Chapter Three

Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect.

Right. So there were two choices. We could go after Fist ourselves immediately or we could NOT potentially face an angry Krogan at the end of this. I haven't come face-to-face with many Krogan and I've certainly never pissed one off. I rather suspect that there was some sort of correlation between that and my continued well-being.

Krogan are notoriously belligerent and so even just approaching him about the possibility of working together might have caused him to try to kill me but I figured that, since I really did need to speak with Fist and I have a healthy respect for the lethal prowess of the Krogan, I really did need to deal with Wrex in some way or another and this seemed like it might end the least badly for me. At the very least I'd deal with him then and not have to worry about him ambushing me at an inopportune moment. Not that I really think that Krogan are much for ambushing but, well, you always have to think about the consequences of being wrong. I'm going to assume that Wrex does ambush people and not put myself in that position.

So we got to the C-Sec Academy (why is it called the Academy? I'd ask but it seems like one of those things that are just too self-evident to ask about) and have the good fortune to arrive precisely when Wrex and a C-Sec officer were threatening each other – Wrex won – and Wrex left.

I told Wrex that I needed to deal with Fist, Wrex threatened to kill me if I got in his way, I told him that I really needed to deal with Fist, and he agreed to team up with me. Well, that was easy and quite a bit less bloody than I had expected.

Evidently Alenko and Williams had been talking as they both attempted to get some extra shore leave as Wrex came aboard.

Somehow or other (maybe the fact that Wrex is telling the world that he is out to kill Fist or the fact that betraying the Shadow Broker is considered a form of suicide on 39 different planets), Fist had clearly heard that someone was out to kill him and had shut his bar up and hired a bunch of thugs to shoot anybody who came in. I really hope that he made some sort of public announcement I didn't hear about to save his clientele. Of course, those who pre-game might be too wasted to know to stay out even in the event of a warning.

I had a rather surreal experience behind one locked door. To begin with, there were hostile men with guns there and yet they were not shooting at me. Wrex nearly blew them away before he even realized (cared?) that they were not attacking us but he didn't.

They didn't seem all that keen on attacking us, really, and Garrus identified them as crappy warehouse guards called to serve because we killed all of the real guards. That was a lovely little status report right there. I took a stab in the dark and told them to go away and let us get to Fist. And you know what? They did just that. Garrus said that that tactic never would have occurred to him and, honestly, it really shouldn't have worked. They are either being seriously underpaid or they are worth every credit they're not getting.

But anyway, we got to Fist with far less fuss than we probably should have. He's either a coward or not a fool and so he wasn't particularly eager to fight us after we'd slaughtered all of his guards. Anyone who could legitimately face down a threat that annihilated his guards only actually needs guards for the convenience of not having to deal with idiots who try to kill him.

Fist said that the Quarian refused to give him the information and wanted to deal with the Shadow Broker directly. No one deals with the Shadow Broker directly…at least not that they're aware of. Maybe that Volus is the Shadow Broker and I'd never even know. I highly doubt it but that's what would make it so brilliant. Everyone knows no one deals with the Shadow Broker and this Quarian's information about Saren, while potentially very interesting to certain parties, is not nearly galaxy-shattering enough to change this policy. The Quarian apparently doesn't know this, though, so instead of killing her himself, Fist cheerfully sent her off to meet with agents of Saren and washed his hands of the matter. What a hero.

We continue to have amazing timing and had a few minutes before the Quarian meeting was to take place. Let me tell you, my timing is not usually this good so there is only one explanation. I've had fantastic timing ever since Eden Prime and so either Alenko or Williams must be a good luck charm. Probably Alenko because his entire squad didn't die on him. Jenkins died but I'm counting that one as a positive.

Fist asked me if I was going to kill him or if he could get back to disappearing into the ether for betraying the Shadow Broker (then why do it in the first place? Idiot) and I told him that it literally made no difference to me whether he lived or died. Wrex took the news well and promptly shot Fist in the head. Alenko was upset by this but Wrex was unrepentant and I pointed out that we knew Wrex was out to kill Fist when we brought him. Williams muttered something about not being the one to invite him and I readily acknowledged that as true. She just sighed and shook her head. Strange.

But yeah, we arrived in just enough time to save the Quarian from being murdered and might have even made it with time to spare if I hadn't gotten lost. But I did.

I'm not sure if she was grateful or not. She said that she could take care of herself which made me think no but then she also said that she'd repay me for saving her life by giving me her Saren information so maybe that is a yes after all. More people should give me things for saving them. Except now I think that I'm her bodyguard or something.

Wrex has no reason whatsoever to stick around but I'm not about to tell him to get lost and he's not only heard of me but has heard good things so I suppose that I don't mind having a Krogan around to help me kill people. Actually, thinking again, this is in no way a bad thing. Well, as long as he doesn't make a habit of killing people that I'm not out to kill. There's a good chance that that was just because he was hired to kill Finch but, well, the jury is still out.

The Quarian introduced herself as Tali…something. Honestly I'm bad enough with human last names so I shouldn't even start on alien ones. Tali it is. She doesn't seem to like being called 'the Quarian' so I should really stop doing that.

I really haven't run into very many Quarians since they pretty much all live in their flotilla (a fleet of extremely eclectic ships) and no one actually wants them around draining resources. I asked Tali about why she wasn't there and she said that Quarians have really hard-core rites of passages called pilgrimages where they leave and can't come back until they find something that will improve life for them. That sounds pretty impossible since they know little of the greater galaxy and probably don't leave with much to help them (they can't be given a ship so are they just dropped off somewhere?) and I'm surprised that anyone ever successfully completes it and heads back. Maybe they just have really low standards for what counts as improving life there. She acted like I really should have known this but I'm not sure if that's her perspective as someone who has been immersed in that culture her entire life or if I really should have known that.

We took her to Udina who was his charming self. Once he got him to understand that Tali had useful information, we played the tape for the first time. It turns out that she does, in fact, have some useful information. We really should have played it before taking the matter to Udina to make sure that we weren't wasting everyone's time and, more to the point, I didn't look stupid. At least he had the foresight to make us play it for him before taking it to the Council. I mean, just because Tali thought it was important and the rumor of information on Saren spooked the bad guys didn't necessarily mean that there was anything there.

It was a Geth data core that, even though they fry them when destroyed, Tali managed to salvage a few very convenient scraps of data from. Saren was saying something about…Well, actually I don't really remember. I really should have written that down. He mentioned that he succeeded on Eden Prime, I know, and some female voice mentioned the return of the Reapers. I'd never heard of the Reapers but the Geth think that they're a race of super-machines who annihilated the Protheans 50,000 years ago.

Well, it's as good a theory as any.

That's when the meeting just got completely stupid.

Tali decided to stay around because the pilgrimage is about giving of yourself or some nonsense and so she's practically required to save the galaxy from the Reapers that Saren's bringing.

Wait, what? What?

I did not sign up for any galaxy-saving! The galaxy is really, really big and anything that could destroy all of it (or at least all of the parts that we know of) sounds far too big of a job for me to want to deal with. What happened to just stopping one rogue Spectre gone mad with power? I am not looking to stop a race of super-sentient machines that wiped out the Protheans 50,000 years ago! And everybody's acting like it's a done deal or something, like just because Saren and the Geth believe it then it must be true and I have to deal with it.

Well…Everybody but Udina. It's strange but I think he's beginning to grow on me.

Because seriously, this is not happening.

He and Anderson went off (you know, they are spending a lot of time together, just saying) to go set up a Council meeting and I guess the Council is just really not busy at all because we're supposed to follow in just a few minutes and get right into that meeting.

Or maybe this is why the galaxy thinks we're super arrogant, the fact that we think we can just do things like that?

Couldn't be.


I preempted Williams and Alenko's attempt to leave by letting them know that I thought the six of us would really get a lot out of that Council meeting. Seriously, what is it with them whenever someone new comes along?

Okay, this is kind of bullshit right here. I left literally three minutes after Anderson and Udina did and I've been there before so I wasn't actually lost and got there about as quick as is humanly possible. And yet somehow, again, I arrive after the meeting starts. Why can't I ever be there for the start of the meeting?

Saren wasn't summoned holographically this time or perhaps he was but knew we'd gotten to Tali first and didn't want to actually have to face the Council in person when he was getting yelled at and stripped of his Spectre status. I knew that in his shoes I'd be ducking their calls as well.

I arrived just in time to hear the recording again and I learned from my mistake. They are looking for the Conduit. Whatever that is.

Now, as far as I know the tape was just directly played. They certainly had no time to authenticate it and I refuse to believe that Saren's voice sounds so unique that, with no identification, it couldn't be one of numerous other Turians. Still, if that's what the Council wants to call 'irrefutable evidence' then I'm all for it. Well, in this case at least. In other cases I think that that's a system doomed to miscarriages of justice and mistakes every time you turn around. But in this case, yeah, it's a really great thing.

He was promptly stripped of his Spectre status and then the hard part began. They said that they would make 'all efforts' to bring him to justice but it quickly became apparent that that was not actually true. They couldn't send a fleet in because not only is a fleet of ships not really much use in locating one singular person in hiding in this galaxy but it might spark a war and we really don't want that. Our other option appeared to be doing nothing and hoping that somebody might stumble upon him until the Asari Councilor hit on a happy medium.

The Turian Councilor seemed to know exactly what she was talking about because he said it was too soon and that 'they' weren't ready so I guess she'd been pulling for us for awhile. Apparently the only other option is to have me become humanity's first human Spectre and go hunt Saren down. I would have pointed out that they could have just had another Spectre (made another Spectre if everyone else was busy) but since the whole point of all of this was making me a Spectre I knew better than to sabotage myself. I think then Udina might actually kill me and, worse, I might actually deserve it.

But seriously, what happened to 'You must go on a series of missions with an experienced Spectre who will evaluate your capabilities'? Whatever. This Council clearly has no idea what it's doing.

And I found it very interesting that the Turian Councilor's objection were that they were not ready and not she were not ready. Was not. Was not ready. Either for some reason he's referring to me in the plural or having a Spectre isn't just about the Spectre's capabilities but their species as a whole needs to qualify or something. Which might have been humanity's whole position since they started this campaign (twenty years ago if you believe Harkin and I don't) but I didn't think that the Council would be that open about it. But I guess maybe a half-finished startled declaration might not count as being open about it.

The ceremony was pretty cool. They gave me a nice speech about how awesome Spectres were that was nothing like that C-Sec guy's complaints about how much potential for abuse there is. Apparently I'm an ideal now and if anybody in the galaxy hadn't heard of me…Well, they will have now. All they needed to do was have the three of them press a button at the same time so either making someone a Spectre is really, really easy for the Council or they already had most of the work done on me. Even though I was told barely anyone even gets in this building and you have to have special permission (despite the fact that the Council isn't even here), there were plenty of people around to lean off of balconies and witness my crowning moment.

Apparently I get to have a special ceremony later. It will probably be really boring but also really awesome because it will be celebrating how awesome I am and how can that possibly be a bad thing?

There was one other part of the meeting that I kind of want to block out but I suppose that I really can't avoid it forever. I became a Spectre specifically to hunt Saren down and stop him and that means facing what he's doing. The female voice was identified by the Asari Councilor as Matriarch Benezia and when I asked who she was the Councilor gave me a condescending little explanation about what a Matriarch was and I actually already knew that. People can ask who one specific Matriarch is without needing to know what a Matriarch even is, you know. I really don't like the Asari even if the Asari Councilor was the one who was evidently pulling for me to make Spectre. They're just so damn smug and superior and trusting in the fact that everyone finds them wildly attractive. The fact that everyone but me seems to find them wildly attractive is beside the point.

The Salarian Councilor asked me what the Reapers were. What was I supposed to say about that? I don't know what the Reapers are! I know that the Geth worshipped them as gods and think that they wiped out the Protheans 50,000 years ago and that the recording makes it clear that Saren and Benezia think that they can bring them back.

Anderson seemed quite convinced that they could and would succeed if we didn't stop them and that everything the Geth believe is literal truth but I have no idea why. How would the Geth, created mere centuries ago, have knowledge of this when no one else did? And even if that did happen, if the Reapers became extinct or something then how exactly is Saren proposing to bring them back? The whole thing is really absurd. I mean, I'm not suggesting that we don't investigate (it's all about the consequences of being wrong again. The consequences are either looking really stupid about believing something ridiculous or all being killed by Reapers so, yes, let's investigate) and I'm sure that in the course of dealing with Saren I'll figure out the truth.

I just don't see why Anderson is so damn convinced by all of this rather shaky evidence. Or maybe he's just covering his doubts because he knows how this will sound to the Council and how hard it will be to sell and so he knows that any doubts on his part will be used as an excuse to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand right now. Anderson also thinks that my psychedelic vision means that I saw the Reapers destroying the Protheans. It's my damn vision and I'm not sure. I mostly just saw a bunch of flashes of light and shape. It could be that, I guess. It could also be an acid trip. I'm just saying.

The Council didn't seem convinced as it is, possibly because I kept phrasing things in terms of 'the Geth believe that the Reapers killed the Protheans' and 'I suppose that technically it is within the realm of possibility that the Reapers could come back and kill us all.' But you know, I'm really not convinced at all.

The Turian Councilor really summed up my doubts nicely with his rather pointed questions we can't answer. We need to look for answers to these questions, obviously, but we're being given the opportunity to do just that. The Salarian Councilor kind of annoyed me when he said that Saren is clearly just pretending to bring back the Reapers and plan on destroying all life everywhere to appease the Geth because, while that is certainly a valid possibility, we don't know that so it's not 'clearly.' And then there's the fact that it can't be a convenient smokescreen like he was implying (and further implying we were stupid for believing it) for us because we were never supposed to hear this.

So yeah, after two meetings with the Council I've decided that the Asari Councilor is condescending and annoying, the Salarian Councilor is narrow-minded and annoying, and the Turian Councilor is kind of awesome and I hope that if there is any truth to these wild and unsubstantiated claims that I will be able to prove it to him.

I don't know what it is but I'm seriously reconsidering my previous opinion about Turians after having met three that I like in quick succession. Sure, it is absolutely bullshit to hold a species that you know has no possible way of knowing that they were breaking a law to the standards of that law and fire on them without even alerting them to the law first and requesting that they stop but that was ages ago and I don't even remember the war so maybe it's time to move on. No promises, though.

Once the meeting was over, Udina was still not happy even though he got his human Spectre. Despite the fact that he would have been part of bringing me to the attention of the Council in the first place, he's really not looking to happy that it's me. But then, before we met he probably had no idea how complicated I'd make something like a simple Spectre promotion. Not that any of this is my fault in the slightest, however. And who can blame him for not being happy when we've got to deal with this Reaper threat and kind of hope that there's something to it or else end up looking really stupid?

Well…apparently the people with me can blame him. Have a little empathy, guys!

I spoke with an Admiral Kahoku of the Alliance on my way out. His line: "I'm getting stone-walled by bureaucratic assholes" cemented him as awesome in my book. He's looking for his team that went missing and now nobody's allowed in the area so he asked me to check it out and I said that I would. I mean, I probably won't but if I really have nothing better to do I might look into it.

And I stopped by Emily Wong again because I happened to be walking right past her and she called to get my attention. Someone – not me – grabbed Fisk's files and so I sold them to her. I promised to give her an interview, too, which I may or may not actually do and she gave me a lot of credits. So yeah.

Then I headed back to the ship and found Udina and Anderson waiting for me with news that really belonged in the Worst Day Ever I had the other day.

It turns out that I'm getting the Normandy and all the same crew which is good. I really like the Normandy and now that Jenkins is dead I like the crew. The only problem is that apparently Anderson isn't going to be reassigned. For reasons that have not been explained (read: Udina really fucking hates him), he's stepping down and going to get a lame desk job.

I know he only agreed to this because I'm his protégé, he hates Saren as much as Udina hates him, and seems to really think that we're all going to be wiped out like the Protheans if we don't stop Saren. I had better succeed because this whole thing is making me sick. Even as a Spectre, though, (maybe especially as a Spectre as technically I don't answer to the Alliance anymore even though I so totally will. I love the Alliance) there's nothing I can do about this.

Anderson is very stoic about it and having to reassure me which is all kinds of wrong and just making the situation worse. He also outright told me to ignore my mission of finding Saren because that's just not going to happen so instead I should look for the Conduit and follow the Geth. They've been stopped on Feros and Noveria so I should look there and Benezia has a daughter Liara who is off…somewhere…I don't really see why she matters at all since I'm sure she's not going to go around confiding her evil plans in family members but whatever. She's an expert on Protheans so I guess that's something.

Then, after Udina left, I made the mistake of asking Anderson what happened with him and Saren and he told me this really long, boring story about it. The gist of it is that twenty years ago Saren was Anderson's Nihlus but he apparently really hates humans and subtlety and loves explosions so when they were sent in to stealthily kidnap a scientist and then eliminate him, Saren instead decided to set off an explosion that killed something like 500 people. And then he blamed it on Anderson for 'blowing his cover' or something because Saren is kind of an asshole.

I can see why that would have destroyed Anderson's chances at being a Spectre but I'm afraid that I do not see why the Council sent their best Spectre to test a possible recruit or why, if the Council thought humanity was ready twenty years ago, it took just one failure before they decided that we're not ready now.

This just further proves my theory that they're all incompetent.

Or at least the Salarian and Asari Councilors are.

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