Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya
During the two weeks that the Normandy spent searching the Artemis Tau cluster, Tali found herself pushed to breaking point time and time again. A few days after the mission on Edolus, the Commander pronounced her marksmanship to be satisfactory. The next part of Tali's training was to practice taking orders without hesitation. To her surprise, the Commander cut back their regular training sessions. Tali hoped that this would mean that the hardest part of her training was over. As she found out that evening, she couldn't have been more wrong.
Tali was sitting at the mess table, eating the bland nutrient paste that was the staple for quarians everywhere. Suddenly the Commander came thundering into the mess hall. "Zorah! Get down!" he shouted. Unsure what was happening, Tali stood up. Suddenly, Chief Williams, who had been sitting at the far end of the mess table eating her own meal, fired four shots at Tali with a pistol that had appeared in her hand as if by magic. Caught completely off guard by the sudden turn of events, Tali ran her hands over her chest where she had felt the rounds impact. Her hand came away covered in fine blue chalk. "You're dead, Zorah!" shouted the Commander, "That's not good enough. When your Commanding officer tells you to get down, you get the hell down!" Tali felt tears begin to well up in her eyes and for once was grateful for the visor which hid her face. "Now head down to the cargo hold and give me twenty laps."
Over the next week, Tali was 'killed' dozens more times. The whole crew seemed to be in on it and, at the Commander's shouted Command, every one of them had pulled out that hateful practice pistol at some point. Every time she ended up 'dead', the Commander would yell at her and send her to run laps of the cargo hold. Her only refuge was in engineering. She figured that the Commander didn't want to risk damaging any of the vital equipment. The low point came one evening after being ambushed for the third time that day. This time by one of the bridge crew on her way out of the elevator. She was running her laps of the cargo hold, exhausted and barely maintaining the required pace, when the Commander shouted from behind her in a voice that Tali had come to dread. "Zorah, get over here! Now!" acting on what was beginning to become instinct, Tali dived to the ground, realising too late that the Commander had wanted her to turn around. Before she reached it, however, she was hit side on by a massive force. She tumbled sideways, leaving a trail of blue chalk on the ground behind her. When she came to a halt, it was facing the direction the shot had come from and there, crouching next to the nose of the mako was Williams with a shotgun in her hand. If she had turned around when that Commander had told her to, she wouldn't have crossed Williams' line of sight. "You're dead, Zorah!" Shouted the Commander. It was a phrase she was beginning to hear even in her sleep. "If I have to ship your dead body back to the migrant fleet, I'm going to be unbelievably pissed off."
It was finally too much for Tali. She stayed on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Come on, Tali," said the Commander quietly. It was the voice of the Commander who had rescued her on the Citadel and taught her to shoot, rather than the monster who had been shouting at her all week. "I think it's time you got some rest." She opened her eyes to see the Commander standing over her, offering his hand. She took it and he pulled her up. He led her to the armoury where he helped her to brush the chalk off her suit before sending her off to her sleeping pod.
Commander John Shepard
John sat down heavily at his desk. Being the ruthless drill sergeant took a lot out of him and it was starting to take its toll. He hated what he was doing to Tali. It was unfair and he knew it but until tonight, she had taken everything in her stride. John felt more than a little guilty about the trick he had played on her. She had reacted instantly to his order, even if it was in the wrong way, and he had seen her struggle to regain her footing only a moment later as she realised her mistake. He hoped that the worst was over at this point and that they could move on to less unpleasant lessons next week. John turned on the terminal at his desk and began to catch up on his correspondence. There was nothing official. His report on the Edolus situation had already been sent to the fifth fleet as well as the Admiral in charge of recon division. Instead he wrote a brief letter to his mother and to Cass, who wouldn't get hers until she finished her training exercise. He also politely declined an invitation to attend the premier of a movie based on the Skyllian blitz.
After half an hour of writing John shut down the terminal and got into bed. Having a bed was still a novel experience. He had spent most of his life living on ships and sleeping in pods. As he forced his body to relax the images from the prothean beacon began to run through his mind, as they had every night since Eden Prime. With each day the Images became a little bit clearer and as they did they became even more disturbing. Underlying it all, worse than the gruesome glimpses of slaughter on an unimaginable scale, was the most profound sense of despair. John was a soldier. He'd seen plenty of atrocities in his time, but the despair was keeping him up at night.
Lieutenant Cassandra Shepard
Cass double checked the seals on her hard-suit and its connections to the parachute. Before take-off the instructors had said that this was going to be a routine low orbit parachute drop into a field near the N school site. Now, five minutes before she was due to jump, she had been sent a data packet containing her real mission.
Your mission is to make your way from the drop zone to the extraction point. (Coordinates for both are attached.)
This is a hostile drop simulation. As such the following rules apply:
Parachutes must not be opened above an altitude of 4,000 metres. Failure to comply will cause your locator beacon to activate and result in your failure of the exercise.
Landing must be within a 500 metre radius of the given coordinates. Failure to comply will activate your locator beacon and result in failure of the exercise.
Deadly force is not authorised. Failure to comply is grounds for court marshal and imprisonment.
Cass's eyebrow quirked at the last rule. It suggested that there would be resistance. Before she could consider it further, the warning light came on next to the exit hatch as the atmosphere slowly drained from the passenger compartment. A moment later the hatch opened and the jump light turned green. Cass leapt from the shuttle. Far below, the islands of New Zealand and the South Pacific stretched out in front of her. With a gesture, she lit up the landing co-ordinates on her HUD. Suddenly the reason for the high opening altitude became clear. The drop zone was in the midst of the snowy peaks running the length of the largest island. Cass shifted slightly to adjust her trajectory and waited, enjoying the feeling of being in freefall.
Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya
Things were starting to look up for Tali. The day after the disaster in the cargo bay, Adams had sent her to fix a minor issue in the cockpit. Figuring that the entire thing was probably a trap, Tali made her way carefully through the ship, ready to dive for cover at a moment's notice. She made it to the CIC without incident. The Commander was standing at his terminal next to the galaxy map, not seeming to take any notice as Tali walked past. She had made it most of the way to the cockpit when the trap was finally sprung. "Zorah, take cover!" shouted the Commander. Tali reacted instantly and instinctively, diving under the CIC's main console. She stayed there for about thirty seconds, unsure of what to do next. She hadn't gotten this far before. "You can get up now, Zorah." said the Commander. Tali crawled out from under the console and looked around. On the opposite side of the console, the navigator stood with the practice pistol in his hand, looking slightly embarrassed. Everything was quiet for a moment, before the Commander spoke up. "Better luck next time, Pressley. You should know by now that I only bet on certainties." He turned to face Tali. "Well done, Zorah. Now, as it turns out, there really is a short in the cockpit intercom." Taking the hint, Tali picked up her forgotten tool box, grateful that it hadn't spilt when she dropped it, and headed for the cockpit. On the way every crew member offered her a smile or a pat on the back. It was a nice feeling to see that they liked her enough to want her to succeed. The problem in the cockpit was easy enough to fix and Tali enjoyed listening to the pilot's wisecracks. Later that day, Tali was ambushed in the cargo bay by Lieutenant Alenko and the Commander yelled at her for getting 'killed' again but it didn't matter as much to Tali as it did before. She could do this.
The next week passed quickly. The Commander took Garrus, Wrex and Williams to investigate an anomalous reading on another planet which turned out to be an ancient Turian exploration drone. As time passed Tali managed to avoid the crew's 'ambushes' more and more often, until the Commander changed things again. "It's time you learned clock positions." he had said at the beginning of one of Tali's daily training sessions. "This is your twelve." he said, standing directly in front of her. He walked a small way to her right. "This is your one." he walked in a circle, numbering the positions at regular intervals until he was standing in front of her again. "Easy right?" the Commander asked. "Yes, Commander." Said Tali. The Commander grinned in a way that had begun to unnerve Tali as it was invariably followed by some kind of unpleasant, and often exhausting, task. "Well then. When I call a number, I want you to turn to face that direction. Keep in mind that the positions are relative to whatever direction you are facing at the time." Tali nodded. "Six o'clock" called the Commander and, after a moment of frantically trying to remember where that was, she turned around to face directly away from him. "Too slow, Zorah. Nine o'clock." By the end of her two hour training session, Tali had managed more or less memorise the clock positions, although she was still too slow to react for the Commander to be satisfied. She was also irrationally annoyed at humans' obsessive compulsive need to move clocks around every hour.
C-Sec Officer Garrus Vakarian
"Ground team, report to the conference room for briefing."
Garrus stowed his rifle and headed for the upper deck. He was joined in the lift by Tali. "The Commander said he wants me to sit in on mission briefings from now on." She explained. Garrus could sympathise with the poor girl. The Commander had recently changed from giving direct instructions for how to avoid his faux ambushes to simply calling out the attacker's location using his strange 'clock positions' and it had had a drastic effect on her rate of success. He noticed Tali shifting her weight nervously. "Don't worry, the practice pistol was on the armoury workbench when I left." he said, taking a guess at what Tali was nervous about. He couldn't see her face behind the visor but he got the impression that Tali smiled. "That's a relief." she said, "I'm still getting the hang of those clock positions and I'd hate for you to get caught in the crossfire. Although, I guess blue is your colour." Garrus laughed, surprised at the joke from the timid young quarian. The elevator finally finished its slow ascent and Garrus and Tali walked together into the briefing room. Garrus took the seat furthest from Wrex. He didn't have a problem with Wrex exactly, he was just worried that, being a krogan, Wrex might decide to rip him apart on principle. When everyone was seated, the Commander activated the screen behind him, showing an unattractive red-brown planet. "This is Therum, a backwater human colony with a population of just over thirty thousand. The population is concentrated around the polar regions. Scans have picked up several geth ships in atmosphere over this region." A glowing dot appeared near the planet's equator. "Now, this might have something to do with our target Doctor T'Soni or it may be completely unrelated. We need to check it out regardless. Any geth activity could lead us to Saren." The Commander pushed a button and the view on the screen changed to an image of an area of very rough terrain. "This is where the geth activity is concentrated. Scans show some kind of underground structure in this area." He highlighted the northern part of the map. "This is probably what the geth are interested in. Unfortunately, the nearest stretch of flat terrain large enough to drop the Mako onto is twenty clicks south." He shut off the screen. "While Therum is technically a garden world, I want everyone in full environmental seals. The operational zone is in an active sulphur volcano and we'll be following a lava flow most of the way to our entry point."
Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya
Tali listened as the Commander moved on to logistical details. He was bringing the whole team, even though it meant a slightly uncomfortable squeeze in the mako. While he finished and dismissed the team, Tali waited. As soon as the door closed, leaving the two of them alone, the Commander turned to face her. "Don't bother asking, Zorah, it's not going to happen."
"But Commander, it's the geth. I could…"
"No." said the Commander in a tone that brooked no argument, "You're making good progress, Zorah, but you are not ready yet. You are not coming on this mission."
Tali sighed and nodded. "Yes, sir." she said.
"Cheer up, Zorah." Said the Commander, "At the rate you're going, you'll be on the ground getting shot at with the rest of us in no time."