aka 8 new lines of Shepard's first impressions of her squad; this one is for Tali
God damn, she’s fucking twelve.
She’s younger than Williams.
She’s never been trained to fight in a squad, her people send their babies out completely fucking alone and there is no part of the galaxy (that she’s aware of) that’s particularly nice to quarians so what the actual fuck is wrong with absolutely everyone in this situation. Including Udina and Anderson who were absolutely delighted to make sure Shepard recruited a baby.
Ok, a fucking genius baby who pulled a memory core out of a geth which is in fact supposed to be impossible and Shepard wished they’d kept more of the Beacon pieces from Eden Prime, she’d love to hear what Tali thought of them. She’s looking forward to hearing Tali’s thoughts on everything about the Normandy; Shepard’s as much of a tech-head as she can manage, but Tali’s clearly something fucking else.
tagged by @spacemomnephmoreau (and similarly sad by the lack of Joker; I mean, you do get to play as him even if he's never a squadmate, I feel like he should have gotten a waiver or something 🤣) to do the sortr ME Squadmates; I'm sure my results will be just shocking to anyone who has ever met me 😅
I am incredibly disappointed (in an of course that happened sort of way) by how Miranda got framed there in box 9 🙄
so average-mako-enjoyer made this post about Shepard being forced to have a social media account for morale and only posting hamster pictures and like
I read that and immediately had four different Shepards yelling at me in my head (I blame @shadoedseptmbr's Aedan tags) 🤣🤣🤣
*
Weaver would in fact include hamster pictures, but they'd be macro pictures of like, whiskers and toes only.
The whole account would all only be macro photos. No tags, no comments, no explanations, no definitions. No time stamps or metadata, all expertly wiped, no location cues beyond maybe the quality of the light... which isn't that hard to manipulate after all, if you've got an omnitool and some good flashlight/spotlight blueprints.
It's all just exquisite close-ups of pieces of gravel and seeds and leaves and pollen or fractions of circuit boards and weird screws or clamps or the odd pattern of wear on a [redacted but clearly the Mako for those in the know] tire.
She and Aeden would clearly get along great.
*
Ngaio would flat out refuse. (She would've done it if she'd met Traynor sooner, because she can refuse Traynor nothing, but that was too late, on several levels.)
*
Ella would be asked to make an account after she gets her N7 status and starts showing up in the news periodically; she's told to try and soften the public image of the infamous Butcher of Torfan.
She does set something up, posts some generic pretty Alliance Training Stock Photos, the kind you get in a recruiters office, but that's it for ages.
And then she posts five separate in-depth tutorials in a row, three on astronomy and two on France of all things, one specifically about the language, one about cooking.
Then nothing again.
And then a three-part series on astral navigation, and how different species figured out the math for measuring where the fuck they were in space.
Then a thing on baking with chocolate, including how to convert levo recipes to dextro (and vice versa) and which things were more likely to translate into something that might still taste good.
She never shows herself however, so it does fuck all to counter all the pics and videos of her stalking around heavily armed and armored in full gear, occasionally with a bit of a blue halo from biotics usage, generally glaring or scowling as she avoids reporters trying to get a comment.
Most people don't connect her socials to the Butcher of Torfan at all, and those that do assume someone else is running the account in her name in a failed Alliance PR stunt.
After the Battle of the Citadel, there are enough recordings of her helping with clean-up efforts and being polite at formal ceremonies to make it clear that the Butcher and the Shepard-who-goes-on-weird-tangents-on-social-media are actually the same person, who is also POSSIBLY a galactic hero, so the whispers about Torfan finally start to fade out a little...
And then she dies.
*
Ward would be some terrifying (but delightful once you got past the scowl) combination of Adam Savage and Mercury Stardust because he would legit show people how to take things apart and upgrade and fix them (and which bits are 'legal-ish' depending on whether they technically own them or not) but also things probably explode sometimes (or at the very least spark A Lot™️) and Tali guests wearing glorious (flame-retardant) Turian fashions and ALSO sometimes PROPRIETARY TECH THAT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE and no one ever bleeps ANY of Jack's swearing and sometimes the three of them are gleefully trying to make something that probably shouldn't exist and some poor Alliance PR officer cries in their office sometimes because they are actually spectacular PR and GREAT for morale and also they break so many TOS's but it's Commander Fucking Shepard so who's gonna tell him to stop?
So this turned into something more like meta or the old @headcanonwednesday In-Universe Ramblings or what I tend to tag as a not!fic, but I hope it still fills the prompt reasonably well. Or is at least entertaining? 😅 (Of course, now I have to figure out how to post it. And now I have a meta/not!fic collection on ao3 apparently.)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Every military in earth's recorded history has always made pheromone blockers mandatory while on active duty. Close living quarters and emotional conditions followed by separation as people were transferred or went home or died... it was that or half their soldiers never would go home and settle back into 'polite' society, too hooked on the heightened pheromones of such a tightly knit group to accept the looser connections more common in civilian life.
Going into space made a whole range of hormone and pheromone blockers even more common, what with recycled air and water that either tasted a bit like everyone on board or too much like the chemicals used to sanitize it.
And then Humanity made first contact. Dextro-pheromones were undetectable to levo species (and vice-versa) which added to how poorly Turian to Human communication began... but the Citadel was a revelation.
Almost an apocalyptic one.
Asari pheromones were completely unblockable by every technical, genetic, or chemical process humanity had figured out. Even staying in a fully enclosed suit didn't work once you were sharing an atmosphere outside said suit. (Once trade opened up with other species, Humanity found rumors that the Salarian Task Groups had a method to do it... but no one could get further than rumors.)
Asari were thus omnipresent. And while the sense other species could get of them was almost universally pleasant, would shift and change with age or mood or cycle just like anyone else's, they were also completely incomprehensible. Asari were there, you could tell exactly where they were, all the time, but that was it.
Somehow, the Asari had no trouble understanding anyone else's pheromones, regardless of chirality, age, attempted blockers and filters, or even atmosphere. (They could read the volus! Somehow! It made most non-Asari researchers devolve into swearing and ranting gibberish if you got them on the topic.) No one had a clue how they did it, and while most peoples assumed the Asari knew how it worked, they were not sharing.
Wearing a fully enclosed body suit or armor in atmosphere meant you were blocking pheromones to everyone except the Asari, which just added to the Asari advantage in political circles, and was thus considered at worst an act of aggression against non-Asari, and at best unbearably rude.
(A large part of why the Quarians were looked down upon, and the Volus never could quite get recognized as a full-fledged Council Species, was this low-grade irritation from everyone else at not being able to scent them while knowing that the Asari could, no matter how little anyone was willing to admit that was part of the problem.)
The Volus managed a partial exception in that something during the actual construction of their suits made them palatable to the Elcor, who, having an even more scent and pheromone based society than anyone else, had actual physiological symptoms (mostly vertigo and headaches, but occasionally full fainting spells and nausea and very rarely full-blown hallucination) upon having to be in close quarters with anyone completely blocking their scent.
No one wants to be anywhere near a dizzy or queasy Elcor, even beyond the ethical constraints against making another species that sick if it was avoidable. (Most Quarians added a pheromone mod to their suits during their Pilgrimage, something that would at least mark them as there to everyone else, especially the Elcor, even if it was clearly a series of artificial notes rather than a naturally varying, layered scent.)
Everything that humanity did historically as a matter of course to manage large populations in small areas or high-risk/emotionally heightened situations was no longer an option, not for anyone who wanted to leave Earth.
Part of Alliance training now involved pheromone acclimation, both in how to manage your own, and how to read everyone else's without being too invasive or rude about it.
Which brings us to Joker. Whose lifetime of complex medical treatments mean his hormone levels are not remotely standard and whose pheromone output is, shall we say, unique. (Potentially even a little distracting.) Historically that would have been a perfectly acceptable reason to be on some sort of blockers for the rest of his life, but he wants to fly spaceships.
Which means he can't do that.
Does this make him even more of a sarcastic bastard because every Human he ever meets tends to do a weird stutter/stop the first time they're in scenting distance? Yes, it does. (This is a bonus, not a detriment, I am not accepting opinions on this matter.)
Biotics tend to be less obvious about it, because their pheromones are also a bit weird in comparison to non-biotics, but most biotics have the same sort of eezo tang unlike Joker's very odd melange of various artificial hormones & gene-therapy-induced protein strands that were attempted to improve his bone development as he was growing. (Some of them even worked! Some of them didn't. Most of them didn't cause any particular negative side-effects, but all of them linger in his pheromone profile.)
Most non-Humans don't pick up on it, because Alliance pheromone training and gene therapy are similarly artificial to them, so they tend to think that's a Human Thing.
(It is kind of hilarious to most Alliance personnel on the rare occasion someone from Earth or the Colonies who hasn't had gene therapy ends up on the Citadel, because the non-Humans get so confused.)
Which means that Flight Lieutenant Jeffrey Moreau's friends, acquaintances, and assorted contacts he keeps on the modern-equivalent of speed-dial for the trading of favors and intel, are almost exclusively biotics, aliens, and all of three non-military/non-family people he's known since they were all going through cutting-edge medical treatments together as kids.
Which definitely doesn't help with some of his more conservative CO's, but is absolutely in his favor when the Normandy SR-1 is being built. Even if he hadn't been arguably the best pilot in the Alliance, he would've been Anderson's first choice because Anderson knew he'd get along with a non-traditional crew.
Anderson requests Joker, who is not-so-secretly delighted by a CO who realizes his odd background is a benefit not a detriment. Nonetheless, Joker is prepared to be his usual asshole self to the other Alliance personnel when they show up.
And then he meets Alenko, who is not just a biotic but an L-2 who gets just as many weird raised eyebrows as Joker does, and responds by being very calmly, diplomatically, exaggeratedly even-handed with everyone about everything. (And only occasionally rolling his eyes at them behind their backs when he's been especially provoked.)
And Joker meets Williams, who ALSO gets the side-eye, though in her case it's for her name rather than her scent, but who is very equal-opportunity unimpressed by anyone else's opinions which is delightful.
And most of all he meets Shepard, who regardless of background is an outlier by almost every possible human and galactic metric, and may give Joker shit for his attitude (depending on your Shepard) but never once calls him out on his skills or his scent.
YOU DIDN'T GIVE ME A FIC OR A FANDOM, SEPT. (I'm assuming ME tho, since you "!!!" at Weaver and also because that is all that's in my brain now, nothing but spaaaaace!!!!)
*
uh, I'm terrible and gonna write a what-if for Virmire?
*
"Go." Shepard's voice is like nothing Williams has ever heard from her before, and she doesn't have it in her to refuse the order.
She doesn't think anyone could refuse that order.
She goes.
She hears Shepard and Saren behind her, talking, his attention taken up entirely by the object of his obsession, the one the Council deemed good enough to go after him.
Williams manages to drag most of the Salarians with her, back to the ship, more survivors than anyone would have thought possible.
Anyone except Shepard.
Except Shepard.
They only get Alenko on board because he's injured, and not quite far enough gone to use his biotics against his own people. He flares as the bay doors close behind them though, an almost invisible mirage of blue that she can see more out of the corner of her eyes than if she glances at him directly. She imagines she can feel it, flickering and shifting around her arm at the moment of no return, at the moment he knows, the moment they all know, that there's no going back.
So the most recent ME fic is a 5+1 F!Shenko thing from Kaidan's perspective, so I guess my first run at Weaver's POV is what you get?
*
It's only once she's in the Captain's Quarters (Anderson's quarters), the door sealed behind her, that Shepard lets her shoulders slump. She's still not sure what to do with a rack like this, all to herself, but she might as well take advantage of the luxury.
She collapses across the bed, arms and legs spread, head squished between the pillows, and sighs.
What the fuck is she going to do on Feros? A colony going dark could be slavers, could be geth, could be some new disaster out of the Terminus Systems, and no one wants another Raid...
But her combat team consists of a merc, the sort of cop she'd have felt no qualms about shooting first and asking questions of never about fifteen years ago, a brilliant tech-head who's barely more than a teenager, an NCO who knows her shit in theory but is green as grass aboard ship and dealing with mixed teams, and one proper marine.
One.
And she's supposed to save a whole damned colony like that?
The whole galaxy, even?
Shepard hopes, not for the first time, that her visions are just visions, misfired symbols breaking against her poor human mind into things they never should have been, rather than...
Reapers.
She doesn't believe herself, but it's that or start screaming, and that definitely won't help.
She grabs a pillow and presses it against her face so she can scream just a little, before she drags herself back up to her feet and over to her console to get to work, to try and figure out how to make a bunch of mavericks into something resembling a squad.
What the hell, she pulled it off on Elysium, and that time she didn't even have an Alenko to back her up.
/do I have other things to do now? NO, JUST SPACE.
//and also Kaidan 😅😅😅
[post]: @evilsapphyre said:
I can’t wait to see her!
@shadoedseptmbr said:
Weaver!:D
LOOK AT HER SHE’S SO GREAT!!!
(dimple!)
[post]: (just a general thank you to @shadoedseptmbr, @syzara @servantofclio & @evilsapphyre, ISN’T SHE LOVERLY? And I did use @annakie‘s roll the dice method, so to speak, for her headmorph and most of her features; tho sometimes I did a fate die for left, right, or about the same, rather than a number for a specific point along the slider. Gave me enough leeway to make sure I didn’t have any terrible face glitches. Tho her coloring’s a little weird in some lights? The only downside is that Weaver does not like that haircut... I will have to get a new one when she wakes up in ME2.)
[post]: @syzara said:
*hands over mobile mic* :p
@shadoedseptmbr said:
yell at me about her!!!!
I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START!!!! (I should reblog a meme or something, huh? *laughs*)
[post]: @shadoedseptmbr said:
*hearteyes*
🥰🥰🥰
@phdfan said:
Oh you have made a very nice looking Shep!
THANK YOU.
(I have thoughts about how pretty she is, tbqh, and how she used it as an earthborn brat on the streets, how she was the distraction whenever the gang was running a hustle because cute kid, and how eventually she was a pretty girl instead of a cute kid and she didn’t like that sort of distracting nearly as much. Also how that experience meant she was good at the PR circuit after the Blitz, how she was exactly the sort of Hero Of Elysium the Alliance could put on the posters.)
