Mass Effect: Revelation is one of three novels that Bioware will admit exists. If I'm lying I'm flying. It takes place in 2164,
juuuuuust barely after the First Contact War.
So, humans finished fighting with the turians, and we're all best space buds now. Humans at this point have ventured out into the galaxy, they're living on the Citadel, whole nine. Stuff looks really similar to the galactic community you see presented at the beginning of Mass Effect 1.
The novel follows several main characters around, the mainiest main character being Lieutenant David Anderson. You remember him, the bright orange guy who punched Udina in the face? But this is like twenty years prior, so he's not a captain yet.
The novel opens with him and several Alliance members that you never hear from again through the entire course of the series checking out this research facility where some giant explosion went off. I'm not going to bother to draw it. It reads just exactly like someone's playing a cover shooter, which is lolarious. Anyway, Anderson and pals discover that the base probably blew up because it was an inside job, dun dun dun.
But who could have done such a thing?!
Could it have been another main character, one who's currently sitting in a bar with something good and strong, listening to a news report about the attack on Sidon?
Shit! What if it is?
Meet Kahlee Sanders. That's pronounced Kay-lee, by the way. Doesn't it look like Kahl-lee? She's a brilliant scientist who works ... or maybe worked for the Alliance, and who hauled her ass out of the Sidon facility a day before it blew up, which doesn't look suspicious at all, no sir.
"BUT BEAN YOU MADE KAHLEE LOOK LIKE SHEPARD" You know, she does, a little bit, and even then, I'm pretty sure no one promised you good art to begin with.
The real reason Kahlee fled the facility was that she discovered they were illegally researching AIs. The people of the Mass Effect universe aren't really big on AI constructs during this time period. Remember, the quarians made AI constructs called geth, and that only cost them an entire planet, so.
But, I mean, she went AWOL, then the entire facility blew up, and that ain't a good look on anyone, so, uh, she's, kind of very much wanted by every Alliance member and also the Citadel council. She manages to slink out of the bar to go see her dad. Her dad is John Grissom, Alliance Hero, and will probably know what to do. Maybe. You know what? It's not like there's any other plan.
After that comes a fuck. ton. of scenes where Anderson goes to the Citadel and does Citadel shit. These chapters (that's fucking right I said chapters) were probably meant to take anyone who hadn't played the games and introduce them to the universe, but who the hell is going to pick up the novel without playing the game? Also? The shit that we see Anderson doing? Not that thrilling. It's not like the guy went wading in the Presidium fountains or visited the Consort or anything. There's a long sequence where he checks his email.
He checks his email.
THRILL! as he empties his spam folder!
There's also a discussion on how exactly data packets and traffic works on the Intergalactic level. That is some sexy shit right there. There's a brief part where he goes to Chora's Den -- remember that, that's the titty bar from Mass Effect 1! But Anderson's the only guy in the galaxy apparently that can't get a pair of bloobies in his face even when he goes to a titty bar. Damn, son, I just feel bad for you now.
After a hard day of being fucking boring, Ambassador Goyle meets with him. (Ambassador Goyle is the lady who was Ambassador before Udina.) She fills him in on what we already know, that Sidon went kaboom and Kahlee is AWOL, and sends Anderson out to find her before a council Spectre does, since a Spectre will have to turn her in to the council, and the Alliance wants their turn first.
Wait, shit. A Spectre. Do we know any of those? I mean, sure, Shepard's a Spectre, but she's 11 when all of this is going down (shut up I am not proud that I did that math). Fuck. Fuck. Quick, name another spectre that we know? Um? Um?
Wave hello to Saren! The book at this point starts to take on a little bit of duality in its plot -- one half is Anderson, and we'll discuss exactly what his plot line is in a bit I promise, and the other half is Saren killing shit.
No, seriously, every Saren scene can be neatly summed up as follows:
My favorite scene with Saren is when this one batarian visits ... a ... I'm trying to think of the nicest way to say it. A house of ill repute? Will that offend tumblr? I think I can use that one.
Oh, sorry, we haven't discussed batarians! They're brown, four-eyed aliens that are the literal whipping boys of the Mass Effect universe. If something unnecessarily awful is going to happen to an alien, it'll be a batarian. Wait until we get to Mass Effect 2 and tell me I'm wrong.
So, this batarian walks into a den filled with very professional women, which sounds like the start of a really great joke. He orders a human lady with the intent of beating the snot out of her instead of getting his swerve on. He's just sitting around, waiting in his room:
But, see, his, um, lady friend doesn't come in. Someone else does.
i am so sorry for drawing saren dressed as a girl but would you have been able to resist?
Also, I'm sorry, but it is hilarious, the idea of waiting for a girl and instead a big ass turian killing machine popping up.
So Saren beats the shit out of the batarian until he starts talking: some other batarian named Edan hired a krogan named Skarr to hunt out Kahlee and make her quite dead, quite dead indeed, so that Kahlee couldn't tell anyone about what shook down at Sidon. True to form, Saren kills the batarian and goes about his merry way.
Meanwhile!
You know, it's a story about Anderson and I don't even get to him until like the tenth drawing. It just don't feel right.
But anyway, Anderson shows up on the door step of John Grissom, Alliance Hero, looking for Kahlee. John Grissom, Alliance Hero is an old grizzled bastard, and won't help.
Uh. Okay. So. Anderson goes off to find the second star on the right and straight on until morning while John Grissom, Alliance Hero goes off to check on Kahlee. SURPRISE SHE'S IN THE HOUSE!
Ha, tell me you legit did not think that Anderson bought that whole story that John Grissom, Alliance Hero fed him.
Still, shit, we're fighting with a krogan, and it's not going well, even for John Grisson, Alliance Hero. Hrm. Is there anyone else who knows their way a good fight scene?
You know, the bastard gets results, what can I say.
Afterwards, when they flush Skarr out of the house, Saren turns to Kahlee and is like, dafuq bitch, why everyone on yo ass. Kahlee makes up a lie about the Sidon facility being used to create human biotics.
Saren buys it, but that's probably because he hasn't played Mass Effect 1 and 2 yet. There are actually human biotics running around during this time period. They're not super common, I guess, so maybe that's why he goes for it? But seriously, Kaidan, Shepard (if you made her a biotic), SpoilerCharacter1, SpoilerCharacter2 and SpoilerCharcter3 are all alive, even if they're little kids right now. I just named five damn charaters off the top of my head, you know there's more.
So there's a sequence where they make sandwiches, because this is a gripping action sci fi novel, and then as they're sitting there with said beer and sandwiches, Kahlee tells Anderson the actual factual truth: that she was working under this guy named Dr. Quan, who started acting weird. When she looked into it, turns out that Quan wanted to make AIs. She high tailed it out of Sidon, but she has no idea why the facility exploded.
Hey, remember when I told you that Anderson's side of the story was a different style than Saren's? See, there's this moment, right here in the novel --
Yeah, hey, we're doing this.
Apparently Anderson's a sucker for blonde hair and a cute smile. He spends the rest of the novel acting like a big squishy dope over Kahlee in just about the girliest damn love story I've ever seen. I mean, I had a shit ton of fun reading it, but I gotta say, it's really fluffy and fanficcy. I could easily see where you'd get turned off.
But then, you wouldn't get great scenes like the one I'm about to MSPaint. Normally I'd leave this out, but holy shit, guyse, it's pretty amazing:
So they decide that they've got to sneak Kahlee off planet, right? But they'll have to disguise her. So they hire the creepiest fuck in the galaxy.
hahhahahhaha the hate mail I'm going to get over this
Anyway, he's totes perving up on her, brushing her hand whenever he can, rubbing on her and shit, whole nine. For whatever reason, he makes her take "pigment pills" which turn her skin dark for a day. No idea why the hell this isn't gloriously offensive, but what do I know. Anyway, he also has to cut and dye her hair, and you better believe the goony fuck takes the hands on approach.
Hmm. If I were a bad person, I'd probably color her orange instead of brown in this next picture.
Hmm.
So anyway, this goes over as well as you'd expect.
I have no idea why Kahlee wasn't all like "hey maybe less creepin more cuttin," but there it is. God DAMN I was dying through this section.
Hey, people who've actually read the book: is it me or is there a boner joke in the next scene, the shuttle scene? I'll leave it to you all to find if you haven't read it.
There's this manufacturing plant on a planet called Camala that was providing the Sidon plant with supplies, both Saren and Team AndersonKahlee hope that if they can get there, they can get some clues. This is why Skarr sends some cronies to blast it sky high. While they're on Camala, Saren and Anderson meet up and discuss old times over a cup of coffee beat the shit out of each other. Saren wants Kahlee, and he's figured out that Anderson is probably harboring her, but Anderson has, at this point, figured out what happens when Saren interrogates people.
Saren thankfully didn't think to look in the damn rover like 30 yards away where Kahlee was actually just sitting out in the damn open. You know she wasn't ducking either, she was probably just fucking around on Spacebook on her omnitool. Anderson returns to the rover, but decides that he's not going to tell Kahlee that Saren wants her dead. See, he's thinking that he ~might~ kinda ~like like~ her, and he wouldn't want to take advantage of her and make her all scared and dependent on him and shit.
BETTER LOVE STORY THAN TWILIGHT
Saren wants to know why the plant blew up, so he visits a plant worker in the hospital who's near death.
The doctors gave him this stuff to inject in her IV bag so that she'll wake up out of her coma, but they warn him, she won't live long unless he gives her a second dose of medicine to put her back to sleep.
He manages to get to say that Skarr and Edan were behind the explosion before administering --
Hey, uh, Saren?
God damn, dude. I don't think Saren knows how to leave a room without leaving a dead body in the corner.
So then Kahlee's like, "Anderson, you dope, I know Saren wanted to kill me!" which leads to the novel's Big Teary Confession Scene. Were this Japanese, it might involve someone saying something about straight buzzin' robotussin, wanna get their mits in that oven, wanna get a lick of this lovin', but we're dealing with Canada here, so Kahlee just says that she's been lying this whole time, she knew who the traitor at Sidon was -- it was Dr. Quan himself. She thinks he's working with Edan to blow shit up to cover his tracks.
See, Quan was working with this artifact, and it was so old, it might have even been older than the Protheans! (Hey. Kids. REAPER. He had like a reaper leg or some shit.)
Anderson has a lot of damn feels over this -- he gets that Kahlee was mostly trying to stay alive, but damn it, he was trying to give her that black eyed peas, you know that boom boom pow.
Okay, follow close, because this next part gets fucking thick. They get this information to the Council, who decide to not be useless fucks for once and send Saren after Edan. Ambassador Goyle asks that they send Anderson to pal along, because maybe he could be the first human Spectre, please? Oh, and also, they need to get Kahlee off Camala, so they're going to smuggle her off with some Alliance marines. Saren, however, Sarens it right on up by realizing that Edan is searching for Kahlee, so he calls Edan up, tells him RIGHT WHERE THE DAMN CONVOY IS, and lets Edan kill all the marines and capture Kahlee. They take her back to Quan's compound.
So anyway, you can imagine how impressed Anderson gets.
Saren wants to go into Quan's compound and make as many dead bodies as possible, while Anderson's like, "Slow your roll, Kahlee's in there!" They bitch for a bit before striking a deal: Anderson gets a thirty minute head start in the compound to find Kahlee and get her out, and then Saren gets to come in and try to sell Mary Kay products no of COURSE he's going to kill everything.
You know, I was really surprised Saren didn't figure out that Anderson had a thing for Kahlee. Then again, I guess when the only emotion you can feel is "murder", things such as "affection" and "horny" really don't blip on your radar.
A summary of how the infiltration goes: EXPLODE.
No, seriously. Anderson uses up his 30 getting to Kahlee, but then Saren comes in and legit reenacts the ending to Cowboy Bebop.
You know how Anderson gets Kahlee out of her cell? One of Saren's explosions accidentally jars the the door open.
So, the end scene is Anderson and Kahlee on the presidium grass.
Saren, pissed off that he didn't get to kill someone, told the Council that Anderson is a big pants-wetting baby, thus fucking over his Spectre candidacy. But you knew that, we talked about that in ME1.
But hey, that other plot thread?
and then my kokoro brokoro
No, but seriously, what a blue balling finish to a sweet story. Kahlee says she can't because she's been reassigned to a top secret project and will be away.
...
Alliance, damnit, I'm calling you out on this one. Putting her on top secret shit didn't work out so hot for you THE LAST TIME, what makes you think THIS ONE will go any better?!
But still, so it ends, not with a bang, but a cock block. Thankfully we've got three other novels to see if they get together. Oh, sorry, two. There's still that one that Bioware won't admit is real.
