Just a BioWare Fan

His face changed as he saw that I was serious and he stepped into the doorway looking ready to talk rather than...other things. When he realized I had on only a towel he froze. He closed his eyes and took a moment to remind himself of what we'd been discussing.

"Okay," he said, opening them again, "let's talk about Cerberus. Let's talk about you flying around the galaxy with a crew full of attractive men. Let's talk about that."

He had to have heard my side of the story on news reports and through Alliance channels. Part of the reason I had agreed to so many interviews and written so much was in the hope that he would see them and realize how very dead I had been shortly before he accused me of abandoning him. I may not have been able to talk to him directly but a girl deserves a little slack for having been reconstructed in a four-billion-credit medical experiment, doesn't she?

The Game’s Afoot

Once we’d recovered from the idea of Garrus rubbing up against Joker in a dark closet Anderson briefed us on our objectives and procedures. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want to see the encrypted forms of the messages he sends,” Anderson assured me. “He hides them in the sorts of pictures that have made him infamous on the extranet.”

I cracked up again at the idea of some staid intelligence handler opening cross-planetary, 3-D porn every time Joker had something to report. I supposed it was someone with whom he’d served on another ship so that it would look natural for him to keep sending smut like he did to half of the people he’d ever met. On certain subjects Joker was pretty easily entertained.

We finished the actual details and left the Cone of Silence, wandering over to Anderson’s desk. Garrus, Jack, and I replaced our comm links and chatted about how little Anderson enjoyed his diplomatic duties on the Council. As we did so, I became more and more curious about the photo on his desk. He’d never mentioned family to me and I had been under the impression that he’d been as much a loner as I always had. Spectre status didn’t lend itself to spouses and children.

After another round of bridge and stairs, we reached the lowest level and slew the Darkspawn guards. From the smell of it, we faced a cul-de-sac filled with tainted flesh. Rank gobbets covered the floor in various shades of nasty and dangled from the walls much as it had in the Deep Roads beneath Orzammar where I’d first faced—and defeated—a broodmother. Pods like those from which various childer forms had sprung along our path lined what little distance we could see.

We may never find The Architect’s main lab, the place where he’d kept the bulk of his research and presumably a stronghold for those converted Darkspawn who remained on his side in this conflict, but I hoped that he was one of the few, if not the only one, who knew how to make and administer his “cure”. That he had sent so high a lieutenant to draw me to The Mother’s lair lent me hope that he had committed most of his forces in the long string of recent battles and perhaps the two sides had reduced each other’s numbers to the point where we could eliminate both factions.

Despite our new connection, I couldn't put my interest in Thane before the mission. It seemed that every time I turned around one of my crew had an issue that needed to be addressed.

Grunt was going through puberty, Jacob had discovered the location of his long-missing father's ship, and Jack needed closure at Pragia before she could focus. There were mercenary bases to destroy, geth infiltrations to investigate, and planets to explore. While I made time to talk to Thane and the new easiness between us meant that I was less distracted by my growing interest in him, neither of us seemed to be in a hurry to get more physical.

I was intensely aware that I still had one more piece of unfinished business that stood between us. It took me two weeks, but finally I mustered the nerve to face this last concrete connection with the love that I had lost simply by being dead for a couple of years. As the Normandy cruised through yet another nearly-empty system I dragged myself to my cabin.

Pirates and Play

Clearly I lack Varric’s facility with weaving elements into a story so seamlessly you barely notice their beginnings. In telling this tale I have neglected to introduce both another of my companions and the force that complicated the lives of everyone in Kirkwall.

Yet Isabela was as entwined in these events as any of us, perhaps more so at the beginning, and without the Qunari I would never have been named Champion of Kirkwall in the first place. Had I known how byzantine my life would get after returning from the Deep Roads I might have taken my spoils and returned to Ferelden, familial mansion be damned.

There was plenty else afoot in the city to occupy us even before we solved the mystery of the Starkhaven assassinations and brought Sebastuan into our fold for good. It seemed that Fereldens and exiled princes had not been the only folks washing up on the shores of Kirkwall. In the midst of the flood of blight refugees came a ship’s worth of Qunari from Par Vollen.