Rylia stared at the Marketplace options with bleary eyes and a fuzzy mind. Faintly, she realized that she was starting to get a bit overwhelmed. Realizing she wasn’t going to get anything more done tonight, she marked her place and closed the System Menu. Leaning back in her sinfully comfortable chair, letting it adjust itself so she was partially reclined, she rubbed at her eyes and just…let herself do nothing for a few moments. Unfortunately, there was a reason she hadn’t allowed herself to stop much, not since waking up as an amalgam of two people on Illium. Doing so now, her mind soon drifted in other directions, ones she’d been trying to avoid.
Specifically, to her concerns about the fact that she had absolutely no clue what the fuck she was doing.
Yes, she had a plan. Or, at least, she had ‘part of a plan.’ Possibly even eleven percent of a plan, as Peter Quill had so infamously claimed and been infinitely memed over. Though, given the scale she was working at, she wasn’t even sure she could claim that high of a percentage. Sure, she’d made an amazing amount of progress since waking up as the fusion of Rylia and Hazel, but the Reapers? Hell, Reapers nothing, even just the Terminus Systems…
She was so far out of her depth it wasn’t particularly humorous.
She was also self-aware enough to know that part of the reason she’d immediately started doing rather than thinking was a cover for panic. So long as she was doing something, being productive, making progress towards a possible edge over the onrushing doom, she could at least pretend to be okay. Summoning Momo had helped a lot, since at least she actually did know what she was doing.
Within her limited sphere, at least.
Which was the problem. Rylia was a genius engineer, Momo was a genius CEO and industrialist. If the goal had just been to make the galaxy a better place and get rich in the process? They’d have been in great shape! Unfortunately, existential threats to all higher-order organic life in the galaxy were…a bit beyond that. Beyond even Momo, who had at least been a professional Hero.
Rylia had just been a Stripper.
Hazel had just been a plucky artist.
Now, aside from possibly Shepard if the game series hadn’t been completely full of shit, the new combination of those two souls was somehow the greatest hope against a threat that had wiped out countless civilizations. A threat whose parameters she could barely define, since even the games had been…inconsistent…on the Reapers’ numbers. Nazara, or Sovereign if you preferred, had claimed that the Reapers were numerous enough to ‘Darken the sky of every world.’
But what did that mean?
The Protheans had held out, fighting back, for centuries, at least if the DLC including Javik was to be believed. If there were hundreds of thousands of them, the way some had assumed based on that line, than that shouldn’t have been possible. Not even if the Reapers were slowed down by the need to harvest each species to create more Reapers. Likewise, it didn’t mesh with the Turians having been able to at least stall the Reapers from taking Palaven.
How much of that was Reaper arrogance, committing only the resources they thought each cycle needed? How much of it had been Nazara simply blowing smoke? Were there ‘merely’ thousands of Reapers? With only a few hundred Dreadnaughts and thousands of smaller units? Or was the number something so truly insurmountable that the bullshit of the Crucible was truly and genuinely the only option?
So many questions, so few answers. Who the fuck was she that somehow she believed she could be a roadblock to the hell that might well be coming for them all? Who was she that she believed she could conquer even the more achievable end of taking over the Terminus systems? Would doing so, would forcing an arms race, even matter? If there were too many Reapers coming, what would making a few guns that could hurt them do?
Rylia took a deep, bracing breath. Focusing on a simple meditative exercise from her life as Hazel, she sucked air in, imagined all the bad thoughts, all the doubts, as simply bad air. Then she pushed it out, sending the thoughts out with her breath and leaving her mind, if not exactly at peace, at least not racing toward a cliff to dive into the abyss of panic lying beyond.
She could only do as much as she could do. Someone or something had given her the Omniversal Marketplace with an eye to fighting what seemed the be the inevitable and impossible. She was not alone. Momo was with her, and there would be others in time. Others from the Marketplace, and others that simply called this reality home. There were trillions of Asari, hundreds of billions of Turians, tens of billions of still other species.
They could fight back.
They would fight back.
Rylia would give them the best possible tools she could to do it with. It didn’t matter that she might not be the best person for the job. It only mattered that the job was hers. One she’d taken up willingly and wasn’t going to abandon now. Not when so many lives were riding on it. Not when they’d barely even begun. Still, despite the fact she had no intention of losing, a previous thought from her first days with the Marketplace came to mind.
Perhaps it was time to put some thought into the backup plan. Into how to hide a sufficient population of each race so thoroughly that the Reapers would miss them if the worst should happen. It would, she thought, make her feel better as a hedge against the possibility that there truly were hundreds of thousands of Reapers.
Tomorrow, though. She would do it tomorrow. Tonight, she was going to find some hot chocolate, some whiskey, and then a bed. Hopefully a little sleep would do her mindset some good…
… … …
“Okay, Rylia, you can do this. It’s not like the fate of the galaxy and trillions of lives are riding on it…oh wait, yes it is.”
Knowing letting herself say that aloud had been a mistake, she pushed the thought away and focused down on her notes and the sprawling map of the galaxy being projected in fine detail above her living room coffee table. The projector wasn’t a Mass Effect model, being one she’d bought off the Marketplacce. Not because ME tech couldn’t do what she needed, but simply as another security feature. She was busy transcribing events from her memory and notes onto the holoprogram, information she felt she was justifiably paranoid about. The fact this holo was meant for military planning, and was thus biometrically secured, helped her feel better. As did the fact it didn’t use any architecture or language found anywhere in this universe.
It was also nice that it had features intended to be used for campaign planning, which let her set up a timeline. In this way, she was creating a much more visual representation of past, current, and future events and where she might be able to prevent, leverage, or otherwise utilize them. Given that Hazel had been an artist, it was no surprise that she had an easier time processing what she was seeing in a format like this, and even the part of her that was still Rylia found it useful. The problems were so big and spread across so much space, that trying to hold them all in her head was migraine inducing. Trying to stick to that was also a fantastic way to miss something important, or to fail to share that important thing with allies. So this should be well worth the effort.
Even barely a tenth of the way done, she was already spotting issues with the decisions she’d made so far. Like, just as one of the more irritating examples, the location she’d chosen as her company headquarters. Nevos had been perfect for what she needed in the short-term. For that matter, it still was. Relatively remote, with minimal oversight since the corporations here did a lot of their grey market research on planet and didn’t want people poking at that. It even had exactly the sort of light-industry which perfectly fit her initial manufacturing needs.
What it wasn’t, showing that she hadn’t thought every detail through, was anywhere remotely near the Terminus. Illium was in the Crescent Nebula, right on the border between the Attican Traverse and the Terminus Systems. Nevos was much deeper into Citadel Space. Still a great place to do Research and Development, but it absolutely was not a great place to launch their eventual strikes to take over the Terminus from. It also didn’t have a shipyard industry, so building anything big was going to be very noticeable.
In some ways, that was all fine. It would actually make it easier to separate Erotic Delights and their new medical company from their Warlord campaign. In other ways it was…less than ideal, as it meant they’d need to operate from two wildly different and distantly separated locations. Not to mention that any war industry they set up here would eventually have to be moved elsewhere, lest it be discovered and the connection between the company and their efforts be made anyway. With employees and assets seized if they upset either the Council or Asari Republics enough.
That was just one major failure of planning so far. One she was trying not to let get her down. Nevos was and had been a solid option that still came with big advantages. She knew there probably hadn’t been ‘one perfect solution,’ but as she detailed out the map, she was fighting the increasing feeling of being out of her depth.
“No! Focus you stupid bitch. Now, where is the Broker in all of this mess? Let’s see…Hagalaz is in the Hourglass Nebula. That’s well and truly into the Terminus. Huh, it’s actually technically a garden world, if a second tier one. Didn’t realize that. Originally had a bunch of mining operations, but those were abandoned when worlds with less violent climates were found that could be exploited more easily? That’s promising, potentially. Palladium, Platinum, Iridium? Lots of metals that could be used for shipbuilding, and using droids would solve most of the environmental issue…”
“Let’s see, Cerberus is a known entity, but only just barely. The only public incident was them attempting to steal antimatter from the SSV Geneva in 2165. The R3s picked up some indications they are recruiting more heavily now that they are known, but do any of the facilities I know about exist yet?”
Realizing as she puts in the locations that she has no idea when most of them came online, she groaned. She’s going to have to investigate a lot of the information she has, isn’t she? Does that mean she needs to recruit a spy or something from the Marketplace? Or can that wait? She still needs a lot of help in the R&D department too, and the R3s and some probe droids could probably put together a lot without spooking anyone or drawing overt attention.
Wishing she had hair still, just so she could pull it out, Rylia continued to give her attention and best efforts to mapping everything she knew…
… … …
“Damn it!”
Rylia kicked the omni-gel printer with annoyance, then yelped and hopped on one foot as she’d forgotten she wasn’t wearing shoes. Hobbling backward, she flopped into a chair at the desk with her prototyping workstation resting atop it. Omni-gel was an amazing material, almost as much as medi-gel.
Frankly, as far as she could tell sharing either of them should have gotten Humanity elevated farther and faster than they had been. Unfortunately, realpolitik was at play. None of the current powers that be wanted an upstart gaining influence barely ten years onto the scene and had done their best to brush off arguably two of the greatest technological gifts given to the galaxy since the Citadel was discovered. Something made all the more insulting by the fact it wasn’t a Prothean tech rediscovered, but a genuinely new development by Humanity.
Well, unfair or not, Rylia certainly appreciated how much easier and faster it made prototyping her altered designs from Marketplace blueprints. It wasn’t practical to produce items from omni-gel at industrial levels, not even with an industrial omni-gel printer like the one she was using. But it was immensely useful for prototyping. Unfortunately, as good as it was in most ways, it was proving inadequate for her current needs. It just didn’t have the precision required for making advanced components from other tech bases. Particularly ones with materials science that hadn’t been taken into account by the people who made either omni-gel or the printer. Something that had resulted, in this particular case, in the printer getting so gummed up it might as well be a brick at this point. It might legitimately be faster to scrap the thing and buy a new one, instead of trying to clean it up.
“Fine. This is fine. I can look on the marketplace for a better prototyping tool. I still have a decent number of credits, even if I probably need to arrange for another mass sell-off.”
She groaned, adding that to her ‘to do’ list as well. Yes, technically she could just buy things with in-universe credits to then sell off to the Marketplace, but it wasn’t terribly efficient to do so. Not to mention that it might cause flags to pop up for people and groups that she’d rather not notice her other operations. If mass amounts of omni-tools, guns, or other bits and bobs, just vanished once she got ahold of them, someone would notice that fact, sooner or later.
Maybe she could look into larger salvaging operations? For things like old ships? She didn’t think there were any such places on Nevos, but there had to be orbital breaker yards or similar groundside facilities out there. It was yet another thing she would need to somehow find the time for, though. Sighing and rubbing her eyes, trying to force back her exhaustion, she opened the Marketplace and determinedly started looking for some sort of fabricator that could handle what she needed. One she could hopefully get without utterly breaking the bank on her remaining Marketplace credit by being too far above the local tech level…
… … …
Rylia smacked a folder full of flimsiplast, an Asari paper-equivalent that was more environmentally friendly, down on Momo’s desk. That desk, made of local woods in fine quality, was occupying the C-suite of their office building floor…which had previously not really been in use.
Rylia had, prior to Momo, mostly worked out of her Penthouse. She’d visited the testing labs and production facilities, but hadn’t bothered much with the office space which held much-dreaded departments like HR. Admittedly, their staff for things like HR was still fairly thin on the ground, but Rylia still did her best to hide from them. Her past life as Hazel hadn’t left a good impression of those people, even if she intellectually knew Asari HR departments were usually less…condescending. Also that they weren’t as likely to complain about her doodling naked women in her cubicle.
Particularly since she was the boss.
Past life HR trauma aside, Rylia just hadn’t seen the need to use the physical office space that technically belonged to her very often until Momo came along. Her chief minion had gently lectured her about that, though, explaining that a certain number of physical office hours was good practice. If for no other reason than so that your top minions knew when they could safely approach you. Annoyingly, she’d been right, several of her many relatively new department heads having been anxiously waiting for a ‘good time’ to ask questions. Some of which had genuinely been important.
Thankfully, she had Momo to wrangle and herd all the other minions now, so Rylia herself still wasn’t suffering too many office hours. That said, Momo ran a tight ship, and there was almost always time in her schedule, like now, for Rylia to bring up various topics. Strictly speaking, this was one that she’d have preferred to do a bit later, in the greater security of either her penthouse or Momo’s apartment. It was, however, potentially time-sensitive.
She’d taken the time to look into Henry and Miranda Lawson, and discovered that Miranda had just fled her father. As in, within the last few days, basically the moment Miranda turned eighteen and gained a bit of legal wiggle room as a result. Rylia, assuming her knowledge from the game was correct, knew that she’d eventually approach Cerberus for protection from her father. Yet, she didn’t know how long that ‘eventually’ would take. Had it been days after she fled her father? Months? Years?
Back to the present, Momo merely quirked an eyebrow before picking up and opening the dossier Rylia and smacked down on her desk. One that was written in the Galactic Basic they’d both gotten brain uploads of from Star Wars. They used the language routinely as an extra security measure to protect any information regarding their more long-term plans…or that Rylia had from her life as Hazel.
Seeing it here caused Momo’s eyebrows to rise, and she quickly reached under her desk to activate unobtrusive security measures against someone trying to listen in. Even an entirely different language wasn’t proof against enough brute forcing by a VI, so extra precautions were just common sense. Thankfully, such precautions were also common place in Asari C-suites, so their installation hadn’t raised any eyebrows.
“I take it she’s important? Wait…Lawson. Didn’t you mention her as one of ‘Commander Shepard’s’ companions?”
Momo’s quirk enhanced her memory, though not quite to the extremes Rylia’s own Asari physiology had. Living for a thousand years without a very good memory would be all sorts of suck. Thankfully, by either nature, someone’s tinkering, or just as a side effect of their Bullshit Nervous System of Doom, all Asari had eidetic memory. Not perfect, and it sadly hadn’t affected her memories from Hazel, but fantastically good by most standards. Knowing that Momo’s Quirk let her come within spitting distance of that same level of memory retention, Rylia let her think for a moment. It only took those few heartbeats for Momo’s expression to shift, as she obviously thought back on the extensive, hand-written notes Rylia had given her about the games.
“Oh! The woman in charge of the Lazarus Project! As well as one of the higher ranking agents of Cerberus. You think she hasn’t been recruited yet?”
Rylia hadn’t been able to include every detail in what she’d written out for Momo, so she nodded and explained.
“I’m almost certain she hasn’t been. She originally went to them for protection for her and her sister, after they ran from Henry Lawson. There’s some risk of drawing Lawson the elder’s attention if we pick her up and shelter her…but he honestly doesn’t have much reach into Asari space. Given how deep into said space we are, if we’re careful it could take years for him to even figure out where she went. By which time we’ll be set up enough that it shouldn’t really matter.”
Momo pursed her lips, then nodded. Nevos was in the Silean Nebula, just about as physically far into the rim of the galaxy as the Citadel had explored. There were multiple Relays between it and even Inner Council Space, and the Arcturus Relay to Human space was clear on the other side of even that chunk of Council territory. The planet Nevos itself was also notably unimportant, mostly a resort and corporate world that strongly discouraged people poking their noses into business here.
Henry Lawson might be an influential businessman by human standards. But Nevos was ruled by Asari corporations, who’d been keeping everyone, up to and including the Salarian STG, away from their secrets for thousands of years. The chances he, or even Cerberus, had any penetration of Nevos was incredibly low.
Cerberus might have one or two minor agents looking into the bigger and more important corporations here. But even they probably weren’t paying any attention to a sex toy manufacturer. Even their branching out into medical applications was unlikely to draw immediate attention from anyone other than the Asari medical sector. Doubly so given how new that branching out was and the fact they hadn’t released any actual products yet. Read this novel at novelping(.)com for the best experience.
Momo nodded again, not protesting the idea, but bringing up a pair of practical questions.
“How are you going to convince her you want to help, and what will you do with her if you can convince her?”
Thankfully, the questions were ones Rylia had already thought through. In fact, she sort of needed Momo to play along with one of them, which is why she’d brought them to her at all rather than acting immediately.
“For convincing her? I figured we can hit two birds with one stone by telling her we have reasons to hate Cerberus, and that she drew our attention since Henry Lawson is one of their larger contributors. So far as I remember, that much is actually true, and it will likely turn her off joining Cerberus even if she turns us down. I don’t think she ever knew about that little detail, with Cerberus having chosen to invest in her and ditch Henry Lawson as a backer in the process.”
Momo hummed, considering, and proved just how smart she was, again, by realizing why Rylia was bringing this to her.
“You need me to be the injured party. An Asari business owner operating mostly within the Asari Republic, and with your former profession, wouldn’t have any reason to be at odds with Cerberus. But since you set my identity up as having spent the last few years working for businesses in the Terminus Systems, it’s extremely plausible that I have crossed paths with them and made enemies.”
Rylia smiled and nodded enthusiastically, pleased that Momo had gotten there on her own.
“Yep! The fact you’re a successful human businesswoman who had been operating in the Terminus makes you a highly probable target for their recruitment efforts. The fact that you do have issues with their methodology and want to annoy them even has the benefit of being true. Even if it’s a more intellectual issue, rather than having had a run in with them.”
Her chief minion snorted at that. Given the horrible shit Cerberus had gotten up to, or would get up to if they hadn’t yet, any sane person would have an issue with them. Let alone someone who had been driven enough by a strong sense of justice to become a professional Hero.
“And the second part? She’s only just barely eighteen. What are you planning to do with her?”
To that, Rylia shrugged.
“Honestly? I figured we let her sell her own usefulness. It will make the whole thing more believable, I think. We offered a chance to escape just to annoy Cerberus, but any help she wants us to give beyond that requires her to be useful to us. That’s not how I honestly see it, of course. Given the background and paranoia she’s coming from though, it will be believable to her. More so than the idea that someone just wants to help, at least.”
Momo visibly thought that one over for a moment, before nodding. She glanced down at the dossier again and shrugged.
“She’s already a trained biotic with an advanced education. Certificates that easily equate to a Bachelor’s degree at eighteen, combined with biotic and firearms training. There’s a dozen places we could use her, and we already offer continuing education resources to our employees. Letting her pick a focus and convince us she’s a good fit should work. At minimum it denies her future expertise to Cerberus, with a good chance she’ll end up with a useful focus for our long-term goals, becoming a significant asset.”
Her face shifted into a grin as she got to the heart of the matter.
“Besides, you get to help her this way, and I recall you liked her in the games you played. What was it, that she’s ‘Badass, snarky, and has the ‘best ass in the Mass Effect series?’”
Rylia grinned, completely unrepentant as she nodded in enthusiastic agreement to that statement…
… … …
Momo frowned as her ‘boss,’ really more a friend at this point and possibly something a bit more, left her office in a rush. Rylia…hadn’t been looking great, despite putting on a good show. It wasn’t obvious. Not just because of the species differences either.
If Quirks had done one positive thing for her version of humanity, it was helping most of them evolve a far greater ability to pick up on emotional cues that didn’t rely on appearance. Just in her own class at UA, for example, they’d had someone made of rock, another with a raven’s head instead of human standard, and Tsuyu whose facial muscles had been far less mobile than normal. Nor had they been truly exceptional outliers. Mutation Quirks came in all shapes and sizes, and a couple of centuries of acclimatization had resulted in people adjusting.
No, Asari were downright easy to read compared to a lot of Heteromorphic Quirk holders. Even the Matriarchs with their supposedly-legendary poker faces were relatively easy for Momo to pick up cues from, though part of that was her own training. No, Rylia, fortunately for their goals yet unfortunately for others noticing when something was wrong, was something more problematic than merely ‘alien.’ She was a gifted actor. In truth, whether Rylia realized it or not, the stage had probably lost a once-in-a-century genius when it came to raw talent in that area. Something she’d realized when she dug into Rylia’s stream and realized just how good the woman was at drawing in her audience. All without the slightest bit of training.
It had explained a lot about how she’d gotten this far, honestly.
A normal Asari, even one that had merged with a human, likely wouldn’t have been able to successfully hide all her operations to date. Whatever Rylia thought, she hadn’t slipped below the radar of the people in power on Nevos. She’d just done such an insanely good job of acting out the role she was putting on, that of a tech genius Maiden that had hit on a good idea, that the attention had slipped back off of her. Virtually every Matron and Matriarch she’d approached for manufacturing deals or private investment had already known exactly who Rylia was. Her friend had just, almost unintentionally, pulled off a masterwork of acting that had them all firmly thinking they’d figured her out.
It wouldn’t hold forever, of course, not once Rylia started broadening her scope.
That wasn’t the point for the moment, though.
No, the worrying point right now, was that Rylia had looked rough around the edges despite how good of an actor she was. While part of that might be her feeling comfortable with Momo…she suspected it was far more a sign that her boss was beginning to crack a bit under the pressure. She had certainly seen the same sort of signs with people like Izuku, the sorts who were terrible at asking for help. For that matter, she’d seen it in other Pro Heroes and faced it herself, if to a lesser degree, when she’d first taken on the CEO mantle at Yaoyorozu Industries.
Given what they were up against, and the long slog they had if they were going to deal with it, something was going to have to be done about this. She was genuinely convinced that Rylia had the vision to help save the galaxy, but that wouldn’t happen if she cracked under the pressure first. Pulling up her calendar, she blocked out the entirety of the next two days. Rylia was far more important than any of the meetings that she’d had scheduled…
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
A/N 1: As much as I've made Rylia a happy go lucky sort, and she'll REMAIN that way, the sheer weight of her situation demanded an eventual crash for realism sake. Don't worry, she's not the type to angst for long or very often. It just can't be a smooth ride ALL the time, or it wouldn't be much of a story ;-).