#oopsiedoodle

Still playing around with the repercussions of some headcanon changes, and this came about.

Setting: ME2, shortly after boarding the Normandy SR2 (may or may not be before anyone has been recruited yet, I haven't decided yet)

~~~

“Briseadh agus brú ar do chnámha!** What the hell have you done to me?”

He doesn’t yell; if anything, the words escape barely above a whisper, and yet, they impact every person standing in the Mess now staring at the pieces and parts of what used to be a chair that litter the floor near the wall. His eyes, a blazing blue under normal circumstances, now burning with a glow of dark energy as they focus on the woman staring back at him, her arms folded across her chest, her face a neutral mask.

“I would think it obvious, Shepard; I brought you back to life.”

Anger floods through him with the speed of a tsunami. The dark energy feeds off it, swirling around him with a snapping hiss. He raises a hand – not in threat so much as frustration – and the hiss becomes an uncontrolled crackle as it flies off in her direction. She calmly, neatly, side steps it, allowing it to hit the wall behind her.

Caleb is oblivious to the crew as they jump away and gasp. No, his focus is solely on Miranda Lawson, on the firm set of her facial features when she doesn’t even flinch. “What the hell have you DONE to me?”

“Nothing that your DNA hadn’t already done to you,” she replies. “The markers were always there, Shepard, I just… encouraged them to be more open.”

Thunder echoes in his ears, and it takes a moment to realize that, no, it isn’t thunder, not on board this copy of the Normandy, but his blood as it pounds through his veins.

~~~~

BUT... okay, so they fixed the glitch where going up to the geth transmitter didn't really do anything (at least on the PS3 version) and this time it DID but instead of initially reading "turn off geth comms" I read "Turn off geth.com..."

I know it’s kinda sorta early for retrospectives but ehh, I was in need of something to do and the new year is close enough.

I think I actually had a pretty good art year this time around. I remember having many sincerely fun moments drawing. Like, the process itself was enjoyable and brought me delight, which has been such a rarity for the past few years. I think part of it lies in being more honest with myself about what I want to draw and how. I think I’ve been, on some level, holding onto the thought that if I just chill a while, I’ll bounce back, find my stride again and go back to being an extremely prolific and ambitious artists with Projects and Goals. And then I’d get very disappointed in myself when that didn’t happen, even though I allowed myself, very generously, multiple moments of ”taking it easy”.

But, as I’ve recently also read from studies, the truth of a burnout is that your mind will very likely be permanently altered and there is no recovery that looks exactly like the pre-burnout time. In retrospect a lot of the choices I made after overextending myself at my animation job 7-8 years ago helped preserve what little artistic spirit I had left, but I can’t expect to return to the ways of my younger, driven self. I can no longer sustain dreams of creating something huge and meaningful that moves hundreds of people and brings me acclaim from critics and the audience. If I want to continue to have art - or drawing, more spesifically - in my life, it needs to be just my little treat. Not as a quick goodie I allow myself to indulge in before going back to doing something more meaningful, but as a constant fact. And if that means I keep drawing a single subject over and over, to the point of feeling extremely silly about the lack of variety in my head, then so be it - and I need to learn to be okay with that.