Until last week's Halloween game against Eastern Michigan, I hadn't attended an Arkansas football game in over a year. This is due in part to listlessness, in part to the small amount of homework that I put in the upper cabinets of free time, and in part because I simply forgot to buy tickets. I can't force pledges to give me their ticket vouchers every week, can I? (I actually can, but the listless part of me always makes it seem like too much work to make them do so.)However, I count my attendance at the Eastern Michigan game a miracle no degrees short of a dove descending from heaven and a loud voice saying, "Behold my servant Cass, on whose account I have mixed feelings." Because that day, I saw Garrus Vakarian in person.
I've known Garrus for about two years now; we met initially during the first Pankration, when I played Mass Effect. I was playing it, he was in it. From there, we met off and on, mostly during holidays, when I would pick up saved games which were in the middle of exciting plot developments. Garrus and I would spend hours killing the dastardly robotic geth, hunting down mischievous mad scientists, and tracking the rogue spectre Sarren using our powers of deduction. We were a great team. Some nights, when it got really dark, I would forget that Garrus was a graphic summoned off of a storage disk, and think that, for the first time, I had met someone with whom I could share my hatred of robots.
At halftime during the Arkansas - Eastern Michigan game, with a score of rock to scissors (there was no way Eastern Michigan was getting out of that one, even if it was best two out of three), the Arkansas Alumni Association honored a group of graduates who had ventured out into the world and made their fortune. Among them was Brandon Keener, who they announced as an actor from Fort Smith. Intrigued, I went to the library (I don't have the internet at my house; this way they'll never find me) and Googled him. And God said, "Behold Brandon Keener, who voiced your best friend Garrus Vakarian in Mass Effect."
Garrus Vakarian! I saw him, from a distance of around a hundred yards. Plus a significant elevation change. I invented the Pankration just to be with him. And he walked out of my life without me knowing it.
The whole situation reminded me of an ancient Greek myth. One day, Apollo was walking through the fields at Delphi when he heard the wind carrying a beautifully melody. He immediately fell in love with the voice an flew off in search of the singer, knowing that when he met her, he would make her his bride (or rape her and then she would bear his bastard offspring - this is how Greek myths actually worked). He flew over forests and mountains, past mortals and gods, in search of his beloved, who he could not find. Eventually, exhausted, he stopped in a grove of olive trees. There, washing clothes at the water's edge, was a beautiful maiden. He asked her, "Do you know of a girl who sings a most beautiful melody? I am in love, and I will make her my bride/rape her and she will bear my bastard offspring." She sheepishly looked away and said, "I know this girl." Apollo asked, "Is she close by?" "Ay," the maiden said, "she is here in this grove." Then the maiden began to sing, and Apollo realized that Garrus Vakarian was his only true friend, and he was ashamed that he didn't recognize Brandon Keener when the man was a hundred yards away from him.
Do not fear: Garrus has been announced as one of the characters in Mass Effect 2, out at the end of January. Announced. As if the video game designers could keep best friends apart.
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