A Game of Cards

The little observation room was already crowded when he came in. Kasumi and Tali were sitting on the floor with their backs against the far wall, and Jack was crouching in front of them, looking at a data pad that occupied the trio’s attention in full. Zaeed and Thane were mixing drinks at the bar. Some music was on but he couldn’t quite place it; and there was a familiar scent of alien food in the air… popcorn. The word came to him with almost no effort at all. He was getting used to living on a human ship.

Continue reading A Game of Cards

The Hearing

Chapter 11 of Ghost in the Machine

The hall echoed with their heavy footsteps in the perpetual violet twilight. Nihlus felt as if he were walking through a dream. Everything had a halo of unreality about it. The ancient trees with leaves of gold and brown, never touched by the autumn winds. The deserted paths, watched over by ghosts of countless generations. The glass chasm dividing the pleaders from the judges. But the most unreal of all was the life-sized holo of Saren in the witness stand, shimmering in the distance.

Continue reading The Hearing

A New Mass Effect Fic – Directed

Check out my latest Mass Effect fic, Directed. It’s a very short, slice-of-life story, possibly the first of a series, and my first venture into Saren’s pre-Nihlus history. Young Saren reaches an important milestone in his biotics training, but at what cost?

Image: Catwagons @ DeviantArt

Directed

Saren closed his eyes and willed the tension out of his shoulders. He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. Thinking out the rhythm of breathing was acceptable. Not ideal, but acceptable. It kept the words away. Or did it? They would creep back on him as soon as he’d relax.

“You’re doing it again,” said Elethea, and he nodded. “No need to move,” she censured.

He tried to clear his mind again. Nobody but him had difficulty with this exercise. Inferior as they were in both intellect and ambition, the other students have all moved on to advanced techniques. And Saren didn’t like lagging.

“May I imagine music?”

Fruit from Palaven

The hum of the engines was giving Garrus a hell of a headache.

It hadn’t bothered him before Donnelly and his crew installed the silly torque compensator into the guiding of the starboard cannon. Either there was a loose panel on the compensator, or the tech team hadn’t returned the panels in proper positions, and now there was a sickening resonance with one of the lower frequencies of the FTL core. Garrus had demanded that the engineering crew come back and reassemble the entire thing, but Donnelly wouldn’t hear of it. Literally. Garrus brought him in and told him what to listen to, where to put his hand to feel the vibration. He even produced the spectrum of acoustic waves present in the battery, with the offending peak clearly visible — and positioned just outside the range audible by humans. Donnelly shrugged and suggested they take the question to Miranda, but Garrus said no. He’d rather stand it for a couple days. Eventually he’d learn to filter it out.

Rural Witchcraft

Travelers are advised to negotiate the roads between fortified towns only when necessary and as quickly as possible, avoiding at all costs the hospitality of the indigenous Breton populace. Outside the influence of urban sorcerocrats, fear and superstition reign unchallenged and the deplorable mockery of Imperial presence will sooner get you into trouble with the Covens than save you from their curses.

Tales of crops ruined due to rain falling skywards and of witches eating the hearts of unfaithful men out of their chest at night are probably exaggerations, of course. During the day, the hardworking women of rural communities do not appear any more, nor any less inclined towards the abuse of magic than Breton women elsewhere. It is only at night, when the watchful Eye of Magnus is closed, that the signs of unsanctioned witchcraft can be descried, as the chimneys grow alight and shadows rise in macabre dance.

Sinister customs developed around the dark power of the night. A man who seeks to ruin his neighbor should but leave a jug of water out in the evening, and will find it turned to vinegar in the morning; a drop suffices to poison a dog, and a thimble fells a cow. If a young woman wants her future children to be gifted in magic, she must brave a lonely hill at night and let the wind spirits enter her body, after which she will no longer be considered a virgin even if untouched by man. For a blessing of health, one needs to bake a wax cake with two holes at midnight, and for a blessing of manhood, one needs to relieve himself through the keyhole an hour before sunrise, without spilling a drop in the house. It is said that General Lavidius, who at one time commanded Fort Wavemoth, made an overly enthusiastic attempt to perform this ritual, and could not extract his swollen limb from the keyhole for three whole days, during which the natives gathered in crowds to laugh at the typical example of Imperial ambitions and their likely ends.

Notes

Submitted to Temple Zero.