It seems that recently, I can't get away from my memories of Mindoir. Everything that happened here reminded me of Mindoir somehow.
We landed on Feros, expecting a LOT of dead colonists and having to sort through the rubble for clues, given that it took us three months to get here, but what we found was uplifting; the colonists were holding the geth off and fighting hard for their home.
We made our way through the colony, fought some geth, and talked to their leader about what we could do to help the colony. He told me that they needed geth in some lower tunnels removed, and to speak to three others. They told me they needed me to kill an alpha varren so they could hunt other varren for food, get them a power cell for their generator and to fix the water pipes.
So we headed down into the tunnels and took care of what we were asked to do, and met a man down there. Something was off about him though; like he was actively defying someone, and paying for it heavily. We talked to him, and found out a little about what was going on, and were told to ask about something before he was cut off from the pain of defying his "master".
Dear God, I hate slavery.
We headed back and told the leader, Fai Dan, about the man in the tunnels, and he told us he was "very sick". We pressed, but he brushed us off, and I let things go, and told him that we performed the tasks to help the colony. He thanked me, and my team and I headed up to the road that would take us to the Exogeni base. Although I still don't know Joker got the Mako up there. I mean, the Mako being on Noveria was odd, but this was impossible. Even more so on how we got it back on the ship.
Anyway, we drove through another army of geth before getting to the Exogeni bunker and got information about an Elizabeth Baynham from her mother, who was able to give us information on how to get into the base and get the information on why Saren attacked this colony; the Thorian, an ancient organism that had been around since the Protheans.
Anyway, we fought our way through the base and destroyed the geth ship that was preventing us from leaving, and headed back out of the base to confront Elizabeth Baynham about what we had found; the Thorian enslaved the minds of the Zhu's Hope residents and that Exogeni knew that would happen and wanted to study the Thorian's abilities. Elizabeth admitted to knowing, but wanted to stop it, and the geth attack made that difficult. We brought her back to her mother, who was being held at gunpoint by the Exogeni representative, Ethan Jeong.
Elizabeth freaked out over seeing her mother at gunpoint, and Jeong demanded that I come out. When he saw it was me, he told that my "heroics weren't needed here". I flat out told him to let his hostages go, and he said things weren't that simple, and that Exogeni wanted the colony purged.
While I was angry at Jeong, I knew the best way to save these colonists would be to appeal to his greed; I told him that they could make more money and get more colonists coming here if they could pitch the idea that Feros recovered from a geth attack.
He agreed, reluctantly, but said that the Zhu's Hope settlers had to disappear. Juliana, Elizabeth's mother, gave me a nerve gas to put into my grenades, and sent me to Zhu's Hope. What we found at the entrance of the road was disturbing; Thorian Creepers. Corpses that the Thorian managed to resurrect and essentially use as zombies, with toxic blood that they sprayed everywhere when they "died". I wanted to destroy that thing all the more because of what it was doing to innocent people.
Anyway, we made our way through the town, gassing all the colonists and shooting all the creepers before getting to the crane that led us into the Thorian's resting place. Fai Dan came out at that point, saying what being under the thrall of the Thorian was like, and how it wanted him to kill us. But he refused, and shot himself instead. And while I feel that suicide is normally a permanent solution to temporary problems, in this case it was justified; Fai Dan was permanently enslaved by the Thorian, and only death would release him.
We made our way down into the Thorian's resting place, and I saw how big the thing was.
Addition by Garrus Vakarian: Shepard remarked on how "we (were) going to need bigger guns."
The Thorian then essentially shat out a green asari, which it was using as an avatar to speak to us. My biotics flared as I told it that I didn't care what it gave Saren, only that it needed to die for enslaving the colonists. And I just threw the asari-clone down the pit in front of us.
It took us about twenty minutes to fight through the Thorian Creepers and asari-clones and set charges to blow up…I guess you could call them bracing tentacles, even though the Thorian is technically a plant…and a blue asari appeared out of its entrails. She told us what Saren had been doing there; he need a "Cipher" from the Thorian that would allow him to understand the Prothean beacon, and he needed an asari's mind melding ability to get it. And then, to prevent me from getting it, he fed the asari to the Thorian, and had the geth defend Exogeni HQ and throw themselves as the colony to keep the colonists on the defensive.
I'd say that was a brilliant idea, but I don't want to send any praise Saren's way. And in the end, it didn't work.
The asari gave me the Cipher, and then we left her to her devices; she chose to help the colonists rebuild their lives as an atonement for her actions. We headed back to the Normandy, where Liara did her own mind meld to gain access to the Cipher and my vision. She recognized things in my vision, but said it was incomplete. I allowed her to get some rest, and I talked to my crew to wind down.
We were no closer to Saren and the Reapers, and things looked bad for us.
Luckly, all is not lost. We got a lead from the Council after I finished talking to my team; Virmire. A salarian STG team was investigating something that Saren was doing, but they lost contact with the team. They want me to investigate, which I readily agreed; if nothing else, I could get more information on what Saren was doing from his facility.
For now, we're heading back to the Citadel to resupply. We'll be heading off to Virmire shortly after.