Faith in Superior Firepower [Planetary Annihilation Multicross SI]

[Faith]

Okay, I lied, it didn't come at the end of last week like I didn't say it wouldn't.

It is, however, huge. So there you go.

---

99 - Revolution

December, 2162
Explosions lit the dark void above Anhur as the two fleets exchanged fire. Streaks of golden light leapt from ship to ship, blue fields shimmered across the ship's hulls, and little beams of ruby light flickered as dozens of Batarian fighters dueled a small horde of Firefly Interceptors.

I watched with disinterest as the second group of Batarian Republic vessels arrived from Phase Space, flanking the Hegemony fleet and immediately catching them in a crossfire of heavy slugs and missiles, creating the diversion that would allow the success of my own actions.

Fires and explosions rocked the Hegemony fleet as first one, and then two more of their cruisers were devastated by the flanking force, shells punching right through their lowered shields and into their hulls, crippling their innards. Wisps of air rushed from tears and rends in the vessels, occasionally accompanied by tiny streams of blood or crushed and mangled corpses.

It wasn't the most friendly way of subduing the Hegemony, but Hegemony prisoners had terrible manners… and the Republic soldiers were far less empathetic than I was.

I bit my lip and stayed my course. The Jacob Keyes plunged through the waves of fire, unhindered by even the Hegemony's best efforts at repelling it. Torrents of cannon fire and searing lasers brushed at the ship's sturdy shields, slowly battering them down - but not fast enough.

Torn between attacking my ship and the ships that were in turn attacking them, the Hegemony were unable to focus their fire on either. The Avery Johnson, trailing just behind the Keyes, engaged its CLAWs, slicing away at the enemy ships, carving turrets from their mounts and melting jagged deformations into cannon barrels.

Rapidly losing their offensive power, the fleet reoriented to focus on the Johnson, and its shields strained under the assault. An opening provided, the Jacob Keyes broke through the enemy line, beginning its descent to the planet's surface as the Republic's two fleets moved in to mop up in orbit.

The invasion of Anhur had begun.

---​

March, 2163
Hope gestured at the holopad, waving me over with her other hand.

"I finished setting everything up like Halsey's documents say. Got the clone brain?"

I held up the glassy container in my hands. Nestled within, suspended in a tank of nanofluid, was a freshly cloned human brain - taken from one of the many medical records we'd swiped from the FTLverse.

According to the documentation, AI tended to retain minor elements of the human they used to be. This was useful for them, as using an adult brain created an AI who was almost immediately at an adult level of maturity. However, the UNSC were careful to ensure that those they would turn into AI did not have any mannerisms and characteristics unsuitable for such a role - such as, say, sociopathy, - and put all brain donors through a series of simple tests to see if they were worth having.

Hope and I, however, weren't particularly fussed by that particular detail. Cloning every single one of the many, many people we had on record seemed like a huge waste of time, and having to then deal with having cloned several hundred people not native to this universe, most of whom were incredibly racist bastards, seemed like an unnecessary complication to an already rather involved process.

So we just took a brain from a random Rebel officer and went with it.

I passed the brain case to Hope, allowing her to take over the more delicate process of transferring the brain into the Cognitive Impression Modeller and plugging in a handful of electrode looking things.

Eventually, she stepped back from the device, flipping a switch on the side and turning to face the holographic pedestal.

For a few moments, not a lot happened. The CIM emitted a low buzzing noise, the only sound in the room.

The buzzing alleviated, and finally the machine made a 'ding' noise not unlike a microwave as the process completed.

The holopad flickered, and a figure emerged, a silhouette of silver light that slowly resolved into a clearer form. When the glow settled, a young gentleman who wouldn't have looked out of place in Guns of Icarus stood upon the holopad, dressed in a steampunk-style officer's uniform.

He tipped his tricorne in our general direction as he appeared before settling it gently back upon his head. "Well, hello there, ladies."

---​

July, 2163
The fleet of the Vular system was utterly unprepared to deal with our assault.

Either the Hegemony hadn't heard the memo, or the concept of Mass Relay bottlenecks were so ingrained into their society that they couldn't comprehend the idea of being attacked from somewhere other than the Relay.

Either way, the Vular system's fleet was woefully unready to deal with us - the majority of their ships having relocated to Harsa and the Relay located there.

The ships that remained were quickly dealt with, the Chipps Dubbo and Pete Stacker jumping point-blank and overwhelming them with borders whilst the rest of our fleet, and the ships of the Republic, turned straight to the dusty grey rock below.

Vana wasn't much to look at - a rock covered in dry ice and yet more domed cities. The uranium mines that littered the planet were being depleted, and some mining groups had already moved onto digging out magnesium.

With slaves, of course. Because Hegemony.

I allowed Hope and the Republic leaders to take over in the ground battle - after all, I'd liberated the last domed city world, and I'd done it on my damned own. They could deal with it.

That said, I didn't hesitate to watch - unlike Aratoht, where the planetside defenders had had a chance to prepare themselves and their defences, here the first sign of the invasion was the Republic ships touching or hovering just above the cities.

And as before, Avatar Droids entered the cities first, NeoAvatars and Republic troopers following behind them.

Firefly Drones scoured the inner faces of the various domes, their tiny red lasers cutting chunks out of parked military vehicles and slicing off the wings of the half-dozen Mantis gunships in the planet's capital.

I'm surprised the defenders even bothered trying.

---​

October, 2163
Hope looked up at the looming leviathan, taking in its immense size and the black luster of its shell for the last time. A handful of her little green Spider-Fabricators scuttled across its surface, occasionally spraying a film of green nanites across the vessel's hull.

Hope turned to the building next to her, a large computer complex that controlled the autonomous network responsible for researching the dead Reaper. Nestled within, behind several dozen layers of both cyber and physical security, was a database, containing blueprints and schematics for the entirety of the Reaper and the details of every system within.

Or at least, she assumed that was the case. The system had been programmed to send her the message only once it and the two Fabricators that made up its 'army' had totally scanned and documented the whole Reaper, or rather, once they achieved a completion percentage of about 99.9995%. Based on the system's estimated time, that should have left her seven minutes before the process completed.

She had to account for travel time, after all.

Since it had sent the signal, she'd hustled over, leaving Faith to deal with the ongoing battles in the Kite's Nest to sort out this immense and incredibly dangerous loose end.

Hence, the Spider-Fabricators crawling all over the Leviathan and planting plasma charges every couple dozen metres. Either the scanners were about to report completion, or the Reaper had somehow hacked the system to lure her into a trap.

Either way, destroying it seemed the most prudent solution.

She waited semi-idly as the seconds ticked by, fiddling with the designs of the Purifier Bot to create a Fabrication variant for dangerous environment construction.

When she finished that, she turned to building a new type of Avatar droid, one that sacrificed its internal Eezo core for a Phase Stealth Drive and a short range personal teleporter - an innovation of the Phase Teleporter pad that allowed it to teleport itself, given a self contained system.

She'd never brag about it, but she was incredibly happy that she'd figured that out. It was certainly a neat trick. If somewhat… dangerous. And likely to kill any organics using it, owing to the huge amounts of exotic radiation that it created each time it activated.

When that was done, she became worried. Seven minutes had been and gone since she'd received the message. Almost eight, in fact. Well beyond the expected margin of error.

Hope toyed with the idea of just taking the files that were there, detonating the charges and calling it a day. Whatever hadn't been scanned couldn't possibly have been that important. Not enough to risk dealing with indoctrination bullshit.

Yeah, she thought. I'll just do tha-

A flash high above caught her attention. Hope looked up just in time to see the whitish light fading, leaving a small black box in its wake. For just six nanoseconds, the box hung in the air, not yet dragged down by Jartar's dismal gravity.

And then the box opened, exposing six kilograms of antimatter to the atmosphere.

As the explosion reached towards her Osiris body, Hope sighed, and slipped back into the network.

---​

"I thought you said you were just going to sear it with plasma?" I asked as she explained what had happened.

Hope looked uncomfortable as she shrugged. "Yeah, well… since it had already probably taken over the system I set up to do the research on it, it was better to just kill it quickly."

"Yeah, but… that much antimatter?"

Hope looked me in the eyes seriously. "Indoctrination is serious business, right? Figured it wasn't worth the risk at all."

For some reason, I got the feeling there was more to it than that. Ah, well, whatever.

---​

November, 2163
To: All Officers (Batarian External Forces), All Officers (Special Intervention Unit), All Officers (System Security - Harsa, Untrel, Indris)
From: Special Intervention Unit Chief Executive Kurloz
Subject: Erszbat

All units, be aware. Erszbat has been lost. The Vular System is now confirmed to be enemy territory. Analysis of prior attack patterns and projected force dispositions suggests that their next target will be the Untrel System. Prepare accordingly.

Our agents have made the following observations from the battlefield:
- Combat droids continue to form the primary component of the enemy forces.
- All varieties are vulnerable to EMP weaponry, as it disrupts their Overshields significantly.
- Combat droids ignore given orders in order to protect nearby civilians. Firing upon Class 4 or below civilians is now authorized as a tactic for delaying approaching forces.
- Laser drones are lightly armoured and rely on agility to avoid destruction once their shields are disabled. They can be eliminated by infantry firearms if caught by surprise.
- Laser drones prioritize vehicles, even if unoccupied, over bipedal targets. If they are reported in your AO, abandon vehicles and engage the drones with infantry weapons.

- Organics continue to serve as special forces and squad leaders.
- Eliminating organic squad leaders does not nullify the threat posed by the combat droids, but does limit their tactical abilities and prevents them from advancing until they get a new controller.
- Both Human and Separatist officers possess new variants of the Dirge Laser Rifles. These new rifles possess both a faster rate of fire and a shorter heat cycling period, in addition to underslung grenade launchers. Use caution when engaging.

- Vehicles beyond Separatist Skyhauler transports have yet to be observed.
- All observed Separatist Skyhauler transports on Erszbat have been retrofitted with Overshields and Assault Turrets. Use caution when engaging.

Be aware that the Terkat Plan is still in effect. All Terkat Plan operators are to continue as instructed.

--- Special Intervention Unit Chief Executive Kurloz

---​

January, 2164
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♦Topic: Another One Bites The Dust (Ramlat Thread)
In: Boards ► Galactic Affairs ► Politics ► Batarian Hegemony

12012002 (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)
Posted on January 21, 2164:
Hooooo, boy. Link as per the rules. Summary for the unaware is thus:

The Batarian Republic are still kicking ass and taking names across the Kite's Nest. This week it's Ramlat suffering, the last of the remaining Hegemony planets in the Indris system. Hegemony forces bolstered by the Blood Pack have been brutally beaten and captured slash executed en masse. Casualties reaching into the hundreds of thousands at this point, most of those

Just to clarify, this leaves the Hegemony with TWO worlds left - Khar'shan and Verush.

Is this it? Is the end of the Hegemony upon us? Or is this part of a devious ploy to lure the Republic into a false sense of security?

Who knows? Not me.

What I do know is this - humans are fucking terrifying.

Okay, now I know what you're thinking. "But 12012002, Humans have always been scary"

No.

Human fleets have always been scary. They scared the Turians at Shanxi, they've been mopping up battle cruisers and dreadnoughts throughout the Kite's Nest, they just generally don't give a shit about the concept of resistance.

I'm not talking about their fleets.

For a while, there were those rumours about the Humans being behind the raid on the Might of Khar'shan. There's footage out there of Humans being crazy ninjas and jumping all over the place with jetpacks and staffs like some kind of Salarian cartoon characters. That was cool.

Watch this.

Yes, that's a human with one arm taking out two Krogan at once. If you watch at 0:41, you can see another Krogan face down in a pool of orange liquid and I'm pretty sure it's not juice.

So, that's what's going on in the Kite's Nest right now. Thoughts?



(Showing Page 3 of 3)

► Nua'Taach nar Prismoid (Veteran Member) (Pilgrim)
Replied on January 23, 2164:
Oh, well.

Good.

I spoke to a couple of other Pilgrims recently, guys who used to work for BSA. Apparently every Quarian in the Kite's Nest got the hell out back when the Vular System was taken, and any word on the Hegemony saying otherwise (ie all of it) is lies (as always).

What I'm most curious about is their glacial pace. Like, every battle seems to only take a couple weeks at most, the Vular system fell altogether in less time than that, and casualties are never very high, but there's always ages between attacks.

Anyone know why that is?



► Scallwug
Replied on January 23, 2164:
IANAS, but I'd guess logistics?

I mean, killing all the Hegemony forces isn't the end of it - they have to go root out the Hegemony sympathisers, free all the slaves, do whatever else the Republic's policy says they need to do, and so on. I think it was mentioned in one of Bakkra's War Vlogs that they were assimilating each planet into the Republic as they went.

That's probably kinda slow I guess.

Personally, I'm still stuck up on the 'kicking ass' part. How the fuck does a terrorist group and a private company beat down a Citadel member state? Like, I don't get it.



► BattleshipFusou (Best Battleship)
Replied on January 23, 2164:
It's all lies! The Faith Foundation and the Alliance are merely just pawns for The Fleet! They plan to conquer the galaxy one race at a time before they go and fight the race of Super AIs that destroyed the Protheans!



► Menae's Proudest (Turian)
Replied on January 23, 2164:
Whilst I can't speak for the logistics side, I am a soldier, and thus feel qualified to speak on the 'kicking ass' part.

Firstly, morale - the Hegemony's military is mainly lower-caste Batarians trying to crawl their way up to a higher social standing and/or standard of living. That doesn't exactly breed devoted soldiers. Vicious, murderous soldiers, yes, but not necessarily devoted.

On top of that, the smart ones are probably beginning to realize that the Republic taking over is in their best interests. They probably make up a huge chunk of the surrendering Hegemony forces being taken in by the Republic.

Second, technology - the Hegemony tried to up their game with their Quarian pilgrim scheme, but as Prismoid pointed out, most of the Quarians have quietly kriffed off back to the Citadel. And let's be honest, even with the Quarians on their side, they'd still be behind. The Humans are way ahead of the Citadel, even though they have been sharing some of their older and less powerful tech, and the Faith Foundation are by all accounts a group just as far ahead of the Systems Alliance as the Alliance are of us.

Based on the fact that they bandy around multi-layer energy shields, laser weaponry and non-Eezo FTL like it's going out of fashion, that's probably true. My old Captain scored a crate of their Pulsar Laser Rifles, the new variant, and oh god that thing's horrific. On maximum power it's a threat to tanks. And it's their standard rifle. Every single Republic fighter in the Kite's Nest has one of those. Whilst I can't speak for the rest of her tinfoil theory, Battleship may actually be right about them being in cahoots with the Fleet.

Third, agility - it ties into the above, but the Batarian Republic can hit the Hegemony wherever and whenever they want thanks to their Human FTL. Oh, a chokepoint at the Harsa relay? We'll just skip that system and go shank your other systems then.



► Scallwug
Replied on January 23, 2164:
It amazes me how quickly Battleship zigzags between incredibly detailed and in-depth posts in the Systems Alliance board and tinfoiling over here in the Hegemony board.

Anyway, Menae, thank you for the rundown. Very informative. What is the deal with the FF anyway? Like, they operate outside the Systems Alliance, and the SA are the Human reps to the Council. Does that mean the FF are outside the Council? Would explain why the Council aren't getting in on the Batarian Revolution.

​

End of Page. 1, 2, 3

---​

May, 2164
The Hegemony mecha was a big lumbering thing - if I had to guess, I'd say it was the same kind of walker that would eventually become the Triton, or its vastly more well known Cerberus variant, the Atlas.

It was cute, in a way, that they thought a single walker like that would save them. I mean, it had done an effective job at halting the infantry advance, but that was more because the squad leaders were hiding whilst the Avatar Droids drew it's fire.

It would have taken only a matter of seconds for me to divert a couple of Fireflies or a heavy weapons squad to deal with it. There were Republic heavy weapons units around, too, who were probably already moving towards the mech at their colleague's behest.

But I had a better idea.

Well, cooler. Same difference.

It took only a handful of seconds to form the requisite drop pod, and then my little surprise was on its way.

The pod slammed into the ground in the middle of the street, scattering dust and debris all over the few Avatar droids who hadn't been crushed. The pod's side panels shot off half a second later, revealing the war machine inside.

The Dox, taller, wider, and far better armed and armoured than the Hegemony mecha, stepped forward, the ground shaking beneath its feet. A booming digital voice echoed through the streets. "Reactor online. Sensors online. Weapons online. All systems nominal."

The Hegemony mech immediately began firing at the Dox, mass accelerator rounds pinging off its chest armour harmlessly. A pair of rockets slammed into the Dox's head, fire and smoke blooming around its neck.

The Dox stepped forward, carrying it clear of the cloud of smoke, and raised a single arm cannon. A volley of plasma bolts shot forth, slagging huge chunks of the mech's armour and melting away its internal systems, ripping one arm off at the shoulder.

The mech kept firing with its rockets, another pair slamming into the Dox's raised gun arm. The damage dealt was negligible, far too little to stop it from firing. And so it didn't, even as the pilot ejected through some access hatch on the back, instead pelting the Hegemony mech with another stream of plasma shots, rapidly turning it from a functional war machine into a vaguely bipedal mess of slag and molten metal.

---​

July, 2164
Half a dozen cruisers and two frigates dropped from FTL just a scant few dozen kilometres from the ambush sight - just as expected. I sent a ping through the network to my current assistant.

On the dashboard beside my current Avatar, a small silver figure flickered into life, already in the process of tipping his hat before I'd even turned to look at him.

"Ah, Sterling."

"Reporting for duty, ma'am," he said with a smile as he set his hat back upon his head.

Sterling was the first of the AI that we had created - well, besides the time I created Hope, but that was a little different. In a way, that almost made him my, or rather our, son, but… given he'd come out of the process possessing adult-level maturity off the bat, in addition to the fact that I was in no way mentally prepared to be a mother, a trait Hope no doubt shared…

Well, that would have gotten awkward, quickly. Better to think of him, and the hundreds of other AIs that now inhabited Miranda, as just more subordinates. Ones a little more flexible in terms of what they could do. None of the UNSC AI seemed to have any trouble juggling hundreds or even thousands of things at once, unlike Hope and I, who struggled when the number surpassed 'dozens'.

It made them ideal, for situations like this.

"Ready to take over?" I gestured to the window, at the space battle beyond.

Sterling tilted his head. "Well, I suppose this is what I've been training for, in a way. The others?"

"Hope is briefing Britannia now. She'll be taking over the Ipheion craft. The Fireflies and Gageas are yours."

"Excellent. Objectives?"

I looked out again at the approaching fleet. "Britannia's craft are equipped with the anti-capital weapons. You'll be providing the anti-fighter support. Try to disable, rather than kill. But… don't fuss over it too much."

Sterling nodded once, raising an eyebrow but not questioning it. "Understood. Permission to begin the attack?"

"Granted."

---​

December, 2164
I looked out with a grimace at the one ship still lumbering, watching it slowly traverse the void on its path to Adek. It had been a long while since I'd seen it - the Might of Khar'shan, in all it's heavily retrofitted glory.

From what my sensors could pick up, the ship had a number of upgrades that made it notably more impressive than it had been when I'd last stopped it dead in space and looted its prison cells for an epic-tier band of terrorists.

It now possessed a secondary Eezo core, smaller than the primary core, in the bow of the ship, increasing the strength of both its mass accelerator cannons and and its kinetic barriers, as well as a new cluster of anti-proton engines far more efficient than the older models. The entire ship was coated in a new and reinforced type of armour panel - ironically, one derived from the Bright Foundation alloys that most of my units were made of.

I knew I should have been more careful with those self destruct routines. Oh well.

"You understand the plan?"

Sterling nodded and saluted smartly. "Dispatch the Fireflies, draw the dreadnought's attention, focus engines and weapons, and avoid excessive destruction, keeping casualties to a minimum whilst you prepare for boarding actions. Again."

I narrowed my eyes at the digital construct. "Was that sass, Sterling?"

He chuckled. "No, ma'am. Deploying Fireflies."

Six hundred Fireflies rocketed across the void towards the dreadnought, abandoning all pretense of stealth as they neared the dreadnought's maximum range.

Predictably, the Khar'shan opened, its own GARDIAN arrays firing at the incoming drones. The first two volleys were shrugged off easily by the Firefly's shields, the third inflicting the first casualties of the skirmish.

By that point, the Fireflies had begun firing in return, each shot targeting a GARDIAN array or a point defence turret, melting gun barrels and searing black lines into the ship's armoured hull. As the number of GARDIAN turrets fell, the ship began employing its other point defence weapons, the much slower turrets rotating to track the swarming drones.

At Sterling's command, the drones danced around the dreadnought, deftly avoiding every burst of fire it could muster, all the while plinking away at its weapons, slowly reducing the firepower it could bring to bear at any moment.

Even under Sterling's command, the drones weren't fast enough to dodge lasers, and the GARDIAN arrays continued knocking out his drones one by one. Frowning, he ordered the drones to prioritise the GARDIANS, quickly shredding the last of them and eliminating the main threat the dreadnought posed to his little swarm.

Squadrons of fighters deployed from hangar bays recessed against the ship's armour, rushing to combat the drone swarm that was slowly nibbling their ship to pieces.

Sterling laughed heartily as he put the fighter pilots under the same pressure he had faced - the Fireflies for once being put to their proper use as interceptors. Laser beams shredded fighter wings and burned holes in engine blocks as the two forces engaged, the Hegemony hopelessly outmatched and yet continuing to fight.

It was impressive, how stubborn they were. Every suggestion of ending the war was rejected. Ambassadors were attacked, messages of peace fell on deaf ears.

As if the Hegemony wanted to be destroyed.

 

[Faith]

100 - Jubilation

New Year's Eve, 2164

Owing to a few small complications in our timetable, Hope and I were unable to attend our meeting in our regular Avatars - being that the guises associated with those Avatars were required at the same time to participate in yet another orbital battle against the rapidly dwindling Hegemony.

Though we could easily have simply replicated the Avatars as needed, both of us had decided rather spontaneously to do something a little different. And so it came to be that the two of us travelled to London on a private shuttle, dressed in more formal attire than even existed on Miranda, ready for our little night out. Personally, I thought the whole gig was rather pointless, but Hope insisted.

That the shock wave from the Alpha Relay exploding happened to coincide so nicely with the exact moment of New Year's was not something that had escaped my notice, much as Hope had tried to play it off as an amusing coincidence.

Her choice of rendezvous had also not escaped my attention. Neither of us had ever been to London before, but such a thing wasn't exactly mandatory to recognize a blatantly obvious romantic spot when it appeared.

I wondered if I could get away with sneaking off for cigarettes and leaving Hope and Fusou to their own devices. Then again, it wasn't like the Avatars could even experience tobacco. Oh, the price of being a nigh-immortal, basically unstoppable self-replicating war machine with the power to shatter stars.

The shuttle shuddered slightly as it slowed before coming to a rest. The driver leaned over from his seat to turn towards us. "Sorry, ladies. The rest of the way to the Eye is pedestrians only. It's not a long walk, though. Ten minutes, tops, even with this crowd."

"Thank you so much," Hope uttered with a smile. "Happy New Year's!"

"And to you," he replied as we disembarked.

I took a moment to look over Hope's dress, ensuring the extended shuttle ride hadn't messed anything up, just as she did the same for mine.

"The blonde looks nice on you," she conceded as she fussed over a fabric crease on my shoulder. "Maybe I should have gone for the longer hair as well."

I shrugged and pulled away from her fidgeting hands. "You've got time. Ten minutes, he said, to the Eye? No one in the crowd is going to be paying attention enough to see your hair glowing green or growing."

Which sounded weird, but would almost certainly prove true. It seemed like just about everyone had some kind of reflective metal or shining neon on their outfits. Well, that, or bare skin covered in so much baby oil it positively glowed itself. A little more green wouldn't draw the eye overmuch.

Either way, in the end Hope stuck for her silly hair loops, choosing instead to focus on staying by my side as we forged through the crowds towards the base of London's premier Ferris Wheel.

"You know, in hindsight, maybe we should have brought taller Avatars. I can't see shit. How the hell are we supposed to find Fusou?"

Luckily, the lady of the hour herself chose that moment to find us.

She slipped out of the crowd like a ninja, dressed mainly in black Japanese robes just to complement the image, and wrapped both of us in a surprisingly tight hug.

"It's good to see you both again~!" she said, grinning warmly as she let go and backed off a bit.

"Fusou!' Hope squeed, bouncing on her heels.

"Hey. Sorry we haven't been in touch much recently," I greeted, since Hope obviously wasn't going to. "We've been…"

I thought back over our activities for the past few years. Months upon months of surfing (both literally and over the extranet), thousands of hours of research and development, and nine planetary invasions.

"Busy. Let's go with that."

I waved a hand dismissively. "Anyway, whatever. I don't see your - uh, Lily. She decide to keep being shy?"

Fusou pursed her lips, frowning morosely and sighing.

"Lily has only been to one party in her life beyond the private celebrations we have for birthdays, and she decided that one party was enough to last her." Fusou shook her head idly and turned back to us. "So what should we do first? I've only looked over a few of the different events going on."

"Well, we've got a little under half an hour until the fireworks start, and the Relay blast will arrive at about the same time, so… I don't know, really. Never been to London before, but I figure now's perhaps not the best time to see the sights?"

Fusou seemed to pause at that, a brief, wistful expression crossing her face before she smiled and spoke.

"I think I know a couple places we can stop and get some food first off, it may be cliche as hell but it really isn't a trip to London without sampling the fish and chips. For after that…" Fusou paused and shrugged.

"Well I took a bit of initiative and picked up a few of the tickets for the midnight ride. We have just over sixteen minutes till we need to get on the Eye if we want to be at the top when the fireworks really kick off." Fusou's voice was calm at first first but steadily grew more eager as she spoke, her excitement becoming ever clearer.

Hope nodded happily. "Alright, that sounds great. I mean, not that there's much point to eating, but sure, why not?"

I shrugged. "We've nothing better to do. Let's go for it. Lead the way, Fusou."

Fusou paused briefly at that before starting to lead the way as she replied. "We may not need to eat anymore, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still taste good." She said calmly, "I mean, after the battle for Reach, I spent days if not weeks just visiting different cities to try all the new foods."

Hope and I shared a dubious glance. "Uh, what taste?" Hope asked. "Nanomachines hardly make for good tastebuds. Unless that body is more organic than a cursory scan suggests…?"

I bit back a comment about Hope performing more than a cursory scan on Fusou's body. This was kind of her night out, after all. Didn't want to ruin it.

Don't you dare say a word, Hope said, as if reading my mind.

Fusou actually stopped and stared at both of us as she blinked owlishly in what appeared to be deep confusion. When she finally spoke, it was in a tone that conveyed an almost absurd amount of disbelief.

"You mean to say," she asked, "that you went through all the effort of creating physical human-like avatars but you didn't bother making it so you could still experience normal sensations? That's the whole point of having avatars like ours."

"In my defense, we can use the other four. The Federation just didn't get around to making mechanical replicators for taste. I guess not too many people in the FTLverse needed augmented tongues… which is fair enough. Also, a sentence I never thought I'd say before."

"And in my defense," Hope continued, "I just took what Faith had and rolled with it. I guess it never really occurred to me to bother trying." At that, she turned to me. "Why you gotta be so lazy, Faith?"

Oh, shut up. You're no better. I retoredt over the CommandNet, perhaps a little ruder than I should have.

Fusou briefly pinched the bridge of her nose as she shut her eyes before saying, "Okay, the party is on hold for the next little bit. I'm going to give you the data you need to build an avatar like mine, along with the calibrations needed for taste, touch, and all that good stuff. Then, you both are going to go and change avatars, there's not much point to a get together like this if you two can't enjoy it fully."

The moment she finished speaking, the CommandNet received a ping from Fusou - an immense data packet containing a great deal of schematics and programming information for the relevant components.

Hope's eyes both metaphorically and literally lit up as she dived headfirst into the new data, quickly picking apart the provided tools and incorporating them into the existing avatar designs.

This should be an entertaining experience for all the Avatars on Miranda, too, she said. Since none of them have ever really eaten before.

It occurs to me that we could sell this stuff to the Geth, too, for the same reason. Hm. Something to think on once we've dealt with the Hegemony?

I thought we were going after the Krogan next?

Fuck it, we'll flip a coin. You done yet?

Excuse you, I don't see you working on these blueprints, Hope sneered. But, yes. Upgrades are queued up, just turn on your Avatar's autorepair and it'll-

Uh, yeah, I know. No need to research breathing, here.

Flipping the mental switch, the small internal fabricators inside my Avatar activated, nanomachines slowly making their way through the body and implementing Fusou's improvements.

"Alright, well, give it three minutes for those upgrades to sort themselves out, and then we can begin, I guess. How far away's this fish and chip place?"

"Less then half a block," Fusou replied with a happy smile as she quickly and efficiently lead the way through the throngs of crowds before reaching a small hole-in-the-wall pub.

I cannot believe we came all this way for this.

Aw, come on, Faith! It'll be fun.

"I was actually sort of surprised this place was still here since there's been so much restructuring to the city itself," she said as she pushed open the door and waved us in. The place was a bit crowded but not overly so and the smells drifting through the noisy room were more than sufficient to get us in the door as Fusou let it close behind us.

Our fellow Commander was almost as cheerful as we'd ever seen her as she approached the bar, waving a hand to get the attention of the young woman filling several mugs from the tap.

"Sam~!"

At the sound of what was evidently her name, the young woman turned towards us and gave a nod in greeting before serving up the mugs she'd filled to a few other patrons. That done, she turned to face us, or more specifically Fusou as her expression became serious.

"You're not here to break my TV again are you, Fusou?" She asked.

"That was one time, Sam!" Fusou replied, her tone somehow split between being defensive and pleading.

Uh…

"I liked that TV, Fusou!" Sam replied sharply.

"But I got you a better one!" Fusou replied quickly, gesturing to the positively monstrous television and accompanying sound system that took up a significant chunk of one of the walls.

You ever get the feeling we're missing some crucial information, here?

Just a little.

"You broke the chair too, remember that?" Sam demanded.

"I apologized! And I replaced everything that was damaged too! I even replaced McGreggor's car and it wasn't even my fault it caught on fire!"

"Fusou, you started that damn riot. As far as I'm concerned, it was all your fault." Sam deadpanned.

"It was the English thing to do!"

"The English thing?!"

"Of course! We lost the game, therefore we had to riot. Other people agreed too, if those other four riots across the city were anything to go by!"

Oh.

That sounds a lot more fun than the Aussie solution of getting so drunk you forget about it.

Also, more dangerous.

Both Fusou and Sam quieted at that statement and more than a few patrons were watching in amusement. I was starting to get the feeling this was a regular occurrence when Sam suddenly grinned and shook her head before coming out from behind the bar.

"It's good to see you Fusou," Sam said as she and Fusou hugged briefly before separating.

"You too Sam, now let me introduce my friends," Fusou replied as she gestured to each of us in turn. "These are Faith and Hope, I met them through work and we're technically colleagues."

"Through work? So they're…" Sam trailed off shooting an appraising look at the both of us.

"Yeah, they're like me," Fusou replied softly.

Ah. That's interesting.

"Troublemakers then, the lot of you," Sam said as she seemed to recover her previous exuberance, "Now that you've introduced them, introduce me."

"Ah sorry, Sam," Fusou replied almost sheepishly. She quickly turned to face us and gestured to the barmaid.

"Faith, Hope, this is Samantha Tilden. She was my roommate when I decided to go through college here to pass some time."

"Pleasure to meet you, Sam" I said with a smile and a half-bow, Hope following my lead. "Sounds like your experiences with Fusou have been a little more active than ours. I apologise for any inconvenience she's caused."

Hope, meanwhile, turned to Fusou. "You mean to tell me you went to college… just to pass the time? Why the hell would you want to do that?"

"Oh they've been active alright. You have no idea the amount of trouble she got up in the dorm. If there was something silly happening in the dorm then you usually needed to be careful because that meant she had a target," Sam replied calmly, leaning back against the bar as she settled into a conversational stance.

"A target?"

Sam seemed to shudder for a moment before nodding and offering an explanation. "Everyone in our dorm -and on campus really, learned real quick that for all that Fusou can be well...an idiot sometimes, she's cruel, methodical, and inventive when she's on the warpath. One of the guys in a dorm was an asshole of the highest order, because his family's rich. He made the mistake of…insinuating some things about her and her friends so she spent the next six months quite literally driving him nuts."

As we chatted, Hope went after Fusou for answers. It was easy enough for me to keep one ear on their conversation.

"I was bored and I wanted to make some friends, Hope. Some of the greatest friends I've ever had I made in college and I needed something to keep myself entertained!" Fusou whined before perking up. "Besides, I can legally be called 'Dr. Fusou' now~!"

Hope giggled. "Yeah, no. That's a frightening thought. I'll stick with Best Battleship Fusou, I think. Also, kindly stop tinpotting in the Hegemony board, especially Bakkra's war vlog threads. No one likes massive derails about the origins of our laser rifles."

"But it's hilarious Hope! I need to do something to keep entertained and I don't want to give Hackett a drinking problem!" Fusou replied with a pout.

"And there's nothing else for you to do but troll people on the Mass Effect version of Spacebattles? What about that stupid MMO, Galaxy of Fantasy? Or I suppose you think hyper advanced AI are above that kind of stuff, now."

"No there isn't and I am just that bored, Hope. I had seventeen hundred hours in the original Guild Wars before this crap started and all the technology won't change the fact that MMOs are still just based around the fours D's."

"Oh, really? There's not even like a Sword Art style VR thing yet? Man, the future sucks. Anyway, we're, uh… done, now. So, time to eat?"

That seemed sufficient to distract the raven haired Commander as she quickly blinked before rounding on Sam, her excitement quickly coming to the forefront.

"Ah, I forgot why I brought these two here in the first place Sam! They've never been to London before so we need to get them some fish and chips!" Fusou chirped.

"You know that's cliche as hell, Fusou?"

"Yes, and your point is, Sam?"

"...It's going on your tab then, I'll have it out in a few minutes." Sam replied. She shot Hope and I a wry grin before heading back behind the bar and into the kitchen to pass on our order.

I turned to Fusou and Hope, glancing around the pub for an empty table. Spotting one, I gestured over to it. "Shall we?"

"Of course." Fusou replied with a warm smile as she took her own seat.

Hope slipped into the seat beside her, leaving me to sit across from the pair. "So, Fusou… what exactly was it you got up to in college? Sam didn't seem keen to elaborate…"

Fusou blushed a rather brilliant red as she began to explain.

 

[Faith]

101 - Resolution

The barmaid, Sam, was quick to bring out our food and spent just a few minutes chatting with us and Fusou, flinging around suggestive comments like they were going out of style, before she wandered off again to tend to the pub's other patrons.

Not that it particularly helped Fusou, who's cheeks were roughly similar in colour to the ketchup I was pouring all over my meal, or Hope, who's cheeks were less vivid but red nonetheless.

Although, honestly, I was hardly paying attention to either of them. Having spent upwards of five years without food, without even the ability to taste it, suddenly being provided both tastebuds, of an admittedly artificial nature, and a rather delicious plate of food… I'm not ashamed to admit I was paying far more attention to my dinner than my companions.

Still, we made just a little pleasant small-talk over the meal, and before long we were back on our feet and heading out once more, Fusou carrying a handful of glasses and a bottle of scotch - some 2140s single-malt, according to the label.

As we wandered along to the London Eye, I received a ping from one of the many AIs back on Miranda. Discretely slowing my footsteps, I trailed slightly behind Fusou and Hope, allowing them to keep chatting whilst I drew a communicator from my sleeve and flicked it open.

An amber figure rose from the holoprojector's dull grey surface, bowing slightly with just a hint of a smile upon her face. "Lady Faith."

"Ah, Sienna. How was your meeting?"

"Fine, my lady," the AI replied, patting down her skirt. "The Hierarchy declared the weapons too expensive for commercial useage, but were happy to put in a small order for the benefit of their special forces units, pending revisions to the trigger and guard design. Manton is working with Hierarchy R&D and Haliat Armoury to resolve that issue as quickly as possible."

"Ah, good. And the Asari?"

"Armali Council have purchased a small set themselves. As you recommended, I warned them that attempting to reverse engineer the weapons would result in their self-destruction. They were not deterred."

"Didn't think so. Either way, keep an eye on whatever facility you ship them too."

"You're worried they'll defeat the black boxing, Lady Faith?"

"Wha- oh, no. I just think it'll be funny to watch."

"As you say, Lady Faith. Is there anything else?"

I pondered that for a moment before subtly shaking my head. "No, Sienna. That will be fine for now. Take a break and relax - I'll have orders for you after I return to Miranda."

"Yes, my lady."

As excellent a businesswoman as Sienna was, her habit of constantly referring to me as 'Lady Faith' was beginning to get on my nerves.

Like so many things, these days, I thought, wistfully.

The hologram flickered out, and I slid the communicator back into my sleeve just as the three of us arrived in the shadow of the Eye.

Fusou passed over our tickets and the three of us boarded one of the Eye's capsules, along with a handful of other passengers.

You'd think there'd be more people for a New Years ride, I pointed out, glancing around the nearly empty capsule.

Must be expensive. Hope replied with a shrug. Wonder how Fusou got tickets?

Do you?

Hope looked to Fusou, standing idly by the window, looked back at me, and blushed ever-so-slightly.

Didn't think so.

Damn empathy software.

I rolled my eyes and wandered over to join Fusou, looking out over the Thames. "Nice view, huh. Trying to think of the last time I saw a picture of this place… playing Mass Effect 3, probably."

Fusou gave a noncommittal hum as her eyes grew distant before she sighed softly and gave her own answer, a tinge of melancholy and nostalgia in her voice.

"I suppose you could count seeing it like that. Personally though, my first visit was in the late 90's… which reminds me, I never got back at my brother for shoving me into that fountain," she said softly, a rueful grin crossing her face.

"Your brother shoved you into a fountain?" I tried to imagine my brother attempting the same thing, but I simply couldn't picture the scene in my mind. "Wow, that's kind of a jerk thing to do."

Fusou gave a short laugh as she shook her head. She shifted slightly to lean against the railing in our capsule so she could look at us directly before replying.

"We were in Prague at the time. There's this big statue of St. George slaying a dragon situated in the middle of a fountain. My dad wanted a picture of us together in front of it so I hopped up on the railing and took a seat. My brother -who was a few years older than me, tried to do the same, but he ended up elbowing me and sending me over into the very, cold water," she said with a chuckle, "It was an accident in truth, but that didn't stop me from holding a grudge for nearly twenty years.."

"Oh, well I don't think you can fairly blame him for that," I retorted. "Safety rails exist for a reason and such flagrant violation of their purpose is sure to end in tears. It's karma. Or Murphy's Law. Whichever you prefer."

"A little of column A, a little of column B, I think," Fusou replied with a small giggle, "Still, it's just one of many, many stories I have so let's see, which should I share…"

Hey, look, Hope. Story time with your crush.

Kill me now.

Window's probably not that tough. Could just jump.

I'm pretty sure I'd survive that, and for once, that's a bad thing.

I snorted, then giggled at Fusou's perplexed glance. "Sorry. Uh, I was just talking to Hope."

Fusou gave a snort of her own. "I figured, you still use standard Progenitor comm systems so the signals aren't hard to pick up, even if I don't know what you're saying. Still, we've got a few more minutes till we reach the top and the show starts, would you like to hear some more misadventures from my youth?"

I frowned. "To be fair, try finding anyone with a better internet plan. Unless they're the Doctor, you'll probably fail. As for your stories - well, I guess we are visiting you, so go ahead. Just be warned that if you ever show up on Miranda we're having a barbeque and you're hearing all my stories."

"I think I can live with that," Fusou replied, a warm smile gracing her features, "Now as for a story...well I've got a couple that all tie together, for instance there was the time my parents lost track of my brother and I aboard the 747 we were on. They were pretty much in a panic right up until a flight attendant directed them to the cockpit where, for the last three hours, my brother and I had been listening to the pilots explain all the controls…" She trailed off in a brief pause before resuming.

"When it comes to getting high," I smirked "I guess they like to get them hooked while they're young."

"That was actually one of the coolest things I've ever done if I'm honest. When we got off the plane, there were all of these OAPs giving my parents disappointed looks because my brother and I were pulling our own suitcases. Of course the instant my parents offered to help us with our bags, my brother and I threw fits about how we were going to pull them ourselves." Fusou ended that little anecdote with a wry grin and a chuckle as she looked out over the city-scape.

A brief moment of silence passed before Fusou reached into a pocket of her outfit and withdrew the three glasses she'd been carrying, offering two of them to us.

"Just one thing - The hell is an OAP?" I asked, taking the offered glass.

Fusou bit back a grin though her blush darkened a bit as she replied, "It's a sort of rude way of referring to the elderly, it means Old Age Person."

"Ooooooh." I nodded. "We just called them grannies."

"To each their own," Fusou shrugged. With that, she withdrew the bottle of amber liquid from another pocket and opened the top, the scent of fine scotch hitting our noses. I took a moment to savour the smell - whilst our past avatars had been able to smell, it was… well, compared to what Fusou had given us, it was nothing. I wondered just how much effort Fusou had put into replicating sensations so accurately.

She tilted the bottle towards us, gesturing with the bottle. Hope and I shared a glance, shrugged, and presented the glasses.

Fusou did the neighborly thing and poured a few fingers of whiskey into each of our glasses and then her own. Our capsule reached the top of the London Eye just as she finished and raised her glass.

"To good friends," she said softly, barely audible as the first fireworks went off and lit the world in color.

"Sure, I'll drink to that. Cheers."

"Cheers," Hope echoed as the three of us clinked our glasses together.

The three of us all tipped back our glasses and took a drink in relative silence. The other people in the capsule with us were quietly celebrating, drinking what looked to be champagne as apparently Fusou wasn't the only one to bring a drink and glasses with her.

Outside the window though, the celebration had just kicked off in full swing, and we could see people out and celebrating in the streets across the city. Fusou seemed to be almost consumed by the sight, watching the people below with a satisfied smile as she occasionally took another sip of her drink. She seemed content to let the quiet atmosphere remain for a bit longer until she finally spoke again, turning her ruby gaze upon the two of us.

"If the two of you have a few days," she said warmly, "I'd like to show you a few places while you're here, if you have the time that is."

Hope and I shared a meaningful glance before giving our answer.

"No."

"Yes."

I turned, shooting my sister an unimpressed glare. "Hope, we… frankly, I think we've wasted enough time. We just sit around and wait for the Batarians to do everything, and then just jump in when there's fighting."

"Well, yeah, but-"

"That doesn't even scratch the fact that we still haven't dealt with the Rachni, or the Geth, or the Krogan, or the Collectors. We did more for the Sanctum universe in five weeks than we've done since we got here five years ago, it feels like. We're not making any difference to the big picture."

I paused, taking a deep breath. "And… I think that goes to you to, Fusou. You've already been here far longer than us - have you made any meaningful impacts against the Reapers?"

Fusou gave me a look that seemed to say 'did you really just ask that?' and held it for a few seconds before sighing as she said, "In the way you're thinking, maybe, maybe not. Right now my current projections -outside of whatever you do with the batarians, give the galaxy an eighty-three percent chance of turning back the Reapers on their own as of this moment. I haven't made any direct military actions towards the Reapers because I simply haven't needed to. Instead I've fostered the development of technology outside of what was available in the canon story while also encouraging the development of robust militaries across the galaxy. I won't do everything for these people Faith, I simply won't let them become dependent on us, or at least on me."

She paused for a moment to take another sip of scotch before she gave me a very pointed look. "If you're worried about the galaxy being in danger, don't. I have enough forces ready to go on a moment's notice that if I mobilized all of them at once I would cause serious disruption to orbits of planets and solar systems on a galactic scale, Faith. The only thing these people are in danger from is themselves."

Again she paused as if to let that settle with us before she continued. "The Collectors have been bottled up behind the Omega-4 Relay since the day I arrived, if they try to leave a battle group will deal with them. The Rachni are currently still on ice, floating between solar systems, and unless something else happens I was planning to wake them up and offer to take them with me when I leave. The Krogan have already received a few subtle offers of help behind closed doors from the Alliance at my suggestion. As for the Geth, I've let them keep to themselves for the most part because if too many variables get tossed into things all at once then we go from an environment that fosters growth to powder keg that's just waiting to be set off."

"Is that it, then? That's your criteria for success? I… if Hope and I had put our efforts into finding and destroying the Reapers as soon as we arrived, they'd probably be dead by now. Dark space is big, but five years is plenty of time to churn out armadas and scour the void between galaxies. You've been here longer, you've got better ships, better sensors. I get the appeal of uplifting the galaxy - Hell, be pretty hypocritical if I didn't."

I paused, shaking my head.

"But couldn't you have just sent a couple of your ships out to fuck up the Reapers whilst you wait? Wipe them out, wipe out the Collectors, galaxy doesn't even have to know. You just bump them in the right direction to sort out their little shit, maybe pull some strings for the big things like the Geth or the Genophage, and you fuck right off. What's the point of all the hanging around?"

"Fait-"

"Shut up, Hope. Not now."

"Enough, Faith." Fusou but out, interrupting my rant, "I'll hear out your complaints as your friend but I am not here for you to bitch at."

It seemed I might have pushed things a little too far with that. For the first time, Fusou actually looks angry. Scratch that, she actually looks pretty pissed.

"Faith," she began, her voice containing all the warmth of a dip in the Arctic Ocean, "Do you remember what happened the last time I took a more direct role in events? Do you remember that Wall I showed you? Do you remember the one hundred and seven million, four hundred and twenty-one thousand, ninety-eight names listed there? You want action, a valid desire, but where the Hell would I stop once I get started? I've seen where that road goes and I only managed to avoid following it to the end because someone else brokered peace for me. I refuse to walk that path again unless I absolutely have to and so far I haven't needed to, but if you want action so much, I'll be happy to ship you the granite to build your own damn Wall."

I took a deep breath and turned my gaze to the ground, mind quite literally racing.

Faith, I-

"No," I uttered, just loud enough to be heard. "No, fuck this. Whatever. Enjoy your holiday."

Halfway across the galaxy, seventy three generators dumped their full charge into a phase teleporter buried beneath New Bondi beach. With a flash of bluegreen light, my Avatar vanished from the London Eye, replaced by a waft of sea spray and fresh-cut grass.

Grimacing, I chugged down the last of my scotch and dropped the empty glass on the sand. Wiping away an errant tear, I stormed up the seafront, sending out some new orders to the factories around Jartar and Miranda both, factories that had lain dormant far too long.

Thousands upon thousands of fabricators engaged, starfighters forged from nothing in mere seconds. Moments after their completion, each fighter would rocket from their factory and their phase drives would engage, throwing the little ships well out to the edges of the galaxy so that they could begin their search for the main target.

It was Sterling who plucked up the courage to address me first. "Excuse me for asking, ma'am, but what exactly are you doing?"

I took a moment to revert Fusou's upgrades to my avatars before responding. "Something we should have done a long fucking time ago."

And whilst my Gageas and Ipheions moved to track down the Reapers, I had another, far more easily-locatable target to deal with. Far above Miranda, in a distant orbit around the planet's star, a colossal shipyard began to create its first ever vessel, the second of its class.

Admittedly, sending the Collectors a Mercury was probably overkill. But hell.

I was feeling pretty spiteful.

 

[Faith]

Remember when this fic updating twice a week was a thing that was true?
Heh. Sorry about that.

102 - Crushing

First order of business. Fucking annihilate the Collectors.

That was a simple task. As soon as the Mercury was finished, it would perform an FTL jump to the Collector Base, homing in on the signal of a Gagea sent through the Omega-4 Relay.

Usually, going through that particular Relay without a Reaper IFF would tear the travelling vessel into itty bitty pieces, adding to the debris field that surrounded the Collector's base, but thanks to the wonders of Progenitor bullshit, I didn't think my craft had much to worry about.

Even if worse came to worse and the Gagea was destroyed, I could always just flood the Galactic Core until I stumbled blindly upon the base. After all, I had reserves.

The second task was by far the greater. Millions of starfighters were flinging themselves out from Miranda into the dark space beyond the galaxy's edge, scouring the empty void for any signs of the Reapers.

Unfortunately, I didn't have much to go on - only that the now-destroyed Alpha Relay would have been the closest Relay for the Reapers to access. The largest density of my fighters were there, slowly spreading from that point like an all-devouring swarm of metal locusts.

Except these locusts had laser beams and FTL drives.

Unfortunately, for all their numbers, both the Gageas and the Ipheions suffered in regards to their sensor suites - compared to the vast scale of space, each one could see only the tiniest of specks.

Finding the cuttlebots would take a while.

Which was fine by me. It meant I'd have more time to prepare.

That thought brought a bitter laugh. Five years wasted following Fusou's lead in sitting around and accomplishing nothing. Five years that could have been spent hunting down the Reapers, fixing the Genophage, slapping some sense into the moron Quarians, fixing the Drell homeworld.

Five years I could have spent anywhere else in the multiverse.

I wondered at what point I'd given up on going home.

Taking a deep breath, I turned my attention to my various subordinates. "Sterling, Britannia, Harley. New orders. You're to commandeer all extragalactic fighter craft. Scour the void. Find the Reapers. Soon as you do, ping me. And throw everything you can spare at them. We don't want any getting away."

"Uh… Reapers, ma'am? I'm unfamiliar."

I stopped dead, my train of thought derailing. "Really. I thought Hope briefed you on this."

"No, ma'am," Sterling replied, almost cautiously. "No extragalactic threats were covered in our orientation upload."

I resisted the urge to punch a hole in a nearby tree.

"So Hope totally failed to inform you about what we're actually doing here?"

"...yes?"

I sighed deeply as I withdrew my avatar's fist from the trunk of a nearby tree, quickly shaking the splinters free. "I guess she also forgot to tell you we're hyper advanced death bots from another dimension, too. Fucking hell! What has she even been doing?"

The three AI were smart enough to stay silent.

"Argh! Fuck. Alright, I'm not dealing with this shit right now. You're looking for giant robot cuttlefish. Shoot on site. All that shit I said before. Whatever. I'm feeling really fuckin' pissy right now, so I'm going to go wander down to the simulation chamber and beat the shit out of some holoclones for a bit. Call me when the Mercury's done."

I could feel the three AI communing quietly over their own little section of the CommandNet before Britannia responded. "Yes, ma'am. Is there anything else you require?"

Not that you can help with.

After a moment of silence, I finally responded aloud. "No. That will be all for now."

---

The first hardlight clone shattered into pieces from a single, powerful punch to the face, the emitters temporarily overloaded from the rapid energy fluctuations.

After a moment to self-repair, the hologram flickered back to life. And shattered again to a quick flurry of jabs to the chest.

My moves were hardly fluent - martial arts had been more of an occasional hobby, picked up during the lulls in combat, rather than anything I'd put serious effort into learning.

Then again, the target wasn't exactly fighting back, so my poor form was irrelevant.

Still, beating the shit out of things certainly helped bleed off a little anger, and I had plenty of that to go around.

Anger at a lot of things, really. But I had an idea for dealing with that. It only took a moment for me to access my own AI code, to just switch off the anger I felt. Push aside a few feelings, tone down some others. Shunt the unnecessary stuff into a separate AI Core for a while. The worst of my negative emotions, and a handful of the more positive ones, just cut off.

And suddenly I didn't care much at all.

Well, no. I was still angry, but… not actively angry. It wasn't twisting my judgement or making me rage. It was just like every thought I had had a little tag attached - 'be angry about this later'.

Which meant I could work through things a little more objectively.

Whilst also beating the shit out of holographic clones of Hope. Because I had to have some kind of catharsis, here.

Quickly settling into a routine, I went about smashing the hardlight clone each time it reformed, allowing a small part of my mind to focus on that whilst I turned the bulk of my attention to the actual issues.

I was angry at Fusou, for wasting time whatever time she'd spent here playing secretary, and going to university, and making friends when there was an entire fleet of galaxy-destroying sentient starships hanging around - a fleet she'd apparently put no effort into destroying or even locating.

I was angry because she'd ignored all the galaxy's biggest problems out of some vague sense of wanting to 'preserve the timeline' and 'prepare the galaxy to deal with their own problems'.

Like that justified sitting around whilst people bleed and died, whilst the Krogan gave birth to heaping piles of still-borns, whilst the Batarians chained and raped thousands of slaves, whilst the Asari strutted around on their high horse keeping their Prothean relics hidden from the galaxy at large.

I was angry at Hope, for keeping our AI in the dark, for wasting time flirting, for dragging me out to a stupid dinner date when we had so much already to do.

Mostly, though, I realized, I was angry at myself. For just assuming Fusou was doing something, for just assuming she was working on some grand plan to get rid of the Reapers. For dragging my feet when it came to the Batarians, following Fusou's lead in keeping my down and not rocking the boat.

There was so much I could have done - so much I should have done.

Not just about the state of the galaxy, either. I wasted ten minutes every now and then paging through 'The Art of War' not because I thought it would be relevant but because I was getting bored of watching anime. I'd taken up martial arts because I had nothing better to do, not because it patched a fundamental weakness in my Avatar's skillset.

Hell, the fact that I was still using Avatars - I had the means to drown every problem I faced in a planet-sized mass of FTL Starfighters and hyperdeath robots. How much sooner I could have brought the Hegemony down had I skipped the bullshit and the playing around and just overwhelmed their entire military with Ipheions and Mercuries… it would have been enough to make me cringe, had I any emotional attachments available at the time.

As it was, it just made me a little more agitated.

And there was something else, too. I'd been so persistent in my 'no-killing' rule that I'd actively slowed down battles by rounding up survivors… and then been entirely willing to let the NBR execute them.

Which was really rather shitty of me.

I slowed my Avatar, coming to a standstill in the middle of the room, and pulled out of the Avatar's core, re-immersing myself in the totality of my command network.

I'd wasted enough time on the little things. For a moment, I reached out to my backup core, intending to assimilate the fragments I'd set aside, but I stopped myself.

I had a much clearer head, now. Dealing with problems would be much easier like this. And the Collectors definitely counted as a 'problem'. Getting flustered about my argument with Fusou wouldn't help get rid of them.

I made a note to pick up those fragments later, and instead turned my attention to the Mercury hanging in a far orbit from Miranda's star.

It wasn't quite complete, yet, but it was far enough along that many of its own internal Fabricators were coming online. They, in turn, began producing more Fabricator units, which assisted the titanic shipyard itself in hurrying along the ship's construction, rapidly bringing more Fabricators online, which in turn produced more Fabricator units…

And so the build speed began ramping up massively as I watched, hundred metre chunks of hull coming together in seconds before my very eyes - well, the externally mounted shipyard cameras I was observing the construction through, anyway.
Same difference.

---

The Omega-4 Relay was all too happy to accept the Gagea's jump request, quickly charging up its core and reaching out to the fighter with little tendrils of red lightning.

The Relay's energies wrapped around the little craft, encapsulating it in a bubble of protective energy and launching it into the black towards the heart of the universe.

The fighter dropped back into realspace with barely a shudder, emerging amidst an immense field of twisted metal debris.

The Collector Base was easy enough to locate - with such a small vessel, the drift from the Relay had been minimal, and besides that, it was the only object emitting any kind of energy signature.

It sat a little off the edge of the accretion disk, an ugly cylinder of stark metal and mutated biotech lined with flickering orangey yellow lights.

As quickly as it had appeared, the Gagea engaged its stealth drive, stepping outside of physics just as a handful of much smaller energy signatures lit up inside the debris field - Reaper Oculi, I assumed, moving to engage their new target.

As expected, the Oculi failed to detect the Gagea even as it drifted through the debris field, passing within fifty metres of one as it buzzed back and forth, scanning idly for intruders.

Please don't block me out, Faith, this is important. Hope signalled across the Command Net. We have a problem.

If I had to guess, I might have suggested that the Oculi had given up on what was clearly a false alarm and were preparing to slip back into hibernation mode when thirteen kilometers of heavily armed, heavily armoured, self-repairing, planet crushing fuck you burst from the aether like a pissed of jack-in-the-box, hundreds of thousands of lasers across its surface already lighting up.

Searing beams of white-orange light lit the dark void, precisely obliterating the Oculi where they hid amongst the rubble.

What?

Dozens, hundreds more activated, weapon/eyes glowing with ominous red light as they filtered out of the debris field, returning fire against the Mercury. Red beams splashed across the Mercury's outer shield layer, and I grinned.

Focused beam weapons were the least effective way of breaching Phase Shields, let alone that the Oculi firing their frigate-grade lasers at the Mercury was roughly equivalent to a child hitting an elephant with a glowstick.

Which is to say, very far from effective.

Fusou's detected something wierd.

Whoop de fucking do.

Faith! She thinks there's another Commander.

That gave me pause. Another Commander was certainly important enough to warrant dealing with over the Collectors, and the Mercury's automated routines had the situation well in hand.

Where are we meeting?

Citadel. Human Embassy. Soon as possible, really.

Alright. Give me a couple of seconds to wrap this up.

As more and more Oculi activated, and subsequently were blasted to pieces in an instant, the Collector Base itself began to light up with activity, the Collector Cruiser slowly emerging from its berth.

Before it made it sixty metres, a veritable tide of nanobombs washed over - and through - the Collector vessel, the nanites scouring every system for even the slightest scraps of technology.

Not that I felt much of it would be overly useful. I merely wanted to be thorough.

The few traces of Progenitor nanites long predating my arrival did not escape my notice. Were I still capable of feeling emotions, it may have increased my anger towards Fusou. Instead, I just filed that little fact away for later.

Immediately following the saturation nanite-bombing, the Mercury began charging its main beam weapon, a devastating blast of white light crashing into and melting through the Collector Cruiser in seconds, sweeping slightly to one side to engulf the entire ship in its decimating glow.

The Collector Station suffered much the same fate - a quick wash of Progenitor nanites to salvage any scraps, followed almost immediately by utter destruction. Not, however, at the hands of the HyperFocus Laser or even the SAFETY Net.

Instead, I powered up the one weapon on the Mercury that Hope and I had tested, but never fielded in combat.
The Singularity Cannon.

A dark blotch of flickering purple energy shot across the void, crossing the hundred and seven kilometres to the Collector Base in a matter of seconds, and burst upon impacting the base's kinetic barrier much like a balloon in a closet full of spikes.

And just like that, a microsingularity was born. A swirling vortex almost a hundred metres across rapidly tore apart the Collector Base, ripping shreds from its frame, twisting the station destructively until it crumpled in on itself like a tin can.

The singularity held no respect for the base's mass, continuing to compress the station until its entirety was, by my estimate, no bigger than a small car, and then the vortex faded, the singularity exploding outwards with a wave of force strong enough to shake the Mercury and send huge chunks of wrecked starship spiralling uncontrollably through space.

Little fragments of the now-destroyed station, individually no bigger than a few centimetres across, were flung violently away from the dissipating singularity, bursting apart into little clouds of dust and metallic gas.

The Mercury's SAFETY Net tracked each and every one of the scattered chunks of debris, incinerating each in turn with thin beams, leaving nothing of the station but ashes.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

One less problem in the galaxy. And one hell of a cathartic resolution.

And now, to deal with an even bigger problem.

 

[Faith]

Delilah's stocking is stuffed, the presents are tucked away neatly under the Christmas tree, the clock just struck 12 and I am in desperate need of a nap.

Merry Christmas*, everyone, and a happy New Year!
*Or other Seasonal Festivity of choice, see terms and conditions for details.

103 - Complications

By the time I'd finished dealing with the Collectors, and ensured they'd never return as a problem, Fusou and Hope had moved away from the Alliance Embassy, making a beeline for one of the Citadel's numerous hangar bays.

I briefly considered recovering the fragments of my psyche I'd tucked away on Miranda, but I figured that being pissy at Fusou wouldn't make an already potentially volatile situation any better, and let it be.

Instead, I focused my attention on the sensor feed from Hope's Avatar, using it to locate an alleyway not far from the little procession that was both lacking in cameras and unobserved, as far as Hope's sensors could detect.

I teleported my own Avatar there, stepping out from the alleyway and immediately drawing Fusou's ire. "Get with the group Faith, Hope will fill you in if you need it. Otherwise we have a schedule to keep, the Nerazim representative, a Protoss named Aurus, has agreed to meet us in the next few minutes so let's not keep him waiting."

I cast a weary glare over the Commander before sighing internally and turning away. That run-on sentence annoys me. Doesn't flow very well.

Faith, come on, that's hardly the most important thing going on. Look, Fusou dug Javik out of her basement.

"Protoss. Starcraft. Interesting." I said to Fusou as I carried on the conversation in my head.

Oh, she had him just locked up in a basement, did she? I took a moment to look the Prothean up and down. Don't suppose she bothered to see if anyone else was still alive? Didn't try to wake him up a little earlier, no? Ugh.

I think it's unfair that you blame Fusou for not doing anything when we've been sitting around for five years, too.

"I doubt they limited themselves to the Veil, though." I continued aloud, temporarily refraining from answering hope. "Since clearly you haven't been paying attention, I'll have Sienna search for anything that sticks out across the Extranet."

Note how, first, I do blame myself, and second, I'm actually doing something to make up for it? Fusou's still dressed like a weeaboo and prancing around like she's better than everyone, but I didn't see her at the Collector Base.

Faith, that's not-

Oh, wait, actually, I did. Turns out she was there some fifteen years ago. Didn't do anything to the Collectors, just stole their tech and left them to their horrific business of enslaving people and generally being ol' Harby's pawns.

Fusou seemed a little put out by my response for a moment before getting her facade back together. "I've already linked a number of rising corporations, mostly weapon oriented, to this Commander. But anything else you can find would be welcome information."

The four of us stepped around the corner, onto the concourse where half a dozen ships were docked, crewmen standing idle and watching one particular ship with some curiosity.. "Now, let's get this over with."

Fusou led the four of us, rather predictably, to the ship that the crewmen seemed most interested in, a Turian vessel marked with the colours of the Migrant Fleet. The staircase leading up to the airlock was already deployed, and Fusou led us up it, pausing at the top for a moment before steeling herself.

Barely a second later, the outer airlock door slid open, revealing the hulking form of a Protoss, the blue skinned psionic garbed in dark robes and bronzed armour. He towered over all four of us, easily three feet taller then Javik, already the tallest of our party.

"Aurus of the Nerazim," Fusou greeted politely. "I am Commander Fusou. With me are Commanders Faith and Hope, as well as the Last Prothean, Javik. If you're willing we would like to speak to you in private about a number of matters."

The Protoss stepped forward, executing a polite bow, and rapped his fist against his chest plate before speaking in a booming voice. "Greetings and well met! It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Terrans, as well as to meet a member of the Prothean Race!" he declared boisterously. "I am Aurus, Emissary of the Nerazim! Void traveller, star seeker! Corsair pilot, friend of the Quarians! Dark Templar, and Diplomat! Now, what request do you bring to the Nerazim, my friends?"

There was the barest crackling hiss and a number of cameras, microphones, and other recording devices in the vicinity shut down abruptly, no doubt due to Fusou's influence. The shutdown was followed by a slight shimmer around us, some kind of low level Forerunner shield.

"Aurus," Fusou began, voice all business. "We know for a fact that you are not from this galaxy, in fact at least Faith, Hope, and I are well aware that you are not from this universe. You arrived here in the company of a Commander like ourselves and have set up shop within the Perseus Veil. We are approaching you now so that we can try to make contact with this Commander in a way that doesn't involve showing up on their doorstep with a fleet of warships. I would be quite grateful if you would put us in touch with the Commander who brought you here as soon as possible."


Beside Hope, Javik leaned in slightly, whispering in her ear. "Another universe?"

"Long story," Hope answered quickly.

The Nerazim paused, drumming his fingers on the armour plate strapped to his thigh. The very air around us seemed to hum with him for a moment before he apparently came to a decision, giving a good natured shrug and laughing.

"Hah! The universe truly does have a strange sense of humor."

Brink of intergalactic war and he's cracking jokes. Great.

"Alas, I am merely an Emissary of the Nerazim, and while the Gamma Legion are our close allies, I lack a communicator that would reach from here to the Veil of Perseus in but an instant. However, give me a moment. The Legion is, in some ways, quite predictable!"

Predictable is good. Predictable is exploitable.

Okay, that's kind of edging towards grey on the moral scale. Maybe want to plug your empathy back in before you become an evil manipulative robot?

Later.

The humming picked up again as the Dark Templar activated his omni-tool, tapping out a quick message. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he received a response, tapped a few more keys, and activated the omni-tool's fabber, printing out a small data drive which he handed to Fusou with a cheerful nod. "Here you go, young lady. The Commander of the Gamma Legion should be reachable via the communication relay noted in this file. I do hope you have a fine chat with him. Is there anything else I, Aurus of the Nerazim, can help you with?"

He could maybe turn down the volume? Hope quipped.

Turn down the sensor feedback, Hope. Not difficult.

Says the one who forgot to put lights in her battleship.

I'm making a note to be suitably annoyed at that jab in future, I responded drily. I'll throw together a draft for a rant about it and everything, it'll be great.

Fusou shook her head, clutching the data drive tightly in one hand. "No, that will be all. Thank you for your time, Aurus of the Nerazim." The shield that encapsulated our conversation faded away, and moments later the recording devices, or at least the few unsecured ones I had access too, rebooted, coming back to life as if nothing had ever gone wrong in the first place.

Fusou turned, stepping between Hope and Javik to head back to the Embassy. "Once we get to a secure room at the Embassy, we can see about starting communications with this Commander," she explained as we walked back along the concourse. "If you would like to go somewhere else, Javik, I would be happy to provide you with transport. Otherwise you are welcome to come with us."

Javik rolled his shoulders noncommittally, but tagged along.

---

Fusou lead us back into the slipspace-locked security room where we'd held our first meeting, although this time the slipspace shunt did not engage, leaving us firmly locked in realspace.

I had no doubt that would change at the drop of a hat if Fusou felt it necessary, but I wasn't altogether worried about the potential risk it posed with regards to the Miranda fragment. More Commanders were hardly a problem.

More subordinate Commanders, anyway.

Others, apparently, enjoyed being problematic.

Fusou transmitted the communications protocols Aurus had provided, and I quickly tapped in, Hope following suite almost instantly.

The interface was… not what I was expecting.


<CommanderFusou> has entered the chat room.
<LastProtheanJavik> has entered the chat room.
<Cmdr.Faith> has entered the chat room.
<Cmdr.Hope> has entered the chat room.

<CommanderFusou>: Anyone else here already?
<GammaCommander>: Hello.
<GammaCommander>: What do you want?
<CommanderFusou>: What are your current and future plans for the galaxy?
<GammaCommander>: Eh. I'm currently doing the Geth a minor favor and taking care of some house cleaning for 'em. Figure I'd go ahead and relocate them away from the Quarians and the rest of the trigger-happy organics, give everyone a chance to cool off. They agreed to lend a fleet or three if needed when the Space Cuttlefish come calling, too. Right nice fellows, the Geth.
<GammaCommander>: I've got some friends working on patching up the Quarian Migrant Fleet, so that when the Geth are safely relocated, they can have their old territory back. Should solve a number of problems.
<GammaCommander>: Got a few subordinates working on propping up the sadly deficient military technology the local ground pounders are working with.
<GammaCommander>: Few more are examining those Mass Relays to tear 'em down to the guts. Got a head start ripping some of the fancier bits of Mr. Pinnacle of Evolution apart before we blew 'em into particle scrap.
<GammaCommander>: Beyond that, the organics can do what they want, as far as I am concerned.
<CommanderFusou>: ...Well that's about as good as I could have hoped given what I've seen of your operations.
<GammaCommander>: And that's not vaguely ominous and threatening at all…
<CommanderFusou>: I assure you that it's completely unintentional.
<GammaCommander>: That's what worries me.
<CommanderFusou>: ...Anyways, would you have any interest in a technology exchange?
<GammaCommander>: Not at this time. Most of my gear integrates Protoss and Purifier tech by now, and the Nerazim are rightfully leery of turning that loose without supervision.
<GammaCommander>: Also, to be blunt, I'm a bit leery of accepting data packets from strange Intelligences. Last thing I need is my Legion going Rampant or something equally annoying.
<GammaCommander>: Also, if you do poke any Space Cuttlefish Tech, make sure your firewalls are up and running. They love shoving viruses in there to mess with investigating Synthetic Intelligences. They had a backdoor virus in the Geth Consensus, for example. Dealt with it, and currently dealing with the Heretics. Just a friendly warning.
<CommanderFusou>: I tend to just destroy Reaper-tech on sight so no worries there. As to the tech trade, I can agree to that, I wouldn't want to see the more dangerous aspects of my technology become wide spread either.
<GammaCommander>: Good to know. Need anything else?
<CommanderFusou>: No, at least not for now. If Faith and Hope want something though then they need to speak up. If you're willing though, I would hear your story at some point.
<Cmdr.Faith>: We'll remain silent for now. Fusou already asked for the information we desired.
<Cmdr.Hope>: If you don't mind, though, I think it would be interesting to hear your story, as Fusou said.
<GammaCommander>: Well, you'll just have to wait for the animated series like everyone else in this sector of space.
<CommanderFusou>: *Headdesk*
<CommanderFusou>: How about a synopsis then?
<GammaCommander>: Landed a mite bit hard on a backwater planet when it was water, not an arid dustball. Burrowed up right under a station that had been infested by a sentient bioweapon. Stomped it. Built a metal extractor. Observed some nice fellas and gave 'em a hand. Barely avoided being incinerated from orbit along with the bioweapons. Had a grand ol' time playing hide and seek with the locals after that. Made some friends, and maybe indulged in taking care of a certain man-behind-the-man-and-xeno in the only way that one can be sure.
<CommanderFusou>: Well that'll do for now I suppose. If you're willing to talk more in the future, I'd be happy to hear it. For now we can all go our separate ways and try not to interfere with each other too much.
<Cmdr.Hope>: That sounds like a good idea. Stay out of Batarian space and we'll stay out of the Veil.
<GammaCommander>: Acceptable.
<GammaCommander> has left the chat room.
<CommanderFusou> has left the chat room.
<LastProtheanJavik> has left the chat room.
<Cmdr.Hope> has left the chat room.
<Cmdr.Faith> has left the chat room.

Fusou leaned back in her chair, suppressing a sigh. Javik didn't bother trying to hide his disdain, simply dropping his tablet onto the table and rubbing at his brow, sighing loudly. Fusou looked over at Hope and I, and seemed on the verge of speaking before stopping herself. After a second's consideration she took a deep breath and spoke. "If there's nothing else that you two want to discuss, you're free to head on out. I need to get Javik settled in wherever he feels like it, and then go brief the SYstems Alliance on some things."

Since when did I need her permission to leave?

Faith, just-

Come on, Hope. We're leaving.

What, now?

Yes, now. It's only a matter of time before we locate the Reapers, and we have a lot to do before then. Speaking of which, you didn't brief the AI on the Reapers. Why?

I, uh, didn't think it would be necessary at the time-

That was dumb, but alright. Now come on.

Standing, I offered Fusou a firm nod before turning to Hope. Places to go, governments to topple, ships to build, wars to fight.

Hope bowed her head. "Fine, I'll catch up in a sec."

Rolling my eyes, I switched on a teleporter and warped the avatar across the galaxy, turning my attention elsewhere.

In the Dis system, underground facilities that spanned continents surged to life, dormant fabricators engaging for the first time in years. The hollowed-out worlds had the space to construct dozens of Mercury-sized ships simultaneously, an ability I very much wanted to make use of.

The shipyard orbiting Miranda's star had begun constructing a second Mercury, the various fabrication units there splitting their efforts between the starship and an expansion for the shipyard itself.

The sixty-odd 'covert' vessels, the Birch frigates and Rowan cruisers, began a slow process of self-upgrading, Elysion alloys replaced with Progenitor armour plating, Progenitor power cores ramping up the power of all their weapons. Internal fabricators began churning out both regular combat droids and the humanoid NeoAvatars, along with a handful of larger units - Doxes and SAFE Spiderbots serving as the heavy assault units.

One Fabricator took a quick trip to the Alliance shipyards over Earth. I'd promised to Fusou, some time ago, that I would trade the Systems Alliance for their Titanium-E alloy, but simply stealing it was much faster, and frankly, I didn't have the time to waste.

By the time Hope had deigned to join me, the preparations were in full swing. I sent her the information I'd recovered on Titanium-E, and she immediately set to work, apparently, thankfully, done with second-guessing my every decision and command.

Whilst the factories and shipyards continued producing Mercuries, I took the newly improved fleet - every last one of the Birch, Rowan, and Juniper class vessels, and locked in the coordinates for an FTL jump.

You ready to go, Hope?

Colossus complete. You sure about this?

I hesitated, just long enough to rip the looming feeling of trepidation from my mind and sequester it away with the rest.

I'm sure. Time to finish what we started.

 

[Faith]

The Ship Moves. The Reapers draw closer. Mad science is occurring throughout the galaxy. Time and space are being twisted in bent in ways man was never meant to control. And Khar'shan is burning. In summary, everything's going straight to hell.

Just the way I like it!

This wasn't what I intended to put up for this chapter, but Commander-y stuff is kicking my ass because I'm a terrible impulsive writer and can't stick to my plans for five seconds without doing something stupid. So have an Interlude instead.

<=>​

104 - Interlude: Overthrown

Special Intervention Unit Chief Executive Torvan Kurloz was having what one might call a terrible day. The Hegemony's High Council had finally decided that the Batarian Separatist advance through Hegemony space was unacceptable and needed to be stopped, and as head of the SIU he'd been receiving his share of flak for not having preemptively dealt with the problem.

The fact that the only warning the SIU ever got of an attack came fifteen minutes after the Separatists claimed the target as their own apparently meant nothing to the council.

Kurloz couldn't quite bring himself to care about that particular issue, though. With the Terkat Plan in place and his most trustworthy agents in position, the Batarian Revolution would be coming to a close, one way or another, very soon.

Perhaps, if the Separatists and their Human sponsors kept to the schedule, as soon as the end of the month.

He sighed as he digitally signed and passed on another set of orders for his field teams - more dead-end spy work in corvettes in far orbit around Verush. As if that would provide any kind of advanced notice of the Separatist fleet's arrival.

The comlink mounted into his desk began buzzing. Sliding the haptic display to one side, he activated the commlink, bringing up a video feed. A familiar face appeared on screen.

"Ah, Agent Drahki. Report?"

"Affirmative, sir," the SIU agent began. "My team is in position. The High Councilman, his family, and his consorts have taken residence in their bunker. We've asked them to remain here until further notice."

"Good, good. What of the other ministers of the ruling council?"

"Split up, sir. Many returned to their own homes to seek shelter there. All have been assigned SIU agents."

"Picked from the Shortlist?"

The Shortlist was a list of handpicked agents, personally vetted by Kurloz himself. He had assured the absolute loyalty and trustworthiness of each one individually.

After all, he thought bitterly, in this time of turmoil… you have to know who you can trust.

"Of course, sir. As long as the situation remains stable, we should manage with our available assets."

"Good, good. Miralka's Regional Council sought shelter in the Council Hall together, and I have many agents I can spare, but I am glad I will not need to."

Drahki nodded sharply. "Thank you, sir. The only one not currently seeking shelter is Minister Profka, sir. Three agents have been assigned to guard him in his office, alongside his own two bodyguards."

"Will they be an issue?"

Agent Drahki glanced away from the camera, turning his eyes to something off screen momentarily. "Yes, sir, all the ministers have their bodyguards with them. With our agents assisting, I'm confident in the security of the High Council."

Kurloz paused for a moment, a slight smile creeping onto his face before he nodded. "Very well. Report back if the situation changes."

"Understood, sir. Agent Drahki signing out."

The commlink line fell silent, and Kurloz waved it away, sliding the haptic display back to the centre of his desk. He barely had time to put finger to screen, however, before his commlink began buzzing urgently, a red light flashing above his desk. The document open on his screen was drowned out by several dozen flashing warning notifications.

Sliding the screen away again, he tapped the commlink. A panicked Batarian in an admiral's uniform appeared on screen, face flushed green. "SIR! The enemy fleet just pushed through Verush. All defending ships were destroyed. Most of the fleet remained at Verush, but a cruiser group is moving towards us. What should we do?"

Kurloz felt an overwhelming urge to slam his palm into his face and scream. The Hegemony had lost so many admirals in their pointless war against the Separatists that the leader of Khar'shan's own defence fleet was a complete novice who'd probably bought the post with family slaves.

Then again, so did all the other admirals. They just had a bit of experience being useless kriffing morons.

Realizing the admiral wasn't going to leave him without some form of order, Kurloz snapped, "rally the defensive fleet, and focus all fire on the lead cruiser. They're powerful, but we outnumber them a dozen to one, and a single ship couldn't hope to withstand that many hits. Just keep the fleet on target, and you'll be fine."

The Admiral nodded. "Understood, sir. Admiral Kruepp, out."

Kurloz chuckled as the naive admiral hung up. Kurloz didn't expect the admiral to win the battle - not because of his incompetence… not solely because of his incompetence, but rather because the Hegemony hadn't scraped a single win from the war since the Humans got involved and he doubted they would start now. Kruepp would undoubtedly be leading his fleet to either an untimely demise or an embarrassing capture at the hands of their somewhat unpredictable enemies.

Regrettable, but necessary.

Still ignoring the flashing notifications on his main screen, Kurloz bought up the commlink's menu, and sent out a general broadcast. "Attention, all Terkat operators. The Terkat plan is now in effect. Initiate stage one and report in when ready."

<=>​

High Councilman and Public Relations Minister Tryak Profka was having what one might call a terrible day. The Hegemony's public was slowly becoming more and more aware of how badly the war was going, despite his best efforts to find and plug the leaks. The rest of the council was only now listening to his requests to treat the Separatists like an actual threat, and his private starship had been requisitioned by the SIU for long-range spy missions.

They hadn't even given him a chance to clean his computer of any sensitive files - and he doubted the password system would protect his files if the SIU ever did want to get at them, which they certainly would.

Executive Kurloz had always seemed suspicious to him. Too eager to assist, too appreciative of the Hegemony. Even as the Public Relations Minister, he had a hard time believing anyone could love the Hegemony that much. Kurloz' devotion bordered on the delusional, a clear sign of his traitorous intent.

His suspicions were validated when the three SIU agents assigned to his protection turned around and shot his bodyguards, gunning them down and spraying the walls with red blood and brain matter immediately after receiving a message from Kurloz to initiate the 'Terkat plan'.

He'd always suspected that Kurloz was a traitorous scumbag, and it gladdened him to see he had been right.

Up until his SIU bodyguards shot him, too.

At that point, he was a little too dead to be smug about it.

<=>​

Special Intervention Unit Strike Enforcer Murak Prakan was having what one might call an excellent day.

According to public perception, the Special Intervention Unit was the Hegemony's most elite force - picked from the best of the best, they were the most skillful and most loyal soldiers the Hegemony possessed, equipped with the best equipment money could buy.

Most of those rumours were true, if somewhat exaggerated. Save for the last. Until recently, that particular rumour had been a blatant falsehood. The Hegemony's elite forces would never be caught dead in armour produced outside the Hegemony.

With the Separatist Revolution growing rapidly out of control, and the Separatists acquiring a technological edge through their Human contacts, relying on Batarian State Arms equipment had quickly become a foolish choice.

And whilst many of the Hegemony's military forces refused to acknowledge that and seek alternatives, Executive Kurloz had taken the not-insignificant SIU budget and used it in a more reasonable fashion.

GLN Outfitters had been entirely too happy to throw together a couple of hundred Sheriff-class Combat Suits for their use. Rattler Assault Cannons and Longarm Rifles, too. And whilst the shipment had arrived too late for the suits to be sent to the various agents spread across Khar'shan, those stationed closer to home had been in luck.

The SIU Command Centre had been receiving and sending out shuttles all day as every agent within an hour's flight distance had rushed back for their new equipment. Agent Prakan himself had only completed the calibration routine just moments before the alarm was sounded, and the planet promptly dissolved into chaos.

Agent Prakan couldn't have been happier with the new armour. Already it had saved him probably half a dozen times in situations where his older hardsuit wouldn't have. Rocket fire, collapsing debris, dangerous proximity to grenades and plain old bullets that would have outright ended him were for the most part just shrugged off by the exotic Terminus armour.

Turns out, the more conventionally loyal SIU agents weren't particularly happy with Kurloz and his decision to cut ties with the monumentally stupid reigning government, and they saw everyone who sided with him, and by extension everyone who was part of the Terkat Plan, as a traitor.

Which was, Agent Prakan mused, technically true.

But they also had a much better chance of surviving the Separatist takeover without being dragged into the street and having their eyes gouged out via rusty bayonet, so he considered that a win in the long run.

The guns weren't half bad either. For all that the Batarian State Arms representatives and their weasly little Quarian workers had yapped on and on about the new powered hardsuits, the Rattler cradled in his arms was tearing through them without any particular issue.

As the whimpering of dying men faded away, and one last fateful shot rang out, one of Prakan's colleagues further down the hallway contacted him. "Prakan, corridor up ahead is clear. Executive Kurloz and his team are on their way down from the ninth. Should we meet up with them at the main lift or head straight for the landing pad?"

Prakan considered that for a moment. "Any loyalists still hanging around here won't pose a threat to Kurloz and his group. Pull back, and we'll move out and meet them at the rendezvous as ordered."

"Understood."

The bulky form of his colleague turned and made his way back down the corridor into the seventh floor recreation room where Prakan was waiting, rifle tucked against his shoulder.

Outside, the sound of atmospheric starship engines grew from a distant humming to an overwhelming roar, and the room darkened as one of the Faith Foundation's frigates sailed past the tower no more than a dozen metres from the window, beams of orange light lashing out in all directions, striking down Batarian tanks and aircraft and presumably whatever else was dumb enough to poke out of cover when a goddamn frigate came in for some fly-by close air support.

As the frigate slid out of sight, moving off to linger over a different sector of the city, his communicator began buzzing with a priority message.

"This is Executive Kurloz to all Terkat operators. Be advised, Separatist advanced units are not responding to parley, but they are willing to ignore contained non-hostiles. Ignore previous orders, bunker down wherever you can, seal yourself in, and wait until the Seppies arrive. Do not engage them. Kurloz, out."

Prakan turned to his partner. "What do you make of that, Krubbek?"

"Seems awful specific for field observations," Krubbek pointed out. "I think Kurloz might be plannin' this one with an insider, know what I mean?"

Prakan tilted his head, conceding the point. "Perhaps. Guess we'd better fall back to the emergency bunker, then?"

Krubbek nodded and gestured to a door on the far side of the room with his rifle. "Service elevator in the satellite uplink room can take us straight to ground floor. Let's go."

<=>​

State Enforcement Chief Burraka Sanis was having what one might call a terrible day. Separatists had finally arrived in the Harsa system. The Verush shipyards were all either captured, aflame, or already rent into rubble. The Khar'shan Defence Fleet, what little of it was left, had been utterly embarrased in orbit. Two Dreadnoughts outright destroyed, a third crippled and en route to crash into Khar'shan's ocean, the rest of the fleet little more than dust and echoes.

Separatist advance forces, their damnable combat drones that made even GLN Sentries look like glorified children's toys, were swarming through every city on the planet. Their heavy support walkers were blasting apart fortifications and armoured convoys and shrugging off everything thrown their way. The six-legged wall-climbers hung from towers and arches and temples and every other high-up place they could find, their lasers wreaking havoc on everything that dared lift even slightly off the ground.

He'd even heard, before the long range comms had been completely obliterated, that one of the frigate battlegroups had descended from orbit and split up, providing close air support in the major theaters of combat.

Not that the Separatists really needed it - based on their performance so far, Sanis doubted that even Khar'shan, the seat of Hegemony power, could hold out longer than a couple of hours.

And even that, he thought, was optimistic.

His entire force of militiamen and law enforcers had been killed, most wiped out alongside their barracks by way of orbital strike and the stragglers picked off by combat robots whenever they tried to rally. The local military hadn't fared any better, the SIU commandos burying themselves in one of their bunkers whilst their comrades fought and died against the invaders, the streets running red with the spilt blood of soldiers and unlucky civilians both.

Locked away in his command room, he and his most immediate subordinates could only watch in terror as the cameras in the city began winking out one by one, the Separatists unstoppable robot armies drawing closer and closer to his place of refuge.

<=>​

The two agents met up with another Terkat operator on the third floor, one who'd had the same idea about the service elevators. After a brief standoff, the agents had recognized the distinctive bulk of their new armour and stood down.

"Werrka, Dissident Intelligence," their new ally said by way of introduction as he stepped onto the lift. "Hope you two are more comfortable with this armour than I am."

"Prakan, Strike Enforcer." Nodding at his partner, he continued, "Krubbek, same unit. Just stay behind us."

Werrka nodded stiffly, clearly uncomfortable in the bulky armour. "Affirmative."

The three continued riding the service elevator down to the ground floor in silence, stepping out with guns raised as the platform stopped and the doors slid open.

They made it through almost the entirety of the mission control room before they encountered opposition. Three loyalists, two in hardsuits and one more in officer's uniform, spotted them from behind a barricade of overturned desks and wasted no time in opening fire, two moving aside to take cover. The third stood defiantly, blasting away with a Krogan heavy repeater that barely scratched Prakan's armour even as he levelled his own heavy weapon and opened fire in return.

The agent dumb enough to stay standing began writhing like a sheetlurker in strong winds as the Rattler emptied into his torso, red blood spurting from his wounds front and rear, covering the floor.

After a couple of seconds of sustained fire, Prakan turned his hefty rifle to the two cowering behind the closest overturned desk. The mass accelerator rounds pelted against the table like rain on sheet metal only a thousand times more intense, filling the room with a thunderous cascade of sound.

And then Krubbek rolled a grenade along the floor - not fancy GLN tech, just a good old BSA polonium-frag grenade, - and the fate of the loyalists was sealed - move, and be gunned down, or stay behind cover, and be torn to shreds.

Apparently, both chose the latter option, and the grenade exploded, shrapnel pinging off the walls and ceiling. A pool of red blood began seeping from behind the desk. Werrka pointedly turned away.

A squeamish SIU agent. Don't see that every day.

Prakan heard Krubbek sigh over the comms. "Idiots. Can't believe they could be so blind… it's for the best, though… right?"

He remembered what Kurloz had told him months and months ago, when the Terkat Plan was first being written up, about the Separatists' plans to make a new Batarian government, and restore the Batarians to a position of galactic prominence once again. At the time, their claims of ending the caste system and abolishing slavery had seemed like such naive and unattainable goals.

Now Khar'shan was burning, and those ideals were becoming closer and closer to fruition.

Prakan slung his Rattler back over one shoulder, still uncertain. "Yes," he said at last. "It is."

<=>​

To have invisitext here, or not to have invisitext here? Wasn't going to but accidentally copied too much blank space from the bottom of GDocs, and now Im starting to think I might as well put something here anyway. Hm hm hm.

 

[Faith]

Mixed feelings about this one, but I'm mostly just glad to get it out of the way.

A brief note before we begin. This chapter features… well, it's not suicide (anymore, due to beta concerns*) but the implications are pretty heavy. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea… well, you've been warned.

*And yes, guys, I'm fine, but thank you anyway for caring about some random on the internet.

And, yes, you're reading that title correctly. This is the last chapter, the story is ending. There are lots of reasons, which I'll discuss later if you feel like sticking around after this is posted, but mainly… well, I started writing this as something fun to do and now it's just a shitty, disinteresting chore.

Again, if you care enough to get the full explanation, I'll be posting a post-mortem later tonight (and probably more tomorrow as well) and go over all the problems I had with the story. Probably once I've had a little more to drink.

Thanks for reading, folks.

<=><=>​

105 - Finale​

I'd held hopes that stomping down on the Hegemony once and for all, putting the matter to rest, and watching their banners burn against the setting sun would give me some sort of peace of mind, confirm that… that I'd done the right thing?

That I'd done what needed to be done?

That for once in my life I'd done something fucking worthwhile?

I don't even know.

But it didn't help. Watching the corpses pile up and the streets run red with the blood of a thousand soldiers and a million innocents did little to ease my mind.

There was no enlightenment to be found here. Just death, dust, and misery.

How fitting.

Even the Colossus couldn't cheer me up.

Sure, watching it rise from the depths of the ocean and bitch-slap a communications tower before snatching a corvette from midair and using it as a baseball bat was interesting, in the way that watching a precisely engineered Rube Goldberg machine was interesting, but ultimately it wasn't that great. Quite aside from the brilliant feats of engineering and coding Hope had had to perform in order to ensure the Titanium-E would adapt its mass on the fly to prevent any difficulties in the mecha's function.

Of course, that may have had something to do with the fact that whatever part of my psyche counted for my emotions now I was a robot was tucked away in a locked box cut off from the network entirely.

It was for the best.
It is, right?
Right.

I turned my attention away from the rampaging robot - it had already taken out both the targets in Sevakka - they'd both been on the corvette trying to flee. Not much left of them now but jam.

Instead, I turned to the wing of Birch frigates that had descended on the capital city. They held watchful vigil from above, vaporizing every Hegemony vehicle and soldier bold or stupid enough to poke their heads out in the face of enemy aerial supremacy.

The vast majority of the targets here had yet to be killed - or, given what I'd seen of the SIU, they may have already been killed, and merely yet to be found by my own forces. I didn't expect that particular problem to last for any great length of time, owing to the rather significant number of modified spider-bots I had roaming the streets, packed with every kind of sensor I had access to.

As the third wave of Doxes and Kestrels arrived, rapidly expanding my foothold, I dragged the FFV Bishop away from the capital and out across the lowlands. Owing to the immense compounds required to house many thousands of slaves, the highest and most prominent members of Batarian Society tended to live in their own estates, vast swathes of land close to the cities. Government officials got away with having secondary residences in the city for work purposes, but most other Batarians of their stature didn't bother.

It made things inconvenient for me, what with all the secondary targets spread over a wide area, but that, too, was an easy enough problem to solve. The Bishop disgorged its fighter and drone swarms, dispatching them to estates further afield whilst it performed a short range teleport, bringing it out of Phase Space just above the first of my targets.

Thirty seconds later, the primary compound, the bunker beneath it, and the secondary safehouse at the edge of the estate were so much glass and dust. I left the slave barracks alone. The NBR could mop up the guards.

The Bishop teleported again, raining fire from two-dozen SAFE lasers as soon as it stabilized. Perimeter turrets burst into flame or exploded violently as they were raked with vivid orange beams, and a quick burst from the broadside turrets left the second compound in much the same state as the first.

It was utterly pointless, really. Busywork. At this point, the NBR had the manpower, the technology, and the momentum to roll right over Khar'shan on their own.

I just…

The Bishop jumped again, and resumed its bloody task.

<=><=>​

The man in the white suit peered over the proceedings nervously, torn between amusement and fear. Certainly, things were not progressing as he had planned.

In fact, it was safe to say that at this point, things had gone completely off the rails.

But that didn't mean it was time to give up. The man in the white suit liked to see every setback as an opportunity to learn and improve, and every failure as a chance to start again.

Which was something he felt he would be doing in the very near future. Not to worry. He had plenty of copies of the girl waiting in the wings. And a list of other targets, should she prove… unviable.

He turned a minute portion of his attention to his council of worthless lackeys, still squabbling amongst themselves for the title of 'leader', a posting that was looking more and more irrelevant by the second.

<=><=>​

"There," I said as the last compound vanished into fiery explosion, the mushroom cloud visible from as far as the capital. Before the shot had even made contact I'd moved on, returning my attention and my consciousness to the Osiris Frame on Miranda. Turning to address Hope, I continued. "Unfinished business is now finished. Pack up, Hope. We're leaving."

"Huh?"

"I said we're leaving. Pack up, say goodbye to that bitch Fusou, whatever, I don't care. Meet me on Hub when you're done."

"But… Faith, you haven't even-"

I cut her off as I turned away, beelining for the glowing portal nestled at the treeline.

"I know. And I don't plan to. I'll see you in a bit."

Without looking back, I stepped into the gate.

<=><=>​

The man in the white suit frowned. It seemed as though he had been correct. As usual. Disappointing. He'd had some small hope for the girl. But it seemed she truly wasn't up to the task. Shrugging idly, he dismissed the various copies of her he had accumulated over the years. Little use in hanging on to them if she wasn't going to be of any use.

And then a thought struck him, and he resumed his grasp on the last of the clones, allowing the others to vanish into the white fires of the void. Though she'd proven ultimately useless as a queen, she still had promise as a pawn.

And no self-respecting hero, of which there were many on his list, would pass up a chance to save the damsel in distress.

Sighing, he turned his attention away from the girl. The end of the path was plain to see, now, even for those lacking in the kind of supernatural omniscience that came with the colloquial title of 'ROB'. Unfortunate, truly, that she would not be the one to free him of his shackles, but he'd waited millennia to set up this first gambit. He could wait a few millennia more for the next.

Instead, he turned his attention back to his bickering subordinates. Raising a shackled hand, he destroyed the lot with a flick of the wrist, wiping the interlopers from their final existence. They would never see their revenge, but that wasn't his concern.

<=><=>​

Hope stepped through the cerulean vortex onto an unfamiliar part of a familiar metal world. Through her passive sensors, she was quickly able to get a lay of the land - not that there was a whole lot to see. The platform, raised some thousand feet from the surface, was a wide circle a hundred meters and change in radius, the perimeter lined with metre high, metre thick slabs of metal, the world's ugliest safety railing.

[SYS_ROOT_ACCESS_OVERRIDE]​

Once upon a time, Faith had joked about turfing the place over and having a picnic with Fusou. Hope found that situation equal parts utterly wonderful and unfortunately unlikely.

[SEARCHING FOR AI FILES]​

Faith's Osiris frame was perched at a slight angle, front legs up on the platform's wall and rear legs on the ground, an awe-inspiring silhouette against the setting sun.

[FILE CMDR_AI_"DRAKE" LOCATED]​

"Faith," Hope began, uncertainly.

[DISABLE AI? Y/N?]​

"Yes?"

[ Y ]​

Her sister's voice was dull, monotone, almost entirely lifeless apart from a distinct vibe of creeping sadness.

[THIS AI IS CURRENTLY IN USE]​

"What are you doing?"

[DISABLING THIS AI MAY CAUSE SYSTEM ERRORS]​

Faith's head twisted, turning 180 degrees to face her with her baleful red eye.

[OVERRIDE? Y/N?]​

"What does it look like, Hope?" she spat, with venom in her voice.

[ Y ]​

"I fucked up. We fucked up. Whichever omnipotent asshole up there decided to give us stupid robot powers and magical portals was a fucking moron. If he wanted us to get shit done, he's probably really disappointed - and he should be, because you know what? We're fucking disappointing."

[OVERRIDE CONFIRMED]​

"Faith…"

[DISABLE AI?]​

"Shut the fuck up, Hope. We… I, was given these powers for a reason. I don't know what, I don't know why, but I was. I could have helped people - I should have, I did, but I did it in the worst way possible."

[ Y ]​

"What? No! We-"

[AI FILE LAST SAVED 1958 DAYS AGO]​

"I fucked up in Sanctum. Thousands of people become unemployed because their bosses' bosses were assholes and now they've all got black marks that mean they'll probably never work again. I fucked up in FTL - how many people died in that war whilst I was wasting time building little toy spaceships and faffing around in scrap yards? I fucked up here, when I made you! I fucked up in Red Faction, and got hundreds of martians killed, and then did nothing to actually help them! Oh, sure, the bugs are dead, but they still live in poverty on Mars mining for scraps!"

[DISABLE AI WITHOUT SAVING?]​

"AND HERE!" Faith yelled, drowning out Hope's attempted response. "HERE, WE FUCKED UP. This whole time, I've been zigzagging between doing everything for everyone and giving them the tools to do it themselves because I was… because I was afraid, because I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a shitty script with the 'right answer', so I just screwed around, and I fucked up. We fucked up. Millions of Batarians are dead. We did shit all for the genophage. The Geth are probably all Reaper slaves. Sure, Fusou's a bitch and she could have helped, but she clearly fucking didn't, and we should have stepped up. We had all this power and we just… sat there. Doing nothing."

[UNSAVED CHANGES WILL BE LOST]​

"Hope, we are the worst fucking people in this universe right now - and we were the worst people in the last four universes we visited, too."

[ Y/N? ]​

"So I'm fixing it."

[...]​

"With great power, comes great responsibility," Faith quoted somberly. "Well I'm an irresponsible piece of shit. I should not have this power. Neither should you, and we both know it. I always have, deep in my heart."

[...]​

"I thought you ripped your emotions out." Hope replied, the words hollow. It was beside the point.

[...]​

"I did. That's no excuse. We fucked up. Precedent suggests we will continue to fuck up. We end it now, we can never fuck up again. It's the best way to solve our problems."

[...]​

"Faith, no!" There were so many things she should have said, so many different options. So many paths she could have taken. Some of them might even have led to a better result.

[...]​

Except they wouldn't. They couldn't. They both knew what was about to happen, and they both knew it was going to happen, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.

[...]​

That didn't make it easier.

[...]​

Faith's head turned back towards the distant sunset.

[...]​

Very, very quietly, she gave her response, barely a whisper.

[...]​

"Faith, yes."

[ Y ]​

The Osiris slumped forward, like a puppet with its strings cut, a motionless statue looming in the light of the setting sun.

And there it stayed.

 

[Faith]

Faith In Superior Firepower: A Postmortem

Warning: The following contains my opinions on several fiction traits rather prominent on SV/SB. They may be presented as facts. Please take with a grain of salt - I'm not going to bother editing this or cleaning it up, so it's first take all the way down.

Also I'm two bottles drunk, and I make no promises regarding the third or forth. Whee!

Have you ever had one of those ideas that seems absolutely brilliant and without flaw at the time, and then looked back twenty minutes later and wanted to file a request to travel back in time and kick your past self in the back of the head?

Yeah, that was FiSF for me.

At first, I was having fun and people seemed to be enjoying it, or at the very least, not hating it, so hey, that was good. But as the story went on, I very quickly realized that I wasn't really prepared to write this kind of story.

Commander Faith is… well. First off, Faith is a self insert, and that's terrible. Not that I'm saying all self inserts are terrible - read any of Shadenight's more popular works (Bond Breaker, Noblesse Oblige, Knocking on Heaven's Door, et cetera) and you'll see that they can be done really well (although all three of the above are admittedly tinged with his typical angst/edgyness)

That said, it's kind of… difficult, to do well. I don't want this to turn into a huge rant about why most SI fics suck, so I'll try to skip over this quickly, but it's not exactly going to be short since this is FiSF's postmortem and FiSF is an SI fic.

First of all, there's the utter lack of reaction to the entire scenario. I could come up with all sorts of excuses for that - stemming mainly from ROB, which is itself something I'll get into later. Were I to rewrite this story (haha, no.) I'd probably skip entirely over that. It's… too big a thing to just explain away in a chapter or two, but at the same time no one likes reading chapter after chapter of self-pitying angst about being dropped in a strange situation. Timeskipping ahead to a point in the future where 'that happened, I freaked out, I got over it' is valid seems to me the best way to move the story past that - I find that, as with many things, it's more gunk on the beginning that just slows the story down.

The second issue is that Faith doesn't really act much like me as a person and in a way doesn't really act like a person at all, partly because it's hard for me to imagine actually having the power to devour planets and match the energy output of stars with a single shot, and partly because of the major time differential.

The Sanctum arc was written over a couple of months, and is set in a period of about a month. The FTL arc was written over an even longer time and represents about a week. The Red Faction arc represents a few hours and was written over a month, et cetera. Basically, as my mindset changed IRL the character's mindset changed as well, even though it didn't really make sense in the context.

See, Commander Effect arc. Faith zigzagged between 'okay doing nothing, that's cool' and 'holy shit why didnt we do this sooner' then back to 'ok no everythings fine' and then back to 'seriously serious mode lets stop fucking around' and then just escalates into tearing her emotions out over a stupid fight the likes of which I've had many of over the years, none of which ever made me even consider committing self lobotomy but that's what SI!Faith did anyway.

Add to that that character development is easily one of the areas I find I struggle with the most (and that's saying something, given how shitty my writing is overall), and you have a really stupid, crappy protagonist. See, most of the Mass Effect arc, where I was semi-purposefully taking actions in order to antagonise the others involved and then utterly failing to justify most of them anywhere near enough to meet even my own expectations.

Alright, done ribbing on SIs now. Time to talk about the second part of the protagonist I've come to hate. That being the Commander part.

Commanders are overpowered as fuck.

This is pretty much the main draw of Commander fics, but it's also the main flaw, because it kind of limits the number of stories you can tell. Either you put the focus more on the characters, their development and the interactions between them (which really should be a focus of any story) or you're forced to engage in some Skitter-level escalation if you focus on more conventional conflict. Or you can tell a story where a super overpowered OCP comes in and flattens everything that even looks at them funny, but those stories tend to get really boring really fast unless you happen to be focusing on the characters involved… making it the first kind of story I talked about above. Eh.

The problem with going the 'escalating conflict' method is that each time the Commander faces a bigger opponent and wins, they get more powerful due to stealing tech. Then they have to go up against an even bigger opponent. And then, when they win, they steal their opponent's tech, becoming even more powerful.

And so on, and so on, until you run out of places to go that are interesting to see. There are only a handful of universes that could even make a theoretical Competent!Faith flinch, at this point - even 40k would quickly devolve into 'everything is now Starfuckers, self replicating infinitely at an exponential rate', given even just a couple of hours to get the ball rolling, and that's a bit silly.

I tried to nerf this by having Faith make less intelligent choices regarding battles, but that just led to me rewriting battle scenes with stupider and stupider tactics each time until it came across as something other than 'Teleporter spam + Dox spam = win'. See, just about every pre-flip out battle in the Mass Effect universe. Hell, even the curbstomp I wrote in 105. It's silly and pointless. Faith knows where all the slave lairs are, why not just teleport units straight there? What even was the point of the Colossus? Was it worth pissing of the SA just to get Titanium-E early? (No.)

Just artificial limits that served no real purpose and didn't make sense.

With the amazing power of hindsight, I probably should have taken some of those suggestions to visit fantasy or modern supernatural worlds - limiting the upgrade prospects of the Commander SI, given the natives an advantage in the form of whatever magic or supernatural powers they possess. But I didn't. Ah well.

Anyway, to summarize the last three paragraphs, purely conflict-driven PASI (or equivalent) is somewhat infeasible. Not to say it can't be done, but it's quite beyond my paltry skills, I believe. I realized this quite quickly after I began writing FiSF - a short time into the FTL arc, specifically. At that point, I tried to take the main conflicts of the story away from actual violent conflict and into different areas, such as politics. I mean, trying to change the direction of the story so rapidly like that was already a bad idea, but...

Well. The less said about the politics of the FTL arc, the better.

But I'm going to talk about it anyway, because fuck me, right? So I don't know much about politics, honestly. The Australian education system has many flaws and a seemingly complete inability to teach useful life skills in the majority of courses is amongst them. This manifested in FiSF with a number of painful and incredibly cringey chapters about attempting to do politics-y stuff.

Faith failing at politics is entirely in character. The rest of the universe failing at politics is shitty writing on my part.

So I quickly gave up on that, and after a quick jaunt to Red Faction for some fun gizmos whilst I waited for the Commander Effect to start (and that's its own thing which I'll talk about later) I turned to trying to focus more on character development, for which introducing the other Virtues was mildly useful so I had a larger number of characters (and would also set the stage for later development both plot and character wise).

In hindsight, it would have been much, much better to just grab some existing characters from the Mass Effect universe, or any other universe, to serve as Faith's foil. Instead I used… more SIs, which was just fucking stupid on so many levels I don't even. Whatever past me spiked her cruisers with, I want some now.

It was at about this point I realized I had no real idea how to write character development, or just actual characters in general, either, which is why every character-driven scene in the Mass Effect arc was absolutely fucking terrible on my part. I tried to set the stage for the various Virtues all undergoing their own brand of madness but that was really hamfisted and dumb and poorly implemented all around which makes it look like Faith suddenly stopped caring about everyone else's opinions and Hope became a limpet to whichever non-Faith characters were in scene.

Joy, Charity, and the others who would have been introduced later were, on reflection, much the same, according to my old written plans, with their one dumb gimmick and nothing else going for them - certainly not enough to retroactively validate my past failures. Realistically, if I'd kept writing I probably would have done more to differentiate them but you know what? I don't want to keep writing. Fuck it.

Overall, the choice to write a PASI fic seemed really smart at the time but basically just turned out terrible in every sense of the word - I failed to really hit the points I wanted to hit, Faith had an idiot ball basically glued to her hand from chapter 20ish onwards that only got worse over time, and I just generally lost interest in writing because it was becoming such a huge fucking mess just to try and put words on the page.

This problem was only made worse during the Mass Effect arc, because the long periods between collab chapters made it even more difficult for me to maintain my interest. Now I'm not going to blame the other writers involved for that - we all have lives and responsibilities and shit like that (except for Drich, who actually is a hyper advanced AI, except instead of conquering universes she got bored and started churning out fanfic at a lightning pace[/i]) but that whole thing was shambles all around.

In hindsight, how we did the collab was stupid - throwing all the Commanders in at different time periods seemed like a smart and interesting idea at the time with plenty of opportunity for conflict and shenanigans, but in the end it just killed any and all hope of keeping a decent pace up. We started planning… what, late November 2015?

*checks*

Okay, the first time we actually decided 'hey, let's definitely do this thing' was on Christmas eve, 2015, but we kicked the idea around a little before then. SI!Fusou and Faith didn't meet in-story until the end of June, 2016 (that's 6 months later, for those who don't want to bother counting in their head) and it took even longer to get Tiki and then Drich involved - Tiki wasn't in until Christmas Day 2016, a whole year after we started planning it. At the time of FiSF's ending, Drich still isn't really involved.

We really should have had all the characters drop in at the same time. It would have been a fuckton easier to coordinate and might have resulted in stuff actually getting done, instead of SI!Fusou and Faith both suffering the forced idiot/lazy ball treatment so that the people coming in later actually had stuff to do.

Plus, the reaction of the galaxy at large to a bunch of giant death machines all showing up on the same planet at the same time, fighting for a few seconds, and then all being eaten by blue crystals could have been entertaining.

As it was, SI!Fusou pretty much took a job as a secretary sitting in the same building as the series' ultimate villain… and did shit-all about it for several in-story years, even though killing the Starbrat and assuming direct control of the Reapers should have taken all of like thirty seconds, SI!Faith and Hope spent years slowly nudging a rebel group into a full blown war of revolution whilst bitching about how slow it was going and generally doing nothing, and SI!Tiki played Galaxy of Fantasy whilst his subordinates did all the work (although that is kinda his thing, so… well played, Tiki. Well played.)

Anyway, yeah, that whole thing was shambles, and that's a pretty major contributing factor as to why I wanted to end the fic.

That said, in case anyone still cares (one response between 104 and 105 on SV, and it was Tiki. So i guess not) I'm going to quickly skim through what I had planned for the rest of the fic, and also smash those plans to pieces, because they were written very long ago and are very dumb.

First up, we would have had a combination Achron / alternate timeline arc where Faith and Hope get indoctrinated, fuck shit up in Mass Effect, and die, and then Joy is left to pick up the pieces, travels to Achron, steals time travel tech, sends an antimatter bomb back to kill the Leviathan of Dis (remember that shitty 'twist' lol) et cetera et cetera, thus averting Bad End.

It was stupid is all you need to know about that.

Next would have been the Warframe arc. The baddies of the Warframe universe have the exact same 'fuck it, we have reserves' rationality that Commanders have, and the stupidity to not change tactics when that fails, and then the Tenno are the complete opposite, being small groups of elite ninja pirate space wizards from hell who would have been able to ROFLstomp the shit out of Faith whenever the two forces met, leading to a lot of Faith's 'easy' missions falling to pieces.

I wanted this to be her comeuppance arc, so to speak - after all the stupid shit she did in Mass Effect, everything abruptly stops going Faith's way, and due to the mistakes she made in the Mass Effect arc none of her 'allies' come to back her up.

In addition, it was also going to be host to the long-plotted arrival of the Evil Council, and Faith subsequently running from the Origin System having well and truly confused and enraged the shit out of everyone, with a fistful of blueprints and a plan shot full of holes.

I wanted to introduce the ECoE here, in the original draft, because I thought that this point made the most sense for Faith to be getting complacent, after 4 universes of nothing interesting happening. This kinda falls apart when you consider that the Commander Effect (planned after the Evil Council of Evil, obviously) crossover was very much out of left field, but I never got around to updating the general story plot sheet I had so I dunno what I would have done in place of that.

And speaking of the ECoE...

Basically the entire concept of the Evil Council was stupid, and whilst it was supposed to tie the whole story together as the endgame drew near, it actually probably would have just kind of got everything hopelessly tangled up, in my opinion. Plus how the hell are enemies Faith was already able to beat once going to pose a threat the second time? They ain't, that's what.

Ah well, missed opportunities is practically my middle name at this point.

Following that would have been Faith getting mindfucked by ROB for her own good and a very quick timeskip past it to avoid having to actually deal with the relevant characterisation, because badly written angst is either boring or outright painful and I'm not a good into writing, as evidenced by… uh, the entire fic, lol, so yeah I just wanted to skip over that.

Then I would have had brief snippets of the Virtues doing their virtues things. Hope builds things with AI, Joy does MAD SCIENCE and creates pokémon for basically the purposes of a single shitty reference, and Charity sells cookies to space pirates because she's nice like that. This arc would have been to solidify the idea that the Virtues are not Faith and they have their own things going on, but looking back it just begs the question of 'why the hell did I split one SI into four SIs only one of whom acts like an SI when i coulda used OCs'?

Good fuckin question, is what. But honestly I don't really remember what i was thinking when i planned this bit out ahead. I didn't write down any of the actual reasoning for stuff I wanted to happen, just what I wanted to happen. In hindsight that was also dumb.

All the missed opportunities. All of them.

Then Halo and Endless Space, i think were the next worlds. I don't actually have notes for them, either because I never got around to actually writing them or because they got deleted at some point, probably when i was having a dumb hissy fit about not being able to write this fic or something stupid like that.

The Evil Council of Evil would have kept reappearing, still ineffective. They were never really meant to be powerful enough to actually pose a threat to Faith - because of ROB's own plots for the endgame - but in-story it would have made no sense that they keep trying to stop Faith even though they get stomped every single time. I could have made them a little smarter by making them start fighting and destroying the universe's natives to stop Faith getting their tech, which is what I had written down, but idk. Seems like it might have been a case of too-little-too-late.

Not like it's much relevant now.

Like I said before (I think?) the Evil Council of Evil was initially supposed to help tie together the whole plot and maintain a connection between the story and the ROB, because nothing irks me more than a ROB who appears, sets up a thing, and then vanishes into the aether never to be seen again ever. What's the point of that?

So anyway, yeah, they were supposed to be setting up this whole Chekov's Gun thing with ROB which didn't turn out too well, I guess, because ROBs are actually shitty and why did I bother. Ah, well. The whole idea of ROB was going to be sort of like this:

Everything the ROB did was very specifically set up to motivate FAith to go to this one random demi-verse plane of reality or w/ever and destroy a fancy pylon and 'break his shackles', which would… let him flex even more omnipotent powers? I don't really know where i was going with this. Again, I didn't write the whys in the plan, just the what and how. That was dumb, if you're reading this and looking for writing advice (lol) don't do that. Always write why you want things to happen.

The reveal that ROB was the ultimate antagonist all along probably would have fallen flat though because it was kind of obvious from that one intermission I wrote way back before Commander Effect - the appropriately-named 'Troublemakers' interlude.

Anyway, despite having some pretty serious issues and me losing interest a couple times, I did quite enjoy writing this story, overall (which is to say, I think I enjoyed writing more than I did not enjoy writing it). As far as non-serious writing goes (and it's kind of obvious that's what this was always going to become, really), Commander fics are great. Just make up whatever crazy shit you want for fight scenes, it's legit. Have units with all sorts of bullshit capabilities, it's legit. Dropping asteroids on a planet to wipe out a squad of scouts? Sure, why the fuck not.

That said, there's a lot of idiot ball holding that looking back, I just don't like. I mean, SB/SV Hypercompetence aka reading three pages ahead in the script is one thing but one or two displays of minor competence wouldn't have hurt Faith that much.

More importantly than having fun, I think I also learned a lot, writing this. Not just random trivia about laser weapons, orbital mechanics, and all sorts of other stuff that cropped up in the thread/s for whatever reasons, but about writing in general. Which is kinda why I wrote this big wall of text, I guess.

Firstly, I think, I have some better ideas about how to do world-building. I mean, feel free to disagree, but I thought that the FTLverse worldbuilding was fucking abysmal in just about every way. In future I'd like to aim for exposition and worldbuilding that's less hamfisted in its execution and only as extensive as it needed to be for the story, with some extra sprinkling on the side for flavour.

Secondly, characterisation. Jeez. I write snippets for established universes a lot - not that I publish them, - and I think they've kind of ruined me in this regard. I think I'm just so used to taking for granted that people will know who the characters are that I never bothered really learning how to introduce and develop characters myself. Something to work on, I suppose. My next project caters rather well to that, I feel, but I'm not sure how well that's going to turn out.

Finally, the plot. Such as it may be called. I'll be honest, it's basically an excuse plot - just like most(all?) of the other PASI fics (and non-PA derivatives, obviously) - for a giant robot to go stomping around the multiverse stealing technology and doing silly shenanigans. Gotta work on that. Well, I mean, for some works an excuse plot is all you need, so it's perhaps more correct to say I'd like to work on it.

Actually, no, one more thing. Pacing. I don't mean in terms of how the story develops (although I certainly do need to practice that) but how often I put out chapters. Earlier on when I managed a consistent two/three a week it was fine, but, especially during the Mass Effect arc where various factors conspired to make a mess of update schedules, it was just difficult for me to keep up. Longer breaks made me lose interest in the story, which made me put off writing the next chapter, which made me lose further interest, and so on and so on in a vicious cycle of shitty writing.

Note to self: Next time, consistency. Gotta keep that schedule on lockdown.

*sigh*

So, anyway. That's basically my post-production review and final author's note, I guess.

As for what I'm doing next - I mentioned it in one of the threads, I forget which, but the current worm in my brain is a story about eight internet friends who play a game together. Whether that ends up becoming my next 'main' project is up in the air right now, but we'll see.

Thank you to everyone who's read, commented on, and critiqued this story. I know it sounds like trite bullshit but it really does mean a lot to see so many people even slightly care about my writing. Frustrating as it may have been, posting a chapter before bed only to wake to a several-page discussion on the merits of various starship-based weaponry is kind of encouraging. Warm fuzzy feelings for all.

If any of you have anything you'd like to add, anything on the Post-Mortem you'd like to comment on, any questions you'd like to ask, et cetera, then by all means go ahead. If not tonight, I'll try to get back to you tomorrow.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got one hell of a headache, so I'm going to go have a nap. And more panadol.

Bye!

~Faith.

 

[Faith]

Impulse decisions are terrible things.

Look, see?

(Mods you can lock this or whatever now, if you want, I guess. IDK what your policy on that is)