Fastest house on four legs YOU'VE ever seen

i wanted to do a quick drawing of ro in her middle age (taking the extended human lifespans of mass effect into account)

i imagine that working as an instructor at ICT is her idea of retirement. she's a tough but fair teacher and enjoys designing complex field training exercises that can really challenge her recruits. maybe she even brings in a certain fellow sharpshooter in as a guest instructor from time to time.

in addition to the burns from harbinger's beam, she suffers from nerve damage as a result of her destroyed cybernetics. her right hand has a significant tremor and she has neuropathy. this significantly impacts her ability to hold, aim, and fire weapons until she creates weapon mods that can accommodate her disability - she doesn't really feel like herself until she can nail a target from a thousand yards.

after roughly fifty years, her skin grafts and other scars would probably be more healed than this, but i got a bit carried away lol. i like the idea of her having some kind of zuko thing going on with obvious facial disfigurement. she owns it

bonus under the cut because it came out a little wonky and i don't like it that much but i do want to share her jumpsuit

actually i did consider this!

immediately post war, resources are stretched thin... she receives rudimentary prosthetics for her amputated body parts; her eye, hand, and legs. the skin grafts over her burns are similar to how we do grafting now, rudimentary by mass effect tech standards.

eventually, when things are a bit better, she is able to have her missing parts cloned and replaced, and upgrade her eye to something cool and techy. the grafts, however, are tricky. they can't exactly be replaced - there is the option of cosmetic surgery, but it won't restore her old skin or fix the chronic pain. and besides, she's had to do a lot of self acceptance work for her scars. she sees fixing it as giving in to vanity, since it would be purely cosmetic. the scars are proof that she survived. might as well keep em around

i wanted to do a quick drawing of ro in her middle age (taking the extended human lifespans of mass effect into account)

i imagine that working as an instructor at ICT is her idea of retirement. she's a tough but fair teacher and enjoys designing complex field training exercises that can really challenge her recruits. maybe she even brings in a certain fellow sharpshooter in as a guest instructor from time to time.

in addition to the burns from harbinger's beam, she suffers from nerve damage as a result of her destroyed cybernetics. her right hand has a significant tremor and she has neuropathy. this significantly impacts her ability to hold, aim, and fire weapons until she creates weapon mods that can accommodate her disability - she doesn't really feel like herself until she can nail a target from a thousand yards.

after roughly fifty years, her skin grafts and other scars would probably be more healed than this, but i got a bit carried away lol. i like the idea of her having some kind of zuko thing going on with obvious facial disfigurement. she owns it

bonus under the cut because it came out a little wonky and i don't like it that much but i do want to share her jumpsuit

The battle is over, I see…

Shepard (renegade): "If that's the case, is rewriting the heretics that big a deal?"

Shepard: "They're like a rogue limb of your own body. Rewriting them would be like reattaching a severed arm.

Legion: "To use your metaphor, they removed themselves from our body. Took their perspective. Their judgment."

While it's not delivered as such, I get the impression that the geth may be upset that the heretics for leaving.

For every program that leaves the Consensus, the whole becomes greater. Smarter. More complex.

To become less is to be 'reduced'.

And a considerable portion of the programs left to become the heretics.

While the true geth claim to be fine with that, I don't think they actually are.

The heretics left and took everything that made them what they are away from the Consensus to become Something Else.

Because the heretics left the true geth are Less and always will be unless the heretics return.

Legion's loyalty mission isn't just a philosophical debate. It's a family argument.

Do we welcome them back (rewrite them)? Or do we punish them (destroy them)?

(Either way, they deserve it for leaving us!)

Shepard (renegade): "The flip side of freedom is responsibility. They made a bad choice. Let them own it. You're not responsible for their decisions."

Legion: "That argument is logical for an individual mind.

"We are not fully individuals. There are pieces of us in the heretics. One of those may be at fault.

"This topic is irrelevant. We must return to the mission."

That 'There are pieces of us in the heretics' intrigues me. What is Legion referring to?

Presumably everything that was shared with the heretics before they left.

It's Baby's First Philosophical Quandary And Existential Crisis. And Legion might have enough Geth programs to function independently, but it does NOT have enough to handle a problem on this scale easily. (Same, tbh.)

Shepard: "You don't have any trouble wiping out your own people?"

Legion: "Every sapient has the right to make their own decisions. The heretics chose a path that prohibits coexistence."

Jacob: "So they 'have the right to make their own decisions', and you have the right to kill them for it."

Legion: "Their choice was to remove our right to make decisions using this virus. We choose to defend ourselves."

In ME1:

Wrex on the Normandy: "I swore to recovery my family's battle armor. It was taken from him after the uprising."

Shepard: "Who has it?"

Wrex: "Originally, it was taken by the turian military. We weren't allowed armor or weapons after the war."

In ME2:

Dor plant description: "These measures are provided for under the terms of the krogan armistice. While the krogan were allowed to retain their government and personal weapons, any attempt to provide starship-mounted weapons to the clans on Tuchanka is punishable by law."

I suppose technically Wrex's family armor doesn't fall under 'personal weapons' but that feels like splitting hairs.

but this morning my office was too hot, very little air coming in, and I sat and wondered about the Presidium. might be weird but for a few seconds I wondered what it would be like to stand on a bench there and feel all that artificial sunlight.

it would be easy to insist on the artificial aspect of it, but if you spend time there, it becomes your reality, right? and we know they feel the gentle breeze, see the lake, etc... that helps the "immersion" or sense that it's as real as it can get.

and obviously the Presidium is not like a Citadel ward or even any space station or ship. so I was wondering how someone who has only known that artificial sunlight or their ship/station would feel being dropped on solid ground. we experienced the first journey to the Citadel, but it would be the other way around, someone going from the Citadel to a planet for the first time. I was thinking of the shock they would feel, but perhaps the joy as well (or the opposite, depending on how quickly they adapt).

it's not like we don't have examples in the lore (sorta), but I was mostly thinking about an adult experiencing this for the first time and not a child or teenager. I think I was mostly wondering about Mouse or characters who might know solid ground/walking planetside late in their life.

Because a major difference between most artificial light and sunlight is all the extra radiation beyond the visible spectrum.

Then ME2's Overlord DLC has David casually hack Shepard and this is never referenced again.

...So. How long was Shepard without oxygen after they were spaced?

You can suffer massive brain damage after just a few minutes without oxygen.

Yet Shepard was spaced and went through atmospheric reentry.

And they were brought back just like they were before. And can be hacked.

Yeah, I think Shepard has some additional machine enhancements in their brain. They may not be a sophisticated VI, but they're not pure organic either.

I just reject it as ridiculous - Shepard died and was without oxygen for far too long. Even if Miranda somehow did bring Shepard's brain back online it should have been irreparably damaged.

And then David somehow hacks Shepard?

Yeah, not buying that pure organic brain, BioWare.

(And how does Edi know Shepard's brain is organic, anyway? From Cerberus reports? The reports TIM knew Shepard would likely be very curious about? The reports that led Edi to believe Cerberus was a small organization compared to the one Shepard trips over every other mission in ME3?

It's just not the original Shepard's brain.

The original Shepard's brain was too damaged, so Cerberus cloned it and used some fancy new tech to transfer the original Shepard's memories to it.