The Quarian Nature
Prologue
Ysa'Dahan nar Shellen was in a bad mood. No, really she was pissed. Badly. Just about everything seemed to turn into crap! Right now, she hated the universe in general and herself in particular. Mopingly she kicked a piece of junk aside on her way to the field hospital of the refugee camp, carrying two tubes of dextro nutrient paste in her small three-fingered hands. She was of firm build and rather short, even by quarian standards, at slightly less than 1.60 meters, which accentuated her wide hips even the more. She wore a brown and beige enviro-suit and a green veil that had yellow patterns of plants and leaves on it. She used to have a green visor faceplate too, but it broke in an accident she had a year ago on her birth-ship, the Shellen. Back then, some techies who were about to repair the hydroponics' climate control system spilled some oil on the floor and clumsy little Ysa slipped and crashed into a metal crate, leaving a crack in her visor. Fortunately she wasn't wounded in the face, but still became quite sick after dirt and pollen had gotten into her helmet. The replacement visor she got was of a dark, dull grey, which mirrored her mood then quite well, sulking away in the infirmary, cursing those stupid maintenance-bosh'tets. She remembered those days, realizing that her current mood wasn't all that much better - it was much worse, actually. She felt numb and muddleheaded, although she wasn't physically sick now - but most definitely homesick.
"Damnit." she muttered under her breath. "Damn filthy shit, all of it!"
"Ba'kho mel detha!" she added even louder, a distinctly quarian curse that no translator VI would dare to process. She noticed the irritated look of an asari in front of the tent she was passing. Her name was Rena, she recalled.
"What?" Ysa snapped at her, "If this isn't the right time and place to curse, then when or where is?"
The asari maiden was taken aback a little by the fretful attitude of the petite quarian girl. But then she tilted her head and nodded, sighing.
"You've got a point there, suity-sweety."
"Rena! I said it before, don't call me that, or I'll accidentally drop some nice spicy turian herbs in your food, squid-head!"
Rena frowned, "Squid-head? Where did you pick that one up?"
"Um... I heard an angry human saying that to an asari. I have no idea what a squid is, but I like the nasty sound of it. It suits you!"
Rena rolled her eyes, "Ok, drop it, Ysa. And about those turian herbs, actually the stuff that came out of your field kitchen down there last time tasted like that already! A quarian cook! That's like... like..."
"An asari mechanic?"
"Yeah, well, once again, point taken." said the asari mechanic.
"And I'm not a cook. I'm a gardener in fact. But you know I can cook well, dextro or levo kitchen, and you didn't complain those last two months, did you? But right now, I'm just cooking for myself and the turians. The guys responsible for the levo foods in the camp are Merrash the salarian, and three of the humans, so don't blame me, ok?"
"Yeah, sorry, I'll have a word with them, then. See you later, Ysa."
The asari smirked sourly and went her way down the path to the field kitchens. Ysa liked that 'young' asari, for she wasn't quite as arrogant as the other asari, most of which didn't even talk to the quarian. Except the boss of course, but she was badly wounded and comatose now. The thought gave her a another stroke of pain and guilt. Ysa sighed. She shouldn't be so grumpy towards people, all in all they had treated her really properly. In fact, those first two months of her pilgrimage went incredibly well, compared to the many stories she had heard from homecoming pilgrims back on the fleet, who had some terrifying tales to tell about racism and mistreatment towards quarians. No, Ysa got it better in those first two months, joining an asari led archaeological expedition to a prothean excavation-site on an uncharted planet in the Tethys Gamma cluster in the Attican Traverse. The archaeological team was surprisingly diverse, besides the asari there were turians, salarians, even a volus, and Ysa herself - being a quarian! And professor Dr. Neria Tenakis, her boss, a leading asari archaeologist, was a remarkably decent person. Ysa thanked the ancestors for bumping into her on the citadel, just shortly after she arrived there for the first days of her pilgrimage.