Thane: Citadel Thugs

We've neglected two major science things about Thane Krios. Science is important in a game with horse anuses mass effects and bloobies.

One, Thane has something called kepral's syndrome, a drell disease where water gets in their gils and affects their ability to breathe. Thane learned to be an assasin on a hanar planet, and hanar are big jelly fish guys, so do some math there.

Thane lives in the life support section of the Normandy, since it's slightly more dry. He's kind of hoping to dry his gills out, see.

One more science fact about Thane.

Drell have this thing called eidetic memory. Effectively, they remember every single thing ever and will randomly recall it out loud while doing this freaky ass eye thing, as you can see in my lovingly accurate rendering above.

So naturally the question comes up: really, every memory?

EVERY memory?

Okay, one more, just to make sure all the Thane fans get good and mad:

I keed, Thane folk always seemed pretty nice to me.

Anyway, Thane's been remembering his son, Kolyat lately:

There may be a reason this game gets called Daddy Issues The Game.

... are those guns in the life support room?

No, legit, the Normandy crew keeps their guns in the damn life support room? Guns are like ANTI-life support! What the hell? Who came up with this idea!?

Really, Thane, you make a pretty decent living being an assassin, sooo .... ?

Still, we need Kermit's loyalty, so let's go poking around the Citadel. I wonder if Captain Bailey's heard anything?

("Duct rat" is slang for a poor kid who grew up on the Citadel. Kind of the same as our street rat or sewer rat.)

Anyway, off to find Mouse, who is standing neatly out in the open.

(That's a real line from the game. REALLY, Thane? How many mice do you know?!)

Shepard and Thane take the name back to Bailey, who set them up with Elias Kelham in a private interrogation room. They've got to get the name of Kolyat's target out of the guy.

The game does something strange before it lets us in the interrogation room:

... do those seem flipped to you? How is Shepard being the bad cop the paragon route?

I suspect that the next few scenes change both depending on the ... uh, cop alignment you choose, not to mention the choices you make in the examination room. I'm not really familiar with how, though, so just take comfort in the idea that you might get a different scene than me.

You could have figured out that Kelham wouldn't talk, though, I bet.

Every so often, Shepard's presented with a renegade option:

I never take them, but I'm pretty sure they make Shepard punch the guy in the face.

Is an advocate a Canadian thing that I don't understand? Why isn't the guy waiting for his lawyer?

Anyway, the guy's lawyer "advocate" gets there.

NEXT TIME: Thane loves vents. Loves them.

Hey, Mr. Tali Man, Tali Me Banana

Oh man, Citadel DLC has put me so far behind, no joke.

This happens in this game, Mass Effect, The Horniest Of Games.

Before we go on today, I totes want to publish a comment I got from Adrienne Joy, because she explains the quarian admirals better than I can:

Love it! But I'm sad that you miss out how Han'Gerrel sort of comes across as the cool, on-your-side admiral in ME2 only to be the guy you want to (and can, as renegade!) kick in the quad repeatedly in ME3. Koris, on the other hand, comes across as a complete lameface unless you actually hear him out and realise why he dislikes having 1) a human represent Tali and 2) Tali get away with whatever it is her daddy did on the Alerei, and then eventually becomes outright awesome. I think it's a really impressive bit of characterisation for some relatively minor characters!

Honestly, I have trouble telling the admirals apart until we get to ME3, at which point they get really obvious, but I get ahead of myself. Thanks Adrienne! She goes on to say:

So basically just want to record the nuance in case MSpixel really does become the only galactic record of Mass Effect in however many thousand years time ;)

Which just proves that she is my spirit animal.

We did Tali's loyalty last time. Shit, did we ever go talk to her? Let's go talk to her.

Tali! Honey! Honk honk all aboard the horny train, geez! Hose her down!

If you play Lady Shepard, Tali will end her fantasy there. (She'll still come on to Girl Shep, though, which I find interesting.)

Here's the thing, though, if you play Guy Shepard, this path gets so much worse.

I've tiptoed around this, but if we're going to discuss Mass Effect, we can't leave it alone. Sometime between Mass Effect 1 and 2, straight male Bioware nerds decided to be fucking creepy about Tali. I'm not sure why. I guess because she's younger, and it somehow reminds them of ~their animes~? Please do me a favor and never google anything relating to Tali. The fan art will burn your eyes out. If you ever come up with the Bioware Social Network post on what Tali's sweat tastes like, it's a great way to induce vomiting.

You remember that paragon interrupt I told you to remember last time? Where you hugged Tali? Yeah. Yeah. It's okay, go take a shower, I'll wait.

This happened on a smaller scale with Garrus. Garrus fangirls always struck me as sort of harmless, though. They just giggle about animu body pillows and his spunk tasting like Mountain Dew and then get on with their lives.

It's so rad that we're preserving the taste of turian jizz for future generations. MSPixel is important work, you guys.

Back to business, Bioware knows where their bread is buttered. To appease the Tali fans (they call themselves talimancers, don't you just wish you were dead now?), they embiggened Tali's ass made her a love interest. The romance path though, it's ... let's just watch.

... wait, fuck, I need a Guy Shepard. Okay. Okay. I can do this. I'll just draw the default guy, right? Short hair, stubble, scars, square jaw ... I can do this. Okay. Here.

Holy shit why do you people even visit this blog?

You know what? We're going to steal my husband's Shepard. He actually has three -- we'll borrow Eusebius Shepard. Soldier, spacer, maybe war hero I can't remember, fairly paragon, half Canadian half Korean. He actually has two other Shepards: Lysistrata, super renegade infiltrator and Alistair, a sentinel who's alignment has totally left me at the moment. All three of them are Korean-Canadian. Eusebius, Lysistrata and Alistair are all traditional Korean names now. (He doesn't know, by the way, about the other Alistair.)

So, Eusebius:

Hey hey, this I can draw.

In ME1, all three Shepards fucked Liara. I don't think he knows that you can play ME1 and not motorboat them bloobies, I think he thinks that's hardcoded plot. Anyway, as Eusebius progressed through ME2, husbando~ discovered that he accidentally had Jack, Miranda, Tali and Mordin all madly in love with him.

He thought about it for three whole seconds before deciding he was going to cheat on Liara and go dive under dat helmet.

This next panel is not parody. It is actually factually what happens in the game.

True story: he's uncomfortable with the tradition of ladies taking dude's names when they get married (took me for-fucking-ever to convince him that I wanted his name!). This whole MISS VAS NORMANDY business makes him throw up in his mouth every time it happens.

... of course, we're both shitty people, we just wind up calling her Tali'Zorah vas MyCock. HEY OH.

I have left out the little hand game Guy Shepard and Tali play while discussing fucking. I love it, but only because I can run up to him, start fiddling with his hands, and make him queasy each time.

We have a problem at our house, though. It's a pretty bad one. It is as follows:

• I am a turd.
• I can do a pitch perfect Tali impression.

You can guess where this is going.

NEXT TIME: maybe I won't fake a quarian orgasm next time

let's call it a quargasm what do you think

All Aboard the Alerai

The Alerai is totally devoid of life. Geth are all over, and they're ... geth aren't helpful folk, to say the least. The story of the Alerai is told primarily through holograms.

Geth work on networked intelligence: you get more of the bastards in a room together, they use each other's resources and something something mass effects and end result, they get smarter. If the Alerai had a bunch of geth get together, network, then attack, that would explain how they got to be rightly fucked.

As we go along the halls of the Alerai:

This moment, this paragon interrupt ... we're not going to talk about it right now. I just want you to take it and hold it in your heart for now. Hold it close. Hear it whimper quietly in the night. Journal about the experience.

Point being, we'll talk about this later.

There's one last console with information, let's check and see what's going on with it.

FUCK. Tali's dad activated all those geth! He's the one guilty, not Tali!

Even if the guy's dead, Tali doesn't want him dishonored. ... even if it means she goes to quarian jail.

Let's go back to the admirals.

Don't fuck this next part up. It affects ME3.

Woohoo! We did it!

Next time: oh hahahahahahah next time you guys. I'm not done with Tali, let's just say that much.