The crew of the Normandy stood around the briefing room, considering their prisoner. Wrex had requested that they depart, commenting to Shepard that, "We krogan don't mind a murder or two, but it gets a bit excessive when you're around." They'd met Grunt on the way back, who'd been eager to tell his story about completing some right by killing a thresher maw or something and earning his way into the Urdnot clan, but everyone was much more interested in figuring out who this woman was that had just killed someone probably destined to become one of the most important and influential individuals in galactic history.
Her appearance wasn't particularly enlightening. The armor she wore looked like an incomplete set of the tight-fitting variety Cerberus issued to snipers, with some pieces of STG gear thrown in, but none of it bore any identifying markings. Underneath was, indeed, an abused and torn pink dress, with pink sneakers to match. Her bare legs were cut and bruised in several places, but evidently she regularly waxed.
"So," Shepard began, "who are you?"
"I told you," the woman said, "I'm Mary fucking Sue." They'd tied her to a chair and kept numerous guns trained on her, but she didn't seemed distressed by her capture so much as exasperated.
"Is that your mother's maiden name, or did you get that when you were confirmed?"
"Jesus fucking Christ. Look, I'm Mary Sue, I killed that bitch you were working with, and I'm glad she's fucking worm food. Now are you going to let me go, or are you going to throw me out the fucking airlock?"
"She's got a goddamn mouth on her, doesn't she?" Zaeed muttered to Jack.
"You think we should let you go?" Shepard said.
"Yeah, I think you should fucking let me go," Mary Sue said. "I sniped the bitch, but I had a good reason."
"And that reason was…?"
For the first time, Mary Sue looked uncomfortable. "She took my powers," she mumbled.
Shepard raised an eyebrow.
"She took my fucking powers, okay? Look, I used to have it great: Everyone liked me, I was smart and funny and successful at everything without even trying. Then this bitch shows up out of fucking nowhere, she hangs out for a few days just watching me, and then she leaves and everything changed. Suddenly nobody likes me, they say I'm arrogant and selfish and I'm just looking to glorify myself. So I tell them that I'm just trying to fucking help everyone, but now when I try to do something good, I fuck it up. I don't have the spark anymore. I'm totally fucking useless. So that's when I figure that the bitch has done something to me, that I had, like, this special power to succeed in everything and she fucking stole it from me. So I track her down—which took a long fucking time, because I have to actually learn how to do everything now—and I fucking light her up because I figure that will get me my power back. But now I'm looking at these faces you're all giving me and I'm guessing it didn't fucking work."
The story was delivered at machine gun speed, and Shepard had to pause to take in all the information before he could continue. "Alright, so before we move on, let's just get this straight: Have you been working with any of my crew?"
Kelly gulped as the commander asked the question. The Normandy crew had almost forgotten they were supposed to be mad at the four conspirators as they took Mary Sue back to the ship, but Shepard evidently hadn't. She knew that she had nothing to do with this, but she wouldn't put it past any of the other three to hire an assassin.
"No, I have not fucking idea who any of you are," Mary Sue said, eliciting a silent sigh of relief from Kelly. "I happened to be on Tuchanka, trying to track down this motherfucker who promised to swap me his ship for a sniper job, when I heard a rumor about someone curing the genophage and I knew who it had to be. Just a happy fucking coincidence."
Shepard nodded. "So let's say I believe your story. What are you going to do if I let you go?"
"Well, seeing as I didn't get my fucking powers back, I'm going to figure out how that bitch got them and use that to get them back. So I'd really appreciate it if you told me where the fuck you picked her up."
"I'll have to think about that. In the meantime, Grunt, Jacob, take her down to engineering; we'll keep her there."
Once the three of them were gone, Shepard turned to the rest of the crew and asked, "Any ideas?"
"Possibility of enhanced social capabilities intriguing," Mordin said. "Could be similar to Asari ability to induce sexual attraction in all sentient species, but more advanced. Hard to see how it could be stolen, though."
"Anyone got a theory that doesn't involve freaky powers?"
Miranda raised a finger. Shepard pointed to her. "She's crazy," she said.
Shepard nodded and the rest of the team murmured their agreement except for Mordin, who was deep in thought.
"The real question is, what was Amanda doing with her barriers down?" Garrus said. "She knew better than to leave herself open like that on Tuchanka."
"Maybe she thought her special powers would protect her," Jack quipped.
"Do we know she had them down?" Miranda asked. "What sort of rifle did our little assassin have?"
"Run-of-the-mill, low-grade sniper rifle," Garrus said. "Dime a dozen on Tuchanka. It probably had three more shots in it before the barrel cracked."
"That was a perfect shot," Shepard said. "There's no way she could have made that shot with a bargain bin rifle."
Garrus shrugged.
"Maybe she's still got some of that luck after all," Zaeed said.
"Commander!" Jacob called over Shepard's omnitool while they were still pondering the matter. "She got the drop on us and escaped. I think she's heading up to the crew deck."
"Damn it, Jacob," Shepard said as the crew rushed out of the room. "This is why we never take you on missions."
"She got away from Grunt, too!" Jacob replied.
"Oh, Grunt's a kid, you can't really blame him."
Down on the crew deck, Mary Sue dodged between startled Cerberus crew as she searched around the ship. She could usually find her way around these alliance frigates, but this one had been rearranged around the huge drive core and had an awful lot of leather seats for a military vessel. After opening doors at random and jumping at EDI's chiding at the men's room, she wandered into the mess. Before she could move on, a panel that had been awkwardly taped to the ceiling dropped down and Commander Shepard dropped through.
"There you are," he said. "Now listen up—"
Mary Sue bounded forward and punched Commander Shepard in the face. The Commander, unused to the sensation, dropped to the floor as Mary Sue jumped over him and ran into one of the escape pods. The door slammed shut and a hiss indicated that the pod had ejected.
"Commander!" Joker called over the intercom, "A ship just dropped out of stealth right behind us. EDI says it's salarian."
"Do something, Joker," Shepard ordered through the pain shooting through his head. "Spin aggressively at it or something."
Shepard felt the slight twinge of vertigo as the ship spun around. "I don't think that did anything, Commander," Joker reported.
"I didn't mean actually—"
"It's gone, commander. Picked up our escape pod and jumped to FTL. Hey, who was in that thing?"
Shepard sighed and put his hand over his eyes. When he pulled it away, Garrus stood above him.
"You alright, Commander?" he asked.
"Now I know what Khalisah al-Jilani feels like," Shepard replied.
Garrus nodded. "Yeah, well, you do kind of look like an idiot right now."
