Chapter 2: Barrier of speech

„So let me get this straight: Some aliens were drunk driving and ended up trashing your flowerbed with their spaceship?"

„More or less."

„And then you called the firefighters and convinced them that 'it was probably just a crashed weather-satellite'?"

"Yupp."

"And then your second phone call goes to your boyfriend in wheelchair, who takes almost 40 minutes to arrive at your house rather than a doctor to get your arm treated?"

"You make it sound like it was a really stupid idea when you explain it like that – you know that I called the ambulance after that."

"Hey, it's not my arm that almost was turned into a large piece of bacon, so suit yourself."

Johanna rolled her eyes – she knew that Jeff was right, but he didn't have to be so blunt about it. She was really lucky that she didn't live that far away from a hospital, the doctors had told her that she was really lucky to still be able to use her arm. It would leave a nasty scar though. But that wasn't what was giving her headaches the most – it was the fact that she now had some unattended aliens running around in her living room while she was sitting here in the hospital. It wouldn't take long before the police would arrive to investigate what this huge chunk of metal in her front yard was, and that was only if she was lucky – with bad luck the press would arrive first, and she wasn't sure how handle them yet. If she told them that it was a space ship they would happily release an article about the crazy lunatic in the neighbourhood and would probably blame the education system with a headline like 'Is turning pressure from universities their students into dangerous psychopaths? Find out on page 6' or something.

Shepard winced a bit when Jeff patted her head lightly.

"Just you know – you had me worried."

Johanna smiled at that and put her head on his shoulder, while making sure not to put too much pressure on him. The Vrolik's syndrome had always been a problem, but the bisphosphonate therapy had slowly started showing effects, strengthening his bones enough that she didn't had to worry about breaking his bones every time she touched him – but she still was worried to accidentally hurt him, even though he said it was fine.

The stayed in this position for a while before they were interrupted by a nurse that stepped into the room.

"The doctor wanted to inform you that you may now leave, just make sure to apply the ointment we prescribed every evening to assist the recovery of your skin."

Jeff smirked at Shepard.

"What?"

"I just think you should buy yourself a new T-Shirt: 'I encountered an extraterrestrial race, and all I got was this shitty moisture-lotion'"

/ Tali'Zorah nar Rayya's point of view /

"Keelah, my leg is killing me" Tali groaned.

She had only awoken from her unconsciousness, just to find herself laying inside a large room filled with the four members of her crew and weird furniture and items she had never seen before.

"Where... where am I?" she asked.

Tali was confused about her surroundings, but for the moment she was mostly glad that all her crew members were still alive. After a few glances around the room she noticed a few things that looked familiar – chairs and tables (even if made from wood rather than metal or polycarbonate) looked fairly similar to the counterparts on the Migrant fleet, even if the surfaces were larger than what she was used to. At least the height was almost identical to Quarian furniture.

"We crashed on the planet-surface. Apparently our sensors weren't the only thing malfunctioning." one of the engineers explained.

"I can remember that much. Thank you for saving me by the way. But what is this place?" Tali continued. "It's nothing like I've seen before."

"Our sensors were more badly damaged then we first thought – it looks like this planet is already inhabited by a sentient species."

Tali quickly turned her head at the last sentence.

"Inhabited? You mean these here aren't ruins? What were you thinking, we have to get out of here before we make contact without approval of the fleet. You can't simply walk into one of their homes, you could start a war with something like that!"

The engineer paused a moment to think about his next words carefully. He slowly shook his head as he answered:

"We no longer have the luxury to choose whether to contact them or not: we already met the creature that is living in this home. It actually helped us to save your life."

Tali didn't know what to answer. She opened her mouth just to close it again – this was too much information at once. Not only did the whole crew just survive this insane crash relatively uninjured, but also they had to thank a member of a completely unknown species that all of them survived. She took another look around.

And apparently the species was already capable of mass production and the development of electronic technologies (she took a closer look at the humming thing in the corner of the room that seemed to rotate to whirl around the air in the room.) - how did a species like this go unnoticed for so long? She then reminded herself that they hadn't seen any indications of colonies on the nearby planets, even with their sensors broken it was likely that they hadn't achieved spaceflight yet (let alone FTL travel), so it wasn't that weird for one single planet to go unnoticed.

Tali wanted to ask another question when the door opened – and two creatures entered. One of them was a bit larger than Tali herself, with remarkable similarities to the Asari, aside from the skin-colour, which was a mix between a light brown and pink (she wasn't sure what to call this colour, as it wasn't really a common one) and the red about shoulder-long fur on the head instead of tentacles like Asari had. But what made her even more curious was the second being – instead of walking it was sitting in a weird vehicle with two large wheels, which appeared as though it was controlled by some buttons it was pressing with his right hand. It was hard to guess if this other creature was bigger or smaller than the first one from its sitting position. Tali noticed that it looked different from the red-furred one though, with a lot shorter black fur, which not only covered the top of its head, but also part of the face around the mandible. This, the lack of breasts and the bit harsher looking muscles made her assume that the second one was male and the first one female. It was hard to tell, since the clothes of those two didn't look that different, apart from a cap the sitting creature was wearing on his hat. She noticed that the creatures were also mustering her and her companions curiously. She was about to greet them when the male turned to the female and seemingly asked her something in their language. If she didn't wear her mask the two would've seen her raise an eyebrow as the two of them started laughing for some reason.

/ Shepard's point of view /

"No Jeff, I do not know if they need those suits or if they simply like latex." Shepard snickered. "Also I'm pretty sure that that's a question we shouldn't write down as one of the first words to this species in the history books."

"Oh come on Joy, you know that history books could use some events that don't make your feet fall asleep for a change."

Johanna cringed at the use of the nickname Jeff had given her – she knew that 'Johanna' didn't leave room for lot of nicknames, and that she would prefer 'Joy' over 'Jojo' every day, but it still made her uncomfortable. If she hadn't lost a bet, that no-one would ever call Jeff by his self proclaimed nickname 'Joker', she wouldn't allow him to call her by that name. Though it was kinda cute from time to time she had to admit.

"Yeah, maybe. But now that we are here – how do we communicate with them? Language-barrier and all."

Joker frowned.

"Have to admit that will be a small problem – but fear not, I already have a plan."

"And what plan exactly?"

"Math."

"Great plan, start an intergalactic war by boring the first members of a foreign species to death."

Jeff rolled his eyes and exhaled sharply.

"It's not that much about actually teaching them anything – they already achieved spaceflight, probably even at speeds greater than the speed of light, otherwise they wouldn't be standing here. It's safe to assume that they can handle that little mathematics I can come up with."

Shepard wasn't sure if it would help them in any way, but Jeff was right – it couldn't hurt them to try. She walked over to the table where her backpack for university was laying on and grabbed a pen and a writing pad. She returned to her boyfriend and handed over the writing equipment. She sighed a bit.

"Please make this work."

After a short amount of thinking she also added:

"And please don't write any obscenities."

/ Tali'Zorah's point of view /

Tali watched curiously as the two prepared some sort of white sheets – she assumed that it was how these creatures were documenting things. She was interested what the writing of this species would look like, but sad at the same time that they didn't seem to understand that her and none of her crew would be able to grasp what they were writing down. She was eager to find out what they wanted to show her, but she also feared their reaction if none of them would be able to answer them.

When the person in the chair-vehicle turned around the white slate she was surprised to see the picture of two hands with 5 fingers each. The red furred woman stretched out her hand to emphasize the drawing and then pulled back the hand to allow the male to continue drawing. He turned the writing-pad around again and started adding additional things.

The new sketch showed five people with masks and suits, with largly inflated hands, so that you could see that they only had three fingers.

The woman then pointed her left hand at the group of Quarians and held up her right hand with all five fingers stretched out. She then turned her left hand to point at herself and the other person and modified her hand-position, so that only two fingers were still visible. After repeating the gesture a few times the male showed them a new sketch, this time ten different drawings, each one showing two hands with different amounts of fingers stretched out. And below each hand there was a single sign.

"Are they... are they trying to teach us their number-system?" Veetor, one of the other engineers, asked.

"I guess so." Tali answered. "But why is there no drawing for all ten fingers stretched out?"

Tali had noticed that there were ten drawings, starting from no finger visible, up to 9 fingers visible, each with a different sign, but a sketch where all fingers were visible was missing. She didn't get to wonder for long, as the creature started drawing again.

This time he came up with different a drawing of three right hands next to each other, with a cross-shaped symbol between the first two hands, and two parallel lines between the second and third hand. The first two hands each had one finger visible, the third one had two fingers visible. Below the drawing was a small number of symbols: '1+1=2'

"That's probably their system of addition. The symbols from before match up."

The sitting person was about to start drawing again when Tali decided to step forwards. She stretched out her hand towards the writing-pad and made a motion with her right hand, to show them that she wanted to draw something as well. The two people took a quick look at each other, then the man handed over the writing pad and pen. Tali noticed that he didn't get up from his weird chair, even though it would make handing over the pad a lot easier.

After a few seconds Tali managed to get colour out of the pen (which luckily worked pretty much identically to a stylus she normally used to plan circuit-boards) and started drawing a few more pairs of those hands with five fingers. She started copying the symbols from before to show that she had understood the number-system and drew a few more equations, with the correct numbers, but symbols between them missing. Two hands with three fingers each and a third one with zero fingers to symbolize subtraction, two hands with two fingers each and a third one with four, to symbolize multiplication, and a few more states for division, exponentiation and similar concepts. She also draw a hand with all ten fingers visible with the plus-sign and a hand with one finger, to find out how this species handled numbers greater than the number of fingers on their hand.

She then returned the pad to the sitting man and waited while he and the female talked for a bit, before they filled out the blanks between the equations she had written down.

Cold sweat dropped when Tali realized how long they just had used, simply to explain a simple concept like basic mathematics – how would they be able to explain to these creatures that they would need food sooner or later – and how would they be able to explain that they might not be able to eat the food on this planet, without endangering one of her crew by making him test the food for everyone else? And only after they managed to exchange vital information like that they could start to think about a way to get back a message to the migrant fleet without a distress beacon (the one they had on board was most likely nothing more than a piece of garbage after the crash).

/ Shepard's point of view /

"Maybe we should've started by explaining binary..." Jeff mumbled. "Well, we can always do that later."

"Are you sure you want to keep teaching them maths?" Shepard asked.

"Yeah, why not?"

"I think they got it by now – and calculating stuff in our number-system won't exactly help them much. If I crashed on a foreign planet and my spaceship burned to the ground, I'd worry a lot more about medication, if my gas-tanks are large enough to keep me breathing, about clean water and food, about other possible dangers like radiation, I don't know, stuff like that."

Jokers eyes widened at this – he hadn't thought about this up until now, he was still to excited because he had met an ETI, a life-long dream of his.

"Damn, you're right. But my drawing-skills are too crappy to accurately depict complex stuff like that."

"I'll just get my laptop then and ask wikipedia for help."

Jeff had to laugh at this. Johanna raised on of her eyebrows.

"I just imagined the face of my old history teacher Mr. Adam, he always kept whining about how we are too dependent on this whole internet-encyclopedia, and how there are too many false articles in there."

"Really, you had teachers like that? Sounds pretty uptight to me."

"You forget that I had to go to a private school, because it was the only one which supported wheelchairs in my area."

"Yeah, guess you're right. Anyway, here it is."

Johanna handed over her Laptop.

"You think they will get stuff like country-borders?" she asked.

"Only one way to find out." Jeff said as he opened the Laptop and started up searching for something on the web.

"Hey Joy."

"Hmm?"

"Do you think we would get paid by Microsoft if we used bing-maps to explain them where they are? I mean this whole thing will go down in history and stuff, would probably be good advertisement for them."

"I'd rather not go down in history as the single idiot who used bing."

"Good point."


Author's notes:

Hi everyone, Yaesephir again!

When I uploaded my story yesterday I was really surprised how many people seemed to stumble upon it within minutes. Really motivating to see the follower amount raise so quickly, I can tell you. To celebrate I prepared a cover-picture for my story, which will go online together with this chapter.

Back to the story: I decided to pair up Femshep and Joker. Why? First of all because I hate stories that take 60 chapters just to get the characters to realize that they have a thing for each other, and then another 40 chapters to build up drama so that they can get together, just that the series gets canceled the chapter after they first kissed. Fuck this shit. In my story they are already together and I will explain how they got together by adding hints towards it in conversations. I will also try to avoid angst: I hate characters constantly whining. Sure, it's in the 101 of writing skills: expose your character to some traumatic experiences to build character, but many writers overdo it.

I handle stuff like this my way, which is the following: Character is already in the situation I like him to be in and I will explain how he got there afterwards – this leaves room for artistic freedom and character progression without annoying the shit out of my readers.

A good example for this is Jokers Vrolik's syndrom: I mentioned that his bones are a stronger than they are in the game, and that he will be fine in a few years (which will be after the first timeskip probably), and then mentioned how this happened: the bisphosphonate therapy. In the original ME-series Vroliks is described as more or less incurable disease which can only be partially cured by extreme actions like implanting steel-parts into the bones (ME2), the reality looks a bit different. We already have a treatement for Vroliks, or 'Osteogenesis Imperfecta' how it's called in the medical fields, the so called bisphosphonate therapy. Through this treatment the body gets animated to increase the bone-density, which results in the bones not breaking that often anymore. It's still not a perfect treatment, but it will make a few things a lot more logical – I mean how would Joker get into the Alliance military in the first place if he has a disease like that. But enough of that.

Now I have to mention that I really really LOVE writing Joker. I enjoy writing humor-passages and hope that I could capture his sense of humor, and maybe even get some of my readers to smirk. I hope that I don't take it too far though, I still want to tell a story...

I hope you enjoyed this chapter, if you did (or didn't) feel free to drop a review, it would really help me out to find the faults in my writing-style. Again I have to mention that English isn't my first language, so I do make a lot of mistakes. If you see me using a word incorrectly or a mistake in my grammar: Please correct me.

With all of that said: See ya tomorrow.