Mass Effect Fanfiction

Border Defence

By: Mage-Alia

Summary: Travellers came to their world, looking for glory and fame, but some never made it to their goal. There's a force in the universe that watches the border of reality. Once to keep the newcomers out. ONESHOT

Sometimes. People don't like the way stories end.

She'd been working hard for weeks on her plan.

Sometimes, they get the bright idea to change it.

Her costume was ready, the scientist uniform done in Alliance blue and white was laid out on her bed where she was hand sewing the final touches to the shoulder seams. But really, where she was going, it wasn't a costume, it was a disguise.

... But stories are told the way they are for a reason.

Picking up a small pile of platinum ingots off her dresser she secured them in pockets lining her shirt where they hung heavily. The metal had been valuable in the game for research and she'd emptied her account to buy them, so that when she reached her new world she'd have something of value to trade. After all, she'd need money, food, a weapon and an omni-tool of her own. She'd put in so much thought to the plan studying the timeline and all of the extra material she could dredge up from the internet before she'd decided to use the device she'd received for her birthday.

She was sure that her grandfather had no idea that the "new fangled disk thingy" he'd given her for Christmas was a dimensional transportation device, but one accidental side trip to a reality where her sister had lived in this room instead had shown her the potential of the device... she just hoped that sticking a game disk instead of her sister's CD into the machine would work as enough of a beacon to pull her to the right place.

My foster parents, said I was an accident. That my mother was a good-for-nothing who gave me up and I'd never meet her. They might have been right... at the time.

But then came the dreams.

She held her breath as she eased the disk into what appeared to be an ordinary walkman and quickly dressed herself in the outfit. She threw a small bag of... necessities over her shoulder... after having made sure that no brand names were attached to cloud her origins as much as possible. Then, when she was finally ready she picked up the "Walkman" and with the headphones slung loosely around her neck she finally hit Play.

Dreams of a woman, that would do anything in her power to make the universe safe.

The world tore itself apart in the multicoloured storm of light and sound and energy as a wormhole opened around her and swallowed the room, far bigger than when she'd made the transition to a neighbouring reality. She held onto the backpack straps and the device with a frightened iron grip and didn't dare close her eyes on the spinning world around her for fear of missing the first sight of the new universe and see it she did as the swirl of energy abruptly stopped to the sight of a metal wall and the faint vibration of movement beneath her. And then the wall gave out to glass giving her her first view of the citadel from the elevator of the Citadel tower.

And dreams of those with good intentions paving her way to hell.

The arms, even more massive than she'd possibly been able to comprehend from the games alone stretched out into the bright purple corona of light that was the Serpent Nebula, spinning on an axis that barely felt like it was moving at all. Hover vehicles and ships rushed past with infinitely more life to them than the movement of the station. And lights blinking on and off all along the arms made the city station dance with light and colour that made the wormhole that had brought her here pale in comparison.

Stories are told the way they are for a reason.

Awed at the world around her she still had the presence of mind to take out the disk and put the whole lot carefully into her bag before the elevator opened on the bottom floor and the auxiliary airlocks opened, allowing her to finally step out into the Presidium of the Citadel.

And nearly tripped over a young girl laying slumped against the wall just inside the door.

"Oh! I'm sorry! Hey, are you alright?" A thrill of excitement ran through her and all she could think about was that this was her first quest, her first person to help on her way to Shepard. "Here, left me help you up!" She reached out for the girl's shoulder and was about to touch her when her head rolled up and she was trapped under a pair of bright green eyes. She couldn't move, she couldn't breathe, all she could do was stare in shock as the green eyed, red haired young girl with sleepy bruised eyes GLARED.

"You're not a part of my dream."

The words hit her like a blow to the face and she suddenly found the will to move again as a second sharp pain hit her stomach. She felt the area and her fingers came away red as the situation caught up with her and she fell to the floor, eyes pleading as they looked up at the child.

"Why?" She managed to rasp and she knew that the girl had stabbed something vital even as she leaned over to wipe the blade on her nice new alliance scientists uniform and made it vanish into the rags of her outfit.

"Not of the Dream, Not of the Dream... " It was a chant that haunted her in those last few minutes as the girl got to her feel and shuffled away, swaying around a Keeper and vanishing into a shaft that opened in the wall.

But her message was clear. She hadn't been welcome here, the machine, the disk. It had all been a mistake.

She bled out in the floor scant meters away from her target.

"Stories are told the way they are for a reason."

"Damn, looks like we got another one."

"Ugghh, blood pool, why do you humans always have to leave such a mess?"

The two C-Sec officers grumbled as they went about cordoning off the crime scene and marking down the evidence of the latest killing. Prints and other indicators on file from what they knew of the killer matched the forensics on their omnitools and by now they weren't all that concerned with the evidence even though there was a dead body on the ground beside them.

"You notice how it's always humans?" The first officer asked, running yet another scan. "You'd think a killer that's been around for the past two years would have branched out into the other species by now but it's only ever humans... I think it's gotta be a specialist assassin." His partner, a Turian, just grunted.

"Maybe they all pissed off some mob boss somewhere." The Palaven native offered. "I mean not a single one has any sort of record. It's like they just popped up out of nowhere for this guy to kill." And the observation was a valid one. Half the reason few people cared about the killings was because so far, the killer had simply been taking out what appeared to be illegal immigrants. There were rarely any traces of them before their deaths and never did anyone come forward knowing them after. The case had become a curiosity for detectives to study in their spare time when they thought they might have a new idea. Most of the force now knew the signs and this was just another one.

"Hey, whoa, this one was carrying about a thousand credits in Platinum." The human officer poked the edge of the woman's shirt with a key tool from his data pad and with enough force the narrow bar slid from the hidden pocket.

"You'd think the killer might want to take some of the booty with them too, I mean this is the third one carrying unmarked platinum bars." Aside from the obvious connection of the lack of identities there didn't appear to be any real motive and the human officer eventually sighed. "So which shmuck was looking at the case this week?" He asked and the Turian pulled up a list.

"Vakarian is the only name on here." He responded. The detective had been on the case almost since the beginning and he hadn't given up on it yet.

"Then I guess where just sending it through to dispatch then." The human piped up, getting to his feet. "Vakarian quit this morning."

"What?"

"Yeah. He got put on the Saren Investigation, you know, after Eden Prime? Anyway, he eventually got the shits and left. Last I heard he was shipping out with a Spectre Team."

The Turian let out a low whistle.

"Damn. You know which one?" There were many spectres, but few worked in teams given the nature of their work.

"That's the fun part, Scuttlebutt says he signed on with Shepard."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

The two officers continued talking even as someone finally arrived to clean up the remains, and down the hall, laying flat on her back in the middle of a Keeper tunnel ignoring the insect life forms as they scuttled over and around her the green eyed killer slept, whispering in her sleep as she waited.

Waited for another to come and disturb her world.

A/N: Annnnnd that's another plot bunny I needed to get out of my head. There are lots of self inserts and I'm guilty of writing a few myself, but don't you think it'd be fun if there was another force in the universe that knows the newcomer didn't belong and worked to pull history back on track? lol. It's a morbid little plot bunny spawned from another mass effect fanfiction I read.

anyway...

Don't forget to review!

Cya.