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Where the universe is concerned, Olaf doesn't generally question its choices. Bad things happen. Good things happen. Strange things happen, but usually it all fits together in the larger pieces of the puzzle. It's why he doesn't really do so much more than shrug when instead of walking into Mike's bar, he walks into a party in full swing where he doesn't recognize a single guest.

It's not like this is the first time it's happened to Olaf. Generally, him recognizing someone in a crowd full of people is usually a start. Still, he has learned to go with the stranger events in the universe and no one's died as a result of this little left turn, so he grabs the joint he'd tucked away behind his ear and drifts into the throng of people, observing the summer-like nature of the party from the vibrant drinks to the decorations to the clothes everyone's wearing. Really, this could very well still be Auckland for all he knows and whatever he took earlier had been laced stronger than usual, but Olaf's sort of getting the feeling there's more to it than that.

With no shoes and a Hawaiian shirt fit for a king, Olaf feels like he fits right into the breezy, summer theme of the party around him. He might not know how he got here, but Olaf's never turned down a good party. This one holds a great deal of promise.

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"Almost none of it," Garrus confirmed with, all told, a fairly optimistic tone, "except the police brutality part. That's not a Turian concept, per se, but I was a member of C-Sec. Which is of course the police body on the Citadel, which you aren't familiar with. Ah, it's the galactic hub for all known space-flight-capable races."

That was a massively reductive explanation, which he got the feeling she would realize, but it seemed, with a certain universal gulf between their points of origin, the most expedient way.

"Is 'black' a clan qualifier? Something to do with skin pigmentation? Turians of course have some sense of colony pride, but we don't have a long history of... intraspecies conflict, I guess you could say. At least not the way I know humanity used to. Which, seeing as you're probably from the period of time I'm referring to in the past tense, is probably an immensely condescending thing for me to say." He could feel his human face pulling into expressions, but he had no real idea what it might look at. The humans he spent time with were rarely contrite.

"I apologize."

"Right," said Martha, slowly building the picture of the society he was talking about. Her eyes narrowed just a touch at the police brutality bit, and that he was a cop or an ex-cop, though she'd not had a problem with them much directly, thank god. Leo got stopped more than he should, and it was fucked up, that, but fortunately nothing else.

"Turians are your people, then," she said, face easing a little bit. "But you know humans, and you don't look a thing like this, usually. Right. Sorry to be sticking to basics but it's the easiest place to start; not exactly where my own time is at, or universe, or whichever it is. Forgive me for starting slow?"

She cleared her throat, watching him wince a little as he mentioned intraspecies conflict, and smiled wryly in response. "Would you believe I'm used to that sort of thing?" she said. "You're forgiven. Black's skin pigmentation, yeah, people with darker tones of skin, like me, to put it wayyy too simply. It's hard for me to picture a culture where there's not...intra-species conflict. Hard, not impossible."

"Well, when there's no abundance of conflict within one group, it's almost a guarantee there's plenty of it with an outside one. That, sadly, seems to be more or less a universal truth. So, you're from... Earth?" he ventured.

"Yeah," said Martha, with a wry smile. "London, if that means anything to you--no hard feelings if it doesn't, I promise. I take it you're very much not. From Earth."

Hell, he didn't even usually look like this, apparently. Clever girl, Jones. "And that the Turians therefore had outside conflict, unfortunately." Not to mention that likely humans had it now too, from what he'd said about the resolution of 'intra-species conflict'. She doubted it was with the Turians, though, at least in this instance--that kind of hate usually meant the guy would be seriously undone by turning into a human.

Edited 2013-07-07 21:10 (UTC)

He didn't mean to hesitate. The last thing Garrus wanted was to be the bearer of bad news, let alone catastrophic news, and anyway this was all a hallucination, but... He hesitated, and nodded a little, and wished he knew what human faces felt like when they were slipping into emotions so he could stop it from doing that. He ended up just looking slightly subdued.

"It does mean something. I know London," he said. He hadn't been there, but he had heard enough. London was one of the Earth cities the Reapers had staked out first, had burned in the first wave with Vancouver and Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. It was still standing, sort of, as far as he knew, but if they didn't get to Earth soon, it would suffer the same fate as Cipritine. As every city on Palaven. The thought caused his unfamiliar heart to wrench around in his chest.

Martha's brow furrowed a little at his pause and tone--she could tell something was the matter, but not exactly what. Maybe a little of what, from context. "I take it it's not pleasant, where you're from," she said, taking this all very calmly. "Or when you're from."

"I've actually heard great things," he said in an attempt to be reassuring.

"But, ah. Well, let's just say this little detour is keeping me out of a very important fight that involves protecting every system, including Earth Systems Alliance Space. So whatever conflict may have existed in the past, we're all allies, as far as I'm concerned."

"Good to hear." It was an honest response, though, as pat as it might seem--Martha'd learned that you shouldn't really turn down alliances unless the other parties were morally dubious.

And even then. Well.

"I mean, the alliance part, not the fight--you just ended up here at random, looking human, then, if you don't mind my asking?"