Councilor Tevos' personal office was much smaller than Shepard would have imagined it'd be. Probably not even as big as Udina's, this one nevertheless sported all of the amenities which one would have reasonably expected from the Asari. A wall of screens, each showing a different channel, all of them for the moment muted. Tasteful art on the walls, or soothing sculptures in the corners. Also, the windows were capped by a biotic barrier which could probably have stopped a meteorite strike.

There were little touches which Shepard didn't expect, though. Namely, a small picture of a small blue girl. Daughter, or sister? That was the thing about the Asari, sometimes, it was damned hard to tell. Shepard stood at attention as Valern, last one contacted, entered the room, joining Tevos and Speratus. "I have to admit, I hadn't expected to receive the Feros debrief in person," Tevos said.

"I couldn't trust my equipment to hold a signal," Shepard said simply. "I take it you've looked over my report," she turned a glance toward the turian, "thoroughly enough to not make knee jerk reactions to it."

"I did," Speratus said. "Your species has a bad habit of backing companies headed by madmen. First ALMA, and now Exogeni? At this rate, VolCre will be tanking your economy just to keep this sort of thing from happening again."

Shepard rolled her eyes. "ALMA was an unrelated incident, and doesn't have a damned thing to do with the Feros mission."

"The Spectre is right," Valern said with a clipped nod. "Exogeni's dismantling, and your public denouncement of it, has shown that you're willing to take a neutral stance..."

"There was nothing neutral about my stance," Shepard said. "They were selling human beings, asari, salarians, anything they could get their hands on, just so they could talk to a plant-spirit and milk some technology out of it. They deserve a new hole in their head, not just to get bankrupted."

"I was referring to the fact that you didn't cleave to species politics. It is a refreshing turn, especially given certain fears about your loyalty to the Citadel," Valern said, once again giving a glance to Speratus. My, wasn't the turian everybody's favorite today?

Speratus, though let it roll off of him like water off his face. "I stand by my assertion that even if you are showing unusual aptitude at your current task, it doesn't negate the fact that this shouldn't have been your task to begin with. This entire appointment was..."

"Councilor, you are losing track of what is relevant," Tevos said. "What was the nature of this Thorian you mentioned?"

"Insane, inhumanoid, with a penchant for mind control, slavery, genetic tampering, and vandalism," Shepard rattled off.

"I'm surprised you include the last in the list."

"It made a mess of my ship. That stings almost as much as the mind-control," Shepard said dryly. And Speratus, flying in the face of what she expected of him, chuckled lightly at that. But not for very long. After all, a human had seen him do it.

"Still, it should have been taken intact, for study and communication," Valern said.

"Shepard's assertion was probably the correct one," Speratus countered, even though he did sound a bit begrudging. "Salarians don't have as much... history... with spirits as the turians do. They can be temperamental at the best of times, and at the worst, as dangerous as the entire Krogan Rebellion. Killing it while it was manifested might have been extreme, but one does not 'study' spirits," he said, doing air-quotes as he did.

"And the colony survived at the end of the day. Even without Exogeni's financial backing, it is estimated that it will be a profitable venture again within two years," Tevos said.

"Of course the colony is intact. She would go to any lengths to save a human colony," Speratus said sourly.

"I would have saved anybody in that situation. Maybe not the batarians, but for them, it'd just be divine irony," she admitted.

"What you did was admirable," Valern said. "But you must be aware that Spectres have to make sacrifices in their line of work. Sacrifices which cut to the bone. You cannot save everybody, and you need to have the clarity of vision to be prepared to do what is necessary when the time comes."

"Was there anything else?" Shepard asked.

"Yes," Tevos said. "The recent 'uproar' about the human discovery of one of our genetic illnesses has us... somewhat baffled. Would you care to offer insight into it?"

Shepard scowled. "Ask Udina. That's what he's here for."

"Udina seemed as incensed as the others were," Tevos said. "Frankly, this office is swamped by human reporters and human pryers and smear-merchants."

Shepard gave a moment of thought, then shrugged. "This is a lot like something which happened in human history. We tried to make it illegal to be born a certain way. It backfired royally."

"And what would you have done in this situation?"

"If we're both talking about Ardat Yakshi?" Shepard asked. Tevos nodded. "Tell 'em the truth. All of the truth. This is what happens when people suck in the Extranet through a drinking straw. Every now and then, they get a mouth-full of shit without understanding that there's only a blob of it before they hit ambrosia."

"A colorful metaphor," Speratus said dryly. He turned to his fellow Councilor. "I could have warned you that something like this would happen."

"Thank you for your input, Commander," Tevos said.

"One more thing," Shepard asked. "Has there been any movement on Saren since we got back from Feros?"

"Not at this time," Valern said. "Some rumors, of geth in the Armstrong Nebula and some sort of biotic gathering near the Terminus, but those rumors have been circulating for months. We've determined that the likelihood of their association with Saren, and your current investigation, falls under the statistical probability of chance."

"Our eyes and ears can see far, Commander, but yours can see in resolution that ours cannot," Tevos said. "Pursue your agenda, and if we find something relevant to your investigation, we will contact your ship."

Shepard nodded, then turned toward the door. Speratus cleared his voice, though, as the door parted. "Just one thing before you leave," Speratus said. "Have you found any more information about Saren's ship, Sovereign? It seems a quite advanced piece of technology."

Shepard considered turning back, and regaling him with everything that she'd learned about Sovereign, and that the Reapers were real, or at least were real during the Prothean's time, and a dozen other things. But she wasn't nearly drunk enough to do something that stupid, and she prided herself on keeping her idiocy private whenever possible.

"No. Doesn't matter if I did, though. Not like I've exactly got a surfeit of proof, do I?" Shepard asked rhetorically. And with that, she left the embassy office and headed back toward her ship. Free time. Gods, could there be anything more taxing? She needed something to give her focus, at least until Saren popped his head back up.

She gave a bit of thought to that. Saren could be anywhere right now. That was a big target to throw darts at and hope to hit something useful. She could think of quite a few places he wasn't, but that didn't help. She offered a growl to the impatience, the mania in her head, the stir-craziness. Everything she knew about being a soldier told her 'don't volunteer for anything', and 'don't do something unless you'll die if you don't.'

Which was why she knew she had to finish N7 so quickly. She wasn't good at doing nothing. Airbenders never were. Even stunted, train-wreck airbenders like her. So she got a notion in her head. She headed to the Emporium, across the bridge, following the booming voice which was loudly haggling – if not outright threatening – the hanar who ran the weaponry store. Sure enough, Shepard rounded a corner to behold roughly a tonne of red-armored krogan.

"What's going on here?" Shepard asked, having to skirt aside as some workers wheeled a computer panel past her, with more emerging from the back room.

"This one was trying to facilitate the purchase of new kinetic barrier generators," the hanar said serenely.

"He's trying to rip me off because I'm a krogan," Wrex said with heated tone.

"This one does not discriminate based on race."

"I'd tell you to try saying that with a straight face, only you don't have one," Wrex noted.

"KREE! I've eaten bigger than you!" the lizard bird perched on Wrex's shoulder screeched.

"Wrap this up quick, Wrex," Shepard said. "As soon as we have the crew aboard, we're heading to Tuntau."

Wrex turned to her, a gauging look in his large red eye. "Really?" he asked, suspicious. He grunted to himself. "Fine, jellyfish. I'll pay your price. But don't expect me to like it."

"This one is pleased to have served the customer," the hanar bowed its head-like appendage.

Wrex turned to her. "Didn't think you were actually going to divert after Actus. When you go, I'd better be there."

"Of course. Who's Actus?" Shepard asked, falling in step with the krogan as he stomped back toward the ship.

"Tonn Actus, a turian filth who stole something which belonged in my family for generations," Wrex said, and bumped into the people still moving that computer terminal. That jostle caused one to lose his grip, and a corner banged onto the floor.

"Hey! Watch it!" the turian said, annoyed. "Some guy payed us a lot 'a money to move this thing."

Wrex ignored him, though, and Shepard did as well. "I assume he didn't come by your family relic honestly?" Shepard asked.

"After the war, we got stripped of everything which could be considered a weapon," Wrex said. "The Turian Hierarchy took most of our history away from us. Every bit of ceremonial armor, our ancient weapons, even our old war movies – movies! – ended up in turian hands, usually dropped into their museums. I'd be a lot less angry if Grandfather's armor was in a museum. Actus, though, sees it as a status symbol. Proof that his people one-upped mine," he shook his head, but his lips were peeled back in barely contained rage. "I don't want to think about how he's... desecrated it."

"KREE! Kick 'im in the quad!"

"Well, you'll be able to bring that up with him personally," Shepard said. Wrex grunted, and continued to walk.

"Shepard?"

"Wrex?"

"Not going to ask about the bird, are you?"

"Nope."

Wrex let out a chuckle. "Fair enough."

Chapter 10

Grandfather

"Don't be discouraged. Not everybody heals right away," the waterbender said, before glancing back and sighing. "I'm sorry, but I've got to get some rack time. We'll talk later, alright?"

Tali nodded, focusing on the water which coated the arms of her suit. Getting it there was one thing, and a ridiculously easy thing. Getting them to glow like Doctor Chakwas' nurse, that was something completely different, it seemed. Shepard wasn't lying when she said that healing wasn't as easy as hurting. But still, she'd figure it out. Nobody had ever had so much impetus as she did to learn waterbending healing. She needed this. Her people needed this.

The training area had been set aside in the hold, as most training was. This time, though, they had opted to do it just off of the mess, near a line of lockers which moved up one wall. Didn't need as much room when there wasn't any real movement, no targets, and no violence to undertake. It was a strange thought, that she'd gotten used to the notion of violence so quickly. Even a couple of weeks ago, when she found her way limping and bleeding through the Citadel, Saren's assassins in her shadow, she was a different person than she was today. Time changed people. Some, faster than others.

She got to her feet, and moved past the other humans, who talked over their supper. It was comforting to have this kind of schedule again. Most quarians on Pilgrimage usually lost whole weeks trying to get their heads around living without a captain to mandate things as simple as when to sleep and when to eat. Tali had taken to it well, but that was because... well... Father wasn't the most active in her upbringing to begin with.

"You're making steady improvements," Alenko said, from where he was idly paging through the code to the Normandy's cyber-warfare suites. Tali was fairly sure she wasn't supposed to be looking at that. But she didn't exactly run away from Kaiden's side. "There are a lot of waterbenders who'd be so envious of you, they'd just die."

"So you say, but it's like the most important thing just won't come!" Tali muttered in frustration.

"It's not always fast. Sometimes, yes, but not always," Kaiden said.

"You left a back-door there," she said, nodding toward a page.

"What?"

"That security screen has a back-door which an intruder worm from a volus operating system compiler could breach like it wasn't there," Tali pointed out.

"How did you see that?" Alenko said, quickly shifting between pages.

"I didn't. I just didn't see the workaround people use to stop it," she pointed out. "Everybody's got that same hole, pretty much," she gave a shrug.

"You're a girl of many talents," Kaiden said. "Sounds like somebody I used to know."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Tali said. She leaned against the wall. "Kaiden, do you know anything about... bending?"

"If you wanted to know more, shouldn't you talk to Shepard?" Kaiden asked.

"I did, but she keeps telling me 'I'm the Avatar, not a school-teacher'. It's like she doesn't know anything about what she does without thinking!"

Kaiden gave a sigh, and shut down the screen. "Shepard is... impatient. I guess that means that she's not a good teacher. She's got a bad habit of not trying to learn something until she needs it. Some day, that's going to be a major problem for her," he turned to her once more, obviously forcing a more cheerful expression onto his face. "What would you like to know?"

"The elements," she said. She ticked them off her fingers, and had to go to her other hand to finish, "air, fire, earth, water. Why four?"

Kaiden took a moment, then beckoned her to join him sitting on the stairs which led up to the currently vacant cryo-tubes. She sat at his side. Perhaps a bit enthusiastically. "Well, one could claim that there are four seasons, and benders tend to be born under the auspices of the month which is strongest to them. Not always, but usually," he cut off her obvious question. "Firebenders can be born in winter, just as earthbenders can be born in autumn. Honestly, though, I'd say there was a degree of social engineering involved."

"How so?" Tali asked.

"Air Nomad weddings tended to happen in the winter," Kaiden said. "And nine months later..."

"You're in autumn again," Tali said.

"Fire Nation day of romance? Beginning of autumn. Best time to have a child in the Water Tribes? Winter, since you're not migrating at that time of year," Kaiden said. "There's probably more to it than that, but as a non-bender, I couldn't claim to know."

"You know more than you think," Tali said.

Kaiden smiled at that. "Kind of you to say, Tali," he said.

"Another thing," Tali said. "Why can benders only bend one element?"

Kaiden got a bit of an uncomfortable look on his face. "I don't know."

"...but there's something you're not telling me," she said.

Kaiden gave a shrug. "It's a very rare case, but it can happen. Humans can bend two elements in their lifetime. But it gets... messy."

"If they can, what makes the Avatar so special?" she asked.

"The Avatar can bend any of the elements, any time she wants," Alenko said. "Even if she does have trouble with airbending. Normal people, though... different story. If I were a firebender, I would usually be a firebender until the day I died. But... there's a way to change what people can bend."

"Really?" she asked.

Kaiden nodded, and from the look on his face, it wasn't a kind one. "In a lot of ways, it's like what ALMA did at Jump Zero. Take a bender, and tear them apart, down to the tiniest bit of their identity. Then, you build them back up into what you want. Usually, you just end up with a crazy person who couldn't bend to save their own life. Sometimes, though, the bender starts bending a different element. As though they were born a waterbender instead of a firebender, say."

"That sounds brutal," Tali said. "Did people ever do that?"

"I've read enough horror stories from the First World War and the Witch Hunt to say that they definitely tried," Kaiden said. He shook his head grimly. "You might get a new element, but it's always accompanied by a psychotic break, and a complete change in who they are, how they act. The person they were... just doesn't exist anymore."

"That sounds like a nightmare," Tali said.

"It is," Alenko said.

"Where does the Avatar fit into this? Does she... um... control the elements themselves? Could she shut off somebody else's bending?" she asked.

"Yes," Kaiden said, "but it definitely doesn't happen very often, and it's an involved process. She doesn't just turn a metaphysical faucet and somewhere out there, somebody's bending stops," Kaiden shrugged. "The Avatar isn't the source of bending. Bending predates the Avatar, by about three thousand years in the case of firebending. It's almost as old as shamanism."

"How does that work with bending?" Tali asked.

"It usually doesn't," Kaiden said. "You can't bend in the Spirit World, and spirits don't tend to interact with the Physical World," he broke off, and a smile came to his face. "I have to say, you do have some interesting questions."

"This is important to me. I need to know everything," Tali said.

"The commanding officer is aboard. XO Pressley stands relieved," the computer stated pleasantly, which caused both to glance to the speaker.

"I guess that means that our time on the Citadel is coming to a close," Kaiden said. "Did you want to know anything else?"

"All of the things," she answered him. "But I don't have any questions right now. You'll be around to answer them when I get them sounding coherent, though?"

"Of course," Kaiden said. She could hear the thud of the clamps releasing a few seconds later. "Well, we seem to be underway sooner rather than later."

The ship began to hum to Tali's senses, as the engine moved from standby to active, and the ship began to soar toward the Mass Relay. But her attention was mostly focused on the two coming down the stairs ahead. Wrex and Shepard. Shepard looked through the mess, then reached over and pressed the button for the intercomm. "Ground squad, assemble in the mess."

Wrex shrugged, and leaned against a wall, the green bird reptile thing squawking lightly as it clung to his hump. It was only a couple minutes before the others appeared near Shepard. Tali glanced around. They were all here. "Alright," Shepard said. She pointed a thumb over her shoulder to Wrex. "We've got a couple of things to do on Tuntau. One, we're going to break up a pirate organization headquartered planetside. It's headed by a turian named Tonn Actus. He's a known associate of batarian slavers, and tends to keep mercenaries as body guards. We shut down his operation, and the Alliance gets a few light years that can breath a little easier at night. Two, we're going to track down the squad which tried to do this before us. Admiral Kahoku gave us their transponder signal. If we're within a few kilometers of it, we'll find them. Any questions?"

"Who's on the ground team?" Garrus asked.

Shepard glanced to Tali. "No geth. Tali, you're sitting this one out."

"That's alright," Tali said.

"No Protheans either. Liara, you're staying shipside," Shepard added.

"But..."

"You're also shy on the trigger," Shepard said, turning to face her more directly. "Not all of the things which try to kill you out here have white goo for blood. Some of them are human, turian, even asari. Doesn't mean they don't need to get shot. If you can't do that, then I can't have you on my squad."

Liara fell silent at that. Tali felt a little bit angry at that. There was no call for Shepard being so cutting! Shepard, though, turned to where Jackie was leaning next to the infirmary, her jaw still swollen where it broke, even with waterbender healing. "You're manning the med-bay on this one, Jack," Shepard said.

"...the fuck?" Jackie asked.

"Doctor's orders," Shepard reminded her. "You'll probably be right as bricks by the time Saren pops his head up again," Shepard then smirked. "And besides, this can't be the only bunch of pirate scum out there."

"Ugh. Don't remind me," Jackie rolled her eyes.

"Hey!" Murtock piped up. "Not all pirates are scum!"

"Shut the fuck up," Jackie said easily. "'Sides; you kinda are."

"We'll hit Tuntau in eleven hours. Everybody not cooling heels, make sure your weapons and armor are ready. Be ready for anything."

"Aye, Commander," Asha said crisply, before descending down the ladder. Tali gave a glance toward Alenko.

"It's been broken since the Thorian. Shepard never released its repair," he said.

"Why does she hate elevators so much?" Tali asked lightly.

"I've got a feeling that's a long story," Alenko said, once again not happily. Tali couldn't exactly gainsay Shepard's choices, though. She was right. Without geth, Tali wasn't exactly indispensable. It did give her more time to practice, maybe figure out how to get healing to work. But at this point, she'd been training all day.

"Do you think you'll be alright?" Tali asked, as she moved to the ladder leading down.

"I've survived worse. So have Shepard and Nilsdottir," Alenko said. "Don't worry about me. Just focus on what's important."

"Saren and the mission?" Tali hazarded.

"Waterbending training," he said gently. "Get some rest. It'll be a long trip."

The wonders of the Mass Relays, when a trip half way across the galaxy took ten hours, and people had the gall to complain about it. Tali, though, descended, into the lower level. A glance told her that Asha was working on her weapons, and that Adeks was getting the Mako not only finished, but repainted. That krogan had a way with machines, that much was obvious. He'd almost make a fine quarian in that regard. Tali moved into the engine room, and spent a moment, her eyes closed, just feeling the dull thrum of the engine. It was almost silent. But in its way, she was comforted by it. Not an old, familiar comfort, but one she took all the same.

She then turned, opened up a panel, and stepped into the storage closet which had been turned into an impromptu room for her. It was about as big as a single bunk bed, and most of the room was taken up by a container on the floor. Her bed, such as it was, was a hammock which stretched over top of it. It wasn't steady, but it was comfortable enough. She crawled up into it, and she thought about her family. Her people. Her future.

If she could bring waterbending back to the fleet... what future would the quarians have?

When she drifted into sleep, rocking slowly in that hammock, it was to better dreams than any quarian had for quite a while.

Shepard was pacing again. She knew it was a bad habit, but from the time she was young, she despised being still. It was apparently an airbender trait of some renown. Hannah hated it, always chastising Shepard for not being able to sit still. She could as well stop as she could still her heart.

"Careful, Commander. You might wear a hole in the deck plating," Joker said over his shoulder as he carefully manipulated a few panels of screens before him.

"If that's all it took, then Adeks would have fallen into space weeks ago," Shepard answered back. "How long until we hit the exit Relay?"

"We're past the Argos Rho frontier... hitting Phoenix in two minutes. And five minutes ago, it was seven minutes," Joker said with mock shock and surprise.

"Stealth systems online?"

"Not yet," Joker said. "They don't work until we land out of FTL anyway. 'Sides, aren't you hunting pirates? Why bother with the stealth systems?"

"Don't ever let a pirate think it's backed into a corner," Nilsdottir said from the chair near Jokers. She still looked like one massive, barely healed injury, and doubly sore in that she couldn't knock heads to let off steam. "They tend to get nasty when you do that."

"And you'd know?" Joker asked.

"First hand experience, flyboy," Nilsdottir said with a smirk.

"Alright. New fantasy, a biotic in high boots and an eyepatch," Joker said.

"If you say, 'and nothing else', I don't care how brittle your bones are, I'm rearranging 'em," Nilsdottir pointed out.

"Dropping out in two, one," Joker said, and with a tiny lurch, and the heavens outside returning to a normal color and form, the ship was banking away from the massive Relay which allowed exodus at hyper-luminal speeds. "Drift is at... five hundred K. Beat that, I dare you! Stealth online. We're running quiet. Estimated time to Tuntau is... alright, we might need to drop stealth before we get there."

"What? Why?" Shepard asked.

"Have you seen that star?" Joker pointed out the canopy over his shoulder. The star was indeed massive, bright, and powerful. "That planet's four times as far out as Earth's gas giant, and it's hot as an asari's ass out there the whole way in."

"Lovely image," Nilsdottir said.

"I try," Joker pointed out. "We try to stealth, we cook, Commander."

"Taken under advisement. Bring us in nice and quiet, then. Find a way to get onto their doorstep without them noticing us."

Joker flexed his fingers with a little smirk on his face, at that command. "Alright. Get ready for a hot drop; I'm taking us in on a cannon-ball run."

"Ooo, I love these things," Nilsdottir said. "How close do you figure you can get us from the star? Think we can dive under one of its flares?"

"You've been watching way too much sci-fi," Joker said, as he began to plot a course, and skirt within one AU of a star. Shepard, though, turned and walked the length of the ship, getting used to the feel of her armor again. When she took that hit on Feros, it must have knocked something loose inside. The thing chafed a bit when she moved in certain ways, now. She'd have to get Adeks to look at it. Or maybe Tali, if she had any experience with it.

"Commander," Alenko said, appearing at Shepard's side, armor on. It seemed he'd taken the opportunity last time on the citadel to find better armor. This version was grey and white, rather than the drab, slate grey. "I hear this is a personal request from Wrex. Anything we should know about?"

"Pirates," Shepard said. "They've probably got biotics working for them. With one of my squad's biotics down, and the other pretty much useless for task, your job is to shut down any space-magic bullshit that they try to pull against us."

"I'll do my best," Alenko said, cracking a smirk at her choice of term. "I was talking more nitty-gritty, though. Who is this Tonn Actus? What kind of forces does he have? Numbers? Armaments? What about base security? If he's smart, he'd have some."

Shepard paused, standing in front of the doors to the stairs. "You've got a point. I'll have to get a brief from Wrex on our way to site."

"Good. I'd hate to go into a firefight without knowing what to expect," Alenko said. She started down the stairs. "Commander, can I ask you something?"

"Do you ever stop?" Shepard asked rhetorically.

"Why did you exclude Liara from this mission? I'm an effective biotic, but I can't see in all directions at once, and I like having backup," Alenko said.

"You heard my reasons," Shepard said.

"Everybody was gunshy at some point in their careers, ma'am," Alenko said. "Even me. Although, that was a long time ago in my case. You've got other reasons. What are they?"

"Isn't it a bit presumptuous to second-guess your commander?" Shepard asked.

"Wasn't it you who asked me to 'call you on your bullshit' after that incident in Jong Hui?" Alenko answered back. And once again, Shepard was bound against herself. He had a point.

"You know, I really shouldn't get drunk around you. You make me agree to things. Bad things," Shepard said darkly. She shook her head and stopped by the ladder down. Her voice was quieter here, as though to not cross the mess. "She's... not cut out for this. She's a civilian. Worse, she's a civilian who thinks the galaxy is a fundamentally good place. There's enough lessons to the contrary out there that bringing her along with me more than I absolutely have to is just putting a target on the back of her head."

"I think you're selling her short," Alenko said, and not harshly. "She's a lot tougher than she looks."

"She'd have to be," Shepard noted with a note of sarcasm, before moving down the ladder and into the hold. Alenko was once again right on her heels. Shepard came to a halt, before the Mako where it stood on the launch catapult. "Alright squad, fall in."

The humans, krogan and turian, all gathered around her in a fairly informal scrum. She didn't berate them for it. She didn't much stand on military formality more than she had to, at the best of times. "We're hitting a pirate base on the planet within the hour," Shepard said. "We're expecting some harsh resistance, but given our advantage in stealth, we should catch them with their pants down. Wrex will give a rundown of what Actus' capabilities are."

"He's a turian shit who took something which didn't belong to him," Wrex said. There was more than a moment of silence after that.

"And?" Shepard asked.

"What? Do you think I've got a layout of his base? It's probably a prefab drop-base. Shoot whoever's wearing blue or yellow. That'll be all you need to know."

"I thought you took fights a bit more seriously than that, Urdnot," Shepard said.

"I take them plenty seriously," Wrex said. "The only real good news is that he won't have krogan working for him. He's a known bigot. He also tends to hate anything that can't eat dextro-food, but he's smart enough to work with them. He has contracts with both Blue Suns and the Eclipse. That means drones, likely, and those damned tough batarians they send to breach battle-lines."

Shepard's jaw tightened at hearing that. Garrus glanced to her, a bit of concern hidden in the fact that Shepard didn't yet know how to discern concern from a turian's expression. "Noted. Anything else?"

"Tuntau's a popular place to vent cores," Garrus added. "Just because we know to expect drones, biotics, and a few rampaging krogan, doesn't mean that we won't suddenly have an entire ship full of confused but belligerent pirates coming out of the sky behind us."

"A risk I'm willing to take," Wrex said.

Shepard nodded. "Actus has been a thorn in the Alliance's side and a pain in its ass for long enough. We shut down his landing site, the Alliance rolls in and locks it down. That's a few dozen more lightyears without pirates, slavers, and the scum of the galaxy having a foothold," she gave a dark smile. "Call it a gift to the galactic community as a whole."

"I like the kind of gifts you give, Shepard," Wrex noted. "Remind me to ask for one when I reach my next birthday."

"Which would be?" Garrus asked.

"Wouldn't know. Forgot that a long time ago," Wrex said.

Shepard cracked a smirk, and hopped into the Mako. As she was heading to the front, though, Asha thrust her arm across the breach from the personnel bay to the wheel. Shepard's smirk withered a bit. "Is there a reason for this, al'Wahim?"

"Admiral Hackett's orders," the Si Wongi said crisply, and not smugly. Which was for the best, because despite appreciating the woman's skill and perseverance, Shepard would have laid her out for that. With no more than a grumble at that, she moved back and settled in with the others who were strapping in for an orbital drop. Alenko leaned forward, from his seat across from her.

"It's been a while since you dropped against batarians, Commander. Are you sure you're ready for this?" he asked.

"I've been ready since I was twelve," Shepard said darkly.

"That isn't what I meant, ma'am," Alenko said.

"There's a place for anger, chief," Garrus said dryly. "It can keep you sharp when there's something trying to distract you."

"That isn't the whole truth. There are things which can go wrong if you're blinded by hatred," Alenko said.

"Are you saying that I'm blinded by hate, Alenko?" Shepard asked.

"No, ma'am," Alenko said. "Only pointing out a hypothetical."

"Might be a bit more than that," Wrex said, and paused, as there was a lurch which sent all of the inhabitants of the Mako who weighed less than a tonne by themselves shifting uncomfortably backwards as the ship was hurled out of the Normandy's bay, and began its plummet. Wrex kept right on talking, even as the whole group experienced a long stretch of zero-gravity. "Anger is good to a point. Then it starts to eat at you. I've seen a lot of my kith and krannt eaten alive by hatreds, because they didn't know enough when to let go. That's a lesson that too few krogan are taught these days. It's one everybody should learn."

"Are you seriously saying to 'let it go'?" Garrus asked at a yell as he clung to his restraints. Shepard likewise held onto her chest as they plummeted. "...Doesn't sound very krogan of you!"

"Maybe the turians don't know my species as well as they'd like to think they do," Wrex said flatly.

"That's all kind of moot, since it's got nothing to do with Actus!" Shepard shouted.

"Planetfall in ten seconds. Nine. Seven. Five."

Shepard sucked in her tongue and clenched her teeth. She hated being a passenger in these things. It wasn't that she was a terrible back-seat driver, but she liked knowing with absolute certainty when they were going to hit a bump. She'd had enough bites into her tongue during N4 that she crunched the Universal Armor Licensing just so she could always have a valid reason for being in the front seat. The thump was not as calamitous as some had been, but still jarring, and caused Shepard to hiss as her armor dug into her ass-cheek just a little. She would fix this armor. Just as soon as she got this mission over with.

"I wouldn't say it was irrelevant," Wrex said. "I know who I hate. I hate Actus. I hated Jarrod. I hate Hosrim Ahak. I don't hate turians. I don't hate batarians. I know my limits, Shepard. There's only so many I can hate at one time."

"I'll take that under advisement," Shepard said. "al'Wahim? What have you got on scanners?"

"We're picking up..." she paused, and glanced back. "It seems that bringing miss T'Soni might have been a prudent course. There are ruins upon this planet."

"Hindsight. You know what they say about it," Shepard said flatly.

"Yes," al'Wahim turned back to the scanners, and the Mako started to accelerate forward as smoothly as one could please. "Also, strong EME from the coordinates which Urdnot provided. There is a ship on site. It is performing a drive discharge."

Alenko unbuckled himself and levered himself up beside her. "Let me see that?" he asked, and al'Wahim gave an acceding wave. "Hmm. Decommissioned Roanapur from the discharge profile, probably a converted freighter. But it's dumping a lot more charge than it should. Weapons, maybe?"

"Not very well decommissioned, then," al'Wahim made note.

"Pirates," Garrus said. "This planet was noted as a haven for them."

"There's not much fun to be had poaching pirates," Wrex said.

"Really? I thought you'd have lots of stories about pirate-related derring-do," Garrus said dryly.

"Mostly from the pirate's side," Wrex said. He shrugged. "Hell, I was working as a pirate when I met Saren."

Both the turian and the human's eyes both went wide to Wrex at that. "And you didn't tell me this, why?" Shepard asked.

"It didn't matter," Wrex said. "It was just a hijack and pillage job on a volus owned superfreighter. Lots of cheap, low grade weapons, a few grunts that were working for almost nothing. I almost felt bad killing them. They didn't stand a chance, even though they outnumbered us five to one," Wrex said.

"When was this?" Shepard asked.

"I'd say about a decade ago," Wrex said. "Hadn't had a chance to purge it out. Too recent."

"What happened?" Garrus asked.

"We were stripping out anything we thought we could sell," Wrex said. He shook his head. "I had a bad feeling about the thing from the jump. And that feeling got worse when I saw him. Just walking around. Looking for something."

"Looking for what?" Shepard asked.

"Don't know. Didn't care to find out. Wasn't my business," Wrex said. He scowled, pulling at the scars running up his face. "My instincts are pretty good, though. Once I got a measure of him, I decided it was time to go. I didn't even wait to collect my paycheck; I just jumped the very first transport to Omega that was flying, and laid low for a year."

"Seems a bit paranoid," Garrus pointed out.

"It's not paranoia when somebody's trying to kill you," Wrex answered equally flatly. "The others, who hadn't split and hid? They ended up dead within a week. Every. Last. One of them. Saren was bad news then, and seems like he hasn't gotten any better. I could hate his kind for neutering mine, but that's too big. I prefer to hate Saren, for killing the few guys I could actually stand in the Terminus. It's... cleaner that way. I prefer to hate Ahak for wrecking my favorite gun and leaving me to die, instead of all batarians. I preferred to hate Oro'Reegar for shooting me in the spine, not all quarians."

"Batarians are different," Shepard said. "Every damn one of them deserves a bullet."

"That's a bit of a racist attitude to hold," Garrus said. "There are plenty of humans who think that about my species."

Wrex let out a growl. "Wasn't always that way," he said, shaking his head slowly. "Two hundred years ago, the batarians were different. Turning into something more like you. But then... well?" he shrugged against his restraints. "Couldn't tell you what's in their heads. All I know is that nowadays, I find myself killing a lot more batarians than turians, and that's saying a lot considering where I've worked."

"We're five minutes out," al'Wahim said from the front of the craft. "Check your seals and weapons. Going in hot?"

"I might think not," Alenko said. He turned his seat around, so that he faced Shepard and those behind. He opened his Omni, and began to project a holograph of the topography. He pointed to one particular spot, overlooking the prefab bunker. "If we approach the site from this vector, we're going to be out of all of their auto-guns' lines of fire, and the bunker will block line of sight from the ship. We'll be in before anybody knows we're there."

"Good. Never punch them in the face when you can stab them in the spine," Wrex said with a nod.

"My sentiment exactly," Shepard said. "Bring us in, al'Wahim."

"Aye, Commander."

Liara knew that she was doing something wrong. She knew, but she didn't stop herself. Hong had been quite clear; Shepard's soul depended on her. And more and more, she felt a certain investment into that. It was a massive responsibility, which was only outmassed by the possibilities having access to Shepard's mind could offer. But she forced herself out of wistful contemplation of academic awards and being able to stand astride academia and laugh with an almost maddened pitch at those who had doubted her before, and back toward figuring out something about Shepard, and why she was as she was.

The Extranet console which was the only one with unrestricted access flashed through pages, trying to access even the publicly available files on Shepard. What happened to her sister? She knew that Mindoir burned, but there had to be more than that. Her eyes were locked on the streams of information which blurred past at a rate even salarians would have trouble keeping up with, shooting through her service record – that which was open to public access, anyway – to her citations, her training. What was she missing?

"I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be impressed if she saw you doing that," Tali's electronically muffled voice came from Liara's shoulder, causing the asari to let out a peep of alarm, before turning to see a purple helm shaking slowly. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you had a crush on her."

"I do not have a crush on Shepard," Liara said. "I simply want to know the intimate details about her, on a completely unrelated matter, and stop looking at me like that!"

Tali hadn't altered one whit, still standing there with her fingers tapping on her arm. Only the momentary shift in the light on her faceplate showed that she bothered to blink. "Yes, I'm convinced," she said sarcastically.

"Good," Liara said, not catching that fact. "Now if you're not going to report me, could you help me find something about Shepard which has me fascinated?"

"Oh, really?" Tali said in a leading tone, which, as usual, Liara completely overlooked.

"Yes. She is called the 'Butcher of Torfan', but I cannot find any information on what that appellation is referring to."

Tali continued to tap her fingers against her arm. "And the Extranet didn't tell you? I could check in five seconds."

Liara shook her head. "I know when data is being manipulated when I see it," she pointed out. "The things that are in the public file don't make sense when compared against the live specimen. There is something important that is being left out of the information which is publicly available, and unless I can find out what it is, I will not be able to understand Shepard the way I need to. So I must track it down at its source. In their database."

Tali shrugged. "I'm not exactly the best source on history in this part of the galaxy," she admitted. She raised a finger, though. "But, if you need access to a file which is locked to outside access... I might be able to help. For a price."

"Yes! Anything!" Liara said, and then reined herself in. "Ahem. Within reason, of course."

Tali stared at her. "...you absolutely don't have a crush on her," Tali said, then shook her head. "She listens to you more than she does me. I need to convince her to let me bring some destroyed geth onto the Normandy."

"Is that wise?" Liara asked, then she rolled her eyes. "I suppose you'd know the dangers better than I would. And what you claim is patently untrue. She treats you with a great deal more care and kindness than most aboard this vessel."

"What? Are you ins... well, of course you are. Are you blind?" Tali asked. "She treats me like I'm some sort of helpless child! I need..." she shook her head, gesticulating as though to conjure a word from the air, but failing to. Liara sighed at that.

"She had a sister," Liara said. "I believe you could guess her name."

Tali's gesticulation halted. Then she sighed, palming her helm, before gently moving Liara aside. "Is this what you wanted?" Tali asked. Liara nodded, as the quarian began to systematically crack open the file defenses around the recording from the grounds of Torfan. "I don't know what you think this is going to show you. As I understand human culture, 'butcher' isn't a title given out of respect or kindness."

"I need to understand her," Liara said intensely. "I need to know how she thinks, why she thinks. It is unbelievably vital to the continued existence of sapient species across the galaxy!"

Tali stopped, and turned to her. "...of course it is."

She fidgeted with impatience as the quarian turned her attention back to the panel, and to her Omni which was open on her other hand. Nimble tridactyl hands flit from one to the other, and back again, but Liara couldn't track the advancement; technology, at least modern technology, was not any strong suit of hers. Tali began to mutter under her breath in Khelish as she worked, and Liara leaned in all the more intensely, her expectation coloring her world, focusing her perception, and dulling her sense of hearing to the point where she didn't hear the door open behind her.

"...what the fuck are you two doing in Shepard's room?" Nilsdottir's voice demanded, not so much angry as confused and annoyed. Liara glanced to Jackie, then to the console, until she turned back to Jackie once more.

"There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this," Liara began.

"She wanted to hack into the Alliance Navy database and read Shepard's file," Tali said in a great blurt, pointing at Liara. Liara turned to her with a look of shock and confusion. Tali wilted a bit. "...she's scary."

Nilsdottir glanced between the contrite quarian and the embarrased asari, her arms crossed before her chest. She worked her swollen jaw for a moment, as though sucking on teeth. After an entirely too long period of deliberation, she said one word. "...why?"

"I need to understand Shepard's background better. It is vital to my studies of the Protheans and the continued survival of our two races!"

"I think she's got a crush on Shepard," Tali said. Liara shot a glare at her. "What?"

Jackie let out a scoff at that. "Sorry, Liara. Shepard's type is tall, beefy, and penis-bearing," she then leaned aside, to get a better look past them. "...what 'cha looking at?"

"Torfan?" Liara said, but it came out like a shamed question.

Nilsdottir sighed at that, and shook her head. "That's something I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to share."

"Please, you have to let me see this," Liara said. "You cannot grasp how incredibly important this is."

"...major crush."

Liara shot the first death-glare of this decade at the young quarian. It didn't have the intended effect; it caused both she and Jackie to burst out laughing, the former far quieter than the latter. When Nilsdottir's laughter died down a bit, she let out a puff of breath. "If you're so stuck on it, then I'll show you my suit's video feed. It'll tell you anything you need to know."

"Really?" Liara asked.

"I didn't say you'd like it," Jackie pointed out. She beckoned the two of them to follow out of the forbidden zone which was the CO's quarters. As soon as they were out of the doors, Liara could see Nilsdottir's lover, Murtock, waiting for her. Jackie shook her head as she stomped toward the crew compartments, which would be housing most of the crew as it was currently the ship's night-cycle. "You know what's fucking sad? I'm the mature one right now. That's fucked up."

"What can I say, babe? You've always been mature beyond your years," he said.

"Oh, shut up," Jackie said over her shoulder, to which Murtock just rolled his eyes. Liara could tell that there was a great deal of warmth between them, but the way that they verbally abused each other strained Liara's understanding of how romantic relationships were supposed to work. They were supposed to be about kindness and respect, not screaming matches, thrown objects, and mutual insults. It was all the stranger that they actually seemed happiest when in a state which to the best of Liara's understanding would have been the immediate precursor to a separation.

She opened the door, and pushed Liara back as she tried to enter with her. "Uh uh. You wait here."

She moved into the darkness, with a great deal more quiet as she moved to her things. Liara stood beside Murtock for a long moment. "So... how did you meet her?" she asked.

"Pirate," he pointed to himself, and then toward her, "pirate."

"She's not a pirate... I think," Tali said.

"Eh, it's complicated," he waved off. "Important bit is that we hit it off, broke a few beds, and she came back when it looked like I was proper fucked. Rest is history."

"That has not explained anything about your relationship," Liara said with confusion.

Murtock shrugged. "Yeah... there's not much about what me and Jackie've got that can be explained."

"That much is obvious," Liara said. And Jackie herself cut off that line of conversation with an abrupt nod as she emerged into the low-light of the night. "Is that..."

"Come on, your room," she said. They followed Jackie as she walked, somewhat stiffly, through the med-bay and passed the door which lead to Chakwas tiny quarters, before entering the room Liara had essentially claimed for her own.

"So, what is that?" Liara asked.

Nilsdottir held up a solid state storage device, itself a rare thing, since Omnitools had been... well, omnipresent for quite a few asari generations, and plugged it into a hole in the side of Liara's console. "You want to know about Shepard... about Avatar Shepard, this is all you need to see. A complete lesson on who she is, why, and how fucking scary she can be, all in one clusterfuck of a mission."

"...you think she's scary?" Tali asked, sitting down on Liara's other chair. Nilsdottir had a very distant look as she nodded.

"...I saw her go Glowing Badass. That shit stays with you," she said. And then, she turned on the console, and the video started to play.

Most prefabricated structures produced by the major structural companies tended to be built to survive just about anything. Some had to withstand meteorite strikes. Others, tectonic shifts which would tear a lesser building in two. Others still were reserved for military use, being premanufactured bunkers that could be dropped behind a retreating force and give them pillboxes to hold ground from. There was one other kind, but it hadn't seen wide use nor construction in roughly a millennia and a half.

This structure was once a military command hub. The tale of how it was stolen was a story for the ages, leaving an entire turian regiment baffled and confused, for the week it took for the vorcha who had been swarming to rip them to shreds. It had changed hands several times in the last few hundred years, until a turian with enough money to require an edifice large enough to house his ego paid for it, and here it now rested on the powdery aluminum-oxide surface of Tuntau. Severus didn't consider himself an officianado of buildings nor history, despite being turian so both were hammered into him since birth. That lackadaise proved to be... problematic.

Doubly so, because the airlock portion of this structure had been built long after the Krogan Rebellions, and thus, hadn't been proofed against metalbending.

The first and only warning that Severus got was the squealing of metal, followed by a gale as the oxygen was displaced by three atmospheres worth of helium and methane, sending the unhelmeted turian stumbling back, and his fellows scrambling for guns, if not simply pounding on the inner airlock door.

First through that breach wasn't what Severus would have expected. Shepard came up in a roll, glaring through the thin slit of her breather-helmet as she put a stream of fire into the rapidly suffocating salarian who was trying to point a weapon at her. They weren't the problem. The turian would be a bigger one, but the major, major problem? The batarians. Much as vacuum didn't kill them nearly fast enough, overpressure didn't either. Even as Wrex was closing the breach she'd made at Alenko's back, Shepard was already powering forward, firing as her gun overheated, walking fire over the thick armor of the four-eyed monsters.

Whoever these ones were, they had discipline, and they had focus. They didn't marvel in incredulity, nor flail hopelessly at the inner doors which would not open until the extra atmospheres out here could be vented. They advanced, quickly standing in a staggered line, and one before was retreating toward it. He raised a fist, and Shepard tried to duck aside. She wasn't fast enough, though, to dodge the ballistic blades entirely, and they gouged her armor on one shoulder as they broke through the shields. She pulled her trigger again, but the warning beeping of the rifle was relayed directly into Shepard's helm. Overheated.

As one, the three batarians launched forward, sending out a massive wave of fire, which caused a deflagration, swelling those flames a brilliant gold as the methane empowered them far beyond what the firebenders behind it had intended. And all of it streaming directly at Shepard, with murderous intent. Given her destroyed shields, they would cook her to death.

If she wasn't a firebender herself.

With a roar of angry effort, she swept her arms forward, and slammed her feet down into the deck-plating so hard that it deformed under them, and her bending, far stronger than their even concerted effort, called that wave of fire to a halt, and then, began to push it back. The heat was stifling, even if it wasn't bathing her, and the pain of holding it forward... it called to mind another fire. Another fight. But she had more to do than worry about the past. With another howl, one foot rose from the indent which it found itself in, and slammed forward, and then, the other. She walked forward, into that stream of brutal flames, and started to project her own, powering them back faster then they could be projected, until the three batarians and the single human were at an utter stalemate. One which would end soon enough, because the fourth had almost reloaded his ballistic blades. Shepard couldn't expend the effort to pay attention to him. Luckily, she had two sharp-shooters to do that for her.

Even as the batarian rose his gauntlet toward Shepard, a crack sounded in the thick air, slamming into his kinetic barriers. A second less than an instant later tore through the batarian's shoulder, sending the assault mere millimeters wide of its target – Shepard's head – and painting the firebender behind him with blood so dark a red as to nearly be black. But while that batarian did falter back with an unvoiced snarl, he didn't fall, even though that shot should have put him flat on his back. Even Alenko's heavy heave of a Throw only knocked that veteran back a few steps, and put him right beside a dying turian, and more importantly, that dying turian's rifle.

Shepard roared as she used the hatred to burn at these monsters who had twice destroyed her. And as she did, the flames grew hotter. Brighter. Angerier.

Then, they stopped, utterly and abruptly. Not just from her, but from the batarians as well.

"No more oxygen, fucker," Shepard said mostly to herself, and she pulled her own rifle from her back, and began to spray them with fire of a very different sort. Whatever sterner stuff the bladesman was made of, fatefully, the firebenders were not, and her stream of metal cut them all down.

Shepard glanced toward the veteran, and let out a growl, rather than a yelp of alarm, as she had to throw herself at a roll behind a block container, moments from being ripped to shreds by that veteran's return fire, which he offered one-handed.

"Concentrate on bringing the four-eyed fuck down!" Shepard roared into her comms.

"Whoa, that hurt the eardrums a bit," Garrus answered. "Afraid we wouldn't hear you?"

The veteran ignored not only suffocation and injury, but being outnumbered, as he advanced on Alenko and the others, firing with brutal precision on the one who had the weakest armor; Alenko. The biotic had to fall back, ducking behind both of al'Wahim and Garrus, but still, the veteran's fire followed him, battering away at barriers with insanely precise shots. Another pair of shots, one bursting shield, the other tearing flesh, but the veteran only grunted, and kept advancing.

Right when he reached where Shepard could flank him, he turned that rifle on her, and her rush was abruptly halted when he flipped it in his hand, catching it by its barrel, and slamming it into the side of her helm like a massive club. The sheer impact of it sent her sprawling, trying to shake some vision back into her eyes. It was enough that she couldn't see how the veteran then hurled the gun with similar brutal precision, catching Garrus in the knee and causing him to fall against al'Wahim, causing both to land in a heap, which Wrex was stepping over. There was a stomp of metal against metal, and then Shepard could hear the clatter of a ballistic gauntlet priming.

She twisted, tearing up the deck-plating as she did, and cocooning herself with it. The blades dug into the shell she'd made so powerfully that only because she held that cocoon out from her armor did they not breach her suit as they did the metal. She pushed the metal down, seeing that the veteran had turned his attention back to the others, and he was pulling out a grenade to burn them. That, Shepard would not allow. What came from her mouth was debatably even human, but she used the power of undiluted hate, half of her entire lifetime's worth, into an edge, and she bent the metal of her armor, just past her forearm, into that blade. A blade, she then introduced into the veteran's chest.

The veteran halted, and the grenade dropped, unprimed, to the floor. He finally wavered, those four black eyes fluttering slightly. He didn't show a superior sneer, as she expected. He didn't show hate or wrath. Just cold detachment, and in this moment, mild confusion. A moment after that? Acceptance. And that hand grabbed the throat of her armor, and began to squeeze.

So she stabbed him again, with her other hand, in the other side of his chest. He dropped to a knee, still squeezing Shepard's throat with his one remaining hand. Shepard extracted one blade, as she was pulled down to a kneel herself by that grip. He just stared her in the eye, defying her to look away as he died. She wouldn't if she had the option.

At least, she would have, had a massive krogan fist not come in from over her shoulder and slammed into the batarian, causing her other blade to tear the veteran's spine apart, and spilling an ever increasing black pool around him.

"Are you done dancing with batarians, Shepard?" Wrex demanded. "Actus is just inside. Let's go!"

"Emergency equalization in progress"

There was another whoosh, as the air which had blown in was forceably ejected, and fresh air took its place. The turians on the ground let out audible gasps, and began to twitch as they clung to the edge of life.

"Well, now they know we're coming," Shepard said.

"I think the blasts of flame and gunfire might have been a better clue," Garrus pointed out, as he helped al'Wahim to her feet. Shepard glanced back to the breach, which Wrex had closed, and to the group she'd brought with her. They all seemed alright. Well, almost all.

"Alenko, are you alright?" Shepard asked.

"Just a flesh wound. Gelling it now," Alenko said, managing to stand with very little stiffness. The red on his armor, though, did Shepard a bit of worry.

Shepard looked at the man for a long moment, then nodded. "Alright people; we've got pirates, some of which are batarians, and that means firebenders. Favor shotguns over snipers. Wrex and I will take the heat," she rattled off.

"Aye, Commander," al'Wahim said with a nod, pulling out her rifle.

"Are you sure I can't take a nice secluded spot to work my magic?" Garrus asked. Shepard answered him with a glare. "Oh, very well."

Wrex damned near fondled his shotgun, as he looked at the doors. Shepard too her spot opposite him at the edge of the aperture. "Been waiting a long time for this, I imagine," Shepard said.

"Eight. Hundred. Years," Wrex said direly. He glanced toward her. "I'm only going to say this once, human; don't fuck this up."

Shepard smirked. "I've got no intention to."

And behind them, Severus' fingers twitched closed around the trigger-guard of his rifle.

"Keep your head down, Jack! Don't you see that fire coming in at you? Got a death wish or something?"

"Oh, fuck you!" Jackie's voice came from the back of the camera, which was connected to her helmet and thus recording all that she could see. "Where's the Major? I thought we were catching up to him?"

"He must have moved in deeper," the unidentified soldier said. "Come on, rook. Don't slow us down."

Liara glanced toward Nilsdottir, who was leaning with her back to the table upon which the monitor sat. Her eyes were closed. "Are you not going to watch this?" Liara asked.

"Don't need to," she said quietly. "I was there. I know what happened."

"Oh shit! Flank flank flaaugh!" and a spray of red as fire poured in from a vent. Nilsdottir turned, and even Liara was a bit baffled to see how a batarian had managed to cram itself into so small a space, with a shotgun to boot. The batarian turned the gun on Nilsdottir, but the biotic's hand lashed forward, and sent a Throw hurtling at the ambusher. With nowhere to be cast, the attack smashed the alien into a soupy mess.

"Gods damn it, Kalgot, why didn't you see that coming?" Nilsdottir said, swatting the soldier who let that shot slip passed him.

"Well pardon me for not thinking that a batarian could fit in a fucking air vent!" the dark-skinned soldier screamed back.

The whole mission had been like this, according to what Liara had watched. More than an hour, starting with a brutal killing-field approach, followed by a murderous slog deeper into a complex which seemed to run half way to the moon's core. Every attempt at advancement was met with ambushes and bombs, every intersection turned into a killing zone. No lights, lots of noise, and a lot of dead.

"Where's Kiel? For that matter, where the fuck is Shepard?" Nilsdottir snapped at one of the others.

"We might be catching up with her. Him? Hell if I know." the other soldier, still unnamed, answered as he pulled the medigel pack out of the armor of the dead man and slotted it into his own. Liara was taken aback by the seeming callousness of it. Stealing from the dead like that. But then again, she'd already seen, through Nilsdottir's eyes, the death of a dozen soldiers and comrades in as many minutes, and another dozen before that.

The camera moved forward, a shotgun barely visible in the bottom of the shot, as Nilsdottir tried to keep up with the other soldiers, who were advancing with all the grim resolve of men walking to their own execution. They didn't speak as they moved into their positions, trying to get better sight lines into the next room, to mute the next ambush. To limit the next deaths. "Any luck with comms?"

"Not a chance," Kalgot shook his head grimly. "Still locked."

"This wouldn't be so fucking match-stick if we could just talk to each other," Nilsdottir snarled. Kalgot nodded, and then counted down silently on his fingers, before throwing open the doors and turning a rifle into the room. But unlike every time they had done so since the bulkheads dropped and separated Nilsdottir from Shepard and her commanding officers, there was no brutal, withering assault of gunfire bearing down on them, no blasts of unimaginable heat and flames. This room was only populated by the dead. Nilsdottir moved forward.

"Hey, back in line, rook! You'll get yourself killed!" the unnamed soldier hissed, but Nilsdottir shook her head, and advanced into the room, seeing only with the light shining out of her helmet. It started by falling upon the grey armor and bright red of the dead humans. But this wasn't the same kind of violence as there was before. The floor and walls were blackened and pitted, and in some places, the humans had been blown to bits. "Tui La..."

"Looks like we looped onto somebody," Nilsdottir said, and the others moved up, surrounding her with a hedgehog of weapons. "Figure this is Kiel, or Shepard?"

"Rook, take a look at this!" Kalgot hissed, and Nilsdottir turned. She moved to the Tribesman's side, and watched as he turned over the body of a dead batarian. One which was much smaller than the others they'd come across. "...it's a godsdamned kid!"

Nilsdottir looked over the others, and found that they had been peppered by gunfire and left where they lay. "...you've got to be shitting me. It wouldn't have been them who did this."

"Rook, you'd better stop talking," Kalgot muttered.

"No, fuck you! I didn't sign on to shoot kids!" Nilsdottir shouted.

Liara leaned back from the video, ignoring the heated argument which filled the screen, and turned to likely the only surviving party to it. "Tell me that is not what I think it was," Liara said.

Nilsdottir shrugged distantly. "Don't know what to tell ya," she said.

"Tell me that it wasn't Shepard who did that!" Liara said. Tali, though, just watched, silent, a hand over where her mouth would be.

Nilsdottir nodded slowly. "It was," she said. Liara's eyes fluttered, her lips trembled.

"...but... that doesn't..."

"I was as pissed as you were. Then, about ten minutes later... not so much."

"Shepard wouldn't murder innocent children!" Liara said.

"She didn't," Jackie said. And then, blindly, she tapped the fast-forward indicator, skipping a heated argument which indeed did come to blows, only being held apart by four soldiers in armor which was either bloody, cracked, smoking, or a combination of all three.

"Alright, got that out of your system, rook?" Kalgot said, back-handing some of the blood away from the split on his lip.

"Oh, fuck you," Nilsdottir muttered.

"That an offer, Rook?" the unnamed soldier asked at Nilsdottir's side. She punched him in the stomach for his snideness. "Alright, maybe later."

"Maybe never, asshole," Nilsdottir answered. She shook her head. "Why'd I have to be the only chick in this fucking match-stick?"

"Luck of the draw, I guess," Kalgot said. "Eyes up. We've got gunfire ahead. Might be Shepard or the Major."

Nilsdottir followed after, still at the back of the pack, just ahead of the rearguard. The dull thud of grenades sounded dimly in the recording, but loud enough for the viewers to hear it. The whole group seemed to be walking on a razor's edge, following the blood, the ensconced batarian bodies, and the corpses of the fallen marines. "That looks like Kalroh. You alright, Kalgot?" the unnamed soldier asked.

Kalgot glanced back, but shook his head. "Don't have time for that. Keep your eyes open, marines!"

"Don't need to tell me twice," Nilsdottir muttered. But she stopped, waving a hand. "Wait! Everybody shut the fuck up for a second!"

There was a moment of relative silence, only broken by explosions somewhere ahead of them. Then, even Liara heard it. The thumping of skin against metal. "Vents," Nilsdottir said quietly, and the lot of them moved from an irregular blob to a semi-circle in a practiced instant, guns all forward. The gate swung open, and all weapons were a twitch from firing.

Thankfully, they didn't, because the figure which came out of that vent was tiny. The young batarian looked to be no more than six years old, dressed in a tattered brown robe, arms clutched close around him. "Is the bad human gone?" the batarian child asked.

"Did you run when the shooting started?" Kalgot asked, motioning the others to take up a flanking position up and down the hall. The batarian child nodded, its four eyes leaking tears. Another dropped out, followed by a third, all looking terrified out of their minds. Liara wondered what could have possibly happened that would make Shepard so debased as to kill their like. How deep had her hatred gone? Had Liara just fundamentally underestimated how evil the commander was?

"The bad human kept shooting. I ran. We ran," the batarian child said. "Tried to hide. She found some of us."

"She?" Kalgot asked. Nilsdottir glanced toward him. "Green armor?"

The child nodded.

"Fuck! We shouldn't have brought Shepard into this," Kalgot muttered. "I knew she was out of her fucking mind! Anderson's going to get drummed out for this when we're..."

Nilsdottir looked back just in time to see the child locking something to Kalgot's calf. Kalgot's eyes grew wide in his helmet, as he kicked the child hard in the chest, sending him flying back. The other two children began to sprint at the other humans. "SATCHEL CH–" Kalgot got out.

Then he was torn in half, by the satchel charge that the batarian child had strapped to his leg. The blast likewise pulped the child in question. Nilsdottir could see the other soldiers trying to recover, and seeing the batarian child rushing toward them, explosives now in the open, and they opened fire, riddling the child and painting the hallway with even more black. The recording, though, went staticy for a moment, as Nilsdottir's arms pushed out and away from herself, and the child rushing her was heaved up and over, trapped in a biotic field.

"What the fu..." Nilsdottir said, but the child hurled the explosives back at Nilsdottir. The camera was sent flying by the resulting explosion, coming to a rolling stop, staring at the blank, black, glassy stare of a batarian child-suicide-bomber. Liara just sat, silent, stunned.

Jackie lowered the cooling pack from her jaw, and glanced toward the two aliens watching her suffering from years past. "That's the way that they fought. They armed their slaves, their women, and gave bombs to their kids. In the end, Shepard made the call. Burnt earth. No prisoners, no rescues. She was down to two guys by then. The Major... he was on his own."

"There had to be another way," Liara said, still clinging to her view of the galaxy, that there was good in this life.

"If there was, I didn't find it," she said. She shook her head. "I got a lot of nightmares. Torfan... is just a lot more vivid. And not just because of having to shoot kids who want to strap bombs to you."

On the screen, somebody grabbed Nilsdottir's helmet and handed it back to her. In the moment that she was in the view of her own camera, she looked like hell. Blood was running down her face, giving her a sort of red mask, before she plunked that helmet back into place, and the scene returned to its usual form; following her. She glanced around, and saw that even of the six that she'd been walking with before, there were now only three. The two who had shot the child up front, and Nilsdottir.

"You've got to be kidding," Nilsdottir said. "Who's that put in charge?"

The two who were left glanced down at the scant remains of Kalgot, and then to each other. Then, they pumped their fists three times, and made a finger-gesture with their third pump. One vaguely resembled a wave, the other, vaguely a stone. "Water erodes stone. You're it, Tseng."

Tseng rolled his eyes, and then his shoulders. He picked up his rifle, then with a snarl, threw it aside as it was burst open from the shrapnel of the explosion. He picked up one which had been left behind by a marine minutes before, likely escaping the first such attack. "Alright, Rook... What's your name, Rook?" Tseng said.

"Jack."

"Funny name for a girl," he mentioned. "Alright, Jack. Stick close. Shoot anything that doesn't have two eyes. Got it?"

Nilsdottir was silent, and Tseng leaned toward her. Even Liara could tell that he didn't like giving that order, from the look on his face. "Got it?" he reiterated.

"Yes," she said.

"Jack..."

"Yes, sir," Nilsdottir corrected. Tseng sighed, and nodded.

"Shepard must have had the right idea, eh Tseng?" the still unnamed soldier muttered.

"That's Commander Tseng to you," he said dryly. Liara shook her head, and depressed the pause key.

"What's wrong?" Tali asked, for all she'd been keeping her own quiet and her own peace.

"I... This doesn't... I cannot..." Liara couldn't get the words to form in her mind, is what she could not. Jackie just nodded slowly.

"That's what the entire mission was like. Batarians, dug in harder than they'd been at any time since the Alliance-Hegemony War. Dug in so deep we couldn't even Orb-bust them. Had to kill 'em, room by room."

"Why would they choose somebody like Shepard to be a part of this?" Tali asked, confused. "Wouldn't they want to keep somebody as... well... capable of irrationality away from this kind of fighting?"

Jackie shrugged. "Brass didn't care that she hated batarians. They'd just gotten out of a war with 'em, after all. Irrational hatred of them wasn't exactly seen as a character flaw. More like just a quirk, I'd guess," and Jackie stepped forward, keeping her eyes on her bare feet. "She was a good soldier. They needed good soldiers on this mission. I was a powerful biotic. I jumped the line. How we felt about those four-eyed fucks didn't really matter too much."

"This must have been brutal for Shepard," Liara said. Jackie nodded.

"She had a lot worse than my group did, that's for sure."

"I think I am beginning to understand why the Alliance didn't want this sort of information made public," Liara said.

"Kid-killing doesn't exactly help foster the image which the Alliance was gunning for," Jackie agreed.

Tali shook her head, that light which indicated when she was talking lit up, but for silence. Then, finally, she spoke. "Why would the batarians send their children to their deaths like that?"

Jackie chuckled, dryly, at that. "Hate," she said. She glanced toward the other two females with her. "They hate humanity. Don't know why. They hate us enough to hurl their own teeth at us, if they think it'll kill us faster. They hate us enough to give bombs to their own kids. They hate us, the way that Shepard hates them. And for the life of me, I ain't got a clue why."

The first thing that Shepard saw, as that door was kicked off of its rails by an infuriated krogan, was an explosion as an antipersonnel mine set on its far side was tripped to flying metal rather than walking flesh. That door careened across the room, smashing into a human wearing yellow armor and folding him in half backward over a low wall, before it finally embedded itself into a rack of shelves which started to shudder and droop. "Snipers, then batarians!" Shepard ordered. Actus wasn't so stupid to work with the Blood Pack, but batarians were almost as hard to kill, and in some ways, worse. Shepard bolted forward as the first crack of fire began to spill out behind her, as Garrus and al'Wahim began to spray ballistic death across the catwalks above. Whatever snipers there were had to keep their heads down, or else risk losing them.

"ACTUS YOU SLIME! WHERE ARE YOU?" Wrex roared as he kicked his way over the wall the pirate had been folded over. He was answered by a bolt of ice slamming into his armor, driving him back a step. Shepard ducked the whizzing of ballistic blades, and the snap of their electrified netting that they tried to prevent her movement with, and reached Wrex's side as he swatted that icy spear off of his armor. "I should have known you'd pick up a few new tricks."

Tonn Actus looked quite a bit like Garrus; more than even most other turians that she'd met. They had almost the same hide-color, the same shape of head. But where Garrus always wore a blue stripe down his cheeks and across his nose, Actus' face was bare. And his hands were splayed wide, in a waterbending pose, more spikes floating at his command.

Wrex rose his shotgun, and began to belch fire, but Actus responded by spinning behind a shelf and letting the krogan's assault hit nothing but contraband, sending a thin cloud of red dust into the air. "We can..." Shepard began.

"Deal with your own problem, Shepard. Actus is mine!" Wrex snapped, before charging ahead toward where Actus slipped out of sight. An unfortunate turian pirate who had the misfortune of choosing that moment to attempt to fire found himself smashed aside with a sickening crunch by Wrex' fist, not managing to slow down the nine-hundred year old Battlemaster in the slightest. Shepard, freed to her own targets, found some. Batarians, trying to flank and net her. She didn't even reach for her rifle. The forward of the two launched that electrified net toward her, but a single stomp brought a pillar of metal up between her and he, and the net wrapped harmlessly around it, sparking impotently. Shepard wasn't about to have that, though, so with a brutal punch into the metal, she sent it flying away as easily as most earthbenders would do to bricks. The block of electrified metal, returned to sender, sent the batarian staggering back, only to be caught by the other and pushed back to a relative stand.

The other, though, matched her, and began to tear, and hurl, great chunks of the open warehousing toward her, to batter her down. Shepard wasn't going to let that happen. Her own metalbending flowing through her fists, she pounded through the blocks as they reached her, sending each one exploding into long slivers of curling titanium mesh. Shepard pressed forward, changing her assault from earth to fire, and lashing out with a snap-twist of her arms into a lightning bolt, which the two batarians each leaned out of the way of. Damn these four eyed monsters! Why was it that every one she ever met had to be a brutally effective soldier? If nothing else, it meant that she felt all the better about killing them.

The first, having recovered from his momentary stun, took out his own shotgun, and let it announce itself to the warehousing, causing Shepard's kinetic barriers to shine a brilliant blue, and her HUD warn her that the generators were taxed to breaking. Essentially, one more hit, and she'd start bleeding.

At the moment, she didn't care.

She didn't bother roaring. She just focused her wrath into the tips of her fingers, and she bent.

And the arm with that shotgun wasn't pointing at her anymore. The next blast went straight into the wall, as the batarian glared with the first real emotion he'd shown so far; confusion and alarm. The other stomped past, swatting the first with an electrified gauntlet, causing her bloodbending to falter as his body locked solid. He swooped low, and this time, when he metalbent again, it wasn't to batter Shepard. It was to contain her. A bubble of metal leapt up, surrounding and blackening her world, pulling tighter with the creak of metal-fatigue and the complaints of physics. It was a prison of metal, as tight as Shepard's armor, and very, very strong. Shepard was stronger.

She bent the metal even as it surrounded her, another layer of armored skin. She didn't see but with the muffled sensations through her feet. It wasn't the pristine tremor-sense that the Beifong family had introduced to the world, but it was enough to know that if she moved that way for just a little bit, something would die. She swung a double-armored fist at the batarian who tried to use one of her own elements to contain her, smashing him flat with the blow. But her attempt to follow it up with a stomp to the eyes was called to a halt by horrible pain, electrification now searing through Shepard from head to toe.

The other batarian had netted the armor.

With a roar of agony, she twisted the metal away from her, sending it spiraling away from her like an explosion. Part of it cut the batarian who'd just dealt her injury, but he barely flinched. She needed more. With a flick of her wrists, the water began to stream out of the seams of her forearms, and she gathered it into a sweeping mass which she hooked under the leg of the closer batarian, and heaved. Finally dropped from his perch, the two-flanked assault ended as one had a moment of concussion to deal with, which was made all the worse by Shepard sharpening the water into a pick, which she hurled down at the other fallen slaver. The slaver twisted the floor up into the pick's path, blunting the assault. He couldn't stop Shepard's boot, though, as it slammed down its tread into the slaver's eyes.

Shepard spun the water around, focusing hatred once more on the one which deserved it more than anybody else in this galaxy. She slashed out with that water, impacting with brutal force in the center of the slaver's armor, cracking it under the impact. She didn't relent. She pulled the water back and around, an sent it back in, to impale the batarian, and to rid the world of one more four eyed monstrosity.

Well, tried to.

One moment, Shepard was waterbending. The next, she was flying through the air. She landed in a heap, her feet up the wall which she'd come to rest against, staring upside down at a smug looking asari who dropped gently down to the floor. She was a very dark blue, marks almost purple around her eyes, and she looked like somebody who fought turians for fun. "This ought to be fun," the asari said, a smirk on her face.

"You got this, Dahl?" the batarian asked as it rose to its feet. The Asari nodded.

Shepard pulled her side-arm, even upside down, and put a bullet through the center of the batarian's broken armor, causing his eyes to shoot wide, and black blood to plop out as it crumped to its knees. A lucky shot, but Shepard wasn't above accepting a bit of luck. She pushed herself to her feet, and then squeezed off another six. The asari dodged and weaved the lot of them. This was starting to get annoying. Shepard put her gun aside, and then began to send forth blasts of fire, baking the red sand and setting alight to who-even-knew what else was in this stockpile. And the asari dodged. Not just by moving. She dodged by bouncing, by flowing like wind through the branches of a tree. By hovering in place, and not with glowing biotic power.

Shepard had a moment to wonder what that meant, before the asari made a twisting motion, and a blast of wind appeared essentially out of nowhere, and sent Shepard rolling away once again.

It wasn't that Wrex had a one-track mind. It was just that everything that got between he and Actus was going to die. He'd suffered this kind of crap long enough, and today? Today was when Urdnot Wrex was going to have himself a good day. "You can't keep running forever, turian!" Wrex shouted into the maelstrom.

"Who says I'm running?" Actus' voice came bouncing through the stacks of stolen and illegal goods, trying to taunt Wrex, to get him moving stupid. To get him fighting stupid. Wrex was old enough that he learned that one wouldn't last long on stupid. So instead of rounding the corner, shotgun first, he went straight for the shelves. With a heave, he sent one of them tipping off of its moorings and crashing into the one beyond it. Actus had the decency to let out a yelp of alarm as the shelves began to come crashing down in a line. Not all the way across the warehouse by a long shot, but enough to cause some enormous property damage. "You goddamned thick headed idiot! Why couldn't you have the decency to go extinct like the rest of your forsaken kind!"

A grin, and not a kind one, stretched onto Wrex's scarred face. "Because some of us aren't forsaken," he answered, and then he charged up that angled shelf, mounting it like a stairway, and leaping off of its top to the catwalks over it. He landed foot first onto a human in yellow armor. A twist of the ankle ensured that the metric tonne of death which was Urdnot Wrex snapped the annoying fly's neck. Wrex looked down, trying to find exactly where Actus had mocked him from. He could see from his peripheral vision a shocked sniper trying to get a shot on him. Wrex just raised his shotgun and fired two blasts, which tore the salarian's armor to shreds and sent him tumbling off of the catwalks. "Hm. If I was a cowardly waterbending turian, where would I be?" Wrex asked, as he surveyed the mess he'd made.

There was a flick of movement at the edge of that pandemonium, where Actus came crawling out from the prison the stacks had become. Wrex let out a pleased grunt, and then bounded off of the catwalks, down to the ruined stacks. They creaked under his massive bulk, but the metalbending he could do without thinking kept him from falling straight through and getting trapped for grenades or rockets to finish. He didn't think so highly of himself as to warrant himself explosive-proof. He was angry, not crazy. Feet stomped as he covered distance, and then slammed hard enough to crack the reinforced concrete which made up the floor when he dropped from the devastation onto the ground. His head flicked up, and his shotgun followed, snapping a shot at the turian as he hurled himself around a corner. The shot went into the wall, rather than the turian. Not everybody could hit every time, after all.

Wrex was up and running again, but only made it a few steps before he heard a hiss in the air. A glance aside, showed that there was, indeed, a rocket flying at him. If Wrex'd had the time, he would have said 'oh, well this won't be good'. He had about time for 'Oh...'

Then, the rocket hit him, and blasted him rolling along the floor. There was a moment of blackness in the krogan's vision. Then, a grunt of pain and annoyance, as he forced himself onto his chest, and from there, back unsteadily to his feet. He glared into the distance at the pyjack who decided to hit him with an anti-materiel rocket. A good idea, he'd have to admit, but it hurt, he was bleeding, and his armor had gaping holes in it's hard-plates. There was even a section of his orange-brown hide showing through the breached red. "Note to self," he reminded himself for whatever possible centuries might come. "Always watch for rockets."

The blood made an orange trail behind him as his gait started limping, but gained more steadiness as Wrex started to systematically ignore the pain that he'd essentially dealt with. There would be no medigel, not with his armor in the state it was. But he wasn't going to stop. Actus had something to answer for, and all the mercs in the Terminus weren't going to be enough to stop Wrex from making sure that the turian despoiler got what was coming to him. When he reached where he'd dropped his shotgun, he realized the folly of grabbing it; it was in five parts. That just wasn't fair. He liked that shotgun. He then gave a sigh and a shrug, barely paying attention to Garrus and al'Wahim diving into cover far ahead of him, squatting over the corpse of the rocket launcher as the others tried to pin them down with fire.

Wrex shook his head, and then turned to the stairwell. He reached for the rifle on his back, but found that it wasn't where he left it. He let out a sigh, and ascended anyway. He'd done more with worse weapons. 'Aleena' and he had made a hell of a mess with nothing more than fifth rate guns and enough explosives to crack a planet's crust. He was practically chuckling as he reached the top of the stairs, his bleeding slowed to a trickle. As Wrex turned the corner, it was to be face-to-face with a human Eclipse merc. Wrex wasted no time introducing Eclipse to Urdnot Wrex's skull-plate. Even a military grade helmet wasn't enough to keep out a krogan head-butt, and the cracked pot oozed red as the human collapsed. Deftly as a pickpocket, Wrex took the gun from the dying mercenary, and turned his attention to the room at the end of the walkway. There couldn't be anywhere else Actus went.

Wrex stomped to that door, a rictus of somewhere between pain and focus on his face. With a roar, he kicked that door, causing it to dent and deform. He wasn't even metalbending at this point. He was just kicking it down out of sheer hate. "You can't hide from me, Actus! You should never have stolen from my family!"

Another kick, and the door crashed off of its rails and twisted to the floor. Wrex stomped into the room, and at a glance, saw Actus winding up. Wrex tried to bring his stolen rifle up, but it was on his wrong side, and if there was one advantage bending had in close-quarters, it was speed. The wound up water smashed into Wrex, driving him back a step. The second, even more powerful send him sliding along the metal flooring to the sound of squealing metal as the remnants of his armor dug into the plate. Wrex pointed his stolen rifle into the source of that deluge, and tried to get a bead, tried to fire. The deluge parted for just an instant, and Wrex cracked a smirk. That smirk was short lived, however, as the water twisted into a sort of pseudopod which twisted around the rifle, and tore it out of Wrex's grasp. Actus smirked in that greasy way he did, flicking the weapon behind him on the water he controlled.

"Your tricks won't save you forever!" Wrex promised.

"They have so far," Actus pointed out. Then, the deluge was slamming into Wrex once more, blasting through the sheilds and impacting his armor – and his exposed hide – directly. The impact of it was pushing him back once more. Slamming him up against the wall. Starting to drown him.

Don't let rage blind you. Blind people die faster.

Grandfather's words.

It was a strange thing, to let the rage drain away as somebody was killing you. But Grandfather was right. Like he was right about so many other things. And as soon as the rabid, bone-chewing hatred wasn't blocking his vision, making him stupid... he brought up one fist, and stomped the floor. And a wedge of metal was thrust up out of the floor, parting the deluge and allowing Wrex to breathe. As soon as his breath was returned, or rather, this lungs emptied of water, he kicked that wedge forward, coming within one whit of bad-luck of bisecting Actus right then and there. Wrex got a smile on his face, then. Because he was going to win.

"Fire up front! Jack, give us eyes," Tseng ordered, and the camera went forward. Jackie herself wasn't even looking. She just stared at her feet, where they were propped up on a box, as she poked and prodded the injured parts of herself. Liara turned back to the screen transfixed.

The camera came up on the back end of a war-zone. There were six humans on the ground. Some of them obviously dead. Others... not so much. Badly, badly injured, but unable even to sit up. "We've got Shepard!" Nilsdottir shouted back, upon catching a glance of the green armor ahead. There were two others with her. One of them looked barely conscious. Nilsdottir ran up.

"Jack! Stay close!" Tseng tried to order, but Nilsdottir was obviously ignoring her. Because her eyes were on Shepard, who was pointing a gun at children.

"Open the robes!" Shepard shouted. "Open them or I do it from here!"

"I... don't underst..." the child said, hands out to his sides.

"OPEN THEM!" Shepard roared. The child gave a glance to what might have been his sister, and then took a step toward Shepard. "One more step and you get a fifth eye! Open the robes!"

The child gave one more glance to its possible sibling, then broke out at a sprint directly at Shepard. She didn't even flinch. Just a loud report, and a child slid to a dead stop less than a meter from her. Shepard's gun then lifted to the other. "Last warning! Open the robes or that will happen to you!"

The child reached into her robes and pulled out something dark and segmented. The satchel-charge, like the one which killed Kalgot. The batarian girl then threw it away, her arms then pulling close as though in utmost fear. Shepard glared at the bomb, then at her. "I know that's not the only one you've got."

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to!"

"Bullshit!" Shepard said. "We both know..."

Shepard was cut off when the bomb, cast aside by the child, detonated, hurling the girl in a lifeless mound. Liara glanced to Jackie, who just shook her head. Then, back to the screen. A swelling of batarians seemed to pour in from every vent and door, instantly filling the room with flying metal, driving Shepard back behind the planter which served as cover.

She finally looked up, and spotted Nilsdottir. "Rook! Where's my fucking backup!" Shepard screamed.

"We are your backup!" Nilsdottir shouted back. "Kalgot's dead! So's everybody but Tseng and what's-his-face!"

Shepard's face began to pull into a rictus of rage. "God... damn... it," she hissed. She pushed the soldier next to her, and the woman slumped over sideways. "Xi? Xi come on!"

"Where's Kiel?" Tseng asked, after coming to a halt opposite Nilsdottir flanking Shepard.

"He's about a dozen corpses that way," Shepard pointed down the door which had been blasted shut and filled with rubble. "We need to bring down that scrambler! We don't have the men for this!"

"Where is it?" Tseng asked.

"Take a guess!" Shepard said, throwing an angry nod back behind her, where the batarians were laying down a withering degree of fire. Nilsdottir kept leaning out, firing a couple of rounds out of her shotgun, but it was only a few seconds of exposure to break her barriers, and she obviously didn't feel like dying. Dying then would have caused some sort of temporal paradox, after all.

There was a clatter, of a grenade landing near Shepard. Nilsdottir saw it, and flicked out a barrier between Shepard and the bomb. It still detonated, though, and if the poor soldier on that side of Shepard was not already dead, the grenade would have ensured it as it covered that side of the room in toxic and incendiary white phosphorus.

"Tseng, I'm gonna go for it," Nilsdottir shouted across the room through the gunfire.

"That bullshit won't work twice! It's suicide!" Tseng countered her.

"Well, if I die, tell Dad I'm sorry I pissed him off so much," Nilsdottir said with an obvious shrug. She almost got out of cover, but the still unnamed soldier grabbed her and pulled her back. "Hey! Let me go!"

"You've gotten a direct order. There's another way..." the voice came directly into Nilsdottir's microphone.

"...no more," the words seemed to stand oddly clear against the gunfire, which hadn't abated in the slightest. Nilsdottir's camera turned toward Shepard, where she was squatted up against a slowly breaking planter. Jackie sighed, and finally got off of where she was sitting on the table and moved slowly and stiffly to the back of the other two women in the room.

"This is where things get a bit crazy," Nilsdottir said, her voice distant; haunted, even.

"Shepard, we're going to need some covering fire!" Tseng shouted. But Shepard wasn't listening to him. "Shepard, are you listening to me?"

It was obvious that she wasn't, because her knees were drawing up, and her hands splayed across her helmet, fingers seeming to dig in. Then, with an almost stunned or drunken movement, they pulled the helmet off of her head, letting it roll away. "Shepard, what are you doing?" the other soldier's voice demanded.

"...I've had enough..." again, the words cutting through the din, despite their relative quiet. How, Liara couldn't say. Almost like everything in the recording had politely stepped aside so that she could be audible. Only it hadn't quieted. It was just as loud as ever, but Shepard's words were still clear.

Another grenade, this one kicked back through a gap in a door, to blast the room behind it with choking and burning. Tseng turned his attention back to Shepard. "Shepard's losing it! Nilsdottir!"

"NO MORE."

Shepard's hands were in her hair, her eyes pressed shut, knees pulled up as though a terrified child. But the sound which came from her throat was anything but. Her eyes opened, but they didn't seem right. Like there was something... sparking in them. Bit by bit, surging brighter and brighter.

"What in the name of..." Tseng began. And when he did, the green of Shepard's eyes was lost completely to blazing white, and the wordless howl from her throat bore her up and out of cover, her fists clenched and out to her sides. Behind her... there was a flash of golden light, like a grenade going off, but it didn't bathe or consume her. When Shepard turned – without yet touching the ground – the humans seemed to know what this meant.

Liara glanced behind her, to Jackie. "What is happening to Shepard?" she asked.

"Avatar State," Jackie said. Liara turned back to the screen, watching as the even then awe-struck Nilsdottir beheld a demigod coming to life, a sphere of solid air deflecting hundreds of rounds of incoming fire every second without so much as a thought. Then, with another roar, a wave of flame seared away from her, melting the planter and scouring the points beyond. The impact of it consumed Xi completely, and knocked Nilsdottir out of her own cover, sprawled onto the floor. Shepard's white-eyed glare turned, and when she spun back, it was to a brutal wave of a hand. The flames began to pulse forward, brutalizing the batarian line ahead of them. Tseng tried to move up, to get behind something a little less perforated. Nilsdottir just scooted backward, away from the Avatar in a rage.

One of the batarians in the edge of Nilsdottir's shot raised a rocket launcher, and sent the missile streaking toward the immobile Shepard. Shepard... punched it. The explosion washed over her, but didn't so much as scuff her armor. Jackie let out a quiet chuckle at that. "Yeah, we're still not exactly sure how she managed to pull that one. Not in the typical toolbox, I hear," she muttered. Liara, though, was just about ready to believe anything. Then, Shepard's hand flew back, and lightning began to rake off of it. One capricious beam of it cut across Tseng, and cut indeed. He fell into two. But Shepard's blind wrath was all the more powerful, when it was directed forward rather than the thoughtless slaughter which landed around her. The bolt of lightning which shot forward seemed larger around than Shepard was tall, blasting through the batarians, their barricade, and the walls beyond them. When the view returned to normality, the shot continuing after that bolt, the camera could pick out that the bolt had traveled also through the armored walls of the bunker, and melted at least a hundred meters of rock beyond it.

"...any members of the ground squad? Do you read us?" the comms opened, bleeding into Nilsdottir's feed.

"Gods help us," Nilsdottir whispered.

"Say again, Private?"

"ENOUGH!" Shepard's voice was a thousand voices, all pressing over themselves, reflecting across the video clear as a bell in the Armali morning. For some reason, every word she said... just stood out in the recording. She had no idea why. And apparently, nobody else did, either. The Avatar made a motion, as though tearing something apart. When she did, the entire room seemed to shake. No, not seemed. The ground split, and the still unnamed soldier was swallowed up in an expanding breach which otherwise began under where Shepard was floating, and plunged out of sight, growing wider, wider. The stone in the distant cracked and warped, and then snapped.

"Holy Sh... Is that an earthquake?" the voice on the other end of the line asked.

There was a moment of shocked quiet, as the Avatar ripped the bunker in half. "This is Nilsdottir! Everybody else is dead!" she finally said. "...Shepard is the Avatar!"

"You're going to have to repeat that last part, Private," the voice said, cautiously.

"It's exactly what I said..." Nilsdottir said, her voice quiet, her usual foul bluster completely gone. "...Shepard is the Avatar. And the gods have mercy on us all."

Then, with a howl, Shepard swung down a fist, filling that gulf below her with flames, as white and hot as the surface of a pulsar. A hand rose into Nilsdottir's view, as she tried to hold back the blinding light of it. She didn't move. She had nowhere to go. With one last howl, Shepard shot down into that burning breach, and out of shot. The camera shifted, and then seemed to raise for a moment, before it tilted and lowered again. It and the helmet it was built into rolled away, and as it did, it showed Nilsdottir, staring ahead, stunned, at the destruction around her.

Jackie reached past them, and shut the recording off. "You don't need to see the rest of it. Just me blubbering like some fucking six year old," Jackie shook her head.

"...is that what all Avatars are like?" Liara asked.

Jackie nodded slowly. "When you piss 'em off enough," she said. "Some of the guys who got left back near the first ambushes got out with pretty severe injuries. Most people had some terrible fucking PTSD. Kiel scrubbed a Six over it, I hear."

"What?" Tali asked.

"He's crazy," Jackie explained flatly. "I was the only one who survived seeing her like that. Nobody else did."

"Has she not been like this since?" Liara asked.

"Course not. And you can thank your fuckin' stars that she hasn't," Jackie said. She nodded toward the screen. "It's different when you're there. You could... feel it. It was right here," she said, prodding fingers between her extremely modest breasts. "That anger wasn't natural, and it wasn't normal. It wanted everything to die, and it didn't care what got in the way," she slumped against the wall at the far side from Tali and Liara. "I have no idea how I survived that. I shouldn't have. I should have been right where what's-his-ass was, got smoked when he did. But I didn't."

"What happened?" Tali asked. "After that, I mean."

Nilsdottir stared forward, past all of them. Past the Normandy, it seemed like. "Reinforcements came, but the batarians were all dead. All of them. Four thousand. The base was obliterated. Our squads had taken ninety-seven percent casualties – seventy-eight percent KIA – but the batarians were routed from Torfan. We'd won. Didn't feel like a win, though," she said.

"And they let her stay in the military?" Tali asked. Well, more like wanted clarification on.

Jackie scoffed. "Shit, they promoted her," she said. She looked up at the quarian. "We didn't even think we'd find an Avatar again. So when it shows up, and it's a raging, heavy-drinking soldier, they jumped right on 'er and planted a flag saying 'we're the Alliance, all you arrogant fuckers can back off' on her ass."

"And after that?" Liara asked.

Jackie shrugged. "I get a medal, a promotion, which lasted around three months until I was demoted again. Shepard got taken to some facility somewhere on Earth to get trained. I spent the next few years with the Corsairs, since the Brass thought I might get into less trouble there, and they weren't about to shelve one of the 'heroes of Torfan'. I was out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere when something like the real-story got out. Hero became butcher. I was nobody, so nobody cared about me. Kiel, like I said, lost his damned mind. Shepard, though? It stuck on her. And I think she prefers it that way."

Liara looked to Tali, who was rubbing her mask as though she could knead her brow. She then turned back to Nilsdottir. "Why did you show us this? Weren't you afraid what we would do if we found out the truth?"

Jackie shrugged. "Maybe I'm just tired," she said. "Tired of lying about it. Tired of the bullshit," she shook her head slowly. " ...maybe I just need somebody to see this and... understand it. See what happened, like I did. Know what I know. Maybe, I just can't keep this inside my head anymore. I've got enough nightmares. I'd like to have one less."

The ice crashed against the shield which Wrex had called into place around his arm. In its way, he was like the Jyorgul Hoplites of old, only his spear was a shotgun and his armor was a fritzing kinetic barrier. It had been a long time since the krogan bronze age. Wrex pressed forward, gaining speed with each crash of a foot, and every assault against his great and adamant shield became more and more muted, futile.

With a roar and a heave, he smashed that shield into the face of Tonn Actus. The clang of metal against metallic head resounded, but not as deeply as Wrex would have liked; the impact didn't dash Actus along the wall, but rather sent him flying through an overlooking window. The turian landed at a roll amongst the warehousing, only pausing briefly before shaking out the stun the krogan had dealt him, and then got unsteadily to his feet. He pointed up at where Wrex now glared down at him. "You'll have to do better than that, you hump-backed animal!"

"Watch me!" Wrex shouted back, and prepared to throw himself through that window after Actus, but even as he reached the threshold, metal shutters slammed into place. Wrex tried to barrel right through them, but they let out a harsh electric zap when he did. Wrex snarled, but his eyes instantly flicked to the speaker in the center of the room, as it crackled to life.

"Can't have a dangerous animal like you running loose," Actus said. "'S soon as my partner cleans up the rest of your lackies, you and I are going to have a nice little chat."

"It'll be over your corpse!" Wrex shouted.

"Oh, and you'll likely be missing your limbs when we have it," Actus continued, probably because the speaker was one-way. Wrex wasn't sure how Actus would pull something like that off.

"Emergency decompression in progress. Safety protocols overridden."

"Well, that answers my question," Wrex said flatly, likely the last thing which would be said in this room, because as soon as he did, there was a great sucking, all of the air being pulled out of the room and deposited somewhere else. Wrex, of course, held his breath. He wasn't about to let something as trivial as a bit of decompression slow him down. He stared at the shutters. Lost cause; he couldn't metalbend without touching them; that would cramp his muscles; cramped muscles couldn't metalbend. He glanced beside the shutter, to the wall. A stern kick brought a smirk to wide, scaled lips. Eternally the dumbass, Actus had electrocuted the shutters, but not the wall.

A kick, silent in the vacuum, deflected the wall a solid half-meter. A second, somewhat more unsteady where Wrex slipped a bit in blue blood, another quarter. The third, with a silent roar, caused the entire tonne of Wrex to burst through the wall, pushing past the air which blew past him into the void behind him. He landed hard on his knee and a fist, and glanced aside to see Actus fleeing into a deeper part of the bunker. "This isn't over, Actus! You promised me a little chat!" Wrex shouted after him. The turian was fast, as fear gave his feet wings.

Wrex was faster, as hate gave his feet rockets.

Wrex hurled himself after Actus, firing the stolen shotgun at the departing turian, and only getting blue-spark impacts of occasional hits of his barriers. There was a reason he preferred things like the Graal or the Eviscerator; they had precision. This garbage couldn't hit a barn you were standing in. Wrex hurled the gun aside, and let his pace grow ever more ground-eating. There was a whine ahead of him. The doors were slamming shut. Not on his watch.

Wrex hurled himself through those bulkheads just as they collided with each other, and when he pushed himself up off the ground, he found himself... in a sea of ancient opulence. Every shelf held weapons from some species or another, from all of the ages of warfare and vice. Weapons from turians, humans, salarians, asari... even some Vorcha back-blades stood proudly displayed in all their savage glory.

Wrex only gave himself a moment to stare in understandable awe. Because after that, the felt something brutal slam into his shield-arm, driving back against his chest, and then, pain through that. Wrex glanced down to the new spot of flowing orange. He didn't have that much more blood to lose; he knew from experience exactly how much he could part from and still stay standing, and a few more sniper-shots like that might be enough to send him into a long, black sleep. So Wrex took a page from Actus' book, and ducked into the stacks of armaments.

"You've caused me a peck of trouble, krogan," Actus shouted through the warehouse. "I might lose some valuable business with Eclipse over your merry band of trouble-makers."

"And what are you going to do about that?" Wrex asked drolly, as he moved past some of the elegant but no-doubt deadly polearms once omnipresent on Thessia.

"I figure I might invite some of my 'friends' over. Have some stew, served in your skull plate. Of course, you'll still be there; I know the trick of popping those things off without killing you."

That got Wrex's teeth grinding. It wasn't just a thing of male-pride to value one's headplate; without it, the slightest bump on the head would be lethal. Well, slight, by a krogan's standard. It would still need to break their actual skull, first. Still, to something which was as subconsciously resilient as the krogan, having even a tiny bit of that resilience stolen from them felt like being hopelessly crippled.

He had to find a way to shut this turian up. Do it effectively. Do it despite the floor obviously being prepared to thwart Thunderwalkers like him. And do it with weapons several thousand years out of date.

Easy.

Actus kept stalking through the stacks, with his batarian produced sniper-rifle to his shoulder. Any sign of red or brown, and he'd pull the trigger. Say what you would about that filth, he knew how to snipe. Then again, show Wrex a turian who couldn't, and it'd be a first. While Actus was searching for a krogan, that self-same krogan was searching for something else.

"You know, I think your kind got off a bit lightly, considering the trouble you caused," Actus said. "The salarians shouldn't have sterilized you with the genophage. That was their mistake. They should have just eradicated you. You're a fossil which hasn't realized its extinct yet, krogan. The sooner you realize it, the better. And the better for me, since your junk will quintuple in price, once there's nobody alive left to make more of it."

Wrex held his tongue, hearing his entire people's martial heritage reduced to the bottom line of a pirate and smuggler. Wrex glanced aside, and did a double-take at what he saw. Oh, now that was interesting.

Wrex, in his youth, hadn't been interested in anything but what all young krogan were; fighting. Any fight at all. Against the turians, against the asari, or against themselves, it didn't matter. Didn't matter to Wrex, either. Grandfather changed that. He taught Wrex that the krogan had been more, once. That in the ages of steel and sail, they had been proud, upright. They had stood at the bottom of the food-chain, and with bronze and iron they beat back the night, fought the forests and the beasts. They carved an empire into the bloody corpses of everything that vibrant Tuchanka-which-once-was had to offer.

And it started here.

"You can't hide from me forever," Actus said, turning Wrex's words back on him. "Not here. You're in my hunting grounds now. I know them as well as my own face."

Wrex didn't wager that Actus looked in the mirror very often. Almost reverently, Wrex lifted the spear from its pedestal. The alarm it triggered was lost in the din already swallowing the bunker. It wasn't much to look at in terms of ornateness; it was a bronze head, almost half a meter long, its base once flanked with spurs which curved up and out. The spurs were missing on this one, or else and more likely never there; this was a weapon for krogan to hunt other krogan. The weapon continued back, its haft a hollow pipe of bronze which extended back another meter, before it was bound by spike and gut to the wooden haft. It was massively heavy, but sat in Wrex's hand as though it were made for it. In its way, it was.

"Come on out, krogan," Actus chided. "Let's end this, once and for all."

Wrex turned a corner, getting a glimpse of the filth who thought to plunder Wrex's people, as so many had before. He was still dribbling blue blood down his nose and mandibles, almost hiding the fact that he was bald-faced. Almost, but not quite. There were many things which people would call krogan; strong, tough, angry, ornery, dangerous. But sneaky? They'd never claim that. But then again, they didn't understand what the krogan had to surmount in order to even reach as high as they did before they bombed themselves to oblivion. If you hunted a nathak, you had to flank it. If you wanted to survive a Thresher Maw, you had to hide.

Krogan were perfectly capable of being sneaky. They just usually didn't bother. Right now, perhaps out of a sense of racial pride, Wrex bothered.

"I'm getting tired of this game, krogan," Actus said, as Wrex slid through the shelves. Not silently, not in this armor, but the incidental noises he made were swallowed by the blasting, the thuds against the walls as bullets slammed into metal. As rockets detonated against goods. "I thought your kind were supposed to be warriors. Not craven cowards."

Wrex steeled himself, hefting that spear a little higher. Strange how he'd thought of the Jyorgul hoplites. It was a good kind of strange. He was behind the turian now, that hood-like back which almost formed a hump on the armor swaying, as Actus tried to get Wrex into his crosshairs. So close. Close enough.

"Actus?" Wrex asked quietly. The turian glanced over his shoulder, black-rimmed eyes going very wide. But as he tried to turn, to put another bullet through Wrex's already pocked hide, the krogan's arm was launching forward, giving strength and speed to a weapon which had bathed in the blood of innumerable beasts from ancient yore. Blood, red, brown, orange and green had slaked the thirst of this weapon hundreds of times. Today, as the spear slammed through the weakest part of the turian's chestplate, right under the arm, it supped sweetly on blue.

The spear punctured deep, bypassing the kinetic barrier completely by its low velocity, and caused all manner of havoc. The hated thug took in a breath, as the rifle fell from his hands, and slumped against the massive weight of the spear until its replaced haft clacked against the floor. He then coughed, letting out a spray of blue onto his armor and the floor under him, before more blue began to dribble down and turn that spray into a pool.

Actus stared up at Wrex, eyes fearful, desperate. He hacked and coughed. "...I..."

"I'll see you in hell, Actus," Wrex said, as he wrapped a massive fist around the spear. "Although, I intend to take the long way to get there."

With a twist, he dug that spear even deeper, and tore apart the turian's heart. And with that, Urdnot Wrex was almost done. He pushed the spear, and let the turian impaled on it slump onto his other side, leaving the weapon thrust into the air like a standard which had lost its flag. And with that, Wrex began to limp back through the lines, looking for something which had belonged to Grandfather. Something which Grandfather would want in Wrex's hands.

Shepard wasn't sure what hit her when she essentially cartwheeled over a bin of red sand, landing in an inelegant heap on its far side. The fine powder, kicked up by gunplay and her own harsh introduction, hung in the air like a shimmering cloud of addictive cinnamon, and likely didn't do her any favors in recollecting her wits. Even small doses of red sand could wreak merry hell on the nervous systems of a biotic and send them on a trip the likes of which they wouldn't soon forget. Much as Shepard would never admit it, that illustrious company included her. As she unsteadily tried for her feet, reaching for a rifle which was wedged under a shelf three stacks away, trying to aim down a target which didn't stay still for more than a second with a weapon she didn't have, it occurred to Shepard that she might have been better off if she'd actually accepted Master Norgeh's 'refresher' on airbending. While she still couldn't twitch a breeze, at least she'd have a bit more experience in how they moved. So she could shoot the annoying blue one that kept hounding her.

She reached for that missing rifle at least twice before her concussed brain clued in, and went for her side-arm instead. She held it before her, unsteadily, and tried to guess where that asari pirate would be approaching from. Instinct far older than her martial training kept her eyes high, near the tops of the stacks. She knew that the others were fighting out there, trying to grind down the pirates, mind body and soul. But she was here, trapped in a fight she couldn't win against something which was just outright better than her. She was too hurt, to muddled to be angry at that.

So when the blue woman in the black armor came to a skidding halt at ground level – far lower than Shepard would have expected of any human airbender – Shepard didn't have much of a chance to pull that trigger before the asari swept through a twisting motion, which both dropped her out of where Shepard's headshot would have gone, had the pistol been pointing the right way, and sent out another column of wind which blasted Shepard straight back. She hurtled backward until she slammed into a rack full of what felt like low-priced, knock-off designer clothing. Mostly, she believed that because it didn't hurt as much as flying forward, sideways, or backward into the dozens of other containers of guns, electronics, and densely packed drugs that she'd made acquaintances with in the last few minutes.

She felt an arm grab hers, and instantly, her instincts rallied into her other hand, pointing the pistol at who dared to manhandle her. She came within a blink of pulling the trigger, staring up at a grey face with black-and-blue eyes. It wasn't until that half of an instant it took for Shepard to recognize this turian that she managed to keep herself from painting a warehouse with cream-of-Garrus.

"Commander, we're getting a bit pinched here," Garrus reported as he pulled Shepard to her feet. Shepard glanced aside, and saw that al'Wahim was back-flat against a wall, watching the warning display on her rifle with the intensity of somebody who was trying to ward the end of one's life. And in her way, she was. There wasn't any obvious sign to Shepard, but the Si Wongi popped out out of her hiding place, and began to fire a stream of hyper-sonic metal at one of the humans who had decided that money was worth more than honor. Even as their shots burst her shields and dug into the thick ablative plates which covered her heavy hardsuit, she continued to fire, until his own barriers gave way, and then, the wall behind him was painted red. With that, al'Wahim pulled herself back into that nook she'd picked out, dropping the rifle to the floor. It absolutely radiated heat, and the gunnery-chief waved her hand as though it had been burnt. "Where did our favorite krogan go?" Garrus asked.

"Lost track of him about a dozen concussions back," Shepard said, pointing vaguely in a direction she wasn't remotely sure was correct. "Where's Alenko?"

"I'm not sure," Garrus said. "He peeled off just after we got in. Why haven't you asked him?"

"Spoofed comms," Shepard said. Garrus gave a glance to al'Wahim, who returned it. "Gotta blow the jammer."

"There is no jammer here, Commander," al'Wahim said with a note of dubiousness. Shepard blinked a few times, and shook her head. Of course there wasn't. This wasn't... She glanced aside, trying to see where the asari had gone. She was taking her sweet time.

"Right," Shepard said a bit strongly. Perhaps to hide that she'd made that mistake of time and place. "There's an airbend..."

Shepard was cut off by a blast which sent her off of her feet with all of the brute force of the tail-slap of a bison. Her first impact was with Garrus, which caused the turian to tumble with her. Somehow, the turian ended up on top of her, rifle still in hand, and tracking back at the blue woman whose eyes widened just a bit at facing somebody who had more togetherness of shit than Shepard did at the moment. The crack-crack-crack of his rifle's lethal intent was muted somewhat by the asari twisting the wind under her feet and racing straight up the rack, so that the trail of missed shots followed her toward the roof, at which point the asari bounded off of the ball, and as she fell, her body glowed blue. The impact of her fist against the floor was enough to send cracks through the reinforced concrete, but it was the biotic shockwave which did the most hurt. It hurled Shepard straight up into Garrus' back, and hurled Garrus into the air like a rubber ball bouncing off of another rubber ball.

Whatever turian profanity that Garrus had lined up for this moment was lost in its release, as the asari made a twisting thrust, and a ball of air smashed at the turian's armor, sending him rocketing along the tops of the shelves before colliding side-on into the catwalks, and subsequently dropping out of sight. The asari had a smirk on her face as she advanced on Shepard, one stomping foot at a time. But just as she came within two paces of Shepard, the Si Wongi attacked. Not with rifle or pistol, and certainly not with bending, but with a flurry of simple and iron-fisted assaults. The first blow blindsided the pirate, a fist smashing along teeth and sending blue blood spraying, but now that the asari was aware of al'Wahim's presence, every other of her technically perfect assaults were ducked, sidestepped, and dodged with contemptuous ease. It reached a point where, despite the Si Wongi's best efforts – which were without any doubts quite good indeed – the asari managed to stand solidly at the woman's back, rotating with her as she spun to elbow or kick. At least, until al'Wahim remembered something that even Shepard didn't; when fighting a hostile airbender, back up.

Asha hurled herself straight back, and again the asari had a surprise on her hands. The derisive expression on her face gave way to a start, and then she had to almost hurl herself out of the way so she didn't get pinned against the shelves by Asha's back. But the asari kept her footing, rounded, and with a fist glowing with biotic force, she punched al'Wahim directly in her sternum. The deep and resounding thud of it was an expression of the force which then sent al'Wahim straight through an entire row of stolen goods, and the hole she created filled itself as the row above that one collapsed down into the breach.

"There we go. Just the two of us, now," she said. That voice sounded oddly familiar. Or maybe it was just the head-injuries talking. Even as Shepard was still with great difficulty forcing herself to her feet, fumbling for the rifle which al'Wahim had left on the floor. She took a moment to inspect her fingernails, adding even more insult to Shepard's capabilities. "I honestly thought that somebody who was as vaunted as the humans' Avatar would be a bit more of a challenge. I guess that just shows that whatever tricks you have, they're only yours until somebody better takes them."

Shepard raised the rifle and fired, but her aim was well off, and the rifle barked flying metal both toward the asari and indeed everything else in the region. The shells spanged off the purple field which the pirate was keeping active with her mind alone, leaving her a bit annoyed, but utterly unharmed. The asari made a clenching fist, and Shepard felt her body being crushed, her arms being trapped at her side. And then, her boots started to lift from the floor. "What a name I'll make for myself," she said. "The first asari to kill the Avatar in a fair fight. Nobody will cross Dantius after this."

The asari reared back a fist, alight with power, and Shepard's mind radically raced through all that she knew, all that she had memory of, trying to find something which would see her out of this. No movement, no metalbending. No waterbending, either. She couldn't bloodbend with her mind, and was certain that she was too concussed to try firebending with it. After all, she liked having limbs. Salvation would have to come from within. It wasn't like anybody else was going to save her.

Only, somebody else did.

Landing like a minor god of ancient lore, Alenko slammed onto the concrete much as she had, although to less cracking and more directed shockwave. The asari managed to bound out of its way, causing another wall of goods, stolen, illicit, or both, to crumble. Shepard struggled against her immaterial bonds, but as easily win against gravity itself. Odd, how once in such a fight, she would have succeeded. The asari seemed to instantly be at Shepard's back.

"So the Avatar has a loyal hound," the asari said. Alenko rose, his eyes hard as armor plating. The asari leaned in closer. "Stay back, or your Avatar gets a slight alteration to her anatomy, one I'm fairly sure humans can't survive."

Alenko stared at her, blue light sparking off of him, and his hand went to his sidearm. The asari shifted so that Shepard, and her light hardsuit was between she and he. The pressure holding Shepard immobile and in place wasn't so much that she couldn't speak, however.

"Shoot through," Shepard ordered, teeth grit.

"With all due respect, Commander, that's a terrible plan," Alenko said, his voice very calm, even if his eyes were anything but. The blue light around him pulsed, and there was something like a crackling sensation, as though she was being pushed slowly through crumbly cookies in zero gravity – and where had that metaphor come from, Shepard wondered? – before her momentum began to increase as though she were falling. But she was falling directly toward Alenko. Alenko pulled his sidearm, and even as Shepard was caught and set onto the ground, the blue fading around the lieutenant, he was firing. The asari ducked and weaved as she had before, this time bounding back and landing to bound out of the way. Alenko swept his other hand forward and up, and even before she landed, there was a distortion in the air, pale-blue-green light. She started to drift upward again.

With a quite unladylike snarl, she thrust out her arms, and the haze around her shattered into something like vanishing glass, and her feet returned to the floor. Shepard brought the rifle up again, and this time, when she fired, it was much more accurate. Still moot, as the biotic cast out a hand and a barrier of purple light deflected those bullets away from her. Then, she hurled a black bolt forward, and it seemed to detonate in front of Alenko. Then, everything around the two humans began to lift and rotate, falling around a point of absolute gravity created by the Asari's mind. A Singularity.

Shepard lost sight of the asari for a moment but when she craned her neck back around, the woman was running, first at an angle to them, and then up a wall. "Got any..." Shepard began to Alenko, but Alenko was... smirking.

"Grit your teeth," Alenko said quickly, and then followed suit. With a flick of a hand, he cast a distortion of space into the heart of the Singularity. Which, as it had many times before, proven by Nilsdottir a hundred times over, detonated it. Shepard was cast sideways into a crate which dumped motherboards onto her back. Alenko, given a bit more room to tumble, landed at a knee, just as the asari began her downward plunge, blue light almost making her shine like a plummeting star. And Alenko's fist was almost as bright as she.

She was coming down, to crush him. He was pressing up, to crush her. The main difference between the asari and the human biotic? He wasn't multitasking to keep up a kinetic barrier. His uppercut flashed with blue-black light, and the bolt of the Throw, the twelve hundred Newtons of unbridled force, raced upward, into the shimmering purple field the asari was generating. But because she was trying to attack and defend in the same moment, she couldn't do either as well as one alone. So the bolt sloughed a few 'layers' losing several hundred Newtons of impact when it struck, but that was also moot, because it struck the asari right on the bottom of the chin.

The wrenching crack of the asari's head being folded backwards was audible even to Shepard's compromised hearing. Alenko didn't even bother checking the fallen pirate, who had landed so gracelessly on the concrete; because of the way asari brains were shaped and positioned, a broken neck was all but inevitably fatal. Alenko helped Shepard once again retake her feet. "Are you alright, Commander?"

"I've had worse..." she said.

"You don't always have to compare things to Torfan," Alenko pointed out.

"...still had worse," Shepard reiterated. She turned, marveling that the gunfire was starting to die down. Shepard almost forgot about the comms, but flicked them on after that moment's confusion. "What's our situation out there?"

"All are accounted for, Commander," al'Wahim said, sounding a bit banged up.

"I'm not reading any more hostiles, Shepard," Garrus chimed in.

"Then we're done here," Shepard said.

"I have to agree," Wrex's voice came from nearby. He was walking out with a tarpaulin bundle under an arm, his own armor absolutely blown to shit. "Actus is dealt with. I got what I wanted. You can do whatever you want with the rest of it."

Shepard glanced at the tarp. "Well," she said, a smirk pulling onto a bruised face. "Let's see it."

Wrex nodded, and pulled a box of stolen Omnitools down and set the tarp atop it, before rolling it along and showing the massive piece of armor within. It was thick, it was strangely elegant for something to be worn by a krogan. It looked to be far lighter than what Wrex had been wearing, but somehow, far more resilient. But one thing snapped Shepard's capacity for disbelief. Namely that it was...

"...it's pink," Shepard said. "Why would Actus paint it pink?"

"Actus didn't paint it. This is the color it's always been," Wrex said, a little annoyed.

"...but it's pink," Shepard repeated.

"So has been the color of Urdnot in the oldest days. Some people remember a time before the red and black," Wrex said as he rolled the tarp back up. "Grandfather liked things... the old way."

Shepard gave a glance to Alenko, who could only shrug. She mouthed the words '...it's pink' to him, but he only shook his head.

"Do you mind calling this in to the Hierarchy when you go?" Garrus asked as he rounded the corner. "There's a few things that my species might want to collect from Actus' vault. Some things I'm fairly certain are irreplacable relics."

"You made a quick trip," al'Wahim muttered as she limped into sight.

"I get around," Garrus shrugged.

"I'll inform Hackett. He can tell whoever he pleases," Shepard said, beginning the aching, painful walk toward the doors. But then, she stopped. She turned, and faced the asari who had beaten Shepard to within an inch of her life.

"What is it, Shepard?" Alenko asked, catching Shepard's shift in attention. Shepard just beckoned her to follow him.

"Pink, eh? Don't see that on krogan armor very much," Garrus noted at their backs.

"Another word, and I'll turn it blue. Immediately," Wrex said humorlessly. Shepard slowly bent down and took the pirate's blue hand, and wrestled with the omnitool which was strapped to the wrist of it. After a few tugs, she managed to get it off of the dead asari, and handed it to Alenko.

"Run me the mail files," Shepard said. Alenko nodded, plugging the Omni into his own. In a moment, and a flash of orange light, he was cracking into it. "Who is she?"

"The most common address is Dahlia. Wait, I got a communique from Illium. She has a sister, named Tyrienne Dantius."

"And another named Nassana," Shepard finished. "That bitch played me to get rid of an inconvenience."

Alenko's expression became concerned. "Are you certain about that?" he asked. "That's a dangerous conclusion to jump to."

Shepard just turned a glare on him. "One day, you're going to get fucked over in such an enormous way that you'll never see the galaxy the same way again. You'll see it the way I do. And on that day, your life expectancy will go up by about two decades," Shepard said darkly.

Alenko shook his head, but didn't answer her. She thought it was because she'd gotten the last word. Alenko, on the other hand, said nothing, because there was nothing he could say that wouldn't make her feel worse, and that wasn't anything he wanted to do to her.

Shepard walked toward the exit, with a battered group all with their own limps and sprains, heading back out to the surface of Tuntau.

It was more painful than anything that the turian could have imagined. He'd been exposed to vacuum as part of his Ranger training, back when he was fifteen. Most didn't, since it was so singularly unpleasant that few would ever require it. That his commander did was much of the reason why Severus went private-contractor the first conceivable opportunity; if this was the kind of thing that the Hierarchy expected Severus to do on a daily basis, then he wanted nothing to do with it. But as painful as vacuum was, somehow, overpressure was worse.

There was a ringing in his ears which wouldn't go away; that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the pain behind his eyes. It felt like they'd been crushed, pulped, sifted, and then put back into his head at random. But he could still see. And his hands still worked. He crawled across the floor, to a particular turian, another victim of the overpressure. Somebody who just couldn't get her helmet on in time. Yulia. He flopped out beside her, and gently took her face in his hands. Those eyes, green like gems shining all the brighter for the black around them. And now, they stared blankly.

"I promise, I'll get 'em for you," Severus slurred, unable to hear is own words. His teeth ground as his mandibles flicked and fluttered, barely able to contain the insatiable wrath boiling in his heart. Whoever those fuckers were, they'd made a huge mistake. There wasn't much Severus was truly proud to have in his life, but Yulia was it. She was... tough, smart, and in her own strange way, innocent. Yes, a sniper who could and had popped heads from five kilometers out, but there was a way she saw the galaxy which made Severus... hopeful. But no more. They'd taken her from him.

With a snarl which would have been appropriate in a krogan, Severus forced himself to his feet, against all the pain of his joints and the shortness of his breath. He stooped to take her gun with his other hand, and held out two rifles dead ahead of him, at the doors which were the only way back to the outside world. Severus would have revenge. For Yulia.

The doors slid open with a beep.

"DIE YOU MOTH–"

Severus was cut off as a green-armored human woman put a bullet through his skull, even as she limped through the doorway. The turian collapsed straight back, into a pool of his own blue-black blood. Another turian, in black-and-blue armor, turned to that human with a wry turian grin. "Remind me never to try to outdraw you," Garrus said, as Shepard lowered her sidearm and returned it to her hip.

Shepard, for all her many hurts, just grunted at that, and continued over the newest of many corpses, before resealing her helmet, and walking back out into the pressure of Tuntau.

"We're roughly two kilometers out from that distress signal the XO found," al'Wahim said over her shoulder, as Shepard rubbed the back of her head, now that she wasn't wearing her helmet. Her face was essentially one massive bruise, and she hadn't gotten around to healing it yet. There'd be time for that later. What occupied her attention, at this moment, was Wrex. The old krogan was staring at a chunk of pink shin-plating like he'd never seen its like.

"You're welcome," Shepard said flatly.

"I didn't thank you," Wrex said just as flatly.

"Not big on appreciation, are you?" Shepard asked.

"On showing it to humans? No," Wrex said. He sighed, and ran fingers along the smooth metal. "This is the kind of craftskroganship that you just don't see these days. This armor... it's probably older than your civilization. Two thousand years if it was a day. Piece of crap, by today's standards. But..." he shook his head, as though he didn't have the words to describe what he was feeling.

"But it's yours," Shepard finished for him. Wrex flicked a red eye toward her, and for a change, it wasn't baleful. Just... thoughtful, maybe? "You obviously respected your grandfather quite a bit. Why?"

"Why does anybody respect their teacher? Because they learned the lessons that'll keep you alive before you did," Wrex said testily. But then, he clicked his broad tongue in his mouth, and shook his head. "No. That's not even close to it. Grandfather... he was insane. That's the only way I could describe him. He thought about things in ways that people don't think about things. Talked about things that people don't talk about. And he was obsessed with the old."

"Rachni War?" Shepard asked.

Wrex shook his head slowly. "Older."

Shepard frowned. "What's before the Rachni War?" she asked him. He glanced to her, and settled himself into his seat a bit more concretely.

"Shepard, have you ever wondered why Grandfather was fighting on Rannoch when I met him?" Wrex asked.

"I'm going to guess money," she answered dryly.

"Yes, but for a very strange reason," Wrex said. "There was a radio telescope, right around four thousand lightyears from Aralakh. He took every credit he got from the war on Rannoch, and a few other conflicts before that, to buy positioning and readout rights to anything that telescope found over a two year period. Every. Credit."

"Why would he want that?" Shepard asked, but Kaiden perked up.

"He was trying to read radio signals from Tuchanka, wasn't he?" Alenko asked. Wrex nodded.

"We had only a thousand years between gunpowder and the nuclear bomb. We had only a century between radio broadcast, and every radio going silent," the krogan said grimly. He let out a small, almost galaxy-weary sigh. "Like everything else we did back then, we filled that tiny span of years with as much of the krogan people as we could. We had culture, Shepard. We had art. We were a proud people, once. We had something to be proud of."

"Your grandfather was... what? Trying to watch old vids using a telescope?" she asked.

"Don't say it like that, human," Wrex said, his tone testy. "He was trying to recover some fragment of our past, when Tuchanka was the most hellish paradise in the galaxy. Our songs echoed through every street. Our cinema captured the glory of the wild forests, the untameable seas, and the people who had survived both. And in a nuclear flash, it was all gone. Ashes in the wind," he stared down at that armor. "Grandfather had spent his entire fortune, almost a thousand years of money, to recover anything he could from back then. There's an entire episode of some four-thousand year old krogan television show, sitting in a vault on Tuchanka, because of what he did, bit by bit, over centuries."

Garrus chuckled. "A krogan historian. Never thought I'd see the day," he muttered.

"And you probably never will," Wrex muttered. He shook his head, almost as though ashamed. "I can't believe how much I despised him when I first met him. I walked right up and cracked him in the skullplate, called him 'a traitor to the race'. Jarrod's gibberish. If he wanted to have a family with some asari woman, what's my problem? None, that's what."

"If you hated him, how come you respected him later?" Garrus asked, his tone quite interested. Wrex sighed once more, an odd sound coming from so massive a throat.

"Have you ever talked to somebody who just... believed in something so much, that you couldn't help but believe too?" Wrex asked. "That's the way it was with Grandfather. He believed that the krogan could be something great again. Not just excellent warriors for hire, slowly dying out under the weight of our own stupidity and the genophage. The krogan can be great again. Grandfather's words."

Shepard nodded, even as she kneaded a headache away. "And he needed an example to show the others."

"I guess," Wrex said. "Maybe he wasn't sure what 'krogan greatness' was supposed to look like. Maybe he didn't think that he'd be able to convince the others without something as great as his vision. Or maybe, he just didn't have a clue what he was looking for at all. I don't know. He got killed before I really understood what he was going on about. But only after he made me care," the last word invested with quite a bit of venom.

"You did say Grandfather was the reason you went back to Tuchanka," Shepard nodded. Wrex shrugged.

"Some of what he said stuck with me, even through my own youthful stupidity. If... If I had another chance, I'd do it differently," he said with a degree of certainty. "No more trying to lead people around with big words and promises. Just take 'em by the quad and drag 'em where you want 'em. It's not about respect, Shepard. Not anymore. It's about the survival of my species. And there are days where it feels like I'm the only one still paying attention to it."

"Why don't you go back to Tuchanka?" Alenko asked, earnestly.

Wrex turned his eye to the biotic, then let out a bitter laugh. "There's nothing left for me, there."

"You might be surprised," Alenko pointed out. "Can you honestly say you aren't smarter now then when you had this Jarrod ruining your plans?"

"I'm smarter by default," Wrex answered.

"So why don't you try using that?" Alenko asked. "Make your grandfather's dream for your species come true?"

Wrex stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head slowly. "As I said," he reiterated, "my species is dying out, and I'm the only one who cares about it. I'm not going to fight for a losing cause. There's no percentage in it. You just end up dying tired and disappointed. I've had enough disappointments."

"Commander?" al'Wahim asked from the driver's seat. "We are approaching the signal."

Shepard nodded, and rose from her seat, to glance past the gunnery-chief's shoulder to the white dust of Tuntau. A beacon was clear in place, still rotating slowly and broadcasting. Likely, a distress signal. Shepard leaned further forward, and could see bodies, mummified on the ground inside their armor or hardsuits. "Something isn't right here," she said.

"They died waiting for rescue next to the beacon," al'Wahim guessed. But Shepard shook her head.

"These people didn't die of suffocation or thirst. Those suits are burst," she pointed out. Al'Wahim leaned forward, saw what Shepard did, and nodded.

"I see what you mean," the Si Wongi soldier agreed. "What does that man?"

Shepard once again looked out ahead of them, to the drifting dunes of aluminum-oxide dust which covered the planet. A breeze, only a few dozen kilometers per hour, but packing a lot more punch in the thick atmosphere, stripped away layer upon layer of that dust from a mound near the beacon, until something metal poked out. The two soldiers shared a glance, then looked forward once more, as more of the sand slowly drifted away in the rogue wind, until it showed roughly half of a Kodiak, which had been... snapped in half.

"This doesn't..." Shepard said once again, and this time, swung her head wide, side to side, trying to look as far as she could through the apertures into the surface of this planet. Mounds. Mounds of displaced sand.

"...is something wrong up there?" Garrus asked.

"Yes," Shepard answered. She tapped Asha's shoulder. "Bring us in a little bit closer. Very slowly."

All of this had an alarm screaming in Shepard's head, but she couldn't say with certainty why, as yet. It was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't quite figure it out. That beacon, for example. It looked different from the kind that the Alliance used. Like it was kit-bashed together. Asha oh-so-gently edged the Mako closer to the fallen, and their destroyed transport. She in particular kept her eye on the bodies. Something about them just wasn't right. Or rather, was right, in a terrifying way. She leaned forward over the dashboard, looking down at the closest body she could find. The hardsuit was breached... but not by explosion or impact. She leaned back.

Those hardsuits had been melted open.

"What are you seeing, Shepard?" Wrex asked.

"Wrex... do you feel anything?" Shepard asked. Wrex turned an unamused eye toward her, but he rolled it and then focused. "...I feel..."

"What are you two talking about?" Asha asked.

There.

"Did you feel that, Wrex?" Shepard asked quickly, her eyes suddenly bugging wide. Wrex turned to her, his lips twitching.

"I did," he answered. Human and krogan shared a look, and a common understanding, and for a moment, a common terror.

"You two aren't ma–" Asha began, but was cut off by Shepard grabbing her by the shoulders and heaving her out of the driver's seat with a squawk of confusion and alarm. Alenko shouted her name in complete surprise as she bounded into that seat, not even bothering to fasten herself in, before slamming down a foot onto the pedal, and sawing hard on the controls. And not an instant too soon.

Within a fraction of a second of Shepard beginning her seemingly mad usurpation, the entire craft bucked violently, its back wheels being hurled upward by the power of something massive and unbelievably strong forcing its way up directly under it, through the very earth. Wrex held on, his lips tight, before he finally said what Shepard was thinking, as the half-kilometer long beast erupted almost wholly out of the sand, arched in the air, and then slammed down and vanished into the dust once more.

"THRESHER MAW!" he shouted, and Shepard reefed on the controls, pulling it into a hard turn as the beast reared up out of the ground and let out a scream which was all the louder for the thicker 'air' it traveled through. Shepard ignored it, though, concentrating on driving in as insanely random a path as she could. Because of that, the gobbet of saliva that the Maw spat at the vehicle missed by scant meters, rather than hitting and corroding right through the metal.

"JOKER!" Shepard roared. "Where is the Normandy? We need immediate evac!"

"Commander? You sound like you're trying to outrun a Thresher Maw," Joker said in his usual, incorrigable way."

"I AM!" Shepard screamed back at him.

"...oh shit," Joker's voice suddenly lost all of its mirth. "I'll be there in... forty seconds. Keep out of that thing's jaws, and I'll give you a barnswallow!"

Shepard leaned aside, and had to slam her other foot down, onto the other pedal on the floor. This one was the breaks, causing al'Wahim to smash against the wall mostly separating the passenger pod from the drivers' seats. This sudden stop prevented the monumental bulk of the Thresher Maw from intercepting her course; the hundreds of meters of violence, death, and earthbending slammed into the sand, causing it to spray up in all directions, only a dozen or so meters ahead of her. Shepard glanced aside. The rough terrain that al'Wahim had navigated to reach here wouldn't stop it; Thresher Maws were natural earthbenders, like Badger Moles. She cranked the wheel the other direction, and slammed the pedal down once more.

"You might want to buckle up, Asha," Garrus shouted to her over the howl of the engine, and the screaming of the Maw outside. The Si Wongi offered him a rude gesture, even as she started to buckle herself into place. Shepard didn't have time to check on her, to make sure that the impact hadn't hurt her more than the fight earlier had. She turned wildly, almost insanely, sending the Mako fish-tailing and skidding along the aluminum-oxide sands, trying to keep the Maw from getting a bead on her. A bead, in this case, was death, and a fairly rapid digestion in the most resilient digestive tract in the galaxy. The only planets which couldn't host Thresher Maws, after all, were ones colonized by the turians, for reasons obvious to most if not Shepard.

"It's gaining on us, Shepard," Wrex warned, clutching that bundle of his grandfather's armor close him even as he tried to see past her into the distance of Tuntau.

"I know," Shepard answered.

"We've got to lose it!" Wrex continued.

"I KNOW!" Shepard shouted, even turning back to do it over her shoulder. The last time she had one of these ruin her day, it took an orbital extraction to get clear of it. And so, it seemed, it would again. "Come on, Joker, where the hell are you?"

Wrex let out a grunt of alarm. "Shepard! On your two!"

Shepard glanced aside, and saw that the Maw was indeed erupting from the sands to her right. It turned and opened its massive jaws wide, the blue tongue flapping out as it roared at them all once again. Then, with a twist as though snapping a whip, it lashed out with not so much a spray as a fan of green, caustic spittle. Shepard pounded down on the third pedal at her feet, neither accelerator nor brakes. So that when that fan reached her, she was being powered upward, forced away from the planet by the timely and jury-rigged operation of the Mako's re-entry stabilizers. Jump-jets, essentially. She landed with a crash which set all jaws to rattling, but didn't dare slow down one whit. The Maw was howling once more, and this time, plunged down and she could see the ripple of its passage bee-lining for the Mako.

Her lips pulled back into a rictus of not so much wrath as survival instinct. There was nothing else she could do but this. So she did it as best as she could, even as she silently gauged how long it would be until the thing finally raised up, and smashed the craft down. Until the screen got just a little bit darker, and she glanced up.

The nose of the Normandy was hovering overhead, screaming along the terrain the same direction she was. "Commander, we're here. Jump in!" Joker said with enthusiasm. Shepard didn't smirk as she slammed both feet down on the stabilizers again, causing the Mako to lift up off of Tuntau once again, but this time, when she did it, she landed with a clang of metal against metal, as the cargo-hold of the Normandy surged forth to replace the jagged rock and fine white powder of the planet below. The Mako bounded just once, before slamming back-end first into the elevator doors. Shepard's head was thrown back, and bounced off of the head rest, before the counter-force threw her forward into controls. Only because she was wearing her armor did they not break another rib. She finally turned to the others.

"Everybody still there?" Shepard asked.

"You drive like a krogan, Shepard," Wrex said simply, and with a degree of respect.

"Of course I do," she said. The turian and the two soldiers just stared at her, jaws agape, as she slowly limped to the side door, opened it, and moved into the ship. Garrus turned to the two of them.

"I take back everything I said about her driving," he told them.

The two humans didn't have anything to say to that.

"Hey, babe..."

"Not now, Murtock," Nilsdottir said, as she tried to find a way to eat without her face hurting. It was becoming easier by the day, but still no picnic. The guileless and frankly unintelligent 'probationary seamen' sat down opposite her, a confused expression on his face.

"What's wrong, babe?" he asked.

"Just... fuck off 'till my everything stops aching. Can you do that?" Jackie asked with sour tone. Sourer than she wanted it to be, and sourer than she intended, since the man blanched a bit, and shrugged.

"Whatever you say, Jack," he offered, and then rose from the chair. Man, all of this shit was weighing on her mind of late, and she didn't even have the medical okay to get it fucked out of her. That was most of why she liked having Murtock around! But no; no boning until her bones heal. Some days, she wanted to strangle Chakwas. And those days weren't Jackie's best.

The clack of people ascending the ladder pulled Jackie's attention away from her sandwich and to the newly-returned Commander and her band of merry shit-disturbers. She rounded the corner just as Shepard caught up with Alenko, who'd beaten her to the top. "He's not going to be happy about this," Shepard said.

"'bout what?" Jackie asked. Shepard cast a glance her way, then shrugged.

"Kahoku's men were lured by a counterfeit beacon, and then had a Maw thrown at 'em," she said. She shook her head darkly. "Like Tuntau wasn't enough of a shit-storm. When I see that blue bitch, I'm going to kill her."

"Shepard, you're overreacting," Alenko said, and Jackie let out a hiss of danger noticed. Alenko, though, didn't seem to get it. "She might not have known about what her sister was doing."

"Yeah, and I might not know how to throw lightning bolts from my fingers, but that'd be an idiotic assumption to make, given what you know," Shepard pointed out. Alenko sighed, and shrugged. Shepard, on the other hand, pounded the intercom button under the heel of her fist. "Joker. We're heading back to the Citadel."

"If I knew that I was going to be back on the Citadel so often, I wouldn't have run up my bar-tab so quickly," Joker pointed out. Shepard let her silence be all the answer she was going to give. "Heading for the Relay, Commander."

"Good," Shepard said. She let out a sigh, and glanced toward Jackie. "You look like shit."

"So do you," Jackie answered her.

"You should see the doctor," Alenko said to Shepard. "You took quite a beating down there."

"I'll be fine. I've had worse," Shepard said. She stood, watching Alenko watching her for a few more seconds. "Well? Dismissed."

There was a bit of disappointment in Alenko's eyes, right then. "Aye aye, ma'am," he said quietly, saluted, then moved toward the crew compartments. After the door shut behind him, Jackie nodded after him.

"Argument with the Sentinel?" she asked.

"Don't pry," Shepard said.

"When do I ever pry?" she asked.

"You're doing it right now."

"Oh, fuck you," Jackie said. Shepard just raised a coppery eyebrow at her. "Right. Fuck you, sir."

"Better," she said. "Anybody wants me, I'll be in my quarters."

Nilsdottir scoffed as Shepard turned and rounded the at-the-moment defunct elevator shaft, heading for her own rooms, even as Jackie returned to her sandwich. A sandwich unmolested by the other crew, especially after her last lesson on what happened to people who fucked with her food. She had just gotten to sitting down, to start eating, when Shepard rounded the bend. Then, tapping across the deck, the asari almost jogged toward her, before practically tackling Shepard with a hug. The other crew men were almost as baffled as Shepard herself, who stood leaning away from the archeologist with the most confused look on her face. Luckily for all involved, that hug ended quickly, with Liara running back for the medical bay, looking on the verge of tears.

Tali, who was sitting off to a side, watching the whole thing, had the most smug look on her face, apparent even though it was impossible to actually see her face.

Codex Entry (Culture): SHAMANISM

The communication, interaction, and elimination of intelligent or pseudo-intelligent entities living close-but-not-within the bounds of the 'Mortal world' is a widespread and long-standing tradition amongst many peoples across galactic history. Spirits, which either self-create from fundamental aspects of existence - such as spirits of philosophical elements, death, birth, and 'void' - or are created as a result of mortal activity, can and have caused great cultural shifts with their proven existence and the interactions there with.

Galactic civilization has, on the whole, become a very secular entity, but there are still facets of it which defy such reification. The most obvious of these is that of spirits. The histories of different species hold different views on the existence, the importance, and the interactions with these entities. They range from the nearly non-existent - as is the case with the Salarians - to the overtly hostile - as was the case on ancient Thessia. The most amiable contact with spirit entities falls upon the two most militant species associated with the Citadel; the turians, and the krogan.

Turian history is filled with spirit veneration, and shamanism was quite common throughout the pre-spaceflight period and beyond. It is estimated even today that four out of every seven shamans in the galaxy is turian. This disparancy was borne from an early and remarkably friendly association with spirits which were borne from the turian's activities. Turian farmers created spirits of agriculture, which when contact and placated, lead to buffers against crop disease, drought, or other bad harvest. Turian armies often created Spirits of Corps, a manifested entity representing the morale, the honor, and the excellence of the unit in question. When ancient turian armies fought, there were always accepted laws in place that while the spirits could act upon the soldiers, there would be no interference with the spirits. Hostile shamanism attacking another army's spirit was considered throughout history as a war-crime, even in the face of victory. Ancient spirits of the turian age of sail have, through careful supplication, been transplanted throughout their naval history, up to and including the modern day; the CTH Defiant houses a Corps Spirit transplanted across two thousand years, and true to its reputation throughout turian history, it has always brought its crew back alive, no matter victory or defeat.

Krogan shamanism was much more rooted in pragmatism and survival. The spirits on Tuchanka were described as vain, brutal, capricious, hungry, and predisposed to violence. Any spirit turned from enemy to even neutral player was a victory for krogan story and song. Their ancient lore told of truly ancient and dangerous spirits which predated the krogan as a people by millions of years, embodying the crucible of Tuchanka through feast and famine, through storm and nuclear devastation. Even to this day, the names Kalros and the Meretsegger are spoken quietly amongst krogan shaman, who see their trade as a thin line between an angry Spirit world, and a hostile physical one. Krogan define any ally in the spirit as one which won't stab them in the back. In the face, they claim, is a different matter.

Other species have more unusual interactions. The quarian race on Rannoch had some obliquely recorded interaction with spirits, but it is not known how the practise continued with their exile. Vorcha also engage in widescale shamanistic practice, but never make records of their actions. Salarians outright didn't know that spirits existed until the discovery of the krogan. Asari seemed to have enacted a pogrom in their ancient history against spirits as part of their Athamite period; 'any which thinks deprived of the mortal shell is Nemesis, and is to be destroyed' was one of the Athame Doctrine's central tenants, and they took it to mean spirits. Needless to say, Thessia, to a shaman, is a quiet and bitter place for those entities which survived the purges enacted tens of thousands of years ago.

Human shamanism falls between the extremes set by the turians and the salarians. Most people don't interact with spirits in a daily or meaningful fashion, but those tha do, give spirits a wide berth and a fair degree of respect. Comparable to Palaven, Earth's Spirit world is positively treacherous. Compared to Thessia, verdantly lush. While humans have a roughly turian level of skill when it comes to interacting with spirits, their limited numbers prevent them from being as omnipresent in spiritual negotiations compared to the long established Turian Hierarchy. Some have called humanity a sleeping giant in this capacity; a species as influenced by spirits through its history will have a surfeit of experience. With time, they could easily take their place beside the turians as the chief supplicators of the ephemeral.

Why is Grandfather's armor pink? Well, there's a bit of a long story to that. See, back about fourteen years ago, lad that I was was playing Super Metroid, and having an absolute nightmare of a time in Meridia. Water, you see, made it impossible to maneuver or jump any height in what had to be roughly a tonne of armor. So my brother and I finally got wise that there might be an item we were missing. So we scour the map, until we figure out the hidden part of the crashed ship. 'A gravity suit, that'll be just the thing', my brother says as the icon shows and the tune plays. And then, I replied. '... it's pink.'

The rest is history.

Regarding Shepard, she's not exactly in a good mental place. Before she learned she was the Avatar, she just was a bitter, angry stunted-airbender with a chip on her shoulder the size of Elysium and a penchant for bad decisions in her personal life. After... she became self-destructive, and nobody on the crew, as yet, knows why. It doesn't help that there's only one person who follows her because it seems the right thing to do. Alenko has a lot of faith in her. Asha, on the other hand, sees Shepard as a means to restore some of her family's wounded honor, like an inverse Zuko. Wrex sees Shepard as a taxi toward killing Saren. Garrus is starting to question whether Shepard's way is the right one when it comes to solving problems. Tali doesn't care about Shepard except inasmuch as somebody can teach her enough waterbending to help her people. Liara has both a quest from a former Avatar, and her own personal obsession with the Protheans keeping her aboard. And Nilsdottir? Well, Shepard's the only one who understands what happened at Torfan. You saw Jack's view of it. Shepard's was worse.

The other problem with Shepard, besides her self-destructive tendencies and lack of useful leadership abilities? She tends to make her own problems. Case in point? The Dantius family.