Double posts for the post god!
Chapter 7.2 (Snip 3)
Let's just say that Liselle was dismayed, and leave it at that.
Aria was her usual nonchalant self, and if it wasn't for her indifferent manner, I would have said that the roles of parent and child had reversed, but alas this is Aria we are talking about here, so she keeps her calm flawlessly while Liselle freaks out. I'd put my shirt back on in case Liselle decided to rip in half or something stupid (I don't know, I'm not qualified for dealing with raging ladies), and it didn't look like she was going to calm down anytime soon.
Vasir definitely wasn't helping things; laughing uproariously as she was.
But Aria is Aria, and all she needed to do was casually glance over at Liselle and say a few words.
"Do we need to talk about that turian again?" Aria questions; anyone else would have given it a sinister emphasis, but Aria simply asks the question plain and simple, and Liselle shuts up immediately, blushing a deeper blue. Turning on her heel, she flees the room in a huff, apparently dismayed that her own mother melded with the guy she was aiming for.
"…Turian?" I inquire curiously, sidling back over to my (and it is 'mine' by now) recliner, sighing in relief as I lay back on the soft leather.
"Just the son of some general." Aria dismisses without a care. "Liselle was very attached; almost like she hadn't heard of casual sex. It was funny for a while."
"Wow." I say, a little surprised.
"What, surprising that she found a man and got clingy?" Aria deadpans (which she's been doing a lot more of lately, I notice).
"No," I reply, slower. "Just a little surprised that her mother is mocking her about it. Mine would have never done that. Species difference?"
"Something like that." Vasir answers, stretching cat-like across the right side of Aria's Couch (yes, it warrants a capital letter). "Because we live so long and are so concerned with reproduction, asari tend to be more… loose with their parenting. It's probably part of the reason you see so many young asari working as strippers; to try to get back at their parents."
"And then they're somehow surprised to learn that their parents did the same thing when they were Maidens." Aria says derisively. "The thought that it could just be a cycle never occurred to them."
"Yeah." I grunt, her word choice bringing back my big problem again. "We'll have to do something about that cycle."
"Hmh." Aria still doesn't sound convinced, though she depresses another button on her panel of joy; luckily it turns out to deploy all of the emergency bulkheads, so as to keep any eavesdroppers out. "I don't fully believe this, evidence or not."
"Well," I sigh, having half-expected this. "At least you're honest. You'll have your proof, though, when the Collectors pop out of the Omega-4 relay."
"Oh, I don't need proof." Aria responds coolly. "If you are wrong, then I still get to the reap the benefits of this relationship with Vasir. I may have my connections, but a Spectre that's willing to work with me is a rare prize, and not one I'm willing to squander."
"Oh, but of course, Aria." I drawl sardonically. "Really, though, I wouldn't have expected anything else."
"Actually," I continue, stroking my beard and looking up at the ceiling as if in thought. "That's probably what I would do if our positions were to be switched."
"It's one thing to say that, and another to think of it on your own." Vasir points out.
"So," I say loudly, clearing my throat. "What are our priorities here?"
It's a bit of a test, that question, for both them and me. To see if they agreed with what I had already planned out, and if they didn't, why. This was my way of seeing if I was capable of planning at their level or not, to see if I was just a source of intelligence or a full player in the Great Game.
"Eden Prime should be priority one." Vasir expresses her opinion, and I quirk an eyebrow at the choice.
"No." Aria disagrees, shaking her head. "We'd need to find the package before we could retrieve him, and even then we need the Cipher."
"But the technological advantages of Prothean weaponry and designs could help turn the tide against the Reapers." Vasir argues.
"Heh." I chuckle, causing both of the asari to look up at my interruption. "That won't help."
"And why not, Nick?" Vasir asks, though her voice isn't one of somebody learning wisdom.
She's made up her mind on Eden Prime, and she'll fight us every step of the way for that to be our target. I'm going to have to defuse this situation carefully; otherwise we could lose her support, which would severely restrict us.
"I'm going to need to explain something here, so please don't interrupt me, okay?" I request, getting up from my recliner to explain my point. I've always argued and ranted better when standing or pacing.
"When I was Home, away from all of this, I studied things. I didn't study psychology or physics or anything you'd find in a normal school, at least during my time, but instead I studied other things, whatever caught my interest. I came up with a saying, and though the terms are probably being used wrongly, I think it fits. It was that 'there are three orders of proficiency; these being Civilian, Professional, and Hobbyist.'
"Now, when I say 'Civilian' I mean somebody who has no experience in the matter, somebody who has never been exposed to it. The 'Professional' relates to somebody studying their subject enough to make a living doing it, whatever it is. Finally, the 'Hobbyist' is somebody who lives and breathes their subject. The Hobbyist is the most complex of these, because it's hard for most people to grasp. A Hobbyist is devoted to their subject, no matter what it is, be it model train sets or nuclear bombs.
"There was a professor at Stanford University back Home by the name of Paul Kruger; he taught nuclear explosion theory for a good thirty years. At one point, there was a scandal in the newspapers when a graduate student revealed he had the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb. When they asked Kruger, he said that if the student didn't know how to build a nuclear bomb, they wouldn't pass his class.
"Now, if that's just a student, imagine what Kruger knew. Granted, technology marches on and all that jazz, but that's the epitome of a Hobbyist. Nuclear explosions were the driving force of his mind, this was a guy once told the President of the United States that he could have created the Panama Canal in a hour with a few shaped nuclear bombs."
"Not that I don't appreciate another chance to hear you chatter," Aria says, her eyes narrowed (presumably) at my inane prattle. "But what does this have to do with our problem?"
"Simple." I reply, pointing my hands towards my chest. "I'm a Hobbyist. My focus, the love of my life, is the study of winning. I'm nowhere near the tactical level of a lieutenant, much less a general, but I study enough tactics to compare them. Similarly, I study whatever I need to so that I can make a list. In this case, the list was on the greatest armies; ever. Specifically, the greatest armies in terms of recruitment, reinforcement, and logistical replenishment, since logistics was the biggest deciding factor."
"What about troop quality? Ship capability? What about Spectres or weapons advancements?" Vasir takes the counterpoint, though I can tell she's only doing it so that she can hear my response. Or that could be my arrogance speaking up again.
"Irrelevant!" I dismiss, flinging an arm to the side to emphasize my point. "Ships and weapons can be captured and reverse engineered, Spectres can't beat whole armies when confronted directly, and troop quality can only go so far because the technology gap is almost never massive enough to dramatically change things; while the Reapers have an undeniable superiority in naval combat, their ground troops primary advantage isn't their combat skills, it's their numbers. The Reapers convert any available biomass into more husks; you saw how they turned a couple turians and krogan into a Brute despite the levo/dextro incompatibility."
"Yes, you managed to suck up to the enemy and discourage us, this is a great help." Aria retorted sarcastically.
"You aren't letting me finish!" I bark, agitated by the constant interruptions. "That's the thing; the Reapers have effectively created a ground force of zombies. Their ground forces, no matter the cybernetics, are effectively zombies, which humans have debated and discussed for years. The primary advantage is that you can use most biomass for it; though apparently it has to be an organic animal of a certain size. Hell, even the Reapers themselves are basically a ground up organic slurry that is stripped of morality and turned into a machine.
"Now, I'm a Hobbyist that studied a lot of various shit so that I could analyze the ways that armies got 'recruits', for lack of a better word. The Reapers file under the third thing item on the list, which was to convert the enemy dead and civilians into your soldiers, because your enemy has to have an enormous kill/death ratio combined with a technological level that renders your dead into mulch, otherwise you could just pull up your casualties and use them again."
"…What's the first item on that list?" Aria asks cautiously, perhaps starting to understand the underlying concept that I'm trying to explain here.
With enough study, with enough applied taxonomy, you can unravel and understand anything.
"The first item on the list was an army that creates, or 'recruits' for familiarity's sake, it's troops out of raw matter, assembling individual protons neutrons and electrons into whatever element that desire to create the perfect troops. An army like that would be the most resource-efficient, and would be capable of creating the most troops out of any other idea except from my banned list."
"Banned list?" Aria asks, curious about what I would deem banned.
"There's a flaw with that-" Vasir says at the exact same time, blending both of their voices together.
Vasir cuts her sentence off and gestures for Aria to go first.
"What do you mean, a banned list? If this is supposed to be a comprehensive study of everything, then why did you create another list?" Aria interrogates, pointing out what she deems to be a flaw.
"Well, I made the banned list so that I wouldn't take forever to make the first list." I shrug, scratching my neck. "The banned list is stuff that would break the game, so to speak; things like using time-travel in a stable time-loop to send your army back in time to help yourself win in the first place, you know, the kind of bullshit that can't happen in real life. Keep in mind, even cloning is on the normal list, because it's possible. The banned list is all the things that I thought were either hilariously improbable or that I knew would take me a decade of study to properly understand. I mean, using time-travel as a method of recruitment, it's not going to happen."
"Alright, then." Aria nods, having found my explanation acceptable. "What's your complaint, Tela?"
"Nick, you can't be serious about this stuff, there's a basic flaw in it." Vasir starts lecturing, her confidant tone giving me the impression of a teacher; meaning she thought she knew for a fact something was wrong. "This model doesn't include a time-frame. The Reapers can convert a corpse into a husk in a few days at the slowest, it takes us eighteen years to replace a war casualty; or three, if you use vorcha as ground troops. Simply put, the use of a nano-forge or a raw matter assembly plant could take a day to make a unit or it could take a year. How many troops how fast is what the point of logistics is."
"You've got a point," I answer, already having a response prepared. "But I thought about that and tried to take it into account. See, the Reapers need a supply of biomass so that they can create their husks; if they allow us to whittle away their ground forces with death of a thousand cuts, then they don't have the corpses of our troops to convert into more of their troops. Similarly, an army could be laying in wait for years, even centuries, if they did a good enough job at keeping you from discovering the troop buildup; just like how you could use diversionary raids and other tricks to keep an enemy occupied. And how about how many factories were there building these troops? The matter-assembly method took first because you could create a factory or a bomb with the same step as you did to make a trooper, whereas the other methods have to used dedicated tools to make their factories."
"I still don't see how this helps us." Aria says, folding her arms. "You're correct in saying that we can't out number the Reapers, but what do you propose that we do, demolish families and society to increase the speed of our recruitment? That's not going to work, unless you – the Geth."
For the first time, I have the rare privilege of seeing Aria forced silent by something. I smile broadly, as Vasir connects my previous rants to this one.
"The Geth took number two on your list, didn't they?" Vasir demands, starting to grin as well.
"Not the Geth specifically, but Von Neumann machines did. They only need materials, and while the right materials can just as hard to acquire as biomass, the primary advantage is the whole 'one robot builds a second, two build two, four build four, and so on. Sixteen 'bots build a factory that builds bots, then it just keeps escalating. Once you get the avalanche started, it's very hard to stop it."
Aria, the only member of the trio not grinning like a madman, merely shakes her head.
"So that's why you were so crazy about the Geth." she says. She tries to make it sound dismissive, but I could swear I detect a hint of …pride? No, maybe it's happiness?
Aria's happy that I had a plan?
No…
Aria's happy that she made a good choice in hiring me.
Well, I reflect as I plop back down in my recliner, I'm happy about that too.
"Now that we've got that sorted out," I draw out, looking both Aria and Vasir in the eye. "What's next?"
Xxxx
I blame the size of this one on Swift; I made it this long so that he took longer to read it.
EDIT: DAMMNIT HE DID IT AGAIN.
...) ?
