Asala knew that, every time Michael Blackstone became involved in a case, things would get complicated fast.
Generally speaking, Asala had a pretty simple job as one of the resident morticians on the Citadel. She'd wake up in the morning, come down to the morgue, and her boss would give her the corpse of the day for her to take a look at. She'd go to an exam room, take the next few hours to go through a thorough autopsy, and give the report back to her boss that, yes, the man had been stabbed twenty six times in the chest, or that no, there wasn't any use of poison in that salarians drink, his heart just gave out. Whatever the autopsy said, Asala would give the report to her boss as quickly as she could while still being efficient at her job.
Sometimes, though, her job got a bit too political for her tastes.
Sometimes, there would be a stiff that her boss would hand down to her and tell her in too-subtle phrasing that he wanted a specific answer to this case. That it would do the morgue and the departments attached, a great deal of good if this guy had been found murdered, that there was a case for C-Sec to jump on, or that the son of some ambassador, who just so happened to die from an overdose of narcotics, hadn't had a drug problem.
Usually, her boss would take cases like these, and he would find for himself the answer that he was looking for. But there were times that he couldn't, and in those cases, he shunted the duties off to Asala.
Those particular cases often took more than two days, seeing as the department head wanted Asala to do an even more thorough job than she normally did (as though they thought that she made up the answers for every other corpse that she's ever looked at).
Thankfully for Asala, corpses like that didn't come around too often, and when they did, they were rarely her responsibility. All she had to do was look through some junkies intestinal tract to see if the needle that was found in small intestine was swallowed down or forced up (five points to anyone who guesses the right answer).
Her job was nice and simple. FInd out how the dead guy on the table ended up like that.
But then, of course, there were the times that something so utterly weird comes through the doors.
A prime example of this would be the first corpse that ever brought Michael down to the morgue. The corpse with practically every known disease ever raging through it.
At first, when that particular corpse had been placed on her exam table, she hadn't really known what to think of it. The first thing that she had noted at the time was the complete lack of head on the body, which ruled out any possibility of gaining a facial ID. The corpse was humanoid enough that the possibility of a fingerprint ID was on the table, but that was the other thing that couldn't be explained about the corpse.
Every square inch of the corpse was covered in boils, blisters, bruises, puss, and skin necrosis. Not a single part of the body was left untouched by some disease, and some areas even had diseases that couldn't be contracted in combination with one another because, if you were to get one of them, you'd be dead by the time it took you to travel across the galaxy to even be in the remote area of where the other disease might be, let alone the specific area of where the disease could be found, or the time that it took to actually contract the thing.
To say the autopsy of this particular corpse was a complicated thing would be an understatement. And when the results actually came back for exactly which diseases were infecting the body, the answer gave Asala only more questions.
And when the C-Sec official came down to the morgue to see just what was all the fuss about this one particular corpse was, Asala had no straight answer to give.
She had told the C-Sec official, in clear terms, that this body was an impossibility, that it shouldn't have even existed to begin with. There were diseases from so many different species, races, even animals, that to contract all of them, all at once like that, wasn't scientifically possible. There was a human blood cancer, a salarian liver disease, an asari lung infection, batarian cataracts, turian neurological disease, and even the damn genophage. That was only a part of the list. There was more that Asala didn't tell the official, because, if she did, it would make her seem insane.
To make the situation even weirder, the C-Sec official didn't even blink at the report of the scientific anomaly. They just sighed, muttered something under their breath about, "That smarmy asshole, making me take that bet," and told Asala that C-Sec would send down a consultant to take a look at the body.
Asala was just made confused by that. What kind of consultant would be able to give any sort of advice about something like this? This would be the only recorded case of this many diseases in one place ever, and C-Sec was going to just send someone who probably had no scientific or medical background to take a look at something they had no professional experience with. Worse yet, they were probably going to pay the guy to come down to the morgue and just get in her way.
That's taxpayer money at work, that is.
Sometime later that day, a tall human male walked into her exam room, probably the consultant that C-Sec had sent her, and the first thing that she noticed as he entered the room was how different he seemed.
Not to say that he looked different from any other human that she had ever seen before. Dark, raggedy hair that seemed like it needed to be cut, strong features, particularly around the jawline, and dull green eyes that seemed to be both relaxed and attentive at the same time. He wore a dark blue jacket with a hood, simple denim jeans, and heavy boots of some kind. The bags around his eyes seemed to say that he got just barely enough sleep, but other than that, the man looked as normal as any other human that one might run across.
But there was something about him. Some simple feeling in Asala's gut that told her that there was a lot more to this man than anyone she had ever met. Something about his bearing, his presence, the simple way that he took in everything in the room like he could see more than she could.
Being near the age of three hundred, Asala like to think that she had fairly good intuition for a woman of her age. And her intuition was telling her that there was something fundamentally larger, more vast, about this human. As though he were a part of something, even representative of something intrinsically more than anything that she had ever encountered.
And yet, despite the profound presence that the man gave off, the first words out of his mouth when he entered the exam room, after he had taken a look at the diseased corpse on the table, was, "Oh, yeah. That guy is thoroughly dead."
So, yes. Asala knew, just as well as anyone, perhaps even better, that when Michael Blackstone came into the picture, things got complicated.