Born on Lowell City in 2146, Iosif was the first-born son in a primarily academic family unit: his father was an R&D Technician who originally hailed from the Russian Federation before his assignment whilst his mother had spent her entire life on the red planet and had been a colleague of her future husband. A mere two years after his birth, the unearthing of a series of alien ruins and the subsequent wealth of research and technology which followed gave the family a dedicated assignment early on in life, which led to Iosif spending his childhood years within the confines of a residential facility for the families of the R&D staff with the frequently iterated expectation that one day he would follow both parents into a similar field.

This however only served to alienate Iosif from the pursuit of such a path and whenever he found the opportunity to spend time outside of the residential facility, he often visited the hangar bays and public sectors where cargo and transport shuttles most frequently landed and departed, as this granted him the opportunity to speak with the shuttle crews and the passengers aboard and learn more of the human dominion, taking interest in the idea of leaving the Solar System for other worlds via the newly discovered mass relays and FTL-technology. This interest piqued even further when humanity made first contact with alien life during the brief First Contact War before going on to be introduced to the greater galactic community. Drawn in by the appeal of seeing the wider universe, Iosif resolved to join the Systems Alliance Navy as a pilot when he was of age.

Naturally, his parents had already reserved a number of slots at various respectable educational institutions and with the influence of both mother and father he’d been all-but slated to attend, yet on his eighteenth birthday he ultimately followed through with his earlier resolve and announced his attentions to join the Systems Alliance, much to the chagrin of both parents. To them it was a mere phase, an immature notion generated by media depictions of exploring new worlds and performing epic feats of heroism, yet Iosif continued to stick to his guns until one final confrontation led to the two officially disowning their son rather than allow him to ‘throw their long-term investments away’.

Taking the first shuttle that he could to the Moon, Iosif enlisted at the recruitment center on Armstrong Outpost and began his pilot training over the course of the next two years. Unlike most, Iosif had aspired to pilot smaller craft such as the shuttles he often saw entering and departing from the hangars back on Mars, or gunships that were being used to patrol the newer colonies that humanity had established outside the Solar System. Once he’d completed his training, he was assigned to the 21st Airborne Division and soon saw deployment.

It was here that his training would pay off as Iosif manouvered his way through AA-vulnerable locations to ferry marines to-and-from their destinations whilst other operations saw him taking the reigns of the recently introduced A-61 Mantis Gunship.These next few years saw him develop his talent as a pilot, yet at the same time also saw him become slightly disillusioned with the Systems Alliance, if only for the fact that most of their resources were being thrown towards a few pirates and warlords, until it finally came to a head in 2173.

During a routine patrol of one of the Alliance’s colonies in the Attican Traverse, Iosif’s gunship suffered catastrophic engine damage after a kinetic impact from an insurgent’s weapon and the subsequent crash-landing resulted in his left arm being pinned beneath the gunship’s mangled chassis, forcing him to undergo an amputation and later have the arm replaced with a prosthetic. Disillusioned with the idea of chasing after warlords, pirates and the occasional terrorist, Iosif took his medical discharge from the 21st Airborne without argument and opted to find a new occupation that met his own terms.

Recalling that his family had disowned him and otherwise unwilling to admit defeat, Iosif took to running private jobs to keep himself afloat, primarily hiring out to low-profile mercenary crews and PMC’s that weren’t particularly noticeable to the public eye.

Eventually, he crossed paths with and soon struck up a partnership with two fellow freelancers: Jedrah, a salarian infiltrator who’d deserted from military service in favour of the better-paying contracts found with freelance work and Rael’Dorvah nar Selai, a quarian who’d been exiled from the migrant fleet after causing the accidental deaths of six crew members whilst testing a hacking module which exposed part of the ship to an open vacuum. Together, the three made an unlikely extraction crew; Rael would be the one to head into the field, using his tech skills to hack his way through any obstacles and reach whatever goal they required, whilst Jedrah would provide covering fire from a distance. Meanwhile, Iosif would drop off and evac the two whilst also providing additional cover and fire support from a gunship when needed, making the crew ideal for clients who sought to acquire information or items of value from locations which were locked down tight. Iosif even began to regard the two with an odd sort of friendship, somewhat amused by the salarian’s matter-of-fact approach whilst growing fond of the quarian’s boastful rants and lectures of his supposed technical prowess.

Yet, during one contract in which a dossier containing blackmail material on a Citadel official was extracted, Rael also happened upon another dossier with an extensive amount of encryption barring unauthorised access. To a quarian, this was a challenge for sure but not impossible, so after a few days’ worth of extensive work he’d managed to expose the files with the majority of the information still intact. When the crew examined the files in question, they discovered a damning amount of evidence that would incriminate a number of private contractors - including several executives within Siame Industries, with various connections to mercenary groups, criminal operations and the mysterious deaths of several people considered to be whistleblowers within the company.

Considering the implications of such information falling into the right hands, the three decided to sell it on to the Shadow Broker’s agents in exchange for payment which would have easily given each of them cause to take a long vacation from contract work. Jedrah established a meeting point and the two agreed upon it unanimously. However, treachery is often known to be a common practise in the freelance world: the date the transfer was due to occur, Iosif arrived at the meeting point only to find the quarian dead from a well-placed shot through the visor and suddenly felt the presence of another individual in the form of a gun placed against the back of his head.

In Jedrah’s own words, the betrayal was ‘nothing personal, a matter of simple business’ and that a third-party had made him a better offer. Whilst most would’ve faced a cruel, if quick death at this point, the salarian added insult to injury by stating that ‘out of respect’ for their previous business partnership, he had made an ‘arrangement’ for Iosif to live in a manner that he would profit from: enslavement, something he quickly realised after being marched at gunpoint into a waiting shuttle loaded with members from a known batarian slaving ring, some of whom Iosif had recognised from very brief encounters during his previous contracts.

In short time, the slavers shipped him off to Aratoht to endure back-breaking labour in the colony’s extensive mines. The experience left him somewhat traumatised, due in part to the inhuman treatment and beatings that he often suffered at the hands of the batarian ‘masters’. Yet something drove Iosif to press on, a desire for vengeance or perhaps to spite the salarian who had betrayed him through escape. Over the course of several months, he learned the routine of the overseers and guards who kept the mines operational and whenever he was assigned work at surface-level near the shuttles, he took every available opportunity to note down when the shuttles arrived and departed and for how long they were left unoccupied. At best, it left him little time for resting between shifts and at worst earned him a rough beating at the hands of whichever guard had caught him 'slacking off'.

Eventually he figured out a blind spot where a certain overseer often stopped to slack off between shifts and drink, and so he took advantage of the batarian's laxed attitude towards work and used a handheld mining excavator to bash the slave driver's skull in. With that out of the way, Iosif quickly removed the overseer's ID chip and used the excavator to bury the corpse beneath a pile of debris, absolving himself of any blame in the case that it were discovered - the batarians would simply dismiss it as a cave-in. However, this was only the first phase of Iosif's plan. Now that he possessed the overseer's ID chip he could unlock access to the armory, though not for himself. Instead, he left a small rumour that one of the guards had 'accidentally' left the armory unlocked whilst drunk, and within a few hours about half of the slaves in that sector had taken up arms.

In the resulting confusion that followed as the batarians rushed to quell the revolt, Iosif used the same ID chip to access a maintenance closet and after retrieving a rebreather for the journey ahead, he climbed up into one of the maintenance ducts and began to follow the route he'd mapped out in his head over the previous months. A short while later he managed to reach the surface, noticing that only half of the usual guard had been placed on watch whilst the rest had been dispatched to handle the situation in the nearby mining sector. Of course, there was a shuttle available and practically waiting, an unoccupied slave transport which conveniently fitted the ID of the overseer he'd stolen the chip from, and after spying a gap in the guards' watch he quickly bolted for the shuttle and climbed aboard.

After that, starting the shuttle was fairly simple - the ID chip got him through the automated security system and within a few minutes he'd dragged the vessel up into high orbit, too late for the batarians to do anything planetside, though it soon caught the attention of the other batarians vessels stationed around the system. Without hesitation or any regard for how much remained of the fuel reserves onboard, Iosif slammed the shuttle into FTL and bolted for the system's relay. Before the batarians could cut him off, he'd managed to cross reach the relay and quickly jumped over towards the other one outside of the system, placing himself outside the reach of his assailants and giving himself a freedom he'd been deprived of for almost a year.

All in all, the incident left him with an open grudge against batarians and the practice of slavery that would never truly heal, whilst his former partner’s treachery had left him with a muted distrust for salarians that he found difficult to subside, and so with little other option remaining he made a return to freelance work, only to find the market had changed in his absence, with many formerly prominent contractors losing business to a familiar face on the market: Siame Industries.

Remembering in Jedrah’s own words that a ‘third-party’ had made him a better offer, it didn’t take long for Iosif to draw the conclusion that the corporation had been directly responsible for his betrayal and therefore was also responsible for his subsequent enslavement by association, and grew determined in his resolve to act against both them and the salarian even though the latter had since disappeared on Illium. Paying close attention to the news and word-of-mouth throughout the freelance networks, it didn’t take long before Iosif saw an opportunity to enact his revenge and make a comeback at the same time. Pooling together the credits that hadn’t been scrubbed from his offworld accounts during his absence, he re-equipped himself and grabbed a shuttle to Cartagena Station with the intention of seeing his plan come to fruition.