A/N: The game in this chapter is Mass Effect – specifically Mass Effect 2.
"You don't grab someone who's having an electric shock!" is the first thing Claudia exclaims upon regaining consciousness and, honestly, Pete thinks that's a bad reaction, considering they're standing in the middle of nothing.
Literally... nothing.
Everything is black and nothing and they're somehow standing on nothing. He's not sure how this works.
She thwaps him on the chest. "You turn off the power! You don't touch someone being electrocuted!"
"Okay, okay, ow," Pete says, rubbing his chest. "I just reacted! I didn't think! You were in trouble, I grabbed!"
She huffs a little and drops her arms. "I'll let you off this time," she says. She looks around. "Where are we? Did we die? Oh, god, we died, didn't we?"
"I don't think we're dead," says Pete. "I think if we were dead that punch wouldn't have hurt so much." He's still rubbing his chest because good golly she can hit hard. He reaches out with his hand, testing his surroundings. "There's just... nothing."
Claudia looks down at her feet. "What are we standing on?"
Pete crouches, wafts his hand below him. "That's just freaky," he says, when his hand slides straight through the not-floor. Whatever they're standing on... they're not. It makes his head spin so he stops thinking about it.
He does that for a lot of things.
The floor vibrates slightly under their feet and Claudia steps closer to Pete, grabbing his arm. "I don't like this very much," she comments, off-handedly.
The black of the nothing surrounding them lightens into grey and Pete says, "Nope, definitely don't like this."
They stumble when the floor turns into a set of stairs and slip down to flop into a seated position on the steps as a room appears around them. It's a not particularly well lit room, with a big double bed in front of a window through which stars are visible and when Pete turns around he can see a fish tank full of dead fish behind him.
"Oh," he says.
Claudia is gaping at the room.
"What?" he says, when he sees her expression.
"We're..." She scrambles to her feet. "Oh, no."
"What?" he says again.
"No, no. We can't be." She hurries over to the other side of the room to a desk opposite the fish tank and lifts a photograph up. There's a blue woman displayed on it. "No!" she exclaims.
"What?" says Pete.
"Don't you see?" Is she... grinning? She's grinning. She's grinning from ear to ear and holding the picture of the blue woman up.
"What?" says Pete.
"Look where we are, Pete! This is an awesome artefact!"
She's bouncing and holding the picture and grinning and Pete is not going to get any sense out of her at this rate so he bounds forward, grabs her shoulders and exclaims, "CLAUDIA, WHAT?"
She finally blinks and comes out of her geek stupor and says, "We're in a video game."
"What?" says Pete.
She rolls her eyes and puts the picture down. "This," she says, "is the cabin of one Commander Shepard, Commander of the Normandy SR-2 in the video game 'Mass Effect 2'." She grins and points at the fish tank. "See? Shepard never feeds her fish! And they're dead!"
Pete looks at the fish floating on the surface, which are very, very disturbing, then back at Claudia. "It all looks very... real... though."
Claudia nods. "It looks amazing. I guess the artefact makes it all look as real as we are?" She spins around in the room, gleeful. "This is great! Come on!" She grabs him by the wrist and tows him out of Shepard's cabin and into the elevator.
"Shouldn't we be trying to figure a way out of this...?" says Pete.
"I'm in Mass Effect," Claudia says, levelling a glare on him. "I want five minutes of enjoying this and then we can bag, tag and move on."
Pete eyes her warily. She seems a little too into this, so he warily stands in the elevator and tries to remember if Claudia ever mentioned this game before, or if he's played it. The only thing that pops into his head is RPG, so he says, "Is this one of those RPG games?"
Claudia nods and she's still grinning. Pete loves it when she grins, she always looks so utterly gleeful and her smile is bigger than her face, so he grins a bit too, stuffs his hands in his pockets and grins. "Okay then," he says. "Where are we going and how long does it take to get there?"
"Elevators take forever in this game," says Claudia, but she doesn't seem to care. "There's a hypothesis that the Protheans died out because the elevators took too long to take them anywhere, not because of the Reapers."
The doors finally open and Claudia flies out like she's magnetically attracted to something on the deck and Pete mouths, "Reapers?" at nothing in particular and follows her.
The deck the elevator has stopped on has a small mess hall, empty, and a couple of doors. One is labelled 'INFIRMARY' and, for a moment, Pete thinks that's where they're going, but then Claudia strides straight on, all the way to the far end and a door labelled 'MAIN BATTERY' swishes open.
The man standing in the Main Battery turns around and Claudia squeals.
Pete is completely sure that isn't his first reaction. "What is that?" he exclaims.
"Garrus!" Claudia squeals.
The terrifying creature before them tilts his head and says, "Who are you and how did you get onto the ship?"
Claudia's smile doesn't even falter. She just stands there, grinning like an idiot, and Pete steps in to say to the really, really scary guy, picking up on the word 'ship', "Uh. We just sorta ended up here. We have no idea how we got here. Are you the captain?"
"No," says Garrus, but I'll take you to him.
"Him?" says Claudia.
Him turns out to be Commander John Shepard or, as Claudia insists on calling him, Sheploo.
"This is so cool," Claudia says, grinning from ear to ear.
Pete doesn't think standing with weapons pointed at them is cool, personally. He thinks it's just another day at the office.
"How did you get on my ship?" says Shepard and Pete sighs.
"We just... appeared," he says, helplessly. "Trust me, we don't want to be here."
"I do," says Claudia, still grinning like some insane person.
Pete groans. "Claud," he says, "I don't think you seem to realise they have guns on us."
That seems to at least vaguely bring her around and she swallows, grin fading – and Pete mourns it a little – and says, "Right."
"I got the camera recording, Commander." A very Australian-sounding woman enters the room they're in and pauses, hands clasped behind her back. "EDI, playback the recording."
"That's Miranda Lawson," whispers Claudia as Shepard and Miranda watch the recording and Garrus keeps his gun trained on them. "She brought him back from the dead."
"Claud, I like these kinds of games as much as the next guy but—"
"No, you like Call of Duty," Claudia says. "You like shooting people in the face and then shouting, "FUCK YEAH, KILLSTREAK!" at the top of your lungs."
Pete feels a little like he's about to die. "You've... heard that?"
"Yeah." Claudia shakes her head and turns away. "Okay," she says, after a moment. Miranda and Shepard are arguing between themselves and Garrus is pitching in occasionally. "We need to figure out what caused this."
Pete shakes his head. "I have no idea," he says. "Maybe the spirit of Bastet did something?"
"Why would Bastet send us into Mass Effect?" Claudia crosses her arms and Pete takes the opportunity to finally look at EDI and Miranda. EDI... is weird. He doesn't want to think about EDI because he suspects she should be in the Warehouse, locked away nice and secure. Miranda, on the other hand, is just... nicely shaped.
"Pete, you're drooling," Claudia says, with a sigh.
"Am not." He checks his mouth just in case.
"She's a genetically engineered 'perfect human'." Claudia does air quotes, as though she doesn't quite believe it.
"I can see that." Pete can believe it. Claudia rolls her eyes and finally their not-so-gracious hosts make their way back across to the stowaways.
"What technology did you use to just appear in my cabin?" asks Shepard.
"We told you," says Claudia. "We don't know. We just... appeared."
Miranda scowls. "Perhaps we should hand them to the Illusive Man."
"I'd rather not give humans to the Illusive Man," says Shepard. "I know what he does with them."
Claudia shudders visibly so Pete inches a little closer to her. "Look," he says. "Just... drop us off somewhere. I promise we're not trouble. We're just lost."
Shepard's scowl almost matches Miranda's, but before he can respond a blue circle appears on the wall to his left, right at the end of the table.
"Pete!" Claudia exclaims, grabbing his arm.
The circle pops and becomes hollow, leading through to an almost white room.
"What's that?" says Pete.
"What is that?" says Miranda and he looks sideways at her because he just said that.
"It's a Portal!" Claudia pulls on his arm and hauls him towards the blue Portal. He goes willingly because it's better than here.
"Stop!" exclaims Miranda and Garrus raises his weapon, but they're through the Portal before Shepard can give an order to shoot and when Claudia looks back, it's closed behind them.