Sarah Campbell felt the afternoon of light housekeeping was well worth the effort. Shepard did eventually unbend enough to tell them about her spectacular fall through the Ryuusei's floor. It was Campbell herself who realized that the reason for this chattiness was more painkillers than anything else. Even a low dose could lower inhibitions, and clearly whatever they had Shepard's poor bruised and battered self on was just enough to loosen her tongue.

An afternoon of housekeeping in return for a small-group story time with someone whose life deserved to be novelized? Totally worth it.

Shepard puttered around, assisting where and as possible, but eventually yielded to reassurances that her stories were more than compensatory. Shepard hadn't sat down after that, but she had started leaning on various sturdy articles, as if her strength and endurance weren't quite where she would have liked them to be.

Campbell, Palmer, Westmoreland and Traynor all pretended not to notice.

It started with stories about parachuting, because the N-program still taught parachuting to its members. "It's like you're holding still, and everything around you is what's moving."

Or the first time her own parachute had not deployed correctly. "Thank goodness for backups. I was one of the first to have problems. We realized eventually that it wasn't a problem in the parachute shop resulting in badly-packed 'chutes—it was intentional. It was meant to teach us not to panic. The rest of the class wanted to pack their own after we had one recruit actually panic and forget his secondary 'chute. It was my turn to run the drop zone when this happened. Another N had to cut her own primary, fall to where the first guy was, pop his backup 'chute for him, and then pop her own backup. Needless to say, the guy washed out of that evolution." Shepard shook her head. "Mostly because he couldn't get out of his own head, you know?"

Then came scuba-diving, and the various happenings and mishaps.

As it turned out, Shepard had come face-to-face with a real, live shark—albeit not a terrifically large one—and had decided scuba really wasn't her bag. "I was longer, but it had more mass than me. I never liked shark attack movies to begin with, but damn if I didn't have every one I never watched playing in the back of my head! And, of course, the shark turned out to be all 'you're too big and tough for me to even consider taking a bite.' So I ended up totally freaked out for no reason. The instructors were kind enough to inform me that they'd never even heard of an N draining a breather tank so fast. I really thought they were going to bounce me out of the program, right up until I had my cert."

Then again, she'd also had a pod of playful dolphins crash a training exercise, with the end result that the plan to achieve the objective had to be reformulated on the fly to include the porpoises. "The instructors thought it was hilarious, though. If I had to hear 'never go into an operation without a clear porpoise' one more time…"

There was an anecdote about being the smallest member on a crew, and having to squiggle through tight places, with the fear of getting hung up close at hand. "And all I could think was that if I got hung up by my butt or my chest, I'd never hear the end of it. I'd rather have died that not been able to get in or out of there."

She even gave them her on-the-ground experience on Elysium, not even omitting the broken ankle that ended it.

When Shepard stopped to take her next dose of medication—prompted first by an alarm on her omnitool, then a twinkle that was probably a message from Alenko—Campbell had a moment to really absorb how much Shepard had experienced before the whole mess with the Eden Prime, Saren, and the Reapers.

They got to hear about her favorite CO, Ludmilla Robbins, who seemed somehow larger than life. "Bare-knuckle boxer, and she knows where to hit you to make it count! I saw her drop a krogan in real-time—granted, he'd been drinking, and she hadn't, but still. Bam."

"Have you ever punched a krogan?" Palmer asked.

Shepard shifted, then rubbed her neck. "Punched? No. Head-butted, yes. Not the smartest thing I'd ever done, but it got my point across."

This rueful acknowledgement was not allowed to pass uncommented upon, which was why they got to hear a much more colorful version of the Thresher Maw on Foot story—which featured Grunt, whom they'd met, and the mysterious Miranda whom they had not—than the version everyone else had heard in the past. "We were coming down off that stuff for days. I always knew there was a reason training says never to eat strange food when you've gotta be in the field."

This story involving two former crewmen opened the door to more of her Collector hunt-era stories, usually harmless anecdotes that avoided anything particularly heavy. Campbell didn't think she'd ever heard Shepard laugh so much—albeit, the laughter was mostly constrained to rueful chuckles.

It got better when Alenko returned from shopping and offered to make everyone lunch—partly because it was a friendly, personal kind of get-together, and partly because Shepard had been coaxed into discussing some of the weirder things she'd eaten during her military career.

Some foods were exotic; "I was the designated driver, but for a brightly-colored asari drink, it put half the class on their shoulders. They missed falling on their asses."

A few were tried out of necessity; "Seriously, I don't care who said it tastes like chicken—nothing in the galaxy tastes like chicken except an actual chicken, and boa constrictor isn't even close."

When Campbell and the others left, she left feeling as if she had really met Shepard for the first time.