[127] "The hanar really liked that moon."

[128] Operation Herakles was the joint 3WA/WDF operation to eliminate the human-supremacist terrorist network known as Cerberus. It was several years in the making, from the point at which it was initially greenlit by Command to the final assault on the Illusive Man's ultimate redoubt ca. 2285.

[190] Those of you who have played Skyrim will probably recognize from the description that Jack is wearing Steel Armor here. She doesn't really require armor in the conventional sense, but one has to look the part, hasn't one?

[196] Those who have played Skyrim can probably surmise just how Jack knew that Shepard was in Valhalla all this time...

[220] The fun part about this is that her old Jedi Master just might have been Yoda... or it might not have. Who can say?

[263] Paarthurnax hasn't lived in Alfheim for many centuries at this point, but he's a well-connected dragon, and though he and Shepard have never met, he's heard of her. "Stormrider" is the Standard translation of the Norse-style epithet (Vethriddari) she has as part of her Valkyrie name.

[331] And speaking of specialized names, Jack has acquired several in her time on Nirn, since the data file Shepard has on her was compiled. Dovahkiin/Dragonborn is the obvious one, but (thanks to another handle given to her by the Greybeards) she's more widely known among the general public of Tamriel as "Jack Stormcrown". I really enjoyed designing what became of Jack since she and the Normandy parted ways, proceeding from the basic idea that she'd either have gone completely to pieces, or on to contentment, fame, and fortune - and become the star of some other video game along the way.

[350] And presumably for joining the Justice Department under a false identity in the first place.

[351] She can even make them without using her hands, but that isn't recommended when you're trying to remain incognito.

[354] If you've seen the original Men in Black, you will understand why the Silent Masters of the Shiranui clan, who run Ninja World, chose this as her ninja name.

[359] She grew out her hair for the role; Laura, in turn, considered shaving hers, but decided against.

[397] And, well, neither could I.

[456] This conflates 03F8, the junk planet first seen in Scrapheap City Shuffle, with Korlus, the planet of shipbreakers where Warlord Okeer is to be found in Mass Effect 2.

03F8 has served as a cosmic junkyard for millennia -- at least as far back as the rise of the Minbari, if not earlier to Atlantis/Santovasku times. The only planet that can compete for the title of "Junkyard of the Galaxy" would be the Planet of Junk, the homeworld of the Junkions. Since they service different parts of the galaxy (03F8 the Outer Rim, the Planet of Junk the Coreward Frontier), they aren't really in competition for 'customers'. Besides, would you want to haul your trash halfway across the galaxy when there was a planet relatively nearby in your cosmic backyard?

[466] This happened sometime shortly after Scrapheap City Shuffle. Not one of Kei's better days, though it can be argued that Lance Maltby deserved it.

[515] To be fair, that's because Salusians are stronger than baseline humans - though in Shepard's case, that shouldn't particularly bother her, since so is she.

[545]

As Shepard implies, the reference is to the labels American folk singer Woody Guthrie was known for putting on his guitars (which was reportedly, in turn, a reference to some Republican airplane graffiti from the Spanish Civil War).

[535] Urdnot Armory M-300 Claymore. Not recommended for unaugmented human users. Tends to break arms.

[551] A modified version of Jack's "Alternate Appearance Pack 1" costume, in case you're curious. Different shirt, rattier pants, trenchcoat instead of the biker vest.

[561] N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton, 1988.

[580] Before the Flotilla redeployed around Halo and became the Quarian Union, 03F8 was a frequent stop for quarians on Pilgrimage and ships needing spare parts scavenged from the wrecks.

[608] One of the least helpful things your squadmates can yell in Mass Effect 2.

[625] Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine, and is a major cultural, scientific, educational, transport and industrial (but, in the 25th century, evidently not agricultural) center.

[665] Well, considering that Biotic Charge allows you to go through some forms of light cover, it just might be... but the asari don't talk about that much.

[669] Here Jack demonstrates that "sane" and "not crazy" are not necessarily the same thing.

[679] Something Bruticus, of all people, once said about Predaking on the old Transformers cartoon.

[698] The thought of Jack and Zaeed Massani having been Vault Hunters together on Pandora is something that's vaguely scary.

[719] After a few minutes of debate as to whether or not show the intervening combat and conflict, we decided to just get on with it and get to the resolution, since everything in between was pretty much a given if you'd played the game already, and if you hadn't, it wasn't much to write home about. There's only so many ways you can write "Shepard and her squad wipe out a bunch of mercs", after all.

[726] Well, she knows what the genophage is, that's common knowledge, but - well, we'll get into that later.

[758] In UF, Colonel (later General) David Anderson was a WDF lifer who managed to avoid the GENOM death squads by joining up with the UEDF (he was on detachment as a liaison officer at the time, and it was pretty easy to make it look as if he'd always been a member). When the WDF reformed, he helped with the rebuilding of the ground forces in the run up to 2388. He now currently serves as the number-three man in the Wedge Defense Force (behind Daver and Noriko) as Commander, Surface Forces (i.e., tanks, Destroids, infantry). Not bad for a man who thought his salad days were behind him back in 2280.

[776] "Well. That was like arresting him." - Atomic Robo, 1938

[779] The brief fails to mention his frequent guest starring on children's science shows, his stellar acting career in community theatre, and his hobby writing pulp-noir spy fiction.

[827] One of the great things about Liara is that, however badass she becomes, she never quite sheds that lovable haplessness - so she can offhandedly capture a bug everyone else in the room's been destroying the place in futile efforts to catch (a visual inspired by a sequence in an episode of Enterprise, of all things), but something embarrassing (though ultimately harmless) is bound to happen shortly thereafter. I'm sure she finds it all rather annoying, but she wouldn't quite be Liara without it.

[841] And Mordin, for his part, wouldn't be Mordin without his ability to absorb, with such complete nonchalance, sudden shocks like Virginia Shepard sloping into his lab 118 years after her indisputable violent death.

[838] The seeker bug paralysis antidote was first revealed in the OVA movie Mass Effect: Paragon Lost.

[847] And he'd totally do it, too. One of my favorite contributions to Act II.

[915] "... and that's why I hate politicians."

[980] Even married to Virginia "Pepper" Stark, the Stark Charm can't exactly be turned off at a whim.

[1018] Edie nearly gives the game away here; on the other hand, lots of guys in the galaxy called "Jeff". (Or, as our own Geoff Depew points out, other names that sound the same over an intercom.)

[1055] Adams forgets to mention that by removing the warp systems from the S-foil Warp Wings, he was able to add even MORE repulsors in them. The Surprise is a nimble little bugger.

[1067] The Surprise is sort of a larger-scale version of Daggerdisc in this respect. Not in the sense that anyone's going to try to go asteroid racing with a ship that size, but that a huge quantity of resources have been thrown at cramming the most advanced possible capabilities into the spaceframe, essentially just to see if it could be done - and because such a thing might come in handy someday.

[1070] Be careful what you wish for, Tali'Zorah.

[1080] Which, as we saw in Manhunt, would eventually evolve into Captain-Pummelling Day on the Invincible. One wonders whether IPO Headquarters has Chief-Pummelling Day.

[1089] His skin also serves as a heat radiator, though it's usually kept to normal human temperatures in respect to his human crewmates.

[1092] I was just going to go with the "four small optics around a large central one" thing they've obviously done with Bri's face in the more recent CG-animated films, but Phil wasn't having it. He's a bit of a Shirow purist. :)

The central sensor is a sophisticated airborne chemical/molecular analysis suite. That big round disk in the middle of his face? That's his nose.

[1097] This is in fact Samantha Traynor, from Mass Effect 3; Phil's idea and a "for future expansion" kind of thing, as I haven't actually played that one yet.

[1103] This scene was inspired by the Vega vs. Shepard sparring scenes in Mass Effect 3, crossed with the Briareos vs. Tereus spar in Appleseed: Ex Machina (47:27-49:17 on the DVD). While James Vega is a lot less gymnastic than the bioroid Tereus, and Joker isn't inclined towards extreme acrobatics (a holdover from his original human body), the overall effect of the sparring is meant to be the same.

[1125] I love the way Jack has evolved in the FI era, but this is hands-down my favorite reveal of the "gathering the team" phase of the adventure. In development, it took shape gradually, and was initially floated as a bit of a joke - "what if he was a Hecatonchires-class cyborg?" - but the more I thought about it the more logical it looked. I mean, if ever there was a candidate for making the H-class control system work, it would surely have to be Joker.

[1169] Jack likes to make her point unequivocally whenever possible. Not for nothing is this particular Dragon Shout called Unrelenting Force.

[1210] When I wrote this scene, I had just been reading some back entries on Badass of the Week (preparatory to my Source Material post about La Maupin). As such, it was a struggle not to have Jack lapse into the full-on BotW style ("... so badass she got bored in friggin' WARRIOR HEAVEN and came storming the fuck back to the mortal world to curbstomp some more bad-guy ballsack?").

[1225] One of Kevirin'Zorah's most important contributions to this paper, which was their joint doctoral thesis, was persuading him not to entitle it Flying It Like You Stole It.

[1243] The Hecatonchires-class body frame allows the owner to retain their cardiovascular, digestive, reproductive, and autonomic nervous systems, which means that Joker can indeed eat most foods through his "mouth" (though he tends to mangle forks frequently, like Briareos does). As for his brain, that's kept protected within his chest cavity; his "head" houses the auxiliary biocomputer that's used to convert the H-class's sensory and motor input into conceptual information that is easier for a human to process.

[1253]

    
                                      _____   ___ Wow, that's rough.
                                     /     \ /
[Tell me more about the H-Series]---|---@   |
                                     \_____/ \___ Never mind that.

[1259] Presumably there's another one out there somewhere designated Cottus. (In Appleseed that was the name of the police robot that turned up now and then, but it was also the name of one of the Hekatonkheires of myth, so it makes sense.)

[1265] He can also swap between sensors in the booms by clicking them in and out like a multi-colored ballpoint pen.

[1277] *click click click click* "I feel like a toy, heh heh.... I can't WINK!"

[1301] And indeed did, in the actual game, but one of the beauties of a story that is not a video game is that not everything has to happen to the same protagonist.

1328 You can more or less recreate the Mk I Extremis suit's default styling in Mass Effect 2 by using the Kuwashii Visor, Aegis Vest, stock N7 shoulder guards and gauntlets, and Stimulator Conduits, in black and red, with the stock right-arm red stripe left on. Tony's always tinkering, though, and the exact configuration may vary from sighting to sighting. (Her original suit, the one destroyed in Act I, was a WDF Armory CVR-9 special ops armor system, which for our purposes here looked more or less like the medium version of Onyx armor from the first game.)

[1378] It fits, it's short, it's snappy, and it ensures that even if I suffer some kind of taste-reducing brain injury, I can't use the Warren Ellis definition later.

[1391] The QuarTech Omni-Tool� series is one of the Quarian Union's top exports, now that they've settled in the Scandia system.

[1406] And it ties into one of Soldier-formula Shepard's special abilities (albeit one I hardly ever use), Concussive Shot.

[1482] Combines the concept of EDI from the latter two Mass Effect games with the style of the AI platform, already well-established in the UF universe, that derives from the Halo games. (In UF this system is called "HalOS" not because of any connection to the Scandia Halo, but because its principal inventor was a Salusian Navy officer, Rear Admiral Kath'ryyn Halsey.) Shepard recognizes the effect because she worked with several RSN HalOS AIs during her original career, including Cortana.

Also no relation to the HAL Corporation, which went out of business in the 2100s due to quality control issues with their own cybernetic constructs. Those that survive to the present day are stable, but ... quirky.

[1551] This is what happens to particularly diligent amateur astronomy and/or ham radio clubs when the tech level reaches the interstellar travel and instantanous FTL communications plateau.

[1650] Tali may be overstating this slightly. On the other hand, it's the summer after Quarantena, so her estrangement from Rael is more or less at its height, not yet having experienced even the for-form's-sake reconciliation that saw her (grudgingly) aboard the Rayya the following year for Line of Duty.

[1659] Was originally "like white on rice", but c'mon, it's the 25th century.

[1672] Originally in the running for the title of the overall piece.

[1688] Having passed through "The Grinder" (the Quarian Navy's grueling small-arms competency course), Tali'Zorah has been a legal member of the Quarian Naval Reserve since the age of seven, and therefore fully combat-qualified and allowed - indeed, expected - to fight, should the proper circumstances arise. Rael'Zorah hadn't quite thought that one through at the time, I think.

[1735] Properly configured and outfitted, a Hecatonchires-class cyborg could run an aircraft carrier by himself.

[1736] One of the downsides of Jack's otherwise pretty sweet setup on Nirn: there are no comic shops in Tamriel. She's years behind on Top Thrills Comics at this point.

[1742] The Scott Equations were pioneered by Captain (then Lieutenant Commander) Montgomery Scott back in the 2300s, proving conclusively that safe quantum teleportation by Erickson-Petrarca transporter could be accomplished at relativistic velocities between two locations, even across a Cochrane warp, so long as you have a big enough computer at one end to crunch the (really fabulously huge) numbers.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.