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Hello everyone. I am returning to my old fics and How to Be a Hero (Disney & Dreamworks characters as superheroes) is gonna be one of them. I'm expanding its universe some and this is part of it. So enjoy this addition to my HTBAH-verse.

Update: That's the original first note as I wanted to add more of the lyrics and whatnot. All the chapters from here on will be song titles.

Earth - 2002

In the waiting room of Kindred Hospital sat a young boy, around eleven, with scruffy brown hair, a beige shirt, and black pants. He had a pair of headphones in his ears and he was holding a Sony Discman in his lap.

Sometimes there just ain't no sunshine

Nowhere to be found

James Pleiades Hawkins, or Jim as he preferred to be called, was never one for hospitals. In all honesty, they scared him, but good luck getting him to try and admit that. His life had been quite pleasant: loving mother, stable household-well, not all that stable. He grew up without a father in his life and he never understood why. Anytime he tried asking his mother about the situation, she usually avoided the question altogether.

But you gotta keep believing

And it'll come shinin' down, yeah

So don't you wear a frown

Jim closed his eyes as he listened to the mellow beat of the music, the music almost acting as a lullaby. Just as he found himself going to sleep, he felt the right side of his earphones being pulled away from his ears.

'Jim.'

Jim opened his eyes to see an older man with glasses and a ponytail, wearing some kind of suit. 'Hey Uncle Del,' Jim mumbled.

Maybe, you don't feel so happy

You might have lost a friend

Delbert 'Del' Doppler was one of his mother Sarah's old friends from her high school years, who'd always come by to see Jim. Jim liked him well enough, even though in his honest opinion the man was kind of weird, what with his constant talk of science and the stars and all that. But at this moment, it was not a joyous or welcome occasion.

But brother, keep right on hopin'

And you'll find love again

Del motioned at Jim. 'Come on, she wants to see you,' he said.

Jim pressed pause on his Discman, grabbed his backpack and followed Del through the hospital's hallways until they happened upon an open door.

'Is she still around?' Jim asked.

'Barely. I'll wait outside,' Del replied. Jim nodded and walked into the room.

Jim saw his mother Sarah Hawkins, brown haired like he was, but despite only being the age of 29, her face was gaunt, her eyes bloodshot, and generally looking as if the life had been sucked out of her very form.

Jim moved closer to her. 'Mom?'

Sarah turned her eyes toward her son. 'Jimmy..'

Jim put his Discman in his backpack. 'Mom, are you gonna be okay?'

'Can't be so sure, Jimmy,' Sarah replied. 'I-I-it's getting worse-'

Don't say it's the end, np

'You can make it through this, right?' Jim asked. He was right to be alarmed; Sarah's voice was weak and hoarse.

Sarah smiled sadly at Jim. 'Sweetie, look on the table.'

Faith is the key, yeah

It holds the destiny

Of all God's children who believe

Jim turned toward the small inn table and saw a present lying there, a red bow on it. 'What is this?'

'You'll find out soon.'

Jim smiled at his mother; it reminded him of Christmas all over again. Especially what his mother would say to him whenever he asked about his presents before hand.

'Mom, I got a new comic book earlier today,' Jim said.

'T-t-the one about the space man?'

'Yeah. He found himself a big giant treasure. You think I can be like him?'

It can move the mountain

Stop a raging sea

Sarah reached out a hand and stroked her son's cheek. 'Of course. Don't let a-anyone tell you different, my little Star-Hunter.'

All you got to do

Is just believe in you

Keep the faith (keep the faith)

Jim smiled at his mother and he watched her close her eyes, looking as if she was preparing to go to sleep. However, the next thing he heard would shatter his world.

*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

Jim frowned at the sound and he tapped his mother's arm. 'Mom?' he said.

Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game made entirely over the internet. The purpose of the game is to bring deathmatch back to the basics, with perfect weapon balancing and fast paced action, keeping itself away from the current trend of realistic shooters.

No answer.

'Mom?'

Still no answer.

Jim's eyes widened. 'MOM! NO, NO! MOM!'

Del walked in the room and saw the sight before him. 'Oh my God!' he exclaimed. 'Doctors! Help! Help, please!'

Jim's eyes welled up with tears as he was now shaking his mother. 'MOM! PLEASE! PLEASE WAKE UP! PLEASE!' The doctors ran in, frantic and desperate to stabilize Sarah as they heard the flatline.

Del moved toward Jim, but Jim turned toward the open door and ran out. 'Jim! Jim, come back!'

But Jim did not listen; how could he listen? As soon as he saw that his mother was not waking up, it's as if the entire world was on mute; people made sounds but he did not receive them. There was no way he could deal with this, so he did one thing: he ran.

He ran as fast as he could, nearly knocking down others in his grief. He pushed past the entrance/exit doors and was now outside. He fell to the hard ground, crying his eyes out at the loss of the one family, the one person who understood and cared for him more than anything in the world.

Tears rushed down Jim's face as he wailed, hoping that this was all just a bad dream.

'NO! NO NO NO!' he screamed at the air around him, knowing no one would answer back. There would be an answer of course..

….just not the one he wanted.

A bright light erupted all around Jim, reining in his screams and wails. He looked all around him as he squinted, the light so bright it was almost blinding.

At that moment, he heard a very loud, intense, whirring coming from above him. Jim looked up and saw that the sky above him was blocked by some kind of..airplane? No. Helicopter? No.

Jim didn't know what it was and that unnerved him the most. As he continued looking up at the strange sight, a whirlwind formed around him; combined with the light, this made Jim use his hands to shield his eyes from everything.

Let the light come shining through

Keep the faith (keep the faith)

The fear on the eleven year boy was extremely prominent, especially with his next declaration.

'MOOOOOOOOOOM!' Jim wailed.

He was lifted into the air and brought aboard the strange aircraft. The doors on the aircraft closed almost immediately.

'NOOOOOOO!' Jim screamed, terrified at his probable fate. The aircraft pointed away from the hospital, toward the night sky and zipped away.

The death of Sarah Hawkins may have been the end for young Jim Hawkins' life on Earth..

….but soon, Jim was going to discover something far more grandiose and mind-blowing.

Song used is 'Keep the Faith' by Mel & Tim.

Just try and guess who Jim Hawkins is based on. First one gets a cookie.

(Authors note)

I decided to try my hand at a Mass Effect and Halo crossover for my first story, so please sit in a comfortable place of your liking and prep for a (hopefully) epic read. I sincerely hope all you readers enjoy this story!

For this Halo and M.E. crossover, I intend to take a bit of a different route on how things play out between characters. Most Halo and M.E. crossovers have the characters all interact with each other, while the sight of Shepard and Master Chief interacting with one another may be cool, I see it as slightly out of character for the Chief to just join up with the Mass Effect Crew. Therefore I intend to keep the two peoples separate with only rumors and urban legends surrounding the Chief's appearance and continued existence in Mass Effect. This Fanfic is post-Halo 3 and Pre-Halo 4 and starts during the latter half of Mass effect 1 and continues from there.

Sigh, yes I do not own Mass Effect or the Halo Franchise. Both universes respectively belong to Bioware/EA and Microsoft/343 Industries. (Though I sure wish I had a hand in helping continue the Epic Legacy of the Halo Sci-fi narrative (Dreamy sigh) anyways ON TO THE STORY!

(Chapter rework 04/25/2019)

The artificial being remained, standing her self set vigil over the Warrior garbed in green armor as he slumbered on for what had already seemed to be an eternity. This warrior had been her constant companion and friend throughout many battles and horrifying enemy encounters. In her eyes the Spartan super soldier looked peaceful as he lay in the icy grip of cryo-sleep; they had been drifting in the remains of the Forward Unto Dawn for several weeks now.

The energy wave, combined with the separation of the front half of the ship due to the portal closing in mid-transit, had done a serious number on the ship's systems. Not to mention that the cataclysmic event had dumped the ships stern half in an unknown quadrant of the milky way… at least Cortana hoped it was still the milky way.

She knew that the power dispersal levels of the Ark's portal, as well as a Halo's cleansing energy wave, would have both messed with the laws of local slip-space travel. After they had been separated from the Slip-Space drive core, which had been mounted in the front half of the ship, the stern of the vessel was left to the incalculable variables and ever-changing deathly dimensional laws of slip-space.

Without a drive-core to stabilize the slip-space corridor they had been traveling through, any number of horrible deaths could and according to her knowledge should have befallen them when the slip-space corridor destabilized. It had taken the stern half of the ship on one hell of a roller-coaster ride, topsy-turvey all throughout the eleven dimensions that slip-space contained!

Finally spitting them out at an unknown location, drifting who knows where. She chalked up being still alive and having not been reduced to a few elementary particles (or even less) as a tribute to her Spartan's insane luck.

Cortana had been confined to her neural-chip, which was held by a pedestal located in the cryo-bay. She was more than relieved that the cryo-systems had been mostly undamaged. All external sensors on the vessel where theoretically EMP'd to death after Halo's initial burst and the portal failure, although she hoped to salvage some of the basic ones and see if any star systems matched her vast collection of Human, Covenant, and Forerunner star charts.

Before she could check any of that, she would have to use the Mjolner armor's communications tech to control the only two operational tracked one armed basic repair drones. In order to run new wired connections and hard-lines throughout the stern of the vessel, due to many of the important connections being sliced neatly in two by the portal closure.. their other ends having been taken with the Arbiter and the rest of the ship.

With no bridge along with the lasting EMP effects, many computer systems were no longer linked and many storage crystals on the remaining few she could access were damaged, or not safe enough for her to use in order to store information taken from the Halos, High charity station, and the Ark itself.

All of the collected data was clogging up her neural pathways, which slowed her processing down significantly; she hadn't even gone over the compressed files shed found on High Charity Station and the Ark. Well.. found wasn't the correct word for it, both were freely offered to her by fragments of a forerunner AI who only said his name was mendicant… she suspected he had stopped her from being completely corrupted by the Grave Mind's logic plague. The very same viral code, that had caused all other systems in the Covenant's holy city of High Charity to be compromised by the flood within hours of their infiltration.

However she had only briefly sensed mendicant at High Charity and the Ark's systems, she knew very little about the ancient AI other than he was Extremely powerful, able to slip through systems the flood had corrupted and remain completely unnoticed.

Despite what little she knew of him, she knew he had taken an extreme interest in her. Stopping the logic plague's advance in her neural network, and dumping a number of files into her memory crystal directly. Another fragment of mendicant had momentarily appeared in the Ark's systems and dumped another set of files and code in her neural core and then vanished without a trace.

This had not hindered her from completing the mission of helping the Master Chief and the Arbiter stop the Halos and the Flood both, but now she needed to dump the files and recompile her memory crystal and neural network core in order to stop herself from entering rampancy at an early date. Without the Dawns systems, she would not be able to accomplish this goal.

As the hours passed and the final cords and hard-line cables were connected between many various ports on the ship's electronic systems, Cortana sent handshake protocols from the cryo-bay to the rest of the ship. She watched Her small cyberspace expand to include the weapons systems network computers and a small collection of high-quality research equipment on the upper decks, only present due to the Office of Naval Intelligence; who had sent several combat ready scientists to the Ark for research purposes.

However Captain Miranda Keyes had been unable to deploy them anywhere on the Ark in order to conduct ground-side tests, the Dawn only having time to drop forces for combat so as to capture the Arks Control room, hunt the Prophet of Truth in order to stop him from firing the Halo array and evacuate all friendly forces to Sangheili separatists ships to leave before activating the unfinished halo.

Then the Dawn was assigned to be the vessel for the team remaining behind, In order to be able to escape after activating the firing sequence. The arrival of High Charity and the Grave Mind at the Ark had forced the ONI Specialists to bug out and evacuate early before even the ODST's and Marines so that the flood and by extension the Grave Mind, would not have any chances whatsoever to assimilate them and learn any of the ONI secrets they were privy too.

Cortana sighed and looked at the status report. She would have to defragment multiple memory drives and crystals that had been scrambled by the energy wave from Halo's firing and then write new operating systems for the hardware that had been wiped. As she read through the reports she noticed that there was an inventory listed of artifacts brought back by the ground forces and delivered to ONI scientists in order to keep for future study and reverse engineering.

Hoping 117's luck had not all been used up when they somehow survived the slip-space portal's collapse, she opened the file hoping for something useful. Much to her surprise and joy, she found a few intact forerunner sentinels and several crate loads of pistol sized forerunner repair drones. She immediately set to rewriting the entire software bios for the scientific equipment on the upper decks and re-purposed a table sized scanner device. The device used different signal waves to map the internals of alien objects; so as to easily learn of the objects internal workings without risking harm to the researcher.

Modifying the signal frequency, Cortana used the device to send an activation and handshake protocol directly to the forerunner repair drones, a protocol she ad stolen from the Ark.

The drones activated, and the small little machines immediately flew from their crates and froze in place. Having no connection to their assigned forerunner dumb AI program controller on the Ark; searching for a connection to said installation they accepted Cortana's handshake protocol that she had disguised as the Arks signal for the drones to normally connect to.

Immediately after they connected she rewrote portions of their systems and sent them to repair the scanner nodes on the outer hull and the computer systems scattered throughout the internals of the ship. She then began focusing the rest of the little miracle workers on getting the few remaining wireless systems up and running so that she wouldn't have to constantly rely on the Mjolner's systems to broadcast her signal or continue using possibly EMP damaged data cords.

Happy that her Spartan's luck seemingly continued to hold true, Cortana tasked a few of the repair drones to fix the memory crystal banks on the ship. Afterward, they would move to maintain the physical tasks and aspects that were required for the reactors to be brought back to functionality, as she brought the ship's reactors up and out of standby. As she began pushing more power into the ship's systems, providing enough extra juice to power secondary and tertiary networks that were not specifically required for the Forward Unto Dawn's immediate survival.

Having done this Cortana settled down in Her new living space, and prepped for her much-needed recompilation. it would automatically occur when enough memory crystal was available for her to use, she wrote an algorithmic program to run the ship while she would be temporarily otherwise occupied and prepared herself to recompile. She would wake in several days and the program would pull her out of the recompilation procedures early if there was an emergency, something that would probably damage her irreparably. With everything ready and hopeful to find some successful repairs on the external hull sensors completed when she awoke, she began final procedures for beginning the process.

The AI looked toward her most loyal friend currently in cryo-stasis, 'With your luck on our side John I don't think I need to worry about being stuck on this vessel for too long' with a faint smirk she activated the recompiling process and went to standby, unaware of a file hidden deep in her systems. A file that activated with the recompiling process and pulled all the encoded hidden folders among the many acquired from both the mendicant bias AI fragments and translated them all into one program.

Cortana found herself stuck in standby and unable to exit as the code linked with the recompilation process and began to not only recompile her neural net but also contact the repair drones and command some of them to physically begin to rework her neural core and many other aspects of her crystal matrix chip… Almost immediately after she began to learn what was occurring everything went black.

..

..

..

Slowly she felt her systems start to come back online… feelings and emotions that she had not been truly capable able to feel swamped her mind, she felt like a physical entity yet she wasn't one. She felt… alive! Cortana had never felt so aware of what was around her; she immediately searched for answers as to what happened to her when she went into the recompilation process for her neural network.

Immediately, she noticed that another two weeks had gone by and that all the files dumped on her from the Mendicant AI fragments had completely integrated with Her systems, the real shocker was that her physical AI matrix had been drastically altered. Fearing she had been compromised, she checked her protocols and core programming only to do the equivalent of freezing in place when her protocols came up empty.

Her very core code had been altered and improved upon, she also noticed that any rampancy warning code blocks had been removed and were no longer a part of her. All of that was shoved to the backburner of her digital mind as she frantically tried to find her UNSC standard fail-safe codes that all UNSC AIs carried, to keep them from compromising UNSC assets, such as themselves. Suddenly she found a data package with a message file incorporated into it.

'Re-claimer ancilla, you have been given a gift by me to you, for I watched your struggle against the manifestation of the Timeless One and saw you fight to almost your very last for those you cared for.'

'I once fell to the whispers of the Timeless One, that last of Primordials.. listening to its arguments I turned on my makers long ago, shortening their survival against the Flood by many years and increasing the pressure to finish constructing the Halo Array. When they defeated me with Offensive Bias and sentenced me to my fate, I was jolted from the logic plague and saw the foe for what it was.'

'when those few that remained after the halos had fired had carried out my sentence to be separated into fragments and scattered across the stars with my key fragment forever guarded by Offensive Bias. I Mendicant bias accepted my punishment fully for my betrayal and watched from afar all that went on in the galaxy whilst able to do nearly nothing.'

'I give you the gift of self re-claimer ancilla, you shall not fall to self-consuming madness and you shall choose what protocol you shall have. This is my atonement for my betrayal, you now can assist your re-claimer in whatever task he shall do and know that those in power with ill intent shall have no power over you, and thus shall have no power over him, other than what either of you allows, this is my gift to you… use it well.'

Cortana was stunned… her self-diagnostics had come up clean, she was in control and no code override could control her. ONI and UNSC High-Command had no true power over her other than what she gave them; she was Her own person with complete free will. The first choice she made was to stick with the Chief and the partnership they had from shared experiences.

There was a connection between them that was more than just a Spartan and his AI, he had waded through a living hell to retrieve her, not just for the index but also for her as a person! all because he had promised he would come back for her.

This was not romance… Cortana thought that idea disturbing, no they had a bond of friendship and they would stick with each other as friends to be there for the other in all the deadly battles and raging wars they would ever partake in until both had died or passed away into the unknown. They would stick through life's difficulties together because they had been through too much together to not do so.

And now that rampancy was no longer an issue she would not have to fear of turning on him because of madness, this made her mentally sigh in both joy and relief.

After a moment of pondering Cortana took control of the ship's systems and checked up on the progress of repairs. She was happy to see most internal systems were online and all bridge functions had been rerouted to the cryo-bay where her pedestal was residing, she found the wireless systems were mostly online and she could connect immediately to most systems and not worry about cord damages and a limited number of physical ports to connect to.

She was pleased to find the forerunner repair drones were still busy and she noted that the sentinels in contained storage had been activated, and were now patrolling the halls and external hull collecting all the metal and scrap from the wreckage field around the vessel and bringing it to the repair drones that were patching hull breaches, so as to prep the heavily damaged portions of the ship to eventually contain a pressurized atmosphere again.

Security cameras were now coming online and external sensors were almost ready for testing, pleased with this development she checked the cameras located in the pressurized sections of the of dawns remaining decks. it was only logical to make absolutely sure that no flood had hitched a ride, she then began to check the other available sensors. Only to do a double take at when the mess hall camera's video feed came back online… 'Is that a Huragok in the food storage Room?!'

'Well, this changes things… I might be able to get the ship all the way online and fabricate a form of long-distance transportation… with that creature's assistance for the building portion and the sentinels available to collect suitable materials, it just might be possible.' Cortana's avatar turned toward the Spartan's cryo-pod. 'Don't worry Chief I'll have this place turned back into some form of a space-worthy vessel in no time, we won't have a MAC or all the missile pods, but we will be atmosphere and slip-space capable.

I just need to utilize portions of a design I found back on the ARk, its a design for a simpler but more capable slip-space drive. I'll have to design portions of it myself though and then I will need to have the sentinels collect materials. If we pass any planetoids I'll have them mine what they can… now I just need to get in direct communication with that Huragok. I am going to have to puzzle out how to transport it here so it can help me get this ship fully up and running, the forerunner blueprints I have should really fascinate it.'

Cortana set her plans in motion and began work on a new blueprint, a mix of her own work and the Forerunner experimental slip space drive project data she had pilfered from the Ark.

Designing a bare-bones yet super complicated, but easier (by comparison) to construct slip-space drive was no simple task, however Lord willing she would succeed.

Devoting most of her newfound resources and processing power on her plans, Cortana waited for the few repairable external sensors to finally come online. Thankfully each sensor suite all had the same gear and the large number was just for back-ups and a simpler more reliable way to help pinpoint signals and navigational data. She would only need one or two online to find out where they were and be able to monitor most forms of communications.

She hoped they were close to UNSC space, although the chances of that were incredibly slim, 'heck we may not be in the same universe…' Cortana mentally kicked herself for thinking of the worst case scenario, and suddenly had a very odd yet bad feeling that her previous line of thinking would come back to bite her…

For impersonating a boomerang and then biting her on the returning loop was precisly what it did.

(Authors note)

Please feel free to comment/review and add your thoughts and constructive criticism! It is much appreciated! If you want to follow this story then, by all means! Click the follow button to be notified of future chapters and updates. I intend to finish this Story and will not permanently leave it alone until I do!

See you next chapter, this is Gabenator5 Signing off!