is utterly convinced that when the smoke clears and the tanks have rolled through the Presidium, humans won't dominate or be dominated by turians so much as the two sides will simply merge... and then assimilate or exterminate everyone else.

This being RR, Rillek is very much Not Nice. He's not just willing to justify the means with an end- it's that the end itself is a bit suspect. He thinks the genophage was a swell idea, and wants to apply it to other species like the Vorcha that he considers to possess a warped idea of population dynamics. He considers a war with the Terminus systems “infinitely preferable to the alternative”. And for whatever reason, he really, really likes labor camps. I'd best characterize his alignment as “angry good”, with good being relative to the RR norm.

I'm not sure how powerful Gul Rillek is right now, but it's probably not very. He certainly doesn't expect governments to change within his own lifetime, and his ideas are just too weird to net him any popular support should he move around openly. He doesn't really have an army of his own- just mercs and random thugs, and I don't think that if push came to shove he could even really hire that many of those. But at the same time, I think he's passed the point where he's just building up resources, and is now actively influencing the galactic political scene. Which probably means Councillor Sparatus should just go ahead and make peace with his ancestors as quickly as possible.

Rillek is able to bring his essentially subversive politics in line with his extreme (even for a turian) nationistic and authoritarian nature only through his truly collossal hubris. Gul Rillek is firmly convinced that he is simply smarter than the Primarch, smarter than the Council, and that Only He knows what's best for the turian people and the rest of the galaxy.

In personal terms, I have surprisingly little to say about the guy. He's not particularly dynamic or charming, nor is he particularly abrasive. He's a biotic, although a very very bad one (going to have to check up on whether a turian biotic could ever be allowed to completely squander his abilities and receive no training whatsoever), has no combat skills to speak of, and has only a layman's understanding of scientific and technical fields (hence his employment of Ren).

He looks... well, he looks like a turian, although early on I decided that the right side of his face is scarred, charred, or maybe just outright synthetic. To hear Rillek tell it (he does so in person rarely, but the information is floating around somewhere), he was born into a mildly wealthy family, served as an interpreter in the turian military, and participated in a series of raids against batarian slaver operations. One such raid went disastrously wrong, and after taking a grenade at close range Gul Rillek was forced to play dead as he watched his surviving squadmates dragged off to slavery, all of which sparked his conviction that the galaxy needs to be reformed. All of the official records support that (with the possible exception of the Shadow Broker's), but after the “interpreter” part none of it's true. He worked in an office far from the Terminus, got his face mangled in some unfortunate accident (Rillek mentions a female soldier he was close to in the heroic version, and she is a real person- maybe he was injured while doing something stupid to try to impress her?!), and came into his politics entirely without direct outside influence. But politics demands a narrative, and so he produced one...

Other than that, Gul Rillek has a few quirks, mostly relating to his truly massive hubris. He never verbalizes “opinions” or “beliefs”- things simply are, because Gul Rillek is never wrong. He avoids any sort of romantic 'shipping: due to his “disfigurement”, he thinks anyone interested in him is such because of his power and influence, and does not feel comfortable participating in something that one-sided (read, the fact that he thinks he's in charge of everything makes him unable to perceive someone as freely giving consent). One way I thought of to really show the core characterization was having him, once he'd met them, actively try to maneuver Shepard and Garrus Vakarian into a 'ship, because that really gets to the core of who Gul Rillek is- supremely convinced he's right, and absolutely incapable of comprehending that some things aren't his business to mind.

Letting his titanic sense of infallibility be his undoing seems almost... cliché. I want to make him smart enough to adapt and paranoid enough to include redundancies in case he's tactically wrong, and I don't really think his hubris extends to day-to-day decision making. Rillek must be able to admit temporary defeats, listen to his advisers, accurately evaluate his opponents, and react competently to failures. I think that sometimes he proposes ideas that he deliberately knows to be bad, just to weed out the yes-men in his inner circle. He's read the handbook, basically.