Author's Note:

As many of you know, Dragon Age 2 is out. [*giddy laughter ensues*] That said, movie review updates may be a little less frequent…for a time. Just giving you fair warning.

Again…many thanks to those who have fav'd, alerted and reviewed this ongoing fic!

Review suggestions are always welcome.

Humor is just another defense against the universe. -Mel Brooks [Shepard knows this little tidbit well.]

ENJOY!

Underworld

Lakota Shepard's crew packed themselves into the Medical bay for this evening's vid fraternizations. In order to provide some privacy and darkness, the three large paned windows had been covered with Kasumi's collection of rare asari tapestry. To the thief's unvoiced relief, Samara didn't ask any probing questions about their accrual. The entry door had been locked and a temporary screen had been installed for the digital projection. The Flotilla furniture had been ushered into the large space with exception of the floor pillows (aka: high-tech bean bags.) Instead of loafing on the floor, the crew used the four, more-than-comfortable, medbeds.

Chilling in his lazy-boy, Zaeed sneered, "Vampires? Werewolves? I've met scarier things cleaning my gun!"

Thane stood, perfectly still, next to a covered window with his hands positioned in front of him, as if in studious prayer of the ancient drapery. Without moving he commented, "The style of the film was rather meretricious in capturing the essence of a dark noire environment."

"This vid is a Matrix rip-off!" challenged Tali from her perch on a medbed.

Lakota disagreed, "I don't think so. I got more of a gothic feel from it." She was leaning on Chakwas' desk. Since her 'resurrection', she had an irrational and, some say, intense dislike of medbeds.

"Our quarian engineer has a point, Commander. The rotary phone, the leather outfits…," contended Garrus. He stretched out on his medbed as though it was a lounge chair. "Not that I am complaining about the outfits."

"OUR quarian…? What does…? Who are you…," Insulted by what seemed to be a demeaning remark, Tali badgered, "I was unaware we were being categorized. What does that make you, Garrus? Our turian vigilante?"

"Our 'good-looking, turian vigilante' will do."

"Keelah…" Tali muttered to herself, "…little mandible syndrome…,"

"Holy CRAP!" exclaimed Joker from the Flotilla sofa. "It would be BOH-RING to be a vamp. Cooped up in that mansion all day and constantly posing for Formax."

"You noticed that, too?" Chakwas was leaning back in her desk chair and stretching her legs out. "It seems that the life of a vampire, if you don't hunt Lycan, boils down to sitting on your proverbial rump all night, draped across furniture, and spending hundreds of years worth of evenings making small talk and sneering at each other."

"Miranda and Jack do that all of the time," razzed Joker. Adding to his commentary, he lifted both hands as if clawing the air in front of him, "….hisssss…..hisssss."

"What tactical purpose did the hissing serve?" Grunt asked. A perplexed frown creased his reptilian face. "Is it some form of battle cry?" He was positioned in front of the tapestry furthest away from the entry door. He touched it, and then analyzed its movement. To the innocent onlooker, it appeared as though he was trying to weaponize the fabric in his head.

"But it does give Selene some kind of motif while walking through the mansion," Lakota astutely observed. "They gathered to look at her in awe. Or they looked at her in anger. Or they looked at her as a betrayer. Or sometimes they just looked. That's an insanely dull afterlife!"

"Unlike you, Shepard," said Garrus. "You've had a very active afterlife."

Nodding her head, Lakota agreed, "Hell, yeah."

"Meh…An entire world was created and contained within a story told by the vampires: meaning that they would only tell, and we would only see, the world through their eyes." Kasumi's shoulders drooped despairingly as she sighed heavily, "A world of eternal darkness…whoopee."

Shifting the conversation back to the Matrix-Underworld comparison, Lakota pointed out, "There was no slow motion kung-fu in this vid, no bullet time effects…"

"I don't know, Shepard, Tali is on to something." Miranda argued, "Michael took up dead space…much like Neo. Both were dull on the screen and clueless in the vid."

"And yet, they somehow managed to get the good-looking girl," Jacob wistfully admired.

"Michael did look yummy," leered Kasumi.

"Not the brightest nuke in the box though," ridiculed Zaeed. "It was a GUN, not a lock pick, jackass!"

"But Selene…she was sleek and sexy!" panted Jacob.

Kasumi hotly dismissed the remark, "A Trinity rip-off!"

Interrupting their "we're not lovers but we act like it" tiff, Joker excitedly bellowed, "I don't care! She WAS hot! And that opening scene when she dropped from the tower to the ground… BAM! Nothing feathery or light about it. She hit solidly and it was freakin' fantastic!"

Legion stood next to the AI Core room door, slightly apart from the group, as if guarding it from interlopers. "It is an unlikely possibility that no organic witnessed the movement."

"Humans are usually oblivious to what goes on around them…unless it has to do with money or sex," said Jack shrewdly. She was on her feet, back leaning against the covered medbed, with arms defiantly crossed in front of her. THE Jack pose.

"There was plenty of sexual innuendo in this vid," Chakwas discerned impassively. "Brown eyes turning blue in some vampiric state of arousal, for example."

Lakota mention, "The reversal of asari melding…"

"You ALWAYS bring that up!" accused Tali.

"I do NOT."

"Shepard-Commander, current trends average 1.7 times per day. But there is a 37.8 percent increase after the Normandy departs from the weekly maintenance at the Shadow Broker base."

"Stow it, Legion."

"As a doctor, I can say that the sexual tension between Michael and Selene was, at best, an ambivalent pscho-sexual tension that translated on screen as inappropriate affect." Leaning back into her desk chair, Chakwas put her hands together, tapping her forefingers in cadence to her thoughts. "As a woman, I can say that it was… well…non-existent."

Rolling her eyes, Miranda scoffed harshly, "Hah… the bloody idiot was hand-cuffed during a kiss…"

"Boy did that scene bring up some bad memories," reminisced Lakota, "…fond ones."

"Shep," Kasumi advised, "some things are not meant to be shared."

Unnoticed, Thane made a sideways glance towards Lakota and mumbled, "He desired the one thing he could not possess. The oldest story in the book."

"That and death," declared Samara matter-of-factly. She was sitting in the lotus position on the medbed closest to Chakwas desk.

"So…what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, right Shepard?" mocked Garrus.

"You tell me…you're the one who almost got his ass kicked to the netherworld back on Omega."

"You're the one that got spaced…remember?"

"Ehhh… not really. It's all kind of a freakishly cold, yet eerily suffocating blur. I will say this though, for all of the money that was spent bringing me back, I wish it had translated to my hair. Wavy strands or wispy clips would have been nice…never seem to be able to make that happen."

Ignoring the banter between the turian and human, Jack spat incredulously, "So the blonde chick recognizes the human has been bit, he's NOT a lycan yet though, but then jumps to the ceiling anyways and hisses? HISSES? What the fuck?"

"'And then the human easily escapes the mansion." Miranda said, "How is it that the lycans hadn't won the war? Not only were the vampires weak beyond compare when it came to security and tactical reasoning, they were also complete morons."

Grunt quietly raged, "No one has answered my question. What tactical advantage did the hissing serve?"

"I dunno, Grunt. Sure made Blondie look like a fucking idiot though," growled Jack acerbically.

"And Craven reminds me of VIDO," grumbled Zaeed menacingly. "Backstabbing sonofabitch."

"Oh...don't forget when Viktor told him 'Your incompetence is becoming most…taxing…' I LOVE that line." Sighing, the Spectre stated, "Wish I had more opportunities to use it."

Still meditating on the images woven into the ancient tapestries, Thane offered, "Forbidding anyone from questioning the past has a tendency to end in misfortune."

"Oh yeah…ewww…," shivered Kasumi, "A book with human skin…"

Jack jumped down from her med bed. "I can get behind the 'work one century, sleep two'. Seems like a fucked-up paradise." Stretching her arms over her head, she continued, "But I wouldn't want to be a vamp. They're all pathetic and whiny. Amelia is supposed to be some badass bitch, but rolls over when the first lycan shows up."

Mordin's mind stepped to Viktor's resurrection, and then jumped to possible practical applications, then leaped to current examples. "Reanimation through blood. Successful with Shepard. Human genome adaptable. Though cybernetic and synthetic augmentation needed."

"MORDIN! For the love of all things blue, don't remind me!" yelled Lakota, a visible shudder coursing through her body.

"What's the point in being immortal if you can't enjoy the simple pleasures in life…Samara, any comments for the long-lived Justicar living by a code?" poked Joker.

Narrowing her eyes, Samara commented, "Pleasure will lead to your demise as easily as sarcasm, Mr. Moreau."

"Oh…well…that's no fun."

"Even my spirits were lessened by that insight," Thane stated morosely.

"How'd Selene figure out it was Michael Corvine from just a picture? That's bloody miraculous!" argued Miranda. By this time, she was agitatedly pacing the floor.

Jacob responded, "You need to suspend some disbelief, Miranda. It's a vid, not real life."

"I've suspended a lot of things, Jacob… be careful you're not the next."

With a quizzical look, Joker asked, "How did Selene NOT notice the shoulder wound? I thought she was some ultra lycan hunter? I thought she LIVED for it. She's not going to live long with that kind of observational skill."

"And a Death Dealer didn't realize she'd been followed by a pack of lycans when going back to get Michael?" Miranda scoffed. "Highly unlikely."

"And what about those silver nitrate bullets?" questioned Tali. "You would think the 'advanced' vampires would have figured it out way before the 'backward' lycans and their UV rounds."

Mordin, who was attempting to discern the physics of such ammo rounds, mumbled some sporadic thoughts. "Clear-tipped ammo. Breaks chunks out of walls. Also, explodes on impacting flesh. Velocity-mass calculations inconclusive. Conclusion- impossible. Unless material density fluctuated. Then most likely- improbable."

"No wonder the feud went on for so long," observed Zaeed in outright disgust, "they couldn't hit the backside of a frigate."

"At least the Death Dealers had their infinite ammo," Garrus mocked. "No calibration required!"

Lakota sighed nostalgically. "Makes me miss the days before thermal clips."

"Looks liked both sides forgot rule number one: you don't bring fangs and claws to a gun fight," mocked Jacob.

Irritation radiated off of Miranda in waves. "And whips? Who the bloody hell thought bringing whips was a good idea?"

"They're not?" Joker asked innocently.

"Oh… and pitch black holes in the wall… what could POSSIBLY be in there?" ridiculed Tali.

Scowling and shaking his head, Garrus challenged, "Check out the 'superior' hybrid…how is it that an untrained fool could contend with a god-like, vampire warrior?"

"And the all-black eyes… like we haven't seen that before," slurred Joker.

Lakota straightened as if to say something, but was abruptly cut off by Tali, "DON'T EVEN SAY IT, SHEPARD!"

Sheepishly, Lakota settled back on the edge of the desk.

"Leather, guns, ninja moves… What do you say, Jacob? Remind you of anyone we know?" Joker was smiling impishly.

Jacob looked between Miranda, Kasumi, Samara and Jack…his eyes carefully avoided Thane, "Um…yeah…"

"Where are the women lycans?" wondered Kasumi.

The room remained silent.

"So...," Tali asked hesitantly, "roaming in those lycan tunnels...remind anyone ELSE of Feros?"

Before the movie:

Kelly received a personal message from Miranda Lawson:

Tonight's vid revolves around vampires and werewolves. Dress appropriately.

[Vampires?…Werewolves? hmmm… Leather?… oh yeah…]

Three hours later, Kelly was still in front the mirror admiring her black, leather-clad ass in the mirror while she thought about and perfected her appearance.

[Oh yeah, I look good. Maybe just a little more of a hitch her…lower there…and definitely a darker shade of lipstick…]

Upon hearing the familiar beep of a message in her in box, she looked and saw a correspondence from an unknown sender:

Though I cannot predict the future, the consequences of this night will reverberate through the halls of the Normandy for many years to come.