Just a BioWare Fan

It suddenly dawned on me why BioWare shoved the ME2 love interests out the air lock, as it were. They couldn’t explain, otherwise, why they waited 95% of the entire timeline to leap back into bed with the Commander. I haven’t played my lone Garrus-mancer yet and I never romanced Tali so I don’t know how they handle that but if Thane, Jacob, or Miranda were part of the crew why on earth would they be anywhere but sharing Shepard’s cabin? Damn, I’m going to have to do some research on this.

It’s only been six months since any of the second game’s love interests saw the last of the Commander. Why wouldn’t Tali or Garrus be right back into it, especially if they were on the mission that landed Shep in jail in the first place? All of the “three years apart, you worked for Cerberus and I’m a loyal Alliance soldier” trust angst that Kaidan and Ashley have for (completely believable) excuses fail in the face of anyone that accompanied Shepard on the ME2 journey.

So they get Jacob a new woman, which is okay because it always seemed like a fling rather than a romance to me. They give Miranda massive family issues (and then massive internal injuries) that keep her away from the Normandy. And Thane? Thane they kill,

The Sins of the Mother

Jacob and I saw the women and what few men could be coaxed out of hiding into the shuttle the transport had sent. All of them were crying and some seemed as much afraid as relieved. I imagine nine years of chemically-induced forgetfulness would make any new and strange experience a little scary.

The woman who’d given me the datapad wrung my hand awkwardly, not quite able to shake it normally but knowing some such gesture was appropriate. It gave me hope that they could recover. “You brought us the sky,” she said, “just like he promised.”

I nodded solemnly at her. “I will remember,” she said insistently. Then she turned and shuffled up the ramp. She lifted her hand briefly before disappearing inside and I realized I didn’t even know if she knew her own name any more than I did.

Daddy Know Best?

Naturally I ordered Joker to head straight for the Citadel, it being essentially next door. Once I’d changed back into my BDUs and thrown my armor in the wash I thought I’d visit Jacob. Hopefully his little display in the shuttle bay had only been an aberration.

When I walked into the armory, he turned from cleaning my sniper rifle. “What were you doing, bashing mechs to death?” he complained good-naturedly.

“That may have happened once or twice,” I laughed. “We were rather outnumbered.”

He set the Viper to one side. “I’m glad you came down,” he said gravely. Ah, crap, I thought, he’s going to bring it up.

Dead but Maybe Not Gone

I took Urz back to where I’d found him and got a dead pyjack for a goodbye present. “Don’t eat Wrex,” I told him, rubbing my knuckles across his lumpy spine, “but the other clans are fair game, okay?” He slimed my leg one more time, rubbing against it, and then settled to his meal.

I said a fond farewell to Wrex, as well, though without the gift of vermin. He told me the Weyrloc women and children had begun to filter into the Urdnot camps. They would join his clan as his agents had defeated their protectors.

Then he relayed breeding requests from the females with barely-suppressed hilarity: several for Grunt, two for Garrus, and one of his men had sent one in for me. He seemed to have a difficult time getting that last tidbit out between the spasms of thunderous laughter.

Such a compliment cheered me immensely. Apparently I’d become acclimatized to the idea that everyone I’d met since returning from the dead wanted to get in my pants. I did a little dance of “no way am I sleeping with a Krogan but thanks for the compliment” and Wrex had to sit on that throne of his before he fell down.

Old Friends, New Problems

While we’d been marking time and exploring various systems for resources with which to make the Normandy as strong as she could be, Jacob had been patiently testing and investigating—for weeks—the guns we’d picked up on the Collector ship. He was thorough, I had to give him that. I suppose he didn’t have much else to do since I never took him anywhere.

After we returned to the SR-2 he invited me to the armory to hear the results of his intensive study. Jacob and I played around in the shooting range for a while so that I could get a feel for how each of the new guns handled. Between clips he ran down the specs and how they differed from what we already carried.

Though it looked impressive, the sniper rifle simply couldn't outperform my Viper, the only gun I'd ever wanted to tuck into bed with me like a teddy bear. I love that thing.

“They’re alive!” I yelled as the others piled through the doors behind me. As I watched in horror, Chambers’s face became blotched and the skin began to peel away. The fluid in her pod turned a frothy, bloody pink and she beat at the port with hands from which the flesh had sloughed down to bone. “Get them out,” I screamed frantically.

We hammered and pried at the pods on the floor as the eight plugged into the network of tubes along the wall flushed obscenely behind us. I didn’t know who had been in the other seven pods, didn’t want to know. I may have scorned Yeoman Chambers’s attempts at manipulating my life but nothing she could ever have done could have merited the torture and dissolution that she’d suffered. I saw Garrus help Dr. Chakwas stand shakily and would have started crying if tears hadn’t already been streaming down my face since the moment I saw that at least some of my crew was still alive.

We opened the pods that we could reach, finding twelve more of my crew and seventeen colonists. Empty pods hung across the vast walls and across the ceiling. Hundreds of them filled each of the distant outcroppings that dotted the chamber. There was no way to tell if those were empty and no way to reach them directly, beyond the fact that the Normandy couldn’t carry all of them even if we could release the prisoners. My heart ached as I realized that anyone still alive in this chamber would have to be left behind. I wanted to smash each of those pods, preferably with the face of a Collector, and save every human on this station but we simply couldn’t. They were as doomed to die as if we’d never come.

Getting to Know You

We wended our way across the galaxy once more, stopping to check out distress signals and perform other research projects for the Alliance and Cerberus. We dropped probes on twenty or more planets along the way and generally had a leisurely journey. Until I heard more from TIM about how to chase the Collectors we were mostly chasing our tails. I decided to take a little time on the way to learn more about my crew and the members of my team that I’d mostly ignored. Since I wanted to work out some of the weapons upgrades we’d picked up on the Citadel I started with Jacob.

As I chatted with him about maximizing damage and restocking ammo for our power weapons I tried to draw him out about his history as well. He told me he’d been rated an M6 before he’d left the Alliance. That was pretty impressive. My own N7 ranking was the highest you could get before they classified your entire existence and made you an O-Zero.

O0 meant that they’d mark your record KIA, deny you were ever born, and may eliminate any living relatives who would swear differently. A lot about the O0 program didn’t make sense. That wouldn’t have been a problem for me but the few other N7s I met were a bit concerned about walking that fine line in job performance: if you do too well you disappear forever and your mom gets axed but if you don’t do well enough you get busted down in rank or a court martial or you die from sucking at your job, any of which might kill your mother with grief, if I understood this family thing correctly.

Introductions

Once upon a time I died. Let me tell you, that hurt. What hurt even more was coming back to life. When a scary-smart, cat-suited, mad scientist woman reconstitutes you from dehydrated space debris and screws ninety percent of your bones back together, that should come as no surprise. To be fair, that part didn’t hurt because I had no working nerves or brain function. It was the part where I was alive and awake, with holes in my skin and my bones still knitting, that really killed me, so to speak.

I woke up in a blinding white room with some woman on a loudspeaker telling me to get up and grab an empty gun. Except for a few crazy glimpses, the last thing I remembered was my ship getting sliced to bits by unknown parties. I’d shoved everyone into the escape pods, been slammed into a bulkhead, and then floated out into open space with two blown seals in my suit. Needless to say, waking up was the last thing I expected. I presumed that I was in some Alliance facility, as that’s for whom I was working when I died. I presumed wrong.

It turns out that some psychos whose nefarious experiments I'd repeatedly foiled had gotten hold of my body and resurrected me. If you don't think that's creepy you try it once. They figured I'd be so grateful not to be orbiting junk any more that I'd happily go to work for them. The kinky mad scientist was named Miranda Lawson and she worked for these goons as part of an organization named Cerberus. How a three-headed dog made sense as the name for a bunch of freaks who wanted humanity to rule the galaxy is still beyond me.