Flux Effect

A Mass Effect Fic

A/N: Oh look, another Mass Effect SI fic. How original. Well, let's hope that this take has a few new twists, hopefully enjoyable ones. First, let's get the basics out of the way. Mass Effect and all associated characters are not my property. They remain Bioware and EA's. I'm just enjoying playing in the sandbox. It's a great universe, even given the occasional misstep. I hope you folks enjoy my take on this genre. Further thanks and acknowledgements at the end of the chapter.

Uncut batarian ale is expensive, exotic, and has a smooth taste. The proof is frankly obscene, and isn't the kind of thing you drink if you want to remember the night. It's become a favorite of mine.

It's also the kind of thing to never drink alone, and never when depressed over being hurled out of your universe and into the detonation of an eezo core. That one, admittedly, is a personal rule…not many others having cause to even consider it.

You shouldn't even do it if, like me, it's your two year anniversary of waking up blind in a hospital, your left arm dead numb and full of dust and shard form eezo, malnourished and recovering from exposure. Not even if after they turned on your new artificial eyes, complete with light blue glow, they send you in for major brain surgery because your genes code for biotic adaptation and your arm might as well be a disruptor torpedo for all you know how to do with it.

This is strictly against the rules of good sense.

If you're mourning the loss of your fiancée and son, you should not head up the to the "aught" blocks of Zakera Ward, and go to the club called Flux, which incidentally, has some quasar stations in the back, walk up to the bar and ask Jenna for 307 Ale. You should not do it alone, and particularly not with a gun in your jacket.

"Hey, Chris."

I look over to see one of my better acquaintances, then flick my finger along my sunglasses in a sketchy salute. "Hey, Jake." Jake is an Alliance reservist, a member of my battalion during off-semester training. He also works as the bouncer at Flux.

Guess what I'm doing?

"I think there's an open table down in the corner."

For a bonus round, guess what accounts for the .8 kilos of mass hanging out under my left armpit.

"Jenna's section?" Seriously, Jenna might soon be heading out to Chora's Den to help Chellick, but she's definitely a better waitress than Rita. Wish there was a way to keep her here without obstructing the gears of justice. I sincerely doubt one more former waiter tipping generously here will outweigh her civic responsibility.

He nods. "Yeah. I hear she might be looking for another job, though, so enjoy it while it lasts."

With two years of practice dissembling, these sorts of things come easily. "Damn shame. Can't imagine why she'd want to abandon so many regulars."

He shrugs and leans back against the wall. "Got me. Have a good night, alright?"

With being a former waiter comes a powerful ability to project fake cheer. "I'll be doing my best." I wander over to the corner table, not my favorite, since it's a little out of sight of the server station, but probably better for my mood tonight. The acoustics cut a few decibels off the club's music, and depressed drinking doesn't go over well in sight of a dance floor. Jenna is over in no time at all. "The usual, Chris?"

I shake my head. "307 Ale, Jenna."

She laughs at the reference to the ancient song, still floating around the extranet. "Got a big sale?"

"Yes, but it's actually for a special occasion. Bring a carafe."

"Gotcha." She flashes a flirty waiter's smile at me. "Be right back with the good stuff."

I pull out my datapad to check my emails one last time before I forget business and in fact the whole universe I'm living in. Nothing of note, just a few inquiries that will keep till tomorrow. Jenna drops off the carafe and a glass, reflexively hoping that I'll have a good night. I thank her and pour a finger of the ale, lips quirking at the bright green heated liquor. "Here's to reality," I murmur before tossing the glass back.

The warm drink is traditionally served hotter than this carafe, due to batarian throats being a tad hardier than human ones. I burned myself a few times before Doran got it right, but the smooth taste kept me coming back for more. This time is perfect, the heat bringing out smoky undertones and seeming to spread through my body. Before the taste fades from my tongue, I pour myself two more fingers and swirl the glass, watching the liquid climb the synthcrystal. "L'chiam." The sip I take is better than tossing off the first finger, letting the alcohol roll around on my tongue. Exquisite.

"Is that some asari toast?" I look up to see a lady with cinnamon toast skin, dark black hair, and an impish smile. Recognition tickles at the back of my mind, but nothing comes to my tongue. "Mind if I sit with you?"

Still trying to figure out where I've seen this lady before, I nod. "Hebrew, actually."

"Oh, you're Jewish?" She's lean with long arms, developed shoulders and legs, and I imagine a great core under the white dress that hugs her curves like it was painted on. The drink she's holding makes me think of mulled honey mead. At my nod she smiles. "I'm a bad Catholic myself."

"Huh." I take another sip of the ale, still trying to figure out where I know this girl from. Before the alcohol makes my head any fuzzier, I decide on the direct approach. "Sorry, but I've got the feeling I should recognize you, and I'm drawing a blank."

She laughs, a very endearing sound. "My name's Abby. I was in your Eezo Dynamics 267." She brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. "Sorry, but when I saw you carrying a giant block of ballistics gel into an optics lab, I knew I had to ask you about it. Then I hear you're in the ROTC, and you just got even more interesting."

I raise an eyebrow at that. "Most people at SIT aren't much for the ROTC."

"I'm not most people. My sis is a Gunnery Chief in the Alliance. Dad served too." She sips at her drink.

"To the Alliance then?" I ask, raising my glass.

"The Alliance," she agrees and we clink glasses. "So what were you doing with the gel?"

"I run a specialized custom shop on the side. I was testing one of my products."

"In an optics lab?"

"Yeah." I run my tongue over my teeth. "I don't really work with mass accelerators."

"Wait. No." She points at me, wide-eyed. "Are you saying you built a laser rifle?"

This gets a laugh out of me, the ale starting to get a foothold. "Technically without rifling in a barrel…or in fact a barrel at all, it can't be a rifle…"

"No way. You can't make a worthwhile laser gun."

I shake my head. "You can't cheaply, I'll admit. But the information's all there, out on the extranet, even. I just put it together first." I could go on longer than that, having made a tidy living on the subject, but technical conversations are not really drinking topics.

She takes a deeper drink of the honey-colored liquid in her glass. "And it works?"

"I was spitting out chunks of gel after the first full-power shot," I affirm.

"Next you're going to tell me you've figured out how to set a laser to stun," she laughs.

"That was actually pretty easy."

"You're shitting me." Abby reaches across the table and pushes me playfully.

"No, I'm serious. You ionize a path through the air with a laser pulse, then use it as a guide for current. There's another method too, but I haven't really experimented with it."

"Wait, that's cheating." Well, so was me taking all the ideas from half-remembered internet readings before I ended up here, but they say invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, so I figure I'm close. "You're not really setting the laser to stun."

"That's what you do with the other method," I point out.

"But you don't use it," she says with a mock-accusing finger. "So you're cheating. Hah. I win." She takes a triumphant drink, draining her glass.

I hold my hands up in supplication. "Fair, fair. As forfeit, I'll buy your next drink." As the ale takes greater and greater effect, depressing mourning seems like less and less of a good idea, even by drunk logic.

"What are you having?" She asks.

"Batarian ale. Uncut." I watch to see that she doesn't take a swing on me in drunk patriotism.

Instead she dissolves into laughter. "That's awesome!"

"What?"

"You just toasted the Alliance with batarian ale. I gotta get in on this." I motion for a glass, which Jenna brings promptly, and pour Abby a finger. "To the Alliance," she laughs.

"The Alliance!" We clink glasses and toss back the ale. I laugh as she coughs, not expecting the heat.

"That's damn good," she croaks out, holding out her glass for more. "So what's the name of the guy that just bought me a drink?"

"Chris," I say, pouring in two fingers this time. "What shall we toast this time?"

She smiles over the rim of her glass. "Well, I can think of at least five fleets to start with."

"I like the way you think," I reply.

We make it through all five fleets and a few divisions before the ale is gone.

I wake up with a pounding headache, sore muscles, and a very nude bedmate. "Ugh." I sit up, shaking my head. That proves to be a mistake, as the pain nearly sends me reeling to the floor. I squeeze my eyes shut and grope for the painkillers I placed on the side of the bed before heading to Flux. My clumsy search sends the bottle skittering away, but not before spilling enough tablets to get a maximum dose. These, I swallow dry before falling back to the pillow.

It's some minutes before I decide to rise again and look at my bedmate. As expected when I woke up, it's Abby, and my earlier suspicions on a well-developed core are confirmed. She has a fencer's build and firm, high breasts. As she shifts in her sleep, I note a number of bruises that are almost certainly hickeys. Given everything…

I groan. Given everything, I just celebrated my unofficial anniversary of losing my fiancée and son by getting stone drunk in a bar and having a one night stand. Hardly the night I had planned, though if I'm honest, it does beat playing Russian roulette with a pulse laser, which strikes me as the kind of thing I might have considered had Abby not shown up.

I slide out of bed and pad over to the bathroom, looking for a reasonably clean glass to get water with. It's only after a minute or two of searching that I remember I actually cleaned, remembering *****'s pushing on the subject, and head to the kitchen. Three glasses later, my throat is feeling human again, and I'm standing in front of the bathroom sink, pupils glowing at me from the mirror.

Two years and those artificial eyes still make my face a stranger's, just like the scars all over my left side transformed my body. In reflex, I check the inert plug that fills my L4 port, keeping the implant operating at standby. The smooth polymer is in place, like always.

"I wondered why you always wore those sunglasses," says Abby. I open my eyes to see her in the mirror, as nude as she had been when I left her.

"Feel free to freak out now," I mutter, splashing water across my face.

She doesn't. "How long?"

"Two years and one day." I gesture at the scarring on my left arm and torso. "That's when this happened too." I cock my head to the side. "Or at least that's when I learned about it."

She winces. "Sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

I sigh. "It's better than most of the reactions I get. Look…" I turn to face her. "How much do you remember?"

She shrugs, which does enticing things to her chest. "Toasting the Alliance with batarian ale, making out in a skycar…not the sex, though, which is a shame, way I'm feeling. You?"

I rack my brain, and vague snippets of off-key singing come to mind, along with being warned by a turian C-Sec officer, and a flash of Abby's face as she orgasms. "Pretty much the same, I guess. I think a cop caught us in the car."

"Damn." Abby shakes her head. "Woulda been sexy to fuck under the nebula."

"I'd rather a private car," I muse. "You do realize this was a one-time thing, right?"

She rolls her brown eyes. "Duh. What do you take me for, some dewey-eyed spacer who thinks sex only happens with your true love? You were smashed, I was blitzed, we had a good time. Not saying I wouldn't object to a repeat, maybe with a little less booze, but high romance, this was not."

"Yeah," I say. "I'm not entirely over my fiancée yet." Understatement of the decade.

Abby winces. "Two years ago?"

I nod. "Two years ago."

"Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen head,
And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;
But thou, go by."

It's obviously a memorized poem. Tennyson, if I'm right. She leans against the doorframe. "L'chaim, right? To life?"

"That's one way of looking at it, I guess." I nod towards the shower. "Go ahead and take first crack. I'll go find your clothes and make some breakfast. How do you like your eggs?"

"Scrambled." Abby flows over and hugs me. "Thank you." A kiss on the cheek. "I am sorry about her." She slides into the shower and is soon obscured by steam.

"Yeah." I turn away from the tempting sight and pull on a pair of boxers before searching for Abby's clothes. Everything but her panties soon make a stack on the bed, her underwear nowhere to be found. Breakfast is a simple affair, eggs and toast with something that imitates bacon rather admirably. I'm dipping my second slice of toast in my eggs' yolks when Abby joins me, wrapped in a towel.

"My implant read green on the function check. We should be in the clear." She digs into the eggs. "Sunny side up? Really?"

"I like dipping my toast," I protest before scarfing the last of my bacon substitute.

"Laser rifles and sunny side up eggs. You're some kind of weird, Chris."

"Some kind of dirty, more like. I'll be back." I put my plate in the dishwasher and head for my shower.

Apparently Abby didn't see fit to mess with my temp settings, which suits me fine. I like my showers just a degree under scalding, the better to work out kinks and knots in my muscle. That became rather more critical after the eezo core detonation. It's not uncommon for me to become slightly light-headed from the heat as I work on my muscles. I give a grim chuckle. My predilection towards long showers always amused or irritated *****, depending if we had somewhere we needed to go. Now it's practically necessary, and one of the reasons I settled on the Citadel, even after promising myself I would never interfere with the flow of canon. There's only so many places that have the tankage to provide a good shower.

And this is a good shower, hot and long, plenty of opportunity to stretch out and limber up. I run through an abbreviated set of short-energy motions, focusing on the interplay between my muscles. Later I'll have to find time to put in time for a more complete form.

"And martial arts?"

I overextend on an elbow strike and crack it against the wall. "Son of a bitch!" I look over to see Abby, clothed, with a look halfway between amusement and apology.

"Sorry." The look tends more towards apology as I cradle my injured elbow. "I was going to ask if you knew where my panties were…then I got worried you'd fallen asleep in there or something."

"I've done that before," I admit. "And I have no idea where your panties are, sorry. You can borrow some boxers if you like."

She waves off the offer, perching herself on the sink. "I'll make do. Just have to be careful about how I sit, right?" She opens her legs fractionally.

I groan. "I get the feeling that this isn't going to be the last time I see you, is it?"

She flashes that impish smile again. "Well, you are going to have to return my panties when you find them…" Seeing me shake my head, she laughs. "Seriously though, Chris, I think you're a pretty interesting guy. Even if you're right and this was just a one-time thing, I certainly wouldn't mind being friends."

"I don't think I'd mind that either," I say after a moment. "It's just…two years is too short a time, you know." Especially when you spend most of it in a bout of repression.

"I think I get how you feel." She hops down from the sink and steps over to the shower. "Look, why don't we meet Thursday after classes at the cafeteria? You don't have any business you have to take care of, right?"

I shake my head. "No. Why?"

She smiles. "Let's make it a surprise. I think you'll like it, though." At the incredulous look on my face she laughs. "I'm serious."

"Okay."

"Good. Now, I can let myself out if you like, and you can spend the rest of the day thinking about the fact that I'm not wearing any panties." Her smile is positively wicked.

I shake my head in mock exasperation. "I get the feeling that sexual teasing is going to be one of the conditions of friendship, huh?"

Her laugh is accompanied by a shake of her head. "You kidding?" She runs a hand down her belly, leering at me. "That's one of the benefits, Chris. I'll see you on Thursday." With that she sashays out, leaving me to shut off the shower and run a hand through my hair.

The hell? I look back to the mirror, swiping a hand through the condensation. Scarred up, fucked up, and out of place. I might have approached handsome once, but with glowing eyes and eezo scarring, I'm a tad bit further away than I used to be, to say the least. I bite my lip. I never used to really believe ***** when she called me sexy, not entirely. Too many old memories. I suppose it's possible there's something there, but dammed if I can see it. Abby's questionable taste or not, there's another issue.

Given what she said last night, her last name is almost certainly Williams. I just fucked Ashley's sister, and I'm going to be meeting her again on Thursday for…something. I'm more than enough of a sci-fi fan to know how messing with a series of pre-ordained events tends to send things spiraling out of control, hence why I decided to stay out of the path of canon a week after I showed up. As nasty as some of the implications can be, Shepard gets it done, and doesn't need any help for me. Abby is a little close to that main canon. Sure she wasn't much more than a one-off mention in some ship dialogue where it was mentioned that she practiced the sword and liked 'tops you have to tie her into', but even the fact that I met someone mentioned in the game…

I swear viciously. The guy who goes drinking at Flux of all places is worried about knowing Abby. Sure it's a good bar, but it's a place Shepard explicitly goes to. I should have never set foot in it. And selling pulse laser weaponry. Like that wouldn't mess with canon?

Well, the lasers are a small business, and when 3 rolls around, having the technology out there will help a lot. One of the major advantages the Reapers have is their incredibly tough barriers. Lasers ignore those. And as much as Shepard wins, it's awful Pyrrhic. If my putting lasers on the scene helps to win the war, so be it. I'll honestly be pretty happy with that.

As for Flux…I'm just a background character. Set dressing. Shepard would never talk to me. And Abby? Same. Not important, not going to derail what needs to happen. I blow out a breath. I want to believe myself, and it's still sounding like justification. Justification to help forget *****…and my son.

What the hell should I do?

A/N: So, I'm not entirely a good person. This started as therapy writing, to deal with some fears about Ms. ***** and my life, but as usual with writing, the story has already taken on a life of it's own. I'd like to take a moment to thank Herr Wozzeck, TheRev28, and iNf3ctioNZ for providing excellent examples of the genre, as well as being very welcoming to questions. Hadij Drake also gets a shout out for reminding me that there's always a new take on a story, providing at least half the impetus to write this. Project Rho, especially Luke Campbell on that provides the lion's share of my tech and science checking. Like Chris implies, I'm cheating off your notes.

I hope you've enjoyed this first little bit of the fic. If you did, rest assured, there's more to come. (If you didn't...sorry?) I'm not going to make any promises on schedule, but I will lay out some promises to give you an idea of what to expect in the future. First, this will be a harder, more military sci-fi inspired story than most of what I've seen, and indeed, more so that canon in some ways. Technology, tactics, and logic will inform both the wins and losses for both sides of the conflict. There will be no overt 'space magic' and I will try and clean up some of the major plot holes that show up in the games. This will result in a different path than canon from the very beginning. While major elements will stick, hopefully you'll be as surprised as Chris will by the changes. With any luck, it should be an enjoyable ride for all of us.

Till next time.