μεράκι (meraki): [Greek] to do something with soul, creativity, or love; to put something of yourself into your work

When Staff Lieutenant Hannah Shepard gave birth in 2154, it was aboard the SSV Einstein ("No child of mine is gonna be born under the damn sky and not in it."). Jane Shepard remained aboard the dreadnought for nearly three years, but at the outbreak of the First Contact War, the ship was deployed to engage the turian fleet near Relay 314, and the Lieutenant LT, as the crew aboard the Einstein called the fiery little girl, was shipped to the Alliance Academy in London, UK on Earth.

The Einstein would be part of Admiral Drescher's counteroffensive against the turian hierarchy at Shanxi, during which SLT Shepard was meritoriously promoted to Lieutenant Commander. She sent her gold Staff Lieutenant oak leafs to her daughter at the Academy, with the words "these are for you one day."

It was no surprise when Jane Shepard opted to commission into the Alliance Navy as soon as she turned 18.

During basic training, Shepard was singled out by her training command for exceptional leadership potential and warrior skills. Her series commander recommended she be designated N0 Special Forces trainee upon her graduation from training. The designation earned her a meritorious promotion to First Lieutenant on graduation day. Hannah Shepard pinned the silver bar on her epaulets.

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Vila Militar was an old base. Shepard knew that, both because the facility was on Earth, where space was at a premium, and because, even blindfolded as she and the other N0 trainees were, she recognized the shift in texture when the bus transferred from asphalt to gravel and again to dirt.

The bag over her head made it difficult to breath, the moisture in the air and in her breath becoming trapped in the thick burlap cocoon and stagnating there to steam-cook her. Sweat trickled down both sides of her face in slick rivulets, streaming down her neck and staining the collar of her thick dress uniform shirt. The climate was part of training here, her boot camp series commander, an N7 Special Operations Commander, had told her. They were wearing their thick dress blues for a reason. The cadre wanted them to sweat. Lack of food and water, uncomfortable conditions, and sleep deprivation were infamous cornerstones of Alliance Special Operations training.

She focused on keeping her shoulders square, the vertebrae in her back burning in protest to being kept erect for the past four hours. In her head, she counted the footsteps of the liaison officer who paced back and forth in the aisle to be sure none of the candidates had lost consciousness. It wasn't uncommon. Some candidates came from colonies on frigid, wintery planets or were used to the dry chill of space stations. The humidity of Rio de Janeiro was sometimes the first facet of N-School to claim casualties. Passing out on the bus earned a candidate their return ticket home.

Shepard had to admit, even if only to herself, that sitting perfectly erect in a long-sleeved, woolen dress uniform with a burlap sack over her head, for four hours, in what had to be over ninety percent humidity, was sapping the resolution from the edges of her vision. Her mother had been stationed on at a few temperate posts, but most of her childhood had been spent in space, aboard the Einstein. The back of her throat seemed perpetually dry, no matter how many dusty swallows she forced into it. Dehydration would be a major concern here.

Finally, mercifully, the bus slowed to a halt. It was ancient, like she assumed the base was as well. Air brakes hissed angrily beneath them. The doors folded open squeakily, the sound followed by the clomp of boots on the metal stairs.

"Sacks off, candidates," a raspy voice ordered. Thirty candidates removed their burlap headgear in unison. Shepard kept her eyes squarely focused on the shaved head of the candidate in front of her, trying not to squint too much. The sun was painful after the darkness of the sack.

"Listen up," the voice, she found with a surreptitious glance to her right, belonged to a middle-aged Operations Chief in old-style digital camouflage. "You are now aboard Alliance Interplanetary Combatives Academy, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is not boot camp, for those of you fresh out, and this is not the fleet, for those of you coming off deployment rotation. You will be addressed as 'candidate' and you will address each member of my cadre as 'N7'. They have earned that title. You have not. When I tell you to, you will get off my bus and assemble quickly and quietly into formation outside. Any questions?"

Silence rang throughout the bus.

"Get off my damn bus."

They stood in formation for another three hours, at attention, in the sweltering sun. The cadre lingered nearby in the shade of a square popup umbrella made of camouflage netting. They talked amongst themselves quietly, and they watched.

Twenty minutes into the formation, the class suffered its first heat casualty. A pale, skinny Marine from the 10th Mountain Division crumpled at the knees. Two of the cadre rushed to help him into the shade and administer emergency medical attention. He came to a few seconds later, confused and, when the instructors told him what happened, crestfallen. Shepard tried not to think about what that must be like – to be selected for initial training and then falling out because of a bit of humidity on the first day. She clenched her fists, one after the other, digging her blunt nails into her palms. The little pains kept her mind sharp against the billowing, lazy heat.

They'd lose more than that first Marine if the cadre didn't let them have some water fairly quickly. The bus ride had taken four hours. In this kind of heat, it wasn't a matter of if they would start to dehydrate, but when.

Two more Marines, three sailors, and four soldiers succumbed to the heat before the Chief stepped in to address the platoon again. They were down ten candidates, and the first day wasn't half over.

"I get it, candidates," the Chief said. "You're tired. You're hot. You're dehydrated. You're standing in your dress blues and brass, in hundred percent humidity, in the middle of tropical assfuck nowhere. So here's what I'll tell you: if you're here for a red stripe, or a patch on that uniform you've got on, just go buy one. We don't need you. But if you're here because you want to be part of a brotherhood, and do things most people can't do, then you better start puttin' out now. There's a month of this, candidates. And it only gets worse from here. Anyone wants to back out now, there's no shame in it."

Shepard's brow furrowed. No one would be dropping voluntarily out of a formation like this. They were all top-notch candidates, recruited as much for their aggressive personalities and thirst for achievement as they were for leadership or combat skills. Some might drop tonight, when they were alone with their own suffering and no one was around or awake to see them quit. But not now. Not in front of this crowd. Ten servicemen and women had already accepted heat stroke before asking for reprieve.

The Chief caught her look of disbelief, his eyes searching her face. Shepard maintained a disciplined lack of eye contact, but she could have sworn that when the old dog walked back into the shade, he was smiling. The idea made her stomach turn. Best not to get singled out here. The course would be difficult enough without being afforded additional attention by the cadre.

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Being noticed by the cadre was soon her only concern. The first week of evaluation involved mostly physical training. Up at 0300, two mile forced march into the forest with loaded packs, then group PT until noon. A makeshift MRE of protein paste and crackers split between their four-man fireteams, and then march the two miles back to base.

Everything was timed. Falling too far behind the column on the marches to and from base, failing to keep cadence or not putting out enough during training evolutions, or even taking too long to puke put a candidate at risk for being dropped from the course. By the second day, nine more candidates had dropped or been pulled from the course. Shepard had no time to consider the dropouts. They went through the same training evolutions every day, but they were brutal.

First after reaching the jungle clearing that signaled the end of their march was rolling. Taken from the old United States' records for the evaluations of their Army's Special Forces, the main focus of this exercise was to disorient and confuse. An hour of rolling back and forth across the pit had Shepard's stomach roiling, threatening to bring her meager breakfast up for a return appearance. Sometime around the forty-five minute mark, the nausea got the best of her, and she stumbled drunkenly out of the pit to puke orange mush on the grass around its edge.

"There's another!" the Gunnery Chief overseeing the evolution was positively gleeful. "You wanna quit, candidate? You quit now, you don't have to pick up that trash you just spilled on my deck. Somethin' to think about."

And for a moment, it really was. Special Forces left no trace. That meant no orange froth on the deck after she went back to the pit. She hesitated.

"What are you doing, candidate!?" another of the cadre jumped on her indecision. "Why are you sitting over here staring at your puke? Everyone's doing the evolution but you!"

Shepard unfroze. She scooped the frothy, sticky vomit from the ground and stuffed as much of it as possible into her right thigh pocket. It was so watery, she felt fluid seeping through the fabric and down her leg almost immediately. The layer of grime coating her skin after six days without a shower served as a sluice for it, shunting it immediately down into her sock and boot below. She ignored the squishy feeling in her sock at every hurried step back to the pit.

Vomit would not be what sent her packing.