#tho i have to admit all the combat practice ive been doing working on the pantheons has definitely helped...watchers went very well

[nbmudkip]

havent run hollow knight in like a week so i decided to do a run just now, got a 52:44. which while Not even remotely my best is also yknow not bad, esp for a warmup after like a week of absence

#i was well on track for a sub 50 up until uumuu split bc i died like a Fool. #tho i have to admit all the combat practice ive been doing working on the pantheons has definitely helped...watchers went very well #despite me being extremely anxious #also i just had generally faster movement and better control #thank you p5 <3 i still despise you <3 #me.txt

[meggannn]

ive been cranky lately because of work and real life bullshit (i don’t know why i thought the housemate moving out would be any less dramatic than living with her for 6mo), so here’s some ideas i’m kicking around about what my shepard does after the war

what my shep does IMMEDIATELY after the war i am leaving up to covering in my fic and i won’t get into details bc there are some spoilers and shit i haven’t posted yet

so many years in the future, maybe in a decade or two: i dont know if i see shep 'retiring' so much as just choosing to decommission as an active officer. maybe her leg gets too irritating to handle or her migraines get worse or she just gets fucking tired or she realizes that one of garrus’s biggest fears is of him receiving a death notification and her dogtags in the mail, or a combination of all four.

but the alliance prob still keeps her as an advisor or senior member for possibly a few things, the preference of which i have not entire hashed out. she is para-centric in terms of morality and ideals, which doesn’t change as she gets older, but -gade in terms of drive and occasional ruthlessness within her job, which always has the potential to harm both herself and others. i think her attitude gets a little more manageable once she works out a new schedule and healthier job for herself. i’m thinking something like a liason for interspecies cooperation, or overseeing general of certain territories, or senior intel strategist, etc etc., something that keeps her away from active combat but still engaged in it, with her fingers in a lot of pies. so i think she'd be doing is “”deskwork”” but work that mostly requires cooperation and strategical planning at a very high level that she could do from the citadel or wherever.

then also, because she doesn't know how to take a fucking break, i see lyd admitting this with much embarrassment and discomfort but with TOTAL support from garrus: she kinda comes up and says “uhhh, also btw you should know i've been discussing with the university of thessia/oxford/sur'keh/etc about master's/phd programs" and g looks up from his briefings from the primarch like "what? you want to go back to school?” and shep is like, still mortified abt this as an adult but determined to act like it’s nbd, but now that she has Free Time she wants to check something off her list, which is: attend a formal school and gain a diploma. and not the damn remedial studies courses she took back in the alliance just so she could be taken off probation. and g is like “huh, well you know i support you, what are you gonna study?" and she's like "probably law, criminal justice, political theory, turian history and maybe interspecies language theory -- ” and she rattles off a bunch of things that nobody can ever possibly do all together, and garrus is kinda trying to wrap his head around the fact that it now sounds like his gf wants to become a lawyer or dump him to go become a xenoanthropologist with liara. and then she says “well look war cleanup is going to last the rest of our lives, we both know i can’t stay out of it. and because nobody takes me fucking seriously when i give advice on this stuff based on what i’ve observed with my own two eyes of this inefficient government system, i need a degree, or like, ten" and g is like “so ur going into politics" and she's like “FUCK no i would never" but she gets to work anyway.

working a full time job and doing classes w private tutors and profs g is like “ok i give up, you’re not going into politics or law? shit you’re not going to c-sec are u?” and she's like “no.......... but i will be making all of this as publicly accessible as possible” and this is basically just part of her movement to start making galactic govts more accountable for their actions and help inform the ppl of what's going on, in both legal and literal terms as they rebuild, and shep is adamant that the same problems that let saren run around loose and unevaluated, the hand-waving that allowed colonists to go missing for years, prejudice that led to one species threatening to not participate in a galactic total war just because a commander didn’t give into their command to allow an ongoing genocide to continue, yeah, that shit can’t keep going on. not just bc she feels like the govt failed them in the war, but bc of all the ways it failed the marginalized species and forgotten civilians, the blind spots, the corruption, etc, which she damn well knows abt bc she was a victim to this exact system as a kid. so she wants it, she wants it so bad, and it’ll never get done in her life time, but that’s ok, if she’s known for anything let it be for this too

meanwhile when garrus is too old to serve as commander of citadel defense he probably becomes like a military or political correspondent for citadel news network while also training young hierarchy engineers in ballistics and programming, and he’s known for being That eccentric instructor who you’re pretty sure pulls at least half of his “war stories” out of his ass, and he gives a different story to explain why half his face looked like it was eaten by varren every time he’s asked (”a maw got in a good hit of acid before i filled it full of cannon fire” “i overloaded a geth prime so hard its head is still embedded in the station ceiling, and then it dropped the rocket launcher it was holding which fired right into my face”) and for all that he loves to brag about cool shit he did, he still won’t answer if he and general shepard secretly eloped years ago because he still calls her his “girlfriend” but always winks when he does????

other ideas: with all the rebuilding, assuming for this post this is on the citadel but could be wherever, architects come to shep like “hey we have this empty space that used to be a department store, after it was ruined by the blast, now it's totally gutted and we want to put like a museum of your life there” or sth equally obnoxious and shep is like “........why. why on earth would u do that. make it a library you assholes” so they name the library after her instead. which she’s like good, that’s practical and will actually help people, here’s my seal of approval, and she doesn’t admit she's super touched they really did that bc when she was a kid she used to hide out in libraries and read all day till closing. and the librarians were nice and she'd feel normal, like she was learning even tho she dropped out of school at age 13. so i think that would be non-negotiable for her, like “i cant prevent you from making a dumbass statue but if you're asking my opinion on how to use five thousand square ft, you're going to make educational and free-access, or you're not putting my name on it"

more later maybe

#lydia shepard