An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapter update alert! Chapter two is finally posted as of today (1-17-22).
And it only took 1.5 years.
What happens when the Systems Alliance shoots up your ground base and your injured team leader needs urgent medical attention? Ill-advised heroics! That’s what.
Possibly one of the most complicated action sequences I’ve ever written, with kind beta reading by @andersonsbiceps.
Enjoy!
-
Fic Synopsis
Saren Arterius is the youngest and probably shortest recruit in the history of Blackwatch Team Ravus.
His first deployment as ground support on the colony of Shanxi is going well until the Systems Alliance 2nd Fleet crashes the turian occupation.
Even if Saren and his team survive—there's a non-zero chance that he'll be banished to the Cabals when this is all over.
Prompt: What kind of traits make a character interesting?
I only have one answer for this, and that’s because I don’t start to write characters with any particular traits in mind.
The Singular Trait: Personal conflict and contradictions.
We all have them! We’re human. I don’t think about ‘what kind’ of person I’m writing or ‘what traits’ they have. Traits are relative and established only through actions on screen.
What they’re called, good or bad or brave or cowardly, is also more or less irrelevant to how I think about character. While the concept of traits may be useful in a general outlining sense, the most challenging thing for me is writing into a POV perspective or character voice.
I know a character is ready to be written when they have a crystallized voice and viewpoint in my mind, and that they’re capable of carrying on conversations and debating options with other characters. When they’re able to argue their case.
Another thing I do to help myself develop and discover who I’m writing is to consider their role in the story, or what kinds of character roles might be needed for the kind of story I’m telling:
For ‘Air Needing Light,’ this approach was critical to developing the side characters in Saren’s turian Blackwatch squad. I looked at what sort of supporting functions might need to be performed on a team, and then I considered who might have been selected for those duties, their histories (including with each other), and their personal motivations and goals apart from the primary situation. This story is about being part of a team.
For ‘the fate of poets in a republic,’ this approach gave me a turian translator and a human linguist on similar footing who begin by distrusting and misinterpreting each other, but by the end of the story recognize and genuinely respect the other’s differing needs and viewpoints. This story is about recognition and translation.
For ‘This will have no bearing on your evaluation.’ this approach gave me Nihlus’s OC friend Alleia, who shows up again in ‘Above center of mass in all respects.’ as necessary ride-or-die backup AND a witness to the madness. No one would believe Nihlus if she weren’t there to confirm his version of events. These stories are about trust and vulnerability (professional and personal).
For ‘The husbandry of victory is blood,’ this approach gave me Nihlus’s entire OC family, a pair of batarian grandparents who love him very much, and an OC Blackwatch trainer who recognizes the value in what he brings to the Hierarchy (and helps him see it in himself). This story is about identity.
I don’t have too much loyalty to any particular character traits. It’s more about trying to pick out the central personal conflict, and then seeing how that grows and intertwines with the kind of story I want to tell.
Prompt: Post your favorite line of dialogue that you’ve written recently.
Long story, but this prompt (July 7, 2021) simultaneously shorted out my brain and sent me back to rereading my chapter two draft for Air Needing Light, which saw the light of day approximately six months afterward.
Let’s start with one of my favorite lines of actual dialogue:
“Confirmed, E-5,” Ranike added blandly. “Let it be noted that E-4 is welcome to put her hands on me any time.”
That’s in chapter one. I love it because Ranike as a character is using humor to keep Saren and another squadmate (Trevia) from succumbing to the stress of an awful situation.
The joke relies on a shared history of everyone in their squad assuming Ranike and Trevia are dating or hooking up because 1. they fake-flirt constantly, and 2. they’ve been working together for so long. With turians there’s no prohibition against fraternizing, so they took it a step farther and have mutually decided to troll everyone around them. Ranike cracking a stupid troll joke after they’ve just been shot up takes the stress levels down. I’m proud of this line because it felt like the character suggested it to me, it was 100% his personality to do this, and it was more like recording something that had happened than making it up.
At the time, I’d posted that chapter back in July of 2020!
It seemed absurd to me that my favorite line of “recent” dialogue would have been written a year ago, but it was true.
I shuffled through the Saren/Nihlus one-shot I’d written for Spectre Requistions (This will have no bearing on your evaluation.) and found to my horror that all of my favorite lines there were internal dialogue. Which, to me, didn’t count as spoken words and therefore were right out as examples for this prompt.
While a great deal of my worldbuilding and outlining is built on the backs of rapid-fire conversations between two or more characters, very little of this has so far made it into print in my fics!
I hope I’ll have the opportunity to let more of the background work and drafting surface in the future as actual dialogue, but my first order of business is always letting a story be what it wants to be.
And sometimes that means cutting conversation in favor of implication.
Prompt: Which character is an absolute pain to write and why?
You’re all going to laugh at me. And you know what? I deserve it.
Saren is a pain to write. Yes, I know he’s the POV character in my fic.
One of the reasons I ended up writing some other voices, backgrounds, and versions for Saren is that the no-Reapers Air Needing Light Blackwatch!Saren version, in particular, likes to be enigmatic and resistant to all attempts to get to know him.
And he’s the gosh-darned POV character!
Half the battle is doing enough revisions and drafts to get him to talk to me at all.
Apparently I like pain? Granted, it makes it that much sweeter when I do finally get an opinion out of him.
Prompt: What worldbuilding idea did you come up with that you would have loved to use but just couldn’t get to work?
Worldbuilding that doesn’t fit into the main story? One-shot fics are great for that.
So, so many things are really cool ideas that won’t fit into the main storyline for one reason or another.
For instance: POV character conflict.
Air Needing Light is from Saren’s POV during the FCW. I haven’t decided if I’ll stick with that for the second fic, but it’s a very high likelihood that it’ll also stay in Saren’s “voice.”
However!
I still wanted to write out a very particular type of character background for Nihlus Kryik. Our in-game canon codex implies that Nihlus is a merc-born turian.
Does a whole-ass one-shot fic count as worldbuilding that didn’t fit into the main story? Because that’s what Nihlus demanded.
Instead of being forced to write a multi-chapter background story for his character, I decided to give him a one-shot: The husbandry of victory is blood. It’s a character sketch of the kind I’d normally write for myself and never actually publish ... but this time, I published it and let it out into the world. There’s a whole other post detailing a series of author annotations on worldbuilding that go along with the fic, because it’s SUPER DENSE and not very reader-friendly.
Can’t really apologize for it, since this is the kind of background sketch I do for my real novel-length work all the time.
But it’s the writing equivalent of letting everyone peer into my jumbled sock drawer.
I like adding in a bunch of background detail without full-on explaining everything. More or less as easter eggs or just to entertain myself. While there may be points in the main stories where these details become important, many just function as aesthetic flavor.
One of the benefits of writing is getting to entertain yourself! I feel for my readers, though...
Prompt: What’s a worldbuilding detail in your WIP that you really like?
Turns out writing a whole-ass war is hard work. Who knew?
I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to start reading Mass Effect: Revelation and just get a timeskip where the First Contact War (FCW) was supposed to be!
While there’s a comic that handles a few scenes from the FCW, Saren is some kind of aide to his brother, General Desolas, and there’s a whole lotta nepotism going on. We’re not even going to talk about how the Reaper tech fits into this, because it’s irrelevant to the point.
My friends, they skip over the meat and potatoes of the FCW.
For an event supposedly pivotal to humanity and the Systems Alliance, the turian Hierarchy, and the races of Council space, it’s just glossed over.
That’s where I come in!
The Air Needing Light no-Reapers AU was created to fill this gap. Our story starts with Saren Arterius as the POV character on the ground at Shanxi during the First Contact War. It’s his first combat deployment with his Blackwatch team, Ravus Three.
Ferus, a Blackwatch Team? What?
Ravus (”Gray”) Team Three normally fields two fireteams of five, or ten field operatives, in total. This can be expanded out to twelve or more when mission objectives warrant it.
Turian Hierarchy “Blackwatch” and the worldbuilding that went into it is based heavily and perhaps in somewhat cliché fashion on a number of different special operations groups and organizational structures, as well as combined forces. Blackwatch is a bit different in that they pull servicemembers from a variety of separate branches and tend to select for diverse capabilities and perspectives.
Prospective Blackwatch recruits go through a selection process which includes an intense yearlong series of trainings in (1) survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) skills in different gravity and atmosphere scenarios in and out of armor; (2) a basic powered armor specialist course; (3) Atrax qualification training—an infamous mix of classroom theory, practical team-based tests, psychological evaluation, and grueling physical endurance trials.
Something like 70% of candidates drop out in the first round of environmental training. Of those who complete the full series and earn an Atrax qualification, very few are offered a place in one of the active teams.
Note: “Atrax” is the 85th Atrax Legion—my formal organizational designation for what everyone calls “Blackwatch.” 85th Atrax is nowhere in canon! I just wanted to have another option to use in the story.
Remember how Garrus tells Shepard he would have been offered some additional training to prepare for the Spectres?
Since an Atrax qualification doesn’t guarantee that someone will be selected for Blackwatch, I’ve more or less worked this out as the kind of cross-skills portfolio that would also be highly valued in turian Council Spectres. :D
Please look forward to more things like this as background in the fic!
I generally imply or demonstrate these things rather than doing a whole lot of exposition. But you never know, allusions to this could show up at some point during the story...
Prompt: Have you ever read a thing in a book or seen in a show/movie where you thought: “Oh, this is good, I’m gonna steal that!” What was it?
I am once again pleading the Fifth.
But really a lot of the time what I steal is just sometimes things that happen, or bits of realistic perspective-taking that I felt were particularly telling that I can just bring into my work.
My favorite wartime propaganda ever written is “The Moon Is Down” by John Steinbeck. There’s a bit of historical evidence that it was one of the most popular works/novels among the Resistance in WWII.
They couldn’t make enough copies.
Can you imagine?
One reason it may have been so popular was that it wrote of ‘the occupiers’ as ‘those who will inevitably be defeated.’ How powerful.
And not as villains, either! As humans and understandable sorts of people who were just doomed not to succeed.
If I can ever borrow some of that keen understanding for the needs of the audience, I’ll be very pleased. Because I’d like to write (even from the turian POV!) about what should be seen as the true consequences of the FCW for the civilians on Shanxi’s surface.
If that makes it into my fic, it’ll be a bit more than 2/3rds of the way through, probably. We’ll see.
Prompt: What kind of gestures are your characters often using?
This is a good question. There’s the gestures I write, and then there’s the gestures I imagine are habitual for a particular character.
I probably have more patterns of action than I consciously realize, but in rewriting the First Contact War there’s just gonna be a lot of slogging, and maneuvering, and waiting around in between the aforementioned.
On a totally unrelated headcanon aside, I can see biotics adopting habitual actions based on or adjacent to their mnemonics. While I get that the whole point of these mnemonics is to control the biotic ability, I think that using your space magic a lot would also start to bleed over into your everyday body language.
Habitual gestures and ways of seeing are something I try to incorporate into my POV characters. I just think it makes them more relatable.
One of the other challenges in Air Needing Light is translating between human terms and trying to inhabit the turian perspective.
I do a lot of splitting the difference and will tend to default to the human term when it’s nonspecific enough or general enough that I don’t want to take time out to more fully develop the turian viewpoint.
However, when the turian view is different enough that I feel like the human word may or may not apply, I do make an effort to illustrate the turian idea of the concept or cover it in my author’s notes. This is a constant balancing act.
