Woot! The second rewrite is here, get some! Finally! All it took was trip to Nebraska to get shit done! Yay for rural America!

BTW. Six's armor is this: Operator Helmet w/Command Network Module, Recon Shoulder pads, Tactical/Recon Chest storage, Tacpad, Silver Visor, FJ/ Para knee-guards, with a black rose as the emblem...and its gunmetal grey...

Disclaimer: These 2 games belong to their respective companies, not me. If anyone and anything in real life is similar to people, places, or events in this work of fiction, then that is simply a coincidence…and nothing more…absolutely no convoluted scheme to take over the world here, just keep walking.


Noble Six was studying the man in front of her. His armor was the first obvious difference from what she was used to (sure there had been armored bodysuits of the like back on Reach, but it didn't even look like it had any titanium-A in it [then again nobody in their right mind would wear defective armor, and he didn't seem insane yet, so she would adopt a wait-and-see policy]). The next most obvious feature about him was his scars, particularly the fact that they seemed to glow around his cheeks and chin, which was freaky as hell. Other than that, he seemed to just be a generic human…which was a relief given how she had gotten here. Now if only she could figure out what "N7" meant.

Running through the list in her head, she didn't recognize him from any of the officer dossiers she had seen over the years, and he didn't look insurrection, which again made a case for the actions of that damn robot. She still barely believed in what had happened herself, and she had been there, but, slowly, she was being forced to accept it as truth. She wasn't entirely sure that telling him what had happened wouldn't get her thrown into a psyche ward, and not to mention that the brunette woman a few feet behind him already looked like she was ready to throw her out the airlock as it was, and, with a broken helmet, it didn't matter that the suit had been able to refill its oxygen supply while on board. Sighing, she flexed her right hand, trying to melt the freezer-burn, and made her decision.

"I have no idea, sir, one minute I'm fighting for my life, the next I find myself on a foreign vessel."

She managed not to grimace with the pain in her, well, everything. She noticed the man, Shepard, grimace at the "sir". She glanced at the woman, who merely stared right back at Six, before asking, "Is there any reason you winced at the 'sir'….sir?"

Shepard winced once more and glanced to the side before answering, "I'm not entirely sure if I still hold rank considering that I was dead until a few weeks ago."

She blinked a couple of times before she, too, glanced to the side and shuffled her feet, wincing when she did so. She finally looked back at Shepard and replied with an ever-colloquial, "Oh."

Shepard gave her a deadpan stare before squeezing the bridge of his nose and finishing with, "I was going to have us to sit and have a nice chat, but, seeing as major reveals seems to be the theme of this conversation, I think I'll just keep us standing."

Six slowly nodded and settled into a relaxed stance, or at least as relaxed as she could get without being able to lock her armor…

…and with just how much it hurt for her to move, locking her armor would have been really nice.

After she was done moving, Shepard turned to the brunette and told her, "Go get the others, all of them," he swiftly corrected when he saw her mouth about to open, "Whatever revelations our friend here has for us would better come from her than second-hand from you or me."

Nodding, the brunette turned sharply and walked over to a part of the wall with a green circle on it.

Suddenly, the woman's hand turned orange and she waved it in front of the circle. Beeping, the circle disappeared and the walls retracted to show what clearly was an elevator.

Slowly, shaking her head at the blatant display of man-portable and interactive holographic interfaces not of Covenant origin, she turned her head back to Shepard, who was watching her with a bemused smile. However, that smile soon turned into a frown, as before, and Shepard finally sighed once more before saying, "We might as well start now so that I won't look completely ignorant in front of the others,"

Six only nodded in reply.

Shepard leaned back for a moment before looking her in the eye and asking, "I guess I can start by asking you what these Spartans, assuming you don't mean those Thermopylae guys, are."

Six was taken aback for a moment, she was starting to really hate that damned floating eyeball for giving her the one theory that kept bouncing around her head. Slowly, she sighed and said, "The term 'SPARTAN' refers to a series of projects funded by the UNSC in order to create physically, genetically, technologically, and mentally superior 'supersoldiers' as a special fighting force for high-risk, high-benefit missions unsafe for regular military units to undertake that include but are not limited to: espionage, infiltration and extraction, demolition, and spearhead operations…Does that answer your question, Shepard, or do you require further elaboration?"

As she spoke that, Shepard's eyes widened slowly before he calmed down and replied, "No, 312, that was quite thorough enough. But that also raises the question as to why I've never heard of this UNSC...well, other than the former United Nations," Six perked up as he started his explanation, maybe this isn't so far away from home as I thought, "…Security Council." And, like that, Six deflated, nevermind…

Six shook her head slightly before answering, "The UNSC is the United Nations Space Command, the military branch of the United Earth Government…you've never heard of those before, have you?"

Sighing, Shepard shook his head before replying, "The closest thing to this 'UNSC' here is the Alliance, and there is no 'united' Earth government exists yet, the planet proper is still controlled by nation-states."

Six just sighed and ran her hand through what was left of her hair, before continuing, "Well shit," Six ignored Shepard's amused snort, "If that's the case, explaining the Covenant is gonna be…"

At that moment the elevator the woman from earlier had disappeared from binged and opened at that moment and Six froze, spotting the occupants. As they walked out, laughing among themselves, a switch was flipped in Six's head changing her from 'happy fun time' Six to 'Hyper-Lethal Vector' Six.

Pushing through any pain she felt, Six reached down to her shin and opened up the hidden compartment concealed there. Gripping a now-familiar handle, Six pulled out a long blade, a kukri to be exact, Emile's kukri to expound upon unnecessarily, and began to throw the blade when an armored hand intercepted her motion, buckling slightly under the force of her arm and throwing the blade far off of its original path of destruction and having it impale the wall above the new group's heads.

Stepping back swiftly, Six looked down to see who could have…oh…oooooooh.

Belatedly, the switch in Six's head flipped itself off.

Six tried to use the strongest argument for her position immediately, in the hopes of bum-rushing Shepard vocally, "Traumatic youth involving secret training camps on abandoned world, comrades dying by their hundreds, and an alien invasion of the only place that was ever really 'home'."

As she watched Shepard, the rest of the group drew weapons and spread out, maintaining intervals despite the small-ish size of the cargo bay.

Shepard looked contemplative for a moment, before finally lowering his arm from hers and taking a step back. Slowly, he turned to each side of himself, towards the rest of the squad, and waved them down. After they had finished fidgeting (or salivating, in Grunt's and Mordin's cases)

Six sighed in relief, that wouldn't have been the first diplomatic meeting she would have ruined due to her 'switch'…how was I supposed to know that murdering their leader would only make them angrier?

Six refocused her gaze from the odd, mid-distance sight that didn't focus on any one of the others to flicking her eyes between each of them and taking in as much detail as possible in a short an amount of time as possible.

There, on the far left, just rising up from cover, was an alien of avian origin if the beak-like mouth was any indication.

Six slammed down on her switch before it could flip when she noticed its mandibles. Flashes of screaming and blood quickly faded into the background as she looked away from the visor-ed alien and on to the others.

There was a ninja, a toad, a bitc-wait, it was Miranda, a hunchback lizard, a man who could easily master fanservice no jutsu, and a woman in an exo-suit.

All together, eight well trained people/aliens/threats were all targeting her, she briefly thanked the primordial ooze from which all life had sprung that she had been able to reign herself in. Sure, she could have probably won if a fight did break out, but she would definitely be even more wounded beyond the plasma burns on her body that…were really started to get to her right about now.

Wincing she turned back to Shepard, who had been staring at her strangely for a good while and said, "Moving on, for a while now, at least 27 years, the UNSC has been fighting the Covenant, who are a religious extremist alien conglomerate bent on the total destruction of the human race. Over the course of the last quarter century, they've killed several billion civilian and armed personnel. Beyond that, I, and by extension most of the UNSC if not all of it, know next to nothing about the Covenant."

After a brief pause, Shepard just blinked before shaking his head and replying, "Oh right, we were talking about your past before Garrus's face freaked you out," a brief shout of "Cheap shot, Shepard!" interrupted Shepard before he called out, "EDI! Did you catch all of that?"

Surprised, Six glanced around, looking for this "EDI" before her eyes settled onto a very familiarly styled holographic pad. Sure enough, soon thereafter, a tall, blue, vaguely head-shaped image revealed itself and responded, bars on its face moving in time with the speakers to give the illusion of the hologram actually speaking, "Of course, Shepard. The entirety of the events surrounding Six's pickup have been recorded and are accessible by your omni-tool."

While Shepard smiled at the hologram and thanked it, Six let out a mental breath of relief. As far as she knew, the Covenant didn't have any AI's aboard their vessels and by this point, even if that damn robot was right...well she had pretty much stopped caring, after all, Shepard seemed the reliable sort.

Resolved, Six clapped her hand together to grab the Commander's attention, wincing slightly as the movement did nothing to alleviate her pain, before looking Shepard in the eye and saying, in as calm a voice as she could muster, "Seeing as your AI took the liberty to record that whole conversation, I'm gonna take a nap."

She promptly collapsed with a squelching sound and splash of blood.


Since this is the point where I usually tell you all about my masochistic tenancies...I'm gonna stop that now. Dammit, I want to be known as a sadist who takes pleasure from the screams of the infidel, not some emo prick who can't help but whine about how he writes! I'm still fucking doing it! Except now I have for exclamation points! God Dammit!

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