Disclaimer: I do not own the Mass Effect francise and nor am I at all affiliated with Bioware, EA, or even Dark Horse. Nor do I personally know anyone who are.

I want to clarify some things: Yes, this is another "alternate ending" story. No, I didn't hate the ending as much as everyone else, but I do think it was badly written, rushed, and silly. And if the fanbase is this upset, it's a problem. EA doesn't seem to understand that their customers actually are entitled; not only did they promise a more varied ending through advertisements (putting themselves in a very possible legal battle), but these customers are very invested in the series.

This spirit is something that the company should celebrate, not condemn in a PR lie of "artistic vision", and here is why:

Star Trek: The Original Series was 79 episodes long. These episodes ranged on average from 40 to 50 minutes each. This makes them about 60 hours of content. Now, imagine that, at the end of the series, the fans received the opening credits to Star Trek: Enterprise. They'd be kinda pissed, don't you think?

One play-through of the three games of Mass Effect comes out to 90-100 hours of game play, and has a much broader modern audience than Star Trek saw in the '60s. In other words, starting out, Mass Effect is a bigger universe than Star Trek, and could even become a bigger influence on sci-fi than Star Trek could ever imagine.

So, what happens when you piss off a Trekkie?

I hope the free extended footage (which, I'm sure, was already in the works and wasn't originally going to be free) makes up for their lost image and lost sales of people who sold their games back to Gamestop, allowing me and others to quickly get used copies, keeping money away from the actual publishers and producers of the game.

Prologue

"Commander."

"We did it," Shepard rasped. Everything ached. Even sitting down and laying her charred back on the raised stage beside the admiral—her former captain—stung like a bitch.

Anderson managed a slight nod. "Yes. We did."

Fires and falls and the clouds of Earth swirled before them.

"It's—ah-quite the view," he said. Shepard cleared away some of that blood in her throat to answer.

"Best seats in the house."

"God. Feels like years since I had just... sat down."

"I think you earned a rest. Anderson?"

"Mm? Mm."

"Stay with me. We're almost through this."

"You did good, child. You did good. I'm... proud of you."

"Thank you, sir."

A sound, something out of the deafened and dead quiet, jarred Shepard's attention to the side. She wanted to pull her hand up with the pistol she found, but her hand fumbled with fatigue and her blind grasping brought shots of pain up from her fingers. Her eyes settled on a figure, shadowy, crawling up towards them from the ground.

Shepard blinked away the residual black-out from the G-loss of consciousness she experience earlier from the beam, wondering if she was hallucinating.

It was the child.

"What the hell?" she moaned, "You... can't be here." She turned to Anderson. "Do you see—"

Anderson's face looked cold and pained, then alarmed. His eyes flew, and with a great groan of last strength and pain, his own hand found Shepard's pistol and brought it up. Shaking aside, he pulled the trigger three times.

"Anderson! What—" The ungodly screech brought Shepard's eyes to the boy. Black blood oozed from a hole in its cheek, and it screamed something out of a nightmare, his teeth bared like some ungodly, hissing demon.

"That child... was in the transport when Earth was invaded," Anderson choked out as he crawled backwards, pistol still up. Shepard scrambled to pull herself up on the raised section, away from the creature. "I saw him die... The Reapers must have found us here." No sooner had he said that was when Shepard felt cold claws close around her shoulders and tug her up. Her neck whipped around, and she saw the growling faces of cannibals, banshees, marauders, husks.

They were taking her away.

"Commander!" Her eyes returned to Anderson. The gun clicked with the spent heat sink, and the child-husk leapt into him. The admiral gave a grunt and slammed the hilt into the small skull as best as he could. "Shepard!"

"Sir!" For the first time in so long, she felt her eyes burn with tears that wanted to form. Incessant pulling of deformed hands and claws kept her from lurching forward to help him. The rancid breath of dead and dying things hissed at her and made her face cringe as she fought. "No!"

"Don't ever stop fighting, Shepard!" he cried out. He collapsed, still in tackle, behind the raised platform as the red of the room retreated her vision.

"Anderson!" Her scream ripped through her torn throat. The pain and pressure took her over again. It was hard to focus. She was being taken somewhere... taken out of the Citadel. But, but the fight wasn't over. The fight wasn't over!

She blacked out.