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attempting-writer · 3 years ago

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Found in the Dog’s Mouth

So, here we are again. Me, with a completely different and completely new story that I may or may not finish or continue, and you, someone who I, somehow, managed to sucker into reading this nonsense.

Anyways.... When you reach into your local Cerberus facility you may find a boy and friend.

A Cerberus base. It just has to be a Cerberus base, because when it comes to barely legal technology and AI development and containment, look to the humans to ignore the rules. Of course, now that there’s a whole, multi-species, multi-billion credit project being set up that’s reliant on a handful of AIs to lead the way, there’s now a need for computers and tech specifically designed to maintain and manage AI and their processes. And now, here Drack is, stalking through a recently plasma-burned hallway, in the middle of a Cerberus lab, trying not to trip on the occasional human carcass strewn across the floor.

He grunts and is glad that they haven’t developed a smell, yet, but that means whoever did it, is still nearby. He stalks through the halls, towards where he assumed was the main lab, judging by where the signs, which were now blasted beyond recognition, were pointed. He pauses as he hears unfamiliar weapon fire coming from one of the halls. He increases his pace taking a position in a slightly curved hallway with a chokepoint on either side. The shots have been growing closer, and from where the sound has been coming, he realizes that the two ends of the hallway are connected to each other, through others. He grunts and curses to himself.

He sees the light of a plasma bolt and turns towards that entrance, his shotgun at the ready. He takes a knee in the hall, bracing for an onslaught, when, he hears a quick tapping approaching him from behind. From behind him, a small body comes sprinting through the hallway. They are glancing back at their pursuers as they enter the hallway, colliding into his back with an audible crack. He turns as they fall to the ground, about to shout something at, what he now sees is a young Quarian, when a bit more than a handful of Geth, in varying states of repair, or more disrepair, flood into the hallway, calling his attention away.

Thirteen shots, and the last Geth hits the ground, unmoving. Drack turns towards what hit him, about to either berate or threaten them, only to see a large crack across the Quarian kid’s visor. His first words to him shifts from some upset rant about watching where he was going to a quickly panicked, “Shit! Hold on!” as he bends down over them and brings up his omni-tool tapping at it a few times before bringing it over their visor.

The kid’s reaction was… less than calm. After laying on the ground, just staring at the crack on their visor while the shooting stopped, seeing the large hand and omni-tool come over their face brought them back to reality. They start lashing out, scooting themselves away and trying to push and slap his hands away. It took a bit of effort, but Drack managed to pin one of their wrists over their opposite shoulder as he brought his omni-tool to their visor, a nozzle-like beam touches the crack with a hiss, slowly closing the crack up.

To Drack’s relief, the kid stops struggling, watching the crack seal away until it looked as if it wasn’t there to begin with. He slowly lifts his arms away, waiting until they look up at him with their softly glowing eyes. Even with that glow, he sees nothing in the kid’s face, in their eyes. Not fear, not hope, not the faintest bit of curiosity, or confusion, just a blank stare. He reaches down and gently helps them to their feet before giving him a once-over. No signs of harm, and his suit, mostly white, with blood on his boots, gloves, and legs, but no noticeable punctures and no thin splashes or sprays of blood, implying that he simply walked through and over the mess of bodies without witnessing them die up close.

He hums thoughtfully and rights himself up with a groan and the audible popping of his old joints. He glances around, regaining his bearings and listening closely for any further threats. As he gives himself the all-clear, he hooks his shotgun to his back and turns, saying, “Stay close, kid. I don’t know if there’s any more of those things, but I’ll find you somewhere safe to hide out until we can get out of here.” He offers a free hand to the little Quarian, who simply stares at it. After what felt like an hour, but was really closer to a few seconds, of awkward silence and motionlessness, Drack leans down and takes the kid’s hand in his before beginning his return trip to his shuttle.

The return to his shuttle is a bit quicker than his trek into the facility, but it is interrupted, near the docking bays, when they come across exactly the computers and hardware Drack is there for, being carted away by some Turian. With a firm and frustrated growl, he picks up his pace and slips his hand out of the kid’s, you can’t be intimidating with a child on your arm. He squares his shoulders, or does as close as a Krogan can, and marches up to her with another growl, continuing in his gruff voice, “Now, where do you think you’re going with that tech?” This causes her pause, but her demeanor remains calm as she turns to face him.

She looks him up and down and tilts her weight casually towards her cart. She glances at the shotgun on his back before starting, “So, all that noise, just a minute ago, was you, huh? I don’t suppose the rest of it was, too?” She gestures vaguely towards the rest of the space station, referring to the humans, strewn about.

Drack turns his head slightly, glancing at the hallway that leads to the rest of the station, before returning his attention to her, replying simply, “Geth… a small group of ‘em. By the looks of it, I’d say that these Cerberus eggheads were trying to experiment on them and accidentally powered them back on,” he pauses and places one of his own hands on the cart, “Now look, AI can be a risky business, and this kind of tech could put a lot of unwanted attention on your head from a lot of unsavory people. What do you say, I do you a favor and lighten some of this load off your hands?”

“Now that is a very tempting offer… Uh…”

“Drack. Clan Nakmor.”

“Vetra,” she briefly gestures to herself, “That’s a tempting offer, Drack, but I’m going to have to decline. Besides, I’d say you have your hands pretty full already,” she leans to the side of his free hand to look behind him a bit, bringing his own attention to the kid, who, while he was talking, managed to slip their hand back into his own, and was staring at it. Drack, as he looks down, sees the kid draw his attention away from their hands, and up to him. He feels the cart being pulled from under his hand as the Turian concludes, “Well, I’m sure you’ve got a lot of time to get the kid back to wherever he belongs, so I’ll let you get back to it.” She quickly pulls the cart away and runs it through a door before he has a chance to stop her. As she exits into the loading bay, she shoots the door’s control panel, causing it to close and lock behind her.

Drack lets out a harrumph and looks around the corridor, as the kid simply stares after her. After glancing at the signs and familiar hall. He sighs and steps to the door’s control panel, “My shuttle is on the other side of this door…” He taps it a few times but shakes his head and leads the kid next to the panel, motioning for him to wait, “Hold here, kid. I’m going to try something.” He walks over to the other side of the hall as the kid idly taps at the control panel. After doing a few stretches, he braces himself up and breaks into a sprint towards the door, fully intending to ram himself straight through it. Once he gets to it, however, his head crashes through nothing as he passes straight through an open door. With his current momentum and disorientation, he continues before tripping on some loose cabling and stumbling right into a stack of crates.

#nakmor drack #vetra nyx #original character #mass effect fanfiction #original quarian character #first meetings #mass effect andromeda fanfiction #found in the dog's mouth #fitdm

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attempting-writer · 3 years ago

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Found in the Dog’s Mouth

Chapter 2! It’s almost like I was working on this one long chapter, but felt that it was too long, and cut it into two separate chapters.... Maybe I did.

[Prev]

He groans, lying on his side among the scattered boxes and what look like welding tools. Glancing back at the door, he sees the kid glance through the loading bay they were in before walking over with something in their hand. They offer it to Drack, and he takes it, looking it over. It was a “PULL” handle with an open end, implying that it was meant to be pulled out of its socket, and a little tag with the text “Emergency Door Release” on it. He stares at it, silently, for a moment before starting to stand up, with a chuckle. After he stands up, he gently pats the top of the Quarian’s visor, saying, “Good job kid. Let’s—Uh… not mention this to anyone, alright?” He grunts as he stretches his back, letting out a relieved groan as a couple of popping sounds shake through him.

He tosses the release handle to the side and offers his hand back to the kid, who takes it right away, this time, and he leads them to his shuttle. With the kid securely seated and strapped into the copilot’s chair, Drack kneels in front of the dashboard and powers up the communicator. After a moment of static and not so much as an idle tone, he turns it off and back on again. After a short hum, he glances at the kid, who is staring, rather intently, at the debris detection system, which was claiming that unidentified space debris was hurtling towards them from behind, despite the radar not showing any activity and the fact that they’re still in a shielded hangar.

Drack double checks the alert and peeks out of the shuttle just as a beam of light, barely skims the side of the shuttle. “Shit!” comes out before he can react in any other way, and the Quarian jumps into action, starting up the shuttle, sealing the hatch, and taking off. Just before they pass through the hangar shields the shuttle is shaken by an abrupt boarding; a Geth machine had managed to jump onto the top of the ship and was climbing to the cockpit, priming another laser to use against the small pilot. Seeing their immediate demise, they shut off the forward thrusters and set the reverse thrusters to full power, throwing the Geth off the shuttle and causing its laser to fire off into the distance, and before the Geth can recover and start priming again, the shuttle is set to full forward thrust, bringing it to violently collide with the Geth’s eye, rendering it useless as it drifts off into space.

Recovering from the laser fire and being treated like a pinball in his own shuttle, Drack slowly makes his way to the Pilot’s seat and takes control. He glances at a rear-view monitor to watch the Geth blindly drift off into the dark reaches of space. Sparing a quick glance at his ever-silent, new passenger, who is currently blankly staring at the dashboard, he clears his throat and at least attempts a conversation, “So… Uh. Got a name there, squirt?” after a moment of silence, “What are, or were, you called?” The Quarian, beside him, seems to hesitate for a moment.

“Called…” they respond, simply. Though it wasn’t said in the form of a question, it’s clear that they didn’t understand the question.

“Yeah kid, what’d they refer to you, as? Either the humans or whoever else? Did they have you do something on there?” Drack starts up again, glad that the kid wasn’t deaf or mute.

Another moment of silence before the kid responds, “Engineer…. Repair and maintenance.”

Drack let out a gravely sigh, thinking that this method of communication would get old quick, especially with the kid’s monotonous voice. He powers through, asking, “Did they have you fixing up the space station? I doubt humans would go out of their way to hire someone of another species for that…”

“Geth,” was their response, which was followed by a suddenly tense silence, or, at least, Drack thought it was tense.

“Did your family teach you how to do that? Repair Geth?” He asks and then clarifies.

“Family…” there they go again with the vague one-word question.

“Yeah kid, family. It’s who you’re raised with, or who you can be most comfortable around… Uh, they’re usually there for you from the beginning? I dunno’ I guess it’s complicated to explain. Do you have anything like that? Did they call you anything?”

“No…. I… am alone.”

“Did you lose them?”

“Destroyed... Betrayed.” They were quick to answer, drawing Drack’s eyes away from the empty space ahead of them as the shuttle continues to fly by.

“Was it Cerberus that did it?”

The kid notices his attention and glances up at him, stating, “Humans,” before returning their attention to the dashboard.

Drack glanced forward, subconsciously accelerating the shuttle to hasten his return and bring the tense flight to a quicker end. Tightly gripping the controls to prevent himself from saying another curse in front of them. To distract himself, he returns to another past topic. “You got a name, though? Does anything come to mind? You can make one up at this point, or if there was someone with a specific name that was significant, that’d work.”

“Significant…” They glance at their hands for a moment, staring at them as if they’ve never seen them before. Drack assumes this is another question, but before he’s able to clarify, they speak up again, saying, “Nazara… Nazara is significant.”

Drack relaxes, the closest he can have to a smile gracing his face, as he confirms, “Alright… Nazara. I’ll call you that, then. My name’s Drack, Nakmor Drack,” He nods, and with a newfound excitement; as if he were a kid that finally got a stray dog to sniff his hand, but he doesn’t show it, because then the dog would run away again, and he’d lose all his progress; he notices that they were coming up to their destination: a series of construction zones in space, where they were building five massive ships, four of relatively equal size and one that was comparable to a Ward of the Citadel.

“Well, Nazara, I’ve just gotta’ report in, and then we’ll see about getting you back to your people,” Drack offers directing his shuttle into one of many hangars. After seeing an inquisitive look from the corner of his eye, before they can ask, he continues, “The Quarian fleet should be within comms range. We could get you ba-”

“No. I will not go there,” Nazara cuts him off looking to the side, towards the shuttle’s hatch, a small window giving them a view of the Nexus being prepped for launch.

Drack looks at them for a few seconds before nodding, confirming, “Alright kid… No sending you to the Quarian fleet.” He pauses, a thought coming to mind as he follows Nazara’s gaze, thinking out loud he says, “You’re an engineer… and at least a half-decent pilot…. Ever thought of going to the Andromeda galaxy? I know someone who might be able to squeeze in another seat. A completely new start in another galaxy.” As he finishes the landing process and powers the shuttle down, Drack casually opens the main door and helps them out of their seat, but before he lets them off, he quietly mumbles, “Best to save the hand-holding thing until after we get to her office. Wouldn’t want to make people think I’m dragging you along, against your will. That’d be a bad look for me.”

Though the stares were expected, Drack felt that it may be a bit much for Nazara to be receiving so many questioning and curious stares as the little Quarian was being led by an old behemoth of a Krogan. After a while, it seemed that Nazara wasn’t troubled by it though, as they unblinkingly stared right back at everyone, switching to meet the eyes of each onlooker that catches their attention. They eventually get to a private office, where Drack, stops in the doorway, with an indisputably confused “Huh?”

There, standing next to his granddaughter, was the same Turian he met before, presenting the same haul that he was after, to said granddaughter. Unfortunately for his pride, the noise he made got their attention. They turn from their conversation and look straight at him. “Oh, hey! Drack right? What a coincidence, seeing you, here. Since you are here, have you met my employer?” the Turian starts, making a show of gesturing with both hands towards Kesh, with a straight face. Kesh on the other hand, doesn’t hold back her laughter as she watches the old Krogan stare at them with an expression that could only be described as “a drowning fish”.

Kesh quickly regains her composure and responds for him, “So you’ve met on the field, then? Save’s me the time of being part of your first meeting. So, how was it?”

Vetra chuckles, answering first, “The big guy tried to intimidate me out of the haul, but it’s hard to do that with a little Quarrian boy in tow. He got here earlier than I expected him to, was finding him a way back to his people that quick?”

At Kesh’s inquisitive look and the mention of the child, Drack snaps out of it, “Oh, speaking of the kid, I had a question. I was wondering if we could get Nazara, here…” He glances behind himself and is stunned to find that there was no Quarrian, making sure to double and triple check that the kid wasn’t messing with him before quickly asking, “Where’d e’ go?”

“You brought him, here?” Vetra couldn’t contain her surprise as she walked past Drack, to the door, to look for any sign of the kid.

“He didn’t exactly have a home to go back to… and how did you know he was a ‘he’?” Drack walks past Vetra, out the door to look out at where Nazara may have gone. Behind them, Kesh groans and rests her hand on her headplate.

Notes:

#mass effect fanfiction #mass effect andromeda fanfiction #original quarian character #original character #found in the dog's mouth #fitdm

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