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Shannon Taylor

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Revision as of 17:41, 19 May 2026 by Vertex (talk | contribs)

You could storm my sector with a hundred INTSEC agents and kill me right then and there. But you can't. You know I've saved humanity more times than you can count. To interfere with my department is a death wish. To harm me is suicidal.

— Director Shannon R. Taylor

Shannon R. Taylor was the original director of Raven's Black Research department. She was an extremely ruthless, utilitarian, and narcissistic exophysicist who often utilised sapient anomalies to gain the upper hand, even in interdepartmental politics. She believed in protecting reality at any cost, being willing to go to any length and cross any line to execute on that mission. She was killed by her own anomalies in 2310 during the Black Research Mutiny.

History

Aegis Institute

Raven

Director Taylor was a defector from the Aegis Institute, where she was known as Grand Weaver Karshen. She was recruited as part of an early Strategic Intelligence Office (SIO) operation to poach personnel from the Institute, and quickly rose through the ranks inside Black Research via the use of underhanded tactics. Her overall personality reflected in her disloyalty to her own Institute and later to Raven itself, as she saw fit to "protect reality at any cost".

Personality

Director Taylor saw Raven from a very pragmatic, albeit selfish perspective. She believed that the regulatory and policy guidelines put in place by the High Council threaten her department's ability to protect reality, and that to save reality from annihilation she must be willing to go to any length necessary. She also believed that any hinderance in the way of her department diminishes its ability greatly. In this she had a massive superiority complex, in that she and her department were the real people standing between the world and destruction. In her perfect world, she wanted Black Research to effectively run Raven from the shadows, something her department would have already achieved were it not for Internal Security and the SIO standing in the way.

She viewed sapient anomalies not as individuals, but as existential threats; however, she additionally saw the "value" in using them as resources to be exploited for her and her department's own gain. She manipulated sapient anomalies into doing her bidding with nebulous promises of freedom, only to terminate them when they become disloyal, and even pitted them directly against their own kind in the field. This use of anomalies to fight other anomalies has in fact prevented serious incidents in the past, a fact that she liked to use as leverage with the High Council.