Jessica Larson

Washington DC, Earth

(After waiting for a few minutes, I'm finally cleared to enter the office of Jessica Larson that already wait for me and motioning me to sit at the chair directly in front of her table)

You know, I was just woke up from coma when the alien started to come for Earth. It's only a few hours after I awake when the hawks started to come from the skies. These Turians came to Earth just a few hours after my four month "sleep". Actually I thought the whole mess have been cleared up because four months and no war? Thank goodness I say in my mind after my team arrived to visit me and told me everything. That's of course before I noticed the sudden activity of the troops outside the hospital, which I can see clearly from my room's window, and flying ships started to come down and shoot at important buildings. Many important people were lost that day.

(She sighed and started to become visibly angry)

Even though I don't know anyone that died that day, I still felt angry after all my initial shock has faded. Do you know that I am part of the so called "First Contact"? I'm with the leaders of the world when the hawks came to the backyard of the Buckingham Palace with their fancy ships and equipments that also enabled them to speak English. Things started really well and the humans and the hawks might become friends after all, until of course our cavalry came. You can feel the tension goes through the sky when the special forces with their tanks started to come, the hawks understandably unnerved and started to raise and deploy their weapons and some hawk grunts started to urge the Turian representatives to go the ship while more grunts from both sides emerged and enter the field. This army officer named Shepherd, or is it Shepard? Then approached our president telling him to evacuate. The president refused to go despite the urging of the officer and then shit started to go to hell, pardon the language, when these small flying ships used by the hawks carrying these big guns appeared from the sky.

They started to shoot?

No, I don't know. It might be them, it might be ours. It happened so fast and people started to fall before I heard the sound of the bullets and before I could get to know it, this explosion knocked me up and put me into coma. I learned later that bullets travel faster than the speed of the sound. All of this is just a big misunderstanding, the hawks should know that with their fancy equipments but no, they have to invade and tries to KILL US ALL.

(She took a moment to calm down)

If you are not comfortable, we..

No no, it's fine. I'm usually not this worked up when recalling this. It's just the stress today. Okay, a few hours after the first attack happened, these spooks started to appear in my room and "ask" my team to clear out the room.

Spooks?

You know, the Fourth Echelon. I was sternly told not to tell this to anyone but with President declassifying everything about them after the leaks, I guess it doesn't matter anymore. These guys started to debrief me, told me to recall what happened at the first contact incident, bla bla bla, the such. Then I was "transferred to a higher care hospital in DC" after the spooks get everything they wanted, actually it is a higher care hospital but it is full of military personnel and more spooks. After a couple more weeks in the hospital, this guy from the White House entered my room one day and told me that I'm going to be released from the hospital in tomorrow but I can't go home as my country need me.

Your country needs you?

I know, cliché as hell. Anyway, I was offered to be part of the President's alien warfare team. I said that I didn't know anything about war but he said that I'm going to be one of the member of the science section as my "experience" in the First Contact means that I'm technically one of the most experienced one even though I spent the opening weeks of the war in the hospital without any outside information. It turned out that the USA was still gathering the data about the hawks so they need my expertise as I'm the one that found what's now called the "Mass Relay" and part of the first contact incident at Buckingham. I agreed and as soon as I was released from the hospital at the next day, I entered this military vehicle and spent a whole day and the better part of the next day to join the rest of the staff and the President.

A whole day? You're not going to DC?

Oh yeah, after the attack the whole Presidential activities were centered at that huge bunker called Cheyenne at Colorado that became my home until the end of the war. Something about DC was not secure anymore since the enemy could pretty much come back again and blast DC again and what with the Hawks have launched a ground invasion all over the US. When I arrived, the whole place was deserted from the outside but as soon as you entered the underground the base, you won't believe how much people were inside it. I don't think I'm supposed to talk about this either but after the endless propaganda filming and declassification, I guess it's okay too. After navigating through so much corridor, I finally entered the "War Room" as the movies dubbed it. You could see this big screen in the room that always display an interactive real time map about the current situation of the war all over the world but 90% of the time it displays the US front. There's also this huge oval table in the middle of the room where the president and the core members of his war team make decisions and coordinate. At first, I'm not present at those meetings, not until I'm the leader of the staffs anyway, I entered the adjacent room filled with my teams where my team analyzed the Turian warfare tech and tactics and our leader at that time then briefed the president on the daily meetings until, as I mentioned, it's my job to do so.

What happened to the team leader?

She got promoted one day to become the President's Chief of Staff and my experience working with the president before the first contact made me the obvious choice.

How's the situation when you first join the team?

Well frankly things were bleak. The US Forces were overwhelmed despite all their effort as "surprisingly" the tactics that the army used for years were near useless against the more advanced Turian forces. The hawks invaded the US from the northeast, northwest, southwest, and southeast simultaneously. When I arrived, I was briefed on the current update of the war, half of California was gone although the army still held some of the big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose, the State of Washington was officially gone a day before I arrived as the Army lost Seattle, Maine was gone, and the army could only hold a little part of Florida. I remembered the depression that filled the bunker those days, it seemed that all those people thought about the same thing, "we might not be able to get out of this one".

Well first things first, I'm sticking to the name Endwar as I think it's catchy simple as that and I publish it here due to a lack of a "Tom Clancy" crossover as although the name is Endwar, I modified it a lot and adding a lot of other Tom Clancy games (and other military games) in the story with the first one being the Fourth Echelon which the Splinter Cell platers would be familiar with and I might have a PoV from one of the operatives but no promises, more importantly however that this will be mainly a Mass Effect story from here now on as I only used the Tom Clancy stuff to set the world for the story and I decided to not use anymore characters from the game or novel as I thing it's already more than enough.

Also I use an "interview" format for the story as I can easily write the story that way and I have much difficulty writing using the "third person" format and also the third person format is also so "been there done that" and I want to try a new style that rarely used in the stories here.

Last thing, with busy life I can't promise regular updates but I will try my best to update the story as soon and much as possible.