Saren lies quietly on the floor, listening to the hum of the machinery, the beating of that enormous and ancient heart. He feels it pulse, impossibly, in rhythm with his own organic copy. Oh, he realizes, probing the bare metal on his chest with a certain degree of absentmindedness, he is the copy now. Synthetic life forms are the originals. He is convinced of this. His hand touches the cold floor gingerly, as if he were really lying on a thick-walled chamber of Sovereign’s heart. There is a light beneath the floor, a cool blue in colour, shining through the translucent material. This material feels strange; too hard for metal, too cool for glass. The flesh of a Reaper.
The gun in his hand is past the label of ‘outdated’ and well on its way into the category called ‘antique’. He clutches it like a lifeline nonetheless. I am almost sorry. Then I remember all the choices he must have made during the life that dyed his hair grey and I am not sorry anymore. This is how such things go. Some are armed with Carnifexes and some with museum pieces. Obtain the former at all costs, if life’s what you value. The latter look nice next to your corpse.
This is a complete archive of Mass Effect fanfiction written by Misfire Anon, my dear friend and collaborator, who recently gave me the green light to host all their stories.
Conference Transcript 159 is a redo of a sexy Saren/Nihlus flash-fic titled “Fluff” that I posted elsewhere a long time ago. It’s a bit of an experiment in form, consisting of pure dialog. I had a lot of fun writing it and hopefully you’ll enjoy it too.
In an attempt to get back to writing fanfiction for Mass Effect, I’ve been reading and hesitantly poking at some old unfinished pieces. Among them was this rather long short story (about the length of The Candidate), about Saren and Nihlus, of course, tackling some unusual and heavy issues. Like the others, it was unfinished, but unlike the others, it was really close to being finished. I don’t know when exactly I started to write it, but it must have been way back in 2013. When I picked it up a few days ago, it read almost like a fresh piece of (not very good) fiction that I’ve never seen before. Yet I had no trouble whatsoever understanding why it had gone unfinished. At the time when I started it, I simply didn’t know how it should end. The only way I could see it ending was in total disaster, whereas I wanted it to be a learning experience for the characters. Reading it five years and a lot of diverse experiences later, I realized that now I do know how to finish it. And I set out to do it.
