[open] I don't have any song lyrics for this

[thebioticwoman]

Who| Shepard & Anyone
What| A newbie settles in
Where| Around Legion World
When| Post-GAA/OM/TH&TH
Warnings/Notes| In thread headers where relevant

A - Training Room

Target shooting, beating the crap out of hard light dummies, practicing with her biotics--without a ship to run and an endless string of crises to resolve, Shepard spends a lot of time working out. The harder she presses herself the more relaxed she gets, movements loose and fluid whether she's reloading or tossing a holographic krogan across the ring. It's all a comforting throwback to when things were much less complicated, and after her enforced idleness back on Earth, she needs to get her edge back. Her team and the people she's serving will never get less than her best, and while that's always been damn good, it can also always be a little better.

She occasionally comes up for air and a drink of water, or in the case of biotic practice, a long pull from her energy shake. She looks over at her fellow Legionnaire as she takes her break.

"Hey."

Shepard makes friends with anything that doesn't get out of her way fast enough, and today? That's you.

B - Mess

Shepard can do her self-assigned homework anywhere, and today it's in the mess, over a lunch big enough for three people. The opposite of a picky eater, she's got her tray piled with whatever the cafeteria staff suggested, some of it unrecognizable. While she works her way through the meal, she's reading from a datapad, more attention on starship stats than food...until she hits something even her undemanding palate can't quite handle, and she looks down at her plate as if it's betrayed her personally. She trusted you, food.

Oh well, some problems have easy solutions.

"Pass the ketchup, would you?"

Comments

[relativityspeaking]

Kid Quantum listens closely as Shepard speaks, to her tone of voice just as much as her words. Obviously she's not proud of what she did or else she wouldn't have opened with 'terrorism and war crimes', but those are some dire circumstances. Circumstances not unlike the ones they're facing now with Chronoblivion.

"Continue," she says.

[thebioticwoman]

"After the battle with the Reaper, they gave me a pat on the head and sent me off on mop-up detail. The Reapers' puppet species, the Collectors, caught us in a sneak attack and destroyed my ship, killing 20 of my crew...and me." Yes, she knows she's lively for a dead woman. And it's telling she put both the ship and crew before herself in the list of the Collector's crimes.

"An organization called Cerberus retrieved my body and spent two years and a few billion credits bringing me back. They gave me a new ship, a crew, intelligence...all the resources I needed to chase down the Collectors and stop them from destroying human colonies and passing data to the Reapers. But I won't sugar-coat it: Cerberus is a violently xenophobic terrorist group devoted to the advancement of humanity at all costs. I don't believe I did anything immoral--hell, once we'd mopped up the Collectors I flew home and handed the ship and myself over to the Alliance--but I was an Alliance officer and a Council Spectre working with a bunch of human supremacist terrorists."

Shepard leans back in her chair, holding up a hand to forestall any comments. She knows the Cerberus thing isn't that big a deal, not in the face of the Reapers. What comes next is the real sticking point. "And then there's Aratoht.

"For reasons that are classified, I was sent on a solo infiltration mission deep in enemy space. It ended up being much bigger than anyone had realized. Galactic travel in my universe relies on enormous devices called mass relays...which were built by the Reapers millions of years ago. It turns out the one in Aratoht's system was the first, sort of a master key. And the Reapers were about to come through it.

"I rammed the damn thing with an asteroid." Shepard closes her eyes for a moment, remembering the decision to kill one world to save countless others.

"My ship jumped out right before impact, which is why I'm around to be telling the story, but the relays have enormous mass effect cores. Destabilizing one was like setting off a supernova. It killed all 300,000 of Aratoht's inhabitants." Shepard has no love for the Batarian Hegemony, but the colonists weren't the government, just ordinary people who ended up as collateral damage in a war for the survival not only of humanity, but of every civilization in the galaxy. She can't claim to regret the action, not really, but the enormity of it sneaks up on her sometimes when she's not expecting it, and she wonders how many Aratohts it will take for them to win, if victory is even possible.

Shepard shakes off her depressing woolgathering with a visible effort. "So. That's why I was relieved of duty and confined to quarters." She cocks her head, looking at Kid Quantum with a level expression. "I thought you had the right to know who you were bringing aboard."

[relativityspeaking]

It is telling that Shepard put her ship and her crew before herself. It's also probably telling that Kid Q looks less surprised to hear that Shepard died and came back than she did at the 'terrorism and war crimes' revelation.

She makes a note to ask what a 'Spectre' is later, and listens to the rest of Shepard's story. She regards the sentient before her silently for a moment.

"Thank you for letting me know," she says. "I do appreciate it. You have the right to know that there are sentients on this team who, were they in our jurisdiction and we weren't facing the literal end of all realities everywhere, we'd be attempting to arrest." She doesn't look particularly happy about that, but it is what it is.

"That you turned yourself in when everything was over puts you ahead as far as I'm concerned. I'm sorry you were put in a position where you had to make that choice."

[thebioticwoman]

Shepard waves off the sympathy. "I agreed to make the hard calls and live with the consequences when I accepted promotion to Spectre." She has a feeling Kid Quantum knows what that's like. "I just didn't want you to be blindsided if this came out somehow."

She shifts in her seat, consciously releasing the tension of the last few minutes, and leans back, an arm across the chairback. "Speaking of hard calls, what's this about arrests? Is there anyone I shouldn't be turning my back on?"

No judgment. She's had people under her command who really should have been behind bars, morally if not legally. Sometimes things get dire enough you just grit your teeth and take all the help you can get.

[relativityspeaking]

"I don't think anyone's going to stab us in the back here, at least not during active combat" Kid Quantum says, shaking her head. "Everyone understands just how serious this situation is; not much point in backstabbing us and running off when we're the only thing standing between Chronoblivion and the destruction of everything. But we've got a few people who've killed for reasons other than self-defense or the defense of others, and some who have done other terrible things in wars." She sighs and runs her hand over her hair. "We also have a variety of old school vigilantes, and some with highly unusual moral codes, but most of them have their hearts in the right places."

[thebioticwoman]

Shepard nods. It's something to know she probably doesn't need to fear a shot between the shoulder blades, but it doesn't tell her if these mystery Legionnaires can outright be trusted.

"Technically outside my jurisdiction, but what happens when this is all over? Amnesty? 10-minute head start?" She shakes her own head, not seeing a good solution. "I don't like the idea of just dumping violent criminals back on their home universes."