This is a new Mass Effect story. I'm STILL continuing the WE, but I'd be lying if I said inspiration was hard for me to find at the moment. Transitioning from an Army at war to a garrison Army has not been kind to me. It's weird, but I'm actually hoping to get deployed to Liberia at this point... Anyway, here's the story:

This is an AU that takes place in the year 1865 AD, or 1865 CE for you hippies. In other words, it's 30 years before the Morning War. Think of it as a what-if or AU. All the characters from the universe we know and love are (theoretically) in it, only 318 years before the game starts. You'll see. Also, I have (very sadly) omitted femshep at this time. I might bring her in, if there's a popular demand to do so. I think I have a few more chapters in me (inspiration being what it is) before I have to make the decision to continue this or not.

Some notes:

I'm not the greatest at writing according to the period. Some historical anachronisms will happen. You may either ignore them or substitute something better. 150 year old dialogue is also not my specialty. Again, ignore or substitute. Finally, I don't like the whole dextro/levo thing. So for this, everyone is levo. Quarians still have crappy immune systems though, but it isn't nearly as bad yet, because they haven't been exiled yet.

...

Chapter 1: Right In Two

...

"What the hell's going on down there?"

"Dunno. Looks like some kind of battle," Tarrak mused, staring at the screen to the left of his command seat, "It's happening all over the center of the northern land-mass, concentrated near the eastern coast."

"It won't be a problem will it?" asked Ju'lee, his second.

He could forgive her naivete on the subject. A green recruit just finished her compulsory service in the Kar'shan defense forces, she had never conducted a raid on a slaver ship before. The girl had only ever been trained to deal with mass effect weapons, and to her, everything with a barrel and a trigger was the same. He couldn't afford to be picky, however. Not with an operation as small as his.

"No, no. A well placed knife, maybe, but the primitive guns won't do anything against your armor, let alone your shields. Now, if you're planning on running around naked out there, those dense metal rounds will rip clean through you," he added with a chuckle.

"Huh," she appeared to mull over the idea. "And they fight like that? Wearing nothing but colored organic textiles? Is their skin that tough? Like a turian's? I didn't think they could handle being shot any better than we could."

"They can't. They just don't seem to care."

The thought of one of these primitives putting up any kind of resistance was laughable, but still, it happened. Some races just didn't know when they were beat. Like one of their 'guests' whom they had foolishly given the task of servicing the Halcyon Harvester's long suffering engines in exchange for better rations. Never again. He hoped the her penance was sufficient to demonstrate the error of her ways.

Tarrak couldn't imagine the evolutionary pressures needed to produce a race that continued to fight like that, in whatever petulant ways its circumstances allowed it to muster, even when its continued existence stood at stake.

A turian would simply accept the new order, the new chain of command, and adapt to it. They made great slaves, except that the Patriarchy tended to frown on the practice in the most destructive ways imaginable. Hanar and Elcor were similarly subservient, though generally useless unless one had fishing nets to set or a field to plow.

Asari made better use of the circumstances than any race known, so much so that their collection had to be curtailed some years ago. More than once an Asari maiden had been taken, bore all the children of both her master and mistress, raised the offspring, and eventually turned an entire batarian noble-house into Asari. As far as conquering techniques went, Tarrak had to admit, it was by far both the most gentle and insidious.

Salarians were great if one needed a maid or a house-keeper or a doctor, but manual labor escaped them. They complained enormously with every little task assigned to them, but rarely attempted to flee. Like a volus, they could be counted on to eventually buy their way to freedom. Of course a volus's family would more than likely offer to pay top dollar to buy their kin back and be done with the whole affair by the evening meal. They were a good way to make a quick credit.

Even other Batarians made fine slaves. To them, it was just another hazard of existence.

And then there were the quarians. Though they were some of, if not the, best techs in the galaxy, and at least as good at manual labor as a batarian, they made for terrible slaves.

Not only did their non-spacers require the use of either a re-breather or constant medication until they could adapt to any new environment, but they always tried to escape. Or, as was the case with this especially peevish specimen, they simply tried to kill everyone in the vicinity, themselves included. They worked best as indentured servants rather than slaves, where their generally infallible honestly obligated them to try and work off their debt rather than flee, but Tarrak wasn't a con-man, he was a slaver.

If these primitives they discovered turned out to be anything like that, Tarrak vowed to cut his losses and space all the mammals aboard.

"How many do you want to get?" asked Ju'lee.

"If the council finds out we've discovered a garden would inhabited by a new race, a primitive race, and started taking the natives, we'll have a Spectre on us in a heartbeat," he said. "Best to take one at first, find some interested buyers who won't put them on display immediately, see how it works out, then come back for more, one, two, or three at a time, max."

"How are we going to pick one?" she asked, "Maybe we should go to one of the lesser inhabited areas."

"I thought about it," he replied, "And in all the foliage on this world, our visible-band cameras won't pick anything up, and the IR can't distinguish the primitives from the rest of the animals. We have about a hundred or so here to choose from anyway."

"But they're all fighting," she said, "An I don't care what you say, I don't want them pointing one of those guns at me. They might stop fighting each other and attack us, or worse, go off and warn their superiors about us. That would make it harder to take them in the future."

"They are fighting," he said, "That's exactly right. We'll just wait until the battle is over and collect one of the survivors from the losing force. It shouldn't be long now. The ones in blue aren't doing so hot. I'm tracking one now."

...

Captain John Alan Shepard, commander of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, First Maryland Volunteer Infantry Regiment, felt like shit.

Not only had he and his men been routed by an entire battalion of confederates, but his horse had been shot out from under him and he was pretty sure his ankle had broken. It had twisted painfully in the fall when his foot caught in the stirrup.

He had gone back to gather more of the wounded after sounding the retreat, looking for anyone that couldn't move under their own power. He had passed stragglers catching up to the main element in groups, those carrying others or shambling along toward the rally point, but he had left them to look for more, keeping a running tally as he had galloped. Those he passed would be fine, he knew. The confederates were too busy consolidating their Pyrrhic victory to give chase.

With only two unaccounted for, he had found one young man, a sergeant, with his head split wide open by a confederate round. The final member of his company fared little better, making it a whole twenty paces before succumbing to his chest wound. With a silent prayer, he had turned his horse towards the rally point just in time for the beast's head to block a sniper's round. It hadn't even made a noise before falling to the ground.

He had waited there, for what seemed like hours, for the enemy to claim his body. He didn't know then, as he still didn't know now, what he would have done if they found him. Pistol in hand, he could have taken a few of them with him or he could have surrendered. Either one would have bought his boys a few more precious seconds to run if he had been wrong, if they were being chased.

What he had not expected was to be shot at and left for dead.

A hazy dusk settling onto the forest, now he limped along, at least a good hour away from both the enemy position and his waiting men, somewhere in between their two positions.

"Don't move or we'll kill you."

Finally, the enemy he had been expecting were upon him. He gave the whole affair a grim shrug of indifference. Yes, he was about to experience the luxuries of a Confederate prison, but his men would have regrouped at Division headquarters by now, far from the clutches of any pursuers.

But he had to wonder about the tinny, metallic quality of the voice, as if the person were speaking through a tube or into a glass jar, and at the gravely grumbling noises that accompanied it.

Halting in the middle of a painful stride, he leaned against a nearby tree and turned to face his soon-to-be captor.

And nearly fell flat on his face.

Before him was not a man. He could tell that, even in the dim light of the early evening. This thing was a creature from beyond his darkest imagination. Never particularly religious, he tried to remember whatever Bible verses dealt with demonic encounters and drew a blank. Shock gave way to silent confusion when the thing's weapon, leveled at John's midsection, registered in his conscious mind as the reason why his body had halted, refusing to move any closer to it.

Of what use did a demon have for a pistol?

"Good. You can understand me. Raise your hands above your head and walk slowly to me."

John heard it again, the tinny quality to its voice, but noticed something else this time. The movement of it's lips wasn't quite right. They didn't match the sounds John recognized as English, but they did match the guttural noises sounding at the same time. The damn things had two voices, one he could understand, and one he couldn't.

"It looks hurt to me," said another voice, definitely a woman, a demonette, also sounding metallic. It addressed him directly, "Sir, are you hurt?"

"No, I'm fine," he replied.

He knew full well the obviousness of this lie, but he had to do it. If they asked, there was probably a reason they wanted to know. It could be that they were going to shoot him if he couldn't keep up when they started marching to wherever they were taking him. He walked over to them as best he could, slowly but evenly, and hiding his wince. He did not feel prepared for what he saw.

"What in the name God..."

Confederate Soldiers may have been ugly, but not like this. The creatures had teeth like a fish, skin like a wild hog, and to top it all off, four eyes. In his shock, he put too much pressure on his bad foot and collapsed to the soft ground. It took a moment for him to struggle back to his feet.

"He is hurt," said the female, "Maybe we should find another?"

"No!" said John. The fear of losing more men struck him harder than any blow. "You won't take anyone else. You'll take me. I'll go. I'll heal. I won't even put up a fight."

He began hobbling back to the duo, holding his hands up in surrender.

"Fine. I like your attitude," said the male, "We'll repair you well enough to work."

The man-beast ushered him forward towards a doorway in the side of a well concealed building. A kind of netting had been strung over the tops and sides of the structure, and woven into it sat all manner of trapped vegetation, from pine needles, to thistle, to oak, to grass, even maple, sassafras, and mountain laurel. At a distance in would be impossible to distinguish the large house from any of the rest of the forest. That was his first clue that, if possible, something was more amiss than he first thought.

The second, third, and so on, came when he got a good look at the building's sides, base, and door. Not only were they metal, but they were pitted as well, as if the victim of some harsh and sandy beating at the hands of a desert wind-storm, an impossible occurrence in the temperate Appalachians. The base of the building stood a foot off the ground. It could have been suspended on some hidden legs, he reasoned, but more likely, there was a set carriage wheels underneath. It would go a long way to explaining how a house found its into the Appalachians from the Atacama. Of course, given that a pair of demons were at the helm, it could have rolled here from Hell itself for all he knew.

And the door looked suspiciously familiar, a frightfully odd thing for John Shepard to be thinking. Given that he had never met a demon-couple in person before, to the best of his knowledge, and had certainly never been invited into their locomotive abode, he ought to have had no frame of reference.

Locomotive was an apt descriptor as well as proper name for the metal behemoth, and John suddenly realized why the door looked so familiar. It could have been a dead ringer for a hatch found on any massive railway locomotive.

Like the pistols, the idea of demons needing a train engine, albeit one that ran without tracks, to ferry their victims to the pits of Hell seemed a bit off. He rather expected them to have simply opened a glowing gateway to fire and emptiness beneath his feet and dragged him under in their burning clutches, live wolves to a lamb. To be ushered into the back of a rail-car at the muzzle of a hand-gun was, well, anti-climactic.

He halted as his foot came to rest on the ingress. The loud clang of metal sounded as the heel of his cavalry boot hit metal. "So where are we going?" he asked.

"Perceptive, for a primitive," said the male creature, "We're going up there."

John followed its index finger out of habit, glancing up to the sky. So it was a locomotive, and a flying one at that. Why not? He frowned in confusion. The thing surely couldn't have meant the sky is their destination, could it? It meant that they were to be traveling by way of the sky, like an observer balloon if anything, didn't it?

He pulled himself up, still not allowing himself to cross completely through the doorway.

"So tell me," he said, looking from one creature to the other, "Do you mean that we'll be traveling through the sky, or do you mean-"

A thundering crack rang out, deafening John for an instant before being replaced with the high-pitched whine of short-lived tinnitus. He threw his hands over his ears as he fell to the ground for cover. The female demon had done much the same, scrambling next to him at the doorstep of the locomotive. The male, however, struggled to get up from several paces away where he had been flung onto his behind. Quickly, Shepard realized that the male beast had not only been shot and survived the hit, but his pistol had been flung to only the lord knew where.

That left one pistol on the demonette, with who knew how many rounds, his own pistol, a revolver with six, and his unknown guardian angel, who hopefully had a revolver or percussion pistol of his own. The Kentucky rifle that his benefactor had fired couldn't be reloaded in time to be of any further help, although it might make a decent club or spear.

Without a further moment's hesitation, John drew his revolver and pistol-whipped the creature next to him before she could bring a hand to her back where she kept her own. He should have shot her, he realized, but he couldn't bring himself to do that to a lady, even a demonic one.

Ankle pain be damned, he began running to the sound of the shot, but found himself inexplicably slowed after the first few yards of freedom. As he struggled forward to no avail, he found himself surrounded by a bright blue corona. It held him in place, unable to move or even draw a bead on his abductors, and lifted him up, slowly pulling his drifting body back to the locomotive.

Magic. Until now, John had been wondering why they were using common, if strange, technological mechanisms to do their deeds. He had almost begun to question whether or not they were demons at all, and not some heathen lost tribe of terribly ugly four-eyed people. Now he knew. Perhaps, like a good run, it strained these things to use their demonic magic, and so they opted to hold it in reserve.

The demonette leaned against the doorway as she made exaggerated pulling and lifting motions in his direction, with soft blue pops of light crackling from her hands and fingertips. The male demon returned to her side, kicking his booted feet through dried, dead, leaves around her, searching for his missing handgun. John marveled at how the thing kept one set of eyes searching the ground, while the other set stared at his partner, adding its expressions to the gurgling and grumbling noises of their conversation.

"Nun yunu wi!"

All three heads and a total of ten eyes turned to the new sound, more than ten yards closer to them than the shot fired seconds ago. A figure dashed out from behind a large spindle-bush, a tomahawk held at the ready in its right hand, a Kentucky rifle dangling in its left, running straight for the pair of demons like a pouncing wolf.

"Stone Spirits! You'll not take this one!"

It was one of Battalion's Indian Scouts, Shepard realized. He vaguely remembered him as a Cherokee from South Carolina named Alenko, though, as their de facto leader, everyone always call him Chief. He had never seen him in combat, but, being a Scout and learned in the art of hidden reconnaissance, Shepard figured that was the point. Regardless, against these things, he was about to end up dead. If the demon could stand up to a fifty-eight caliber rifled slug, then it would damn sure shrug off a hatchet to the neck, no matter how many of Alenko's shamans had blessed it.

Shepard's conclusion made the demon's reactions all the more surprising. As they realized exactly what the enraged native intended, to part their heads from their bodies, they reacted with as much fear as any mortal alive. The male, all four eyes wide in terror, jumped through the doorway and into the air-train, grabbing his partner in the process. As if giving an invisible rope a mighty tug, she used the blue demon-magic to launch John into the steel structure with her.

He hit the inside wall with as much force as a horse at full gallop.

That was the last thing John Shepard remembered before the world went black.

...

"What... Where... Damn."

John struggled to his feet- one of them still very painful- to stare directly down the barrel of an unusual, of unmistakable, long rifle. The male held it from a good ten paces away, standing down a long corridor, far outside the maximum distance where John might be able to knock the weapon aside.

Demonette stood close with her pistol still at the ready, but not so close that John felt comfortable disarming her either, especially not with the male demon on over-watch. Looking between the two creatures, waiting for instructions, John caught the quick shine of reflected light as the muzzle of Demonette's pistol dashed his face, painfully tearing his upper lip on his teeth.

"There," she said, "Now we're even, Primate."

He glared up at her, debating whether or not to spit his blood in her face. Chivalry warred with anger before he noticed that she had a matching tear on her upper lip from where his Remington had much the same effect on her. It trailed the color of sickly orange bile down her chin, flowing even more than his wound, thanks to her far sharper teeth. He had to admit, fair was fair.

On the other hand, he was still their prisoner, and that had yet to be fully addressed. If a bullet couldn't hurt them, but a tomahawk and a pistol-whip could, that opened possibilities. Perhaps, if he got the jump on the pair, he could even beat them to death. Neither seemed super-humanly strong. He began licking up upper lip, sucking in the copper-tasting fluid, wondering what would happen if he angered them enough.

"Spit on me and I'll cut your testicles off," said the woman, "And then spit right back at you."

John rolled his eyes and swallowed. "Where's Alenko, the guy who was gonna scalp you?"

Demonette smiled, "About two hundred thousand ... below us. Don't worry about him, worry about yourself. Let's get you to a cell."

John wasn't very good at thinking in terms of large numbers. Whatever magic they used to speak to him in English had gone silent on the unit of measurement, but two hundred thousand of anything up in the sky meant a fall that would kill him. He was along for the ride, at least until he figured out how to control this iron horse. He smiled at the female and began shuffling in the direction she had nodded, presumably to his cell.

"You know, Ju'lee, I was going to house him alone, or with the female salarian," said the male, "Because he was being so cooperative. But now... I think he needs to understand that here, his actions will have consequences. I'm tired of my merchandise causing us problems. He's a mammal. Lets put the mammals together."

"But Tarrak... We haven't given her animal protein in a week," said the female.

The male, Tarrak, shrugged. "I like his odds. Besides, we can always step in if she goes too far."

"He's no good to us half-eaten."

"I really don't think she could half of him." Tarrak looked thoughtful before continuing, "Not in one sitting, anyway."

"Wait..." said John, "I can't put up a fight. Not up here in the sky. What would I do if I won? I'll do whatever you want. It's over, I'm done resisting."

"You're right, you're done," said Tarrak. He gestured with his rifle in the opposite direction from where the female had first been taking him.

The female gave John a shove from behind with the muzzle of her pistol, digging hard into his shoulder blade. He staggered forward a step before stopping.

"You can't seriously feed me to some predator," he said, trying to smile, "This is a joke, right? You're not serious, are you? Why would you abduct me just to kill me?"

"I don't know," said Tarrak, "Why would I? She's hardly any bigger than you, anyway. If she gets too close, just swing at her."

"Mountain lions aren't any bigger than me, either!"

A bolt of pain shot through him when he was hit with the barrel of a pistol for the second time.

"Move it!"

...

John had hesitated the moment the metal door slid to the side- seemingly on its own accord- to reveal a pitch-black room. That's when one of the two demons, Tarrak or Ju'lee, shoved him face first into what he hoped was a large enough room and closed the door behind him. His bad foot hit the ground hard in an effort to correct his momentum, pain causing him to crumple under his own weight.

Just before his nose hit the floor, he could swear he heard a gasp.

Like a cannon shot, he was sitting up and scooting away from the noise as fast as his injury would allow, or faster, since the movement sent more fire shooting through his body. If he wasn't more careful, it might become permanent. Of course, if he didn't get away from whatever that thing was, he'd be dead, and that was permanent too.

He glanced around the blackness, eyes squinting and searching left to right. There was the faintest trace of light in the room, he noticed, but it did him no good whatsoever. Slowly he brought his hands up to his face, elbows close together in front of his stomach, the better to guard his vitals and eyes, should he ever get to use them again.

He began to think he had imagined the gasp. He thought perhaps his captors had been lying. Of course they would never put anyone they'd risked their lives to acquire in a position to be killed and eaten, hopefully in that order. He was at least a little more valuable than cattle-feed, he imagined.

And then the eyes opened.

On the other side of the room, a pair of bright white orbs hung in the middle of the inky-black room, almost level with his from where he sat. They were so bright as to almost blind him... They drew him in... Captivated him...

With a shock of realization, he slammed his own eyes shut. He had heard of beasts like this, snakes that could stare at hare or rat, keep it fixated like a statue until they could make their way within striking distance. He squeezed his eyes closed even harder. They were doing him no good, anyway.

His heart raced and pounded in his throat, struggling to keep time with his rapid breathing. Dealing with confederates was one thing, but exotic demon-predators? That was beyond his training as a Soldier. Even a mountain lion, a regular lion, or a tiger would have been preferable... But whatever had those eyes... It was nothing he was familiar with.

Above the pounding of his heart and the bellows in his chest, he heard it. It's breathing. And it was close.

Keeping his hands where they were, up and about a eighteen inches in front of his face, he thought furiously. Just because an animal was hungry, didn't mean it would eat anything. It wouldn't try to eat something inanimate or poisonous... At least not at the beginning stages of starvation, anyway.

A hot, moist breath tickled his neck and cheeks in time to its slow, even breathing. Of course it's breathing was even; of what harm could a blind and lame man be to a supernatural huntress?

The breath moved from the left side of his face, around his nose and lips, to the right side. It pulled away, so he almost couldn't hear it, them came close, so close to his collar bone and neck that he marveled at how the creature hadn't touched him yet. It repeated the pattern several times, each time coming even closer, becoming a bit more bold, and sniffing. The thing was actually sniffing him, again and again.

He took the opportunity to smell the creature as well, and found its scent to be almost pleasant. It held a cloying sweetness, like honey and cinnamon, unlike anything he had smelled outside the confines of the finest bakeries in Philadelphia or Baltimore. Her strong musk lingered wherever she moved, agitated and accelerated by her heady breath. If this was her scent, judging by the strength of it, it was clear she hadn't bathed or done any personal hygiene in ages, if demon-beasts were prone to such civilized necessities.

And if he smelled half as good to her as she did to him, he was a dead man.

He realized that the demon-cat making her decision, although it seemed she was in no hurry to do so, which was a good thing. That meant he was at least questionable as a meal, and no one and no thing would eat questionable food unless they really had to. But the way she kept sniffing, so close to him, to his lips, his face... Did she think he was food or not? Or something else? If he only opened his eyes just a little...

He heard feet hitting pacing over the metal floor.

Illumination poured in all around him with unnaturally sudden haste and intensity, blinding him even through his closed eye lids.

He heard a chirping, meowing speech from a few yards away at about the same time the light surrounded him, also noticing the thing's breath was no longer at his ear. The voice was quick, feminine, annoyed if he had to guess, and as much unlike the grumbling of the four-eyed demons as his own. Unfortunately, it lacked the metallic-toned English that the other demons also spoke.

He kept his eyes closed as he thought of how best to respond. If it expected a certain answer or call in response, he would do well to give it the correct one.

He very quickly understood the reason why that mystical sorcery of a second English voice would be denied to Demon-Cat. If she were not intelligent, there would be no sense to the words. If she was, then she was a prisoner just as he was, and they would do well to ensure they not communicate easily, lest they work together on an escape.

He heard Demon-Cat give the same call, only slightly louder this time and more annoyed. Giving a mental shrug, he opened his eyes.

Suddenly, he didn't feel quite as worried about getting eaten as he once was.

The concept of this person being a 'beast' fled his mind immediately. Demon-Cat stood by the prison door, leaning near a nodule on the wall. She was definitely a woman, though probably also a demon. But mostly a woman.

The first thing that caught his eyes were hers, those entrancing orbs that glowed like white hot embers, staring directly at him in a way that told him she was both puzzled and bemused. He could have guessed more of her expression, except for the shawl she kept draped over her head and wrapped around to cover her face like an Ottoman princess. He hoped it was more of a demonic fashion or religious statement rather than her way of telling him that he stunk or thought him to be a leper.

The second thing were her the loose-fitting filthy rags that passed for her clothes. She wore a set of thin, baggy pants the color of plain wool, but far, far thinner. The shirt appeared much the same, tailored of that thin, billowy, white material. He saw no seems or buttons of any kind on either of them, so he could only wonder as to their construction. Those garments had been torn in what had to have been a struggle of some sort, with strips of fabric hanging down in odd places. Other sections of mismatched fabric- hewed from some of her bed linens he noticed- were tied together over the holes in a vain attempt to cover the poor girl's skin.

Near the rips there were parts of the white fabric stained with blood, indistinguishable from human blood, in much the same way as he had seen on innumerable of his own soldiers. His thoughts immediately fell to those four-eyed monstrosities who might have done this to the girl. At that moment he resolved to do them harm a thousand fold greater than what she had experienced, regardless of whether Demon-Cat ended up eating half of him or not. And if he should find out that they sullied her honor in the process, then they would find the eternal damnation and suffering of Hell to be a far more comforting and pleasant abode than the living arrangements they would find under his care.

Though she wore a shawl, it was not quite long enough, in his estimation. Her hair, full, modestly curly, and as black as midnight, reached halfway down her back, the latter half of her tresses exposed to the light of day when perhaps they should not have been. He imagined that if the intent of her clothing had been to cover her hair and it wasn't doing a very good job of it at the moment. He could tell that she may have once cared for her locks, but at the moment it appeared unkempt, stringy, and caked with something he could only in the vainest sense hope wasn't blood.

He noticed more of the otherworldly about her. Not only her eyes, but her hands and feet were different; both demonic and predatory. She wore gloves over hands that had only a pair of fingers and a thumb each, all larger than man's. On her feet, poorly shod in makeshift sandals, were only two exceptionally large toes with...

Three inch long claws. There weren't terribly curved, but they looked menacingly sharp. With a strong pair of legs, she might disembowel a man in a single swipe or kick. Fortunately, she didn't seem too apt to do that at the moment, though he had to remind himself that involuntary confinement and hunger could do strange things to a person.

She might have had a third toe as well, on the outside of her feet like a cat or dog's dew claw, but he couldn't tell from where he sat.

He could see parts of her skin as well, through the torn fabric, despite her best efforts at repair. What he had first taken to be an exotic, dark, East-Indian tone, was in fact far more exotic than that. The color of her skin fell somewhere between violet and regal purple, perhaps lavender could describe it best.

She mumbled something in her chirping language and turned to the side, covering the small bits of exposed flesh with her hands. He noticed her downcast eyes, and a frown on her barely visible eyebrows. She must have seen him peeking, though he could have hardly imagined a portion of her shoulder and knee to be terribly taboo to expose.

This was a modest demon indeed.

He hastened to reassure her of his purely gentlemanly intentions.

Standing, he straightened his uniform and addressed the girl. "My apologies, Miss," he suddenly found himself oddly hoping this demon didn't have a demon-husband somewhere, "But I meant no disrespect. You see, we don't get too many women like you in these parts."

She looked at him askance. He had little doubt that his words meant nothing to her.

He took a step closer to her and scratched the back of his neck. "Not that that's a bad thing, mind you, you're just different. In a good way."

He took another step closer and waited for the lady to offer her hand. And waited. And waited some more.

"Well, I see that ladies don't offer their hands to gentleman where you're from," he said. Pointing to himself, he began introductions anyway, "The name is John Shepard, Captain, First Maryland Volunteers. And you are?"

She pointed to him. "Shepard?"

"Yes," he nodded.

"John'Shepard firs Marlan'Volunturs," she said, pointing to him again.

"Yes, you got it," he said, nodding. He gestured to Demon-Cat. "And you are?"

She pointed to herself. "Tali'Zorah nar Rayya."

Please review.

Let me know about your thoughts on introducing Fem!Shep at some point, or whether I should continue this beyond three or four chapters. Believe me, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, writing this is good for Warrior Ethos.