What did you do today in ME?

HAHAHA, these are awesome! Well done.

Barbara "Barbie" Shepard...

Barbie: Hi Kaiden! You got a minute to talk?

Kaiden: Uh, sure?

Barbie: You know, you're really cute and I think you are amazing and I really want to date you and have your babies!

Kaiden: Oh dear lord no!

Barbie: Oh no! Why not?

Kaiden: Because, I'm... gay?

Barbie: Oh. Well that's disappointing. Goodbye! (leaves)

Kaiden: I can't believe that actually worked!

Private Hendricks: So...

* * *

Emily Wong: Can you take this bug and put it in an inconspicuous spot?

Barbie: You betcha! (begins shuffling her armor)

Emily Wong: What are you doing?

Barbie: Shoving it up my ass!

Emily Wong: What? Why?

Barbie: Oh. You want me to shove it up a controller's ass?

Emily Wong: Do you even know what 'inconspicuous' means?

Barbie: Of course I know what it means!

Emily Wong:

Barbie: I have no idea what it means.

* * *

Admiral Kahoku: Shepard! My men were killed by a group called Cerberus. They're after me now. Here's their location. Give them hell.

Later...

Liara: Cerberus really likes Phoenix armor.

Barbie: So cute! Matching outfits for everybody!

Kaiden: Pink is not really my color.

Ashley: But I just got some cool looking armor! Please don't make me wear that.

Wrex: I'm burning it the first chance I get.

Garrus: I am starting to regret joining this crew.

Even later...

Liara: Oh no, it's Admiral Kahoku.

Kaiden: Cerberus found him and killed him.

Barbie: We can't rule out suicide!

Liara: Shepard, he was locked in a cell with giant murder bugs.

Barbie: Maybe he locked himself in the cell?

Liara: There are needle marks on his arm.

Barbie: Heroin overdose maybe?

Much later...

Shadow Broker agent: Admiral Kahoku promised us data on Cerberus. You now have that data. I wish to buy it from you.

Barbie: You buy, sell, and trade information?

Agent: Yes.

Barbie: I'll trade you this information.

Agent: What information do you want in return?

Barbie: If a Hanar had sex with an Elcor, what would that look like? I couldn't find anything on the Extranet. Maybe you know? NO WAIT! Elcor and Volus sex! Or maybe a Hanar-Elcor-Volus threesome? With a Turian stripper!

Agent: You know what? Keep the data, it's yours. I have a call on the other line. Don't call back. Ever.

Hmm, I've done a lot since the last post in here... Not sure if I can keep it in line of trying to be slightly amusing. So forgive me if it sucks.

- Landed on Feros and was thoroughly surprised by the geth enemies. He had never seen geth that jump around like a childhood favorite comic book character of his, aka Spiderman. (I had totally forgotten about these geth...)
- Shot some colonists without names cause he was worried the toxic gas could hurt him, but really because if you're a red shirt, you don't get to live in Renegade Shepard's story. Made sure to save the vendor though. Gotta sell that loot.
- Killed the Thorian and Saved Shiala cause she was a hot space babe who just had mind sex with him.
- Told the council that they were stupid... yet again.

- Decided to go to Noveria next to take down Saren's top LT. Who needs the random asari for intel? Best intel is to find it out first hand.
- Faced an asari commando unit, killed them in 2 blasts of his shotgun each. Laughed.
- Killed the giant space roach, because he fucking hates bugs. Plus something about the krogan and the galaxy and whatever.
- Told the council that he likes committing genocide, just to see them squirm.

- Decided to go exploring cause he really didn't want to go recruit the person who's mom he just killed.
- His first stop was...
*Incoming Message, patching it through*
- To go to a biotic cult to drop off kai... er, help bring in Father Kyle for Admiral Hackett. Intimidated Kyle into giving up.
- Ambushed by the geth on two different planets
- Listened to Garrus about his buddy who reeeeally likes to play the game operation. Found him and encouraged Garrus to kill him (yeeeess, unlimited poooowaaah)
- Then decided he should prob-...
*Incoming Message, patching it through*
- Dammit Hackett, I just did a miss... oh a nuke? Well, that's probably important. Fine.
- Disarmed a nuke and ran over the main baddy with the mako for the lulz.
- Was contacted by the council to go to Virmire to link up with a task force. Thank goodness! He really didn't wanna go tell someone he killed their mom.

- Returned to the Citadel and told Admiral Mikey to fuck off because he's a spectre and he'll outfit his ship with volus torpedoes if he wants.
- Was interviewed by Al-Jilanni and told her that humans are the best and the turians helped or something. Anything that was about missions was classified.

- Departed from the Citadel and
*Incoming Message, patching it through*

OMFG Hackett!!!

Barbara "Barbie" Shepard...

Admiral Hackett: An old booby-trapped probe of ours just messaged us. Go get it back.

Barbie: Okay!

Later...

Wrex: Someone just trapped us in here!

Elias Haliat: Shepard! This is revenge for beating me all those years ago!

Barbie: Which time? When I beat you at checkers? When I stuffed you into a locker? When I gave you a swirlie? When I gave you an atomic wedgie? When I gave you another swirlie? When I beat you at chess? When I beat you at arm wrestling? When I beat you at real wrestling? When I beat you at professional wrestling? When I beat you at fencing? When I beat you at karate? When I beat you at judo? When I beat you at boxing? When I beat you at Monopoly?

Elias: All of it! And the Skyllian Blitz! Die!

Barbie: Ha ha! That guy is such as wuss. Time to disarm this bomb.

Ashley: I'll help. (defuses bomb)

Wrex: That was close.

Ashley: I was trying to detonate it.

Later...

Wrex: Hey, isn't that our tank?

Barbie: Stupid nerd stole my tank! Want to help me give him a wedgie, Wrex?

Wrex: (cracking knuckles) With pleasure.

I disagree with this. Ash's arc is extremely weak in ME3. They don't do anything with her character outside of her sister. Kaidan is the much better character in ME3. He shows more growth than Ash does, and it makes more sense he is a Spectre candidate because he's a much stronger character than Ashley (strong biotic and tech character). Its a shame because Ash is amazing in ME1, but really weak in ME3.

As for me, I decided to actually go back and play my really mean Adept femshep in ME2. I am doing this run on insanity, and I have to take back what I said about Adepts. They are really fun in ME2. I was actually trying to play Sentinel, and managing tech armor made this class not so fun. Plus, warp and overload are the main powers and it gets repetitive. I'm not really as attached to this femshep as I was my engineer character, but it will be fun and interesting to play as a mean female for a change. I have already done this with a male Shepard.

I am also playing as Ob vanguard in ME3. Just met Kasumi on the Citadel. And got the female back on Surkesh. I don't know if I've just done this arc too much, but having Wrex as your best friend by ME3 is getting kind of... boring? I was playing it recently with Wreav and he makes things a bit more interesting because the genophage decision is actually a hard decision then.

deleted

Made another GIF, more to come.

Actually, it has its own thread

I'm not sure if this was targeted towards me, or not....

Thought I was going to get right into a new MEA run but decided to return to my Faith & Owen Shepard ME1 run. They're twins from Mindoir who are both vanguards. Because I wanted to stick with them both not liking batarians, I gave them related but different stories, in that Faith is the Butcher of Torfan and Owen is the Hero of Elysium, so she's Renegade and he's Paragon. She's also the one who ends up being named a Spectre, but mostly because she got the Prothean beacon imprinted on her mind. My RP here is that Udina actually wants both of them to be Spectres but can't swing it with Owen until he somehow "proves" himself to the Council. To do that, he gets a command of his own and is sent on various missions (which is all the ones not related to tracking down Saren). Also, Faith has more of a deep hatred of aliens and so refuses to work with Garrus, Wrex and Tali, who will all be Owen's squadmates. Faith so far has Ash and Kaidan as her squadmates. She hasn't started her missions yet but you know it means she'll get stuck with "you know who", like it or not. I do know how ME1 is going to end and I promise you only one Shepard will be around for ME2 and ME3. Well, they'll technically be two for the intro of ME2, but whatever.

Right now, Owen was sent on his first mission to Asteroid X57. Though lacking Faith's hatred of aliens he has no love for batarians. He did, after all, lose everyone he knew other than Faith to the batarians and then fought them again later in defense of Elysium.

All this is just background. I'll follow-up with a more detailed account of what's happened since I started playing again today.

First, I should mention I'm currently downloading ME2 and all of its DLC. I had recently played MEA and my hard drive just isn't big enough to support four Mass Effect games. It can, however, fit three. Any three. I do have a 2TB external drive coming my way (supposed to be "military grade" or something to that effect so that, one theory goes, it would allow me to play from it, but I'm not placing bets on it) that I'm going to use to swap out various games. My internet sucks and it takes forever to download things, and I'm seriously missing access to all of my Steam games.

Owen Shepard: I had been told of an asteroid headed toward the colony of Terra Nova. Details were sketchy but it seemed like it might not be an accident. I was to investigate. With guns. I decided Garrus and Wrex would be my best picks here. Tali had spunk, no doubt about it, but she was still untested.

First thing I noticed was that there were some kind of torches attached the the asteroid, propelling it toward the colony. Second, I found a dead engineer, shot in the back of the head. Third, I got communications working. That led to the fourth thing, which was a woman telling me I was headed in the right direction and needed to disable the three fusion torches on the asteroid.

On entering the first fusion torch, I saw a squad of batarians with their pet varren. Oh, I was going to love this mission. Nothing better than killing off batarian terrorists, and we did just that. Once the torch was taken offline, the woman we’d heard from earlier contacted us again. She was an engineer from Terra Nova named Kate Bowman and said that the batarians were trying to destroy her home colony.

On the way out, I saw another human. When I called out to him he shot me! It was just one shot, nothing my shields couldn’t handle. What could you expect from an engineer? He told me that the colonists themselves had brought the asteroid nearby, intending to mine it and use the hollowed out remaining structure as the basis for an orbital space station. The batarians had simply found out about it and decided to re-purpose it as Terra Nova’s doom. I wasn’t having that. The destruction of Mindoir and the attempt on Elysium were reason enough to not like them but I didn’t carry that over to other races, not even the turians who often disliked humans.

Found the body of a second of what I now knew were three engineers out here. I didn’t have high hopes for the third. These batarians were bloodthirsty.

The second fusion torch was going to be more work. Aside from be surrounded by cannons like the first, this one also had blasting caps in the ground. The only way to turn them off was by a remote near the entrance. At the same time I’d also have to avoid being fired on by the batarians. Damn, killing them was going to feel good.

It was a tough fight just getting to this torch, much less fighting the batarians inside. Still, we got it done, and Kate Bowman once more reached out. Only this time she was caught by the scum in charge. He asked her who was disabling the torches but she refused to answer. Then I heard a shot fired. No idea who was murdered but it was pointless. I’d faced down worse than anything I’d seen so far. I put myself in the line of fire so people like her don’t have to (though, to be fair, I recruited a hell of a lot of civilians on Elysium).

The third torch wasn’t as hard. It only had turrets outside, though a lot of them. The fight inside wasn’t as tough, but I missed hearing Kate Bowman checking in with me after I’d disabled it. The curious part was when I encountered a group of batarians on the lower level who did not open fire. He said it had never been his intention to hijack the asteroid, planning only to do a “slave grab”. His boss was behind the mass murder. I had no reason to disbelieve him but one thing that was for certain was that I was not okay with slavery. Still, I managed to convince him to turn against his boss, Balak, assuring him I’d take care of the bastard. I also made it clear I was not to ever again see him in human territory, which he seemed to agree to. For my troubles, he told me where to find Balak and gave me a pass key to get in. Y’see, Faith? Sometimes diplomacy can pay off.


After finding that third engineer, I kind of wished I had killed Charn. Well, nothing for it now. No regrets. I’ll kill him if I ever lay eyes on him. Meantime, Balak is going to get what’s coming to him. And Charn was telling the truth since his key opened the door to the main facility, at least once after I took care of the mobile turrets. Thank the Maker for whoever put that canon on the M-35 Mako.

Balak thought he had a shot. I was facing more batarians here than I had at any other point. Thing is, I was pissed off. Slave grab or genocide, I still wanted this bastard dead. Having a krogan and a turian at my back was about as much as anyone could hope for in this type of situation. We took out everything he threw at us before he finally put in an appearance.


The prick actually brought up Torfan as an excuse, not understanding that my sister had retaliated for the attack on Elysium. No love lost between either of us. Problem was, he had planted some bombs around. I could either save the civilians or kill Balak. Faith is the Butcher of Torfan, not me. I had to save these people. In the end, I learned Kate Bowman was still alive. Balak had killed her brother. Too many people died here today but at least not the millions who lived on Terra Nova.

Next: Faith goes to Therum with Ashley and Kaidan

The Faith & Owen Shepard Story:

Faith: Fought my way through a horde of geth with Williams and Alenko. Then we entered a facility and fought some more geth. Found T’Soni trapped behind a force field of some kind. She’d done it to herself, by accident, in trying to protect herself from the geth. To get to her, I had to use a mining laser to blow out a passageway beneath her. The tech for the elevator it led to seemed familiar. This was a Prothean ruin and I reasoned that it was something left over from the beacon. What was truly mind-boggling was that this Prothean force field and elevator were still in working order 50,000 years after their creators had gone extinct. I doubted human technology of any sort would still be working in even another 1,000 years. Unfortunately, a krogan battlemaster and some geth were waiting for us at the time - unfortunate for them, that is, because we made short work of them. We escaped the ruin just in time. Turns out my use of the mining laser had triggered a formerly dormant volcano and blew the place to Hell!

A couple shots from my visit to the Prothean ruin on Therum.


Back on the Normandy, we had a meeting with Dr. T’Soni. She had a theory that the Protheans had been killed off in what was just the most recent of cycle of extinction occurring every 50,000 years. That is to say, the Protheans hadn’t created the mass effect relays but instead used technology that had already long been in existence. Of course, I already knew that. My visions told me about the Reapers. Not that it helped but it was nice that someone else believed me. I suppose, as far as aliens went, Dr. T’Soni wasn’t so bad.

I made a report to the Council. They started trying to tell me how to do my job after making a point to say that wasn’t their role. When that ass Sparatus started up with his racist crap - and he probably wonders why me and Williams don’t want anything to do with aliens - I had Joker disconnect us. Probably not the best decision I’ve ever made but I’m not going to let the turians think they can keep us down.

Then it was time to make the rounds. First up was Alenko. Handsome man and a good head on his shoulders - more like my brother, who was always the more level-headed of the two of us. He was forced into BAaT as a teenager. Also found out he had no interest in Dr. T'Soni, preferring more "adventurous" women. Worked for me.


Williams, in contrast, was more like me. I found out that she'd never before served with aliens which is why she had a hard time dealing with them. She didn't even like T'Soni being on board. Still, she said she'd kiss an alien if I told her which cheek. Also implied she might just be interested in me, and I felt much the same.

Next: Owen doing a side mission with Tali and Wrex.