Yes, the party twenty questionarium, because my brains have turned to scrambled egg and I need a lie down.
This is going to get wordy and not really advance anything but I did warn you. Feel free to skip this bit or just pretend it doesn't even exist. Normal updates will resume some point shortly, have no fear, I'm just frazzled and rather figured this would be a reasonable enough point to take a breath and just luxuriate and waste everyone's time.
If anyone asks more question on top of this I'll edit them in. Magically.
I'm going to paraphrase the questions because I can.
Isn't the Assertive just showing up in orbit over Illium kind of a big deal?
Whoopsie.
I posted the last part and then went to sleep without thinking a whole lot more about it other than this seemed a good way of mashing the narratives together again and that'd be pretty funny and one of the first things that popped into my head on waking up was that I'd perhaps not fully thought it through.
Originally I was figuring Omega? Given that Omega is kind of a pivotal location in ME2 but then I thought that, since Horizon just happened, there's reason for Shepard to go to Illium and since Jarrion has got business nonsense to handle Illium was a sensible place for him to go, too. So that part worked out in my head. I just didn't think through the consequences enough at the time.
Mean, the last time a ship no-one recognised showed up it was Sovereign, and that didn't end so well for most of the people involved. And a Dauntless is, like, twice the size of Sovereign. And it looks like nothing else they would have seen. And it tears its way into space in a fashion none would be familiar with before proceeding to enter the orbit of Illium - a planet of millions with a high economic value and, if memory serves, pretty significant defensive assets.
Yeah that's not the sort of thing people will shrug off. In retrospect.
And Shepard will probably have to do something about it, too, being that she's a Spectre and all and happens to be in the area. And that's on top of every other intelligence agency who'll be scrambling to find out what's going on, alongside criminals and other chancers. Sigh. What a mess.
Still, obliquely works out for me actually as that means MORE TALKING! And more Imperials having to interact with aliens, which amuses me greatly.
Honestly, they're lucky it's Jarrion, he's probably the most easy-going Imperial they could have hoped to meet. It could have been much, much worse.
Who's on the Normandy right now?
Well right now we're just post-Horizon, basically, so that'd be, uh…
Grunt, Jack, Garrus, Mordin, Miranda and Jacob. I think? Sounds about right. Not that I've really utilised any of these characters, obviously. I've been pretty bad at it. Partly because I've been too busy salivating over Jarrion's lot, mostly because I genuinely worry about writing them wrong. Especially Mordin, who I love but fear I cannot do justice.
I'm sure they'll all get a chance in due time…
Although I must confess to my shame that I haven't actually ever played any of the DLC with any of the other characters for ME2. I know, I know - my excuses are hollow. But the upshot is that Zaheed and Kasumi are unlikely to appear because, well, I don't know anything about either of them.
I think Kasumi can turn invisible? And Zaheed got shot in the head that one time? That's about the extent of what I know.
And even if I did put them in that'd be more characters for me not to use. Hah!
What do any of these people actually look like?
Not something someone asked but someone did point out a while back that I hadn't actually described anyone. Which is true, I haven't. I dislike reading and, indeed, writing lengthy descriptions of what characters look like and it didn't strike me as important so I mostly skirted it.
But, just so people have a vague idea, it goes something like this:
All ME characters look like what they look like. You know what they look like.
Shepard is a lady Shepard, has the shortest haircut available (which I think is a step above a buzzcut, really) and looks - as I may have mentioned - like she's lost a fight with about twelve panes of glass. Getting spaced and put back together again can do that.
Aside: I wasn't a fan of how going Paragon made the scars go away. It seemed real cheap to me, kind of a harkening back to how fucked up looking you could get going darkside in KOTOR but eh, just weird. I wanted scars all the way, damnit!
Jarrion looks basically like any Rogue Trader that 40K artwork throws up. You know the sort. He looks like Jan Van Yastobaal. Or the guy off any one of the FF Rogue Trader RPG books. Or Count Maximillian or whatever his name was - the one from Inquisitor. Goatee, epaulettes, lots of gold braid and rings and such. And the augmetic ear, though you can't usually see it unless you're looking as it's pretty niftily done. That's money for you.
EDIT: Jarrion is on the younger side, if that helps. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say he's dashing. None of the people here are dashing.
Loghain is an unimposing woman with no eyes - obviously - and who figured that shaving her head would help her blend in when she was pretending to be an Astropath. Her hair is now growing back.
Do I have a thing for women with short hair? No, actually, it's just how it's worked out here. Weird.
Pak looks like a tech priest, though maybe a little more towards the higher end of things given that they are a rather fancy Explorator. High-quality implants is what I'm saying. Number of mechadendrites? More than you'd expect but less than you'd hope.
Thale, for a guy who's seen a lot of shit, is basically pristine. Ugly as sin, however. A man who fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Life compensates him by apparently making him ridiculously lucky. Who can say?
Why are you so bad at demarcating the shifts in perspective?
Whoopsie. Again.
Yeah, I kind of failed to notice the fact that takes out some of the more subtle bits of formatting I was putting in, like the double line break and single hyphen I was putting in to show the bits where the narrative was switching.
So from now on I'm going to be dropping a big, fat +++MEANWHILE+++ or something like that to show the bits where the narrative is moving around.
That'll probably not work for some people but, eh, it's either that or break the thing up into even MORE chapters, and that'll not work for some other people and in the end it's all going to get read anyway, right? So might as well just try to make it clear.
That's my excuse...
The Assertive wouldn't just show up in orbit over Illium, would it?
I'm aware. Though as with all things 40K consistency is, uh, fluffy at times it's fairly standard that warp travel involves appearing outside the system proper then powering in and that is exactly what the Assertive did, confusing and worrying everyone who saw it happen. Shepard was too busy shooting people at the time to notice.
Why didn't EDI mention it? Uh. Shepard said not to disturb her while she was shooting people unless it was mission-related. Yeah. Yeah that works.
Of course, given that the Assertive inexplicably popped right into orbit over Horizon a few chapter ago...
Uh, let's just forget that part, eh? The warp! It's crazy!
Although, to be serious, my namby-pamby handwave is that the Warp is so calm in the ME universe (for personal head-canon reasons I'm not going to get into) that navigating it is much easier than it is back home, once you've worked out how to actually get anywhere. This is my excuse for how the Assertive is able to move around in good enough time.
Though like I said before, neither of these backgrounds give any really useful information on travel time. Oh yeah, the Rogue Trader RPG has a travel time chart and mass relays apparently slingshot you across space "instantly" to a paired relay but then how long does it take between those on FTL? Presumably the novels say more about this but I ain't read 'em.
Look, I'm making this up as I go along here, using twenty-odd years of half-remembered 40K lore and a decade or so of vague ME knowledge.
Why did Pak roll on primitive names, and why do you refer to him as them?
Hah, someone noticed that. The name thing, I mean. I'm not good with names. I tend to forget them. Jarrion just sounds appropriately 40K-ish, so does Torian. Loghain was because I was playing Dragon Age at the time, Altrx is the name of a prosthetic hip insert (a liner, specifically, or a type of liner...) and Pak is just easy to remember is all. Opened the book, looked at names, Pak. Boom.
As for they/them that's just a habit I have. I haven't given it a lot of thought. That and - I suppose - given that Pak is not speaking and given that they're also exceedingly heavily modified even by ad mech standards, no-one knows and no-one cares. Certainly not Pak. Everyone here seems to assume Pak is a guy so sure, why not. I'm not changing it.