Just a BioWare Fan

If Life Were a Picnic

Just as Morinth was leaning in for whatever freaky thing she intended to do to me, the door slid open. Samara didn’t even speak, just hammered her daughter so hard that the backwash of her biotics sent me tumbling off the couch.

The pair seemed evenly matched and only the colors of their catsuits let me tell them apart as they and assorted debris flew about the room. I stayed on the floor, propping my back against the couch but otherwise keeping out the storm of objects and flailing limbs the two Asari created.

The fight raged on for about three weeks and I barely dared to get the occasional lick in when I could. I managed the occasional, biotic cheap shot at Morinth as she flew over my head before bounding back to charge a toaster for use as a projectile but mostly I just tried to keep my head attached to my body by keeping it down.

The two were having the sort of family fight about which I’d heard. It involved a lot of “because I said so” and “you made me like this” and “I brought you into this world and I can take you out” sorts of things. In the end it was Samara who was right: she did take Morinth out.

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.

Like Father Like Son…or Not

While we waited for Samara, Thane told me about his family life and admitted that he hadn’t seen or talked to Kolyat in several years. Apparently, the assassinations he’d performed had brought the wrath of some psychos to hunt down his family in revenge. They’d taken it upon themselves to torture and kill his wife.

When Thane had found out he’d gone a little nuts, something even his controlled nature and training could not restrain. He’d done precisely what I would have: he had exacted vengeance slowly and with great fury on each of those involved, hunting them down no matter how long it took. By the time he’d finished, Kolyat, whom he’d left with extended family, had figured out that the whole thing was Thane’s fault and would have nothing to do with him.

About then Thane had begun to feel the effects of Kepral’s Syndrome and, in his fragile mental state, had decided that it was some sort of divine retribution for the way he’d lived his life and failed his family. That had started him down the path that had led him to join my merry band of misfits and miscreants. And so here we were.

Doesn’t Everyone Live by a Code? Thane seemed a serious fellow but he accepted my request to join the team for what was considered a suicide mission by explaining that he was dying anyway so why not? You had to respect his spirit and it saved me a fair amount of time negotiating his fee. Apparently he was out to atone for some evil deeds, not too hard to believe for a man who had so ably demonstrated his ability and willingness to kill. I hoped that his assassin credo wouldn’t make him balk at the clean-up work we’d be doing on merc bases around the galaxy along the way. We were hardly a peace-loving, spare-the-ammo bunch and there were geth galore to wipe out between TIM's Collector hints. It wouldn’t live up to his high-profile targets but we’d definitely keep him busy. When we’d returned to the Normandy I got Thane settled, brushed off Jacob’s tiresome objections to bringing yet another killer for hire aboard, and stopped on the way to get some breakfast, though the ship’s clock read 3:04 AM. I’d shown Miranda the extent of what I’d learned, burning off the huge dinner I’d eaten hours earlier. I hammered down a big mug of cold coffee and made myself some sausages and toast. I wrapped one in the other and brought them with me to the trash compacter. I didn’t want to get sidetracked again before I’d had it out with Zaeed.

“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.