Chapter 4: No laughing matter
Hi everyone, Yaesephir again.
Some people asked me if I could include timestamps when I change the point of view in my story. I think this question has something to do that I didn't explain what I meant with time skips properly: changes of perspective are normally no time skips. When I change perspective between Tali and Shepard the only reason is, that those two can't understand each other so far, and are thinking different things because of this. The story starts in the year (let's say) 2019 on some random day, which one isn't really important, and until now not a single day has passed. In between chapters a few hours have gone by, but I think that should be fairly obvious from statements like "they had explained stuff for hours without gaining anything from it" (not a quote, I'm just too lazy to search for the real sentence).
What I meant by time skips are large amounts of time which I will only cover in a way, that they read like a protocol:
In year 20xx this and that happened, which lead to this and that in the year 20xy, and now the story continues in 20xz, x years after that event.
I'm not even sure when I will include a time skip like that, and what a period of time it will cover, but I'm pretty sure that there will be one in the near future (because the first chapters are mainly about building/describing the world this whole story takes place in, after I'm 'finished' with that, there is not much reason to keep up the slow pace, so a skip is only logical.)
Because of that I decided NOT to include timestamps when they are not necessary: so if you see a change of perspective without timestamp, simply assume that it happens directly after the last scene, or that the time is absolutely obvious.
With that out of the way I wanted to thank everyone who is reading this story, it's absolutely ridiculous how many views this story is getting: It is only 3 days old, and the story already has 600+ different readers, summing up to a total of 1500 views on all chapters (with 90% or more being visitors without a -account, so if one of you guys want to leave a review: feel free to register on this site, you won't regret it ^^).
Let's continue!
/ Shepard's point of view, the morning after the crash /
Johanna yawned and almost spilled her cup of coffee – she was still tired of the night before, since they had kept teaching their visitors until almost 4 AM. At first she had wondered if these aliens didn't need sleep, or how else they could work for that long, but then Jeff had joked that they probably simply had a jet lag, and Johanna had figured that he was probably even right with this: She had no idea what day-night-cycle these creatures had on their homeplanet, maybe they had a 30 hour day, maybe they weren't day-active beings, maybe they lived on a continent that had a similar situation to countries like Finland, where day and night wasn't really distinguishable for most of the year.
Jeff in the meantime didn't seem to be in need of coffee, he looked like the word 'tired' didn't exist in his vocabulary. Not only was he wide awake, he was already coming up with stupid ideas on how to convince the suit-people to get them to wear some girly looking pajamas next time, and babbled something about how a picture of that would make the most epic computer-wallpaper ever. Shepard didn't really listen, she had a had time figuring out why her cup was already empty again.
When Shepard proceeded to get herself a new cup of the black make-awake-liquid Joker complained a bit.
"You know that that stuff isn't healthy for you, right? You'll kill yourself one day with with a caffeine-overdose, and you know that I prefer my girlfriend, you know, alive."
"Bit of necrophilia never killed anyon- nevermind, it probably did." Johanna replied. She had wanted to tease Jeff a bit, but she was aware that in her half-asleep state the irony in the sentence would probably not be obvious, and she didn't want to end up insulting him by implying that he was into corpses or something. So she changed her mind and tried to change the conversation into a different direction:
"And like you're the one to talk, you drink more litres of tea a day than I drink cups of coffee a week."
"Yeah, but that only had teaine in it."
"Teaine and caffeine are the same thing genius."
"Oh."
Slowly Shepard's brain started functioning at full capacity, and she noticed that the table in front of Jeff was covered by sheets of papers. She walked over to him and put her arms around him from behind, curiously looking over his shoulder.
"What are those drawings?"
"I'm awake for some time already, and thought that preparing the sketches in advance would save us some time later. I also googled and went through some SciFi-forums, to check if maybe someone maybe had already prepared a first contact cheatsheets or other stuff that could help us to communicate with our latexian friends."
"...please don't call them latexians."
"Why? Do you have a better name for them?"
"No, but I don't want to have to explain to them why my boyfriend named them after some weird fetish of his if we ever learn their language."
"Hey, why is it a fetish of mine if I may ask? I'm not the one dressing up in skin-tight latex suit."
A grin appeared on Shepard's face, growing wider and wider with every second. Joker didn't notice until Johanna started chuckling, the chuckles turning into an uncontrollable laughter, that went as far that Shepard had to step away from Jeff's wheelchair to hold her belly, because her stomach started to hurt.
"What is so funny?" Jeff asked, not sure why she had to laugh this hard.
Shepard in the meantime was already rolling on the floor, trying to catch a breath between the chuckles and the hiccup that had started at the same time. Tears started to fill her eyes, the sounds coming from her constantly changing between laughter and crying, since her stomach hurt so bad. This continued for a few minutes, before the laughter slowly started to die down, only leaving behind a broadly smiling Johanna with wet eyes and hiccups and a confused Jeff.
"Care to explain why you collapsed just now?" he asked.
"Your last sentence, that the aliens are the ones wearing a tight latex-suit, not you. It gave me this really weird image of you in a latex-suit."
Shepard started giggling again – and the giggling once again turned into loud laughter, this time not only from Shepard, but also Jeff, whom Johanna had infected with her stupid giggling. They both were laughing so hard, that none of them noticed the group of Quarians that was watching them from the door to the kitchen.
/ Tali's point of view /
Tali wasn't sure what to make of the absurd scene that was taking place in front of her. Both of the creatures that had helped them yesterday were gasping uncontrollably for air, one of them even going as far as having fallen to the floor, the other one had rotated his chair with tires towards the woman on the floor and both of them sounded like they were laughing (the woman made a pretty weird variation of this though, where the sound immediately stopped every few seconds, just to release a high-pitched squeak, just to go back to laughing normally). On top of that the female even seemed to be in pain, which didn't stop her partner (Tali had guessed that the male was her life-mate from a few intimate gestures she had seen, like hugging or a gesture where the both of them connected their mouths) from laughing at her.
She had also noticed that the male was never standing up from his chair, not even now to help up the female. Tali wondered if this maybe had some cultural background, she had already developed a theory based on what she had seen: Maybe the females in this society had a higher status than the males, and to express that the males had to stay at a lower level than their female counterparts. At the same time the exact opposite was thinkable: Maybe they considered walking as work and only males were worthy of having this form of transportation. But Tali knew that only after seeing another male she would be able to make an educated guess.
"Are you sure that it's a good idea to get our information from these two?" Veetor asked from behind. "They don't seem to take the situation too seriously."
"I'm also having some doubts, but they are the best source for information we have at the moment. And they were pretty helpful yesterday. And it's not like we have much choice, we don't have enough time to search for other people, not that I would suggest it if we had the time. We don't know how other members of their species would react to us – maybe it was pure luck that we met some individuals that don't take it that seriously, others might get the idea that it would be safer to them to lock us away, or even dissect us to get information about us."
The hyumen had calmed down by now and the red-furred one was getting up from the floor, removing some dust from her clothes and grabbed the cup with black liquid in it that she had put on the table earlier. The male meanwhile had returned to drawing something on one of the many sheets of paper that were lying in front of him.
Tali decided to knock against the door frame, and hoped that they understood that she simply wanted to draw attention to her group, not that she wanted to damage their home or question it's stability.
Both of them turned their heads towards the door when they heard the sound and stopped for a second. Then they started laughing again.
/ Unknown point of view, unknown location /
"Is it ready yet?"
The doctor pressed a few buttons on his keyboard, before turning back to his superior.
"Yes, the recording is running again, we can resume."
"Okay, then continue – we wasted enough time with this small incident, we need to get this stuff running as soon as possible."
Instead of answering the doctor simply nodded and turned back to the screens.
"July the sixth, day two of operation 'Icarus' heritage', test object Epsilon-Two, attempt number forty-eight. Cameras operational again, experiment can resume. Generator-start in three, two, one..."
He pressed the green button and turned his glance towards the test-chamber. A few seconds nothing happened, and the doctor already feared that this was yet another failure, when suddenly the object started emitting an orange light. The light flickered for a bit, before changing into a more stable form and revealing a menu-screen in a weird language.
The doctor and his co-workers stared at the object for a while before the whole laboratory-team exploded into cheers and cries. They did it. They finally managed to get one of the alien-technology working again.
/ Shepard's point of view /
Shepard scratched the top of her index-finger with the middle-finger on the same hand and stared at the ceiling – a pose she often used when thinking about something. After checking out the drawings Joker had fabricated she knew that they would have a lot harder time, the more complex the themes became. How do you explain that some humans are not to be trusted, without possibly damaging your own trustworthiness, and that of humanity as a whole?
After a while she shook her head. This would be a problem Jeff would have to deal with, not her.
Jeff had suggested that Johanna should start working on her plan to expose the aliens to the public, without looking like a total nutjob, so that they could maybe secure some help from professionals, but without putting their visitors into danger at the same time. One huge problem they had stumbled upon was that those things weren't human. This might seem obvious, but this also implied something that wasn't quite this easy to grasp: They weren't human beings, which meant that they had no human rights in front of the law. At best they would have some animal-rights, but those still wouldn't protect them from scientists that decided that testing on them would be a good idea. But then again sooner or later they would have to face other humans – and then it would maybe help if they already had the support of said scientists, since it could help them being taken seriously by the media.
But how would they convince a famous scientist (or multiple) to support their cause? For mere students like them it wasn't the end of the world if people thought they were a bit crazy, but a researcher could lose his job over that. And they had to make sure that the researcher was from a private institute, and not somehow connected to the government. Politicians were the most dangerous of all things in their plan, mostly because they behaved so irrational most of the time.
Shepard had already scratched her first plan of simply releasing a video on youtube: the most likely results included everyone thinking that it was fake, or some sort of viral marketing campaign for an upcoming movie, that is if the video even managed to surpass a hundred views. In the end it would probably be better to not shout out "I have found an alien lifeform!" but release information like their DNA-sequence and shout "I have found something interesting – what could it be?" instead. But this caused even more problems: how would they extract DNA from the creatures without 1. angering them and 2. damaging these suits they needed to survive.
A knock on the front-door forced her out of her thoughts. Alarmed Johanna glanced at Jeff and made some gestures to hide their guests somehow. Unwanted visitors were something they really didn't need right now.
"One moment" she shouted towards the door, and walked towards it as slow as possible, to buy Joker a bit more time. She closed the door to the living room behind her, took a last breath and then opened the door to see who it was. She didn't even get to open her mouth before as a large team of heavily armed guys surrounded her.
"Hannah Shepard?" one of the men asked her, evidently the leader of the group.
"No... no, that would be my mother. I'm Johanna Shepard. What is the problem? Or better: who are you?"
The leader took a judging look at her before answering.
"My name is not important, important is only the following: I'm from the MAD, the Ministry for Military Counter-Intelligence Service, and you along with every person in this house will have to come with me."
Author's notes:
Hello again, Yaesephir as always!
I can imagine that some of you have the following question right now: Who the fuck is the MAD, how does MAD stand for Ministry for Military Counter-Intelligence Service, and what do they want from Shepard? The answer is simple:
MAD stands for 'Militärischer Abschirmdienst" and is one of the German ministries for military intelligence (like the DIA, NGA, NRO and NSA in the US) which is responsible for counter-measures to espionage, sabotage and terrorist activities.
So... why the MAD, why a German ministry? The answer to that: because in my story Shepard and company live in Germany. The reason for that is, once again, to influence the universe I'm building. In the original games the alliance is formed after the discovery of the Prothean ruins, where the possible enemy, the to this point yet unknown other alien races haven't found earth yet. This way humanity has a bit of time to set aside their differences, find common goals and prepare one of the largest fleets in citadel space. But in my story they find out about extraterrestrial races by some of them directly landing on our homeworld, and rather unnoticed on top of that. This WILL cause a bit harsher reactions, and the opinions on how to handle the situation will go in all sorts of different directions.
So again the question: why Germany?
If you ask a random German if he is proud of his country, or for being German, many will still answer with 'no', being ashamed or feeling guilty for their (ancestors) past. Of those that answer 'yes' are a few idiots that still go on about Germany being strong, and what not. But most will be proud of something different: that they managed to start anew and learn from the mistakes of the past. Today Germany is one of the most pacifistic nations on earth, where the majority of the population would get rid of their own military if they could. It has even come as far that old enemies have complained to Germany, that they don't use their military conflicts in current conflicts all around the world (e.g. France and the UK complained when Germany didn't send troops to help in Syria, or said that there weren't enough soldiers in Afghanistan).
What do you think would happen if a country so fundamentally afraid of becoming a military power once again is the first one to find out about a possible threat to all of humanity?
Tl;dr: I think it will be interesting to read how this whole thing will unfold ^^
If you want to complain, suggest something or even make a compliment: feel free to leave a review or PM, I'm reading all of them :D
See ya next time,
~Yaesephir.
