Revision of Sanity

There were days on the Normandy SR2 where everything went smoothly. Crew shifts passed without incident. Maintenance was carried out without difficulty, and Commander John Shepard was incapable of getting his steadily-growing team into undue amounts of trouble.

Today was not one of those days.

The first hint of the madness that would shortly seize control of the ship was the sharp squeak of a startled space hamster, in Miranda Lawson's personal quarters. The Cerberus operative had spent a full ten minutes attempting to locate the elusive rodent, but to no avail. Miranda later heard that it had ended up in Mess Sergeant Gardner's newly-restocked ingredient cabinet and narrowly escaped becoming a pot of chicken/space hamster soup.

The second sign was Tali-Zorah Vas Neema coming up from the engineering deck to inform Shepard that the mass effect field core was 'gooping'. A strange malfunction whereby every particle of loose matter in the atmosphere – dust, hairs, water vapor, bits of protein bar that Jack had biotically pulverized the day before – was condensed into a disgusting sludge by the intense dark energy fields, rather than being removed by the air filters. This sludge had apparently found its way into the Commander's personal shower that morning, which explained why he used the general crew bathroom that day.

This had been the beginning. When Jacob Taylor started wondering why the Collector particle-beam weapon recovered on Horizon was missing from the armory, things just started snowballing. Before she knew it, Miranda was trying to keep up with all the new reports of strange and annoying happenings occurring all over the ship. Given that the Normandy was not all that big, it amazed her that so much could go wrong all at once, and somehow not be destroying the ship.

Several hours later, Miranda was trying to figure out why the Normandy was stuck halfway between the Illium and the system's mass relay, and not moving closer to either one. Given that the pilot was in a heated argument with a strangely combative AI, it was not easy.

Eventually, the frustrated woman just gave up, and stalked back to her quarters to collect herself. Rather than sitting down at her station in a futile attempt to make sense of the situation, she just threw herself backwards onto her bed; legs hanging of the edge, hand rubbing her forehead.

Right then, the door alarm chimed, signaling that someone requested entry. For a moment, Miranda toyed with the idea of telling whoever it was to go away, in rather un-polite terms. Ultimately though, she sighed, sat up, and said 'come in' aloud to the door. Commander Shepard walked in.

"Can you believe this?" he said without preamble, gesturing out the door. He looked just as disheveled and ill-tempered as she felt.

"Not really" she answered. "Given that we're surrounded by billions of cubic kilometers of vacuum, I'm amazed that no-one has died yet."

Shepard sighed, then ran a hand over what little hair his adherence to military regulations allowed. "I know. It's crazy" he said." "I grew up on various ships with one of my parents or the other, and I only remember this many things going wrong exactly once." He grimaced. "And mass effect core 'gooping', got into my shower then too."

Miranda stared for a second, then laughed. It was only for a few moments, but she laughed. Shepard looked aghast. "It's not funny" he protested, then stopped for a moment. "Okay, maybe it's a little bit funny. But regardless, I wouldn't expect a repeat performance on a ship like the Normandy." A frown formed on his face. "You remember the hobby of mine I showed you, just before Horizon?" He asked.

Miranda, a little surprised at the abrupt change in topic, then remembered. Florescent orange, with bright purple highlights. "I remember" she said. Then her eyebrow rose. "Let me guess: You've accidentally locked your armor in a less than satisfactory setup?"

"Close enough" he answered. "I'm halfway between looking like a stormtrooper and looking like an overgrown wasp."

"Stormtrooper?" the woman asked, a little confused.

Shepard looked at her, oddly. "Stormtrooper. As in, white-armored Imperial soldier?" he said.

Now Miranda was wondering what the hell he was talking about. "You're going to have to explain that one to me" she said.

Shepard's mouth was working like a fish's. After a few moments, he snapped his jaw shut, then grinned. "So, I take it you've never seen Star Wars?" He asked.

"Is that some sort of movie?" she asked back. A sense of uneasiness came to her as the N7 operative's grin just got even wider.

"Wait here a minute. I'll be back." And he was gone. She sat for a moment, blinking rapidly. In an attempt to regain control of her mental state, she got up, walked to her desk and sat back down.

Before she could do anything else, the Commander came back, holding an OSD. "Too bad you don't have a larger screen, that's the only way you can truly appreciate it" he said.

Miranda scowled at the OSD. It looked to be one of the older models, maybe a good thirty years old.

"When I was growing up, I stuck a lot of old time movies, television shows and books on this thing. I'd left this with some other personal items in an Alliance locker away from the original Normandy. They were apparently retrieved by Cerberus, since I found this up my cabin" he explained.

"Ah" Miranda replied. "By 'old time', just how old are we talking?"

"Well, there's at least one from the year 1950, but the one I'm going to show you is from 1977."

The cerberus operative's eyebrow shot up again. "Show me? I believe that, technically, we're both on duty. And in the middle of this insanity is hardly the appropriate time anyway."

John snorted. "Actually, it's the perfect time. It's not like we can do anything anyway. As for 'on duty', I'm the one in charge of this mission, and there are perks to the position." He stopped for a moment. "As for the insanity part, I learned a while back that the best way to deal with insanity is to redefine your view of sanity."

Miranda let her forehead drop into her hand. Idly, it occurred to her that she had never let any such displays of emotion show to anyone before. Being raised in her early life under her father's thumb had trained her to keep everything bottled up inside her. After only a few weeks, Commander John Shepard had managed to get past all her barriers. Had made her trust him, like she trusted no-one else.

She reflected that he must have had a lot of practice at it.

He was right, after a fashion. It wasn't as though she could do anything about the various and bizarre problems plaguing the ship. At this point, she wasn't even trying. The only other thing she could think of doing would be to file and send reports back to the Illusive Man, but there was nothing noteworthy to report, apart from the day's difficulties. She couldn't really think of a reason why not.

"All right" she said slowly, and looked up. "Is this going to drive me insane with scientific inaccuracies and horrific special effects?" she asked wryly.

Shepard smirked. "Well, it was the late 20th century, that time period produced a lot of views of what the future would be, some were more accurate than others."

**M**

Ironically enough, the science-fiction movie that John Shepard insisted was a classic did not, technically take place in the future. That was obvious enough, since it began with the words A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Shepard had called it science-fantasy.

The movie, all the way from its rather loud introduction to its cliché ending, was surprisingly entertaining. Though she couldn't entirely believe Shepard when he said that it had spawned many more movies, several shows and hundreds of books, comics and other money-wasting ventures.

In his words, Star Wars had been an entire industry for decades. And he was apparently still amazed that she had never heard of it.

And now she had a better idea of what he meant when he said that his N7 armor looked halfway like the seemingly very ineffective stormtrooper armor.

**M**

John Shepard walked out of Ms. Lawson's personal quarters, rather content and very pleased with himself. After all, it wasn't every day he managed to get the normally strict and professional cerberus operative to let her hair down, metaphorically speaking. He was, however, rather confused by a slack-jawed crewman whose eyes kept flicking between Shepard and Miranda's office door before he inexplicably ran off.

He entered the elevator, hit the button for the engineering deck, and was pleased to note that the light had stopped flickering the age-old signal SOS over and over again. Tali reported that most of the problems had been solved, though she also said that Shepard would likely still need to avoid his personal shower for the time being.

Garrus was equally optimistic. His major difficulty had been that the newly-installed thanix cannon had kept deploying and retracting on its own, no matter how many times the annoyed turian reset the system. He was much happier now that the problem had been replaced with a much simpler persistent computer glitch. Though Shepard was somewhat curious as to why Garrus looked as though he would burst out laughing at any moment, he didn't dare ask why.

During his walk up the bridge, he noticed that every crewman suddenly stopped talking and stared as he passed. They tried to be discreet, but for Shepard, it was almost impossible not to notice. It wasn't until he talked to Joker that he found out why.

The formerly disgruntled pilot and EDI had settled their dispute – for the moment – and the cripple couldn't seem to keep a grin off his face.

"So, uh, Commander," he started, when Shepard's disquiet reached unbearable levels. "You finally found someone to do some stress relief with? I didn't think she was your type."

For a moment, the words flew right past Shepard without him realizing what the man had just said. Then they turned right around and rammed right into the forefront of the Commander's brain.

"What!" he spluttered, echoing, if he had known it, Miranda's reaction to Garrus not too long before.

"C'mon, Commander" he said, grin getting wider and wider. "You walk into a beautiful woman's room, stay there for two hours, and come out looking like the cat that swallowed the canary? Could it get any more obvious?"

Dimly, Shepard noted that for the second time that day, he looked like a fish. "I – I, you…" he snapped his mouth shut, then pointed, glowering, at the pilot. "Joker, you are obvious a disturbed, lonely, lonely man. Go get yourself a girlfriend or something, I wasn't 'doing it' with Miranda."

"Ooooh, it's first names now, it must be serious."

Shepard's jaw worked noiselessly for a few moments. Then, in his deepest, most threatening voice, said "I find your lack of faith disturbing." He turned and stalked off the bridge, leaving Joker's howls of laughter far behind.

****M****

Author's note:

It's been a while since I updated. I guess I just succumbed to review deprivation.

Oh, and it took me a while to figure out how the heck to make section breaks.