To his surprise, Kasumi appeared in the mess hall for lunch as well. "What did you think?" she asked as he poked at his rations. Reconstituted dried food again, yay, he thought, grimly taking a bite. "Like the game?"

Garrus glanced nervously around the mess hall before answering, making sure that Shepard and Miranda weren't within hearing. "It's a nice change of pace. Reminds me of some of the things I did as Archangel." Trying to keep up his appetite, he took another bite, then scanned the tables to see where the bottles of dextro spices had gone. "This food tastes like wet cardboard," he muttered. "How'd you find a game with my name, anyway?"

"The game maker made a mistake. Some college kid from Earth, scanning all these old games from two centuries ago – only the copy he had wasn't high quality audio." She smirked. "After he published it, some college professor with a degree in early electronics reams him out for all the things he garbled."

He pointed the fork at her, which would have been more menacing if there hadn't been a vegetable chunk on the end of it. "Just for that, I'm going to run through the guard section soon as I'm done, and catch that thief."

"The proper term is 'taffer', if you weren't paying attention," Donnelly said, sitting down next to Kasumi. "This game looks to be quite exciting. Gabby and I already set it up to play on our terminals."

"Just don't let Shepard catch you," the thief warned. "You know how he tends to roam around the ship to snoop on everyone."

"Don't worry, we got it covered," Daniels said, sitting across from her partner, bumping into Garrus lightly. "Besides, I think between the three of us, we can take this little pickpocket."

"You might be the pickpocket," Kasumi retorted. "Each level, the game picks the thief completely randomly. So no cheating," she admonished the engineers, "no screen peeking if one of you ends up as Garrus." The turian made the throat-clearing noise that humans used. "You know what I mean," she added crossly.

As she started to rise, Jack suddenly came up on her other side, pushing her back onto the bench with the hand not holding her tray. "Not so fast, I want to know what this game is." She gestured at the engineering duo. "I've been listening to these punks talk about it for the last hour. I want in."

The rest of the group exchanged worried glances, but Kasumi nodded. "Alright, I'll send you a copy of the game too. We're going to try a game this afternoon once Garrus, Jacob, and Kelly finish the tutorial missions." Shaking off the tattooed hand, she rose to her feet again, activating her cloak and leaving the dirty tray on the counter.

Garrus looked down at his tray. Three bites is enough to hold me until dinner, right? His already rebelling stomach agreed, and he dumped the rest of the food into the recycler. In a fast walk, he strode back into the forward battery, into his favorite hiding spot, and activated the game again. It registered the game server now, with one player waiting. Probably Mordin, the overachiever, he speculated, then activated the other tutorial.

Much of it was the same, such as the commands for weapons. The audio clues he found were far more important as a guard, and while the game didn't point out obvious things like missing loot or doors left mysteriously open, he followed those pretty quickly by himself, and caught the thief in a good, but not expert, time. The gameplay option he found most interesting was the ability to talk to the other guards – but only using fixed commands. That way, the multiple real people couldn't distinguish each other from the VI-controlled guards, since they could send the exact same commands. The conversations he could get into with other guards were pretty good, though he didn't understand why a closing bear pit was a bad thing.

When he finished, the menu now read three players waiting, so he logged in as well, noting Mordin, Kasumi, and Jacob. Figuring it was going to take a while, he set the game to alert him when it was ready to go, and went back to the weapons console. Might as well get the cannon ready while he was waiting.

Two hours later, the game gave him a notification. The game was full, with all eight of them logged in. Shepard had taken Zaeed and Miranda to some junk planet to recruit a krogan, so they had at least an hour, maybe two. The game's VI cleared the screen, and brought up a movie, which started with a little animated sword-and-eagle combo – the symbol of the City Watch. Guess I'm a guard, then. Works for me.

He watched the explanation video, about watch patrols in a neighborhood called Shalebridge being increased due to some wealthy merchant slipping bribes to protect his merchandise. It all seemed simple enough, and along with the other two dozen guards, he left the watch house to patrol the streets. He had ended up with a crossbow-wielding guard, which suited him, and he quickly commanded one of the sword guards to partner up with him.

To start with, he circled the warehouse holding the goods. It shared one wall with a house, and the roofs were close enough together for an enterprising thief to jump them – which was probably the point, from the tutorial. He explored through all the houses that weren't locked, making a mental note of which ones were. In one of them, he got a scheming idea. So the thief needs to take all the loot. What happens if I move it?

Giving it a try, he walked up to the glinting candlestick and tried to pick it up, only to completely fail to do anything but knock it off the mantle. He tried to pick it up off the floor, only to have it literally fly out of his fingers and get wedged underneath the bookshelf in the corner. Damn it, they thought of that too. Shrugging, he left it stuck where it was, and continued his rounds.

It was half an hour in that he found two of the guards, knocked unconscious and dumped in a dark corner under a bush. He flipped through the dialog options, shouting out a warning to all the guards in the vicinity. Of course, whoever was playing was either good enough to have left the area, or was smart enough not to come out due to his taunts. Still, he ran around, checking all the locked doors, until he found one unlocked.

He directed his sword-wielding partner to storm in first, his own crossbow at the ready. They searched the little house quickly, finding a window open upstairs. Annoyingly, "He's on the rooftops!" wasn't a valid dialog option, so he had to settle for, "Where did he go?" shouted out the open window. Hopefully his fellow guards were bright enough to follow that, since there was no way he could make the jump to the opposite roof.

Hearing a thump behind him, Garrus whirled around, only to find that whoever was playing the thief hadn't actually left. And had just succeeded in taking out his partner. He loosed the crossbow, hitting the game-Garrus solidly in the torso. Which, of course, didn't take him down, but rather send him dashing forward swinging a dagger madly. He tried to use the crossbow to defend himself, but blocking the dagger with an unwieldy wooden contraption was harder than it looked. Noticing he was down to half health already, he abandoned his defense, reloading faster than a crossbow had any right to, and shooting the thief squarely in the chest again before a last dagger strike sent him crashing to the floor.

His camera view hovered over the dead guard, and Garrus was momentarily surprised to find he'd spent the last forty minutes running around as a human female. Then, to his surprise, the game popped up a prompt: Respawn in new guard? Y/N It didn't take him long at all to hit yes – he wasn't sure who was controlling this thief, but by the spirits, he was going to take them down!

This time he was in one of the sword guards, inside the warehouse. Two other sword guards were with him, moving in a fairly competent chevron formation. One of these has got to be Jacob, he thought, but paid attention to the surroundings. He hadn't come inside earlier on the level, so the stacks of crates, with their overabundance of shadowed nooks, was a new and hostile area. Still, whoever was playing thief-Garrus wasn't in here yet.

He paid special attention to the various skylights, and when one of them was open, he pointed his sword at it, not even trying to mess with the dialog options. The other guard promptly put his back to a wall, while the third proceeded to run around shouting. I can't tell if that's the VI, or Jack, he marveled. He moved off a short distance from guard-Jacob, scanning the shadows for movement and opened containers. Which was what saved him as an arrow took out the shouting guard of their trio, since he could trace the shooting position.

Blocked from direct sight, he ran around the corner, going up a convenient staircase-like section of crates, and there was the thief, shooting broadhead arrows at guard-Jacob, who was valiantly dodging them while obviously stumped how to reach his attacker. Garrus, of course, didn't have that problem, and promptly ran the thief through the heart.

The camera backed off to what he guessed was a universal feed, showing his guard standing over the fallen opponent. Scores for the guard players seemed based on how long they survived and how much damage they had dealt, and his bonus for making the kill was enough to put him comfortably in the lead despite his death.

Dinner in the mess hall was a curious affair. All of the game players had rather quickly gathered at one table, ejecting Hadley, and a frustrated Kelly was the last to arrive. "You? You were the thief?" Jack chortled. "Damn, now I don't feel so bad about spending an hour walking around in circles."

"You were much better than I expected," Garrus told her, picking at his food. "I figured two crossbow bolts to the chest would stop you."

"I just wish I had some mobility as a guard," Jacob complained. "All I did was get shot at until someone else snuck up behind her." Garrus raised his fork again, receiving a nod of respect from Mordin and Kasumi and quiet golf claps from the engineers.

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in," Kelly groused. "Wait until you're the thief and it's you alone against thirty armed guards."

"Look forward to the challenge," Mordin said. "Like STG missions, without chance of immediate and painful death." This remark was met by a moment of silence.

"Well, should we plan for tomorrow morning? Minus whoever's going down to Haestrom with Shepard," Kasumi said. "Everyone agreed? Good. There's fifteen missions in the storyline, and it continues whether you won or lost if you have the same players."

"I can't wait to be the little sneaky bastard," Jack said. "I will totally rip all of you a new one."

"Right," Garrus drawled doubtfully. "We'll see about that."

Mostly finished with their food, the group broke up for the night.