Happy N7 Day!

Bioware declared their own holiday today! Which I think is rad as hell, and I'm not even being sarcastic or ironic. Everybody get excited over N7 Day!

(Get it? Because it's November 7th?)

It's also my friend's birthday, but you all don't know her. Actually, she's pretty awesome, maybe you should get to know her? She likes elcors. But she thinks Dragon Age is better than Mass Effect, so we can assume all her taste is in her mouth and move on.

Okay, point being! Since this is the first ever N7 day, none of us have any idea how the hell to celebrate. Bioware's promised us surprises which I bet will likely manifest in at least some new swag in their store and some multiplayer stuff, but who knows? There might be something else rad. Watch Twitter, I bet at least one person tweets out N7 cupcakes. Or Pinterest. (It is my favorite thing forever that Bioware is on Pinterest.)

I've known for a while that I'm going to have to explain what the hell an N7 is anyway, so today's as good a day as any. So, what is N7?

Besides an arrow pointing to Shepard's crotch?

In the Alliance military, your job is designated by your letter. N is the special forces. In theory, Ashley, Kaidan, Joker, Chawkwas ... hell, even Engineer Adams have their own letter, and it's probably not an N, but I can't tell you what it is because we never actually find out what the other letters are.

The 7 denotes proficiency. If you're a special forces person, you go train in Rio de Janerio for a while to earn your N1. You seriously even have to be a badass to get that far. If your ass is the baddest there is, you can take training for N2 through N6, and if you complete the N6 training especially well (or just kiss up really good I guess), the Alliance bestows upon you the coveted rank of N7.

There's only a few N7s in the Mass Effect world, since it's a fucking hard rank to get. One is Shepard, obviously, since I keep drawing her with that weird scribble on her armor. There's Lee Riley, an officer who enters the story for ten whole seconds, so don't worry about that name. There's a spoiler character who I have to save for later. I bet you can guess the last one on my list.

Yeah, hey, that orange bastard.

You never see Anderson wear N7 armor in the game -- I seriously had no idea he was an N7 until I read it in the wiki a while back. You could figure that he ran around in it in some scenes in Revelation, but that was a book, so we're all just guessing there.