Getting back to Mass Effect, I finished up the side quests in the Citadel and resumed the main quest, wherein I was suddenly promoted to being a Spectre and sent off to investigate some leads.

I first headed off to find Liara, the final crew member, and had to search a few planets before finding her. Upon landing on a planet, you drive a vehicle called the Mako around, and the controls are a bit unwieldy since it has a large turning radius and tends to bounce around a lot once you hit uneven ground. I got the hang of it though, and soon found the ruins Liara was hiding in, cleaned out some Geth, and rescued her. Some of the fights were actually pretty tough in this part since I was still getting the hang of trying to make the most of my biotic abilities.

Now that Liara’s part of the crew, I talked to her for a while and she eventually brought up her people’s mating rituals (hubba hubba). Apparently they don’t even need to touch their partners…

I returned to the Citadel to finish off a few random quests I’d picked up along the way, start a few more new ones that appeared, and headed off to do some random exploration. There are plenty of planets that aren’t directly plot-related, but you can still land on them to find various minerals, artifacts, loot, or minor side quests, like the one where a monkey stole the data module from a crashed probe and I had to hunt down the one that stole it in another set of ruins.

I eventally landed on Feron, one of the potential leads, where I’m now in the middle of helping a group of colonists there fend off a Geth invasion.