ZFighter18

06.03.2183 — 01:42 okay, so im gonna lay it out. TV production sucks, mostly because of audience. It's a whole galaxy of humanity. 43 billion across systems, like ants, but you know what? Audiences are still the same. So, Victors was originally gonna be a vehicle for both Beacon and Major Victors. A

04.11.2183 — 01:18 Victors S1 is done. Welcome to S2. Goal is still 'heroes', actual ones. Family friendly, bright, easy to root for. Very Avengers-type beat. (Not that anyone fucking knows what that means) Is it propaganda? Of course, for the company and humanity but a weekly extranet documentary w

11.28.2182 — 02:13 Blueguard VEST time Meet the Mk IV. white-blue armor, full seal, shield-efficient, and light enough to actually run in. “light armor” is relative. still stops most small-arms, keeps pressure in, poison out, and the joints dont lock no matter what muck gets into them. ice, blood, v

“Left gantry!” Anything close to standard combat doctrine died under the first minute, long before the first wave of green screechers were chewed through, and Zedd watched it all crash and burn as everything… crashed and burned. Fuck! Fuck! Acid splattered not too far from where his foot was, the gr

“Coil four still lagging the sync window—” “I see it, I see, already compensating.” Even under Tali’s deft and skilled hands, the reactor was still sluggish to start. Zedd couldn’t fault it for that. Not that it knew enough to act against it, but if his internals were crawling with oversized space b

“Jesus Christ…” Peak 15 was a maze in and of itself. That much was unsurprising, given how big the structure was and all the money that clearly went into the place, but it was still a hassle to maneuver through it. Especially without power. Omni unfolded out over his left arm, Zedd’s face was buried

“And how far inside exactly?” Zedd’s question came with a scoff as he stepped over a geth chassis, the entryway still smoking even after the shooting stopped. White coolant threaded beneath his feet, liquid spreading slow and lazy across once-pristine marble. “Because last time we went into a dark e

Whiteout static swallowed the valley behind them, the rear axle rolling over the last flashlight as it sparked back there in the snow. Nobody bothered to look back at the disaster behind them. Zedd definitely didn’t. Granted, that was mostly because looking back meant unclenching from the grab rail

Metal screamed loud in his ears, the Alliance-built tin can protesting the sudden shock. Before Zedd could so much as shout, the world went sideways for all of a second. God- His molars caught each other on the drop, copper on the back of his tongue as the Mako landed back on all four wheels without

Since this story has a lot of enhanced characters, I wanted a cleaner way for people to keep track of who everyone is. So I made an interactive HTML roster. It has a splash page, a character select-style roster, filters for the different asset roles, and full dossier pages for each character. Basica

The walk through Port Hanshan was exactly as Zedd remembered it, down to the last minute detail. Honestly impressive, considering he hadn’t stepped foot on the planet in about a year or so, since the earlier days of the original launch of the VCA. The scale of corporate power was immediate from the

“Feros.” There was a not-so-funny joke that Zedd had heard thrown around over his last five years off-Earth, usually by older men with a couple kids who thought it was the peak of humor. It was a simple joke. “The whole Feros drop.” Easy to remember, too. And it went something like this; where does

Jane Shepard didn’t move. She might as well have been a statue, eyes as still as the rest of her as she refused even the urge to blink. Dead center in the mess deck, boots clambed to the metal beneath the soles, her arms stayed locked tight over her chest as she kept her attention straight ahead. Ce

Rotting wood exploded in a burst of splintered shrapnel, foul-smelling sap smearing against the field of his Mantle and trailing down. “Watch-!” He dropped, a blind shot snapping down the tunnel from the Full Stop. The impact was drowned out by another roar from Jane Shepard’s shotgun, Zedd gritting

“Son of a bitch!” Darkness was not his friend and neither was momentum; something launching itself out of a dark corner of the freighter the second he entered it. It was sprawling limbs and wet rot the moment it crashed right into his chest. His heels ground two long lines across the already-stained

“-Christ!” Zedd backpedaled hard, boots grinding against pulverized ferrocrete as eyes went wide. It had barely been a full five seconds since the Deadband went down, and the silence went with it; all the roar of Zhu’s Hope rushing back into his ears in a wall of noise. Deafening noise. Chaotic nois

The M35 Mako Infantry Fighting Vehicle was rated for a lot. With armor tough enough to withstand high drops — even without its micro-thrusters to slow it down and mass effect fields to lower its mass — and strong enough to weather extreme cold, heat and almost any other kind of rough terrain, its wh

The path of the spine fed them into a wider chamber, ceiling rising higher until it vanished completely into open space and smog-filled air returned in full force. Zedd stopped his forward movement as Jane, Kaidan and Ashley did the same right in front of him. In any other situation, he might have g

“Tell me again why I’m with the fun group?” Zhu’s Hope seemed to have taken all their bad ideas and made it colonial zoning law, an accomplishment if there ever was one. That was Zedd’s immediate and professional opinion after another good half-hour of scouting out the colony with three of the Norma

Maybe the Protheans deserved it. It was a harsh thought, but the further upward they fought into the tower, the more Zedd felt it wasn’t harsh enough. The reasoning for that was simple and a bit petty, yet undeniably centered in logic and reason. Specifically… “Fuck these stairs!” They were a joke o

Wha- Hot copper-scented spray hung in the air for all the split-second it took for David Al Talaquani’s skull to vaporize into mist, red and gray splattering against the shielding of Zedd’s Mantle. The colonist’s body didn't even have the decency to collapse like a person, knees folding as the rest

"...god, I miss the Kodiak." Words he never thought he’d say about that stupid clamshell. The FTL-capable clamshell of a drop-shuttle the Alliance treated as an all-purpose vehicle was never something he was the biggest fan of — mostly for the pettiest of reasons — but right now… “I miss the fucking

The viewport on the Normandy’s observation deck was quality stuff. Nothing like you’d see on most Alliance ships, it was clear and crisp to the point you’d be hard-pressed to miss anything reasonable even without digital assistance as well as being the kind of hardy that could easily weather a micro

“Bip-bip-bip-bi-bi-bip, bip. Bip-bip-bip-bi-bi-bi, bi-bi-bibi-bi-bi-bi-bi-bi-bip, bi-bi-bibi…” “Hmm.” Zedd nodded his head as he walked through the corridors of the Normandy SR-1, the halls an exercise in polished claustrophobia and a damn good one at that. “Hmm-hmm.” Bobbing alongside him was the e

“Twenty-second century, doin’ something mean to it…” Ozone. Gun oil. The tang of high-grade cleaning solvents strong enough to mask the sweat of dozens of marines and their grimy fingers. All of those combined made for a sweet aroma of effervescent engineering while in the utilitarian graybox of the

"You… you completely decoupled the kinetic barrier feedback loop from the eezo core…” “Mmhmm.” As much as Zedd hated the hum of eezo, he was finding that the Normandy’s drive core was almost peaceful. A vibrating too-loud testament to Alliance over-engineering, of course, but somehow a soothing bles

“Absolutely the fuck not.” The Asari blinked, her gaze easing from John back to Jane as the Commander’s sister snapped into the space between them. A scowl on her face, Zedd raised an eyebrow as her hand dropped halfway to the magnetic holster on her hip; a threat if he had ever seen one. A bit too

“So…” Zedd was once again thankful that he could control the polarization on his aviators, eyes rolling hard enough that it was a blessing they didn’t clatter out of his skull. It wasn’t his fault, really. He just couldn’t help it. Every time a certain Gunnery Chief opened her mouth, it was always s

“Thanks.” The word came out as a rumble, like wet gravel in a washing machine, enough to resonate in your chest even from a distance. “I mean it.” Emergency lights strobed a bright red as the cavern strained above their heads, cracks spreading in realtime. “For taking care of that energy field for m

“Well…” Heat wafted over him, a physical wall of it that made him frown for a second before his Mantle auto-adjusted. Unshielded and unplated, it would have been a bitch and a half to deal with — at least if you weren’t a synthetic. Probably enough to bake the moisture out of your corneas and shove

The side tunnel was a failing lung. Thick, toxic, and sulfuric, every breath would have dragged pulverized rock and ancient ash straight down an unprotected throat to coat lungs in a layer of grit. Thankfully, the four of them weren’t idiots. As soon as they entered a space claustrophobic enough to

“Hull… o-one-eighty C-Cel… and climbing.” The comms system crackled loud and not-at-all clear, the voice of Jeffrey “Joker” Moreau barely understood as he spoke from the Normady high in orbit. Zedd didn’t expect any different, especially considering he could feel the atmospheric shuddering in his bo

"So, this is the plan?" There wasn’t much of a plan, actually. Zedd was realizing that quickly enough, when the new human Spectre had called them all for a briefing in the conference room. Even with the place packed with bodies of different shapes, sizes, and races, the filters kept the taste of the

“Victors.” Zedd looked up from his cuticles, even as he slowed his pivot just enough to acknowledge the Captain himself. Anderson’s voice was a familiar thing, even if the last time they’d met in-person had been a good few months prior. There was a benefit to having a higher-up like Anderson as his

A dozen pairs of feet made their way through the yawning doors and out into the open space of the massive space station, the walk back from the Council Chamber far from the victory lap Zedd expected it to be. All the white noise of a quintillion-credit bureaucracy buzzed in the background as usual,

“Again with this? It seems you consider this Council subservient to your needs.” The massive doors had barely hissed shut for a full ten seconds, sealing the airlock with a thud behind them, before the three had launched right into it again. Being back here in the Council Chamber, it really only rei

They should invest in some better music for these things. Poor muzak aside, the elevator ride down to the Wards was a descent into its own version of alien hell to match the cosmic Heaven up top. At the very least, the tight space shared with a Krogan was a septic sensory tank Air pressure spiked as

Recycled money had a taste to it. Not literally, of course, because who would even? Still, air that had been filtered, scrubbed and scented to this excessive degreee had the worst habit of clogging up your nose in a way that was annoying but that stopped just short of being poisonous. Either way, it

"This is an outrage!" Off in the distance, Udina managed to echo all the way over to where Zedd sat, the white-suited man a Doppler effect of political impotence. The ambassador was fuming even more than usual, rail-thin cheeks pulled tight enough the man looked damn near vacuum-sealed as he paced b

Chapter 9 Jesus, this place loves itself. Glasses held in one hand, Zedd tapped the silver frames against his chin as Commander John Shepard said his piece. Purpose-built echo chamber for massive egos. Expansive and overdone, the meeting chambers of the Citadel Council did their part in matching the

Chapter 8 The docking was a silent job, precision even; careful and tight to the point that Zedd knew it was more the man than the machine doing the work. Art, really. Hell, call it fuckin’ ballet. He was pretty good behind a helm, but that was combat flying. Zedd knew where his talents were and it

Chapter 7 The Mess Hall chattered and clattered with the sound of voices and trays, that sort of forever-white-noise that stayed the same across a dozen different postings on just as many colonies And there was now one more to add to that count of postings. Twelve hours… Since Eden Prime, since the

Chapter 6B The Command Deck of the SSV Normandy hummed the way it always had from the first day she’d stepped onto the ship. It was a specific frequency, a low-level drone her brother had described as “calming” more often than once. And every time he’d said it, all Jane could do was roll her eyes. N

“With all due respect, Captain...” “You say that often, Commander.” His voice rumbled throughout the room, quiet but low enough to drown out the soft thrumming from the vents. “Yet I’m not sure you mean it as much as you think.” “...with all due respect, Captain, we’re harboring a terrorist.” The ol