((At first I didn't want to spoil the moment, but then I realized the moment occurred two and a half weeks ago.
((SEVERAL MONTHS AND A FAIR AMOUNT OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT LATER))
'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the overcrowded Batarian labor facility, not a creature was stirring (not that they could, in their chains), except for the ones in the camp administrator's personal holding cell.
Their prisoner was strung up on the steel bars with care, in hopes that the fruits of their labor (
their labor, of course, being the tireless effort being put into beating the ever-loving fuck out of the human) would bear.
The third planet of the Untrel System, Adek was no place for any rational sentient being to spend their holiday. Or
irrational, for that matter; they'd likely be the most privy to breaking first, be it physically, spiritually, or psychologically. Nestled around an unforgiving belt of asteroids and situated deep in the Kite's Nest Cluster, the garden planet (despite the fact that it was anything but) was in the strong-arm of Batarian civilization's home turf, and not even the faintest semblance of Council or Alliance society had touched the surface of the brutally hot, swampy world, with the exception of its amassed slave population of varying cultural origins and species. Given that both the flora and fauna of Adek were formidably hazardous, particularly to the Batarian species themselves, their ventures in colonizing and settling the harsh planet were few and far between, save for the tried and truest practice of Batarian socioeconomic culture: slavery.
And lots of it.
While actual settlements on Adek were highly scarce, the success of countless Batarian slaving rings prompted several 'indentured servitude' facilities to be constructed and operated on the sticky, steamy rock. They were nothing more than labor camps, where slaves tinkered away upon whatever their captors dragged in from their endeavors in salvage and piracy, and maintained the technological systems put in place to keep the planet on the somewhat hospitable side of the spectrum.
The administrator, a particularly cantankerous old Batarian with three (count 'em) eyepatches and an assortment of varying scars and tattoos, along with his smaller, less scarred and certainly less visibly-impaired cohorts, continued to pound away at the dark-skinned prisoner, who, despite his evident pain, remained steadfast and silent.
"You've pushed your luck too fucking much, human," the administrator growled, a bit tuckered out from all the swinging of fists himself. "You're hardly here a fucking week, and you've caused nothing but trouble. Insubordination, assaulting your cellmates, escape attempts,"
The administrator paused as he noticed the human beginning to smile at his accolades. He gave him another brutish hook in the stomach and held it until it subsided.
"Tell me why I should fucking humor you one last time, you two-eyed
freak," he hissed, close enough for his resistant property to smell his putrid breath. "Tell me why I shouldn't take you out back and drown you like the fucking varren you are!"
The human looked like he was trying to smile again; the administrator was growing more livid by the second. "Well," he coughed, a few flecks of blood speckling the cold floor of the cell. "It's Christmas Eve, if that means anything to you."
"
Christmas?" one of the goons spat, looking familiar with the term, but just as outraged. "You still don't know what fucking planet you're on, do you, human?"
The goon reached for his sidearm. The administrator shoved him, sending him reeling. "No," he growled. His voice was lower than most Batarians he had met. "I'm familiar with this . . .
Christmas concept. A human cult's day that sacrifices a tree and forces the exchange of petty shit between each other."
The prisoner shrugged, at least as much as he could, bound to his prison bars. Not too far from the truth, he figured.
A gunshot rang out through the cold administrative office, echoing down the long, wide hallway. The captive human went rigid, his ears ringing from the Batarian pistol being fired mere inches from his head.
"Alright, you insolent dog," the administrator said, smug grin on his withered face. He always made a face like that whenever he'd thought of something particularly clever. "In the spirit of giving, consider your
present under the tree a quick death."
With the hot barrel of a gun to his forehead, Elam said the only thing that had been on his mind the entire time.
"What's the time?"
". . . the fuck you say?"
"The time," he repeated, eyes leveled on the administrator's like his gun was leveled to his skull. "What time is it? Standard."
The administrator frowned, a bit upset that this execution wasn't ending as lyrically as he would have appreciated. "What the fuck does the time have--"
"--twenty-three fifty-eight," the other goon said. With his one usable eye, the administrator blinked. Haplessly attempting to keep the ensuing awkward silence at bay, the goon nodded. "If you're going by the human standard clock. Twenty-three, uhh . . ."
How the administrator hadn't shot all three of them together by now was beyond him.
Elam nodded, mostly to himself.
Two minutes . . . here's hoping I wasted enough time."You've wasted enough time!" the administrator roared, gun aimed to kill once again.
When out from the balcony there arose such a clatter, the two goons sprang from the cell to see what was the matter.
Away to the balcony they flew like a flash, only for the thruster discharge of a
Ripley-class light freighter to blast through and burn them to ash.
The gaping crater at the end of the hall, with its superheated glow, gave the luster of midday to objects below.
When what to the administrator's one working eye should appear: an opening cargo bay door, with contents of origins unclear.
The foreign device lurched free of its hold, and from the freighter it sped, with a metallic paint job so bold.
With the writer of this long-delayed post frantically attempting to string together familiar rhymes at the speed and agility of a bronze medalist at the Quadriplegic Olympics, he chose to forgo the poetry for a moment to describe the vehicle speeding down the hallway, smoke and debris from the cavernous hole blasted by the backfire of the freighter streaming off its shiny, metal frame. The administrator couldn't believe his eye
s: it was a vehicle, to be certain, with four wheels, with a strange, seemingly-decorative sleekness about it, as if it were attempting to come off as pleasing to the eye much harder than it had to. While he couldn't make out, through the tinted glass on the vehicle, how many occupants there were (if there were any at all), he could hear through its muffled confines
some kind of otherworldly music playing.That was, unfortunately, all he could register, as the next order of business for him was the fact that this shiny vehicle with strange music playing inside of it had failed to stop, despite the fact that he stood before it.
The administrator, with a resounding
thud and the screeching of rubber tires, was barreled over by the vehicle, his body contorting around the front of the charging mode of transportation with a chorus of snaps, and pulled beneath it, little more than his head and shoulders remaining uncovered.
With a hiss, the vehicle opened on either side. Two riders had emerged, and the speakers began to pound.
Elam coughed. "You can never do this shit the easy way, can you, Captain?"
"Elam, my boy, of course I could have," Captain Val Caligulus huffed, approaching the bars of the cell to unchain his human compatriot. "But if you recall the last time I led the charge on a hot, jungle world, the whole place happened to blow up."
"
Blow up? Aw, c'mon, did I miss somethin' fun?"
Elam blinked. That was not the Captain, nor the rest of the usual away team.
". . . you brought the doctor, sir?"
"Yes, indeed I did," Val replied, wrenching the chains free. Elam fell forward, catching himself, albeit shakily. It had been a rough week. "He's been terribly polite since he tagged along, and he seemed so very eager to ensure your rescue went off without a hitch."
Elam nodded, using the wall of the cell as leverage to pick himself up, despite Val's offered hand. He turned, noting the impromptu battering ram they had used to ran the camp administrator down.
"Captain . . ."
"Yes, Elam?"
". . . is that a car?"
"No, Elam," the Turian was beaming. "It's a DeLorean."
"Yes sir," Elam nodded, not bothering to question further, standing tall to give this 'DeLorean' a closer inspection, first and foremost, noting that the license plates said
FRESH and there were dice in the mirror.
If anything, Elam could say that this car was rare.
But it wasn't a car. It was a DeLorean.
"You can ask me where I found it later," Val said, pride apparent in his tone. His grin faltered as the camp administrator, coated in his own blood and other fluids, began to stir. "Doctor Guar, I think I need a second opinion."
The armored Krogan Val had addressed turned to look down upon the apparently dying Batarian slavedriver. Guar, Ph.d, of Clan Jurdon, meandered to the front of the DeLorean with a heavy, awkward stride (as only a Krogan can) and without so much as a 'trust me, I'm a licensed medical professional', brought his heavy, dinosaur-like foot down on his head, crushing the Batarian's skull into a party mix of thick blood, skull fragments, and brain matter.
"Anyhow, Elam," Val turned to his second mate in stride, as if nothing had happened, and there wasn't blood pooling by his boots. "I presume this is the successful end to a successful mission? You did everything according to plan?"
Elam narrowed his eyes. "Hard not to, Captain. Especially when your alternative is being locked up in a slave pit. Everything I could get's on the device."
Val looked at him hard.
"What? I got as close as I could, as much as I could."
"Very well," Val shrugged, presumably satisfied with his answer. "Come along, into the DeLorean. Doctor Guar, we're leaving."
"So soon? I got to do, like,
one thing."
Val was already in the driver's seat. "If you'd prefer to stay, I must admit, your facilities will be missed."
The Krogan saw no reason to argue. As awkwardly as he had disembarked, he clambered into the antique sports car with a cumbersome heave, taking up the passenger seat and then some.
Elam now knew what a TV dinner felt like, and he didn't even know to make the reference.
The DeLorean was thrown in reverse back down the hallway, and, with a brief moment of weightless, stomach-in-chest vertigo, returned to the cargo bay of the MSV
Balrog from whence it came. With Batarian slavers hot on their trail, the cargo door was sealed shut soon after their return, and the ship jolted back to movement, blazing upward and outward.
Val sprang from the DeLorean to his crew gave a whistle, and away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
While it wasn't exclaimed in-character as they flew out of sight, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Terminus was back in action.