By popular demand, I'm spinning off this Omake into it's own thread - mostly so that the Voyager thread can go back to being about Voyager.
Special Thanks to PublicLee Speaking for being my friend and co-pilot on these stories.
Location: Unknown
Date: Unknown
I came-to slowly.
I was more than a little out of sorts as my eyes opened yet I couldn't see. Everything was fuzzy, distorted like an old school CRT television that had one too many percussive corrections. A strange lavender tint seemed to just make everything worse as I tried to perceive the world around me.
Was it Halloween? My eyes might be shit right now but my sense of touch was fine. I could feel I was clothed, but I don't think I have been this covered up outside of a costume contest. Soft, flexible fabric hugged me from head to toe, a hard boot-like sole on my feet, and something like a mask over my face. I guess that explained the blurry vision. I was also laying down on something. It wasn't the ground, too soft, but not my bed either since it wasn't that comfortable and felt a little on the small side.
My hands carefully reached out to the sides, and I found myself laying on something that was barely larger than myself. It was almost like a gurney or…
'Infirmary bed,' my mind prompted with a distressing amount of certainty. How did I know that?
That didn't help me understand how I got to an infirmary in the first place.
I tried to reach up and take the mask off, but the damn thing seemed to be integrated into the rest of the costume in a very solid way. My fingers fumbled around the edges, exploring the hard, smooth surface and realizing the mask was less costume wear and more biker helmet. Still didn't help me find a release or even a way to flip the faceplate open. While I love to ride, I never once considered getting a full racing suit like this was starting to remind me of.
Blinking hard a few times to help me fight off the spinning pain threatening to leap out from inside my skull, I came to realize this was a bit more complicated than normal biker gear. Last I checked, blinking inside a biker helmet didn't activate a god damned honest to Eris heads up display.
The HUD was fairly spartan at the moment, little more than a clear field of view - that I was suddenly able to see perfectly out of. There was also a few other little details around the edges just out of the field. A date and time calendar came into focus as I looked directly at it, so it was obviously tracking my eye position. It read as 1371 hours, on May 23rd, 2168. Huh.
'2168? This calendar is obviously busted.' I thought to myself. Thus far the helmet is pretty damn nice, but nothing special and obviously malfunctioning.
My eyes traveled away from the calender and started to look around the room instead as I sat up. I confirmed I was sitting on a medical bed of some kind, but it was like something out of a bastard crossover of Star Trek and Nu Battlestar Galatica. The infirmary wasn't designed for comfort, but to obviously handle as many people as possible. On one wall the beds were set in racks three beds tall, more like a super bunk bed than a doctors office. On my side of the tiny room it was all single beds, each of them were empty except for mine, with just enough room between them for a person to stand if they were sideways. Each bed had a set of monitors above it, various bits of information I didn't understand being displayed. While it was all obviously high tech and clean once upon a time, now it was just a cobbled together mess of repurposed materials slapped together to make something that works.
'Cyberpunk and Junk Chic? Cyberjunk?'
I don't know why, but that thought set me off laughing.
Still, as my giggling got back under control, I started to look more closely at everything. There was something like a grudging familiarity with everything, like I've seen this all before and I should know it, but I just couldn't make the connection. Like a faulty power relay…
Where did that come from?
I shook errant thoughts of relays and power connections out of my mind and instead focused on trying to get this damn halloween costume off of me. Logically, since I can't get the helmet off, whats the next place to start? Gloves! So I looked at my hands and…
'Why the fuck do I have only three digits?' Seriously, how often do you look at your hands to confirm that you have four fingers and a thumb? Because now I only have fingers and a thumb.
That realization brought me up short, and all thoughts rushed away from me as I stared at my hands and moved the fingers one at a time. Just to make sure that those were really mine.
My eyes happened to glance down at my feet, and I had a similar vertigo inducing moment of mental stalling as I saw two long toes on my boots instead of a single rounded end. I wiggled them, hoping, but when they moved I knew they were mine. Just as I knew there was a third, smaller toe where my achilles is supposed to be.
When I moved my legs, they proved to be just as surprising as I now had a compound knee cap that made my legs slightly digitigrade. They still bent forward to walk like I was used to, but at rest there was a slight backward bend that moved pressure from where the ball of my foot should be and instead put the force on my toes.
'What the fuck is happening?!' I knew I was panicking slightly, but I also felt I was justified for it. Waking up in a strange place, in a strange costume, after someone had played backyard amature plastic surgeon with my body! Acceptance is the last fucking thing you could expect me be experiencing right now.
My heart was racing, eyes flirting across the space now looking for a weapon or something else to defend myself with as my mind decided I was now in a horror movie.
Then I saw a fucking Quarian step into the room.
'She's taller than I expected,' unexpectedly bubbled up to the surface, and I fought back another manic giggle with it. Her suit was mostly back, but with yellow swirls decorating most of the outer fabric. A hood was attached to her suit, confirming she was female, and it was colored in shades of yellow and white.
Seeing me look at her, she walked over to my bed without a care in the world that I could see and began to tap at an orange screen made of light that erupted from her arm. At my flinch of surprise, she hummed loudly enough for her mask to interpret it as speaking and lit up with a blue light. "Okay, your vitals are looking strong if slightly panicky."
As I continued to stare at her, the strange thought of, 'she has a nice voice,' popped into my head.
Uncaring of how I watched her, the woman - Medical Specialist Seela'Yeram vas Fiwa, my mind prompted - finally said, "Alright, you took a pretty serious hit to the head. So let's see if everything is still functioning."
"I got hit?" I managed to blurt out.
Seela cocked her hip to the side and tilted a head in the opposite direction - body language suggesting humor or sarcasm, before answering, "No, you arrived in my medbay via teleportation." Straightening up, she added, "That at least tells me you have some short term amnesia. Hopefully you just missed the explosion and not your entire life. Tell me your name?"
Before I could even think about the question, my mouth started moving, "Zod'Rezh nar Fiwa."
"Good. Tell me your age."
"16."
"Good. Who is the Captain of this ship?"
"Lona'Raanar vas Fiwa."
"Excellent. Names of your parents."
"Yaaf and Selo'Rezh." After a moment, I asked, "Are they okay?"
Seela looked utterly unconcerned as she continued tap at her screen, which set me at ease. "Your father is unharmed, currently on shift in the engine room. Your mother is helping in maintenance."
'Huh, uncaring parents. That is typical for me but odd for Quarians. As I understand them, they are community focused creatures that take family bonds deathly seriously.'
Almost like she was sensing my thoughts, Seela looked over at me and said, "They would have been here if they could, but when I told them you wouldn't wake up for three days they took me at my word. I didn't expect you to make a liar out of me and awake after one day."
"Why am I here," I asked after taking a moment to digest the fact my parents aren't uncaring, just extremely pragmatic. "You said something about an explosion."
"You were attempting to build something. I don't know what it was. Just that it was pneumatic and under a great deal of pressure. A seal broke spectacularly, and launched a blunt piece of metal at your head. Your suit wasn't punctured, thank the ancestors, but it did hit you hard enough to knock you out."
Huh, so they aren't pragmatic, just negligent. That's fine. I'll just have to look after myself.
Seela added, "What were you trying to do?"
"I don't know. Don't remember building anything."
After a moment to consider, the medic asked, "What is the last thing you do remember?"
I thought it over for a few seconds, and slowly something started to come to me. It was difficult to make out, like trying to drive down the freeway during a heavy thunderstorm in the middle of the night, but slowly I started to put things together. "I remember going to bed. Before that, watching some old movies while eating dinner. Normal evening stuff."
Apparently, this was typical stuff for me. Parents and I had little to do with each other since I wasn't interested in working the engine rooms or crawling around maintenance shafts. They showed me what they know, like all Quarian parents do for their young. Passing on the things they have learned to the next generation, and I soaked it all up. I knew how to build an engine from nothing but spare parts, but it didn't hold my interest. My days were spent getting better and better at hacking apparently. Computers and chemistry help my attention much more than trying to figure out how to make an Elcor-made eezo tap work with a Volos-made power converter.
So they left me to my own devices much of the time. We cared for each other, but there was no interest in what the other was doing most of the time.
Seela hummed to herself, then shrugged and went back to the omnitool. After a few moments she finished whatever it was that she was doing and then shut it off. "Okay, that is everything. You're good to return to your living quarters when you are ready. Do you want an escort or can you find the way back on your own?"
"Uh, I think I can make my own way back."
With that proclamation, Seela turned around and walked her way into a small office at the back of the clobbered together medbay. Leaving me sitting on the bed, alone with just my thoughts.
My body moved without really needing any direction. Before I knew it I was out of the room and walking down strange yet intimately familiar hallways. Everything was new to my eyes, and yet I could tell you the backstory of each bolt in the wall or stories about what me and a few young kids did to get old-man Len'Zaana yelling at us when we were 10.
The Fiwa was a relatively new ship to the fleet, which made it very desirable to live in. The almost three hundred year old Salarian transport had been with the Migrant Fleet for twenty years, a payment earned for strip mining a system for them. They got enough raw materials to build ten modern ships, we got a single ship they were planning to use for target practice.
Fairness of the trade aside, it is a decently sized ship and since it is "newer" than most ships in the fleet there was fewer things that needed to be adjusted as a result. More importantly, there was actual rooms on the ship that could be used as family quarters instead of people just finding "spaces" in cargo rooms like you find on most other vessels. A hundred families won the lottery to move here at the time, and that is how my parents met.
And in a few years, I'll complete my pilgrimage, and be moved to another ship. To seek out a mate and start a new family.
That thought brought me to a dead stop in the middle of an out-of-the-way hallway. How long had I just been doing that? How long had I been thinking in Quarian? Remembering Quarian stories? Looking at my HUD, almost an hour had passed since I left the medbay, and I had just been wandering the ship that entire time.
I resumed walking, this time making sure to head back to my family's quarters.
It didn't take long to arrive, and as my eyes swept over everything I knew instinctively that this was my home. Mom's artwork she would make and sell when we passed populated systems hung on the walls. Fathers tools were left laying on a small table in the middle of the room where he had last used them. A net/hammock hung from the ceiling, a sleeping/workspace to call my own. Mom and Dad's bed rested against the far wall opposite my own so we all had a sense of personal space to call our own.
'Home sweet home.' I thought grimly.
With well practiced movements my body pulled itself up into the netting and laid back. Now, I had some serious thinking to do.
'Okay, so to recap, I'm a Quarian in Mass Effect. I'm part of the Migrant Fleet. I'm sixteen, two years shy of starting my pilgrimage. Oh shit, what's the year again?' Glancing at the corner of my HUD again, I breathe a sigh of relief. 'Right, right, it's 2168 on the Human calendar. So that is useful. The events of the Mass Effect games don't start until 2183, so that gives us about a decade and a half to prepare. But prepare how? How do you prepare to fight a techno-organic race that has been wiping out civilizations since long before life evolved on your planet'
'And there is the panic again.'
I pinched myself just to make sure I wasn't in some kind of screwed up and very realistic dream, but the pain was real enough.
Taking a deep breath, I fought to center myself. Fought to get myself under control. "Right. Reapers. We are gonna have to fight them. And win."
"Wish I knew how to make some big fucking guns."
At that moment, a presence that had been there since I awoke but hadn't been able to identify stirred to life. I felt something, a part of something, drain out of me just before my head threatened to explode from pain. My knowledge of guns suddenly and excruciatingly expanded. How to make them, the best combinations to get maximum range and accuracy, all the way from a simple ballista that the word came from, all the way up to railguns designed for planetary defense.
I could identify guns, maybe make a few from hand, and even calibrate existing examples.
"Holy shit." I whispered, before a feral smile started to grow across my face. "Maybe this won't be so bad after all."
Then I looked around the room, and at myself who was still locked into an environmental suit for the rest of time. "Okay, no this is going to suck a lot."
- - -
Inspired
Mass
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