Citadel control room, Earth orbit.
45 minutes before end of Reaper War.
Shepard closes her eyes and rubs her forehead. She has a brief vision of her future self, somewhere. Liara is there. It feels so real she could touch her. Kids are laughing. She is overwhelmed by love, seems about to explode. She passes out.
She opens her eyes. Feelings from that dream still linger inside her.
Prepare for Unforeseen Consequences...
The strange floating figure has disappeared. Time seems to function normally again. An Alliance frigate explodes outside. The brat says something about having to make a choice now.
She slowly raises to her feet, looks at her hands.
What is this ?
Where is my armor ?
Why am I naked ?
Why is there so much blood on the floor ? I don't feel any pain.
Then it hits her like a brick in the back of the head. She sees every atom in the room. She sees through the floor and the walls. The whole space station disappears. She looks at the stars. She knows them all. She's been there. She looks at her feet. She's naked, in orbit. Her feet disappear. She starts to scream. She's everywhere and nowhere. She panics and loses consciousness.
Later, completely oblivious to her surroundings, she watches her fingers.
The fingers are her own. She has a body. That feels normal and weird at the same time.
Her body is on Earth now, standing on top of a heap of rubble that used to be a building. If her body is there, she must also be there. Being in just one physical place feels alien and familiar at the same time.
A Destroyer's beam rips through her. She feels all her atoms screaming as her body is disintegrated.
She floats, lost in darkness for a while. She feels a faint glimmer in the distance. She is inexplicably drawn to it. Something is calling her. She has to do something very important. Someone. Liara.
She does not need to search for her among all the debris and mayhem orbiting Earth. She's on the Normandy, wounded, alive. She feels her.
She remembers everything now. She's Shepard. And she's a Goddess.
Wait, I don't remember accepting that soul-merging bullshit...
She hears a voice in the back of her head telling her "did you think you had a choice ? he he he..."
.
Normandy's Med Bay
35 minutes before end of Reaper War.
In a flash, Shepard materializes inside Normandy's med bay.
Liara
(on a bed, covered in blood, and very surprised)
"Shepard ? Are you alright ?"
Vega
"Nice new uniform, Lola."
Shepard looks at her own reflection in the glass. She looks fine although she was disintegrated by that reaper a few minutes ago. It seems she can do that too. She just forgot the damn clothes.
She thinks about bringing back her old armour, but she doesn't need it anymore. A nice dress will do. It just appears on her, with a N7 logo on the front.
While everyone stands motionless with their jaws dropped, Shepard nails Liara to the bed with a very long and voluptuous kiss. She tastes of love and fresh blood. Then Shepard whispers in her ear :
Shepard
"I'm doing this for you. Be right back."
Shepard feels unstoppable.
She disappears from the Med bay in a flash.
.
Earth orbit.
30 minutes before end of Reaper War.
While disappearing from the Normandy, Shepard remembered she could actually be anywhere she wanted.
After a few tries, she got the hang of it. She still had to focus on not forgetting the body and the clothes along the way, but it worked.
She was about to go on a galaxy-wide rampage, but then, she thought she could perhaps do something useful with the Reapers. Although she wasn't interested in any of the options proposed by the Catalyst. She needed to figure out something new. Preferably something the little brat would hate.
Shepard was floating right in front of Harbinger, staring at it in the eyes, thinking. The Reaper looked pissed off, after she disabled its weapons, propulsion, and indoctrination transmitters. She was having a magnificent time, not even realizing she was in low Earth orbit, wearing a suspiciously short dress, and apparently didn't need to breathe.
.
After merging with this God thing, she should have been able to know, or at least remember how to win this, but to no avail. She was not yet used to her new status, and the amount of information was beyond impossible to process. It was so tempting to have a peek, but she knew she would be driven insane.
However, she had no trouble with physical things. She could feel the inside of the Reaper, how it worked. It was weird, as she had always sucked at tech. It seemed as she could use a physical object as a handle to pull related items from her scary all-knowing mind. As she noticed its FTL communications transceivers, and examined their intricate workings, she understood everything. New, incredible physics.
She felt for the Reaper's mind, and found it. It was disgusting. She went back to the FTL transceivers. One of them was focused on Citadel. She followed the signal.
She could sense their communications now, see their path through space. Many FTL communication beams were focused on Citadel, coming from everywhere inside the solar system, and outside through the mass relay.
Shepard then knew that Citadel itself was the Reaper's central communication node. It all made sense, where else would you plug the Crucible and expect it to work ? It had to be connected to all of those bastards somehow.
The Reaper's main FTL router hardware was distributed in the ring at the base of the citadel.
.
Shepard was inside the main server room. It looked like Leviathan hardware from back in the day, which the Reapers had upgraded for durability. It was eerily quiet, the only sound being the soft purr coming from racks of equipment, routing battle commands, counting billions of victims.
Just a peek, Shepard.
She chose the simplest piece of hardware she could find. A bolt on one of the router boxes. She touched it, slowly. She focused all her attention on it. Then she had a peek.
Everything that had or could ever have happened in the vicinity of this simple bolt rushed in her mind, all simultaneously, in no particular order. Although the Citadel was pretty old, the server room was an uneventful place. So, this multi-dimensional information vortex was just enough to almost make her head explode. She grabbed the piece of information she needed and yanked it out. She fell to her knees, wiped the torrent of blood coming from her nose, swallowed some of it, coughed, spit, vomited a little, then allowed herself a few seconds of rest. She was sure about two things : it had worked, and she never wanted to do this again.
She focused back on her mission. She knew what had to be done. It was so simple.
The bastards.
She needed EDI. She teleported back to the Normandy.
.
A/N : What the fuck is happening to Shepard ?...