#It is so hard to be pure renegade in ME2 because the dialogue choices that tell TIM to fuck all the way off keep switching places

[baejax-the-great]

Nadia Fucking Shepard

Early in ME2, Shepard reflects on changes to her body and situation. Genfic. Read on AO3.

~

Nadia rubbed a thumb over her lip.

All those years, and just like that it was gone. She’d grown used to it, the jagged scar that left her with a permanent almost-sneer. Made her less approachable, less pretty, less small. She’d liked it most when it was angry and red and new, the way the brass’s eyes had stuttered over it before they thought better of asking too many questions of the only person to make it out of Akuze, and she’d turned down the offer of cosmetic surgery to remove it. It was her souvenir from watching fifty soldiers die to a thresher maw and surviving on her own, blood soaking the collar of her under armor and crusting there.

It suited her. She rarely wanted to be approached. Not if they were going to talk about fucking Akuze.

Garrus’s gaze had slipped right over her newly perfect lip as he joked about his own scars that hadn’t even formed yet, his face blown to hell. His armor too, come to think of it, and Cerberus didn’t carry turian spares. She wrote that down on her endless to-do list, her tongue automatically tracing the inner section of her lip, too smooth, slimy even, unfamiliar.

The navy dubbed her “Sole Survivor.” Wrote it right on the damn statue, as if not dying was a skill. She’d almost asked them if they were going to put another statue on Mindoir of a frightened, crying girl with the same inscription.

Almost.

At least most people didn’t fucking ask about Mindoir.

She’d never liked the eyebrow scar as much. Got it pierced just before joining the Alliance to try and cover it up or at least make it look deliberate, the needle pushing through the thick scar tissue so slowly she thought she’d break her teeth clenching them. And then she joined up and the first thing they did was tell her to lose it. She always figured when she washed out it would be the first thing she did—repierce it and cover up the gash from when she was tossed under a bed like a doll a second before her first life ended.

Two perfect eyebrows now on the Alliance’s perfect dead soldier, and not a trace of that week in Mindoir when she got her first kill with a rifle previously only used on empty bottles and varren.

No use staring at it. She trudged to her bed and flopped onto it—too soft, she’d been dead and it was too soft—and opened the shutters to stare into the void of space that she knew better than most.

The joke was on the Alliance. Their sole survivor died with a bunch of others she failed to save. Choked to death on her own exhalations in fucking space. Couldn’t hide from asphyxiation. Or gravity.

Couldn’t stop herself from checking her Cerberus-issued armor four times for leaks even on planet-side missions. She felt Jacob’s eyes drifting over to her in the armory as she ran the diagnostics again and again.

Saved one life, though, before her frozen, dead body hit atmo and plummeted like a shooting star into Alchera. That was more worthy of a statue than digging in and waiting for everyone else around to her die. All she got was a death certificate and a lot of accusations.

And upgrades.

Cerberus upgraded her. Not just her skin, but everything else, too.

Shepard died, alone, out there, but Cerberus put enough tech into her she wasn’t sure she could ever die again. Her skin was thicker than a turian’s leathery ass, and her bones weighed about twice as much as they used to. Didn’t matter when she put on muscle like a pubescent krogan. And there was no way the amp they plugged into the back of her head was legal. If she hadn’t shaved her hair down to a quarter inch, her curls would be standing on end with all the energy thrumming back there.

She slammed the shutter controls more forcefully than she needed to, for the first time feeling trapped on a star ship. Having her own command was freedom, it had always meant freedom, but even if they’d filled her drawers with N7 gear—and she didn’t want to think about how they’d obtained it—this was Cerberus. The Illusive Man paid for her life, for her perfect face that was cracking at the seams, and he believed he owned her.

Nadia had made it pretty fucking clear on Mindoir she was not going to be owned by anyone.

Not the Alliance, who she’d contacted the minute her omnitool connected to the extranet and who took three days to get back to her with a message that boiled down to ‘dying without permission results in expulsion from our ranks.’ The shits. Not the Council, the one whose inaction led to their deaths or the new one who owed their positions to her but couldn’t hide their revulsion at her audacity to visit the very space station they’d dubbed her the hero of.

And definitely not fucking Cerberus.

She took a breath, and as she’d done countless times before when she felt like punching a hole through the hull—and she could do it, too, she felt it, if not with her fist, then definitely with her biotics—she dropped to the deck and started her fifth set of pushups for the day.

Hiding. That was all it had ever been. Bunkering up with an entire collapsed house covering the sound of her breathing or digging in behind enough scrap metal that the acid didn’t have time to burn through. The people who ran were the ones who got picked off first.

Shepard didn’t run away from shit.

Couldn’t even make it into a fucking escape pod.

Her sweat hit the cabin floor.

She would hide again, was already hiding, but this time in plain sight. Sure, the new Normandy was equipped with an AI that watched her every move and was tapped in directly to the Illusive Man, not to mention two loyal biotics and an entire crew of people who signed up for terrorism, but she also had Garrus. And Joker. And she was just getting started.

Colonists were disappearing, and the Illusive Man knew Shepard would jump into action for that, and she knew he knew it. So yeah, for now, she’d take her Cerberus body and throw it at mercs and mechs and the goddam Collectors. And for now, while the Reapers were waiting in dark space, she’d build a team to follow her into hell.

Nadia got off the floor and swiped a towel from her sink. Guess even Cerberus couldn’t think of better internal cooling systems than ejecting water from every pore. For an organization obsessed with the plight of humanity, they sure tested the limits of what could be considered human, but she still panted and sweated with the rest of them.

As she tossed her towel into the hamper, she caught a flash of red behind her green eyes. Someone’s green eyes. She had no idea if they were still the originals or if someone had painstakingly painted new irises from some old photo of her. Moment of humanity over.

They wouldn’t call her the sole survivor ever again. Not because she died, but because this time she’d either crash and burn through the Omega-4 relay with the rest of her crew, or they were all coming back. Every last one.

And, if at the end of this mission the entire crew of friendly terrorists and misfit aliens with nothing to lose didn’t answer to her command and her command alone, Illusive Man be damned… well. Then she really wasn’t Nadia Fucking Shepard anymore.

And none of this really mattered.

[waiting4morning]

MEA  Review: 14 hours in (ish)

No plot or character spoilers, but a bit of a spoiler on a ... easter egg? Cameo maybe. I’ve finished Eos, that should tell you if you feel comfortable reading the below.

First, the good things:

1) The story seems intriguing without the frantic "hurry hurry hurry" aspect that ME2 and ME3 had. I like the more leisurely pace; it feels like ME1. I feel like I can take my time with this game, which is good since I won't have a lot of time to play during weekdays. 2) Hair physics! 3) Gorgeous landscapes and spacescapes. I think my mouth literally dropped open the first time I zoomed into a system and planet. 4) Streamlined resource mining. I like that the Nomad has borrowed the ME2 planet scanning feature. It facilitates the exploring part of the game; I found a couple of interesting features on Eos that I don't think I would have found otherwise. 5) I've said this before, but I love how much it feels like ME1. The little side quests, the feeling of exploration and discovery, the politics going on in the background, this feeling of being suddenly thrust into a larger role you aren't sure you're ready for. Love all of it. 6) Characters. So far, they all seem interesting. 7) Texture/settings, Ryder's skin looks like real skin; rock looks like rock, people and vehicles leave behind footprints in the sand. I like when you go into a habitat, it looks lived in. Stuff is scattered around and some of it moves when you bump into it. 8) Battle physics/tactics, I thought I would get annoyed by the jump jet, but once I got the hang of it, I actually really like it. Each battle feels new and challenging without being overwhelmingly hard. The times I've died I knew it was my fault for charging in without thinking, and not keeping an eye on my shields, not because the game was unfair. 9) I don't know exactly why, but I really really adore the scanning metagame. There's something very satisfying about it, and I like that you can use it for the little side quests on the Nexus. 10) I like that the dialogue choices are streamlined and that it isn't a clear renegade/paragon choice: that you can be professional when the situation calls for it or not and it’s not a “be evil” choice or “be purely angelic” choice. And the not so good things: 1) Even in MEA we can't get away from Liara. >_< 2) CC. Since MEA is the newest Bioware game, I expected it to at least have the versatility of the DAI character creator. Sadly, it does not. It is very limited compared to what we're used to. On the plus side, East Asian faces actually look Asian, but I would have liked to pick different lips and eyebrows. 3) Facial animations. I was all set to defend this before I played the game, but actually I think the worst part isn't that they're bad, it's that the facial animations aren’t as good as the animations we saw Dragon Age Inquisition. They appear stuck in the ME2 level, which is odd to me for a game coming out in 2017. Not ALL the animations are terrible (for some reason Ryder's pained face when she gets a SAM headache stick out to me as particularly nice), but they're noticeable in conversations. Sometimes the eyes seem a little fixed and staring too. 4) I don't know if it's just me, but some of the VAs sound a little wooden. Better direction might have been needed. 5) Some of the animations for moving characters are wonky. I noticed several times NPCs zooming around rooms, trying to get to their fixed paths and talk to Ryder at the same time. Also a few floating body times, mostly when I tried to make Ryder jump up a hill she wouldn't be able to climb. Instead of skidding down the hill like in Dragon Age, she sort of floated awkwardly up to her knees inside the hill. 6) In the Tempest, sometimes the lighting is awkward. It does that weird shiny lips, eyes thing, making Ryder look like she's from a horror movie. When it comes down to it, I think the game could have used another 6 months to a year of polishing (I don't know how long it would take to get animations up to scratch). But, that being said, I don't regret buying it at all and I'm looking forward to the rest of the game. I can't wait to play after I get home from work, and that's a good sign. Also, I don't feel like this is a Bioware issue either. I think this is an EA exec issue who didn't want to compete with a Fall 2017 game lineup and forced a quicker turnaround for a Spring 2017 release.