Just a BioWare Fan

A Quarian in Need Is a Friend, Indeed

Kaidan whispered lewd suggestions enough to keep me entertained during trips to the dance floor. He made them casually, all the while looking as bored as one can with three quarters of one’s face covered.

I was glad for my own mask several times, though the exposed skin on my chest colored enough to make him laugh once or twice, despite his act of sophisticated nonchalance. In part my flush came from pleasure at knowing he never showed this side to anyone else. He was the consummate professional, a military man to the bone, regimented and controlled.

But once we’d become friends, and then broken that pesky fraternization rule, our time away from duty was filled by a man I’d never have known filled out those tasty, generic BDUs.

Please excuse the recent interruption of posting here on Just a BioWare Fan. Sadly, I broke my template and it took me days to find the problem. By then I'd changed it twice and have now reinstalled the original template but all of the widgets got eaten. I will get back to regular posting within the next week. Thanks for your patience!

I already gave an overall review of BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and mentioned that I’d been sucked into buying the game. For the most part I run my characters solo through this MMO but there are times when you must have a group. This will be my take on how groups have worked for me in SWTOR.

Let’s be clear: I’m shy and I’m self-conscious about being a noob. I won’t go around asking people to be in a group because, great heavens, what if they say no?! But I want to see all the juicy Star Wars universe BioWare has created and that means working within their multi-player system.

Thus I rely on what are called, in MMO-speak, pick-up groups or PUGs. I’ve done half a dozen and my experiences have been universally positive. For all the bemoaning on the SWTOR forums about people spamming the chat window with LFG (or looking-for-group) requests all I’ve ever had to do was be near the start of one of the instances and I’ve been invited to join a group.

Struggles and Striving

By the afternoon Sebastian and I talked through our discontent we’d spent hours together in one parlor or another, chatting politely with yet another noble family that simply had to host the Champion one time more than their neighbors. We’d danced a hundred stately rounds when I couldn’t face another boorish rich boy who’d never done anything more exciting than walk through Lowtown once on a dare.

His presence at these balls and dinner parties gave him unprecedented access to the nobles of Kirkwall. I often tried to deflect attention to his cause. Talk of betrayal and murder in Starkhaven meant a welcome relief from scrutiny, short-lived though it might have been, and genteel Sebastian made quite the impression on the ladies of Hightown.

The prince’s genuine sorrow and piety won their hearts but no breath of scandal ever touched him. Their husbands found him honorable and masculine enough to be likable, as well. In fact some of them told him how much they enjoyed his company much more aggressively than their wives. He told me of their advances in hushed tones and oblique language.

I Could Have Danced All Night

Kaidan gave that honeyed, throaty chuckle that did strange things to my insides. Over the course of our relationship I’d found myself doing things just to hear it that I would once have considered beneath my dignity.

I’d pulled goofy faces behind the back of Captain Anderson in Council meetings, danced a little jig of mockery during one of the ambassador’s tirades, and tried to juggle pistols in the Mako on the way to a tense mission. Though we’d all cracked up, high on adrenaline, when I’d dropped one and nearly shot Garrus in the leg, we decided that last little stunt had been a bad idea.

Maintenance hadn’t been too thrilled about patching the hole, either. The surprise factor had been worth all of the grief I’d taken, though. Kaidan gave me an excuse to crack the badass Spectre façade from time to time, to be a juvenile prankster more interested in a successful joke than saving the galaxy. Because I’d learned to loosen up with him I found it easier to do so with other people, letting go of some of that military rigidity behind which I’d so long hidden.

But it was a long way from practical jokes to wearing a scrap of a dress and attending a masquerade ball. His eyes sparkled behind his own mask, a wild affair that stretched from the corners of his mouth to a point a good two inches above his hairline, thus hiding his tell-tale waves and that dimple that made me want to nibble on him. He could have been any tall, fit Human on the Citadel.