Squishy/Beir – present.
It's only when I walk into the CIC that I realise just how dire all of this is. It's not even a real combat information room. It's basically just a small tent where they've chucked all their electronics equipment and hoped that one of their engineers can figure out what the heck to do with it all. And the one turian in there that's trying to fix this mess is grossly over tasked and exhausted.
"Saul," the turian escorting me calls out. The engineer in question glances up from behind a machine. "Got a quarian for you."
I'm shoved inside like an unwanted gift and stare around wide eyed at the situation. Saul looks so relieved to have someone helping him I'm vaguely concerned he might start crying or hug me, if turians can cry, I mean. Then I realise I'm here for a reason and I kick myself into working.
I approach Saul, glancing down at the machine he's at and already running through solutions in my head. "What's most important?"
"The radio communications." Saul gestures towards a receiver and a bunch of equipment surrounding it. It's so primitive it almost hurts, but I guess that's all they have given the circumstances. "I've been trying to fix it, get it more stable, but I can't."
I kneel down beside it and bring up my omni-tool, and the first major problem is obvious to me quickly. "This is only a transmitter for your comms," I tell him. "The actual radio server isn't here, without it I-"
"The radio tower was overrun by reapers a week ago, but we've still been able to relay messages through it." Saul's features become pensive. "But they're getting worse everyday, sooner or later it's going to cut out completely. The General won't listen to me, he says we don't have the men to spare to try and get someone up in the tower to fix whatever those reapers did to screw up the servers."
I shrug a little helplessly. "I can see what I can do, but I don't think it'll be more than stretch out your already dodgy connection for a few days at best."
"That's better than nothing," Saul replies, and he's already disappeared to attend to another machine in desperate need of attention.
Squishy/Beir – pilgrimage.
The turian that owns the ship yard is a grumpy, racist old man. At first I thought he just hated quarians and was horrid to me, but now that I'm seeing him insult this human man, I realise that he's probably just like that to everyone he meets that isn't from one of the council races. I stay quiet, rifling through some of the used ship parts that the turian shop keeper is selling grossly over priced.
I wasn't the first quarian to think I would be different from the rest, and that I'd be able to come to the Citadel and not become a vagrant street urchin, and I definitely won't be the last, either. I realise now, after the harsh reality of what the rest of the world is really like, that I'm going to be lucky to afford any kind of small meagre ship part to return home from my pilgrimage with.
"What do you mean you don't know anyone that can repair it?" I overhear the human man saying.
"What I mean, human," the turian emphasises the word like it's physically painful for him to say it, "is that nobody in the galaxy still uses technology that old and far less knows how to work with it."
"It's not that old! The ship's drive core-"
"It's one of the first ships your pathetic little race made after they figured out how to achieve FTL travel, like I said, nobody knows how to work with technology that old. The first drive cores your people started making were almost offensive to my peoples engineers."
The human man starts to say something, but doesn't finish it. I hear him stomp away, and without really much of a plan put together, I stumble after him.
"Um," I start and I realise I'm standing in his way.
"What do you want, quarian?" the man snaps. I notice he's not wearing alliance military clothes.
"Y-you were talking about a ship you wanted repaired-"
"It's not getting repaired any more," he interrupts bitterly. "We'll just have to trash it and build a new one."
"I might be able to help." I've blurted it out before I think about the consequences.
The man raises an eyebrow at me quizzically and crosses his arms. "This is one of the first ships we ever made with an eezo drive core to achieve FTL speeds," he starts. "Apparently the technology we were using back then was so primitive that nobody knows how to work with it any more, and you think you can help?"
"I'm a quarian?" I offer weakly.
"We need the drive core replaced with a new one, the old ones not powerful enough for the paces we want to put it through. All the materials are ready, we just can't find anyone who knows how to actually do it."
"I've worked on ships hundreds of years old in the Flotilla," I counter.
"And what do you want? I'm not paying you some exuberant amount of money, you street rat."
I stop for a few seconds to think, then give the man my best hard, serious look, which given I wear a mask, is pretty redundant anyway. "I want the old drive core."
He gives me a curious look for a few seconds, as if considering to reject my offer on principle even though I'm certain only the quarians would be able to find a use for and salvage an old drive core where any other race would extract the eezo from it and throw the rest away. "Fine. Report to docking bay G21, MSV Squishy."
Squishy.
It only takes a couple of seconds to sink in, and I realise that Reegar is never going to let me live this down if he finds out. Beir'Gerrel vas Squishy. Who calls a ship something like that, anyway?
"The Captain let his daughter name it," the human says half accusingly to me, as if daring me to actual say how dumb of a name I think it is. "She was four at the time and named it after her pet hamster."
"I see."
Humans.
Kal'Reegar – several months after his pilgrimage.
As a Reegar, it's sort of tradition to not waste too much time on your pilgrimage. We already know we're going to join the marines, so why bother? Any military ship Captain would be pleased to have one of us serving on their ship, and we prove our worth by showing what competent soldiers we are.
I spent my pilgrimage on a small human colony with their militia. I trained with them, showed them some combat tricks I knew, and helped them get a pilot competent enough to fly the A-61 Mantis gunship they had lying around, unused and going to waste. In return, they housed me, gave me enough payment to buy my way back to the fleet, let me have a copy of the blueprints for a prototype weapon mod one of their engineers had been fiddling with, and wished me good luck on my journey.
I offered it to the Captain of one of our heavy frigates, he accepted and I was formally instated in the Migrant Fleet marines. I'm mostly trained for ground combat, not space. We only get space combat within the Fleet, usually with mercs that get too confident in themselves and think they can attack us. So, chances are, they'll ship me off as an escort with civilians that have to do business or research outside the flotilla. I'll be more useful on the ground.
But in the meantime, there's still a lot to keep you busy. One of which includes maintaining the armoury. It's a pretty boring job, but it's not hard. I've just picked up an assault rifle to assess when I hear the door open and two loud people stomp inside. We maximise our space as much as possible on our ships, and the armoury is as small as I'd dare say is physically possible.
"Reegar!" one of them says. It's Siri and Jen, two loud-mouthed men perhaps only a year or two older than me that considered it their duty to adopt me into their craziness when I joined the ship.
Not that I mind, they're a good natured sort, if a bit boisterous. They also insist on calling me by my family name, as they do to each other, which has started to rub off on me lately so much so that I introduced myself as Reegar to another crew-mate yesterday, before noting their perplexed look and correcting myself.
"You hear the news?" Jen asks as he leans against a weapon bench.
I glance up at him, but continue my work. "No, what happened?"
"Admiral Gerrel's son came back from his pilgrimage," Siri answers. My mood lifts and I smile faintly to myself. We haven't been able to communicate since they separated us before we left on our pilgrimages. "Brought back a drive core with him."
"Really?" There's a crash and I realised I've dropped the rifle. It's not uncommon for a quarian to bring back a ship or part of a ship as a gift from their pilgrimage, but they're always from ship yards that have stripped them completely of their expensive drive cores and anything else remotely valuable.
"Yep," Jen continues as I pick the gun up again. "Got it as payment for fixing some human ship. SSV Squishy or something."
"MSV," Siri corrects.
They've started arguing about the difference between merchant class vessels and system alliance warships, but I'm not paying attention. Beir, sneaky little shit, probably thought he could hide this from me.
There is no hiding things from Kal'Reegar.
