Purple - Zaeed Massani and Kasumi Goto

Zaeed scrutinized the bottle at arm's length. "Purple?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.

"Oh, quit your whining," Kasumi quipped, rummaging around her drawers for the bottle opener. "One whiff of that'd knock a volus out. Even through the suit."

Zaeed fixed her with a skeptical eye. "Not a chance. You ever see a volus drink?"

"…no," Kasumi admitted, shrugging.

"Well they're pressurized, right? Come in these big iron canisters that attach to the suit ports. Heavy stuff. Few years back I was in a little dive on Cenderes. Dirty, but any kinda drink you could ask for and nobody asked questions."

"Sounds like my kind of place."

"You and me both, girlie. Anyway, aliens like it too. I was counting out my money, right, when I hear this volus arguing with a quarian over who had it worse." He flipped his wrist limply as he mocked them in a sing-songy voice, "'oh, I can't sniff flowers', 'oh, I can't feel my child's skin', crap like that, you know? Anyway, these two jackoffs just get drunker and drunker as the night goes by. Little past midnight when the volus finally dares the quarian to down a volus drink, something called an 'Irune Firestarter'. Quarian goes for it." He stared dourly at the thief.

"Was it poisonous or something?"

"Poisonous! It blew his bloody head off! You crack one of these at standard pressure and its like a bomb, girlie. Blew the bar to smithereens. Pretty sure me an' the volus were the only two to walk out of there."

Kasumi nodded, thinking. "Huh. I never knew that."

Zaeed grinned widely. "Call the volus what you like, but light drinkers they ain't."

Kasumi rolled her eyes. "Unlike some people," she said, pointing at the drink on the table.

"It's purple!"

A/N: So, this story will be a spot to dump assorted scenes I've cut from Interstitium and any other random ME-related writing. I give no guarantee of any quality here, it's just gonna be a scrapbook of lower-quality stuff. I've given it a little editing, but no beta, etc.

Just thought someone might get a laugh out of these. This one was written for the ME challenge community on LJ. Prompt was 'Zaeed recalls a story of a quarian, a volus, and one too many drinks'.