Perhaps, to the leftover stone, its previous life felt like only yesterday.
The lights of Omega were a counterfeit spectacle full of lackluster ambience, and they poured out from the asteroid into misguided directions. Its body had been barren and lifeless once, long ago; left to float away senselessly in the dark. Someone had revived it through pure will alone. That same someone would doubtless insist that they had improved the dead husk immeasurably.
Shepard had closed her eyes, and then a voice brought her back.
"He's fucking crazy," it informed her flatly.
She suppressed a smile. "Oh?"
Aria huffed slightly, sitting gracefully on her couch. "Don't misunderstand," she explained. "It's a compliment. He runs a clinic in the worst part of this place, helping assholes that probably don't deserve it." The asari paused, and then continued with a lofty smirk and a conspiratorial glance. "I've always liked him. He's as likely to heal you as he is to shoot you."
Shepard considered that, with her lips pressed into a frown, while she regarded the assortment of dead vorcha that eventually greeted her in the quarantine zone of the asteroid's slums. She motioned to her team. "Pick one up," she said, and hefted a body onto her shoulder.
Miranda Lawson balked, refusing. Zaeed Massani nodded and he helped Shepard move the bodies aside arbitrarily. When the pair finished, blood lingered on their armor.
"If he's good," Massani drawled, "he'll recognize it for what it is."
She nodded. "It's a test for both of us, I suppose."
Shepard considered that, too, with blood smeared on her cheek, while she passed by more broken bodies that had been lined up on pikes. A vorcha head challenged her silently as she approached the clinic, her steps and those of her team clicking tightly on dirty cement. A gauntlet of mechs guarded the entrance.
Inside, another gauntlet composed of the sick surrounded them. They were herded by assistants through corridors and into the back of the building where a salarian was pondering chemical treatments. He crossed his arms, raising a hand to tap his chin, and shifted his body in contemplation.
Professor Mordin Solus, the salarian scientist. He was a fate worse than dying from the plague, according to an infected batarian.
He enjoyed talking.
Shepard let him, watching his pacing with measured eyes and standing calmly. She wasn't going to give him a reason to attack her or her team with the omni-tool that he never seemed to put away. Eventually, he ran out of swift assertions about her origins and she introduced herself and her intentions.
He had been correct, and that made him smile. Still, he waved her notions away. "No, far too busy."
She pressed the issue, and he pressed the importance of curing the plague. She complied, and so he joined her once it had been cured.
"More authentic now," he nodded his head toward the fresh spray of blood covering her armor when he left with her team. She had fought through a small army of vorcha, far less dead than the first group, and then dispersed his remedy in a dusty environmental facility. He placed his hands behind his back, clicking his fingers together, and added: "Still, merely a symptom. Not a cause."
A doctor, a scientist, and a professor was now a member of the Normandy SR-2. He seemed to have many titles, just as she did.
They had a common enemy in the cause known as the Collectors.