From the Archives: Seashells

Hi everyone. Still on vacation. Next week resumes with new material, but here's a bit I wrote involving one of my favorites series of all time. One of the few pieces of fan fiction, you might say, that I've ever written. Video included for context if you're not a Mass Effect fan. 

In a reality sideways from our own, some details were different about the Reaper War. Some lives that were sacrificed in our timeline were spared, and some lives spared were ended prematurely. This is one such story.

     About an hour before the last light gave up on the beaches of Nevos, Doctor Mordin Solus squatted carefully in the sand, taking an inventory. As was often the case, Solus was lost deep in thought, and muttered to himself in half-song, half scientific jargon.

I've studied species mollusk, horseshoe, and exuviae

I'm quite good at conchology as a subset of zoology

because I am an expert which I know is a tautalogy

     Mordin picked up an especially interesting specimen, an Asari mollusk that grew abnormally large in Nevos's freshwater oceans. He turned it over in his hands, his primary finger tracing the coils affectionately.

My phylogeny studies range from aquatic to agrarian

Appreciating gastropods and cephalopods and scaphopods

In short, in matters purely mollusk and crustacean, I am the very model of a...

     “Hm. Last verse...problematic. Oceanographer too long. Marine Biologist clumsy....ah!” He hissed to himself with the pleasure of finding the solution.

I am the very model of a malacologist Salarian!

     Mordin looked up, spotting the red-haired woman in Alliance blues.

“See? Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”

     With a barely suppressed grin, she tactfully replied, "Mordin...have you thought of learning a new song?"