2463: Athame’s Light – Chapter Two, Part Two

Title: Athame’s Light
Author: Legionary Prime
Media: Video Game
Topic: Mass Effect
Genre: Adventure
URL: Chapter Two
Critiqued by SC and Spectre Myrai T’Sayaa

Admit it.

Spectre Myrai: *grumble*

Admit it.

Spectre Myrai: …Alright, fine, you weren’t making shit up about the weird porn chicks. Being sparred with, and subsequently hit on, by a lion was an… interesting experience.

And then you knocked her the fuck out.

Spectre Myrai: About the point where she started making suggestive use of the words “reach” and “flexibility” was where I finally snapped. Shades and the one who kept bouncing back and forth between adulthood and adolescence gave it a seven out of ten, which I feel is a bit harsh, considering I didn’t have much time to wind up that shot.

Shades might have docked points for not letting her keep that gun.

Spectre Myrai: It was stolen property, and she used to be a cop, she should fucking know better.

Well, anyhow.

Hello, and welcome back to “Athame’s Light,” by Legionary Prime! I’m your host, SC, joined by Spectre Myrai, and last time, not a whole lot in the way of the story happened – it was just Udina, Anderson and Hackett talking about who to choose for humanity’s first Spectre. So naturally, they throw their bid in on one actual human, and the human-born Asari, in an incredible display of missing the point of a human Spectre. Not to mention, both their candidates come from the same family lineage, with the reasoning behind their selection ultimately boiling down to, “their parents are famous, and one’s a human-born Asari, so we gotta.” Sure, there was a token mention of actual merits, but those were glossed over. Meanwhile, lacking for stuff to say, I quizzed Myrai on her pre-Spectre and post-Reaper War days, just to liven up the atmosphere.

I’ll probably be doing that again, as we progress into the second half of chapter two, today. Or maybe not, as this is where we finally meet Asari!Shep, who the fic has so far been building up as somebody important enough to override the major political stepping stone that appointing a human to the Spectres was meant to be for humanity in the first game.

For real, I’m fine with a non-human hero of Mass Effect, but that kind of necessitates building your own plot rather than going by the one laid out in the games, as the way human Shepard got things done is something only human Shepard could reasonably do. Not for lack, or abundance of ability in any particular areas, but because there are just some situations in the games where anybody other than a human Shepard would be fucked, for one reason or another. I believe it was none other than ME-Iron-Maiden who laid it out as so: Alienkind have had too much time to grow complacent with the way things work. Any effort to make proactive moves is quickly shot down. If humanity and our insistence on reaching for ever-greater glory hadn’t come along, the Reapers would have steamrolled the galaxy, because nobody would be in any condition to fight back due to sheer laziness. Hell, this goes straight down to Shepard’s own teammates: Without Shepard to intervene and ask the hard questions they didn’t want to hear, Wrex, Tali, Garrus, and every other alien Shepard worked with would have been content to just go about their day-to-day, until they all wound up dead, I assume, because all of Shepard’s squadmates have a really bad habit of making poor life choices that inevitably lead them to major conflicts. I suspect Legionary Prime knows this to some degree, as their main protagonists are an Asari and a human.

Spectre Myrai: And so, to counter that, they’re being riffed by an Asari and a human.

Exactly!

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