I don't see much in the way of Mass Effect fanfiction these days, so I'm posting this old oneshot from years back.
"I don't think this is a good idea, Shepard."
"Duly noted. Are you two ready?"
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya held her hands and laced her fingers, the better to hide her nervousness. "Couldn't we have selected a less public place for this? Anyone could walk in on us."
"It's an alleyway off the beaten path. There's a locked door at one end and a Krogan merc at the other," Wrex muttered over his shoulder. He glared at a passing Volus and idly stroked his shotgun until the squat alien started shuffling away faster. "Now get on with your business before I get bored."
The lone Human in the alley pulled out a strange device and hooked it up to an omni-tool. The gadget had been cobbled together by two engineers who were particularly unskilled with omnigel fabrication, yet it could do something that the most powerful medical imagers on the market couldn't: it could scan the Citadel Keepers.
If the fourth occupant of the alley noticed anything unusual, it didn't show. The Keeper's attention was solely devoted to the terminal it was working at, manipulating code written in some obscure Prothean language.
Shepard, Tali noted with some amusement, was hardly different, staring a hole through the gadget's screen as it built up a comprehensive image of the bug-like alien. The scanner required a steady hand to operate, but it was a welcome change from hacking locks and disarming bombs, tasks which were distressingly common when one traveled in the company of the Specter.
"Still, am I the only one who's worried about a C-Sec drone flying overhead? They do patrol the wards, you know."
"Act innocent," the Human replied. "I'm new to the Citadel, I wanted to see a Keeper up close, and you two are showing me. We aren't disturbing it."
"You're a human soldier in an alley with a Krogan merc, a Quarian, and a Keeper," Tali remarked. "If that's your alibi, you're traveling in the wrong company."
She leaned against the wall, one covered by a thousand years of accumulated grime and graffiti. Laws were tricky things, in her experience, and she'd preferred the ones that governed the Flotilla. Those laws were few and pragmatic, based in common sense and necessity. Reproduction was limited because resources had to be rationed. Larger ships had right of way over smaller ships, because they were less maneuverable and carried more citizens.
Life outside the Flotilla was complicated. The laws on the books were more arcane, more subject to interpretation by deskbound officers. You couldn't bring gel containers larger than half a liter onto the Presidium without permission from one's embassy, because five hundred cubic centimeters of liquid explosive was somehow less dangerous than five-fifty. Those with an evangelical bent had to purchase permits, because demanding that they pay enough cash for a few days worth of food was somehow an effective way of weeding out the riffraff.
You couldn't approach the Keepers because... well, because.
Shepard tapped the device, frowned, and restarted it.
"Breaking a law for the sake of curiosity seems like a strange thing to do," Tali remarked. "Especially for a military commander."
"I don't see how we're actually harming the Keepers. They self-destruct when they're disturbed, right? We've scanned seven so far, and they don't seem to notice."
"We don't know that a simple scan would cause them to self-destruct. All we know is that the scanning typically doesn't work."
"Point," the Human admitted. "But why are we forbidden to study the Keepers in the first place? Shouldn't it be important to understand what the Keepers do?"
"Should it?"
The soldier sighed. "If you don't get it, I suppose this is a Human thing."
The Quarian idly kicked a moldy food container and tried not to take that statement personally. Curiosity, a Human thing? Shepard was running around the Citadel scanning every unsuspecting bug they could find at the behest of a Salarian. Yes, plumbing the secrets of the Citadel was a noble goal, but how was scanning the automatons that calibrated the garbage disposals going to help?
To tell the truth, the insectoid savants hardly registered on her radar. Taking interest in them seemed as odd as finding studying the faded graffiti on the walls. When she'd arrived on the Citadel, the Keepers had caught her interest, sure, but so had everything else. The Wards were a maelstrom of a thousand cultures, clashing and merging among sights and sounds she'd never dreamed of, and yet still seemed familiar.
The Keepers were enigmatic and alien to a fault. Whatever they did with their consoles and their odd tools, it was beyond her ability to decipher. And while there was no reason to find the Keepers interesting, there was a good reason not to: it was illegal. And no matter how arbitrary or senseless the law was, it was not a good idea to provoke the authorities when they regarded all Quarians as petty criminals at best.
Common sense advocated walking out of the alley, pushing past Wrex, and making herself scarce. Common sense was told to sit down and shut up.
Maybe it was because Shepard had not only come to her aid, but had given her a job. Maybe it was curiosity telling her to stick around humans, learn what made them tick. Maybe it was something she'd figure out later.
"Alright," Shepard said, flipping the scanner shut. "That's a wrap. Just another thirteen to scan, and we can call it a day."
"Thirteen?" Wrex asked, stepping into the alley. His tone was probably the same he'd use to ask a group of Turians which one of them had just cracked wise about the Genophage.
Shepard, apparently, didn't quite catch Wrex's body language. "Yes, Chorban asked us to scan twenty-one of them. I guess he needs that many for a low sigma-"
The Krogan's wattle twitched, an expression Tali had never seen before. Fast as lightning, he balled his fist and smashed the Keeper's head against the console. The Keeper rebounded, a projector-shaped indent in its face gushing a creamy white liquid.
"Wrex!" Shepard shouted, too surprised to put any venom into that word. Tali prepared to walk out of the alley, get away as fast as she could. A dead Keeper in back of a short-order restaurant was bound to be found sooner or later, and C-Sec could almost pull forensic evidence out of thin air.
"Wrex!" the commander repeated, this time making it sound like the curse it was meant to be. "You can't keep-"
The rant was cut short when the Keeper stopped twitching and burst into flame. With a noise like air escaping a pressurized conduit, the critter was quickly reduced to noxious gas and a fine gray ash.
"Another should stop by soon, finish what this one started," Wrex stated, kicking the pile of ash. Left unsaid was that waiting around the alley was easier than wandering around the Wards for an unwatched Keeper. "Now, if you'll pardon me, the vendor down the street sells the best grilled varren ribs on the Citadel."
Shepard blinked back tears from the noxious gas and shot Tali a confused look as the trigger-happy alien lumbered out of the alley. It was almost funny, how a woman who had broken the law for curiosity's sake was surprised that another person would break that law for convenience's sake.
"You wouldn't understand, Commander," Tali said, smiling behind her visor. "It's a Krogan thing."
A/N: I believe that would be a Renegade Interrupt, by the way.
If there's one thing that the sequel improved over the original Mass Effect (And oh, there were so many things improved) it's the absence of sidequests that can be summarized as "Kill/Scan/Find X amount of Y. That was one of the things that annoyed me about the Scan the Keepers sidequest. The other is the jarring disconnect between story and gameplay. Scanning them is illegal, punishable by hefty fines and rehabilitation, yet most of the Keepers were scanned within sight of dozens of witnesses. Wrex's solution, is... a bit more practical.
"I don't think this is a good idea, Shepard."
"Duly noted. Are you two ready?"
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya held her hands and laced her fingers, the better to hide her nervousness. "Couldn't we have selected a less public place for this? Anyone could walk in on us."
"It's an alleyway off the beaten path. There's a locked door at one end and a Krogan merc at the other," Wrex muttered over his shoulder. He glared at a passing Volus and idly stroked his shotgun until the squat alien started shuffling away faster. "Now get on with your business before I get bored."
The lone Human in the alley pulled out a strange device and hooked it up to an omni-tool. The gadget had been cobbled together by two engineers who were particularly unskilled with omnigel fabrication, yet it could do something that the most powerful medical imagers on the market couldn't: it could scan the Citadel Keepers.
If the fourth occupant of the alley noticed anything unusual, it didn't show. The Keeper's attention was solely devoted to the terminal it was working at, manipulating code written in some obscure Prothean language.
Shepard, Tali noted with some amusement, was hardly different, staring a hole through the gadget's screen as it built up a comprehensive image of the bug-like alien. The scanner required a steady hand to operate, but it was a welcome change from hacking locks and disarming bombs, tasks which were distressingly common when one traveled in the company of the Specter.
"Still, am I the only one who's worried about a C-Sec drone flying overhead? They do patrol the wards, you know."
"Act innocent," the Human replied. "I'm new to the Citadel, I wanted to see a Keeper up close, and you two are showing me. We aren't disturbing it."
"You're a human soldier in an alley with a Krogan merc, a Quarian, and a Keeper," Tali remarked. "If that's your alibi, you're traveling in the wrong company."
She leaned against the wall, one covered by a thousand years of accumulated grime and graffiti. Laws were tricky things, in her experience, and she'd preferred the ones that governed the Flotilla. Those laws were few and pragmatic, based in common sense and necessity. Reproduction was limited because resources had to be rationed. Larger ships had right of way over smaller ships, because they were less maneuverable and carried more citizens.
Life outside the Flotilla was complicated. The laws on the books were more arcane, more subject to interpretation by deskbound officers. You couldn't bring gel containers larger than half a liter onto the Presidium without permission from one's embassy, because five hundred cubic centimeters of liquid explosive was somehow less dangerous than five-fifty. Those with an evangelical bent had to purchase permits, because demanding that they pay enough cash for a few days worth of food was somehow an effective way of weeding out the riffraff.
You couldn't approach the Keepers because... well, because.
Shepard tapped the device, frowned, and restarted it.
"Breaking a law for the sake of curiosity seems like a strange thing to do," Tali remarked. "Especially for a military commander."
"I don't see how we're actually harming the Keepers. They self-destruct when they're disturbed, right? We've scanned seven so far, and they don't seem to notice."
"We don't know that a simple scan would cause them to self-destruct. All we know is that the scanning typically doesn't work."
"Point," the Human admitted. "But why are we forbidden to study the Keepers in the first place? Shouldn't it be important to understand what the Keepers do?"
"Should it?"
The soldier sighed. "If you don't get it, I suppose this is a Human thing."
The Quarian idly kicked a moldy food container and tried not to take that statement personally. Curiosity, a Human thing? Shepard was running around the Citadel scanning every unsuspecting bug they could find at the behest of a Salarian. Yes, plumbing the secrets of the Citadel was a noble goal, but how was scanning the automatons that calibrated the garbage disposals going to help?
To tell the truth, the insectoid savants hardly registered on her radar. Taking interest in them seemed as odd as finding studying the faded graffiti on the walls. When she'd arrived on the Citadel, the Keepers had caught her interest, sure, but so had everything else. The Wards were a maelstrom of a thousand cultures, clashing and merging among sights and sounds she'd never dreamed of, and yet still seemed familiar.
The Keepers were enigmatic and alien to a fault. Whatever they did with their consoles and their odd tools, it was beyond her ability to decipher. And while there was no reason to find the Keepers interesting, there was a good reason not to: it was illegal. And no matter how arbitrary or senseless the law was, it was not a good idea to provoke the authorities when they regarded all Quarians as petty criminals at best.
Common sense advocated walking out of the alley, pushing past Wrex, and making herself scarce. Common sense was told to sit down and shut up.
Maybe it was because Shepard had not only come to her aid, but had given her a job. Maybe it was curiosity telling her to stick around humans, learn what made them tick. Maybe it was something she'd figure out later.
"Alright," Shepard said, flipping the scanner shut. "That's a wrap. Just another thirteen to scan, and we can call it a day."
"Thirteen?" Wrex asked, stepping into the alley. His tone was probably the same he'd use to ask a group of Turians which one of them had just cracked wise about the Genophage.
Shepard, apparently, didn't quite catch Wrex's body language. "Yes, Chorban asked us to scan twenty-one of them. I guess he needs that many for a low sigma-"
The Krogan's wattle twitched, an expression Tali had never seen before. Fast as lightning, he balled his fist and smashed the Keeper's head against the console. The Keeper rebounded, a projector-shaped indent in its face gushing a creamy white liquid.
"Wrex!" Shepard shouted, too surprised to put any venom into that word. Tali prepared to walk out of the alley, get away as fast as she could. A dead Keeper in back of a short-order restaurant was bound to be found sooner or later, and C-Sec could almost pull forensic evidence out of thin air.
"Wrex!" the commander repeated, this time making it sound like the curse it was meant to be. "You can't keep-"
The rant was cut short when the Keeper stopped twitching and burst into flame. With a noise like air escaping a pressurized conduit, the critter was quickly reduced to noxious gas and a fine gray ash.
"Another should stop by soon, finish what this one started," Wrex stated, kicking the pile of ash. Left unsaid was that waiting around the alley was easier than wandering around the Wards for an unwatched Keeper. "Now, if you'll pardon me, the vendor down the street sells the best grilled varren ribs on the Citadel."
Shepard blinked back tears from the noxious gas and shot Tali a confused look as the trigger-happy alien lumbered out of the alley. It was almost funny, how a woman who had broken the law for curiosity's sake was surprised that another person would break that law for convenience's sake.
"You wouldn't understand, Commander," Tali said, smiling behind her visor. "It's a Krogan thing."
A/N: I believe that would be a Renegade Interrupt, by the way.
If there's one thing that the sequel improved over the original Mass Effect (And oh, there were so many things improved) it's the absence of sidequests that can be summarized as "Kill/Scan/Find X amount of Y. That was one of the things that annoyed me about the Scan the Keepers sidequest. The other is the jarring disconnect between story and gameplay. Scanning them is illegal, punishable by hefty fines and rehabilitation, yet most of the Keepers were scanned within sight of dozens of witnesses. Wrex's solution, is... a bit more practical.