Rain: Here is another chapter for you guys. Took a little long but I think you guys will like it so sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

Mario: Here we go!

Mass Effect: Sins of the Future

Chapter Ten: Issues

"Well, it could've been worst. Garrus and Ashley could have gotten into a gunfight right then and there had you not been at the meeting, Shepard."

Joker could only look at Shepard with a small grin on his face after giving his opinion. Kaidan and Lizbeth had told him all that had gone down in the meeting from the day before and Joker had to admit, he found the entire story hilarious.

Not too hilarious though because he preferred having his baby in one shape and not filled with bullet holes. "I also have to say, you have your work cut out for you. I mean, this whole situation is very weird. You can't expect teamwork on the first shot Commander. Especially from those two."

"You know, Wrex said the same thing but I know it'll get better," Shepard replied with an exhausted sigh.

"So where is Tali? Kaidan told me that he saw you two cuffed together and as I remember his words from being paired with Lizbeth, 'You can't ever be uncuffed from your Unity Partner'," Joker told him with a curious look on his face.

Shepard merely crossed his arms in looked at the ceiling and said "Well, I had to uncuff Tali so I can let you know of our next location and also to let her rest. She…Well we spent the entire night working with Engine room with Adams."

Shepard couldn't help but be a little disappointed by that event. He thought she would just jump in and talk about her and her race but instead, he found himself to be the third wheel to her and Engineer Adams.

He understood that this ship needed her to work in the engine room but he was hoping that he could get started with their training and hopefully, their bonding into something more…But maybe he was jumping the gun.

He was so used to everyone being roughly the same in this time period that he forgot that this wasn't his crew from his time..

This wasn't the Tali from his time.

This wasn't the outgoing, snarky, dangerous, brave and goofy Tali from his time period. This Tali was more hesitant to speak her mind. She was more nervous around others and crippling shy towards him.

Even the Tali from his time was a bit slow to speak about her race and customs at first before he showed genuine interest in her first so maybe he should start off light and talk about her likes and dislikes first before delving into something so deep and private with her.

But also, he should choose a better location to have those types of discussion so he doesn't have to share her with Adams.

"Jeez Commander, no wonder you look so exhausted. You better get some rest sometime today. Otherwise Chakwas is going to have your ass on a platter," Joker replied with a frown on his face.

Shepard waved off his words and said "I'll sleep when I'm dead. Meanwhile, I want you to take us to the Knossos system, which somewhere is in the Artemis Tau Cluster. Try and find the dull red, earth like planet."

"Yeah, I think I know where the Knossos system is Commander but do you mean the planet Therum? If my memory serves me right, that's the only planet that looks like that," Joker replied with a serious look on his face.

"And that is why I have you around Joker. You know space like the back of your hand," Shepard said as he patted Joker's shoulder good naturedly while also making sure to be gentle with it due to Joker's brittle bone disease known as Vrolik Syndrome.

Walking away to let Joker get to their location, Shepard was walking down the long hallway when his he felt a piercing stab within his head, which caused his vision to blur and his body to shake.

Shepard panted heavily as shut his eyes.

Maybe Joker was right.

He should get some rest.

This headache he has felt like someone was stabbing him in the head repeatedly with a screwdriver. But had Shepard been paying attention, he would have Tali was coming his way and the moment he did, his body slammed into hers, sending her falling to the floor.

"Ow," Was the word that came from Tali's mouth as she bounced on the floor lightly, a pouting tone in her voice which nearly made Shepard smile in amusement but then he placed his hand in front of her, letting a small "Are you ok?" leave his lips.

He watched as she tilted her head at his hand in front of her before placing her smaller, three fingered one into his and let him pull her up where she answered with "I'll be o-k Commander. I was a-actually looking for you."

"Me?" Shepard asked with a confused tone in his voice.

Tali nodded and said "Yes. I woke up in your room and you were uncuffed from me and I waited for a little while but when you didn't come back, I came out to find you and to see if you were ok."

"So was that all you came looking for me for?" Shepard asked with a tilt of his head, thinking that was the only thing she needed but when she shook her head, he was a little confused.

"I wanted to apologize for yesterday…Well….This morning…" Tali responded, her hands clenching and unclenching, something Shepard knew as a nervous tick from the Tali from his time.

'Some things do stay the same…' Shepard thought to himself with a small chuckle but Shepard was still confused.

Why was she apologizing about yesterday? He didn't voice this however. He instead waited for her to continue which he didn't have to wait long. "Well, one of the reasons you chose me to be cuffed to was because you wanted to know more about me and the Quarians…I-I wish I could say I was ignoring you because we were s-so busy but…I would be lying…"

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked, despite having a good feeling what she was going to say next.

And he was quickly proven right when she stuttered out "T-The truth is that I can't a-abide to our Unity training…I'm n-not comfortable revealing everything about my race towards you….I just feel horrible because you've b-been so kind to m-me and yet I can't e-even do this for y-you…"

Shepard stared at her for a moment before he let out a soft laugh before he said "If anything, it should be me apologizing instead of you."

He could tell that Tali was stunned by his admission by how round her silver-white eyes had become behind her visor but before she said anything, Shepard decided to push forward.

"Tali…I expected far too much on our first day cuffed together. I expected to just have you start talking about everything you are without thinking about how you would feel. I know that I requested to be with you to learn more about you and I was wrong to do that…"

"But I was still wrong as well Commander," Tali said gently, her eyes looking down at the ground beneath her arms.

"You stayed up the entire night with me as I worked down there and I barely paid attention to you because I was too uncomfortable to talk to you about it…You are my captain for Keelah's sake! I should have been paying more attention to you and our Unity training you implemented…I wish I-I was stronger. I could have told you how I f-felt about it instead of dragging y-you around…"

Shepard let a small but gentle smile appear on his face as he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, causing Tali's eyes to look at him in surprise and that was when he said "Tali…There are many things I can teach you…I can teach you how to calm your nerves through a mission. I can teach you more about firearms and to hone your skills to the point that you can shoot a soda can off my head from three miles with a pistol…I can even teach you how to cope when someone dies, whether an enemy or an ally. But I can't teach you how to trust in others."

Shepard felt another horrendous stab in his head, which made him pause momentarily to focus more on Tali before he said "I want to learn about you, Unity training or not. But I want that to happen once you are more comfortable with everything here. Me included. So please, take your time…I'm not going anywhere."

He saw Tali look into his eyes while narrowing her own, as if she was trying to pry a lie through his eyes but after a moment, she nodded and looked away from him while mumbling a faint but sincere tone in her voice "Thank you C-Commander…I p-promise I'll come to you when I'm ready..."

Shepard merely smiled at this and went to say something else but then his vision began to sway violently, causing his knees to buckle.

Shepard braced himself against the door that led to the containment he felt a piercing stab within his head, which caused his vision to blur and his body to shake.

Shepard braced himself against the door that led to the containment bay as another stab forced him down to one knee. Shepard gripped his head tighter.

"You will fail!" The voice rang into his head, causing Shepard to grit his teeth as more pain assaulted him to the point where he was seeing flashes of white lights.

"Commander, are you ok?!" Tali asked, her hand touching his chest as another pang of agonizing pain ripped through his mind. "You can't hide for long!" The booming voice shouted and without any further words, Shepard suddenly collapsed face first in the hall.

All while Tali's worried scream of "Shepard!" echoed around him.

The Normandy

Mess Hall

"Wow, you guys look like crap."

Garrus and Ashley glared at Jasmine with enough anger to fuel the Normandy before that anger melted away, their faces revealing how exhausted they truly were.

The first night of their…Unity had been interesting to say the least.

The moment the two left the conference room, they had been at each other's throats and that didn't end throughout the day. Garrus wanted to spend his time in the garage, calibrating the Mako while she wanted to get some sniper training in.

Garrus had to open his big mouth and say "You, a sniper? Please. That's like me wielding that crude Shotgun you love to wield. A sniper rifle requires finesse to use and you have none of that."

It took all of her might not to crush the arrogant bastard with her "crude" shotgun. He continued to be an annoying idiot when the two of them went to bed. While she tried to put her hair up, he insisted on doing the stretching ritual of the "mighty" Turians.

And he had the nerve to be angry at her when she did stretches he had done while he was trying to calibrate his sniper rifle.

Hypocrisy!

"Well it's not easy dealing with this ass-munch all night," Ashley stated with narrowed eyes, clearly not pleased by the smirking Skyllian Blitz hero.

"Now I take offense to that," Garrus said with a glare to the woman cuffed next to him. "I wasn't the one who woke you up with that horrendous thing you call singing."

Ashley face heated up angrily at his remark and said "I know how to sing!"

Garrus face took on a blank look as he asked "Oh really? Because this is what I woke up to this morning…" seconds later, Garrus opened his mouth and sang "I-I-I-I-I'M HOOKED ON A FEELING! I'M HIGH ON BELIEVING…THAT YOU'RE IN LOVE WITH ME!"

Jasmine and Wrex couldn't stop from laughing while Ashley had a mortified look on her face. He made her voice all…pre-teen boy sounding with cracking and everything. Ashley gritted her teeth and balled up her fist, ready and willing to strike his loud mouth but before she could, she suddenly smirked.

"So...You want talk embarrassing eh…Well why don't you tell these two about Arietta?" Ashley let a toothy grin appear on her face as the laughing Garrus quickly become the coughing and wheezing Garrus.

"Yes Turian. Tell us about this…Arietta," Wrex demanded with a grin on his face, enjoying the embarrassed look on that was on the Turian's face.

"How did you…" Garrus asked the smirking soldier beside him.

Ashley leaned back in her chair and said "You have a really bad habit of sleeping talking. Might wanna calibrate that."

Garrus growled down at the soldier, before his eyes glanced down at her chair, which was on its hind legs as Ashley leaned back on it, clearly enjoying her victory over him.

For a moment, he wanted to kick the chair from beneath her and let her tumble to the floor but he then shook his head.

Despite his dislike for the human beside him, he couldn't allow himself to stoop to such a low level. His ancestors would be ashamed of him even thinking of doing something like that.

Just then, the laughing pair of Kaidan and Lizbeth came walking into the room and sat beside the low morale forms of Garrus and Ashley with a shared "Hey guys."

Jasmine and Wrex gave a nod at their welcome with Ashley and Garrus gave a small grunt, causing an amused grin to appear on Kaidan's face. "I see you two are in high spirits," Kaidan said with an sarcastic drawl as he sat his tray of food on the table and sat down with Lizbeth at his side.

"They didn't have a good night being partners," Jasmine responded with a small chuckle, causing Ashley and Garrus to grunt once again but while the former only muttered "Bite me Shepard," the latter of the two glanced at Jasmine and Wrex and realized something.

Jasmine and Wrex were in the same predicament they were and yet they looked completely calm together. Granted, there was no bad blood between them but it still surprised him a bit. "So," Garrus started with a small cough. "How are you two doing as cuff-mates?"

Wrex was the first one to answer. "She's alright. She's still squashy but she's easy to get along with. Might be due to her spending time with Krogan before she met me."

The three humans and the sole Turian turned to Jasmine to elaborate further on her involvement with the Krogan race.

Jasmine saw the looks on their faces and merely took a sip of her coffee and said "I had a mission once that had me team up with a Krogan squad. They were pretty much like jocks in highschool. They thought they were the shit and I had to force them to realize that I was the one in charge. Wasn't easy though."

Wrex nodded then let out a laugh. "She challenged them to a fight. One on three. They didn't back down of course due to not wanting shame themselves but from what Jasmine told me, she had to use her head to defeat them."

"Now how did that work out?" Ashley asked, clearly interested in how the Hero of the Skyllian Blitz defeated three fully grown Krogans.

"Well…The challenge was simple. Since I was a "squishy flesh female", they gave me 24 hours to defeat them all in combat at any time I desired. So the three days before the day of the challenge, I stalked all three of them to learn their schedules. When they might be the weakest..."

Jasmine paused to take another sip of her coffee and murmured "That's the stuff," before she spoke up and said "The first Krogan, Jayck had a huge problem with needing his Asari "Assistant" so he was the first one I targeted. I waited until 5 o'clock in the morning for him to sneak off to meet his Asari friend and during this time, he was thinking with his quad and not with his head. So he didn't expect me to fall from the shadows on his head and forcibly steer him into the lake nearby."

"And Krogans cannot swim well," Wrex added with an amused smirk on his face.

"But this one did know how but the moment he got out, I dazed his ass with a grenade and knocked him out with a club that was created just for taking our Krogan enemies. I called it "Shield Breaker"…I certainly miss that thing," Jasmine said, her tone become wistful at her lost weapon.

"Yeah, from what she told me, she took that "Shield Breaker" from the second Krogan's room," Wrex said with a low laugh.

"Oh yeah, he was infuriated when I used it on him next," Jasmine added with a grin. "Tayx, the second Krogan, was more of the cerebral of the three. He had many, many weapons for all the races in citadel space and outside of it. All of them deadly. I knew that he spent three hours cleaning and sharpening his weapons. When he noticed "Shield Breaker" missing, he was infuriated."

Jasmine then laughed loudly as she said "He didn't even hesitate to run out of his room and when he did, I busted him in the quad and in the face, knocking him out cold!"

Wrex guffawed at this, obviously amused but Garrus and Kaidan were not. Jasmine had played a dangerous game with the two of them and they didn't even want to know how she defeated the third one.

Lizbeth and Ashley on the other hand was in clear awe of the fact they Jasmine Shepard was able to take out two Krogan, despite the kind of underhanded why she had done it but they wanted to know how she would defeat the third one.

"The last one was the leader of the bunch and he was rather difficult. He meditated, trained and slept. That was all he did. I decided to just face him head on with my breaker," Jasmine said with a proud grin on her face.

"You fought a Krogan head on?!" Garrus and Kaidan exclaimed in surprise while Ashley and Lizbeth looked stunned beside them. "Do you know how dangerous that is? Krogan are the strongest species there are in Citadel space and you fought on head on?" Garrus asked, truly wondering if this human was insane.

"Seriously, you could have been killed!" Kaidan exclaimed, also wondering if the famed Jasmine Shepard was truly crazy.

"I'm the hero of the Skyllian Blitz you two," Jasmine said with a coy smirk and a wink before adding "I've been known to do daring things in my time and that will only continue. Besides, it was pretty damn close. Vikas was truly a tough Krogan. He was fierce and skilled. I really had to choice my strikes wisely."

"So did you beat him in the end?" Ashley asked with a frown. I mean, surely she was alive to tell the tale but that didn't mean that Ashley would assume she had won the battle.

"Well it was close but in the end, we wound up in a draw," Jasmine said, her tone voicing her disappointment by that fact. "But because of that, I earned not only his respect, but the respect of the other two Krogan and managed to complete the mission with success."

Wrex chuckled loudly and said "Not many humans I know are daring enough to battle and gain the respect of my brethren but this one managed to do it."

"Krogan aren't hard to fight, if you know where their weak spots lie. Nor are they hard to understand when they are friendly," Jasmine stated while sitting down her empty mug before adding "It's something I plan to show when Wrex and I spar today."

"Great…This should be fun to watch," Ashley said with a grin on her face while Garrus shared her sentiment by chuckling softly but the former of the two then asked "But what I really want to know is how you guys sleep. I know it isn't easy sharing a bed with a Krogan."

Jasmine and Wrex suddenly became very silent, both of them avoiding eye contact with the remaining four but it was Jasmine who said "I'd…Rather not talk about it."

"Yeah…It's nothing you should know," Wrex added before coughing lightly. Ashley and Garrus actually glanced at each other and before the pair stared back at Wrex and Jasmine before immediately looking towards the also confused pair of Kaidan and Lizbeth.

"So…How about you two? How is being cuff-mates going?" Garrus asked quickly, trying to shake the awkward feeling from the air.

Lizbeth's eyes twinkled in excitement while Kaidan suddenly became pale, making the four of them stare at the pair in concern. "Well things are going fantastic! Kaidan has been one of the best partners I could ever have. He's so sweet and kind and very smart too."

'Not to mention very cute,' Lizbeth added in her head with an inward giggle. "To make things even better, he agreed to be my test subject for my potions!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second," Ashley said to Lizbeth. "You managed to convince Kaidan to be your test subject for these…potions?"

"Yeah. He didn't see the harm in them at first but after last night…." Lizbeth suddenly stopped, her ears burning in embarrassment.

Kaidan grimaced and muttered "That was fun to do...Lizbeth told me that this "potion" of hers would replenish lost energy. Not only physical and mental, but even my biotic energy. We spent most of yesterday working me to the ground before she gave it to me….The after effects pretty much had me up half the night with enough energy in me to fight an army of Geth."

"Well…I wasn't expecting it to have a strong effect on you," Lizbeth responded rather meekly but then she strengthened her voice to add "But I'll work out the kinks for it soon. I'm also working on strengthening the Medi-gel as well so it could heal more severe wounds."

"Well I'm sure we'll need that sooner rather than later," Ashley quipped before she realized that Shepard and Tali were missing from their little morning chat. "Hmm…I wonder where Shepard and Tali are," Ashley said out loud with a curious expression on her face.

"Knowing Rocky, he would be training in the gym and dragging that poor Quarian along with him," Jasmine stated with a laugh but not a few seconds later, Tali came running into the mess hall and said "I need help, Commander Shepard just collapsed!"

Rain: And that ends this chapter. The next will reveal a little bit more when it comes to Shepard's true mission so until then…

Mario: See you next time!