thecapitol | On Any Other Day

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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.

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Mindy had seen the expose and shrugged. Sure, it was fucked up. Certainly, finding that out would be enough to fear that Shepard might be setting them up at any time. But honestly, the woman she'd met for a short time in the training room didn't seem to quite mesh with the psychopath that she was portrayed as in the video. So why not get her curiosity satiated from the source?

She took a seat across from Shepard, ordering a hot chocolate.

"Got an earful about you yesterday," Mindy said. "I imagine you're getting some flack, or suspicion. Or both."

"Ah, this is nothing. I'm pretty used to seeing my name in mud on the newsvids," She sips at her own drink then sets it down beside its friends, the empty paper cups she's been collecting.

"After the actual mess at Torfan, they rioted outside my hotel," It had been a terrible mess, and she'd gotten a promotion out of it. Hell of a thing, "Most of my detractors like to start off with 'butcher' or something, so I assume you're here to ask questions, right? Shoot."

Edited (sorry, spellin' errors) 2014-04-22 16:02 (UTC)

"Well sure, something like that is bound to get attention. Makes you wonder if they have the right person doing the right things. Granted, in my world, if you do something like that likely you pissed off someone, and they still don't get all the information anyway."

There were always ways to hide the worst of the worst.

"I guess I'm just curious about how much of that shit is true, really."

"Well..."

She has to think about it, and after a moment of staring off to the side, she takes up the shield of cardboard sleeve and coffee-steam as a cover for her delay.

"It's true that I grew up on the streets. Most of the scenes where they showed me actually killing people happened, but I can honestly say I never outright killed a teammate. Got a couple of them killed, pointed my gun at a few, but— the aliens they showed, the guys with four eyes? Batarians. Never had a Batarian on my crew. They never liked me much," she paused for a moment, as if something had just occurred to her, "...and the ship's name is Normandy. I'm not sure how they fucked that one up. Anything specific jump out at you?"

Terezi shows up just as promised, a small stack of papers clutched neatly in her hands. She would have stapled them together or something if she had the thought to find a stapler, but let's be honest. That was really too much trouble.

She approaches Shepard casually and plants herself into the empty seat next to her. There's no way the woman wouldn't see her coming, so Terezi doesn't bother trying to sneak up on her or anything. She'll have to save that for some other time.

"I believe you will find all my forms are in proper order." She sets the stack of papers in Shepard's lap--and really, they look like they're just a bunch of crayon drawings. Most of them are of Terezi, but there's a couple that look a little like Shepard, too. Almost all of the papers are varying themes of dismembered assailants lying scattered around the dramatically posed combatants.

"There's really no reason for you to not hire me, so I just draw a bunch of pictures of me being cool as shit. And some of you. I think you'll appreciate my artistically rendered credentials."

Edited 2014-04-23 04:35 (UTC)

Mindy took a long sip of her hot chocolate eagerly. Beat those Capitol alcoholic drinks easily, that was for sure.

"I figured the name was too dumb to actually be real. No, in the line of duty, casualties are just a fact. I'd be an asshole to try to refute that considering my run in the Games. What caught my attention wasn't any of that political factions and shit either: that's a whole different kind of game I'm happy not to play. It was the whole killing 'a cadre of civilians' thing that stuck out in my mind."

"I'd be lying to you if I said I'd never killed a civilian, but not like that, and not until much later. And as you can see, I don't hold with hiding from the consequences of my actions. I do things for a reason, and it's usually a pretty damn good reason."

She leaned forward slightly, eyes intent, "Or were you referring to Aratoht?"

"I wasn't questioning whether you killed any civilian. Obviously you must have to be able to do the Games. I was just talking about what the expose mentioned, when you joined the Alliance."

The Ara-what now?

Haymitch, being ever so disgustingly familiar with the Capitol, recognizes the park from the video she'd broadcasted. He's met a couple of victors from other worlds already, but this one intrigues him enough that he actually decides to seek her out.

Or maybe he's just taking a stroll though the park. Letting himself air out, so to say.

Either way, he recognizes her as soon as he spots her. She's been on the news, had her own special, and Haymitch has a way of remembering faces and names even if people don't expect him to remember what he was doing a few hours ago.

He plops down beside her without any kind of invitation or introduction. Before, he was used to people just knowing who he was. Now, he's come to the realization that he's been out of the loop long enough for some people to not have the slightest idea of who he is. Whether or not she knows his face is irrelevant to Haymitch at this point.

"Well, you sound pretty terrible."

That surprises her. It had seemed so incidental in the wake of the last half of the exposé that she hadn't considered that someone might remember that poorly-illustrated few jump-cuts. Hell, she hardly remembered...

"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."

"Oh good, blind-girl scribbles, this'll look great on your resumé."

She's being sarcastic, but she's also leafing through them. This one with Shepard apparantly punching...? Yes, she is definitely punching what appears to be all of the blood out of a vague, humanoid figure.

"...This one's pretty good," She's a fan of violence, she is, "Well I'll pass this up the chain of command for review, and get back to you."

Then she sat back, reached for her coffee, and took a sip. Then another, swirling it experimentally with a contrived air of deep thought. This went on for a full sixty seconds, at least.

"The committee is back from review and we'd just like to say, welcome aboard."

"Well, I am the 'Butcher of Universes,' if you haven't heard."

This man wasn't one of the tributes, that was for damn sure. But after her encounter with Joanna Mason at the most recent Victor Gala, she'd made a point to learn the rest of them. So she could remember, after a moment of thought, that this was one Haymitch Abernathy.

He was notorious for being most usually found drunk, hungover, a little of both, or just plain belligerent, qualities that immediately endeared him to Shepard on a fairly basic level. This place could drive anyone to drink, but it was the liars that really started to piss her off after a while.

Case in point: this so-called'exposé.'

"Is that all you wanted to say, or is this just your usual spot?"

"I always start small to get to the big stuff," Mindy said, noting the look on her face. "The expose was pretty much straight up calling you a psychopath. If you could up and kill those people to start, I could believe that. Always good to know where you get to start."

She stirred her drink a little more. "What about baking your 'people' to death?"

"The man in the fire? Foundryworker, never actually met him," Zaeed fucking Massani and his fucking bullshit tactics had made that whole mess a lot more work than it needed to be, "He was working Blue Suns, a mercenary group. My job that day was to put an end to their presence there, specifically their leader, a thug named Vido Santiago. He mistook my unit for a rescue operation. It was actually one of my men that set the fire."

Oh right. That had been mentioned too. Mindy hadn't believed that one too much anyway, specifically because of the shitty editing of having Shepard smile. If it was meant to show she smiled about the death, Mindy was not at all fooled: clearly it was taken out of context.

"Talking about Aratoht, actually."

Ah yes, the big one.

"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?"

Edited 2014-04-23 17:03 (UTC)

With a preface like that, she certainly had Mindy's attention. She ordered up another hot chocolate, and was handed a few scones as well, to keep until she got her beverage. She definitely wanted to hear all of this.

"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?"

"The arena with the jungle, early winter last year, I had a conversation with Katniss Everdeen I had that you might want to look up. But I'll tell you the shorter version."

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."

It was a long story, but one worth listening to. Mindy couldn't help but imagine herself in that situation and, from all Shepard had said, she knew just what decision she would make if she had to do it herself. Of course the Capitol wouldn't let anyone hear that part: didn't it make it juicier to make it seem like Shepard was killing off people indiscriminately? Fuck a backstory, fuck getting the details right, just make her a murderer!

"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."

"The Batarians didn't believe the Reapers were more than some crock I'd made up to justify genocide. They kept on believing I'd only done it for about the same reasons the Capitol is saying I did... until the Reapers showed up on their doorstep."

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?"

"It's always that was with some people: unless you show them in front of their face what the fuck is going on, they're going to believe they're safe and there's no reason to shake things up. It's a dangerous state of mind to be in, more than thinking everything's out to get you, in my opinion."

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?

"Well, if I could've just brainwashed people into things, that would have saved me a ton of trouble."

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."

"Hey, I don't know everyone's abilities! I was watching Sandy in the Arena and one of those troll guys was able to do some mind fuckery on her. How do I know you couldn't do the same thing?"

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?"

Ah yes, Kurloz fucking Makara. As ever.

"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."

Sandy appeared as she usually did, suddenly and surprised as if she hadn't expected to find Shephard where she was. The scrawny girl came out of the cafe looking for the commander after having searched the inside for her.

"Oh...hey."

Shuffling over she waited for permission to take her seat. Part of her wondered if she should be nervous around someone so capable. But that part was smothered by the part of her that had learned how to throw a punch from Shephard.

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On Any Other Day

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and now I shall write a novel for you

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