27 Morality is a Circle

Sometimes a man has to ask himself: where the fuck did I pick up the paragon points to make this situation happen? As Jack and Miranda jerked my shaft and sucked my quad, I realized that I must have cranked my renegade score high enough to cause life to bug out and start filling my paragon meter, cause there is no way I could pull off an intimidate check to get this result.

We've all been here at one point (hopefully, if not go play ME2). You complete Jack and Miranda's loyalty missions and next thing you know there is a vicious biotic catfight and you better have the morality points to pull off the persuade or intimidate or one of them is dying come suicide mission. Only this time Commander Shepard wasn't called in to fix things because the apparently charisma maxed giant space lizard man was on site to bring about this most jolly cooperation.

Scratch that, Shepard was called in and just arrived in time to catch me in my praise the sun moment.

How bout that awkward moment when your Space Momma sees you cumming your soul out cause your wife and her arch enemy are somehow working all four of your testicles with their mouths. #Relatable.

Not one to let a little thing like that chill the relationship, the Commander and I kept our appointment to work on her guns several hours and quarts of baby batter later.

As a glorious mixture of synthetic and organic material, Shepard could withstand and output forces that would snap a regular human in half. Because of this we could play around with her kit far more than anyone else's save mine, and while she couldn't follow my ethos of just adding more gun to my gun she had no problems handling the changes we were making to even her Widow anti-material rifle. We applied the Widow to Black Widow conversion that I'd used on all my weapons to beef up the thermal capacity at the cost of weight and threw on a thermal scope and high velocity barrel extension. Even with the cut on using ultralight materials the sniper cannon weighed an ungodly amount and the Commander could still operate it smoothly.

"You'll have to test everything once we get to Aeia, but unless we overlooked something you are looking at a damn fine power boost all around with a good deal of quality of life improvements outside of the weight increases." I told her while admiring my handy work.

My best work was applying the automatic conversion to her M-96 Mattock and working every trick in my arsenal to dampen the recoil, turning it into a precision workhorse. With the added weight of my modifications and the Commander's steady hands she could probably put a mug sized grouping at thirty meters just holding down the trigger. Fucking scary for anyone not as ridiculously durable as me… so everyone else in the galaxy minus the yahgs maybe. I'd find out who is tougher between me and the yahgs soon enough, one way or the other.

The commander shouldered the beast of an assault rifle we'd cooked up and grinned, "I'll go over everything with Garrus later tonight."

"Hoho. Hot date tonight, up in the main battery?" I asked while pleased for my homie Garrus.

"Not exactly." Shepard denied and now I felt sad for my homie Garrus.

"Did I imagine the awkward chemistry between you two lately?" I investigated, "Especially after you guys killed that prick, Sedonis."

"We didn't kill Sedonis." Shepard told me and I realized that it was silly of me to believe that paragon Shepard joined Garrus in that murder, "Garrus and I have talked about starting a romantic relationship, but he has been pretty self conscious since then. It doesn't help that I am liking what I am seeing of Jacob."

"Is this what Zaeed feels every time he sees me doing my beauty routine?" I asked myself aloud, "It's like I was so proud of you that my pride formed a pride puppy, and then you took that puppy and shot it with a gun that makes a noise that sounds like 'Team Jacob' instead of a satisfying gunshot noise. You murdered my pride puppy and now I am sad. This is what I am feeling right now."

"You sound really invested into 'Team Garrus'. What happened to the guy who wanted to marry me all those months ago?" Shepard teased me.

"He busted this really cool chick out of the clink, and they went on all these really cool adventures and fell in love, and got married after becoming the coolest special agents in the galaxy. You better hurry up Space Momma, cause the Lizard Baby is pulling ahead in all metrics of life success." I laughed after that last bit.

"Oh you silly boy." She chuckled, "Haven't you heard, 'You can fight like a krogan, you can run like a leopard, but you will never be better than Commander Shepard."

"Holy shit!" I barked out while nearly choking on my explosive laughter, "You've heard that?"

"I am not above searching my name on the net." The Commander admitted.

"With how polarizing you are, that can't be good." I told her.

"It usually feels like a kick to the chest." she agreed grimly, "And how the hell did you get all that stuff done back on the Citadel, you have no paperwork and were high for all of it."

"Turns out that the Citadel is super chill about processing superhero backstories. Apparently no one even cared that I was some super krogan grown in a lab and less than a year old. Not C-Sec, not the Spectres, and definitely not the hanar that did our marriage ceremony."

"You had a hanar do your marriage?" Shepard was hung up on the least exacerbating part of that reveal.

"Yeah, we found the guy you got the the evangelical license for on the Presidium and even though the Enkindlers can go fuck themselves it was too good a thread to leave untied." I explained.

"Small galaxy." She mused, "Any regrets about getting married? Most people are scared to death by the institution these days."

"I'm not scared of anything. Not even commitment." I flatly denied.

"Not even when you were getting torn up on the collector ship?" Shepard asked, "I was terrified when I got spaced. I was floating towards the planet, towards my doom, and I couldn't do anything to stop it. I was helpless, my worst nightmares playing out in real life."

"Not even a little bit." I answered her, "The blood rage meant I couldn't feel what was happening to me, so at first I was confused as hell about why I was slowing down, weakening. I didn't even realize I was fucked up till I saw it with the one eye I had left. And when I collapsed and just barely managed to roll over to look at something other than the fucking awful shit the bugs use for the floors of their ships, I saw all the pods and thought about how I was dying to make sure a bunch of people that would never give a shit about me never fill those damn things, but I didn't regret it at all. I'd spent my whole life going on kick ass adventures and fucking hot aliens. I was dying a total winner, no ragrets."

"Is it really that simple?" Shepard chuckled, "Just think about the cool parts of your life and dying isn't scary anymore?"

"Socrates taught that to fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for a person; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest evil." I quoted one of the greatest minds the human race ever produced.

"Are you kidding me right now?" Shepard looked stunned.

"I've read Plato too." I told her as I got up and left the woman to deal with the fallout of realizing that a great big space lizard was more cultured than her.

As I walked away I bopped my head to a beat no one else could hear and sang, "Got a grey varren, white one and a tabby too, and a big orange guy who put snakes in my shoes. Mad MC skills leave ya struck, and I roll with my varren and we're hard as fuck . . . I'm down with Plato and Socrates, and I like to get busy with all the ladies. Rollin' around, sumthin', sumthin', sumthin', sumthin'. Uh nuh nuh, yeah I'm up in my nest, up in my nest."