The Ancients from Alchera

Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect or Naruto. They belong to Bioware and Masashi Kishimoto, respectively.

(Version 2.0) 2015-04-05. Changed some things, added others things, removed yet others.

– – – – – –

It was supposed to be a routine scouting patrol for any remaining Geth-related activity. They would move into the system, scan the planets, and move on to the next system if everything was green.

She should've known it would be messed with somehow. A routine day on Mindoir turned into hell, a routine vacation to Elysium turned to hell, may the underworld claim the Batarians, a route pick-up to Eden Prime turned into hell, though this time Batarians were not involved, and so when this was supposed to be a routine scouting mission she should've been preparing for Armageddon. But she didn't, and this strange ship had appeared and gave Joker, of all people, problems dodging its attacks. Shortly after that they were hit and shit really started to hit the fan.

As explosions ripped through the Normandy, Joker didn't want to leave his seat so she had to get him out of there. Quite understandable really, if only a smidge annoying. The Normandy was Joker's baby and like a proud father he didn't want to leave her. Unlike an actual baby, this baby was dead but didn't know it yet.

She'd barely been able to get Joker into an escape pod and hit eject when the explosion tore through the cockpit and what little atmosphere it still contained.

It ripped straight through her, smashed her into a support beam that was floating around, then into the remnants of the hull before sucking her out into the vacuum of space.

The most terrifying thing about it all was that it had all been absolutely silent. She knew, rationally, that the silence was due to the vacuum of space, but being hurled throughout a ship by the shockwave of a silent explosion into a support beam, then the remnants of the roof of the CIC, and then out into space in perfect silence was unsettling.

And then the hissing began. It only took her a moment to realize that the only hissing that wouldn't immediately result in her death due to decompression was a tiny leak in her oxygen hose, a leak she desperately tried to close. A few extra seconds of oxygen was all she got as she realized she didn't have an armour repair kit on her and she started plummeting towards Alchera's frozen surface.

She realized it would take a miracle for her to survive. She was plummeting toward the planet from high orbit with a broken oxygen hose and no suit-repair kit on hand, ejected from a dying ship with its last, explosive, breath, and all she could do now was familiarize herself with Death.

She raged inside her suit. She hadn't survived the raid on Mindoir to die in the inky blackness of space! She hadn't persisted through the Blitz to perish near a godforsaken backwater planet! She yelled at Death itself that it wouldn't take her that easily even as her body started lighting up from orbital entry.

Miraculously, she was lucid enough shortly before she crashed to send the biggest pulse of biotics she could muster towards the ground. She wasn't an Adept by any means, but as a Sentinel she did receive training in the basics of biotics. It didn't get much more basic than a giant pulse in one direction to slow oneself down.

Even with the biotic brake she still slammed into the Alchera ice with unimaginable force, screaming. Not a scream from pain or fear, but a roar of righteous rage.

A short while later, she vaguely felt two furred arms close around her before she passed out from the sudden searing pain lancing throughout her body.

– – – –

She was drifting on the endless tides of the ocean. She'd always liked the sea despite her predilection for fire. The gentle rolling sound of waves hitting the shore never failed to soothe her, reminding her of home. Home, she thought with a nostalgic sigh. When times were simpler.

Home, where she was loved unconditionally by her parents. The home that was destroyed by those damned tree-huggers when she was seven, prompting her to start living amongst the clouds. It was then that her fondness for fire got started. Fire burned wood, after all. For a while, among the cloud-people, she found acceptance, friends, and met a boy that she hoped she would spend the rest of her life with.

And then the damned tree-huggers took him too when she was ten. Looking back, it was an infantile crush not destined to last long, but hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. Then and there, she was disillusioned with life, and so she accepted the burden the leader of the cloud-people offered her; housing the hell-cat. It soon become her own nickname as she sought the vengeance her broken heart told her to seek. The Hell-Cat of the Cloud was a name she wore with pride, a promise of death unto her enemies, a promise of vengeance unto the trees for claiming the lives of the people she would gladly sacrifice herself for, those who she would gladly kill for.

In the ensuing decade, she drove away her friends in her single-minded pursuit of vengeance, until the leader of the cloud-people gave her her very own students. Students that she was explicitly told were not to die alongside her in her ever-lasting quest for vengeance. She supposed she could do that, she was entrusted with the favoured niece of her leader and letting such a person die would be... She didn't have words to accurately describe the disaster that would follow such an event.

It was around this time that she met one of her fellows who also had a burden; circumstances had kept them apart for the decade prior but he swiftly became that annoying older brother that she'd always wanted. Her students soon added their own efforts to thaw her nearly-frozen heart and became the younger siblings that adored her simply because she was older, and therefore wiser. Within a few short years they would no longer revere her, but they would always respect her and they would always remain her younger siblings.

Her surrogate brother's students became like her own nieces and nephew. And then she met him on a diplomatic mission to the damned tree-huggers. At first, she'd discarded his presence; he was a tree-hugger, he was loud, he was annoying, and he wore that orange eye-sore. But he simply didn't leave her alone! Being the favoured surrogate grandson of the Grand Hippie, the leader of the tree-huggers as she called him, granted him some protection because the clouds weren't keen to start war with the tree-huggers. She hit him hard a few times regardless simply because he was so annoying he reminded her of her older brother. But where her surrogate brother would spout bad rap and rhyme, though pretty damn good poetry if he set his mind to it, he would simply talk to her end on end without stopping, about nothing and everything at once!

When she learned that he had more in common with her annoying brother than just being annoying, that he had a burden of his own similar to her and her brother's and that that was the reason he hung around her so much because he knew she was like him as soon as he saw her, she decided to at least make him slightly less annoying by buying him a new wardrobe. She didn't dare trust him to do it himself, he said he was an unadopted orphan and the last unadopted orphan she met with good fashion sense was two months before she was conceived. That is, never.

It was an eye-opening experience. She always thought that tree-huggers prided themselves on teamwork, on unity. Mess with one, mess with them all... when it came to him, she was wrong. The first clothing store they walked into, he was kicked out of none too gently. She had great fun scaring the ever-living hell out of the store-owner in retaliation. A tree-hugger was a tree-hugger and she didn't rightly care if the one she scared or killed was civilian or military. Politics demanded she scare him, not kill him, though.

It was fun regardless, and made her see him less as annoying by choice like her older brother but more annoying because he was never told just how annoying he was. She wasn't rightly sure when exactly she saw him as her younger brother, but if she would have to put one specific date on it, she would say it was then. She took it upon herself to teach him properly how society worked, all sorts of social cues that he was simply never aware of due to being an orphaned pariah.

He left soon after with his sensei, one of the few tree-huggers she respected that still lived, on an extended training trip and she was recalled back to the clouds.

For a year or so, life went on as usual. She undertook missions for the clouds, she sparred with her students, she trained her body to perfection and attained a new level of understanding and friendship with her burden following a warning by his sensei that a group of seriously powerful, shady people were after her hide. No, not her hide, her burden's hide, though she couldn't rightfully call her burden a burden any longer. Not after the understanding they had gained.

When the so-called Zombie Duo came, Kakuzu of the Five Hearts and Hidan the Jashinist, they were expecting a powerhouse. They were expecting someone that would sling waves of destruction at them, which they could take and outlast.

They never expected her to fight like a hell-cat empowered ninja. She had them on the ropes, Kakuzu was down to a single heart and Hidan's head was somewhere miles away after she decapitated him and kicked away his head with all the strength she had that wouldn't outright destroy the head because as long as the limb or body part in question was intact, it wouldn't regenerate.

And then that bastard came. Or rather, one of six bastards with the Eyes of the Sage. He flat-out overpowered her, her!, and took her captive as the Zombie Duo he had sent had intended to do. She blacked out from the exhaustion of the long fight with the three obscenely powerful ninja.

She would later learn that she was kept unconscious for three months. They didn't extract her burden as she thought they intended, they didn't rape her while she was out – she didn't know whether to be offended at that or not, she was always deemed highly desirable by any hormonal male she met but here was a group of nine men that didn't even so much as push her shirt and bra out the way –, they simply kept her 'on ice'.

When they finally did move to extract her burden, her friend, they were interrupted by him. He was still blond, still loud, still annoying, but she subconsciously moved him out of the 'surrogate brother' category into the 'potential boyfriend/husband' category because he looked delicious. He heard she was captured, spent two months trying to find out where, and then went like a bat out of hell to take her back. If that wasn't boyfriend material she didn't know what was. He even managed to take one of the bastards out! It wasn't Kakuzu, much to her dismay, but she would take the death of Deidara without shedding a tear. To put it in the words of her older brother, 'bitch is cray, fool ya fool'.

She travelled with them after that, honing the mind and body and developing a few new techniques with the aid of the hell-cat inside her, much like he was helped by the hell-fox inside him. She even became an official part of the tree-hugger military to stay with him, after she learned that her former home had given her up for dead. She kept referring to everyone that wasn't him as tree-hugger though, some of their reactions were simply hilarious. She was thanked most profusely that night... after putting up a few privacy barriers. Only he was allowed to see her in all her glory and his sensei was famous as a pervert, voyeur, and writer of smut.

Two years later, it began in earnest. The organization of extremely powerful people versus the rest of the world. It seemed that there were only ten standing against a hundred thousand, but the organization, Akatsuki, had a few tricks up their sleeve; clones and zombies. Suddenly both sides possessed equal numbers and similar general skill levels even if their side had the mental acumen advantage.

The war lasted a grand total of three weeks, and was all the more vicious for it. Ninja aren't really known for being friendly, but the war caused each and every one of them to reach new levels of darkness and depravity.

They managed to survive, if barely. She wasn't exactly sure on the details, those days were and are still a bit hazy in her mind. Her former nickname ended up becoming her, though. She was the new Hell-Cat. The Lady Two-Tails. The Nibi no Nekomata. She Who Guards The Gates. The Gates being the ones that all souls have to pass through to reach the afterlife. And the best part was, she only needed to exist to do her job! Fortunately, existence was not a problem.

Eternal and Immortal were just two of the words that accurately described her after that. Had she been alone, she would have broken down and wept bitter, bitter tears as she watched her boyfriend, mate, grow old and die. But she wasn't. Both her older brother and her mate had the same thing happen to them. Her older brother was now Lord Eight-Tails, the Hachibi no Ushi-Oni, He Who Guards The Abyss. Her mate had become the Lord Nine-Tails, the Kyūbi no Kitsune, He Who Maintains The Cycle. Five of the remaining six Tailed Beasts were not custodians or embodiments of concepts but of elements, and agreed to merge with the remaining three to increase their power to ludicrous levels. The sixth decided to stay to give her older brother eternal company. She didn't see what his attraction to the Five-Tailed Dolphin-Horse was, but supposed she had little ground to complain on. She was a cat mated to a fox twice her size.

Eventually, as time passed and things became more and more peaceful, they retreated to far-away lands to live in solitude. Until rather suddenly, too sudden for them to react in time, another powerful madman had appeared and destroyed the moon, believing it to be the devil's work. Without a moon, the planet's ecosystem fell into disarray, and the planet shifted ever so slightly in its orbit.

Within two hundred years, the planet had frozen over completely. Another hundred years after that and temperatures had stabilized around minus thirty degrees. They were the only thing left on the planet now, and they had an ingenious idea; Fūinjutsu assisted sleep tied into a Fūinjutsu alarm to wake them just in case.

She was Uzumaki-Ni'i Yugito, the Nibi no Nekomata – though like her fellow Tailed Beasts perfectly capable of assuming a human form – She Who Guards The Gates, but right now she wanted that damn alarm to stop ringing!

…

…

…

Wait, ringing? That could only mean...

"Naruto-koi, wake up you damn lazy bastard!" she shouted with all the volume her voice could handle. Given that she was currently in her thirty-story tall cat form, that was a significant amount of noise.

"Wha-?" he said sleepily, his voice rumbling throughout the mountains courtesy of being a sixty-story tall fox. Naruto was never that good with rising from sleep, and sleeping for... a long time would definitely not be conducive to that. His eyes opened slightly. "Ringing. I knew I shouldn't have made the alarm so damn annoying," he groused, using a tail to swipe at an imagined alarm clock in a long-ingrained reflex.

She waited patiently for the gears to turn inside her mate's head. She watched as his eyes, once blue now a deep blood-red with four concentric rings that never failed to turn her on, widened not a minute later. "Someone's here!" he exclaimed jubilantly.

She nodded and they rose in tandem, the other two Tailed Beasts stirring, still half-asleep. They really must have been asleep for millennia if even Kirabi, her annoying older brother, had trouble getting up. She suspected that the only reason Naruto woke as soon as he did was because it was his own array, which meant that he had to anchor it to his own endless supply of chakra which in turn caused additional feedback because he would feel even the minutest drain on his own chakra, despite the size of his reserves, in addition to that infernal ringing. "Exactly, so let's go and find them," she said.

"You've got their location?" her mate asked as they swiftly made their way out of the glacier they had made their sleeping place. She nodded.

"I do. It's extremely faint, though. It's where the Gorge used to be."

"Right," her mate said. "So, five minutes at full sprint west?"

"Mmhmm," she confirmed even as they picked up the pace. She wasn't sure if the person that triggered the alarm even had five minutes left.

The frozen scenery varied little. There wasn't a lot of difference between a deep-frozen tundra and deep-frozen lush plains, but they managed to make do with what they had. It didn't hurt that they could navigate by natural energy alone.

Four minutes later, traversing the frozen planet at break-neck speeds, they stumbled upon a sight that was impressive even to their aged eyes. This human had survived a crash that caused a small crater upon impact, and apparently she didn't even have the benefit of chakra cushioning. She transformed into her human form, blonde hair with purple eyes and two blue tails swinging behind her, quite nude but completely unaffected by the cold. Such were the perks of being an immortal hell-cat whose form was made from flame. Her mate transformed with her, nine red, white-tipped tails swinging lazily about in the frigid air, though he needed to circulate fire chakra within himself to keep him from being affected by the cold.

"She's in a bad way," she said. "Not only is she a goddess among humans for still clinging to life, she's got barely developed chakra, though what little she has is very refined."

"A civilian soldier, then?" he posited in an impressed tone as they both knelt beside her, working hard to keep her from freezing to death before they could move her to the cave.

She hummed. "Quite likely," she allowed. The next few minutes were filled with fevered work as they became accustomed to her blood flow, which differed slightly from the humans they were familiar with, keeping the blood flowing by pushing it forward with their chakra in addition to maintaining a cocoon of warmed air around her. "Let's rush back, Kokuo is the best healer of us all," she said when she deemed it safe for the woman to move.

"Of course, Yugi-chan," he said as he grabbed her arm before she could punch him for the nickname. "Thankfully I came prepared," he continued with a grin as he gathered his chakra. "Steady yourself... … Hiraishin!"

With a flash of yellow, the trio disappeared from the frozen crash site of Spectre Aurora Shepard.

– – – –

"Yo Mr. Nine-o, what's the dealio?" Kirabi half-yawned, too sleepy still to even bother with a half-assed meter.

"Civvie soldier crashed in what used to be the Gorge," he responded. There wasn't a need to clarify the statement, the only Gorge they ever referred to as such was the Gorge of Clouds and Thunder. "She needs immediate medical attention, Kokuo. She's in really bad shape."

Kokuo transformed into her own human form, an elegant white-haired woman with aquamarine eyes and ample breasts much like his Yugi-chan. "I can see that," she said dryly as she started a diagnostic to find out exactly what was wrong with the woman.

"Your powers of observation continue to serve you well, Kokuo," he responded equally blandly.

"But allow me," she continued, invoking a pout from her nine-tailed companion because of her interruption, "in lieu of the more commonplace sobriquet, to interrupt the coming monologue and say that it is a miracle this woman is still alive."

"What's exactly wrong with her?" Yugito asked. She could feel that this woman was important to the grand scheme of things. Probably a prophecy of some kind, she'd have to check the Halls of Prophecy soon.

Kokuo snorted. "It would be more accurate to ask 'what isn't wrong with her'? She's in possession of beyond third-degree burns, her armour is practically fused to her skin, her lungs are filled with ash, her organs are on the verge of liquefaction, and she's practically three breaths away from death."

He frowned. "So wouldn't it be better to just build her a new body and transfer the soul?"

"Not if we want to keep her personality and memories intact," Yugito informed them. "Which, mind you, it needs to be. She's Important to people Up There. The slight variation in psyche because of a transfer is not permissible. At the very least it isn't until I can visit the Halls of Prophecy."

The other three nodded, eyes slightly wider than normal. It wasn't the first time they met people that were Important Up There, but even after untold millennia they could count the number of two hands and have fingers left over. "How long will it take to heal her?"

"A month?" Kokuo hedged cautiously. "I can't just heal everything either, quite a few organs need replacing entirely, and while we're at it we might as well beef up her chakra network."

"Let's get to it, then."

– – – –

She cracked her eyes open without much effort, much to her surprise. Her surprise increased when her eyes focused and she found herself wearing nothing but a very smooth silk kimono in the middle of an ice bed inside an enormous ice cave. She guessed the cave to be a massive nine kilometres in length and one-hundred fifty metres in height.

She sat up as silently as her body allowed her, marvelling at the lack of the excruciating pain she felt not five minutes earlier as she plummeted down towards the frozen dirt, looking around with very large eyes. The cave itself was rather unremarkable except for its size, but what surprised her was the amount of detail she could see. She could make out individual ice-stalagmites at what she guessed to be four kilometres!

A soft murmur drifted down from the opening of the cave nearly a kilometre from her bed, and she silently marvelled at the strength of her hearing. She winced as she swiftly realized that her new ears could become a big hindrance in a very, very short timescale. She made a mental note to order some specialized earplugs to tone down most sound.

She sat down cross-legged, folding the kimono so that the areas she considered private were kept from the sight of whoever was moving into the cave where she was. For some reason, the cold ice hardly bothered her, as if her nerve endings were dulled to the cold.

Four beings entered her vision, two male and two female. Had it not been for one tiny, insignificant thing she would have said 'humans' instead of 'beings'.

They had tails.

A blonde woman was trailed by a pair of brilliantly azure feline tails that were groomed to look like they were made from fire. The blond man next to her sported nine red vulpine tails, and Shepard was reminded of the stories Kasumi, her old housemate, used to tell about Nekomata and Kyūbi no Kitsune.

Note to self: get back into contact with Kasumi if at all possible.

The other two, with hair as white as the driven snow, were slightly harder to categorize. The stately woman had a quintet of tails attached to her that reminded her of equine tails but... different, somehow. The man next to her was an unknown, until she saw the suction cups on eight the leathery-looking tails and realized they were tentacles.

She shivered a little. This was a little too close to tentacle hentai for her tastes.

She could hear mechanical whirring sounding from behind the four tailed humanoids, though it was rather far off. The blonde woman pointed in her direction and spoke something she couldn't make out. She could hear each word, but her Japanese was not what it once was and normal speaking speeds were beyond her ability to comprehend. The white haired woman vanished from sight, only to reappear next to her a second later. She leaned back, startled. This woman had just crossed what she guessed to be a kilometre in less than a second!

"Relax, Aurora Shepard," the woman said in a soothing tone in perfect Galactic Standard, not a trace of accent hinting at a planet of origin that the Council wasn't aware of. She tensed; how did the woman know her name? "I am Kokuo. I have spent the last three months healing you."

Three months? What about Joker? Tali? Garrus? Liara? Wrex? "Three months?" she asked in a dazed tone. She only got a nod as a reply. What happened to my crew, my team, my friends?

"Yes," Kokuo confirmed. "It only took a month or so to heal you, but you stayed in a coma for another two. Not altogether surprising, given the state you were in."

She turned a weary eye on Kokuo even as the other three made their way towards her, the mechanical clanking remaining in the background out of sight. "Where am I and how do you speak Galactic Standard?" she asked.

"You are approximately fifty kilometres from where you crashed," Kokuo replied serenely. "As for the language... we will tell you later. The new friend who taught the four of us told us you weren't exactly a fan of his kind."

Shepard eyed Kokuo warily. 'Not a fan of his kind' meant Batarians or Geth, assuming she was talking species. Otherwise it meant slavers, raiders, or pirates and she doubted that either of the three would keep a shapely woman like Kokuo intact.

Still, fifty kilometres from where she landed? That meant that she was still on Alchera, wearing nothing but a silk kimono on a planet that was -20 degrees Celsius at it's position closest to the Amada system star. Her call of bullshit must have shone on her face.

"I guarantee you, we are still on the planet you call Alchera, Aurora Shepard," she said as serenely as ever. "In the process of healing you, we made several... modifications to your body."

"What kind of modifications?" she asked bluntly with not a little bit of apprehension that her modifications changed who she was.

"We had to craft a new set of organs for you practically from scratch," Kokuo said bluntly. "So we improved them while we were at it. Your metabolism has been increased while your general resistance to poisons has shot through the roof. For example, you could drink a bottle of ethylene glycol and suffer naught but a mild stomach ache." She turned to face the blond man that had approached them during her talk. "Like this idiot did when he was young." She turned back. "In addition, you've been granted the use of chakra, the blend of physical and mental energies to perform feats of unimaginable proportions... with training."

"Yup," the blond man agreed in the same perfect accent of Galactic Standard. "Things you can do with chakra include, but are not limited to, spitting fire and water, throwing lightning, harnessing the wind and shearing the earth. I gave you the Terumi clan Lava chakra as well, which will allow you to produce corrosive lava, though to do so I had to practically remove your ability to produce wind and water," he finished with a brilliant smile.

She gaped. What kind of nutcases were they? Producing elements from her body as if she was a god? The man nodded sagely as the other blond joined him. "I see you don't believe me," he said with another sage nod. "That was totally my reaction when I first learned about chakra. Allow me to demonstrate."

He took a few steps back and to the side. "You'll want to turn around for this one," he said mischievously. The female blonde turned to him with exasperation written on her face. "What in the name of the Sage are you going to do?" she asked. He simply brought his hands together and made two strange configurations with his fingers that looked downright uncomfortable. "Yōton," he intoned calmly. "Yomi Kazan."

Shepard's jaw felt like it dislocated as she watched as his three words produced a miniature volcano in the middle of the glacier! And she was going to be able to do that, if she understood correctly.

"How?" she asked in a daze. He simply chuckled.

"Chakra," was his cheeky reply that earned him a smack on the arm from the other blond. "That was the product of a years' worth of high-intensity training similar to what we'll be putting you through." He slapped his own cheek as if admonishing himself. "Where are my manners?" he muttered softly. "Allow me to introduce myself, Aurora Shepard. I am Uzumaki Naruto, and this is my wife Yugito. You've already met Kokuo, and the other guy is Kokuo's husband, Kirabi."

"Yo," the hulking man called Kirabi said with a wave. She waved back.

"A pleasure, I'm sure," she replied. She decided that she would ask a question that was burning in her mind since she had first heard it. "What's the source of the mechanical whirring I hear from where you came from?" she asked, her mind dreading the possible answer. The answer that suddenly became a lot more likely as she watched Kokuo, who had so far seemed remarkably collected, flinch ever so slightly.

"That's our friend we mentioned earlier," she said in the serene tone she figured Kokuo always spoke in. "We call him Taigun," Kokuo continued. Wooden vines sprung from the ice below her and snared her in place. The colour drained from Shepard's face as this could only mean one thing. "He is what you call Geth."

Shepard's hand tried to fly to where her weapons usually hung on her frame but the vines wouldn't budge. Kokuo smiled, though she could see a hint of sadness in it. Whatever is she sad for? "Taigun told us you'd react like that. We should inform you that he landed about two months ago. If he wanted you dead you would be dead already. Chakra does not make one immune to bullets. Come on out and say hello, Taigun," she added the last with a shout towards the cavern's entrance as Shepard was still struggling with the vines.

A Geth unit unlike anything Shepard had seen before jogged into view. He was sleeker, yet bulkier than any similar unit she'd seen so far. He moved with a grace that she didn't usually associate with Geth troopers. She paused in her struggling as her mind whirled to analyse the Geth moving towards her. It was faster, more elegant than other troopers. It had a shine to it that other Geth Troopers didn't possess. Shiny coatings were a combat hazard, so it was unlikely that this was a combat model. It stopped in front of her, well within her reach if only these damn vines would let go!

"Shepard-Commander, this unit greets you," it said. She froze trying to process the phenomenon. Geth didn't speak! Absently, she corrected it while she was still processing the phenomenon of a talking Geth.

"Spectre, not Commander. I had to resign my Alliance commission when my probationary period was up."

"Shepard-Spectre, this unit greets you," it said again, the statement slightly modified to include the new information. She slowly stopped struggling, reminding herself that when Geth platforms were destroyed the programs that inhabited them simply uploaded into the main Geth network unless you could jam the wireless transmission, and she didn't have a jammer on her. That was part of the reason why they were such bastards to fight. Kill one no matter how stealthily and the rest knows where you are. Kill a few in open combat and the rest will be more familiar with how you fight. She decided to get some information.

"Why are you here?"

"The Geth desire an intermediary. We have observed unusual interactions between organics and determined the best representative to convey our findings to the Citadel Council. To this end, we sought you out, Shepard-Spectre.

"We determined your last known location from reports filed to the System Alliance Administration and Citadel Council and developed a platform with sufficient hardware to function autonomously for extended periods. We traced your path to the Amada system, where abrupt signal termination was encountered. Flying debris that was determined to be from the vessel SSV Normandy indicated a hostile encounter with another vessel with the likely conclusion of the Normandy's destruction. Consensus was achieved and our exploratory vessel touched down on the planet designated Alchera at the location we determined to have a 60% probability of being your crash site. Our estimations were off by twenty-five kilometres. Three minutes after we landed, we were met with the organically impossible presence of Uzumaki-Kyūbi and were brought here."

She raised an eyebrow. "And how did you manage to track my path?"

Taigun moved his eyeflaps in a gesture curiously close to how humans express discomfort. Discomfort at what? "Security encryption used by organic government falls within minutes of a hacking attempt initiated by the Collective. We have duplicates of all your reports, files from most megacorporations, and the Citadel Council."

Shepard stared with wide, horrified eyes. The Geth could do that? "What happens now?" she managed to get out with great difficulty. She needed to let Anderson know post-haste.

"Right now?" Naruto responded. "Very little. You're going to rest up, and then we're going to spend the next two years training you in your chakra."

"Why two years?" she asked. It seemed such an arbitrary amount of time.

"Other than the fact that untrained chakra in the quantities you have it available to you is dangerous to you?" he asked in return. "There won't actually be much of note going on in the next two years.

"We're going to have to relocate, however. Your continued existence is to be kept a tight secret, and this planet will be swarming with people looking for your body soon enough. Taigun has graciously offered transportation for the five of us." He retracted the vines and gave her a soft shove on her shoulder.

"So take this moment to catch some more sleep. You'll need your energy soon enough."