Chapter 13
Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, close proximity of Relay, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183
"So I imagine you have some questions."
Thirty-nine pairs of eyes locked onto Harry's, more or less answering the question without actually responding. Which was fine with him.
When it came down to it, Harry really preferred to monologue. It was a weakness he acknowledged, but in fairness all of the most powerful examples he had growing up loved their monologuing, between Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Really he was just a product of his environment.
Harry clapped his hands and began pacing in front of the crew of the Normandy, minus Joker who insisted on remaining at his post for some reason, silly people observing their silly responsibilities.
"I could stand here and try to justify it all to you, but frankly you would never believe me. I can tell that my mojo is starting to show some cracks along the edges, as it always does when things start going pear-shaped, but just telling you," he stopped pacing in front of the group, "never solves anything. So! I'm going to do two things, then we'll just see how things go, hmm? Now here is the first thing."
Taking his wand from his gauntlet with deliberate and demonstrative movements, he swished it into the air behind him, conjuring a large poster on an easel. Across the poster were written three simple statements:
How old is Harry Potter?
How did the ground team survive our last mission?
How are we all sitting side by side, in a straight line, in this room?
"The second thing I'm going to do is this."
Harry dragged his wand in a line, pointing at each of the people arrayed in front of him, before jabbing back at himself and saying Finite Incantatem.
For a quiet instant, nothing happened. Harry chose not to force his minor editing of reality away, reality was kind enough to indulge him by slipping slowly back into focus, and as a result it took thirty seconds for a group of otherwise intelligent and observant people to begin connecting the dots in front of them.
First, Technician First Class Caroline Grenado shifted in her chair, glancing idly to her sides with a measuring look in her eyes, then all hell nearly broke loose. The ground crew looked absolutely terrified, began shouting, and Tali visibly ran a radiation exposure program on her omni-tool. All of the engineers and nearly all of the techs seemed very bothered, staring at the ground around them. The requisitions officer fired up a logistics application on his omni-tool and began taking readings of the dimensions of the cargo hold, and confusion was the general order of the day.
Thankfully they were all under silencing spells, so Harry got the silence he treasured alongside the full visual of thirty two people and a Rachni queen all kind-of freaking out. It took about a minute and a half for the crew to get a hold of themselves and calm down, an amount of time drastically shortened by how none of them could remove their bottoms from their seats. Harry was sure he was going to pay for it later, Wrex in particular looked exceedingly unhappy, but it amused him for a moment so it was worth it. The Krogan battlemaster and the Asari matriarch were both wreathed in the telltale glowing aura of their biotics, each testing their restraints, but while Benezia looked intrigued, Wrex appeared to be applying a massive positive force to himself, effectively crushing his chair and warping the deck plating below him.
"So I imagine you have some questions," Harry's eyes twinkled like fireworks at a Krogan bar-mitzvah. Somehow he was the only one amused by the situation.
Wrex relaxed his power, and the techies put away their omni tools, each sitting somewhat gingerly on seats they were visibly unsure of, while he grinned widely from the conjured stool he sat on.
Harry snapped his fingers, the crack of the noise echoing in the mostly empty bay, and signaling the beginning of the questions. By virtue of sheer homicidal will expressed via the medium of facial expression, Wrex won the right to first question.
"Explain, Punk. Now."
"Sure! The easy explanation is that I'm a wizard. My people went by many names while we still lived and at least one of them should translate for you guys. They called us witch-doctors, shaman, magicians, or warlocks."
Benezia seemed caught between disbelief and acceptance, and to a certain extent Ashley's tightly knit brow indicated a similar reaction, but they were the only ones not openly sniffing at Harry's claim. Well, the queen wasn't either, but Harry was about thirty percent certain her 'sniffing' would release neurotoxins or something, so he just counted her as a pass.
"There isn't a scientific explanation for me or my power, and I've lived long enough to say that with authority. What I can do actively defies explanation, I can show you terabytes of data where scientifically rigorous actions produce different and often opposing physical and electromagnetic effects. The least wrong answer I can give you is that I can manipulate a kind of chaotic zero point energy, allowing me to do insane things like stand at ground zero of a nuclear blast untouched, and teleport the ground crew into orbit. Again, that explanation is wrong, but it's the least wrong answer that will make any sense."
Harry's statement quieted the room effectively. His claims were completely insane, but the crew of the Normandy had hardly been picked for lack of intelligence. The fact that not an hour ago the entire ground crew's armor reported their positions at the heart of a nuclear inferno, and the fact that they were in the cargo bay despite the Normandy having never left orbit were powerful pieces of evidence for insanity. Requisitions Officer Germeen Barret in particular looked especially convinced, his eyes were alive with the possibilities of a space bigger on the inside than the outside.
Still, there was some dissent. Harry was suddenly grateful for Garrus Vakarian, after all it was hard to dramatically prove something without someone willing to doubt it.
In the flanged voice of his people, the Turian quickly spat a word which translated into English roughly as, "Bullshit."
"You could do everything weird we've seen you do using mass effect fields."
Harry smiled, "All of it, my metallic friend? What year were you born, Vakarian?"
The Turian's mandibles shook outward for a moment, and in a suspicious voice he responded, his translator pausing imperceptibly as it converted to human reckoning, "2156..."
Harry looked at the crew, making casual eye contact with his people, "I was born in the year 1981."
The human crowd immediately looked taken aback, and after another almost nonexistent pause the aliens did as well.
The flanged voice spoke up again, "Impossible."
"I was present at the founding of the systems alliance, I'm actually in the background of some of the vids of the treaty signing. The South East Asian alliance had actually brought a bomb and I didn't have enough time to disarm it and escape the photo shoot, come to think of it, I wasn't on staff for that event. I saved those worthless politicians for free!"
Harry looked disgusted with himself, before shaking it off and continuing.
"Anyway, that was only like forty years ago, and theoretically my good looks could be explained by an awesome genetic engineering package. Let me ask you this though, have any of you ever looked at the original passenger manifest of the first wave lunar colonists?"
Wrex didn't bother, and neither did Garrus or Benezia, but they did look to Kaiden who immediately dived into the extranet on his omni tool. Further down the line a number of the techs were searching, and from their whispered comments they were looking for confirmation from different extranet locations.
This time Jane Shepard spoke up, "Not three days ago you told me you spoofed Citadel records to show the Normandy as rated for operations in biological hot zones! Why should I believe this?"
A few of the techs chuckled and Harry's smile grew teeth, "Shep, we are rated for that. Your fancy armor has an on board medical suite superior to most colonial hospitals, and you have the training. You're an N-7, luv. Setting those facts aside, I'm a Spectre, I'm legally entitled to do that kind of thing from time to time. I even have access codes for those databases somewhere, but none of that's important, because think for a second about the ridiculousness of me changing a hundred and fifty-odd year old historical record without anyone noticing."
Harry's smile wasn't, however, due to superior evidence. Rather he was smiling he absolutely could, after all his personal history went back that far and he certainly hid that often enough. The crew of a cutting edge alliance frigate hasn't thought to question the ground team teleporting into space after all. In this particular case it was true though.
Jane looked at him, her sharp eyes still accusing, "You sat next to Mark Armstrong. First mayor of the moon, Mark Armstrong?"
Harry's smile died a little, "Yeah. He was always going on about the rising price of air, the pillock."
The crew, those who weren't still chasing down other historical records, quieted again and looked decidedly contemplative. Garrus looked unconvinced still, but Harry wrote that off to stubbornness and not real disbelief. He was okay with it either way though, because he had a final act.
Standing and casually vanishing his stool, Harry drew attention back to himself.
"I have one last evidence I can give, and like magicians have for hundreds of years, I must now call for a volunteer from the audience. Wrex, up and at'em soldier."
The cushioning charm Harry erected under the Krogan's broken seat began decaying, forcing the one ton god of war to his feet.
"Remember how you told me you were gonna shoot me later? God news! Now is later, have a go!"
The crew didn't have time to gasp before the Krogan responded with a simple affirmative, and drew his beloved shotgun from the magnetic clip the base of his spine. The gun expanded smoothly from storage mode, and in the hands of a master took less than two seconds to go from holstered to fire.
The shotgun coughed once, the whine and dull thump of the rail gun completely overshadowed by the wet noise of a torso rapidly disassembling. A wide circle of red spread across the back end of the bay, and just a bit onto the roof, small slivers of white spine and ribs decorating the crimson mess like grim confetti.
Harry's body fell backward even as his knees buckled, collapsing in defeat in front of the Krogan, and when the sound of his armor clacking on the deck plate settled the bay exploded into disarray.
With the wizard's 'death', all of the sticking charms keeping the crew seated failed, allowing them to leave their seats, but at the same time the space expansion he cast on the bay also lost its power. Dimensionally transcendental space collapsed, leaving thirty one humanoids and a Rachni queen in one huge pile with a Krogan standing confused in front of it, starting at the shotgun in his hands like it had betrayed him.
The bay was a font of chaos, with half the crew trying to draw guns on the rogue Krogan and the other half trying valiantly to not get crushed by nearly a ton of tentacles and chitin. The struggle went on for ten whole minutes before Benezia had enough and just upset the whole pile with an angled biotic field, freeing the crushed crew from their Rachni prison and spreading them out over the rest of the deck.
The whole time Wrex just continued staring at his gun in disbelief, under his breath he whispered, "I liked him."
Jane separated from the group, approaching Wrex with her pistol drawn, "What the fuck Wrex!"
The Krogan continued staring numbly at his gun, "I thought he would shield, or his barriers were up, or... I saw him get shot point blank by Geth earlier, he shrugged it off..."
She lowered her gun, Wrex looked lost, almost pathetic without his usual dangerous air. For the first time since she had met the dinosaur, he looked old.
"He just got done telling us he was some kind of immortal all powerful witch..."
Jane lowered her side arm and stared at the shotgun in Wrex's hands. After the things she had seen the crazy bastard do, she probably would have shot him if he asked too, but now...
An arm draped around her shoulders, bringing her into a rather metallic and angled half hug. The jagged edge of a plate dug into her ribs, but she didn't mind. For all his being an annoying bastard, Harry really had seemed like he could do anything. Hell, she still remembered the wild look in his eyes on Elysium when-
Hold on.
The arm around her was attached to a hand with a few more fingers than the average Krogan boasted, also Wrex was a bit taller than her, certainly tall enough for her shoulder to tuck under his and not meet it awkwardly, and there weren't any other humans on this side of the queen, who took up enough of the bay to effectively seal her and Wrex of from the rest of the crew, so-
"Jane, luv, if you keep thinking that hard you're going to burst something, and believe you me, that rather hurts."
She shivered slightly as she looked to the presence on her right. Two emerald eyes met hers evenly, below them a grin that might be charming under other circumstances. Jane couldn't help herself, she let her gaze drop further to his chest where she was being poked by a chest-plate. A broken chest plate, its entire side blasted off leaving a jagged surface that edge into her side. A rib regrew before her eyes, as blood flowed sluggishly from the wound, staining the leg of her duty uniform.
"It's worse than it looks, trust me, after the first few times it happens to you it gets a lot easier to deal with."
Jane Shepard credited her years of training for the five seconds she maintained eye contact before fainting.
As he stood over her collapsed form he looked at Wrex, who appeared to have just seen someone rise from the dead. Which was a fair reaction. Harry coughed, a hacking wet sound, and spit a few metal chunks into his hand.
Harry separated one and raised it closer to his eyes, squinting he said, "I didn't know you used polonium rounds. Itches a bit."
Even the hum of the engines died in that moment, the deck no longer vibrated imperceptibly beneath their feet, leaving the cargo hold in complete silence. Harry calmly twirled his wand, re-growing the rest of a lung, and when he felt he had enough mass south of his collar, he spoke again.
"Even among my people, as weird as it sounds, even among people who reshaped reality by thinking really hard, I am unique. When I was young I made a hideous mistake, I accidentally united three artifacts never meant to be combined, and in doing so I became what I am today. Immortal, indestructible, unending. I am the master of death, in every one of its terrible and beautiful forms."
For one glorious moment Urdnot Wrex stared upon a god made flesh, and if he was honest with himself, he was a little unimpressed.
OMAKE
"I'm not quite human. Not really. An old friend thought that I was, and my people were, the next real step in human evolution. Homo Magus, she said-"
"-Now hold on a sec, I thought for humans homo meant-"
"INTERRUPT ME AGAIN VAKARIAN, SEE WHAT HAPPENS!"
[A/N]: Next time on Getting too old for this: the Harry finds what he believes to be the reborn spirit of his homicidal ex-wife, the Rachni queen presses charges on a certain low end porn distributor, and Kaiden and Garrus make out.