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[Elana.S]

The last time I promoted this story was on the old BSN, so I guess I'm starting from scratch!

 

"The Phenomenology of Shepard" is my longform serialized story remixing the events of Mass Effect 2.

 

The pitch:

Shepard has lost more than she let on after her reconstruction by Cerberus. A consuming attraction for the drell assassin promises a passionate recovery of her senses.

 

It's a bit cerebral, but it's a romance. It's about the way the themes of memory and death figure into their relationship. It's rated M for language, and for literate but unapologetically adult bits in certain chapters.

 

Here's a safe-for-work sample from the opening chapter:

 

 

Thane sensed his pursuers like a pressure wave that moved at the speed of sand. Their advance was as slow and relentless as the dunes of Rakhana. Any sprint race to the top of Dantius Towers, he would win: his silent, solitary fang-strikes allowed him to needle his way through the opposition, bypassing any confrontations too large to be worth the time. His pursuers, however, engulfed everything in their wake — even systematically freeing the pockets of salarians he'd locked in safety, now free to wander off through the recently sanitized lower levels.

 

Unable to resist his curiosity, he paused in an air vent and allowed the trio of human soldiers to catch up to him. Reconnaissance, he justified to himself. But to his surprise, only one of them really resembled the term 'soldier': a gray-haired, gray-faced man whose slightly obsolete assault rifle punched through enemies with a shameless brat-tat-tat. Zaeed Massani: the name came to him with the image of an old mark briefly advertised in the right wrong places. Thane was rarely wrong about that sort of thing. The man's identity explained the fierceness with which he took down the mercs in his path.

 

The nearly inaudible whine of a cloak discharging drew his attention to the second figure. A woman, petite and hooded, laughed easily to herself, having returned to squad lines before her victim had time to collapse. No name came readily for her as it did for the large older man, but there was something familiar in the ways the bodies fell. Also, few indeed had such a high-end cloak, and as finely tuned. It was beyond military grade, to the very top of the black markets. Custom, if his ears did not betray him. They rarely did.

 

Strategically, the two couldn't be further apart. Stealth and brawn in forms that were discordant rather than complementary. Yet they were both taking cues from one source: the third figure, hanging back, the weft that held together their tenuous weave.

 

The field was splayed with the blazing trails of fireballs, punctuated by combat drones darting to and fro, criss-crossed by precision pistol shots in a manner that made the chaos coherent. This third soldier, positioned well in the rear, did not need to navigate the battlefield: she managed it. Her tactics transformed the frantic movements of enemy mercs into a text unfolding before his eyes, which she could read as fluently as she could execute the people within it. From his overhead vantage point, so could he. It was beautiful.

 

The part of Thane's mind which habitually counted bodies as they fell, made a note that it was this figure responsible for most of the body count, with the other two serving as distraction and cleanup duty respectively.

 

She, he thought. This warrior is a she.

 

It should not have surprised him. The drell are accustomed to strong female figures. Their pantheon of gods was skewed towards feminine avatars. Why did his thoughts wander to his deities? Arashu, his mind whispered to him, all tangled up in memories. But the woman firing death from her omni-tool was small, with a tightly coiled presence. Mortal, fragile. Her armour was a jewel-toned blue. She huddled behind the cover of a bulkhead. It was a strategically sound position — optimal, in fact, given the layout of the room — but it still made her look so small, so vulnerable.

 

This dichotomy with her combat deadliness fascinated him.

 

Suddenly he was spurred to action, a fire lit within him from embers he long thought dead. He took off through the darkness. He spiralled higher and higher, daring to confront Arashu herself in the Illium skies.

 

It's been on hiatus for a long time, but I just updated it with the first of a short lead of new chapters. I hope you'll join me on Archive Of Our Own or Fanfiction.net.

 

Thank you!

 

Elana