When Charlie finally gave the ready mark, Shepard had half the mind to ask what had taken so long, before reminding herself that they had probably spent a short period trying to avoid heat stroke. They coordinated with Archer to activate the overrides all at once, and her team entered without a fuss. Bravo were set upon by geth the moment they hit their override, but all she could do for them was wish them luck; her own team had an objective to accomplish
It was when they first walked in the door that the real freak show started.
Overlord started off by playing research logs. Archer had conveniently forgotten to mention his brother was autistic. She wondered if Overlord knew that, if it was, in it's own way, trying to tell a story, trying to talk to them with something other than guns. With each log played, she found herself more and more certain that there was some kind of horror show waiting for them in the server room. She also couldn't help but think that it sounded like Archer barely knew his own brother.
Then came the elevator incident. Not the part where there was a Prime waiting to say hello; the thing that came after. She had never been particularly fond of those old horror movies Joker liked to watch, where terrible things happened in the elevator. This played out exactly like one of those scenes.
She could now say she'd survived a collapsing elevator on top of everything else.
Overlord's continuous shouting at them served to make things even more unsettling, and the way it kept messing with the doors just made her want to yell back. She'd just had a week from hell, and she didn't need all this technological frickery on top of it.
But all that was nothing compared to what it did next.
Ever since she woke up and learned what had happened to her, she had never been able to escape the doubt worming it's way through her mind that she was the real Commander Sierra Shepard. She would spend hours in the mirror, looking at the scars on her face where synth-tissue hadn't fully graphed itself yet, or poking and prodding at the similar ones all over her body, wondering how much of her was human.
Wondering exactly what she was, what Cerberus had put her in. They said she was no VI. They said she wasn't a clone. Miranda said they had forgone the control failsafe. They said she was herself, but there was that worm, wiggling away. It was part of the reason she'd asked Joker to take over if she started acting out, he and Chakwas were the only trusted faces around at the time. She had felt... a little saner, when Garrus came on board, but he'd had, and still had, his own problems to work out, and Tali was still dealing with watching that marine unit die, so Joker had stayed as the-for lack of a less ironic term- crutch in case something turned out to be wrong with her.
The idea that she might not be herself, that Miranda could be lying in any way, had dogged her in ways she didn't care to admit.
So when pain rushed though every neuron, when her limbs started moving of their own accord, the first thought she had was of course it wall all a lie. Her body threw her squad back biotically before staggering out the door. Her vision swam with a mix of reality and cybernetic oblivion. Phantoms walked the hall, but while they appeared to walk right in front of her, she was seeing them from all angles, like from a security feed. Every feed that had seen them, all at once.
She managed to wrest enough control to shoot at any geth that got in her way, but they all seemed strangely passive. More security videos, and her suspicions that Archer didn't know the first thing about David grew and solidified.
She watched as Archer dragged him around, almost frustrated at having to bring his brother into the lab with him. She didn't see why David was there, but at some point, David is watching geth code stream past on a computer screen. He glances around as if to make sure Archer doesn't see him, and then, fingers as much a blur as Joker's were in high-risk flight, the younger man responds.
It turns into a conversation. At some point Archer notices, stops the technicians from stopping David, who has long since stopped caring if anyone sees what he's doing; he seems to be enjoying what he's discovered. Archer demands his brother to translate. He does, nonchalantly, not noticing the gleam in the older man's eyes.
She watched as Archer demanded more of his brother; tell this geth to walk forward, tell this geth to walk backwards, tell this geth to self-destruct. She watches the autistic man grow increasingly frustrated at being told what to do, at being tugged from one task to another, having the equations he wanted to work on be erased and replaced with geth code his brother wanted him to analyze.
She watches as Archer suggests plugging him into the network directly in the morning, and David snaps. It's the only time she sees him say 'no', because even if he hadn't wanted to do geth code, it was still part of something he enjoyed.
Overlord is screaming at her to make it stop.
She feels rather than hears it detect the Normandy and prepare for transmission as it makes her stagger into the main server hub. The hell you will! She wars with her own body, her own mind, and manages to make herself shoot what she knows to be for some reason, the server boxes she knows contains the geth network Archer had set up.
Agony ripped through her whole body, and it was like someone else was creaming in her head. She blacks out, and when she comes to, and looks up, it's to see one of the worse violations of sapient rights she's ever born witness to in person. At least, inflicted upon one sapient by another; she's not sure if there's enough prothean in the Collectors left for them to be sentient without Reapers in their ears.
She had known that whatever they found would probably be bad, that Archer had been lying in some way. But this... this was sick in a way that couldn't be explained by anything. It would have still been sick if David wasn't his brother, it would have still been sick if he wasn't autistic, it would have still been sick if he was some random animal, but none of those things were the reality, and that makes it even sicker.
He was strung up like a marionette. Strings in his wrists and strings in his shoulders, strings in his eyelids, and going down his throat. They even pierce his skull so that his mind might bob up and down in whichever way Archer pleased. He dangles from them like the puppeteer has hung him up and abandoned him after one show gone bad, eyes cloudy with dust and half-death, skin pale porcelain cracked with strained veins where his strings were installed.
She throws up. Everything hurts. She thinks, he might have gained control using her cybernetics. She should radio Bravo, Garrus had Cerberus cybernetics in him, too. For a few minutes, all she can do is sit on the floor and heave. Her muscles keep spasming painfully, and she can't help but wonder if this is what having a seizure feels like.
She forces herself to her feet. She does it, nobody else. Her body is her own, her mind is her own. Her will is her own(at least, that what she'll keep telling herself). David is still breathing, one of those things must be a respirator. How much of this is life support, and how much of it is a torture machine? Could it be both, in a scenario like this?
"Shepard!" Goto, unsurprisingly, pops up first, seemingly out of nowhere, as usual. She grinds to a halt as she realizes there's a person attached to all those wires and tubes and instruments, says something in her native tongue that doesn't translate.
Miranda is next, and Zaeed soon follows with a litany of curses and ranting about this organization being full of psychopaths.
"Is he wrong, Miranda?" Shepard challenges. My will is my own. My will is my own.
"Of course he is." She snaps. "Just because one bad actor-"
"One? Because from where I'm standing, I've seen over half a dozen by now." Toombs, half-mad from torture and vengeance, thorian creepers tearing people apart, Rear Admiral Kahoku dead in a room full of rachni, and so many more. And Miranda Lawson still kept trying to justify it, like the true Cerberus believer she was. "I'm stopping this insanity. Bravo, do you read me?"
"We read you, Commander. Prometheus just self-destructed, but we're all accounted for." Garrus informed her.
"Any wounded?" she needed to be sure before she borrowed Mordin.
"A few dents and burns, but the only fatality is Jack's pride." Sounded about right.
"Get over to Atlas station, we need Mordin. Alpha's all good, Archer's brother isn't." they would need his medical and technical expertise in order to extract David from this... thing. She should probably bring Tali in from Vulcan as well, the rest of Charlie could gather the dead while they dealt with this.
"Commander Shepard!" Archer rushed in, looking frantic. He barely spared David a glance, homing in on her instead. He was the last person in the galaxy who should be standing in front of her right now. "Please, before you do anything rash-"
"Rash? Rash? Like stringing your own brother up like a butcher's cut rash? Plugging someone into a computer against their will kind of rash?" she challenged. Her every nerve was on fire with each movement, and her mind was a whirlwind of anger and horror as she shoved him against the wall by his coat collar. My will is my own. "How about putting a bullet in your head, that rash enough for you?"
"Shepard, we had to!" he gasped. "We needed results or the Illusive Man would cut our funding, we needed a way to control the geth. It may seem out of line now, but our children's children would have thanked us!"
"Thanked you? Let me assure you that if there's ever peace with the geth, your children's children will only look back on this with disgust." she spat. She had to fight her own muscles and tendons as they twitched and tried to jerk out of her control. "I'm going to make the whole galaxy know what you did here, what you did to your brother and the lives it cost. I'm going to make horrific acts of sapient experimentation your legacy, and nowhere you go will offer escape from it."
"Shepard, you can't do that!" Miranda interjected. "You can't leak Cerberus secrets to-"
"I can't? Watch me, asshole." The Alliance was going to get so many secrets they would have to fund a new branch specifically for analyzing them. "This is too far. If you're so willing to go so far for Cerberus, would you do this to your sister if they asked?"
"Shepard!"
"Would you?" she challenged. "She's perfect, just like you, but she isn't important to operations. They've spent so much money protecting her, why not get a little something out of it for once? Think of all the things Cerberus could use her for, Lawson. How fucking far would you go?"
"You leave her out of this!" the genetically perfect woman snapped.
"Commander, it's not like I planned this-" Archer tried to reason.
"Not like you- so you didn't plan that?" She started dragging him towards his brother. Zaeed was leaning against a wall, looking like he was enjoying himself, and Kasumi was exploring the systems locking David in place. "Look at him. You didn't plan to do that to your own brother? Tell me another lie, I dare you."
"Seeing him communicate with the geth, it all seemed harmless." He struggled in her grip, trying to avoid looking at his brother. "I was asked to avoid war! If my work prevented a million mothers mourning the loss of a millions sons, my conscience will rest easy."
"You're just a whole new kind of sick aren't you?" she threw him to the floor with disgust.
"I won't apologize for radical ideas; it was working! It could still work!" he protested. Shepard finds herself inexplicably reminded of history's demons, of those ancient scientists who invented the gas that Hitler used, or found out how to forcibly sterilize people. The inventors of the genophage and the like.
"Still work? How many people have already died for this?" Still work? As if she was letting this continue? As if any sane person would ever let this continue? "Let me tell you how this works; you opened up your own private hell, and I'm shutting it down. David will be safer with the Alliance."
"NO!" Archer shouts, hand whipping to a weapon concealed in his coat. "He's too valuable!"
She manages to avoid his sloppy shots(can't even hit her at three feet of distance, really now), and she flings it out of his hand with a biotic slap that makes her want to scream. It's like the action sets her arm on fire, and she's mentally cursing David even as she kicks his brother and points a gun at his head, while the rest of her squad fix their own weapons on him in case he tried any funny business.
"I've seen enough to know he'll never be safe here, to see he'll never be safe from you. If you even think about going after him, this bullet will find you. Then we'll see who's more valuable." she never enjoyed seeing fear in someone's eyes more than she was in this moment.
"Wh-where are you taking him?" Hospital, dumbass.
"Somewhere that might give him a chance at recovering from your shit care." was all she was going to dignify him with. "Zaeed, take him into custody. Lawson, he's going to the Alliance and I don't care how much you whine about it, go gather the dead while I coordinate our teams."
"Commander-" She wasn't in the mood for 'do as the Illusive Man says'.
"That's an order." she looks up at David and suppresses the urge to scream and curse him out. My will is my own now, asshole. Just because his brother had strung him up in a horrific experiment didn't mean she could forgive him yet. My will is my own. She forced her hands not to shake as she hailed the Normandy. "Normandy, prep med bay for a casualty, expect trauma, exposure, and physical neglect at the least. Joker, call me on our private channel, there's something I need you to do."
She didn't know how she was going to give Archer to the Alliance without Miranda, EDI, or the Illusive Man freezing control of the ship or trying to stop her, but she had to give it her best.
Once the shuttle sets them down just outside Atlas station, Crow takes a few moments just to appreciate how cool and tranquil the ravine is compared to the geothermal plant. He's interrupted when Dr. Chakwas shoves hardtack into his hands.
"Okay, okay." he relents as she marches towards the entrance of the compound. She'd been ferried down from the Normandy to help Overlord. As least, the human part of Overlord, apparently the situation was too ugly for Mordin to handle alone, and Shepard wasn't letting Miranda, the other unit member with medical expertise, help for some reason.
So Dr. Chakwas had been brought down in the shuttle that came to pick up Charlie team, and she had immediately set to work assessing them all for heat stroke and making them hydrate. She had been particularly insistent about him getting something to eat(to which Grunt complained that he was hungry, too). She had ordered that Charlie team was not to haul any more corpses, and some other Cerberus retrieval team would have to do it.
At the time he'd felt guilty that those people would have to be left to rot in the heat for even a minute longer, but now he was just glad to be away from the volcano... which, if anything made him feel even guiltier.
"I'm going outside." he tells the others. Jacob, who seems to already be writing his AAR, simply grunts, and Crow takes this as permission. He steps into the sunlight, and climbs up a cliff some distance from Atlas' entrance, but with a good enough field of view that he could see what was going on. Settled, he get's to work on his hardtack. It's salty and dry, and his canteen is pretty much empty. There's a stream nearby though, and Glint deems it safe.
Well, safe for a Lightbearer, at least; he lets his Ghost spend a good few minutes being fascinated the the variety of microbiology he'd found in the stream, and he kicks his boots off to stick his feet in it while he eats. It feels like the closest he's gotten to relaxing in a long while.
"Hey Glint?" he asks.
"Yeah?" his companion chirps.
"Do you think... do you think anyone will miss us? Or even notice we're gone, aside from Spider?" the only people he'd really acquainted himself with were Osiris and the Wolf.
"I think Osiris definitly will." Glint says. He dips into the water briefly, and grinds his nodes together as he shakes the droplets off. "And a lot of the lower-order eliksni. You might not want to admit it, but a lot of them looked up to you."
"Spider had me kicking their doors down for glimmer." he pointed out, before choking down more hardtack.
"But it was never in doubt that you didn't want to." his Ghost dips into the water again, and repeats the process of grinding his nodes. Crow motions for him to come over, and he continues as he does so. "You always apologized once nobody was looking, you always found a way to make it up to them in little ways. "
"I don't think giving someone a smuggled part as recompense to trauma counts as making it up." Crow grimaced after he swallowed. Holding Glint still, he started parting each set of nodes gently in an attempt to find what was irritating his friend. He finds some volcanic grit in the seems of the top left set. "How'd you get that in there?"
"No idea." Glint chirps as his Lightbearer uses one of the cleaner patches of his cloak to try to remove the dirt. "I meant how you looked after them. How many falls did you take for mistakes that weren't yours, simply because you didn't want to see people hurt?"
"Guardians are meant to take bullets for people who only have one life. That's our purpose, not a kindness." he points out. "If I didn't, what kind of Lightbearer would that have made me?"
"That's not all a Guardian is for." his Ghost chided gently. "If there's one thing I've gotten to know over the centuries, it's that not every Lightbearer is capable of self-sacrifice. It's still instinct to avoid pain, avoid death, and it takes bravery to cast that aside. It's not easy for everyone, Crow. It was only easy for you because you're kind, and those eliksni know that. They won't have that kindness looking out for them anymore, that's why they'll miss you, and if they tell people about you, that's what they'll talk about."
Crow heaves a sigh and lays back on the warm stone. It was a pleasant warmth, contrary to the unbearable heat he'd endured earlier. He shuts his eyes to the bright sky above, and Glint settles on his chest.
"Hey, I know all this has been rough but... I think things are looking up for us." his Ghost says. "We're free, we're mostly safe, and I like to think you're starting to make some friends."
"You still have a bomb in you." he pointed out bitterly.
"Well, yes, but it can't be set off." a small pulse of Light rolled off his shell, as if the Ghost were huffing about something.
"I'd feel better if it was gone. Maybe we could find someone who could-"
"No!" Glint's response is almost frantic, and it catches him off-guard. The Ghost's nodes twitch nervously. "I mean, yes I'd like it out, too, but I don't... I mean I'd rather..."
He settles for flying in a distressed circle as he tries to find his words, clicking and beeping. Crow sits up and halts him, and he flares his shell briefly before settling in Crow's palm. "What is it, Glint? You're always bugging me to talk about my problems."
"I just... I don't want another stranger poking around inside of me." his companion admits quietly. "I try very hard not to think about when Spider grabbed me, I'm not sure I could... let someone take me apart."
"I don't want you to have to live with that thing in you, Glint." he channels some Light through his hand comfortingly. "It can't stay. We'll find someone we can trust, eventually. Maybe on the Normandy, maybe elsewhere, but eventually we will. In a way, we aren't truly free until that... sick thing is gone."
"You'll stay close when we do?" Glint asks.
"In arms reach." When his Ghost's shell flares, he continues. "If it goes off, it goes off. I'd rather go out with you if it happens, don't you pretend you wouldn't do the same."
That's how it had always been, them against everything else. They were in a mess together or not at all, and he thinks if he lost Glint he would die anyway, if not to an enemy then from the sheer size of the hole his Ghost would leave in his life.
They sit like that for a while, contemplating, sharing nothing but the Light between them. Crow kicks at the water a little, until he stubs his toe and decides against doing it again, and Glint lets out a tiny chirp of amusement. His omni-tool buzzes with a message requesting his return to the shuttle all too soon, and he casts Aite's skies one last, appreciating look. He didn't know when he'd be out in the wilds again.
But despite the gruesome outcome of the mission, he feels... better, overall. Maybe it's just being outside, maybe it's that he made a difference today, or maybe it's because he finally got some time away from the ears in the Normandy's walls. Whatever it was, he can't help but feel like agreeing with Glint; things might finally be looking up for them.
He only hoped it would stay that way.
So, instead of funding therapy we're chucking Crow into a haunted spaceship to be further traumatized by his already traumatizing past self? Yeah, Vanguard needs to fund a therapy program. And we need more Glint! There's only one lore tab I've found one the new gear where he's prominent, and while it's sweet like all things Glint, I'm a little disappointed that he isn't playing a bigger role in all this. Not one voice line, and I can imagine him having a lot to say when Uldren's phantom is tearing Crow down. I guess his VA had bigger fish to fry or something.
That, or bungie knows we live for Glint fluff and want us to pay more for our next fix. In the meanwhile, I'll keep manufacturing my own Glint fluff free of charge.
Knightwolf1875: Yes, but not everybody is going to be okay knowing he can vaporize things like that. To someone not of the D2 universe, Light would be hella scary.
Ebuc: Yes, but the Vex are acausual beings, meaning they don't follow all laws of reality but can't break all those laws at once(like Guardians or Ascendant Hive). For the headless ones... they literally pulled off the guy's head, mate. Ain't nothing going on between those eyes anymore. And the case with Jana was corruption by a paracausal force. An exo isn't just an AI a Reaper can hack into submission like geth, it's an actual, complex organic mind, which they probably don't know their way around too well. Any hacking attempts would end unsuccessfully, though they might accidently succeed in lobotomizing someone. Pure indoctrination also involves, as a key part of getting into the victim's mind in the first place. subjecting key parts of the physical brain to infrasound. Any exo equivalent would probably be housed in special casing to prevent interference from such things(cuz that's just how you build a super-sensitive computer meant to house a human brain), and this process could do nothing but annoy them considering attacking an organic brain would produce different results than attacking a computer one. Indoctrination is useless without the infrasound weakening, and as big and bad as the Reapers are, this isn't a totally psionic, psychic, or paracausal process. Reapers are just causal machines, and they work through their agents using signals, not direct mental contact. Closest thing we see to true psionics in ME is the Leviathans, who interface directly with the mind by 'drowning' it and taking over their target completely. Protheans might be close, though. TL;DR: Reapers aren't paracausal or even acausal, neither are their abilities despite how powerful they are, and indoctrinating an exo would probably only be met with varying levels of disaster. Man this is a long response. And can I just say that if the character you're playing is a Warlock, why didn't we just pop a Rift for Cayde? I mean, we know THOSE work on exos.
Guest: Headless ones thing just kind of struck me a pure Glint fan service.
Boy lemme tell ya, I'm going after that Iron Lord title hard next week. I gotta have it before the week ends, I just need it SO freaking bad. And I gotta say, 200 favorites? Dope. Drop some reviews, ya'll, I live off feedback and this monster just keeps getting bigger!
Fare Thee Well!