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Who: Clone Shepard and Nihlus Kryik
When: July 16th
Where: Just outside the medbay, moving into the cargo bay
What: Sitrep after being in cryo and mail check (and overflows from previous months)
Warnings: Possible references to past violence and body horror (Caducus Secondary event chat)

Coming out of cryostasis is uncomfortably similar to coming out of her growth tank, but this time, she has the language to articulate that in her head, and there's no Brooks waiting to teach her everything she knows.

She dresses quickly and only holds still long enough for a checkup on what was supposed to be a simple repair for her cell deterioration but had gotten complicated enough to necessitate her stay in cryo. While she waits, she checks her MID, her eyes widening at how much time she's lost, and sends a text. The second she has the medical all clear, she's out of there.

Out in the hallway, she touch types a second message to Shepard, and happens to catch sight of Nihlus coming towards her. Damnit, she'd just wanted to go and check what she's received in the cargo bay, not have to deal with the alien who could ruin her. She gives him a nod of greeting. "Nihlus."

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The greeting and the worrying throw her a little, but she keeps her course to the cargo bay, regardless of his joining her, which is the least surprising thing here. She can't think of anything both large and incriminating that she might receive - hell, she has yet to get anything of hers from the Ingress at all.

"Well, you can stop: I'm fine," she informs him. She holds up her MID wrist, where she's begun scrolling through the network posts. "Sounds like I missed a hell of a lot, though."

"You say that like worrying's got a switch to flip off," Nihlus puffs, the sound coming through as static from his helmet, but there's some amusement between the layers of his voice.

"You missed one clusterfuck of a fight," he says, watching her scroll through the network, tucking his tablet under an arm. "The Captains wanted us to vote on different plans instead of coming up with a ship-wide strategy. The Caducans decided it was better to die trying to murder everyone instead of trying to preserve some meager amount of their own civilization."

The entire ordeal was all flavors of brazen stupidity and the crew's own attempts at reigning things in were unfortunately built on shaky foundations.

Partway through rolling her eyes at a drunk post, she snaps her head up at 'Caducans'.

"Caducans as in Caducus Primary?" she asks, though she'd heard the term enough on their planet to know that's who he means. "I came out of their Ingress... I shielded so many of them for evacuation when their planet started falling apart." It was the most capable she'd felt since her plan to replace Shepard had fallen apart: She'd finally saved someone and proved Shepard wrong about making a lousy her.

She sighs, her face and slumping shoulders betraying her genuine dismay at this news where her words are merely exasperated. "And here I thought their obsession with glass was the most stupid thing they did."

The words pique Nihlus' interest. She shielded the Caducans?

He's quiet for a brief moment, giving the clone an appraising look through his visor. There'd probably been the pressure to act like Shepard, but that disappointment seemed... oddly genuine.

"You'd think they'd have perfected transparent metal technology at the very least," he says by way of agreement. "How do they even build so much with just glass anyways? It sounds like they must've had a lot of dead construction workers. You'd think someone would've rioted for safer working conditions at least."

Nihlus has so many questions and no way of getting them answered.

She shrugs. For the most part, she'd enjoyed Caducus Primary, but these practicalities had never occurred to her.

"Human ingenuity, I guess," she says, and she sighs, returning to her network browsing while walking. (Training as a Sentinel, she'd gotten good at using her omni-tool while walking; the principle had carried over to the MID.) "The glass could be kind of creepy at night, but I liked their planet. What a waste."

Noticing a lack of mourning posts on the network, she glances sideways at Nihlus. "Only one Moiran casualty?" It's back to business. She can deal with her unexpected sadness about some stupid survivors on her own.

'Human ingenuity'. Goddess but she sounded like Saren sometimes when he was 'subtly' putting humans down. Nihlus resists the reflexive eye-roll and quietly wonders how he keeps getting stuck with the racist sorts.

"Only one," he shrugs in answer. "We lucked out."

It was Aurelia too. He tries to feel little bad about it but honestly?

... Okay, he actually feels a little bad, but she seemed like the orphan murdering sort and he'd like to trade in some of his empathy for gleeful schadenfreude please.

"This time," she says, matter of fact. She more or less expects the Moira's luck to run out on some planet or space station, considering how many harrowing situations they've managed to escape so far.

As they pass a wall with some glass panels amongst the steel, she points at it and raises an eyebrow, letting that ask the question more than her bemused tone.

"Speaking of glass."

"The Ingress decided it'd be pretty hilarious to smush the Caducan ship up with ours." 'Smush' is totally a technical term. "And I mean smush. The ship isn't the only thing affected. There are people walking around with glass body parts right now."

Include, uh, himself. Hence the helmet. Not that Cloney needs to know that, she can just assume it's there for protection. Which does remind him...

"We'd better get you a mask. There's a lot of glass particles in the air right now."

Shuddering, she glares at the glass panelling. It had better not show her anything weird in night cycle like some of the glass on their planet had.

"No wonder the post-cryo checkup seemed long." Well, no, she'd mostly thought it was because it was post-cryo after a procedure to fix her deteriorating cells that had had complications. "They could've told me about the particles."

She puts a little more speed into her stride. "I'll swing through my room and grab my helmet. Good thing it's on the way to the cargo bay."

Yes, she did just change that 'we' to an 'I'. She just wants a sitrep, not company.

The way she glares at the glass makes Nihlus raise a browplate. He debates asking her about it, but the fact that she's not immediately mentioning it makes him pause and by then she's moving to take off.

"I'm heading down to the cargo as well." A shrug. "I'll come with. There's a bunch of parts I need to pull out of the fabricator since things keep shattering left and right."

"Damn," she says, mostly meaning him coming with her, but a little for the fabricator too. Even constructed by aliens, it doesn't deserve that. "Guess the glass wasn't limited to the crew and the ship."

As they approach her deck, she adds, "Anything else I missed?"

Edited (icon) 2016-08-23 08:27 (UTC)

"Nothing else, really. It's been mostly cleaning up and tending to the injured and the glassed."

Yeah, he can tell she's annoyed about him following her around again. She can deal. He's got some henning to do, spirits dammit.

"For now, the Ingress is inactive, which is probably a good thing considering... well. This."

With a nod, she lets the rest of the trip to her room (where she's relieved to find her things haven't moved) for her helmet and then to the cargo bay pass in silence. She doesn't have anything to say to Nihlus on the best of days (not without possibly provoking him into blowing her cover), let alone after spending a month in cryo: She's hardly going to share that she'd originally gone into the medbay to slow down her accelerated aging in case it became a problem.

"This is the first time I've gotten something so big I have to get it in the cargo bay," she says as the doors open. "Usually I just get small things from the Ingress. The other Shepard got the Mako; maybe this is the Hammerhe..."

This is not the Hammerhead.

This is her growth tank sitting next to the Mako, the second thing she ever saw (the first being Brooks), seemingly here to remind her of what she is and announce it to the entire ship. This is her growth tank, which wouldn't look too out of place in the medbay, upright and big enough to grow a human from cells, the wires that gave her nutrients and stimulated and monitored her growth hanging unattached to anything, the fluid containers empty, the display blank.

Involuntarily, she takes a step back, the blood draining from her face.

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