"Well... this is new." Garrus commented. Tali just kept staring, as did Shepard.

"I totally agree." Shepard said slowly, brows creased with confusion and the strain of keeping back his amusement.

"Just hurry up and get me out of this!" Javik snarled. Behind her mask, Tali was the only one who could smile without the threat of a biotic blowback.

The last Prothean was currently half-trapped in a strange sort of goo, which they had found all over the caves they'd been exploring. The Normandy had needed a cool down after a dogfight with Cerberus forces near the planet, and a few repairs had been in order. Though, the more she looked at the goo, the more she was certain it was actually thick webbing... she really hoped face spiders weren't involved in this.

She hated face spiders.

"Well, lets get him out." Shepard shrugged, leaving the words 'before he snaps and blows something up' unspoken. Javik didn't like being trapped. Javik probably wouldn't give a Husk's butt if he killed three people trying to free himself. Sometimes she was glad the Protheans were extinct; if they all had Javik's temper...

Shepard jumped down off the rocks, and approached, taking out his knife. Exactly how Javik had gotten trapped like this, she had no idea. He would probably never admit how. He was stuck in an awekward position, half-bent to the side, with one arm pinned to a tree, the other stuck behind his back.

"Kind of looks like a dancer, doesn't he?" Garrus whispered near her head. The mental image of Javik actually dancing flashed through her head, and she snickered.

"WHOA! NO, NO, NO!" Garrus suddenly screamed, right in her ear. She jumped, and looked in the direction of where the Turian was now aiming his auto rifle.

It was... well, she had no idea what in Keelah's name that thing was.

"W-what the? Bosh-tet, ugh that's disgusting!" She exclaimed.

"What's going on up there, Quarian!?" Javik shouted.

It was, quite literally, the most disgusting thing she'd ever seen. there were really no words to describe it... but if she were to attempt to, she would say it was somewhat like the 'blob fish' that Shepard had once left in Miranda's office as a joke. A really smelly joke. But this 'blob fish' was using it's 'fins' to drag itself along the ground with a squelching noise that made her want to throw up. It was secreting the same substance Javik was trapped in, the orange gunk leaking, seemingly, from ever pore on the creature's body.

"It's uhhh... I have no idea what this thing is but Keelah, it is ugly!" she explained. Shepard climbed back up next to her and jerked away as if the very sight of the thing hurt.

"Ugggh! That's so gross!" he exclaimed. Looking back down at the trapped Prothean, he added. "I think we found what's been making this stuff!"

The creature suddenly cut itself in half, top from bottom, the slime stringing between the edges. This turned out to be the creature's mouth... then again, it might have been the 'other end', because no mouth she knew of did what it did next.

A large blob of a darker version of the orange goo seemed to explode out the opening like a slammed tube of toothpaste.

"UGH! SHEPARD!" Garrus yelled.

"DON"T JUST STAND THERE! SCREAM LIKE A GIRL AND SHOOT IT DEAD!" The Commander shouted.

The Turian obliged. The creature exploded, and Shepard only just managed to throw himself and Tali behind a boulder in time. Garrus actually screamed, in horror, and hen they looked up, it was to see him covered in the brown goop.

"I smells like... unspeakable things." he really looked like he was on the verge of crying.

"That didn't sound like a girl screech to me." Shepard commented in an attempt to make light of the situation. "It sounded like a dying animal."

"You've obviously never heard a female Turian screech before. And, for the record," he waved one hand at the gooey, gross blast in the ground a few feet away, "the animal is dead."

"EXCUSE ME, PRIMITIVES, I'M STILL TRAPPED!" the angry howl of the enraged Prothean caused everyone to cast each other withering glances.

"Any chance we can leave him behind?" she whispered to Shepard. He shrugged hopelessly.

"Sorry. Not ready for genocide yet." he got up, helping her to her feet. He looked at the remnants of the creature, then back down at Javik. "reapers, Cerberus, rebuilding a dead guy, ugliest creature in the galaxy, and a Prothean. you know, sometimes I think we could discover that we're just a bunch of bees in a trench coat, and it'd just be like 'figures'."

Garrus snorted as the Human jumped down back to Javik. "A trench coat full of bees? What, Commander?"

The Hero of the Citadel shrugged again. Tali shook her head in amusement. Sometimes he just comes up with the most random things...

"Ugh, let's go find a river or something." Garrus shuddered, trying to flick goo off his shoulder. It didn't seem to have hardened yet. He attempted to dig one claw across the space between two of the plate-like scale running down the back of his neck. "I'm never gonna get this stuff out from between my scales..."

"I could help if you want." she found herself asking before she could stop herself. her face turned hot, and the Turian made a sort of nervous trilling noise in the back of his throat. She cleared her throat. "You smell bad all the time anyway. Didn't your parents ever teach you how to take a bath and not come out still smelling like a Krogan?"

That... wasn't much better. Keelah, I'm a mess at this!

"Well..." Garrus mused, obviously trying to ignore the awekward that had descended, looking down at where Shepard had tried to cut Javik loose to no avail, and was now talking about fire, which seemed to be making the Prothean very nervous indeed. "At least we aren't all stuck together in a trench coat full of bees with my stink."


I was torn between Tali and Grunt, but Tali won out eventually.

I guess I should properly explain about the 'trench coat full of bees' thing. Me and my bestie, Jayfeattheris Awesome, are frequent contributors to the Destiny fanfiction archive. it's a small archive, a bunch of the authors have gotten to know each other. One of them, MaybeALittleBroken, wrote a fanfic( a roller coaster of blazing ridiculousness and excellent writing), and at one point, one of the characters says something that, to an extent, is word-for-word what Shepard said. And it stuck.

So we have this 'trench coat full of bees' thing spreading around.

So there. Go read Broken's fanfiction. She's blazing.

Okay, so what next? Urdnot Grunt and the Frabjous Snow Day, Than Krios and the Spiders of Nope, Ashley Williams and the Smelly Surprise, Javik the Jerk and the Friday Routine, OR a tiny extension to Legion the Geth and the Case of the Kitten(I've gotten a lot of hints that there needs to be more Legion stuff from me).

Vote up!

Read and REVIEW!