Commander Jane Shepard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
earthborn) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2014-04-22 11:16 am
earthborn) wrote in thecapitol2014-04-22 11:16 am
On Any Other Day
Who| Shepard And Her Adoring Fans
What| The Customer Complaints Desk Is [OPEN]
Where| A lovely little park outside a lovely little café on a quiet day when the sun is shining, just after a certain network post
When| The morning after Shepard's Exposé goes live.
Warnings/Notes| Talk of murder, genocide, cussing, and political discourse. God help us all.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, she's got a rail-thin barrista with a shock of violet-pink hair, and he keeps bringing her coffee from all the way across the street. On any other day, she'd call it perfect— he keeps sarcastically saluting her and she keeps sarcastically thanking him as 'private', and the coffee is damn good in addition to cheap and hand-delivered. On any other day.
But despite the shining weather and the convenient caffeine-drip, she's not set up here with the empty chair beside her own for the sake of simple joys.
Come at me, bro.
What| The Customer Complaints Desk Is [OPEN]
Where| A lovely little park outside a lovely little café on a quiet day when the sun is shining, just after a certain network post
When| The morning after Shepard's Exposé goes live.
Warnings/Notes| Talk of murder, genocide, cussing, and political discourse. God help us all.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, she's got a rail-thin barrista with a shock of violet-pink hair, and he keeps bringing her coffee from all the way across the street. On any other day, she'd call it perfect— he keeps sarcastically saluting her and she keeps sarcastically thanking him as 'private', and the coffee is damn good in addition to cheap and hand-delivered. On any other day.
But despite the shining weather and the convenient caffeine-drip, she's not set up here with the empty chair beside her own for the sake of simple joys.
Come at me, bro.
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The Ara-what now?
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"No, that one would be fabricated," And honestly, it's a little concerning that Mindy would focus on what couldn't, even fictionally, be more than half a dozen bodies over the slightly more frightening three hundred thousand, "Not that I can't see it happening, but... Not with me. I've got a little more discipline than that."
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She stirred her drink a little more. "What about baking your 'people' to death?"
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"Talking about Aratoht, actually."
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"Right, sorry. That one was a solo mission," Shepard finished off her drink with a long tip-back that left the bitter dregs in her mouth, a syrupy artifact just the same after-climax sensation as Aratoht itself, if not a hundreth so intense.
"It's kind of a long story," The cup joins its empty brothers and Shepard leans in with a grimace for both instances, "You keep a good tabs on the Games, Miss Macready? Watch all the footage?"
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"I do my best," she said, and indeed, she could start to tell one person from the next thanks to the footage. "How does that relate?"
and now I shall write a novel for you
Deep breath. Take it on the chin. How best to begin?
"You understand that I'm from a very different kind of world? I live in space. And space is...huge. So we have these things called Mass Relays. Think about them like chokepoints. You can't get very far at any speed without going through one or several of them," Shepard paused, considering the next jumping-off point.
God, she wanted a drink— and not coffee. When the Barista came back he had one for her anyways in addition to Mindy's order, and she took it with gratitude for the distraction if not the actual purchase.
"My mission that day came from an Alliance Admiral, he wanted me to go to the Bahak system, and pull a human researcher out of a Batarian prison. Bahak was Batarian-controlled space, and they had a colony there, garden world called Aratoht. Batarians are pretty well known for torture, so it was understandably urgent. That part of the job went pretty well," carefully, Shepard took the lid off and poured the foam into the grass beside her chair. Then she drank, "Turns out the scientist was working on a project not far off from my own. See, the Bahak system has a Relay in it, it's notable for being the second-closest Relay to the galactic rim. And on the other side of that, approaching the opposite Relay as fast as they could, there was a huge fuckoff fleet waiting to come in. Reapers."
She'll give you a minute, Mindy, to let that sink in.
"Reaper tactics are brutal, even by Batarian standards. They come in, crush every piece of infrastructure they can find, and then settle down to converse the remainder of the population into... A variety of interesting bio-mechanical monsters. It's like a horror vid come to life. The Project that the researcher I'd rescued was heading was meant to destroy the Bahak Relay, forcing the Reapers to fly in the slow way. Problem is, Relays are enormous and when they go, they pretty much take out the entire solar system they're parked in. We were going to ram an asteroid into it, but there was...a mutiny. Sometimes people go a little crazy when the whole world is on the line," she sat back, contemplating her coffer, warm between her hands. No, they didn't need to talk about Indoctrination. The project scientists were heroes, and if the Reapers had infected them at the end, then it was only an artifact of their courage, not a degredation of it.
She inhaled again, and looked up, meeting Mindy's eyes straight-on, "In the end, I made sure it happened, and I took responsibility for it afterwards. But those people, almost three hundred thousand Batarians, most of them civilians? None of them would have survived, regardless of what happened that day. Destroying that colony was the merciful route, and it delayed the Reapers for a little more than half a year while they made up the difference. It gave the galaxy time to prepare for the coming war, the one I was fighting when the Capitol picked me up and dropped me into their cute little death-games."
Re: and now I shall write a novel for you
"That sounds fucking heavy," she finally said, taking a drink from the Barista. "In the end, though, you did what you had to for a worse fight coming in. Not that I bet any straggling Batarians were grateful."
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It's gratifying to see Mindy chew up and swallow the story. How many times had she told the very simple story of the Reapers, coming to kill them all, only to be laughed at? Well it was a hell of a lot more complicated nowadays, and could only seem even more fantastic when put against the backdrop of the sunny park, and all the relative normalcy of daily life. It was boogeymen in the dark, shadows to jump at, and all of that made horribly, horrifically real.
"Turned myself in as soon as I could disengage from my other obligations. At the end of it, I got six months, most of it firmly in Alliance hands, and none of it was a lot of fun, but it seems kinda petty to bitch about 'advanced interrogation techniques' given the relative carnage involved in the Reaper War," She rubbed a hand down her face, remembering— no. Focus. Poker face, Shepard, you're good at poker, "Most people back home, endangered species aside, don't really care about Aratoht anymore. We've all got bigger problems."
And wasn't that just a lovely little understatement.
"Anything else?"
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Mindy did not think Shepard was lying: she had seen her train others, had seen her in the Arena. She was ruthless, quick, non relenting: this, to her, was not the sign of someone who was crazy and loved carnage. It was the sign of a trained military mind, who was used to making tough decisions when she needed to.
"I guess the only other question was that shit about you brainwashing people into becoming killers or whatever, through gas lighting."
Seriously, how the hell did that work?
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Really, Mindy? Really?
"I can't speak for everyone on my crew, but most of the ones I fight alongside have asked some pretty heavy favors of me over the years. And I've asked them to put their lives on the line for me in return. We're friends, and it's not as if any one of them is going to argue that what I'm trying to do isn't important. Way I see it, brainwashing doesn't enter into it," She's had a lot of practice rolling her eyes over the years, but this is a good one. Watch the technique— Nice. Very smooth, "But if you wanna quiz Garrus or Thane about it, you're welcome to. Those aren't my stories to tell."
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Fucking Capitol and their lies. Jesus.
"Ok, then that's about what I was curious about. I mean, you meet someone and you think you know them, and then you hear they practice mass genocides for kicks. You sort of have an obligation to get the story straight. And no, I don't believe every word they tell me, but you sort of have to wonder why they suddenly want to instigate shit out of the blue, you know?"
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"I don't think the right knows what the left is doing with these people, but if I—" She stopped herself, thoughtful, and frowned. Maybe Mindy could handle this,"...There's an Avox walking around with the same face as mine. Donatello remembers a Jane Shepard here before, one that isn't me, that I don't remember being, and if you dig far enough back into the archives, the first non-native victor of the Games is a Commander J Shepard. I don't know what anyone else did to earn a little mud on their face, but I've got a pretty good idea about my own problems. And as I'm sure you've noticed, I'm not very good at keeping my head down."
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She held out her bare wrist to make a point of it. Ah, now this, this was shop-talk. Tactics, interplay, strategy. Intimidation was a familiar weapon, both for and against Shepard; she knew this dance.
"So far as I know, it's the same reason the Peacekeepers don't bother me any of the other times I say or do stupid shit. Because I'm not a kid, I'm not stupid, and I'm not allied with the Rebellion, such as it may be. But I am a professional, and they are absolutely aware of the body-count I'd wrack up before they put me down, if they push me," she put her wrist away, quite calm, and resumed leaning on her knees with a sigh, "'Course the Capitol citizenry isn't going to react particularly well to 'mad tribute goes on a killing spree downtown,' and I'd definitely get run to death by the end of it, so I'm not exactly excited about the prospect. So for me? It's a power-play. Remind me that they can say and do whatever they want, yank the leash, maybe shake a few of my new allies and training-buddies. For Carlos? I'd say they're legitimately attempting to discredit him. Won't know how this is going to affect Miss Milo until we see it happen."
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"Then again, that's probably why they're not trying to stop you. as long as you rip a guy's ear off in the Arena and not outside of it, what do they care? People like you make the Arena interesting. If the last Shepard won the first of the Neverending Quell, why wouldn't they think 'she'll be a crowd pleaser so long as she doesn't step out of line?"
She didn't look too pleased about them mentioning Venus though. "That might hit Ellie hard though, the Venus thing."
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After all, the younger self she could easily imagine in Mindy's place would have accepted nothing less than to be treated like an equal, "She'll either figure out what's the truth, or she'll get over it. Right now, we all just need to keep our heads, and not do anything we haven't thought all the way through."
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"Knowing her, she might not care. She kinda worships the woman, so she might just start cursing out the Capitol for doing their shit in the firs place. Glad I didn't jump to conclusions though."
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That would...have to be an understatement. Ellie had a mouth on her like ten truckers combined.
"You say anything to her?"
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She shook her head. "I'm not gonna bother her. She has enough shit to think about."