We were shipped out of Mindoir after a week, our numbers having been barely bolstered after the gruelling fight against the batarians. Of the whole colony, I saw four other people being shipped out. Kids, all of them. I was the only adult.

To say that the mood was glum would be the understatement of the century. Of any century. The children (Shepard being the oldest, a ten year old named Joe being the youngest) looked like ghosts. The Alliance marines were almost as bad. The impotence against the enormous number of batarians, the staggering number of deaths, it was all just too much. For many of them, it was their first time in a conflict like this. Marie had a lot of work, and she didn't look so flash herself.

And then there were the wounded.

Shepard didn't see them, Marie made sure of that. But I did.

Even with late twenty-second century technology, brain surgery was a very tricky beast. Things like removing tumours and rehabilitation had improved by leaps and bounds, but messing with the wiring was still very difficult. Options were limited, and outcomes were unpredictable.

So when I heard that the batarians were using mind control chips, to turn captured humans into docile slaves, I could hardly believe it. I imagined it'd be some extremely advanced technology I wouldn't be able to recognize.

I didn't consider the other option, possibly because I didn't want to believe anyone would do something like it. Turns out that, when pressed for time, the batarians take a very pragmatic approach to chipping their slaves. Place the tiny chip over the left eye's tear duct, then hammer it into the brain with something that looked like an ice pick. If it worked, great, and if not, throw the prospective slave away and try with the next one.

When I saw the hundreds that had been reduced to barely breathing vegetables, something inside of me just withered and died. The hope that, after all this, my being in the Mass Effect universe would turn into one big, exciting adventure. It was replaced by a mixture of anger and despair. One can read about large scale atrocities, see events like that in-game, explosions wiping people in a shower of pixelated gore. Seeing real people treated like so much meat like this, that was something very different.

It all became so very real.

Thus, one week and we were waiting for the shuttle to touch down. Fighting had long since finished, and the rebuilding effort was now supposed to begin. It was me, the kids, and no less than ten marines. No wounded were being shipped out with us, which seemed like quite a waste. I had seen those shuttles take more than fifty people, including some on stretchers. Maybe they didn't want us seeing that. Or the kids at least.

"Roy," I heard a voice calling, and turned to see Marie walking towards us. She was smiling, but she looked tired. I think I saw her age a whole five years in that last week, her eyes had dark circles under them, and she just looked weary.

She stopped a few paces away from us, so I walked off to meet her. "Marie, something in your mind?"

"What, you're not going to say goodbye?" she replied in a mock hurt tone.

I chuckled and shook my head, there was no real need to say anything. Before the small silence became uncomfortable, she pulled something out of the webbing of her field armor, and offered it to me. It looked like some kind of wrist accessory.

"What's that?" I said.

"An omni-tool," she explained, and she definitely looked surprised. "You've never seen one?"

Oh crap. "Never used one, no."

She saw me hesitate, so she took my left hand and put the tool around the forearm. With a quick swipe, the interface came to life. I have to admit, it looked very cool. With a few moves, she opened a messaging app, and I saw there was a message there for me.

Hello Roy,

This is my personal mail address. I hope you will keep in touch, I'll be here if you need me.

Marie.

"It's just our standard bluewire," she explained. "We have plenty of spares."

"Nice. Thank you."

"You're officially a citizen of the Systems Alliance now," she said. She hadn't prodded me any further about me being in no Alliance database at all. No information meant I wasn't officially a threat, but I wasn't a registered citizen either. I'm not sure what she assumed, I hoped it was something like me being some sort of luddite. Which wasn't far from the truth, come to think of it.

"I feel so honored." There was another pregnant pause. I lowered my voice a bit, and cast a quick glance towards the others. "Anything you wanted to say away from them?"

"Yes. Aliana."

"I know, you've told me already. Don't push her, just be ready to be there for her when she's ready. And be ready to let go of her."

She nodded. "She needs stability, a foster family. They all do. But if she sees you as a reminder of Mindoir, it may be better if you put some distance between the two of you. And vice versa."

"I want to help her," I sighed.

"I know, and it may turn out it's best if you stay close. Listen to the shrinks back at Arcturus, okay?" She smiled at that, the word shrink had lost its edge between the two of us after the first day.

"Will do. And thanks."

"No, thank you. After all this... You're pulling through, you'll be fine. Don't give up."

"Oh, you can bet the farm," I said. I had a lot to do, first helping Shepard any way I could, then figuring out how on Earth I was going to prepare the entire freaking galaxy for the reapers. "I'm not giving up."

She nodded, and there was something in the way she looked at me that made me just pull her close and give her a hug. I think she was surprised, but soon enough she put her own arms around me too.

"You stay in touch too. And if you need to talk too, well, you gave me the omni-tool," I said. She nodded. "Even though I'm not a shrink." That got a laugh out of her, and when we separated, she was looking noticeably happier.

"Come on, I want to say goodbye to the others too," Marie said, and led on towards the shuttle. It had landed while we were talking, and they were just waiting for us.

Some of the kids were quite emotional saying goodbye to her, I had quickly figured her out as being great with kids. Shepard was more reserved, but she did take a hug from her without complaints.

The flight up to the ship was pretty uneventful. I thought we'd be taking the shuttle all the way through, but instead we docked onto a larger ship, which turned out to be a frigate. It was my first time in space, so I was feeling rather... Weird. I should have been excited, but instead I was just nervous. Taking off in the shuttle had been uneventful, a bit of trembling here and there, but the gravity dampeners took all the excitement out of the whole affair. And given that the ship had artificial gravity, I may as well have been in a Boeing taking a flight to Australia.

And the shuttle had no windows either. Neither did the frigate, at least no windows we could see.

Windows are structural weaknesses.

So, all in all, my first experience in space was rather underwhelming. Worse still, I knew I could have done with the distraction, and so could the kids. The flight to Arcturus was apparently a pretty long haul, three days all in all. They put us all in a single room, which had cargo crates on one side, and with just a few bunks for us to sleep in. Not that it looked a lot like the Normandy, but I figured the accomodations had been hastily prepared.

There was something else that was different. The crew. On the ground, the marines and the support personnel all had been fighting the batarians, and dealing with the aftermath, so the atmosphere was... subdued. There was anger, for sure, but there was a kind of quiet desperation that had crept through the ranks. As such, the Alliance marines seemed to share those kids' pain, in some way. Here, the men and women were clearly angry, but the way they interacted with us, those pitying looks they gave us, it was sickening.

Shepard herself didn't seem to enjoy it either. There were always crew members coming around to talk to us, and I could tell she was very uncomfortable. The more they tried to comfort her, the more she seemed to retreat within herself.

It was a realization that maybe I had been doing the same. Was I giving her the same looks? Treating her like a lost puppy? Maybe Marie was right, I should try to just go back to normal. Not that normal was an option for me, but it should have been for Shepard.

That night, just like pretty much every other night, she woke up gasping in the middle of it after a nightmare. All the kids were having them. I was having unpleasant dreams myself, but I did know how to control them. A little, at least; lucid dreaming isn't an exact science.

And just as usual, my sleep was on a hairtrigger, so I was awake as soon as Shepard had made her first noise.

"Another nightmare Ali?" I whispered. We both had bottom beds on adjacent bunks, so it was easy enough to whisper like that. When we arrived, I chose the bunk first, and she had chosen the adjacent one without a word. "It's okay, I have them too."

I brought up my omni-tool, set to the dimmest setting. It barely gave enough light to tell shapes apart, but it was enough.

"Yes," she whispered. She looked like she was about to say something else, but she didn't.

"You know, there's a way to fix it. Two ways, actually." She just looked at me. "The first one is to talk about them." As I expected, that got no response. "The second one is to learn how to do lucid dreaming."

"Lucid dreaming?"

"Yes."

"What's lucil dreamering?" another small voice called from above me. Immediately followed by a head poking out of the edge of the top bunk bed. That was Joe, the youngest kid. A short bundle of messy black hair and blue eyes with far too much grief behind them.

"Lucid dreaming. That's when you are dreaming, but you know you're in a dream. Have you ever had it happen?"

"Uhhh..." he thought about it for a while. "Maybe."

"When I realize I'm in a dream, I just wake up," Shepard added.

"I managed to fly once in a dream, on purpose. It was pretty cool." A different voice, that one from the bunk on the opposite side of Shepard's. More voices followed. The entire little crew was awake, apparently; some couldn't sleep, others had woken up after bad dreams.

I flicked the omni-tool to high light, jammed it on the top beam between the frame and the mattress, and the kids all gathered around me. Five pairs of expectant eyes peered at me – the four kids' and Shepard's – and it struck me that I had no idea if any of this would work; but at least I would give them something.

"Okay, so first of all, the best thing to do is to talk about the bad dream. What did you usually do when you had a bad dream before?"

The kids looked at each other. One of them, a girl with blonde hair that had to be about twelve, curled up with her legs against her chest, and her arms on her knees. "Mom would just give me a kiss, and they'd go away," she said in a low voice. She was sitting next to Shepard and, without any more prompts, the future commander put her arm around the girl's shoulders, gathering her close.

They aren't lost puppies. You hated being treated like that, and so did they, I reminded myself.

"Yes. It helps to talk about it, to one another, or to someone else you can trust. A friend. We're all friends here, right?" That made me the target, since I was the oldest. "But that doesn't help you while you're dreaming. If you know how to have lucid dreams, you can change what you're dreaming, or as Aliana said, just wake up before it gets bad."

Nods of assent. I wondered if they were really taking this in, or they liked to just think the dreams could go away. Considering the audience, I was starting to think this whole explanation was probably going to be a stupid idea.

"It's not going to make the dreams go away, and you'll have to practice. Okay?" More nods. "Good. There are three things you have to do to learn to have lucid dreams. The first one is getting used to dreaming."

That got a few confused looks, which was probably because the explanation wasn't very good.

"Did you know that we dream every night? Every single night, only most people don't remember the dreams. They may remember they were dreaming right when they wake up, but by the time they've had breakfast, they have forgotten."

No one stirred, so I continued.

"So first of all, you need to learn how to dream, and remember dreaming. This is what you will do. Every time you wake up, I want you to write down what you remember about whatever it is you were dreaming. It could be a word, a feeling, even just 'I was dreaming'. Just get in the habit of it, because when you do, you'll start to be more alert when you dream." I looked around, and realized only Shepard and the blonde girl had omni-tools. "We'll have to get you a datapad or a notebook or something though," I said, and smiled at them. "Still even if you can't write it down, just try to remember when you wake up, okay?"

I got several okays all around.

"Good. The second thing is, when you close your eyes to go to sleep, I want you to think I'm going to have a lucid dream." I looked up at Joe. "You can think I'm going to have lucil dreamery if you want, Joe." That got a few chuckles. "Don't keep yourself awake, just think of it when you close your eyes."

I took a deep breath. "The last part is the difficult one. Once you get used to all this, you have to realize you're in a dream."

"How do you do that?" Shepard said.

"There are several ways. Try to count your fingers. Try to open your omni-tool and look at the time. Try to tie your shoelaces. Try to remember how you got where you are. If you're standing in the middle of the street, did you walk out from home? Did a shuttle drop you?" That didn't receive a very enthusiastic response, but I wasn't surprised. "Little things like those are very hard to do in a dream, but are very easy in real life. Once you realize you're in a dream... You'll probably wake up."

Oh, that disappointed them, I could tell. I tried to hold it back, but I ended up grinning. "But only at first. With some practice, you'll learn to realize something is a dream, but not wake up."

"And then?" Joe said.

"Then the sky is the limit. It's your dream! You can do whatever you want with it."

"Like what?" he insisted.

"Okay. You know what I was dreaming just now?" He shook his head. "I was in Mindoir, and the... A house was burning, with people inside." One of the kids took a sharp breath in. Too close home, probably. "But I knew it was a dream. So a door opened on the side of the house, and everyone ran outside. Then the fire became very small, we all took marshmallows out, and started roasting them."

"No way!" Joe said, laughing.

"I'm telling you, you can do whatever you want," I replied. "Okay then, we can talk about it tomorrow, all right? Let's go back to bed."

A few groans followed, but the kids complied. I was pretty sure that had been an overly long, far too complicated explanation, but at least I kept them distracted. Nobody in that room had had a good night's sleep since the attack, including me. And maybe just hearing from me that they could do something to stop the bad dreams would help them.

"Roy," Shepard whispered, after just a few minutes in darkness.

"Yeah?"

"What were you really dreaming about?"

Caught red handed, I thought. "I really was dreaming about that fire," I said, and gave myself a couple of seconds. "It was your home. You were trapped inside, with all your family. I did get you all out... But it was just a dream."

With that, silence fell again. I thought she had fallen asleep, and I was halfway to falling asleep myself when Shepard spoke. "It was dad."

"Huh?"

"Dad. All I can remember is dad. He was hugging me, and then there was this awful noise... and I woke up."

Our bunks were close enough that I could reach out and touch Shepard, which I did. I put my outstretched hand on her shoulder, and felt her trembling underneath. Holding back her crying. She hadn't cried at all since the first day, she had probably been holding it back all the time.

"Want to talk about him?" I said.

"You want to talk about your dad?" she bit back.

"Okay," I replied, and removed my hand. Marie had been pretty clear about it, don't push her, and let her come to me when she's ready.

Our arrival at Arcturus seemed to cause a bit of a hubhub, and not only among the crew. Unlike the SSV Trafalgar, the frigate that had brought us there, there were windows all over the station. And the view was just unbelievable. I know I was gaping, mouth hanging open, when I stepped out the ship's airlock. Being greeted by the view of the planet far below was something else. Themis. The enormous reddish-brown gas giant sat out there, looking over the station, pulling it close into its orbit.

"Quite a view, isn't it?"

I turned to look at the marine behind me, and then at the queue that had formed behind me as I held up everyone trying to leave.

"Oh, crap, sorry," I muttered, hurriedly moving ahead. The marine just laughed and slapped me on the shoulder as he passed.

I was the last of our little group to make it out of the ship. I expected the rest of the group to be as stuck looking through the window as I was; as far as I knew, they were all colony kids with no space experience. But the long faces and downcast gazes told me a different story. None of them cared much for where they were. They did look up when I stepped in, but it didn't have that much of an effect.

"The view is amazing," I said, gesturing up with my chin at the window. Shepard and Joe did look that way, but didn't seem to care. The rest got back to their sullen selves. Not good. However, I didn't have a clue what to do or how to help.

Before long we were taken to what would be their accommodation – psych ward. The kids were taken to their own wing, but for me it was more straightforward. I got taken for a normal consult, and after a somewhat lengthy psych eval, I was given a mostly clean bill of health. Apparently, Marie's reports said I had recovered well. We talked about Mindoir, rescuing Shepard, and fighting the batarians. Since being transplanted into a different universe didn't come up – fancy that – the doctor gave me the ok to go back to civilian life. As far as they knew, I had just arrived to Mindoir from Earth a few days before that, so I didn't really fit with the rest of the colonists who had been attacked.

So there I was, sitting at reception, and talking to some sort of military liaison – he didn't give me a rank, just said he was there to answer questions, after introducing himself as Elliot Darsen. Oh boy, I hoped he had a lot of time.

"So, Roy, I know it's still very early, but you think about what you want to do now?"

"Kinda..." I muttered, looking at him. He was a massive man, easily half a foot taller than my own 6'2", military buzz cut, square jawed, weathered, and tanned face. His eyes looked tiny on his face, probably due to being deep-seated and furrowed under the leathery skin. Damn he was an impressive sight. I wondered if they wanted to make me feel reassured, or intimidated.

"If we can help you, we will," he continued. "What did you do back on Mindoir?"

"Oh... Just... You know, farm work and such," which was true, that's what I did for cash back in New Zealand while I studied. "Wanted to study agricultural engineering."

"Uh-huh. Bet we could find you something for that, Shanxi would be a good place."

I shook my head. "I can't go back to my old life," I said, and meant it in more ways that one. "I'm... Before that, what's going to happen to the kids?"

"Ah yes," Elliot said, taking a look at his datapad and sipping from his steaming mug. "Says here you rescued one of the kids. Shepard, was it?"

"Yeah."

"We'll be trying to find them foster homes. Shouldn't be a problem, news of the attack on Mindoir have spread quickly. There'll be plenty of people coming forward to help." He looked pointedly at me when he said that, and I wasn't sure whether he wanted to say he didn't need my help, or that there would be help for me.

"I'm doing okay. Just... Going to be hard to get into a routine, it's all so different. Back on Mindoir it was like... Dunno, living in the late 20th or early 21st century I guess."

He chuckled at that. "Yeah, so it seems."

"Can I stick around for the time being? I'd like to see them go somewhere safe, stick around until then, you know."

"Uh-huh," he nodded again. "I can understand that, but it's important you let them move on. You can't protect them forever, specially not just you alone."

"Why does everyone say that?" I said. It was starting to get very frustrating. "I just want to help them and make sure they're okay!"

"Because the best way to get past this is to get on with your life," he replied, not at all fazed by my little outburst.

I sighed. "I suppose you guys would know," I said, and he nodded in assent. "Can I stick around for a while anyway?"

"You want to think about what you'll do?"

"No, I... I kinda know already." Elliot raised his eyebrows, not saying anything but inviting me to continue. The answer was really simple, given what I knew was coming, there was only one thing I could do. "I want to join the military."

He nodded again. He did that a lot, I wondered if he didn't want to contradict me or if he just think all I said made sense.

"Not unexpected. Are you quite sure?"

"Yes."

"Well, you said you wanted to stick around. Think about it for a while."

"Okay. So, um, where can I stay in the meantime?"

"We'll find you something," he smirked.

"Thanks."

Elliot found me a room in the station; a small, twenty square meter spartan apartment I could claim as my own for the time being. My duffel bag – the backpack having long been discarded, thanks to the shotgun damage courtesy of the batarian – took a surprising amount of space on the floor, even though it had what little I had taken with me. The spare clothes I had, the Portal 2 track jacket (which, sleeveless as it was now, had turned into a vest), a pair of sneakers, the first aid kit (bolstered by a few tubes of medi-gel), and my hygiene kit. Plus some spare military rankless fatigues, one of which I was currently wearing. And my knife. Not a lot, really. I was travelling light.

I decided to go exploring. First time in space and all that, and let me tell you, Arcturus Station was absolutely amazing. There were over 40,000 people living there, so really, it was like a small city. Shops, restaurants, parks, it had it all. After a quick extranet search I found that there was even an antiques shop in one of the wings, so I decided to pay them a visit to try and get some credits.

The shop turned out to be a rather tiny corner shop; not very conspicuous, but absolutely loaded with stuff. The shelves were stacked sky high with items, most of them apparently military memorabilia, and some of it looking rather futuristic to me – yet still antique. The man behind the counter was a short, balding fellow with gray hair, a very round head, and eyes I could barely see behind a complicated-looking visor. He was concentrating on a small item I couldn't identify, bending down over the counter, and didn't even realize I was there until I walked right to the counter and coughed.

"Ah!" he chirped, nearly dropping the small item he was handling – an electronic gizmo of some sort – and starting in place. "Don't sneak up on me like that!"

"Sorry," I smirked. "Couldn't help myself."

He raised the visor and chuckled. "Welcome to Wilson's. I'm Wilson. What can Wilson do for you kid?" he said, playing a well rehearshed piece.

"Well, I happen to be a bit short of credits, so I was wondering if you'd be interested in this." I raised my left hand, and took off my watch, offering it to Wilson.

He gave it a quick appraising look, and let a low whistle out. Yeah, it was a nice watch back home. I drove a shitty twenty year old Honda, had next to nothing to spend after tuition and expenses, but dammit, I always wanted a nice watch, so a nice watch I bought as soon as I put my pennies together.

I bet the coins in my wallet are considered antiques too. Damn, I should have gone for them first, I thought.

Wilson had put his visor down over his face again, and was now examining the watch a lot more closely. He even gave it a few scans with an octopus-like device on the side of the counter.

"Where did you get this?" he finally said, putting the watch back on the counter and raising his visor. He didn't look at me, he had his eyes glued to it. "It may as well be new, but it all checks out, serial number and all. I can't believe a nearly two hundred year old watch is in such good condition. It even has an antique style battery in it."

"Family heirloom," I lied.

"Well," he spoke as he typed on his terminal. "It's a very nice piece. I can give you 70,000 credits for it right now, or if you want I can check for potential buyers and we can cut the sale instead."

I tried to figure out how much that was, but I had no idea what the credit to dollar exchange rate should be. Still, no matter how I put it, it was easily at least twenty times what I paid for the watch back home.

Damn, should've bought a bunch.

"I'll take the cash now."

"Sure, just give me your chit and we'll be set."

"Uh... Yeah, about that. How... how does that work?"

He turned to look at me, and tilted his head up to glance under the rim of his visor. "You're joking, right?"

"Nuh," I said, shaking my head.

He took a moment to consider my answer. "You been living under a rock, kid? Are you from Drasta or something?"

"Drasta? No, sorry, don't know where that is. I'm..." I hesitated, do I give my Earth birthplace or go for Mindoir? Mindoir will probably be less suspicious. "I just got here from Mindoir."

I didn't think that news had travelled fast, and moreover, travelled fast to the heart of the Systems Alliance fleet. There was a moment where he looked like he was trying to figure out something about what I had said, and then his face opened up in surprise. Then the freaking lost puppy eyes came.

"Oh. Oh damn, kid. Sorry, I didn't know."

"Don't sweat it," I said, raising a hand. "I made it out pretty easily. But, well, I'm a bit of a fish out of water here."

"No, no... Damn. Hold on, let me make a call."

He brought his omni-tool up, and soon had someone on the line who knew how to set me up. I got an account, got it synced with my omni-tool, and even got a credit chit to go with it, a spare Wilson had in the cash register. With a swipe, the transaction was done, and I was up 200,000 credits.

Wait a minute.

"Woah, I thought we agreed on 70,000 credits."

"Yeah, well, must have made a mistake," Wilson said. When I gave him a skeptical look, he just shrugged. "I should be able to sell this piece for two hundred kay, so don't worry about it."

"I... Wow, I don't know what to say." I actually felt bad about it. I wasn't really from Mindoir after all. "If I didn't need the credits I'd say no, but..."

"It's not a charity case kid, I'll get the money back."

"Okay. Well, thank you then. Thanks a lot," I said, feeling rather flustered.

"You're welcome. Anything else you need help with?"

"No, no, that's... That's plenty of help," I closed my omni-tool and looked at the smiling old man. "Thanks again."

"Don't make a fuss," he replied in a good natured tone, waving me away. "Good luck kid."

After leaving the shop in a bit of a daze, I did a bit of digging through the extranet to find out how much 200,000 credits actually was. As it turns out, it's quite a bit, three or four years' salary for the typical manual worker in Alliance space. Not a lot if one lived in an expensive colony, but I wasn't planning on moving to Bel-Air anytime soon.

With that out of the way, I decided on one last stop. Another thing I found out, stationery of the future was a little different. Paper was – after decades of hearing about the "paperless future" – well and truly on its way to extinction. Only paper supplies I could find were from an "artsy" shop, and were definitely on the "holy freaking expensive" spectrum of price.

Still, with five thick notebooks, and five boxes of some kind of future-tec colour pens (made thick lines and promised no mess), I made my way to the kids. Each one of them received one of each, and instructions on what to do with them - after clearing said instructions with the shrinks. Joe and Shepard were the only ones that really seemed to be interested. Robert, a ginger boy about twelve years old, took the items without much conviction, and Liz, the blonde girl I only recently learned the name of, just muttered a single thanks when I put the items on the table in front of her, not moving from the chair where she was sitting.

The most heartbreaking was probably the last one. A girl about fourteen or fifteen, with short black hair and blue eyes, who had not said a word since she was rescued from the batarians. More and more she had withdrawn into herself, and now she just sat there, eyes lost in the distance. I had to put the items next to her bed, where she was sitting, because she wouldn't even acknowledge me.

It was a very long day. By the end of it, I just crashed on the hard cot in my spartan room ready to sleep for a whole century. After going around the station, I came to the conclusion there were only three kinds of establishments: food shops (groceries and takeaways), entertainment, and guns shops. Sure, there were others, but so few they may as well be a statistical error. There was one furniture shop in the whole of Arcturus, but I imagined they didn't get much in the way of business, given how half the stuff they sold wouldn't even fit in my tiny room, if I had had any interest in it at all. For what I could see, the point of everything there was to keep the marines fed and entertained during their downtime between missions, and that was it.

I bought a large box of preserved military rations – the cheapest way to feed myself I could find – and a hologuitar. It was a really cool gizmo, a small folding frame that uncurled into the shape of a classic guitar. The strings had no feedback, unfortunately, as they were holographic, but when folded it was incredibly compact and easy to carry. Sound came out of my omni-tool, or could be synced with headphones or the audio system of most standard alliance helmets.

All together I spent about five thousand credits. The rest could sit there until I really needed it.

Before I went to sleep, I decided to fire Marie a message. I flicked the omni-tool open and, laying on my cot, started typing.

Hey Marie,

We're all settled down here in Arcturus. The kids are staying with the doctors for now, but I've been given an all-OK. Apparently your report was enough for them, so thanks for that. I'm staying in Arcturus for the time being, they've given me a tiny room I can crash in, and I want to stick around until the kids are all shipped to foster families. Hopefully it won't take long, the docs tell me they have a lot of offers from all over the Systems Alliance to help with that.

I meant to ask you, the kids had been complaining about bad dreams, which really shouldn't be too surprising. Well, everyone but the quiet girl, you know, the short haired brunette. She still doesn't speak. I thought I'd try and help them with it, so I've been trying to explain to them how to have lucid dreams. I've got them all notebooks and pencils, and told them to write down everything they remember about their dreams as soon as they wake up. My idea was that if they could have some control of their dreams, they could turn them around. It's worked for me. But since I'm not a shrink, figured I'd ask someone who is!

How are things with you? Any more civilians that may join us? Arcturus is amazing, it's my first time in space... Well, since my trip to Mindoir I mean. I didn't see much of how I got to Mindoir. But this is something else.

I have decided I'm going to join the military. I really don't see myself doing farm work and quietly studying when I know how bad things can be in the galaxy. The military guy they've got here to look after us told me to think about it and not to jump in too quick. I'll give it a few days, but my mind's pretty much made up.

Take care,

Roy.

Author's Notes: Surprised? Well, you shouldn't be! What else is one to do when thrown in the ME universe a decade and a half before things go down? Get some gun training and maybe try to figure out who to tell what's about to go down. Because whoever you tell, you can bet there'll be shots fired in the aftermath.

Mizuki00, yeah sorry! :) Though the fact that you praise the story despite it not being your cup of tea is high praise indeed, thanks! And thanks to Archer and Lfan too! :D