Chief Williams is one fine marine - an aggressive fighter, a competent weapons maintenance technician, and a determined and accurate soldier. Being a weapons specialist she’s fully qualified for heavy armour usage, and she’s a superior markswoman. Her aim is very accurate, and more importantly she’s just as good in the field and under pressure than at the shooting range. Secondary sources indicate that she has a B4 military qualification, with no indication as to what it means.

After joining the Normandy Ashley was subjected to the training regimen for Shepard’s tactical team - which can be euphemistically described as intensive. After weeks of this, the Gunnery Chief was the equal of any MARSOC trooper, to her pride. Ashley has an extra 020 Hero Points over her normal total to represent her game class abilities as a Mass Effect Soldier.

Her training scores, her behaviour in the field and how well she took to the training Commander Shepard ran her through clearly demonstrate her superior potential as a military operative. Had Williams been gauged solely on her drive, performance and professionalism she would likely have qualified for special operations (“N”) training soon after completing the Marine Combat Course - and an officer’s commission some years later.

Like the rest of Shepard’s team, Williams wears very powerful red and black Colossus-class body armour, and wields models of assault weaponry that do not officially exist. As a Systems Alliance Marine she received various minor genetic enhancements to increase her health, endurance, ability to develop muscle mass and other desirable characteristics.

Chief Williams helped raise her three kids sisters, which in her opinion is not terribly different from training soldiers. In practice, it works - though she’s not formally an instructor, she excels at coaching fellow soldiers to help them improve their military skills.

History

Much like Shepard, Ash Williams is a military brat whose family served their countries for generations and joined the Systems Alliance as it was building its own military capacity. This nascent military force would soon become the Alliance Navy, humanity’s military presence in deep space.

As the eldest of four daughters and with her father being practically always absent, Ashley helped her mum run the home and raise the younger Williams daughters. Even with Ashley’s help, four kids, a home and having to move every few years meant that Mrs. Williams had to abandon her dreams to be out there in space and use her degree in exogeology - and concentrate on being a hausfrau. By the standards of rich countries in the mid-2100s, the Williams family was considered a large one.

The Williams are apparently of Midwestern American origin, but ever since Ashley was a kid they moved every two or three years to whatever Naval base their father was assigned to.

Sins of the grandfathers

Ashley, her sisters, her parents and her grand-parents lived under a cloud - Ash’s grandfather, General Williams, was the officer who surrendered the overwhelmed Human garrison at Shanxi during the First Contact War. The military irrationally despised Gen. Williams for being the only man in History to have Humans surrender to aliens, though Williams obviously didn’t have any reasonable alternative.

General Williams, his son and later his granddaughter were thus seen as an embarrassment by the Systems Alliance military. Ash’s father did everything he could to be out there in space and do his job, thus sacrificing his family life and never seeing his daughters - but he was never allowed to progress past Serviceman Third Class. Indignant about this, Ashley enlisted right out of high school despite knowing that her family was essentially blacklisted. The mule-headed youth wanted to show ’em all that the Williams didn’t give up.

Ashley Williams’ performance during her training was exemplary, but her last name nullified most of that. Through sheer persistence and professionalism, she nevertheless was promoted to Chief - though she was at least LT material. When she was made a NCO, her family was very proud of her - the first thing her father did upon learning the news was to salute her. Nevertheless she was stuck groundside in dead-end garrisons, only getting to be in space during the mandatory zero-G combat training course.

(“Chief” seems to be the rough equivalent of a sergeant, since all NCOs within the Systems Alliance chain of command are Chiefs of some sort. There are three kinds of Chiefs - Service Chief, Gunnery Chief, Operations Chief. One gets the impression that these mean different expertises rather than distinct hierarchical ranks. Williams is usually addressed as just “Chief” (just like Shepard is usually addressed as “Commander” whereas her actual rank Staff Commander). For what it’s worth, Ashley is never called a gunny.)

Ash remained close to her younger sisters, being their second mother, and regularly communicated via vid-mail with them. She helped raise the youngest, Sarah, via vid-mail since there’s a nearly ten-year difference between them and Sar was still a kid when Ash signed with the Alliance Marines.

Mr. Williams died in the late 2170s.

War in heaven

Ashley and the rest of her unit, the 212nd Systems Alliance Marines Brigade, were eventually deployed on Eden Prime, in the Utopia solar system. Eden Prime was being newly colonised to turn it into a pastoral farming world and thus not a strategically valuable target - but the area was close to Citadel Space boundaries. The two-twelve and their colleagues of the two-thirty-two were thus presumably there to fend off pirates, slavers and other raiders.

In 2183, Eden Prime was suddenly overrun by Geth forces. The 212 and the 232 were caught flat-footed by superior forces, and suffered tremendous losses. When the invasion hit, Ashley and her squad were patrolling the area around an important archaeological dig, and were overwhelmed by Geth drones and troopers. Despite fighting hard and managing to broadcast a brief warning message, Chief Williams’ unit was massacred and Ashley found herself the sole survivor, conducting a fighting retreat while hounded by a Geth fire team.

Thankfully, Marines Special Forces tactical operators had just landed on Eden to check the archaeological dig. Staff Commander Shepard and Staff Lieutenant Alenko ran into Hunnery Chief Williams and helped her destroy her attackers, then debriefed her. Having just lost the third man on her crew, Corporal Jenkins, Shepard took Williams with her. Despite having seen all her men slaughtered, Chief Williams held on admirably and provided excellent services as a guide and riflewoman.

Aye aye, Commander !

After the three Marines returned to their vessel, the SSV Normandy, it was decided to have Chief Williams join the Normandy’s small Marine detail - the 212 was no more, Jenkins needed to be replaced and Shepard and her CO, Captain David Anderson, agreed that Williams was a superior soldier.

At first Wiliams felt bad about it - she had to mourn her comrades, she knew that she was filling the shoes of a dead man, and she was unsure that she belonged to the Normandy. This experimental frigate was unique among the Alliance fleet, both the CO (Cpt. Anderson) and his XO (SCDr. Shepard) were famous war heroes and Marines Special Operations legends, and the rest of the crew was obviously hand-picked and among the best.

Shepard assuaged Williams’ nervousness, and had Ashley become one of the tactical operators serving on the Shepard-led landing parties. The Chief soon recovered her brash, opinionated self. Much of her time was spent training as per Shepard’s ruthless ad hoc qualification program, and maintaining the small arms locker of the Normandy - though “armoury” or even “arsenal” might be a better qualification since Shepard had several million credits’ worth of guns, explosives, armours, sensors, gunsmithing equipment, ammunition containers, etc. to arm her away teams.

Semper fidelis

During the Saren Plot campaign, the SSV Normandy linked up with salarian elite commandos from the Special Tasks Group, who had located Saren’s base. The Salarians had actually requested fleet-level reinforcements, but their message was inaudible and by the time the Normandy came in time was running out.

Shepard’s operators and the STG commandos mounted a desperate assault on Saren’s base. Despite being thoroughly outnumbered, they gambled that a special operations raid could cripple the base and destroy its breeding lab before it produced an unstoppable army. Ashley was detailed to reinforce the STG men, with the understanding that casualties would be dire since they were running the diversionary part of the assault.

While the Normandy-reinforced salarian commandos attacked, Shepard led a smaller team that invaded the base, leveraging the distraction bought with STG lives. Moving swiftly and terminating all opposition, Shepard’s team destroyed enemy communications and facilities, throwing the base in disarray and making it possible for Chief Williams and her salarian allies to storm its anti-air defences — a key part of the plan, allowing the Normandy to fly in and roll out the improvised nuclear charge that would destroy the base.

At the last moment enemy reinforcements came pouring in, overwhelming what remained of the STG operators Chief Williams was with. Shepard and her squad were about to come to the rescue, but geth troopers converged on the nuclear charge. Ashley insisted that the Commander abandon her and her comrades to focus on protecting the bomb instead, so it could be fully armed. Chief Williams and the Salarians were soon overrun and killed.

After spending her military career fighting reluctance to have women be frontline fighters, Chief Williams proved herself during a very difficult assault conducted by some of the best special forces operators in Citadel Space. After two generations under the Shanxi surrender cloud, a Williams died a war heroine in a critical operation to save the galaxy. And after decades of being wary of aliens, Chief Williams made her last stand along with salarian comrades-in-arms.

Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams is presumably the first Human to be listed among the honoured dead in the Special Tasks Group’s sealed records, and was confirmed as the first Human to ever be awarded the salarian Silver Dagger and the turian Nova Cluster.

Description

Chief Williams is an ordinary, but very athletic woman of average height. She’s usually dressed in an Alliance utility uniform and has a literal as well as figurative big mouth. Like many folks in the Mass Effect future Ashley is of mixed ethnicities - perhaps something like half Midwestern American of distant English descent with the rest split between Latina heritages and Mediterranean ancestries. She speaks with the Systems Alliance accent (conveyed in the game as a “generic American” accent).

Chief Williams’ model in the game has something of a lazy eye, but this is assumed to be a bug - since in-universe this would have been medically corrected.

Here is a short video of a random bit of dialogue to illustrate Ashley’s voice and manner of speaking :

Personality

Chief Williams is a soldier’s soldier. She has a lot of emotional investment in her competence as a fighting woman, and is genuinely driven toward excellence through hard work and not making mistakes. While the whiz kid Shepard was ushered through a series of elite, exclusive tracks, Williams slogged it out through ordinary qualification courses and run-of-the-mill training, a significantly more conservative environment that had reservations about deploying females in front lines roles. Chief Williams fought this every step of the way, being determined to be in the thick of it.

Since she’s so invested a being an archetypal marine Ashley is blunt, very honest and responds aggressively to provocation - she’s the polar opposite of a diplomat, and from one of her remarks probably sucks at poker. She wants things to be open, direct and straightforward, with no bullshit and maneuvering and politics like in the corporate world. And anyway, she likes guns - the bigger, the better.

Chief Williams holds “Humans first” views, having dedicated her life to protecting Humanity from outside threats. It’s not quite xenophobia - some of her remarks hint at finding Turians and Krogans icky, but this is just personal feelings and not something serious.

Rather, she seems unable to get past the tautology that aliens are not Humans, and thus cannot be trusted and can never have priority over Humanity’s welfare. She’d rather keep aliens at arm’s length in a sort of wary collaboration than take a chance by relying on creatures whose thought processes and priorities might be incomprehensible. Her views are likely shaped by the First Contact War and Batarian piracy, and a general preference for caution and guardedness.

Williams has frankly expressed reservations about having aliens run around the Normandy - though she knew her CO would politely tell her to shut up and deal with it, she still wanted to speak her mind about the security issues. Interestingly her reservations were about the more icky-looking and militaristic aliens (a Turian and a Krogan), whereas there also was a Quarian spending her days tinkering with the ship’s prototype drive core.

Life

Chief Williams is single and not enthused about it. She tends to size up men for potential flings - tough in most cases that would be a terrible idea, since most of the guys she can spend time with also serve on the Normandy, and the frigate seldom spends much time in starports. Ashley seemed somewhat attracted toward her CO early on, but sees herself as strictly heterosexual and quickly got over it. Presumably it was closer to fascination due to Shepard’s extraordinary charisma than anything else.

Williams reportedly keeps a sexy clubbing outfit in her shore kit in case she gets a shot at picking up some guy — but as the same time she finds the sort of cheap, oversexed dance clubs she’s most likely to frequent as a marine on shore leave to be squalid and demeaning toward women.

The Williams women have a clan-like mentality and are very protective of each other ; they’re all trained fighters, with at the very least hand-to-hand self-defense skills. This fierce solidarity apparently heightened when Mr. Williams passed away. From Ashley’s attitude, one gets the impression that the Williams brood enjoys male company but is reluctant to genuinely trust men. It may also explain why the two aliens whom Williams eyed warily were the male ones.

Ashley is a poetry enthusiast, and knows several classic poems by heart - particularly Ulysses, her father’s favourite, which she recorded several times for him. She’s also religious - perhaps a Christian of some sort - though she feels defensive about it, as religion is apparently not a popular subject among the Alliance personnel.

Williams occasionally seems slightly jealous of Shepard, but also to wish that she were a more traditional, authoritarian CO just barking orders and having a more conservative attitude about hierarchy, aliens and security (but not female soldiers).

Writeup upgraded on the 7th of March, 2012.