Okeer lounged in the massage chair. It
was like a water bed, only it wasn’t water but some
kind of soft memory foam, and it molded to the back side of his body down to
the pores on the skin. It poked and prodded in all the right places and shivers
of pleasure went through him in a continuous stream. The only thing he’d change
about it was the purring noises that reminded him of turian voices.
Jedore walked past him. Her silken robe brushed his hand and the trail of her fruity perfume brushed his face. Her long hair hung in heavy ropes, still wet after bathing. She had some snack in one hand and a tiny bottle of something that looked like turian face paint in another. Why the fuck was his every second thought about turians?
Continue reading Honey Moon
Nihlus left the base on a public
transportation shuttle. He could have taken the military subway but this way he
got to see Saren’s ship one last
time, still parked in the spaceport, peeking through the sandy air like a faint
star in the middle of a dusty nebula.
You went back to
what you knew
So far removed
From all that we went through
And then it was over. He was out of Trodar for good. He would never see the distinguished turian Spectre again. His heart ached, but not as horribly as he had expected, and suddenly all those other, more urgent problems, came into sharp focus. For example, where was he going to sleep tonight? And what was he going to eat tomorrow?
Continue reading Revelation
Saren brooded for a long time, sitting in
the cockpit and listening to the slow, heavy beating of his heart. His
omni-tool was laid out on the idle navigation panel, a wire to connect it to
system VI dangling loose next to it. The salarian research data that Okeer had
stolen from Sur’Kesh was still there.
He had reported to the Council right after extraction, of course. As far as they were concerned, it had been another mission successful. Access to the data had been restored, preventing years of research and investments from going to waste. With his ship and his omni-tool destroyed, Okeer could not have smuggled a copy of it on his person. Saren had scans to prove it, and the STG were quite confident that not a byte of it had escaped their extranet siege of Invictus. Any copies Okeer might have secured before Saren had become officially involved were their responsibility, not his. Nobody seemed concerned that Okeer had not been brought to justice.
Continue reading Confrontation
Nihlus sat in the waiting room a long
time. Hours, it felt. Not what the clock on the info-holo said, but he didn’t believe a word it displayed. It said it was
lovely outside. Warm and sunny. Nope. It was scorched-earth hot and the UV was
high enough to make his plates spark. It had taken him half an hour to drive
from one end of the base to the other because visibility was the whole of ten
fucking meters due to sand. A nasty wind had whipped him with it from all
sides. Every square centimeter of his clothes had been made crunchy and
abrasive and his eyes still itched.
Warm and sunny my ass. And no way it had only been twenty minutes.
Continue reading Recapitulation
This chapter mentions characters and events from Misfire Anon’s story The Other Beginning and was written under the assumption that you have read it. If you haven’t, please do so before you go on! Not only because it supplies crucial subtext for this and a few other chapters of TTSS, but also because it’s one of the best stories for Mass Effect ever written.
Sand crunched under Saren’s boots as he climbed the drawbridge and walked
through the airlock. His own ship felt alien to him. As if he had been away for
months, not one week. The stardock crew manager reported the Virial had been
repaired, serviced and cleaned. Next to the damage sustained in combat, the
Trodar engineers also took care of a small leak from the starboard coolant cell
and replaced a depleted battery powering the internal clock. Remembering the
Wisp, Saren hadn’t been able to hold back a smile.
He walked around, touching the familiar objects and breathing in the familiar air. The stardock crew had left everything impeccable. Compliments of Major Eraquis, the manager had said.
Continue reading Confession
Okeer froze. The sound had come from
behind. The safety on an automatic weapon, likely trained on him. Unless he’d managed to breathe in some of the toxin after
all and was starting to hear things. The adhesive gas mask he had printed on
the workstation in the communications room had already started to disintegrate
on his ride up.
But then a shuffle followed, a faint
breath of a released vacuum seal, and finally a turian voice. “Turn around, slowly, with your hands where I can
see them.”
Okeer snorted. The voice was familiar. He turned, slowly, to find a familiar face with fading white stripes staring at him from a rocky outcrop a few meters away, just a bit above him. “And so we meet again, skullface.”
Continue reading Leave-Taking