Roll to Seduce: Lawful Evil

"I'm what now?" Syane mumbles.  Her head feels hollow.  With Yas in the other room, doped to the neck folds and being carefully examined by a quarantine-suited Karin Chawkas, she can't blame sharing her mind with a nymphomaniac for it.

"Bare minimum, you're noble.  We pretty much knew that.  Four hundred and nineteen pods were below you in fail-priority and two were tied.  In your new memories, you said the walls were yellow?" Liara prods.  "With this symbol?"

She taps the sketch.

"Yeah.  Rough circle with a hook-shaped blade inside.  Red paint, I think."

Liara sighs.

"That's a House Atredio symbol. The dynasty who ruled at the end. Give me ten minutes. I have to write something on the dark exonet. Call you back."

-----

"This is my fault, little one.  You don't remember the war and I wanted to spare you the awfulness all the other survivors went through.  I taught you about it like it was written history, not a different culture.  Partly because of the fact that what I hoped were citizen scholars were in fact a slave-based, luxury economy of idle tyrants ruled by force of arms and paid for by tributes? It disgusted me.  I wanted you to have my values, not the Empire's."

"I'm not loving the good manners of pre-freeze me as I remember her, mother. So mission accomplished."

Mostly, to protect you from discovering how awful it was or seeking out other survivors.  We spaced each thawing out by days so that your father could recover.  Back then, I hadn't been able to meld the Codex out of her.  Drove me mad with jealousy that I couldn't understand their subliminally-rooted, always-shifting languages."

"She re-lived whatever they personally experienced or lifted from loved ones.  During the tail end of systematic genocide."

"So what am I remembering?"

"Palace barracks," her mother sighs.  "From the fittings, it's the necropolis next in the chain of Resurgence Project bunkers from where we found you.  A protected life in the middle of pure hell.  Kept content as long as could be managed, then stored away for safekeeping."

"So I'm a soldier? I remember training."

"You said there were women, non-combatants?"

Syane shakes her head, trying to plug a dam in her mind that holds the flood.  The worst of the worst of her unburied memories.

"Two, if I recall.  My age, I'm guessing.  Not like we know that much about Prothean puberty."

"Were their flares flexible?  If you can recall."

Syane blows out a long breath.

"Think so, I remember playing a game.  Some sort of dart tossing.  I won and she let me touch them.  They were soft, still dry.  Like mine, when you found me."

Liara reaches for her datapad and hastily types something in.

"Hmm.  Early pubescence. Matched to your age when we thawed you. Not the guards you described.  Sounds more like they were harem girls, not soldiers. From the Age of Splendor on, writings of prisoners and rebels suggest females were aggressively dominant, almost as bad worst of modern human sexists. To have female sex slaves at your disposal? Darling, I think you may have been much higher born than I thought. Or rather, than I feared. If anyone has the bloodline, signal genes and legal claim to be empress, it's you, daughter."

Liara groans. "Goddess. I have to write the other survivors before this spirals into an actual insurrection. Not enough ryncol in the galaxy."

"I'm sending you a file. Prothean erotic text.  Take it with a full glass of salt, not just a pinch.  Neither a medical explanation or a self-help text. Emulate the heroine's behavior and I disown you."

"The Moons of Janere?"  Syane asks, reading the file.  "Janere..."

"The ancient name for the asari festival, yes.  The science team was siloed, their findings masked from each other.  Hundreds.  Split into one group per continent and basic ecosystem type.  The polar-zone team became rank hedonists.  Engaged in local fertility rites, kept harems of dozens.  Prisoner pens with far more.  They killed fewer in their labs, to be fair.  Mostly criminals surrendered by the local chieftainess for mere convenience and often in asari-witnessed executions."

Syane opens the file and hits the random page button several times.

"Well..." she mumbles, swallowing with a fast-closing throat.  "This, ah..."

"That is the collected and dramatized diary of a petty warlord that the Empress tolerated simply because her research results intrigued.  Especially those about Ardats, professional huntresses--back then, literally hunting for game--and Matriarch stage individuals.  Caetva was one of the junior researchers on the Thessian project to modify ancient asari.  One day, she killed her supervisor and took it over.  It's the only firsthand account, or anything like it, that I have that isn't just walls of DNA-RNA interlocks and clinical notes."

"Why didn't you give me this sooner, mother?"

"Besides the fact that it's a lurid journal of someone's sexual uses for--and abuse of--my species?"

"Besides that, yes.  That, I understand."

"Well, I haven't slept in six days re-translating it," Liara admits with a cavernous, languid yawn. "That's reason number one.  I doubled down when you found Yasseni.  Page 319, darling.  Read it aloud, please."

"This blaze-maiden, Shora, was worn in comparison to the others.  Her channel was warm, the grip powerful.  Her mind and body had been eroded from a life of killing."

"Whether battle or ravishings, she bore scars nearly as numerous as mine own.  But ancestors, she was eager.  Feral.  A beast among beasts."

"Made to be broken, to be tamed.  To be bred.  Had I known what a rarity she was, how great a gift the chieftainess made, I might've spared her tribe however weak they were.  Raised them to rule the others."

"Shora didn't allow me, she craved me.  I didn't take long before I denied any others anything but a quick shake of my frond in their throats before I ate, fed, and hurried through work so I could take Shora again.  Shora was endearing.  They were relieving."

"I've gone native, I know this.  But to see her belly, round and hard as a sandstone orb?  To have her place her babe in my arms without a shred of concern or reservation?  I could not help it.  I hid the baby.  Someday, I will be executed for that."

"Love and family makes animals of the best of us."

 

"The next nine hundred pages are foaha tree sap, their love affair is so overwrought."

Liara flicks her fingers in a quotation mark gesture around the word love.

"I'm inclined to believe if only because no self-respecting Protehan woman would have written that about a lesser species unless it were true.  About a lab animal, for Goddess' sake. The worst of the Blood of Old Malari historical romance novels cannot compare.  Best I can determine, blaze-maiden was their term for Ardat-Yakshis," Liara says with a smile. "Probably after the bioluminescence flare they exhibit, earlier in the sexual encounters and continuous.  More powerful than non-Ardats."

"Much preferred among both voluntary lovers and slaves they took and some tribes were glad to give them up."

"Her baby," Syane mutters.  "She conceived?"

"After an orgy lasting nine days and after glutting Shora with fatal feeds of by my count, forty-one prisoners. At least then, Ardats were not infertile so much as extremely resistant to conception.  Probably because fatal melds don't exactly encourage empathy or emotional twining so central to the deep reach we use to map and conceive."

Syane rubs her flare with her hands.

"You didn't want to get Arty's hopes up."

"I doubt your sister wants biological kids that but until I can establish she can have them, even after multiple attempts to scrub Ardats with viruses?  And have it safely?  With Nyra?  They're sickeningly cute by the way.  Every morning I expect to see the application for early marriage and a flood of shrill, panicky notes from the Peeresses. Every morning a tale about finding a pencil in the covers or a schematic under her tea."

Syane chuckles.

"Until then, I'll protect my baby from the hope.  Javik taught me that, ironically.  While I was still reeling from watching Serrice burn, watching those monsters crack the towers and take the citizens of my adopted city.  When for the first time, Shepard and I fled, not just a tactical retreat.  Serrice is thirty-five kilometers from the vacation estate.  The one without servants quarters, just spaces for them to visit.  Where I was conceived, born, raised most of my girlhood.  He told me 'Despair is the enemy's greatest weapon.  Don't let them wield it.'  The way not to despair is not to hope."

"I assume you understand what she means by her 'frond', darling?"  Liara teases.

"I have a guess.  And ah...I can imagine her...ah...interest in that activity."

Liara hums.

"May I merely get a yes-no on whether the Protheans were dual gendered:  males and hermaphroditic females?  No details, I beg you.  I simply am curious since I only have clues in the gender-sensitive languages.  It's 'he' and something more like 'us' or 'we' in the nouns."

"Ah, yes.  That seems, ah...likely."

"So you do blush, miracle daughter of mine.  Seems Jasseni is good for you."

"I'm learning so many disgusting new things about my biology, the apparent existence of libido and my utter lack of fucking common sense this week," Syane admits.

Liara laughs.   Alone, she chuckles and chortles.  With Shepard by herside, she barks and guffaws.

"You're a T'Soni, darling.  Your mother made over, I must say.  I won't be half surprised if Artemis takes over Omega from T'loak but you, I see professorship or authorship in your future, my dear.  An intellectual's life and as your mother, I am glad of it."

"Dad is furious."

"Your dad is panicking because you'd done something so me it made her remember all the times she nearly lost me to my numb-crested curiosity.  Most of my nasty surprises on digs weren't on their feet and coming at me but the best is sometimes in the messy digs, not the orderly ones.  Out past anyone else, where the novelty makes up for the equipment and difficulty preserving a site."

There's a three-knock sequence behind her at the bathroom door.  Chakwas waits, then opens it.  The woman every last hair is white, though it's still thick and glossy for a hundred fifty-two.  Retired, at last.

"What's the prognosis, doctor?" Liara asks through the link.

"Healthy as a varren, if I'm frank.  She must have learned to cook the moss somehow, chemically I assume since smoke would have filled the place.  No signs of long-term bacteria load.  Caught protein somewhere to vary her diet.  She eats like she's in starvation recovery and is averse to sleep.  Not sure I blame her.  Probably afraid it's a dream.  Recovering rapidly from the depression of isolation, to be expected given that she coped so long without hurting herself."

Chakwas laughs.

"Syane, you'll be glad to know that she took the blocker implant like it belonged in her all along."

"Ah...I...thank you."

"You were running out of gloves and prophylatics weren't you?" Karin teases.

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads.

"She also kept spouting nonsense I couldn't parse.  Same word kept coming up, about three words out of five.  Particularly when something agitated her."

"My name," Syane realizes.  

"Anything else?"

"Unusually thin but dense bones, especially in the abdomen and ribcage.  Muscles of someone who did martial arts most of the day, for most of her life.  Curiously, I think that ancient hox genes must have been used for the Unity virus.  Doubt they are ardat-specific but still.  Interesting to find them."

"The what virus?"

Chakwas chuckles.

"Before your time, dear.  Government-funded treatment after encountering the salarians.  The dalatrass donated armies of doctors to it. Immunity boosts, artificial addition of what in humans would be immune system memory and command and control cells.  Skeletal changes, loss of vestigial bones.  Massive enlargement of some parts of the reproductive system, thickening of suspending tendons in others.  Fivefold increase in the flinch reflex of the birth canal's flap, tenfold increase in lubrication gland output.  Wholesale addition of new sphincters to block the intestines off.  So on, so on."

"We humans launched right into a war after first contact.  You lot went through voluntary upgrades so that you went from enough space for two fingers--all you needed for penetrative sex with each other--to where you could take on a bull krogan in full rut and recover in two days.  Hundreds of volunteer subjects died getting it right before they pushed it out species-wide."

"Someone in a position of authority wanted you to be ready to fuck phallic males and enjoy it if you ever encountered them.  I can only assume the people who started it died of masturbation related injuries when the krogan were discovered."

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads.  

Perhaps if she says it a second time, they wont ignore it.

Chakwas fold her arms and stares her down.  This is the woman who confined Shepard herself to bedrest for trifles like gunshot wounds that nicked the spine, after all.  Three recorded occasions.  A legend among Navy medical recruits.

"Who do you think talked Shepard down, my dear, when she was climbing the station's walls worrying about hurting your mother whatever depravity Liara suggested? Who shushed her when she awoke from drug-induced when your little sisters were about to be born?"

Liara smiles on the link.

"Who do you think stood behind Shepard in the birthing pool as she pulled my daughters into this world, dear?"

"Goddess. I am going to very promptly get very thoroughly drunk this evening."