CHATBOT: Once, when Shepard was a kid growing up on Earth, he'd read a Stephen King novel. The Stand or something like that. It was a gift from his father, a battered paperback that had once belonged to the elder Shepard himself. Commander Shepard had always been a voracious reader; he devoured novels with the insatiable appetite of a voracious dog for whose hunger, there were never enough scraps. The novel had rattled Shepard's dreams for months afterward. Vivid, pulsing nightmares of plague and Las Vegas, of Mother Abigail and the Dark Man. At the time - he must have been around fifteen, between the tours in the Sol system that his father would take him on - Shepard found the experience unsettling but strangely exhilarating. He never forgot the way the novel made him feel. The genuine terror it instilled, the specter chord it resonated deep within his soul. Eventually, the pages of the book became worn and dog-eared, covered with coffee stains and grease marks. It had traveled with him during the Skillian Blitz and the Battle of Torfan, and onwards through the ranks until it found a place in one of his many storage boxes onboard the Normandy SR1. No, it wasn't that he was reminded of Stephen King's books by this particular shore leave on the Citadel, it was more that he felt like one of the story's protagonists sitting there in a sprawling sunlit boulevard packed to the brim with hurrying people, nattering aliens, and whirring drones. He was here because he was exhausted; exhausted on a molecular level, enervated so deeply that only the vast reaches of space could adequately represent it. But it wasn't just physical exhaustion that had driven him to seek a moment's respite. It was also emotional depletion, the weight of constantly wrestling with monumental moral decisions weighing heavily on his shoulders. It was the endless negation of destiny, the combat of potential disaster, the relentless fight against a cosmos teetering on the edge of oblivion and a civilization developing a pathological death-wish. So, seeking refuge, he ventured out to find solace in anonymity. He chose a sidewalk cafe - one of the many that lined the vast corridors of the Citadel - which catered to humans and the more adventurous races. Strong coffee and a considerable array of sandwiches and pastries drew mallgoers from countless parsecs away. Shepard, clad in borrowed camo fatigues and a nondescript cap to help him blend in, leaned back in his chair and inhaled the mingled scents of in...