What did you do today in ME?

1. Many thanks!  So Legion is souped up to be able to act independently as a long-range scout?  I had always wondered whether he had been part of a larger group decimated by adversaries.  A lone scout makes sense; better chance to be able to observe without being observed.  (I'm surprised he never returns to base to get his chest plate replaced.)

2.  In some way, this doesn't make sense; the geth go to war against the Quarians after the geth become sapient.  It makes it seem as if the geth took an evolutionary step backward after driving out the Quarians.  "Dumb as a varren" makes them seem more like limited robots as opposed to true AI.

3. Perhaps a sign of his growing sophistication as he has experiences outside of the Collective.  Perhaps Legion is truly impressed with the way Shep was ultimately able to defeat Sovereign.  In some ways, parallels how EDI develops, especially after she acquires a body.

Not really.  All the geth on Rannoch were linked into the network.  They were not dumb, just naive.  However, being part of the network requires moving together to stay part of it or making use of networked comm buoys (I think it was said in the game).   This is why so many people took issue with the geth as portrayed in ME3.  They were only a true AI as part of the network.  When separated from it they aren't much more than dumb robots.  They were okay with that, planning to house the entire network in one floating platform.  When you complete one of the missions (geth fighter squadrons, I think), a bunch who were freed from the Reapers inhabit several geth prime bodies.  We also get to see what a geth "brain" looks like with Reaper upgrades and it shows that individual geth (versus masses of them in a single platform) are independent.  It changes the nature of the geth entirely.

Everyone survived?! Are you ill or something?

Melody Shepard, Colonist/Sole Survivor/Infiltrator, ME2 Insanity:

With the Normandy's battle damage repaired and all systems nominal, Melody toured the ship, figuring that her colleagues all deserved their CO's ear after what had happened. Kelly was traumatized by her experience; Chakwas, Donnelly and Daniels were grateful that the squad had come to their aid. Most of the squad expressed scepticism at Melody's decision to preserve the Collector base. Jack didn't offer an opinion; Melody suspected that the nihilistic biotic truly didn't care.

Melody spent a little time talking with Legion, asking about the N7 armour welded to its housing. Legion explained that it had traced the steps that Melody took during and after the Sovereign crisis, starting on Eden Prime and finishing at the Normandy SR-1's crash site. The N7 armour had been Melody's, recovered from the crash site and used to partially repair damage sustained some time previously. When Melody asked about the significance of using a piece of her armour, Legion was unable to respond.

Before returning to CIC, Melody paused in the tech lab, still functioning under EDI's control, but quiet and empty without its scientist salarian. She wondered what he would have thought of her decision; eager to examine the Collector/Reaper tech, or concerned for the potential for misuse?

Melody ordered the Normandy to Illium, reasoning that the crew and squad deserved some shore leave. She decided to visit Liara while in the neighbourhood and pass on some Cerberus intel regarding the Shadow Broker. Prior to disembarking, she booked an appointment with Dr Chakwas to get the (albeit shallow) scars on her face healed, finally completing the Lazarus reconstruction.

Liara took the Shadow Broker intel back to her apartment for examination; Melody agreed to join her there that evening. She arrived to find a crime scene — someone had made an attempt on Liara's life — with Spectre Tela Vasir investigating. The two of them found a hidden message indicating that Liara had gone to an office building to meet a contact; they agreed that she was likely in danger.

Unwilling to interrupt everyone else's shore leave, Melody's backup consisted of Legion, who did not care about leave; and Grunt, for whom killing things was the best kind of recreation. Per Legion's specifications, she fabricated a Widow sniper for it to use. Arriving at the office building, they found the place swarming with Shadow Broker mooks who blew out three floors in a crude further attempt to kill Liara. The squad fought their way through the building and found Liara's contact dead, execution-style. Liara appeared on the scene and named Vasir as the assassin; after a brief scuffle, Vasir fled the scene in her skycar, taking crucial data with her.

Melody and Liara pursued Vasir in a borrowed taxi, with Legion along for the ride. After a somewhat eventful chase, Vasir's car was brought down on the roof of Hotel Azure. The squad fought several waves more Shadow Broker agents (this was a tedious, derpy mess of a battle that took me several goes until I remembered that I had Squad Cryo Ammo which helped with both crowd control and faster killing) and pursued Vasir, finally catching up with her gatecrashing a party.

Vasir took one partygoer hostage as the others fled. Melody distracted Vasir by reminding her that she was responsible for the loss of the Destiny Ascension and death of the rachni queen, while Liara threw a table at her. With the hostage situation resolved, a protracted battle began. Vasir's vanguard powers made her far too mobile to snipe, but Melody and Liara prevailed using Incinerate and Warp, with Legion's drone providing distraction. (This took three or four tries; I got to the final phase in one attempt, but that Shockwave stunlock did me in repeatedly in the last stretch of the battle).

As she lay dying, Vasir attempted to justify being a Shadow Broker double-agent by claiming that Broker intel had helped her save countless lives as a Spectre, and said that it was not so different from Melody's work with Cerberus.

Liara analysed the data that Vasir had taken, using it to pinpoint the Shadow Broker's location. Before departing, she and Melody spoke a little about the choices she had made that had led her on this path: she had crossed the Shadow Broker while recovering Melody's body, preventing it from falling into Collector hands, and had seen a trusted friend captured in the process.

Make Zaeed a team leader! Someone will die for sure!

I can´t understand how you guys deliberately cut game content by letting someone die.

Anyway, I finally decided to do all the achievements of ME1.

- finish the game in the hardcore. I am doing this now and I foresee a gentle breeze ahead. So far I have not identified what's different in relation to the difficulty I always play, Veteran.

- use warp, lift, stasis and singularity 75 times. As you can see, I've never played with Adept/Vanguard before.

- Kill 75 enemies with the shotgun.

- End the game in insanity and reach level 60. Not a little anxious for these two. I'll still see the best approach for this, try both at once, or speedrun Insanity and then import a character for the third time to reach level 60.

- have Garrus, Liara and Ash for the majority of the game. I´m with Liara and Garrus right now and I´ll save Ash and her broken Imunity for the Insanity run.

If you're concerned about it a trilogy run, you can, for example, just do a non-import ME3 run.  Shepard will have made largely Renegade choices (Council dead, no one is loyal, Ashley alive, Wrex dead, rachni queen dead, Maelon's data deleted, a few ME2 squadmates dead).  You get the impact of Renegade choices and only have to live with it for the one game.  I don't think there's much cut, really.  You still have all the same missions but they play out differently.

He did, actually.  PM'd me and we got it sorted.

Laura Shepard, Colonist, Sole Survivor

This is my last post with Laura, who over the course of three games (two of them twice) has become my favorite protagonist alongside Hawke. Last year, I was pretty much convinced I would never play Mass Effect. I'm thrilled to have been so wrong.


In London, Anderson explained the plan to take out the mini-reaper guarding the beam, and then get a small team up to the Citadel. 

Anderson left Shepard alone with her crew, and she gave a stirring speech. She told them to remember what they were fighting for, and that they would never be fighting alone.

Shepard took Garrus and Ashley as her ground team, and they wasted no more time setting the plan in motion. 

I did the entire Earth sequence on Hardcore, and it wasn't too bad overall. Shepard died once near the beginning (I let her get surrounded...stupid), but this section required several applications of medi-gel to both Garrus and Ashley. It was mostly the multiple-brutes-at-once waves that did it, although I think one of them was done in by a screamer.

With the mini-reaper destroyed, the team ran for the beam...only to have Harbinger show up. 

Harbinger's attacks nearly destroyed the entire team. Garrus was seriously wounded...and Ashley was not in much better shape. Shepard called the Normandy for an emergency extraction.

Shepard half dragged Garrus onto the Normandy, where he had to be restrained from trying to follow Shepard. She had made a promise to him -- No Shepard without Vakarian -- and now she had to break that promise to give him a chance to live. The man who had followed her into hell and back, who had believed in her when no one else had, could not follow her to the end.

The Normandy took off to rejoin the fleet, and Shepard ran ahead to the beam. She did not make it unscathed...but she did make it.

Shepard arrived to the Citadel, surrounded by human corpses and Keepers. Anderson had made it through the beam shortly before she had, and she set out to find him.

Unfortunately, TIM found him first, and had him under physical control. As if it hadn't been clear enough to Shepard before, it was now horrifyingly obvious: The Illusive Man was indoctrinated. He began ranting and raving about controlling the reapers and seizing their power for the betterment of humanity.

In a moment of clarity, TIM finally saw in himself the same thing that Shepard did and, seeing no hope left for himself any longer, he killed himself.

Shepard scrambled to the console to open the arms of the Citadel so that the Crucible could dock. She heard Anderson behind her, crawling forward and pulling himself upright. She sat next to him as he died. They watched the Earth below them and talked about Shepard's future. Anderson couldn't focus well enough to see how badly Shepard was bleeding, but she pretended, for his sake.

After Anderson had gone, Shepard sat staring at Earth for what seemed like a long time, until Hackett's voice came through her comms. The Crucible still hadn't fired, so Shepard crawled forward toward the console. She passed out before she could reach it.

While she lay there unconscious, the Citadel opened completely, and the Catalyst connected with Shepard's consciousness just as Leviathan had done, but this time taking the form of the little boy who had been haunting her dreams.

It tried to tell Shepard she had choices other than destroying the reapers. It tried to convince her to take control of the reapers, killing herself in the process, but ensuring peace for the galaxy. It tried to convince her to end the conflict forever by merging the reapers with organics. But Shepard had watched both Saren and The Illusive Man spiral into madness in pursuit of these goals, as the reapers took control of them instead. And then she knew: this was the reapers' last attempt to indoctrinate her, defeat her, and continue the cycle...and she would not let that happen. She woke up, and readied her weapon.

The Crucible charged itself to fire, and Hackett ordered the fleet to leave the system.

The beam from the Crucible passed through each relay, causing varying degrees of damage to each one. The geth and EDI went dark. However, every reaper in the wake of the beam was rendered immediately inert. 

As the Citadel's control chamber began to collapse around her, Shepard thought about those she'd lost, about Garrus who she'd left behind, and she made peace with her death just before she lost consciousness.


The Aftermath
This might be a good time to mention that I used John P's Alternate MEHEM, but that I completely forgot I had it installed. Imagine my surprise when I reached the ending   So here we go: JP's MEHEM, plus Extended Cut, plus headcanon.



After Hackett ordered the fleet to leave Sol, he held his flagship back to evacuate last, but ran out of time. However, this turned out to be fortuitous for Shepard. After the beam passed Earth, leaving behind dead reapers, Hackett suited up, gathered a small team, and headed to the Citadel in a shuttle to look for Anderson and Shepard. Shepard was kept under sedation in a planetside hospital under a false name to protect her from any lingering Cerberus sympathizers, reporters, and other such leeches. She suffered severe burns over her arms, legs, and most of her torso where her armor had begun to melt onto her, and had to undergo extensive skin grafts to repair the damage.

By the time she woke up, Garrus was waiting at her bedside. The Normandy, like much of the fleet, hadn't made it to the Charon relay before the beam hit. However, the beam had caused some damage to the ship, so it had to limp back to Earth at sub-light speeds. They most certainly didn't crash land on any weird planet, though if they had, I imagine that Garrus and Ashley would have exited the ship with Joker



The first order of business for the fleet left in the Sol system was making sure everyone had enough food for the years ahead. What could be grown on Earth was planted as soon as possible, and what couldn't be grown was synthesized. Rations were tight, but more people survived than not.

With the relays damaged, it would take several years to travel even to the closest homeworlds -- Palaven and Tuchanka -- at FTL speeds. Some ships decided to risk the long journey anyway; some of those were never heard from again, though expeditions were sent to search for survivors in the years after the relays were repaired.

Most, however, were unwilling to risk the trip, and opted to stay in the Sol system until the relays were repaired. The Keepers took over repairs on the Citadel, leaving the fleets to repair the relay. The reapers were scavenged for parts.

Several years later, the Charon relay had been repaired, but no one knew whether any of the other relays had been fixed yet. The Alliance sent an unmanned probe through the relay headed for Palaven...and received a response.



Earth would always be the human homeworld, but the battle and ensuing years had changed it forever: Earth became a multi-species society, as people who had made a temporary home there, waiting for the relays to be fixed, decided to stay. 



Wrex was one of the few who set out for Tuchanka before the relays were repaired. Shepard heard from him soon after the Charon relay was fixed: he and Eve's first baby was a girl...named Mordin. She was the first of many children for them.



Shepard herself spent a few more years serving as the captain of the Normandy (though with several promotions), before retiring with Garrus on the new Citadel. They both took civilian jobs, Shepard with software engineering, and Garrus still calibrating giant guns. They did end up adopting a few children, though not krogan ones.



And...thus ends my journey with Laura Shepard. I've gotten pretty attached to her, so she'll probably end up like Hawke, where I will come back later to play pretty much the same character again. But before I do that, I intend to do a renegade playthrough of the trilogy with an Ashley romance. I'll probably do it simultaneously with my next DAI playthrough. It should be interesting

dragontartare: Hooray for MEHEM and happy endings! I'm one dlc away from the end of ME2 (Arrival). Then I hope to have my happy ending as well.

From the Journal of Ioan Shepard:

- Aratoht: Here I am, deep in the heart of batarian space to rescue a deep cover agent who is a friend of Admiral Hackett. This is an off-the-books mission by any standard, not that I currently owe allegiance to anyone. All I know is that she's been captured and has evidence about the Reapers. That was enough for me to go in. If not for the Normandy's stealth systems there's no way we could ever have gotten here.
- I sneaked into the prison. Was in terrible condition and the presence of varren suggested prisoners came here to die. Still, I overheard a batarian questioning Kenson in a place that was inaccessible due to a laser barrier. Overheard discussion about slamming the local relay with an asteroid to destroy it. The explosion would be massive. But why do it? Then I overheard the interrogation. Kenson said the Reapers were coming to the Aratoht relay. She wanted to destroy it to keep them from coming through. But where did the intel come from?
- I killed the guards and freed Kenson. She said she had to hack a system to get us a way out. Meanwhile, I would keep the rest of the batarians off of her. She really took a long time, too. Wish I'd had Tali or Kasumi with me. Or Kaidan. Eventually she got it and we escaped on a shuttle. [One guard was not shooting and blend in with the background. Took me a while to find him before I could leave.] Kenson admitted trying to destroy the relay, saying she'd found an artifact called Object Rho that proved the Reapers were coming very soon. She said the artifact gave her visions and I immediately thought of indoctrination.
- Project Base: Kenson took me to her base for proof. There was a countdown to Reaper arrival that was just over two days. She showed me Object Rho. It was sitting out in the open, unshielded, with dark energy pulsing around it. Then it blasted me, giving me a vision of Reapers coming through the relay. That's when Kenson pulled a gun on me and told me I couldn't be allowed to restart the Project and prevent the Reapers from coming. Proof of indoctrination. The artifact spoke to me. Reminded me of Harbinger. Object Rho itself finally overcame me.
- I awoke in a lab and had to escape. Once I had, I saw the countdown was at less than two hours. It meant I was out for two days.

- To be continued...

year - 2210
time - 2000 EST
where- North Carolina

Announcer:  Live from North Carolina at studio 54 is The Tonight Show. Heeeeeeeeeeeeere's themikefest. (the band plays music as themikefest walks around shaking hands with the audience}

themikefest: Thank you. Whew. Thank you. Tonight.....thank you. Ok. Tonight's special guest needs no introduction. Over 23 years ago she stopped giant robots from destroying our planet and the galaxy. Since that time, she has raised a family, a rather large family, she has written 2 cookbooks, a book about her life outside of the military. She's even married to the most powerful woman on Earth, if not the galaxy. Here she is,,,,Commander Elizabeth Nancy Shepard. ( the audience jump to their feet when Shepard makes her way to the couch).  For the next 15 minutes, the crowd cheers.

themikefest: Welcome Commander.
Shepard: You don't have to call me Commander. Lisa will be fine.
"As you wish. Its hard to believe its been that long. I know you've been on my show before, but I have to keep saying thank you for what you did. (The crowd claps and cheers)
" I was just doing my job. I also had a lot of help"
" Yes you did. You're what...55 now. You look great. Even having 13 children. You may want to write another book explaining how you keep yourself looking good.
" Hahahahaha. Thank you. I might write a book. Part of it is my kids keeping me on the move."
" There is another person I want to thank. Your wife, Samantha. Because of her, Earth has rebuilt a lot faster than what was projected back in 2187. Correct me if I'm wrong. She has donated 2.1 trillion credits to cities all over the world?"
"that sounds about right"( the audience stand and cheer for the next few minutes)
" Someday I would like to have her on my show"
" That's possible. She does like watching your show"
" I'm flattered. Ok. For you folks at home, this show is 3 hours instead of 1 hour.  Lisa Shepard will be giving commentary while one of my people, Bugs Bunny, play ME3. You will be able to see it on the big screen over there. I will at times ask the Commander questions.  I know Commander that there might ones you can't answer. In that case I will skip to another question. If my cameraman turns the camera to the audience you will see folks wearing various costumes from the Mass Effect game. While they get that setup and the game to load, I willl ask if you still keep in contact with Bioware?
" I do. I first met Casey Hudson when I was first pregnant. He wanted to make a video game based on me. When the first game was released, it did well. It was followed up with two more games."
" Have you met Jennifer Hale? The one who voices you?
"I have. A very nice person. I even met Mark Meer who voiced the male version of me. The rest of VA's I've met. All wonderful people."

" We're ready? Ok. Go ahead. Bugs Bunny will be playing you. This first scene takes place in Vancouver. Why were you there?
" I was there getting my ship, the Normandy, retrofitted. Anderson, that's him there who I'm walking beside, told me that they had someone on Mars who found something that might stop the reapers. "
" The other guy is James Vega. He's one of the people who helped you stop the reapers."
"Yes. A wondeful guy. He has been very helpful since the war ended."
" There's Ashley Williams. She helped you as well?"
"She did. She's also married to James. They own a security firm. They provide security to a number of companies as well as my wife's company."
" At this point the reapers arrive. You and Anderson head to the Normandy. What was your first thought?"
"I thought they needed to be stopped as quickly as possible. I could hear people screaming."
"How about this boy?"
"That is something Bioware chose to add to the game. What happened is I made it to the Normandy while Anderson stayed to help coordinate forces against the reapers on Earth. Once onboard, Admiral Hackett said to stop at Mars to get the information that could help stop the reapers."
"You arrive on Mars with Ashley and James. Here you encounter Cerberus.  Tell me about them."
"Not much to say. They were power hungry that wanted to control the reapers and be the protectors of humanity. "
"I have no problem with that. I just didn't agree with their methods. They had to be put down."
"This is Liara T'Soni. One of your former squadmates."
"Yes. She was studying plans for a weapon to destroy the reapers."
"What about the rest of this mission?"
"It didn't happen like that. Once I got rid of the Cerberus soldiers, we headed to the Citadel to talk with the council to get help."
"So that Eva robot never happened."
"No. It's something Bioware put in."
"Ok folks. Its time for a commercial break. I'll be back with the Commander in 3 minutes"