$5 Story Reward - July (ME: Final Error)

Reminder: The Haven's Port Focus Poll for August is still ongoing! 

MAHWHAHAHAHA my diabolical plot to actually get story rewards back to an on-time schedule has paid off! 

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 *coughs* 

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Errr...right. So... My not-so-evil plan does appear to be working. Going forward, these Story Rewards will likely be released mid-month, or even a little earlier. The only reason this one took longer was that I also had to do June's reward, which was very very later by my standards, as I'm sure you all recall.

ANYWAY, the actual story itself is, as promised, about 50% longer than usual as well. Almost exactly, actually, since I normally shoot for about 5,000 words and this one is just a touch sigh of 7,500! Less awesomely...I've got to admit that I'm not 100% happy with it. That has nothing to do with the plot or overall quality, but simply with the nature of the story itself working against this particular Part. 

Essentially, the thing I'm most not happy with was the amount of exposition (the horrible sin of Telling not Showing too often). It's something I normally work hard to keep to a minimum...but I was faced with the reality that this story isn't intended to be a FULL 100% retelling of Mass Effect, which would take a horribly awful amount of time. Which means that I can't tell every mission in glorious detail and still be true to what I'm aiming for. Eden's Dawn showed that sometimes I will tell a version of game events in a style that I hope makes it interesting. But I can't, realistically, always do that without making the story drag on forever.  Which in turn means that the events of Noveria, covered in this Part 4, are a bit exposition-heavy. They also introduce more butterfly-effect changes, as well, but not in as fun a way as Eden's Prime did.

The second issue is that...the citrus is weak with this one. For those of you not into fanfiction terms enough to get what I mean by that...the amount of sexy times in it is much more limited than usual. This is simply the result of the section of story that was being handled, rather than a reflection of how the story is going to go. Essentially, I'd used up the one-off relationships I could easily get away with and needed to do some set up for the story's actual main-pairing (Liara/Shepard/Oriana - possibly with others as fun asides). So...sorry in advance for there only being single small sexy scene :-(. Part 5 will be a lot more fun in that regard!

As always, PDF is attached, and you can get to the New Content by simply searching 'End of Part 3.'