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

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

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?"

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Everything about Legion World is just recognizable enough without being truly familiar for Shepard to find it all unsettling, like she's in a dream that won't quite give way to wakefulness, and she glances around the office in a reflexive threat assessment before taking her seat. She'll have to get around to relaxing sometime, but not right this second, not until she gets an answer to the question no one else yet realizes is hanging over her head.

"Thanks for seeing me." Best to get it over with. If they're going to kick her out of the Legion, better now that once she's settled in.

Edited 2017-05-17 00:48 (UTC)

Shepard isn't the first person to do a threat assessment of her office before sitting down and Kid Q is sure she won't be the last. The number of people who have joined the team but still feel like they have to do so breaks her heart a little, but perhaps with time they'll come to think of this space as one of the safer ones.

"Of course," she answers, pushing her omnicom aside so as to demonstrate she's giving Shepard her full attention. "What did you want to talk about?"

"My service record." Shepard leans forward, elbows on knees. She thinks every action she's taken has been justified, but her recent involuntary vacation courtesy of the Alliance proves not everyone agrees with her. "Before I arrived here, I was under house arrest pending a decision on whether to try me for terrorism and war crimes."

She can't quite keep all the bitterness out of her voice at the thought of standing a political trial to keep the Batarian Hegemony at bay. Under any circumstances she'd find it a betrayal by her superiors, but with the Reaper threat looming, jerking her around like they've been doing is unforgivable.

Kid Q's eyebrows fly up toward her hairline, which probably isn't a surprise.

"Okay," she says after a deliberate pause to ensure that her voice remains steady. "I'll skip the "did you commit terrorism and war crimes" line of questioning and start with "what did you do"?"

Yeah, Shepard thought that would focus the conversation nicely.

"This is gonna take some background." She reaches for her omni-tool to provide visual aids, but cuts the gesture short when she remembers she doesn't have it. Fine, description will have to do.

"My galaxy is facing the total extinction of sapient life. There's a 50,000-year cycle that's been going on for millions of years--civilizations rise, achieve FTL spaceflight, and are then exterminated by machine race of sapient starships called the Reapers. We don't know why they do it. Hell, we just found out about it a few years ago...and we're at the end of our cycle." Shepard's never before laid it out in a few sentences like that, and she pauses for a second. It shouldn't be so simple to describe the end of everything.

"The Reapers outclass us in every possible way. It took the defense fleet of the capital of the largest galactic power and the human Fifth Fleet working together to kill one of them, with heavy losses doing it. The major powers have convinced themselves it was a fluke, one of the rogue species pouring all their resources into a single starship for an attack that failed. They're wrong." The bitterness is back, one too many fruitless conversations with the Council coloring her voice and making her shoulders tight.

"The bulk of the Reaper forces are still in dark space--outside the galaxy--but that's about to change. I've been doing everything I can to buy us time, and..." Shepard runs out of righteous indignation as the memories of everything she's done crowd close upon each other's heels, and she sighs. "...that's where the war crimes come in."

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.

"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."

Edited 2017-05-17 04:31 (UTC)

It was almost terrifying, how familiar this whole scenario was. Landing himself in an organization claiming to do good, and coming across a redhead firing at targets with scary accuracy. It was enough that Raynor had to do a double take, swearing for a moment that he just saw Kerrigan. But of course, he knew that wasn't right. No, this was someone else... even if the similarities were uncanny.

"Hey."

He answered, leaning against the door frame. Arms crossed, as he just stood there, watching her. In retrospect, it was probably a bit creepy, especially coming from a total stranger. But hell, too late to do anything about it now. "You know, I reckon you might be the second most terrifying redhead I've ever met."

Don't be ridiculous, Jim. The hair's too short and Sentinels don't get the Tactical Cloak ability.

"Oh? Guess I have to start trying harder." It takes more than a weirdly backhanded compliment to get under Shepard's skin, and she returns Raynor's volley amiably. If she finds being watched creepy, it doesn't show.

That's fine, he can do playful banter just fine. If anything, it suited him perfectly, especially after all the information he had dumped on him when he woke up in the medbay. He needed time to process it, time to come to a decision. But until then...

Well, he wanted to explore.

"Don't try too hard, darlin'. Last redhead I knew, had a hell of a time fighting off her admirers." Which was a severe oversimplification of Kerrigan's assimilation into the Zerg, but he wanted to keep this light. "Could put a bullet between just about anyone's eyes though. You'd get along great. Or hate each other. Hard to tell, sometimes."

Finally, he reached for the pack of cigarettes on his sleeve. Opening it up, and pulling one out, before putting the pack back.

"Name's Raynor, by the way. Jim Raynor." He pulled a lighter from his pocket then, lighting the cigarette. Taking a puff, before going back to addressing her proper. "I'm new around these parts."

Edited 2017-05-17 05:25 (UTC)

Shepard visibly cools at the endearment, and at the implication she might not be professional around someone she didn't like on a personal level. It's not fatal, but Jim sure didn't do himself any favors there.

Still, she offers her hand to shake, tapping her other one against the nearest metal surface in a reflexive gesture to discharge any extra charge she's carrying rather than shock him. "Shepard. I'm pretty new myself."

Raynor definitely noticed the attitude shift, and he couldn't help but tense a bit. He thought he was keeping things friendly, but apparently he messed that up somewhere. Still, maybe he was making mountains out of molehills, reading too much into it. So, as she offered her hand to shake, he returned it firmly.

"Nice to meet ya, ma'am." He said simply, keeping a smile on his face. Until finally, after the hand shake, he casually asked: "So, military? Marine corps? Or just really good with a gun?"

'Ma'am' is a hell of a lot better.

"Marine special forces." Marine Corps? It's the little things that keep throwing her. There hasn't been a separate Marine Corps since the Systems Alliance formed. It just makes no sense to have independent chains of command in modern space warfare. "No points for that one. I'm not exactly subtle."

See? Jim can be respectful and continue his cowboy lingo. It's a win/win scenario.

"Not trying to score points, ma'am. Just getting a feel for this place." He said with a respectful nod, taking another puff from his cigarette. All the while, the similarities to Kerrigan continued to pick at him, especially as the term 'special forces' floated around in his head. "After waking up to super powers, I could use the distraction."

He let the smoke out then, turning his head to the side. He definitely didn't want to blow it onto her face. "Marine corps. At least, I was. Training never really goes away though, especially with the kind of life I've led."

Fortunately for Jim's continued prospects of making friends with Shepard, his resemblance to the Illusive Man ends at the cigarette. She doesn't like the smell, but she'll cope.

"I figured. The hair's a bit outside regs," she says dryly. All of him looks the worse for wear, really. A life of conflict will do that to you; Shepard just has the advantage of a very thorough round of cosmetic surgery in her recent past.

"What'd you get? I hear some people pick up talents they didn't have back home."

Raynor chuckled at the hair comment. Sure, it wasn't up to regulation, but then again, terrorists didn't have regulations. Besides, he preferred it long anyway. Looked better on him.

"Well, I can sure guarantee you that I didn't have powers back home, I'll tell you that," He said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. Closing his eyes for a moment, and trying to focus... before his voice made itself present in her mind.

But apparently, I can communicate telepathically now. Which I reckon might be the easier of the two powers, since the other one involves being able to make things from scratch with my mind.

Edited 2017-05-17 06:49 (UTC)

When she hears another voice in her mind, a voice from outside, Shepard stiffens, her hands balling into fists and the biotic aura starting to glow around her before she catches herself.

"Do not," she says through gritted teeth, biotic glow dying away as quickly as it came, "do that without permission."

"Believe it or not, it took a lot just to do that much," Raynor said, eyes still closed. Missing the biotic glow entirely, although he could definitely hear the grit teeth. It seemed he just kept doing the wrong things today, no matter how hard he tried. Oh well. Things to keep in mind for later.

"My apologies, ma'am. Won't happen again." He reassured, opening his eyes. Bringing the cigarette back to his lips, and taking a puff. "Haven't gotten the chance to try it yet, and I couldn't help myself."

"Pass the what?"

Prowl is indignant at the question vaguely thrown in his direction. He didn't sign up to get familiar with organic food. The only reason the Cybertronian was in this area was to net multiple stocks of synthesized energon for when he'd eventually lock himself up in his quarters for weeks at a time to attack one difficult problem or another. Several of the cubes sit nestled at the crooks of his elbows.

Somehow, in the bustle of the busy Mess Hall, his approaching footsteps seemed to be lost, as was his large robot ass attempting to shuffle his way out of the room without creating an intergalactic incident.

Wash is passing by with a bag of orange slices and spacefuture Capri Suns when he hears the request - hand-to-hand class with the kids is due to start soon, and he's making preparations. (Never mind that none of them are actually kids - mental shorthand is a bitch to edit, and he's not really bothering.) Still, he pauses for a moment - "Sure, let me grab some." - before actually seeing what's on Shepard's plate and stopping completely. "Okay, I don't know if anyone told you this, but that-" He points to the traitorous food. "-is generally not safe for human consumption and tends to explode on contact with ketchup and/or table salt, so...I wouldn't."

Raynor is doing a thorough job of finding Shepard's handful of buttons and pressing them, but it doesn't seem intentional, and she's nothing if not level-headed. Better he practice telepathic manners on her than with someone who'll hold a grudge.

"You didn't mean anything by it," she allows, and exhales deeply. "But I have never had a good experience with someone else in my head."

Shepard, this is what happens when you don't actually look at the person you're talking to.

Taken aback by the strangely hostile tone in reaction to a perfectly normal request, she glances over at Prowl. Or at his shin, anyway, which is the part of him that's about eye level to a seated human.

Huh. Usually when she has to crane her neck this much to look at someone, she's about to kill them.

"The red stuff." Shepard leans way over to grab bottle and holds it up. Now Prowl can identify ketchup in the future.

"Seriously?" Now that he mentions it, it does have a distinct tang of ammonia.

Shepard grabs her napkin out of her lap and scrapes the offending food onto it, but instead of heading for the garbage, she leans way over...and still can't quite reach the ketchup. She wrinkles her nose, and then starts to glow blue-white, and the bottle floats the last few centimeters into her hand.

Good job, Shepard, your biotics instructors would definitely be proud that you're too lazy to move six inches.

"I see."

He squints at Shepard with an investigative eye. If she could reach the bottle herself why did this human find it necessary to ask for assistance? Was it a cultural thing?

One arm lets go of the crate of energon cubes to gesture to the infernal demon hot sauce sitting nestled in the grouping of condiments.

"And what is the difference between that bottle and the smaller red bottle also placed on the table?"

"Seriously." Not everyone can recognize a brand new face, and not everyone in the kitchen notices when someone grabs food that doesn't agree with their species. It's just a little busy in here, after all.

It's his finely-honed I've-Been-Living-With-Idiots-For-Months instincts that inform him of what exactly Shepard is planning to do, and he slams a hand down on the ketchup bottle - probably not hard enough to stop her if she really pulls on that bottle, but enough to make a point. "Take it to the hab deck," he says, with all the resignation of someone who's seen way too many unnecessary kitchen explosions in his life.

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

Kid Q | warning for mass deaths/war/general unpleasant mil sf crap

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b im sorry

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