Having clashed with the Collectors at Horizon colony, we are now flush with cash, and feeling good about saving (a few) of  the colonists. But now we're without a clear direction, other than being reminded by the Illusive Man that our team was going to have to be a well-oiled machine to survive, which is the game indicator that loyalty missions for the crew are going to begin opening up. And they promptly do, beginning with Miranda, Jacob and Jack, who now want us to jet around the galaxy to take care of personal stuff for them, never mind the horrible monsters that are abducting thousands of humans every time check the news.
 
Yeah, sure, guys, we'll run your errands so that you feel better. As long as we do this, you'll be ready to throw your lives away at my order. Cool. Deal. Let's kill whoever is bothering you, and maybe you'll be less moody. Also, this seems like a good way to earn some more cash. We're already tapped out again, somebody spent all our dough on upgrades, I'm not sure who. . . 
 
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So Jacob gives us a buzz, and tells us he's gotten a message telling him that the ship that his dad had been serving on, the Hugo Gernsback, has begun broadcasting a distress signal after being missing for 10 years. The signal has been detected on an out of the way jungle planet, and Jacob, although he doesn't have any meaningful feelings for his dad, wants to check it out, to find out what happened. Another one of these scenarios where you know going in that there is absolutely no way that something super messed-up hasn't been going on, yet we decide to go head down there anyway. 
 
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What we find is pretty disturbing. You quickly encounter the wreck of the ship, and several distorted partial recordings that hint at something untoward; confused entries, mentions of local vegetation being harmful to memory and mental function, and a particularly disturbing recording by a man remarking that it is less likely now that his unwanted advances toward some woman is less likely to be rejected now, since her memory is being affected, and she is still cute. . . creepy. 
  
You run into a confused babbling woman, and then are attacked by some hyper aggressive men, who she calls hunters. When they have been dealt with, you find the settlement of the remaining members of the crew of the Hugo Gernsback. Jacob remarks that all the survivors in the camp are women, and that all the men seem to be dead, or feral, like the hunters you battled earlier. Talking to the mentally-deteriorating women confirms the worst; Acting Captain Taylor (Jacob's dad) has been lording over this small community, eating the untainted food, running the mechs, and exiling or murdering opposition. He's only calling for help now that he is running out of resources. There is a very unfuzzy reunion between father and son as after we fight our way to him, and then call in the authorities to arrest him and rescue everyone. 
 
I enjoyed the storytelling in this mission more than I remembered - there is no good solution here, no twist that makes what happened here ok - Jacob's dad is a monster, the other officers were equally complicit in this murder and sexual slavery, the other crew who became the hunters are no better than animals, and the women of the crew are too addled by toxic food to fight back; it's an ugly little piece, with some tough combat to go with it - I actually got smoked right away in my first contact with the hunters, mostly due to not being ready for so many of them at once and them to be as aggressive as they were. I also bit it a few times through this mission, as most of the combat is with groups of mechs, and I still need work with enemies like the LOKI mechs, who just come up on you in groups. They  just walk and shoot, walk and shoot, until they are right up on you, or one of you is dead; in this case, it was often me who died. Still learning, I guess. 
 
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With Jacob's personal problem out of the way, we can move on to resolving someone else's childhood issues - Jack's. It would be a lot easier if Jack's problem was that daddy was distant and mommy loved martinis and the poolboy - her problems are way deeper than that. Jack was taken as a child to a secret Cerberus lab on the planet Pragia, where she was subjected to torture, tests and forced combat with other children in an attempt to develop top-tier biotics. Jack broke out, rage-killed her way out, and never looked back - now that she has found the facility's location, she wants to go back and blow the old place up - and she wants us to come with. Sounds like a fun date, it's a great group of girls we roll around with. 
 
The Pragia facility is run down and overgrown, and mostly without resistance for the first half of it - Jack runs through he memories as you go area to area, and most of them aren't pleasant. Children were brought to the facility, and used as test subject to develop their natural biotic talents, and many didn't survive. As you continue on though, you find researcher logs of the project and the riot which precipitated Jack's escape that don't totally jibe with Jack's memories - it may be Jack was not  the guinea pig for experiments to be run on the other children, but rather they for her - that she was the special subject of the whole project. 
 
As you go deeper in, you run into some Blood pack mercenaries, who are a change from the Blue Suns we've been seeing a lot lately. The Blood Pack is made up of big, bad Krogan with shields, armor and shotguns, gun or flame-thrower wielding Vorcha, and a few dog-beast varren. The Krogans are stout opponents, but not too bad if you get your team to focus on them before get too close, the Vorcha are easy pickings if they can't roast you with the flames, and the varren are like any other ch raging enemy on this difficulty setting - they need to go down first, or they will knock you out of cover, if not bite you to death. 
 
There aren't a ton of enemies here - and the combat isn't too rough, especially using incendiary ammo and reave, which keeps the Krogan and Vorcha from regenerating health - as often as I could, I kept a couple pieces of cover between me and my enemies, and in the few cases where I couldn't, I would use my teams abilities to strip shields and armor and then lift, say a Krogan, and kill them while the pinwheeled through the air. One death through this mission here, but I'm going to write this one off a little as less of my fault than usual - I was in a room with a wall that went 3/4 of the way up to the ceiling, and an enemy up above on a catwalk was able to pick away at me over top of the wall, or through what had been a window in the wall - I couldn't see him, but he chipped away at me while I tried to find where I was taking damage from, and eliminating closer threats. Otherwise, little combat troubles.
 
On reaching Jack's cell, where she wants to plant the explosives to destroy the facility, we run into the guy who hired the mercs to bring him here. He's another former subject of these experiments, and like Jack, he's been haunted by it. He's thinking that there must have been some reason for what was done to him, so he wants to restart the project - Jack and I convince him it's not such a good idea by threatening to kill him, and he runs away, allowing us to plant our explosives. Jack pushes the trigger as we fly away, and some of her demons are consumed in the firestorm. 
 
That concludes the first two of our main crew side-stories. Jack and Jacob are now loyal, and we get their extra abilities and alternate costumes - Kasumi, the thief, is loyal after the heist mission that we did earlier. We will have to do more of these if we want our crew to survive the rest of our battles with the Collectors, but next time, we're going to do something we should have done earlier - we're going to go to a world of sexy blue ladies, see some old friends and recruit my favorite character in the game (no, not Kelly . . although I here she's great and handling a . . . nevermind), 
 
- Nick