#opus!verse

Liara’s eyes linger on the porch swing as she exits the house, heart clenching over a memory that isn’t hers, for a place she’s never seen until today. She runs a curious hand over the old wood, in need of fresh paint but still solid and strong. How often have you sat here, Shepard, she wonders, now that the memory you clung to so tightly is yours to keep?

She looks down the hill, where the lights are on in the barn, offering warm beacons of light as the sunset glow fades into twilight. A breeze whispers through the trees that line the right side of the path, with a stronger bite now without the sun. She draws her stole more tightly to her.

Nothing moves in the barn, but she finally spies Shepard out in the field with the horse, silhouetted in the fading light. He follows Echo with a brush as she grazes, playfully shoving her nose as she tries to pilfer the carrots sticking out of his back pocket. The dog that stays so faithfully at Shepard’s side pokes at the dirt nearby, keeping an eye on her charges. Occasionally Shepard stops to pat the horse’s neck, finally rewarding her pestering with half of a carrot, the price being her standing still long enough to rub his palm over her broad forehead. Or, mostly still. Liara huffs to herself as the horse – Echo, he called her – decides to use his shoulder as a scratching post and nearly knocks him to the ground.

Kaidan had advised her of this ritual when he’d asked her to come, that he tended to disappear to the barn after dinner, and sometimes lost track of time. Such a strange attachment, a strange routine, but the laugh carried up to her on the wind is one that feels happy, whole, in ways that make her ache.

She is too far away for Shepard to sense, but something makes him look back at the house anyway. He waves, she waves back, and a few minutes later he gives Echo the last of the carrots and slips out of the gate to trudge up the hill, followed by the dog, grey coat blending in with the twilight.

“You look cold,” he says with a smile she still isn’t used to.

“I’m surprised you aren’t. I seem to recall many an away mission where the lack of an optimal temperature was…vexing.”

His smile turns lopsided. “Don’t worry. I still complain. If I don’t, Kaidan worries. But sometimes a cool breeze and a clear night is…nice. I, uh. Wouldn’t mind sitting out here for bit, if you don’t mind.”

“For you, I can bear a great many things.”  

He chuckles. “Gimmie a sec. I’ll bring you some tea to keep warm.”

“Do you need assistance?” she asks innocently.

“Nah, our fire suppression system is top notch. Ask me how I know.”

She laughs. He disappears into the house, the disgruntled canine left outside. Liara, unclear on how to be good company for her, sits on the porch swing. Mako begrudgingly curls up near her feet. Together they listen to Shepard putter in the kitchen through the open window. 

In spite of herself, Liara reaches down to stroke the dog’s back, pleased it is just as soft as Shepard claimed. “If you had known him when I did,” she says solemnly, “you may not be so eager to join him near a stove.”

“I heard that,” Shepard calls out.

Mako whuffs.

A character sheet of one of my favourite characters, Kaiden "pancakes are my love language" Alenko.

“I’m not sure what to do with you, Garrus.”

Garrus looks up with a start from his pile of gear to find Shepard leaning casually against a row of lockers in the Normandy’s cargo bay. He’d been so engrossed in inventorying his arsenal for Williams he hadn’t even heard Shepard come out of engineering.  

“Sir?”

Shepard eyes him from crest to talons, as though he’s a requisitions manifest that doesn’t match inventory. Despite being reasonably sized for a human – in Garrus’ experience, anyway, which isn’t exactly extensive – Shepard barely comes up to his chin. And yet somehow Garrus feels a lot like a pyjack standing next to a varren that hasn’t decided just how hungry it is.

“Well, you’re part of my crew,” Shepard muses. “But you’re not Alliance. You don’t exactly fit in my watch rotation, or know anything about Alliance protocol. Technically, I don’t have any recognized authority over you at all. If you stole this ship from me and waltzed off to hand it to the Hierarchy, you’d probably get a medal.”

“Also probably start a war.”

Alenko snorts from his spot over by the weapons’ bench, where the pistol he’d been working on now lies completely disassembled.  

Shepard waves a dismissive hand. “That’s someone else’s problem.” But then he pauses, face scrunching up in ways that faces shouldn’t be able to scrunch. “You know, it probably would be my problem, actually.”

Human faces are distressingly expressive, and Garrus hasn’t been around enough of them to really grasp what it all means. “Uh, while I appreciate the…confidence in my ability to mutiny—”

This isn’t coming out right.

“—I don’t actually have any plans to steal your ship.”

“Good. Because while I may not have authority to give you orders, I’m pretty sure the Council did just give me the authority to put you out my airlock if you don’t follow them.”  

Garrus’ mandibles twitch in alarm. It’s a joke…right? Humans like to joke. Surely that’s a universal trait. “I’m very good at calibrating weapons.”

Shepard’s eyebrow raises.

Garrus’ own brow plates shift rather desperately. “You asked what to do with me.”

“Right.” His gaze shifts over to Alenko, who contentedly continues cleaning his pistol. “Any good with mass accelerator cannons?”

“Uh, sure?”

Shepard nods towards the infantry vehicle across the cargo bay. “Then familiarize yourself with the Mako over there. Pretty sure we’re gonna get a lot of use out of it.”

Alenko groans and rolls his eyes – that one Garrus gets – while muttering something about war crimes under his breath.

“Yes, sir,” Garrus says quickly.  

There’s that laser-sharp gaze again. It’s like looking a rail gun in the face. But then Shepard’s face breaks into a grin. “Glad to have you aboard, Garrus.”

“Thank you. Sir.” Should he salute? Was that…appropriate? He’s still thinking about it when Shepard calls out to another human stepping off the elevator by engineering, and jogs away.

Garrus blinks. At the weapons’ bench, Alenko shakes his head and chuckles, like he’d seen whatever just happened a thousand times.

“Can I ask…what that was about? That conversation felt like…”

“A test?”

Garrus’ mandibles flare. “Yes.”

Alenko’s smile has softer edges than Shepard’s. “He’s feeling you out.”

“…Feeling me…out?”

“It’s, ah, a figure of speech. He’s pretty good at reading people, but he likes to test out his impressions with a little verbal sparring.”

“I can’t tell if I passed.”

Alenko’s chuckle becomes a laugh. “That usually means you did. He doesn’t often misread people, but when he does, you’ll know.”

“Why? What happens?”

Alenko shrugs, with an affable smile. “Someone usually get shot.”

~

“Do we have a deal?”

A cold, perilous silence falls over the warehouse, where every one of Helena Blake’s mercs stand with the kind of staged relaxation that just so happens to put their hands right by their sidearms.

You trust her? Alenko had asked during their stomach-turning Mako drop, in which Garrus is certain that Shepard waited until death was imminent before engaging the vertical thrusters to avoid smashing against the freezing cold rocks of Amaranthine. Alenko had been right about the war crimes.

No, but I think she’s a lesser evil I can live with, Shepard had replied.

He’d been so adamant this was a friendly exchange that he’d walked brazenly into the center of her band of mercs, who hadn’t hesitated to close in around them. Garrus clocks twelve of them to Shepard’s squad of four, including a sentry on the upper level.  Alenko hangs close to Shepard’s left flank while Williams takes the right, leaving Garrus to bring up the rear.

Relax. We’re all friends, here.

Except as soon as Blake had started talking, Alenko’s stance had gotten a little more square, even though nothing about Shepard’s posture changed. When the silence hits, Alenko’s hand drifts marginally closer to his pistol.

“You know what?” Shepard asks thoughtfully. “On second thought, you can go fuck yourself.”

Before the ‘fuck’ is even out of his mouth, Alenko’ is in his hand and he’s knocking Shepard off his feet just in time to avoid the bullet coming from the sniper’s nest. Somehow, in the blur of running, shooting and cursing that ensues, Garrus and Alenko wind up crouched behind a shipping container while Williams lays down another round of cover fire and Shepard yanks the sniper out of the rafters with a skein of dark energy.

“So,” Garrus says, catching his breath. “I take it this was a misread?”

“Oh yeah.”

Alenko checks his heat sink before his corona engulfs him in a bloom of dark energy. He actually chuckles before he gets to his feet and re-enters the fray, like this is just another routine patrol through the Presidium.

I am so, SO glad to hear this (and so sorry my reply is so late). I live in fear that I will fumble the ball badly with Jacob, but I am giving it my best shot.

I'm also thrilled that you've caught the parallelism with Kaidan. I love the idea that they're similar puzzle pieces, but one fits and one doesn't. I think they fact that they have so many similarities and both Kaidan and Jacob have tried to get close to Sam but only one of them succeeded further highlights a) how hard Sam is to get to know b) how easy it would have been for any relationship between Sam and Kaidan to never get off the ground. So many unique circumstances had to exist for Sam and Kaidan to even get a chance.

A foundational piece of how I have gone about developing Jacob is a big spoiler, but the nuts and bolts of it more or less revolve around taking a lot of time to dig down deep, take what little we know about the character, and then figure out things that could motivate and drive him that fit in with the direction I want to take him in.

The things I knew:

I was going to throw out his loyalty mission, because fuck that nonsense. In addition to not wanting to touch the wildly unnecessary racism and sexual abuse with a 10 foot pole, I didn't want Jacob's story to revolve around his father - I wanted it to be about him, and his own internal struggle (which I would need to define).

I liked the idea of a Cerberus Cheerleader - but Miranda's core narrative is more about learning to accept herself and her imperfections than it is about her loyalty to Ceberus. So...what if Miranda looks like the cheerleader...but the reality is that the true cheerleader is Jacob? And what if his 'loyalty mission' revolved around that, in a more abstract way?

Cerberus is more or less a cult. So I started asking myself how they got their hooks into them, what power they would have over him, and how they would continually reinforce that power. We know that Jacob has a chip on his shoulder regarding the Alliance, but it's very poorly defined - more of a nebulous frustration and general disillusionment than a specific, alienating event. So I needed to create a reason for Jacob to not just be disillusioned, but to really have a grudge. A reason - and a very justifiable reason - to have it out for the Alliance. And it needed to be something that gave Cerberus a chance to swoop in and play the hero and win over his allegiance.

Luckily, I had a great opportunity, because I want to involve the Conduit in the events of ME3. So I had the thought...what if the Alliance basically stole it while no one was looking in the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel, and what if Jacob's Corsair team was assigned to recover it? And since I have never liked the abundance of human biotics in ME2, what if Jacob manifested his because of this event? And what if the side effects were nearly fatal? The Alliance doesn't want anyone to know they did this, so it's in their best interest to bury it and consider Jacob a casualty of war. Cerberus would see an opportunity to test Lazarus tech they want to use in Shepard, and get themselves another very capable agent in the process. Win-win for everyone!

It's a messy set of circumstances that have been very challenging to pick through, but very rewarding. There are some REALLY interesting dynamics to explore. Before writing Jacob POVs I have to really take some time to sit between his ears and think about how these events color his view of the world, of Cerberus, of Sam, and how they move the story along.

Again, I loved the chapter! This is my fav fic and series EVER, and I look forward to the next update :)

THANK YOU!! I have been chewing my fist off to get this chapter out there. I have been so excited about it.

Now, before I dive into this. Remember that there is a lot of fiction in this science. We don't know what it feels like to manipulate gravity or create mass effect fields or how dark energy works. So I take a lot of liberties and have a great time, lol.

To answer your question - the biotic "fingerprint" that Kaidan recognizes is not anything Sam does with the gravity well or how he uses it - it's the sensation created merely by his existence within it. This is different from Sam actively engaging with the gravity well to create mass effect fields, which has also been changed, but by the thorian, and not Miranda. And I think that would be harder to spot.

In Opus, that 'sixth sense' tells biotics when another biotic is passively in their vicinity, and for each biotic, that sensation is unique. Biotic implants make that fingerprint stronger, and influence how it "feels."

I do imagine the distinctions are subtle, and really only stand out when you know someone really well. If you walked into a room with two biotics you had never met, you would know there were two distinct fields, but if you ran into them again later, you likely wouldn't clock, "hey that's the asari who served my coffee yesterday!" unless there was something very, very distinct about it.

But Kaidan knows Sam's field very, very intimately. Even without language to describe it, he would - and does - immediately recognize that it's wrong after Lazarus.

Before Lazarus, I don't think humans had any reason to make the distinction that the implant influenced that field significantly enough to alter it, because replacing an implant is so rare. So the assumption that biotics feel unique in the gravity well didn't have a documented connection to the implant.

Now, how is all this different from the way Sam generates biotic fields?

What the thorian did through the cipher was change enough of Sam's brain chemistry that he no longer creates fields like other humans, or even like every other alien race in this cycle. He now creates mass effect fields like the protheans did.

In Opus, most species biotics work through displacement. They create a field in their hand, then send it where they want it to go. There is, in essence "travel time" between the field being created and it reaching its target. But gravity moves at the speed of light, making that "travel time" happen so quickly it's not really visible to the organic eye - and that's the key.

Because what Sam does post-thorian cipher is create fields through superpositioning - when he generates a field it exists in two places at once, his hand, and at the target. When the waveform collapses, the field now only exists at the target.

It's possible this feels a little weird to him, and possible it feels a little weird to someone like Kaidan, who is so in tune with Shepard's biotics. But it wouldn't trigger the same wrongness that the implant change did.

Now, why does charge feel so weird and unsettling to Sam and anyone near him when he does it? Because charge is going to take the superpositioning one step further, which we'll get to soon. Charge is not something he would have been capable of before the implant upgrade. Because 1) it would have been beyond the limitations of his previous implant. 2) He wasn't fucked up enough yet to be that stupid.

Where do you think Sam would be if it weren't for his posting on the 'Yang and that fateful morning meeting Kaidan over pancakes? Would he still have finished the N program and risen in the ranks? Would he still have wound up on the Normandy and gotten plagued by the prothean visions? Or would he have ended up somewhere else, set adrift without Kaidan as his stable ground?

Cantata is such a huge part of Opus that I struggle to imagine Sam becoming the Commander Shepard we know and love from the game timeline without those years spent finding a family with the 'Yang Gang and that lasting bond with Kaidan. Mezzo has been especially interesting (and heartbreaking) to watch as Sam is forced to endure without Kaidan at his side for the first time in so many years. But while it's clear he can find some way to keep going even "on his own," I've been imagining that a history without Kaidan at all is a very different one for Sam. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

'The Words That Change Us' is probably the multiverse story I revisit the most, and I just love it when other people connect with it.

You ask a wonderful question, one that I more or less asked myself all the way through Cantata, because Cantata is very much the story that builds Commander Shepard.

Without the 'Yang, does Sam get the Normandy? Probably. With all the strings attached to him, he was being steered in that direction no matter what happened on the 'Yang. The important thing about the 'Yang and the people he found there was that he had advocates - people who cared about the human behind the soldier, and people who brought that human out of his shell. They didn't change his trajectory; they made him more successful in his path.

So what happens, then, if you take away the 'Yang?

Quite simply - he fails. The galaxy falls to the reapers.

I see Sam and Saren as two beings cut from the same cloth. Two people ordered to protect the galaxy, who were ruthless enough to do whatever had to be done to accomplish that goal. Saren went astray. Sam didn't.

The reason Sam didn't follow in Saren's footsteps was the five years he spent on the 'Yang that taught him not just how to save a galaxy - but why he was doing it in the first place. The 'Yang taught him that he isn't in that fight alone, and that he's stronger when he works through other people rather than just depending on himself. If he doesn't learn those things, he can still make N7, he can still be humanity's first Spectre, but he can't save a galaxy.

We're seeing that Mezzo. It's not Commander Shepard who needs saving in Mezzo - it's Sam - and you may be surprised at who ultimately rescues him.