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Finished ME3, spoilers ahead for some thoughts on the ending

I have to say this but: the Catalyst feels like the crappy robot described in the WBW blogs about AI.

They described an AI designed to make perfect signatures, which ended up, with all resources at its disposal, turning the earth into a huge pile of paper to practice signatures on.

Compare with the Catalyst: an AI designed to make peace between organic and synthetic life forms, which ended up concluding that it’s just best to kill everyone so no war breaks out (since no people can fight the war).

It also reminds me of some (joking) bug fix notes in apps that basically says “we fired the person who found the bugs”.

It’s just very funny in hindsight. Yeah, other AIs who have been “trained” to sort out the sorting algorithm resolved to delete everything in that list because an empty list is sorted. Yet others found out that the way of winning a game is never starting it, thus never losing it. Removing those who’s causing the problem definitely is a resolution to their problems, genocide aspects aside :)

Just for reference, I chose the destroy ending first time around, but that’s more because Astrane promised a certain someone who installed a f*cking bomb In The Name of Safety Measures in her f*cking home that she’d come back. And I figured that backup servers can’t possibly be considered synthetic life forms or how do you tell something with intelligence apart from something without intelligence? There’s a very, very big gray zone in which it’s impossible to tell if something is intelligent or not—hells, even now I think we still don’t have a clear definition of some organics being intelligent or not (cue the mirror test for self-awareness, but is “self-awareness” good enough? My dogs certainly don’t recognize themselves in a mirror, but does that mean they aren’t intelligent?). Since in the ending slides we can see that computer systems are still functioning, I kind of just assumed that they’d have the necessary infrastructure (stored in simple hardware, and proceed following a set of laid-out commands like the assembly robots) to rebuild all the geth and EDI, although due to backup lags they may or may not have memory of what happened. (And this is the interesting part. Do we cheat on a whole race’s collective memory to justify the act of sacrificing them? By saying that “they won’t remember, so it’s okay”?)

My HC and personal interpretation. Could also be affected by the recent years’ progress of AI and training neural networks.

Also, the importance of supervised learning, guys! I can’t believe Leviathans didn’t realize that AI can be SO crappy when they first started with it. Kind of.

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ME3, spoiler for Tuchanka

Just some thoughts that has been living rent free in my brain since I did that part

—

The deployment was a success.

Mordin let out a sigh as the Shroud gave out another large crack. Despite the combined efforts on both sides, it was severely damaged; they had an operational elevator out of pure luck. Of course he can’t take it back down. He looked down out the windows, ready for some final—

“MORDIN!” His comm suddenly bursted back to life. “Shepard?”

The question was drowned in the (un)characteristic shout of the Commander. “JUMP!”

“What? Would—” The Shroud is quite a few hundred meters above ground. Surely he couldn’t survive that fall.

“Trust me, JUMP!”

Another blast punctured a corner of the deployment chamber. Mordin looked back to the elevator. Looked down to the brownish ground of Tuchanka.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, then leapt out of the hole.

Quite the commander, having an old man like him fall to their death.

Only that death didn’t come.

“Wow. That actually worked.” Shepard’s voice.

“You sound astonished, for someone who pushed for the plan.” Liara’s voice.

“All thanks to his ‘creative use of mass effect fields’. Wanna read it some time?”

Mordin opened his eyes. He hope he’s not in afterlife, or the future of the galaxy is extremely dark. Shepard’s face was looking over him, with the other two teammates she brought. “Is he going to be OK? Mordin, you all right?”

“No lasting damage as far as I can tell.” Liara responded as she helped him sit up. “How do you feel, doctor?”

“Good. Alive. Unexpected.” Mordin looked up. They’re right by the bottom of the Shroud. “Mass effect fields as impact buffer. Clever. Not on booklet, though. Did not mean ‘creative’ in this way.”

“Might as well put our biotics to use if we’ve got an asari.” Shepard pulled him up. “Let’s go. Debrief on Normandy and we’ll see what to do next.”

—

Basically, Astrane (my Shep) called everyone back, Garrus found the falling Mordin, Liara and Astrane (sentinel) constructed a buffer field for him to survive the landing, and he was really lucky that no debris hit him. Not sure if this can work canonically, but if mass effect field does alter gravity…why not?



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F!Shep/Garrus, set some time in ME3 but no spoilers (unless you count the fact that you can romance Garrus and he will join your squad), Shep being curious about the turian language

Astrane is just my F!Shep’s name

Sorry again about incorrect tagging, if that happens

—

“Just for the sake of curiosity.” Astrane said as she reached behind her ear. “Indulge me, Garrus.”

She pressed on the tiny, tiny button. Nothing happened at first; but then she heard a sort of scratching sound, with some windy chirp mixed in. There was a subtle tone to it, but she couldn’t discern any meaningful word.

It was as if she’s eavesdropping on some council of birds, held on a cliff near a desert; only weird thing is that the bird sounds very deep compared to more familiar birds—well, she can’t really tell. She’s rarely seen any bird, living in space since 5 and all.

Of course she understood none of it, but strangely, she did recognize the voice. Garrus’ voice. It got preserved quite well by the translator, to the extent that even though she couldn’t possibly tell what he was talking about, she’d still know that it’s him talking.

Garrus cleared his throat, before looking to her again. She pressed on the button to turn the translator back on.

“How was it?”

“Unexpected, but fun.” She crossed her arms, leaning on one of the rails nearby. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just, ahem, some improvised sentence.” Garrus looked nervous.

“As long as it’s not ‘I’m in the middle of some calibrations.’” Astrane rolled her eyes.

There was a long, borderline awkward silence.

“…you didn’t really say that in the turian language just now, did you?”

“No, but I ruined a perfectly good chance to do so.”

But she was already reaching up to her translator. “How do you say that?”

—

He probably said something nice to her. Probably.

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Some Tristian/Baroness moments from HatEoT, after the hide and seek phase

Spoilers ahead! Tagging this time since I’m a tad bit more comfortable with this one

Please don’t roast me as you can see this blog is very new ;-;

—

They camped soon after making sure that they know what happened to each companion. Yleis had a lengthy “conversation” with the book about returning Linzi to a human form, but as far as Tristian knows, nothing came out of it; she didn’t sound exactly discouraged, though, so he suspect it’s just some technical complications—as well as, seeing how life and death in the First World can be easily averted, maybe they just needed a bit more information.

Speaking of life and death…he still couldn’t get what happened a few hours ago out of his mind. He was waiting with Jaethal in the room, not wanting to wander too far, lest the mists took them to another reality and never come back. Then he felt someone familiar approaching, and the next moment Yleis was in his arms, almost knocking him over with the momentum when charging at him.

It seems that his touchy wizard was in need of some physical reassurance. Judging by the voices, she came with Reg and Octavia, both approaching them, but at a much more manageable speed.

“Forgive me.” He heard her voice, right there by his ear, breathing heavily, “I—I was worried.”

“No need to apologize,” He whispered back, holding her close. They let go after a bit, since Jaethal’s gaze became something to worry about, but Yleis was never far from him again. At least, always staying close enough so that they can both reach each other if needed.

She’d hold his hand if she could, but their archenemy’s headquarters really isn’t a good place to do this at.

Back to now. She just sat down by his side, yawning. “It’s been a while since I’m this tired.”

It has been a long day. Both of them used up all of their prepared spells, as did Reg, Octavia and Jubilost with his potions. Tristian chuckles, feeling the weight of her head on his shoulder before wrapping an arm around her waist, pulling her closer. “Can’t sleep?”

“Don’t want to.” She sounds exhausted now. They both fell silent for a few moments.

“Octavia and Reg wanted to take the first watch.” She says after a while. “Can we…stay together for tonight? Share a bedroll, if it’s not too much to ask?”

“You can never ask too much from me.” He turns to press a kiss on her temple. He felt Yleis tense up for a brief moment before relaxing again, still unused to the act of intimacy.

She liked it; she’s just not used to it. After all these years.

Maybe he should’ve done it more often, he made a note to to himself while trying to shake off the uneasy feeling looming behind this note.

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Something from “Betrayer’s Flight”, just uhhh what I imagine to have happened during the confrontation with Tristian.

He tried so hard to remain calm and give answers…

Not sure if I want to tag this aside from it being a spoiler but we’ll see.

—

And he waited. He couldn’t see anymore, so he wasn’t able to check Yleis’s expression. She did not sound exactly happy earlier, but he realized that he didn’t want to think about this.

Stop the train of thought. Let the one who should decide make that decision, and live with it—he could sense Harrim with her party, perhaps in his place, but during the exchange between him and their Baroness, no one else spoke a word.

Tristian held his breath.

Then there were footsteps. Maybe they’re leaving. He should be glad that they didn’t kill him, shouldn’t he? There is no country on Golarion in which a ruler tolerates a traitor.

Then he was pulled into a hug, with a deep sigh, and, “Let’s go home, alright? You must be tired.”

Linzi rolled her eyes. Nok-nok stood there, completely not understanding what’s happening in front of him. Ekun pretended to be occupied with his long bow. Jubilost was jotting down things in his notebook. Harrim sighed heavily.

Yleis didn’t look back at any of them. She just held her wounded priest, close.

“…I will never be able to thank you fully.” He said after a long moment.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, her voice coming from somewhere close to his heart.



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Hullo!

The probability of you following the Twitter link from my Twitter profile to this page is, as of now, the highest, but here are some basic information about this blog and me:

- as I said in the bio, this is a shipping-focused blog where I post snippets of stories (too short to make it to AO3), headcanons and silly little things about my PC, and find some qotd to answer from time to time. I don’t plan on this blog being NSFW, but any such contents will be warned with as many layers as possible, if they happen.

- Ships that may be posted here include: Haurchefant/Warrior of Light (Hermet) from FFXIV, Tristian/Baroness (Yleis) from Pathfinder: Kingmaker, F!Shep/Garrus (Astrane Shepard) from Mass Effect Trilogy, and more on their way! All ships are m/f ships in the foreseeable future. Might have f/f later on.

- Although this account is mainly for shipping, some non-shipping contents from Outer Wilds, Opus Magnum (the game), Stardew Valley (Krobus/the Farmer bff), and all the above mentioned games may appear as well.

If you don’t like any of the above, here is where I kindly suggest that we part ways. If you do, here is where I confess my undying love to you and welcome you into my little world. It may not have a lot of things inside right now, but I hope you can like it.

Enjoy!

(And yes, I am 20+.)