Mass Effect Short Story #1 (written by Nick)

----- The Storm raged on. It had raged on since early morn. The Weather Forecasters predicted it would go on for a few days. It meant I would be doing my mission in the rain. I was half-way to my objective. I had been walking towards it for many days. This was not the most pleasant of objectives. I had to meet a scientist, who had fled from the world of technology, and bring him or her to the Alliance for questioning. I had almost completed this objective. But the aircraft I was taking was shot down. So now, I'm walking to it.

----- A few weeks ago the Alliance commissioned me to pick up a Scientist from a planet that liked living 'off the grid'. Which meant that I had to minimize my own technology usage down to there standards. That wasn't the difficult part. After I had gotten used to 'their' standards of life, I had to take a ship to get to the planet. It had one Dock for space ships. That one Dock was controlled by Cerberus. I had to get past them in order to get to a shuttle to take me to the village where the scientist was living. The moment I stepped off that shuttle, the storms hit.

----- I had a small pack, with some food, and an assault rifle. I had arrived in the early morning, it took a few weeks to get here, because the ship had to use data drops from satellites to find the planet. I was the only non-pilgrim. the other passengers were dressed in hand-spun clothes, it looked weird to me, I found out why the moment I stepped off that ship. Everyone's clothes were hand-made. I felt like my cover had been blown the moment I stepped off the ship. A Cerberus trooper approached me, I thought it was over.

----- I was wrong. He wanted to know how much I knew about the planet, and then offered some hand-spun clothes in exchange for my machine made ones. I told him how little I knew, and accepted the exchange. The hand-spin clothes were comfortable, but I wasn't used to the fibers used in it's creation, it itched. I asked him if there was a fast way of getting to a certain village, he said I could take a shuttle to one, but that it was risky. I didn't know what he meant by risky, I figured it was some old shuttle.

----- It wasn't. There were creatures here that would throw rocks at shuttles flying around. This is when the shuttle I was on was hit. A giant stone hit us and nearly blew us up, we crashed into some trees shortly afterwards. I managed to jump out, and survive the fall. I hadn't realized how tall some of the trees could be. That's what I get for living in a high-tech community. Not many trees. Or exposure to actual nature.

----- Now I had to walk the distance to the village. That was over three-hundred miles I had to cover. We had crashed in a forest, and any chance of finding out where I was in relation to the village I needed to go to, was lost with the Pilot and the people on the shuttle with me. I was alone, in a forest, in the rain. I was an N7 operative. I would find a way.

----- I wandered around that forest for hours, on end, the suns were high in the sky when I finally found a road, or path. I had no idea which way was the right one. I closed my eyes to think. I have very little knowledge of this planet, I don't know which was is north, or south. I had to trust my instincts on this one, I went 'left' on the trail. The clouds cast their gloom upon the earth, the world seemed unreal.

----- I followed the trail until it came to a larger road. This one ran perpendicular to the one I had followed. By this time the sun had begun to set. So the first day of my mission began to end. Nothing is as simple as it seems at first glance.