he/him | acespec | I like Mass Effect a normal amount | all characters, ships, AUs, etc. are welcome here | AO3 | Writing tag | Bsky | hardcore_like_eezo on Discord | blog formerly known as serioussamiam
Hi! I'm Sam and I'm pretty much here for Mass Effect. I like to write and play video games (replays of ME, and hey other games too). I gravitate towards sci-fi with reading and TV. If you DM me, I might not respond right away since I've uninstalled most everything from my phone except what makes it a phone (I only Tumblr on the computer).
All my stories are on AO3 and tagged here. My Mass Effect fic list is under the cut. Most of my fics center around Cambria Shepard, aim to stay canon-compliant, and are shakarian (once they reach the trilogy timeline). I have a lot in the pipeline and will update this post occasionally.
Short(ish) stories
The Usual Suspect | Words: 38,709 | Completed (7/7) | Yeah I know it's not a "short story," but it reads like a novella
The Collector Base is destroyed, Commander Shepard has severed ties with Cerberus, but her next steps remain unclear. Mobilizing an entire galaxy against a threat most people believe is a fantasy is far from simple. When a whistle blower inside a Cerberus cell catches her attention, Commander Shepard winds up on Noveria as the prime suspect in the murder of a major biotech company's CEO, and finds herself with more questions than answers.
The Ghost of You | Words: 16,851 | Completed (6/6)
Garrus looked up to Commander Shepard, trusted her, respected her, and dismissed the chance there might be anything more than friendship between them. But when he's broken by the news of her death, he finds the last thing he can do is learn to move on, haunted by a ghost he can't lay to rest.
One-shots
The Courage of Stars | Words: 2,234 | Completed
Saren and Desolas take on an imaginary army, share some sibling banter, and bond under the stars.
Blood of a King | Words: 1,303 | Completed
Wrex celebrates Clan Urdnot's newest member, Garrus just wants to survive his trip to Tuchanka, and Shepard can't resist adding another notch to her legendary status.
A Gift of Peace | Words: 1,206 | Completed
Shepard’s birthday ends up falling on the same day as a historic ceasefire, and Garrus and Tali can’t help but tell everyone.
Twitterpated | Words: 1,429 | Completed
Shepard’s ever-stoic demeanor is overcome by an indefatigable joy. Liara and Tali are itching to find out why.
New Wings | Words: 1,963 | Completed
He’d lost the Normandy, he’d lost the privilege to fly, and he never stopped blaming himself for Shepard’s death. During his lowest of lows, an unlikely job offer presented Joker with his first glimpse of redemption—if he was willing to make a deal with the devil.
The Disciple | Words: 3,019 | Completed
By the time of the Reaper War, Shepard had honed her biotic skills to a deadly art, wielding advanced techniques like the nova, traditionally known only to the asari. But before that, she had to learn the basics like everyone else, and who better to teach her than an asari justicar?
He Had Reach | Words: 945 | Completed
Garrus attempts to be helpful in the kitchen. Shepard, the tall human that she is, doesn’t appreciate any insinuation that she is short.
I wanted to do give her something very simple but powerful and confident. I also tried to do everything opposite from design of matriarch benezia since she was sexualized and worked for saren and her outfit design was supposed to be reflecting saren’s i think
I like to think that humans deliberately named the turian homeworld Palaven in the wake of the First Contact War and the lingering animosity between the two species. Basically as a bitter little middle finger to the turians, even if turians would never hear it pronounced that way through their translator chips.
It’s been awhile since I read the codex entries but what was the explanation of moving from heat sinks to thermal clips?
It's the "Small Arms" sub-entry in the codex that changes entirely from ME1 to ME2 (and it stays the same in ME3)
Small Arms in ME1 Codex - it starts here
and then the change is explained here: Small Arms in ME2 Codex
I'll copy/paste:
Modern infantry weapons are micro-scaled mass accelerators, using mass-reducing fields and magnetic force to propel miniature slugs to lethal speeds. Nearly every gun on the battlefield is laden with features, from targeting auto-assists to projectile shavers that can generate thousands of rounds of ammunition from a small, internal block of metal.
It was long thought that personal weapons had plateaued in performance, but the geth proved all theories wrong. Mathematically reviewing their combat logs, the geth found that in an age of kinetic barriers, most firefights were won by the side who could put the most rounds down-range the fastest. But combatants were forced to deliberately shoot slower to manage waste heat, or pause as their weapons vented.
To eliminate this inefficiency, the geth adopted detachable heat sinks known as thermal clips. While organic arms manufacturers were initially doubtful this would produce a net gain, a well-trained soldier can eject and swap thermal clips in under a second. Faced with superior enemy firepower, organic armies soon followed the geth's lead, and today's battlefields are littered with these thermal clips.
So in two years it's a change that makes them all switch thermal clips instead of waiting for weapons to cool down. It's a "step up your game" kind of decision that took hold after the geth attack on the Citadel, but as people have pointed out here, here and here, the lore is not always consistent and the choice isn't always popular or make sense to everyone.
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
as a sidenote i enjoy the idea of nyreen meeting garrus on omega and finding him to be an absolutely pathetic loser and also that he is not the first turian Wanna Be Vigilante on omega with righteous fantasies just the latest and most arrogant. meanwhile nyreen is so completely and totally cynical about any pompous turian values that she's abandoned the game completely, has had to actually deal with her checkered past and has interest in the underlying structural problems with omega and she keeps running into this moping loser over and over and just starts avoiding him like the plague to do her own work, rebuild her moral code from the ground up. she never had the luxury to pretend she was a hero after all, she was punished in the hierarchy for her simple existence and got caught in her affair with aria and feels filthy to the bone and knows she cant wash it with more blood. the best she can do is actually try to fix her mistakes where she is now
