Grunt was standing just outside the elevator holding a tape measure in one hand and an unraveled bubblegum tape in the other when Shepard emerged from it. "Grunt?" Shepard asked. "What are you doing?"
"I just learned that bubblegum tape is exactly eight feet long!" he proclaimed excitedly. Shepard stared at the tape measure and the bubblegum he was holding with a concerned look. "Also a frozen waffle has approximately 21 divots in it and that bag of jellybeans in the cabinet has exactly 56 beans remaining!"
"Grunt, get a hobby," Shepard commanded before making his way around the krogan to get to the mess hall.
"Why does everyone keep saying that?" Grunt asked.
"Because you're bored enough to count waffle divots!" Shepard pointed out.
Grunt thoughtfully contemplated while he shoved the entire eight feet of bubblegum tape in his mouth. "Huh. I guess I could try doing that," he shrugged.
Grunt's attempts at finding a new hobby did not work out as well as he had hoped. He first went with Miranda's suggestion to join a book club, but got kicked out almost immediately after complaining that the romance novel the predominantly female group picked was "the most boring piece of varren crap I didn't even bother to read!" He joined an entomology club, but left with disappointment after discovering it was a club about nerds who loved bugs and didn't have anything to do with tree people. The one he probably did the best at was the cooking club, but alas that didn't last either and he ended up being asked to leave after he twice ate an entire cake without sharing. Or letting it cool long enough to put the icing on.
Finally, Shepard saw him looking at a flyer that read "demolition club" and very loudly and firmly said, "NO."
"You could go down to the Citadel Community Theatre and sign up for a play," Jack suggested, somewhat facetiously.
"I don't know how to act!" Grunt pointed out.
"That's okay. Have you been to the theatre lately? Neither can anyone else."
"Hmm..." he grumbled.
Despite the fact that he was 90% sure that her suggestion was a joke, he stopped by the theatre anyway and looked at a list of sign ups for upcoming plays. Most of them were full or closed to new entries, but one in particular caught his eye.
"Does your child love to act? The Citadel Community Theatre now proudly hosts the Little Actors and Actresses Guild, where your child can be a star in a play tailored just for them! Interested parties inquire within. We accept all children ages 14 and under (20 and under for asari)."
"I'm a children ages 14 and under!" Grunt said with an ecstatic glee before charging inside.
Shepard was in the process of gluing the wing back on one of his ship models (Garrus claimed he had no idea how it happened, but he was pretty damn sure the turian had been playing with it again) when he received a phone call.
"Hello. This is Commander Shepard speaking. Whose butt needs saving now?" he asked as he steadily reattached the wing.
"Commander Shepard?" a high pitched salarian voice said on the other end of the conversation. "The Commander Shepard?"
"Look, if you're trying to sell me something, I've kind of got more important things to worry about right now..." Like kicking Garrus' ass because he won't stop touching the ship models. "...so unless this is important..."
"Oh, no! I'm not trying to sell you anything!" the salarian replied. "I'm Director Vynn from the Citadel Community Theatre, and your krogan gave me this number. He's trying to sign up for...uh...hello? Are you there?"
The second Shepard heard the words "your krogan", he hung up, abandoned his ship model, and was at the Community Theatre all in the time it took an elcor to sneeze. "Grunt, what did you do now?!" he demanded.
"I didn't do anything! Talk to him!" Grunt insisted, pointing at a salarian standing next to him.
The salarian, whom Shepard assumed was Director Vynn, looked around nervously and uhhhh...'d before explaining. "I didn't mean to alarm you, Commander. It's just that your um...Grunt...is attempting to sign up for a play intended for children. I tried to tell him he was too old for the age cutoff, but he insisted that he's only less than a year old."
"Because I am!" Grunt said. "Shepard, tell him! I really want to be in the play! I'm bored!"
Shepard looked at Grunt, who had a sad, pleading look on his face, then back at the exasperated salarian. He was probably going to regret this later. "Actually, he's kind of right. He's technically less than a year old."
Vynn did a double take at Grunt before exclaiming, "Wait, what? Seriously? You mean to tell me he's actually a child?"
"Seriously. I was there when he was born. You can't tell how young he is by looking at him?"
They both turned to look at Grunt and realized he was already missing. They soon found him across the street at the playground, rocking on a varren shaped spring rocker while children and their parents surrounded him and stared. Shepard winced when he leaned too far back, fell off, and got whacked in the quad by the rebound.
"On second thought, that doesn't seem too farfetched," the salarian admitted. "Okay, fine. If you'll sign a permission slip as his guardian giving him permission to sign up, we'll cast him in our play." He dug through a stack of documents and retrieved one of the forms. "If you were anyone other than a Spectre, I would have told you to take a hike. I hope you realize that."
"So what play are they doing?" Shepard asked the salarian curiously as he read over the terms of the permission form.
"We're adapting an asari fairy tale," he replied. "My partner, Nya, wrote it and I'm directing it. That's her over there." He pointed to an exasperated asari having a conversation with another set of parents who both seemed angry about something or another.
"Do you think having Grunt in the play is going to be a problem?"
The salarian looked at Grunt with a look suggesting he was already regretting this just as much as Shepard was. "I'll just cast him as a tree," he replied. "I'm sure he can't do as much damage as a plant."
News Grunt's bizarre new hobby spread quickly throughout the crew, mostly because Grunt already sounded proud of his role in a poorly scripted children's play and told everyone from Zaeed to Todd the Button Pushing Guy. Shepard remembered why he rarely ate in the mess hall anymore as everyone and their grandma (quite literally in one case- Todd's grandma insisted on coming aboard to say hi to her grandson) stopped by while he was eating to ask him about it.
Garrus dropped his tray directly onto the table next to him and climbed over the back of the seat. "So I heard Grunt's going to be a movie star."
"It's a play for small children. I highly doubt he's going to be winning any awards over this anytime soon," Shepard replied.
Garrus paused his eating and looked a little concerned. "You let a krogan sign up for a play full of preschoolers?"
"They're not all preschoolers," Shepard pointed out. "Some of them are, I don't know, old enough to stop eating glue at least." He mulled the thought over a bit as he ate his rehydrated potatoes. "I wouldn't worry too much about it though. I gave them permission to use military grade tasers on him if he gets too out of control."
"I hope you know that the fact that you consider this a perfectly valid response speaks volumes about the kind of shit that goes on around here," Garrus pointed out.
The next day, Shepard received an email for him and Grunt requesting that they go pick up Grunt's script so he could start practicing. By the time they showed up, there was already a large group of parents clustered around, watching a batarian woman arguing with Nya, the asari playwright, who was currently busy trying to get the scripts together so they could be passed out.
"Is there a problem, ma'am?" Nya asked with a very displeased frown.
"Yes there's a damn problem!" the batarian mother shouted. "You cast my little boy as the villain! THE VILLAIN! Just because he's a batarian doesn't give you the right to cast him as the bad guy!"
"Ma'am, your son was cast as the villain because that's the part that he auditioned for," Nya replied through clenched teeth. "It has nothing to do with his race. We have another batarian child who isn't playing the part of a villain."
"I don't want to hear anymore excuses! Either you recast my son right this minute, or I'm bringing this to the press!"
"Mom, it's okay, I want to be the bad guy!" her embarrassed looking son pleaded.
"No you don't! Shut up!" she shouted at him before continuing her rant.
Eventually Nya managed to say or do something that made the batarian woman finally give up and storm away in an angry rage while her still embarrassed looking son followed. Nya shuffled a stack of scripts and grumbled as she approached Director Vynn.
"Here are the scripts," she said before shoving the stack into his hand. "Hand them out."
"Oh, I'm glad to see you managed to finish them in time! I was getting a little worried we'd have a few angry parents complaining that they showed up for no reason!" Vynn replied cheerfully before paging through the one on top. His expression quickly changed from a smile to a look of quiet perplexity. "Is this really the script? You usually write much better than this..."
Suddenly the asari's demeanor changed to full-out beast mode. "Look, frog! I've had three hours of sleep! Stan from the costuming department decided to drink all the coffee in the break room and replaced it with a pot of decaf! I've got twenty stage moms pestering me to rewrite the script so that their little crotch goblins are the star! If you want a better script, write one yourself!"
The director stood with his mouth wide open in shock as she stormed away mumbling something about "ungrateful toads". He quickly gathered himself together and, with a notable shakiness, handed the first script to Shepard. "Make sure your krogan gets this...he's the tree..."
It was only a few days until the big production was to take place. Grunt was diligent in attending rehearsals, even though everyone else in the play kind of wished he hadn't as wherever Grunt went, disaster seemed to follow. They had to completely reconstruct the backdrop after Grunt had set it on fire and he'd fallen off the stage so many times that the stagehands had to construct a barrier to keep him in. It took him all of five minutes to break through it.
Everyone on the Normandy was eager for the big day so they could find out just how much of a disaster this play could really be.
The night before the play while every child in the performance was sitting at home nervous about having to perform in front of an audience, Grunt sat at the table shoveling food in his mouth without a care in the world as to the horrors looming overhead the very next afternoon.
Shepard was certainly not one of the people looking forward to this. The closer to the hour the play got, the more he worried that this was a huge lawsuit in the making. "So Grunt, what can you tell us about your role?" he asked, hoping to gauge his preparedness.
"I'm a tree!" Grunt said proudly.
"Aside from the fact that you're a tree."
Grunt thought long and hard with a puzzled expression on his face. "I'm a tree!" he said again.
"Can you maybe recite some of your lines for us?" Garrus asked.
"Lines? I have lines?"
"Did you even read the script?"
The krogan looked deeply perplexed at this inquiry. "There's a script?"
"This was a huge mistake," Shepard sighed.
Shepard knew that this was it. As seats filled up, mostly of parents and family members of the children in the play, he knew this was the moment that was going to make history. Maybe literally if it went poorly enough.
The woman sitting next to Garrus leaned over and pointed to a kid walking in a single file line to the backstage with the other kids. "That one's mine. He was top in his drama class two years in a row!" she proclaimed proudly.
Garrus pointed out Grunt, who was walking while staring at the ceiling and ended up tripping over a garbage can. "That one's ours. He's the one that set the stage on fire twice during rehearsals."
"I'm not sure if I can watch this," Shepard sighed. "Maybe I should just close my eyes and have you tell me what happened later..."
"The only reason I'm even here is because I know how much of a glorious train wreck this is going to be," Garrus replied. "I have no idea how you can not want to watch this!"
"I'll be honest, I'm just here because Grunt asked me to film this," Jack added. Her tone belied the fact that she seemed just as eager to see how much of a disaster the play would be with Grunt in it as Garrus was.
They were in the second row so that they'd have an excellent view of the stage. They could hear a small child having a meltdown about not wanting to be in the play somewhere on the backstage, which was mostly drowned out by the chatter of parents and some cheerful children's music playing through some speakers. Shepard noticed a tiny asari poke her head out through the side curtain and wave at what must have been her mother in the front row before disappearing again.
Finally the lights began to dim and the chatter died down as Director Vynn took the stage and began the introduction. Shepard barely heard what he said as he watched Grunt poke his head through the curtain where the little girl had been only moments before. The krogan noticed his three friends in the second row and waved excitedly before a pair of hands came through behind him and pulled him back in.
The salarian left the stage and the curtains pulled back, revealing about twenty five tiny kids of various species in costume, including a bucket of water containing at least two salarian tadpoles with a label on it that read "pond" (which begged the question of who actually signed up tadpoles for this play)...and Grunt, dressed like a tree. His costume looked about as good as you would expect a krogan wearing a felt and cardboard tree to look and the "branches" he held in either hand looked more like overcooked broccoli. Some piano music started playing and all the kids started singing, horrifically off-key like only children could, while Grunt wobbled in the background doing what Shepard could only describe as some sort of freakish tree dance. The poor kids standing directly in front of him ducked and hopped out of the way as he repeatedly whacked them with his broccoli stalk branches.
"It hasn't even begun yet and already he's fucking up..." Shepard groaned. "Wake me when this is over..."
If anyone had asked Shepard what the play was actually about, he wouldn't have been able to tell you because he was so distracted by Grunt repeatedly zoning out throughout much of the first act. What little he could gather suggested the kids were apparently trying to find some magical space fairy princess for some reason or another.
"What is he doing now?" Garrus asked.
Grunt had stopped pretending to be an inanimate object and pulled up his omnitool. While the kids around him were charmingly flubbing their lines in a dull monotone, he was visibly messing with it and ignoring the director trying to catch his attention. A moment later everyone around them heard a jingle coming from Jack and her omnitool lit up.
"Are you both texting each other?" Shepard asked when she hit a few buttons and closed her omnitool.
Predictably, Grunt's own omnitool made an even louder, more obnoxious jingle that sounded like the refrain from a popular Thrasher Maw song, causing the turian kid who was currently speaking to actually stop pretending to act and look at him in disbelief and a vorcha kid to smile and start dancing to the song before Grunt cut it off and texted Jack back.
"Yeah. He wants to know how well he's doing," Jack replied. She looked at her omnitool when it lit up again. "And he also wants to know if we can get ice cream when this is over."
The interrupted child quickly tried to recover from the audacity of Grunt's actions by continuing his lines. "How do we know the way to the Space Fairy Princess from here?" he asked the other children in a stilted tone that was woodier than Grunt's costume.
"Maybe we should consult the old, wise tree? He might know the way," the tiny asari who had peeked out of the curtain earlier replied. There was an extended silence as the children looked at Grunt expectantly.
"Consult the old...wise...tree..." the turian kid repeated her. When he continued to stare off into space, he angrily shouted, "OLD WISE TREE!"
A hand shot out from behind the curtain and gave Grunt's shoulder a shove. He looked around in confusion, realized what was going on, and belted out, "I'M A TREE!" to the laughter of the younger children.
"On the plus side, at least he's still a better actor than the other kids," Garrus whispered to Shepard while the commander buried his face in his hands in shame.
"Is...is he eating a sandwich?" Shepard asked.
Sure enough, Grunt was very visibly eating what looked like a tuna sandwich, which was messily falling out of the roll and slopping all over the floor in front of him. Once he'd finished his sandwich, he looked around for a napkin and ended up wiping his hands on the costume of an older turian girl with the thousand yard stare of someone who really wanted to be anywhere other than here right now.
They were distracted by Grunt's on-set meal long enough that they didn't notice a kid pretend to fall into a puddle of mud. "Oh no. *schzzct* She fell in. *schzzct* However will we *schzzct* get her out?" a bored volus kid yawned.
Especially compared to the last kid, the next one with speaking lines seemed to be putting in way more effort with his acting than he probably should have given the source material. He was clearly the child of the person next to Garrus, the one who was apparently at the top of their drama class two years in a row. "Maybe we can pull her out with a tree branch?" he suggested with a dramatic flair in his tone. There was a long extended silence as all the kids stared at Grunt, who was busy trying to see if he could lick his own eyes. "Maybe we can pull her out with a tree branch..." the kid repeated with a slightly smaller amount of enthusiasm. The little girl who was supposed to be drowning in mud stopped flailing about and even she was staring at Grunt, waiting for him to do something. "Unfortunately the Old Wise Tree got lost in orbit, so she drowned in the mud and continued the rest of the journey as a ghost," the kid ad-libbed.
"Huh?" Grunt looked over and realized he missed his cue again. "I'M A TREE!" he shouted before he ran across the stage, tripped over a prop, and dragged a bunch of lighting and sound equipment behind him when the extension cord wrapped around his leg failed to slow him down.
"I'm glad you're recording this so we can show it to the rest of the crew on Movie Tuesday," Garrus whispered to Jack. "They would not believe me otherwise." Shepard, meanwhile, was sinking down in his seat and trying to be as unnoticeable as possible to the crowd of angry, glaring parents.
Most of the second and third acts went about as well as you'd expect a play full of underachieving grade schoolers to go since fortunately Grunt didn't show up again for most of the rest of the play. Unfortunately they had another roll for him behind the set as apparently the stagehand who was supposed to hoist Nya, as the Space Fairy Princess, across the stage had broken his leg in an incident that Grunt suspiciously swears wasn't his fault "this time", and Grunt was apparently the only one left who was strong enough to hold her up.
"Look. It's the Space Fairy Princess," a five year old who was staring straight out into the crowd instead of in the direction of the supposed princess mumbled in a tone that made her sound like the Dark Lord stole her soul.
"WE FOUND HER!" a kid with no indoor voice shouted.
"I'm here, children!" the asari announced as she slowly but gracefully "flew" across the stage, suspended by a hidden rope and harness. "I have heard your cries and come to...OH CRAP!" she shouted as she fell six feet from the ceiling onto the ground. The rope flew over the pulley and landed on top of her in a coiled heap, leaving several parents and their children gaping at her in shock.
"Are you okay?" the turian girl whose costume still had tuna on it asked her with genuine concern.
From somewhere back on stage, Grunt could be heard saying, "Oh, you wanted me to put her down gently! Why didn't you specify that in the first place?"
Nya was fortunately unharmed by her landing and managed to get back up and continue the rest of the play as normal. Grunt made his grand reappearance around the very end. He was in the rest of the play long enough to whack a few more kids with his branches, loudly criticize the volus kid for not having a convincing enough volus costume, and somehow got stuck in one of the set pieces which required two stagehands to come rescue him. All of this happened in the span of maybe about five or six minutes.
The play ended with another song and dance number performed by the kids with emphasis on only the kids. Grunt was in the back row, staring at the ceiling and spinning around in a circle while waving his branches around madly in another form of a freakish tree dance.
"Five credits says he gets dizzy and falls off the back of the stage," Garrus whispered.
They watched as he stopped spinning and wobbled a little before falling backwards off the back of the stage, taking the entire set down with him. To the credit of the children, they were so used to it by now that they kept on singing and dancing like it had never even happened even as the two stagehands who had freed him from the set earlier ran out to see if he was alright.
Jack paged through the program while the children diligently kept on going, determined to ignore Grunt trying to get up and repeatedly falling over again and again behind them when his costume proved too bulky to let him stand back up. "Looks like they're doing The Wizard of Oz next. Think they'd let us sign him up again?"
"They could cast him as the tornado," Shepard suggested. "Just tape some streamers to him and let him loose on the set."
Shepard was mulling over a bottle of rum in the mess hall when Tali found him. She was more than a little surprised that he hadn't come down to engineering and told her he was back like he usually did upon his return to the Normandy.
"So? How did it go?" she asked in a bubbly tone that suggested that she already knew all too well how it had gone.
"I'll let you know as soon as I finish processing it," Shepard replied. The hand propping his head up slipped away and his face hit the table. "This rum just isn't strong enough..."
"It couldn't have been that bad, could it?"
"It was an hour and a half of twenty five kids forced into acting by stage parents fucking up their lines and then they set Grunt free on the audience. I couldn't have orchestrated a bigger disaster if I gave a pyjak Jaegerbombs and then set him free in the Citadel gift shop."
"Grunt and I uploaded the tape to the extranet. There's already memes!" Jack pointed out. "And I made a techno dance remix from all of his lines which just went viral!"
"Great," Shepard sighed. "Now the entire galaxy knows about this."
A few moments later, Grunt sat down at the table with a tray of food and proclaimed, "I finally found my calling in life! I'm going to be an actor!"
Shepard's head hit the table again so hard all the silverware bounced.
I found a VHS tape of a play I was in when I was nine years old at a church summer camp earlier this year. I played the head carrot guard in a vegetable-themed world ruled by "Sir Celery", who was played by the pastor because the kid who was supposed to play him fell out of a tree and broke his arm the night before the show. Whoever filmed it was standing at an angle, so at one point you could see me and two other kids whose names I can no longer remember swashbuckling with giant plush carrots off to the side of the stage while we waited for our cue to come out and pretend we knew how to act. I can't wait to show this movie to my hypothetical kids!