A Mass Effect Adventure: The Story of Captain Jay C.

Between A Bar And A Hard Place

The words still echoed through his ears as he was being held down, subsided by the Biotic Stasis. In front of Jay, stood up on their knees, were his three closest friends. How did it come to this? There was a chunk of his memory that was lost to him. Jay couldn't remember how he had been caught in this position. All he could remember was what he had seen in a few nightmares before today. Before him, and behind the other three, there he stood. Jay couldn't make out who was behind the cowl and mask. The Hidden person was walking back and forth, almost like they were pacing, but in an anticipatory way.

"Did you hear what I said, Captain?" The Hidden Adversary said.

"I'm sorry but I must have been spacing out. What did you say?" Jay shot back.

"I said that you have a choice here. Which one of your friends gets to die? Who doesn't make it back to the ship tonight?" The Hidden Adversary repeated themselves. "As a means to keep it interesting; I will only kill the person that you name. I won't be doing any kind of cruelty. Unfortunately for you, you still need to tell me who you pick as a sacrifice. Like I said, you need to make this choice."

"I can't make that choice though. You know this." Jay pleaded.

"That's what makes this all so fun of a game. Who will you be choosing? They all are very important to you, but that's the point." The Hidden Adversary calmly said.

"Please!" Jay cried, tears forming in his eyes. "I beg you. Don't do this to them."

"I wish there had been a different path that we could have taken that didn't lead to this happening." The Hidden Adversary said.

***

The Captain's Lounge was an addition that the Alliance had built into the Normandy-class ships following the Reaper War, and it was a place that only Jay would be found in at the random times that he was normally seen there. The room was still spinning, or perhaps, it was just Jay that was spinning. He awoke from the same nightmare for the last night or two. Whenever he would try to close his eyes, Jay would always see the blood on his hands. He couldn't remember the color of the blood, so that he'd be able to protect that member that he saw dying in his arms. Jay couldn't remember who it was that he saw shortly after he'd woke up afterwards. This lapse in his short-term memory concerned him as much as the contents of his nightmares.

There wasn't any time for him to dwell on these things, not with everything that was happening. What with the first time that he lost a bounty. This had become a matter of pride. This had never happened with any of the many bounties that him and his team had brought in to their contacts. Jay's efficiency was the reason that their pay was always so high. He had the freedom to brag about how good he was that he always had the bounties in the first shot, sort to speak.

"Captain, we are coming up on our destination." The AI that had been the secret pilot and crewmember of his ship. It was not something that he'd tried to let many people even know about since it was for the last 300 years+, illegal for any AI to be created. The AI was very similar to the Geth Consensus, and Jay had even asked the AI if it was just that, but it would always dodge the answer. Not many people ever got to even see the inside of the Thermopylae, so it was easy to hide this little-known secret. The interesting thing was that the ship had the AI on it when Jay had been "gifted" the ship.

"Great!" Jay said with a slight slur to his speech. "Inform the crew of a shore leave."

"Acknowledged, Captain." The AI said.

With that, Jay began moving down to the CIC deck to leave the ship. He had a hot date after all. The date was of course a simple bottle of Tequila, but who had to know the difference. All that Jay wanted to do as of late was just drink the nightmares and depressing feelings away. He was not too secretly hiding from the fact that he was trying to avoid them altogether. What those were, he'd never admit aloud to anyone, even to Ruyak, Aventus, and Saernon. This was largely because those three were in fact his closest friends and the three that were presented before him in his more recent of nightmares.