Bab 26: Subject Zero
"Remember back when becoming a Spectre was an acknowledgement of a lifetime of training and achievement by the most august body in the galaxy?" Tali needled Commander Shepard while we took the shuttle down to the surface of Pragia, "Now people can get it by sleeping with a Councilor."
Coming as no surprise to anyone, Commander Jane Shepard was not amused by Jack and I becoming the first krogan and second human Spectres in the way that we did. The woman ran a pristine military career in honor of her parents, received the Star of Terra for her incredible defense of the Elysium colony during the Skyllian Blitz, somehow managed to be one of the nicest people in space, and she became a Spectre by the skin of her teeth.
Poor girl should have taken the low road like we did and got in on blackmail and called in favors.
"Please don't remind me of that." Shepard muttered.
"Tali." I locked eyes to what are probably some intense glowing peepers behind the quarian's purple tinted visor, "I have been providing intense and repeated satisfaction to the females of this galaxy since I was barely two weeks old. This was recognition by an august body for my lifetime of training and achievement. In fact, I have spent a higher percentage of my lifetime honing my craft than any of those other pansies that join the club." I snorted, "And I kill people. Lots of people."
Jack wasn't feeling particularly chatty as we flew across the overgrown world. Below us, Pragia existed like a sci-fi horror survival show. In an attempt to create a breadbasket world, the batarians seeded the world with modified crops, but hadn't done any research into the microbial life native to the fertile world. The plants the batarians brought with them mutated, many becoming carnivorous, and could overgrow a building in a matter of hours.
Do those guys ever not fuck up everything they touch?
"There it is." Jack spoke finally, "Cerberus built the place to last."
EDI informed us of the multiple thermal signatures in the facility, and we entered from the rooftop landing pad. Right from the start we encountered signs of how Cerberus ran this show, the inhospitable containers used to ship kidnapped children to this madhouse still waiting in the very first room.
Up next we encountered a holoprojector on loop stating that the Illusive Man was getting suspicious of operation and how he did not know what kinds of experiments the wackjobs in lab coats were running here.
"That's sus as hell." I stated bluntly, "This facility has just been running an 'Illusive Man is innocent' advertisement for years? Even if the dipshits here believed they'd pulled the wool over IM's cyber eyes, I'd bet my quad he knew and silently approved."
"You only get so many war crimes you can write off as rogue cells before even the most stubborn bosh'tets have to agree the place smells like bullshit." Tali agreed with me.
We entered a larger chamber with a broken glass ceiling allowing the rain to flow through, bringing up memories Jack shared with us of her escape and the last half dead guard between herself and freedom.
The place was trashed, with a broken catwalk and the containers resting willy nilly throughout forcing us to slog through the maze until we encountered a pack of varren. Something about the weird dog, fish, python hybrid space hounds moved me, and I signaled the team to stand down and removed my helmet. I began growling at the rapidly approaching predators, and smacked the first of them on the snout. My hands came down heavily upon the beasts as I shouted at them in krogan speak.
Fifteen minutes later I had four bad boys sadly following me through the facility, praying to sink their fangs into some fools to make me happy.
"This looks like an arena." Shepard commented on an open space with blood stained floor tiles.
"Only time they ever let me out of my cell was to fight the other kids here." Jack told her.
"Did other children die in these fights?" Shepard asked.
"Yep." Jack nodded, "They'd pump me full of drugs and shock me if I hesitated. Still get those warm feelings in a fight."
A bit further we encountered another holoprojector that last logged a recording of a guard during the riot that ended the facility. The statement that the riot would free Jack and the insistence that Jack be captured alive contradicted her memory of the event.
"I don't remember it like that." Jack mused, "I broke out when I noticed my guards were gone. The other kids attacked me, the guards attacked me, the automated systems attacked me."
"My dear," I spoke up, "you're going to have to be okay with the fact that your memory of events as a drugged up freaked out little girl aren't reliable."
"It won't matter either way once Tali rigs this place to blow sky high." Jack agreed in a round about way.
"It'll be nothing but a smoking crater soon enough." Tali nodded her head.
Our foreword advance hit a unit of Blood Pack vorcha led by a single krogan merc. I opened up with machine gun fire that tore him and a vorcha with a flamethrower apart while my new varren pack started tearing into the rest of the ground based enemies. The report of Shepard's anti-material rifle signaled the end of the vorcha up on the hanging catwalk.
A hail of rifle fire tore through the glass to our left and I returned fire on a team of vorcha who fell to pieces immediately.
"Anybody else notice that this place has such a huge morgue for such a small facility?" I commented on the macabre location of our firefight.
"The other children must have died in great numbers." Tali added her two cents.
"That's bullshit." Jack denied, "I got the worst of it and I made it out alive."
"Babe." I interrupted her woe is me routine, "I think it is time to accept that you weren't an experimental subject."
"Then what the fuck am I?" She snarled.
"The final product." I answered calmly.
"You being for real right now?" she asked far more incredulous than pissed.
"Hundy, girl." I nodded.
"Makes sense." she agreed and we continued our tour the Teltin Facility.
"So strange to be back here." Jack spoke as we continued our trek through this dank hell hole, "I feel like… I'm pissed off. I'm a dangerous bitch. But then I'm a little girl again. Shit, it's complicated. Let's just go plant that bomb."
A pair of vorcha tried to ambush us in the cell wing of the facility, and I got to pick up three more varren for my pack, these ones quickly falling in line with the others.
"Is there a reason you are picking up all these stray varren?" Tali asked.
"Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Supper are good boys." I announced, "Elevenses, Afternoon Tea, and Night Rats will have to show their worth if they want to stay off the grill."
"The fact that you are talking about eating your pets bothers me." Tali stated, "It bothers me a lot."
"I like it." Jack told me as we approached the two way mirror that made up one wall of her cell.
"I used to scream at the kids outside of this for hours." Jack told us bitterly, "I hated them for ignoring me, but it was a two way mirror."
Beyond that we encountered the experiment chambers. Two connected rooms with the evil scientist version of a dentist chair in each. A final holoprojector conveniently logged the experiments run on the children, often fatal, that were conducted to find ways to push Jack's biotic strength just a little bit farther.
"Looks like you were right." Jack admitted before playing the next log that revealed they hoped to infiltrate the Alliance Ascension program and start over, a log that ended with the scientist getting flung across the room.
What a fucking mook. Jack baring down on him and he stops to Vlog for a bit. Fucking millennial deserved the biotic trucking she splattered him with just for his idiocy, let alone his mustachio twirling evil.
The next room found a trio of krogan and their vorcha henchmen complaining on a call about the lack of salvage this outing brought them, and then how they'd kill us for more credits. Their hostility let us know the guy on the other end agreed.
"Ya'll fellows sure you want to ride this train?" I asked them before the fight.
"Choo choo asshole." The leader replied.
The fight was brief and pointless, but did take a long time to finish as I stuffed one krogan's head up his leader's ass, the pair bucking around like a fucked up centaur. It was a lot of hard work, but the reaction of my teammates was worth it. The fact that we would post Jack's helmet recording on the net would make it quite lucrative later.
"That was one of the most fucked up things I have ever seen." wheezed a bent over Tali as the Commander gently rubbed her back.
"I'd give it a seven." she scored.
"You'd think a head that big wouldn't fit up an ass that tight." I nodded my head sagely, "You just aren't approaching the problem with the right attitude."
"Is the attitude, fuck these guys?" Jack asked.
A big thumbs up for my girl.
We found a human waiting in Jack's cell, the unhinged screams of the front half of the centaur echoing down the hall behind us. I know this is some kind of big moment for Jack in the game, but fuck this guy. A quick punch relocated his balls to his throat, causing his scream to choke off into an agonized hiss.
He managed to squeak out his name and his status as another survivor of this facility before he fucked up and told Jack he wanted to restart the project because it all had to have been done for a reason. Jack pulled her gun, but just laughed in his face.
"I'd shoot you, but it'd be funnier to see you try to outrun the blast of the bomb I am going to set off. Get to hobbling, bitch."
I felt proud of my girl as she shot his ass on his way out.
"What a fucking wackjob." She commented.
Jack took a nostalgia trip while Tali primed the bomb I'd been carrying this whole time. On the way out, a hoarse voice whispered up to me.
"Kill me." whispered the front half of the collapsed centaur, the back half having lost the fight for air some time ago, "Kill me."
I pulled out my golden side arm and pointed it down at the relieved krogan.
"Psyche." I laughed as I spun my pistol around my finger and holstered it.
It's real good to embrace your inner asshole sometimes.
It is not good to embrace your friend's face with your inner asshole.
They done learnt that today.
PERTIMBANGAN PENCIPTA 
JManM
JManM This chapter was pretty hard to write. I knew this would be one of the most important chapters of the story, as it is the turning point in canon Jack's arc and my chance to show how much Grunt's changes had shifted that arc, and I had to do it in one of the most boring missions in the game.
I tried to show a more adjusted and mature Jack. Don't know how well that turned out if I am being honest, but the Hancock reference was dope.
Bab 27: Morality is a Circle
Sometimes a man has to ask himself: where the fuck did I pick up the paragon points to make this situation happen? As Jack and Miranda jerked my shaft and sucked my quad, I realized that I must have cranked my renegade score high enough to cause life to bug out and start filling my paragon meter, cause there is no way I could pull off an intimidate check to get this result.
We've all been here at one point (hopefully, if not go play ME2). You complete Jack and Miranda's loyalty missions and next thing you know there is a vicious biotic catfight and you better have the morality points to pull off the persuade or intimidate or one of them is dying come suicide mission. Only this time Commander Shepard wasn't called in to fix things because the apparently charisma maxed giant space lizard man was on site to bring about this most jolly cooperation.
Scratch that, Shepard was called in and just arrived in time to catch me in my praise the sun moment.
How bout that awkward moment when your Space Momma sees you cumming your soul out cause your wife and her arch enemy are somehow working all four of your testicles with their mouths. #Relatable.
Not one to let a little thing like that chill the relationship, the Commander and I kept our appointment to work on her guns several hours and quarts of baby batter later.
As a glorious mixture of synthetic and organic material, Shepard could withstand and output forces that would snap a regular human in half. Because of this we could play around with her kit far more than anyone else's save mine, and while she couldn't follow my ethos of just adding more gun to my gun she had no problems handling the changes we were making to even her Widow anti-material rifle. We applied the Widow to Black Widow conversion that I'd used on all my weapons to beef up the thermal capacity at the cost of weight and threw on a thermal scope and high velocity barrel extension. Even with the cut on using ultralight materials the sniper cannon weighed an ungodly amount and the Commander could still operate it smoothly.
"You'll have to test everything once we get to Aeia, but unless we overlooked something you are looking at a damn fine power boost all around with a good deal of quality of life improvements outside of the weight increases." I told her while admiring my handy work.
My best work was applying the automatic conversion to her M-96 Mattock and working every trick in my arsenal to dampen the recoil, turning it into a precision workhorse. With the added weight of my modifications and the Commander's steady hands she could probably put a mug sized grouping at thirty meters just holding down the trigger. Fucking scary for anyone not as ridiculously durable as me… so everyone else in the galaxy minus the yahgs maybe. I'd find out who is tougher between me and the yahgs soon enough, one way or the other.
The commander shouldered the beast of an assault rifle we'd cooked up and grinned, "I'll go over everything with Garrus later tonight."
"Hoho. Hot date tonight, up in the main battery?" I asked while pleased for my homie Garrus.
"Not exactly." Shepard denied and now I felt sad for my homie Garrus.
"Did I imagine the awkward chemistry between you two lately?" I investigated, "Especially after you guys killed that prick, Sedonis."
"We didn't kill Sedonis." Shepard told me and I realized that it was silly of me to believe that paragon Shepard joined Garrus in that murder, "Garrus and I have talked about starting a romantic relationship, but he has been pretty self conscious since then. It doesn't help that I am liking what I am seeing of Jacob."
"Is this what Zaeed feels every time he sees me doing my beauty routine?" I asked myself aloud, "It's like I was so proud of you that my pride formed a pride puppy, and then you took that puppy and shot it with a gun that makes a noise that sounds like 'Team Jacob' instead of a satisfying gunshot noise. You murdered my pride puppy and now I am sad. This is what I am feeling right now."
"You sound really invested into 'Team Garrus'. What happened to the guy who wanted to marry me all those months ago?" Shepard teased me.
"He busted this really cool chick out of the clink, and they went on all these really cool adventures and fell in love, and got married after becoming the coolest special agents in the galaxy. You better hurry up Space Momma, cause the Lizard Baby is pulling ahead in all metrics of life success." I laughed after that last bit.
"Oh you silly boy." She chuckled, "Haven't you heard, 'You can fight like a krogan, you can run like a leopard, but you will never be better than Commander Shepard."
"Holy shit!" I barked out while nearly choking on my explosive laughter, "You've heard that?"
"I am not above searching my name on the net." The Commander admitted.
"With how polarizing you are, that can't be good." I told her.
"It usually feels like a kick to the chest." she agreed grimly, "And how the hell did you get all that stuff done back on the Citadel, you have no paperwork and were high for all of it."
"Turns out that the Citadel is super chill about processing superhero backstories. Apparently no one even cared that I was some super krogan grown in a lab and less than a year old. Not C-Sec, not the Spectres, and definitely not the hanar that did our marriage ceremony."
"You had a hanar do your marriage?" Shepard was hung up on the least exacerbating part of that reveal.
"Yeah, we found the guy you got the the evangelical license for on the Presidium and even though the Enkindlers can go fuck themselves it was too good a thread to leave untied." I explained.
"Small galaxy." She mused, "Any regrets about getting married? Most people are scared to death by the institution these days."
"I'm not scared of anything. Not even commitment." I flatly denied.
"Not even when you were getting torn up on the collector ship?" Shepard asked, "I was terrified when I got spaced. I was floating towards the planet, towards my doom, and I couldn't do anything to stop it. I was helpless, my worst nightmares playing out in real life."
"Not even a little bit." I answered her, "The blood rage meant I couldn't feel what was happening to me, so at first I was confused as hell about why I was slowing down, weakening. I didn't even realize I was fucked up till I saw it with the one eye I had left. And when I collapsed and just barely managed to roll over to look at something other than the fucking awful shit the bugs use for the floors of their ships, I saw all the pods and thought about how I was dying to make sure a bunch of people that would never give a shit about me never fill those damn things, but I didn't regret it at all. I'd spent my whole life going on kick ass adventures and fucking hot aliens. I was dying a total winner, no ragrets."
"Is it really that simple?" Shepard chuckled, "Just think about the cool parts of your life and dying isn't scary anymore?"
"Socrates taught that to fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for a person; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest evil." I quoted one of the greatest minds the human race ever produced.
"Are you kidding me right now?" Shepard looked stunned.
"I've read Plato too." I told her as I got up and left the woman to deal with the fallout of realizing that a great big space lizard was more cultured than her.
As I walked away I bopped my head to a beat no one else could hear and sang, "Got a grey varren, white one and a tabby too, and a big orange guy who put snakes in my shoes. Mad MC skills leave ya struck, and I roll with my varren and we're hard as fuck . . . I'm down with Plato and Socrates, and I like to get busy with all the ladies. Rollin' around, sumthin', sumthin', sumthin', sumthin'. Uh nuh nuh, yeah I'm up in my nest, up in my nest."
PERTIMBANGAN PENCIPTA
JManM
JManM
The story hit a thousand readers yesterday and I feel pretty great about that. Keep up the interest and I will keep putting out chapters. Its a cycle and after Dragon's Dogma and Dark Souls usually feel like breaking those, but this is one where I benifit so keep it up.
Was I the only one that immidiately shanked myself with the God Killing Blade when we realized we could no longer interact with the world?
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