A/N: P. is nothing but 100% totes wholesome love.

The Editing Gang did not review. They sent skilled trollfiltrators to place any typos or ellipsis abuse in this document. Honest.

Intermission: A denouement that is neither an ending nor a resolution, but a beginning of the End

There was, he perceived, an emptiness.

The figure stood at the edge of a massive, yawning cliffside, overlooking the vista below. Icy white and faintly glowing blue lights silhouetted him from below, lines of illumination that spread off for kilometers into the distance. Tall white metal walls held rank after rank of glowing blue pods, each one filled with a faintly whitish liquid.

The pods also held identical figures – tall, angular, nude, and turian. Thirty million sets of glowing blue eyes stared emptily in front of them. Thirty million strong bodies twitched occasionally, as the AI ran them through various muscle-control tests to prevent atrophy.

P. lifted the cigar in his right hand to his mouth, the cutting and peppery scent of rithe mixing with other fumes as a cloud of green trailed behind him in the wind. He gestured with his other hand. "It's all empty, you know."

Rolan Quarn bent over a smooth panel, inset here and there with glowing blue glyphs hovering a few centimeters above the white metal. His taloned fingers tapped several glyphs, making them flare white for a moment. "Energy levels… at optimal. The command crystal we found appears to be working, all the defense systems and automation is back online for the first time since the Fall." He paused. "What is empty, though? Their minds, Master?"

P. shook his head, his loose-fitting pants whipping in the nearly freezing wind. He glanced up, where the cavern walls reached upwards for unknown heights, and then shook his head a second time. "Not so much their minds. None of us, after all, can be as cruel as all of us. But the facility itself. It's unfinished. There should have been… something else. A payload."

He sighed. "I have been so busy moving in the clouds that I haven't stopped to look at my feet in a long time, only to discover they are indeed clay. But I've made more progress in restoring this place in the past twenty years than I did in the past two centuries. Defenses are up. The units are cycled. The scanners are working. The engines are working. Big Stupid is talking again."

He glanced back at Rolan. "All due to my lovely daughters. And you, of course."

Rolan finished his work, as the entire wide cavern shook and a green-blue field erupted, covering the millions of stasis pods in swirls of energy, freezing them in time once more. "Update and status check finished. Twenty-nine million nine hundred and six thousand units at one hundred percent. Twenty-six thousand one hundred and eleven with minor organ or systems failure below five percent. Thirty-six thousand and three units with complete failure, up nineteen units. And thirty-one thousand and eight hundred eighty-six empty crèches."

P. gave a small laugh. "Thirty-one thousand deaths. The Arcann, for all their many, many failures, were so beyond everyone else it continues to amaze. Death was like a vacation for them. They bred stars, they made friends with black holes, and they captured entire races and used them as weapons systems. And for all of that…"

He turned away from the great hall, looking behind him at the towering pillar of white and blue. "…their greatest achievement is a broke-dick piece of vakar dung."

Rolan also looked at the pillar, the most powerful device the Arcann had ever produced, and pulled his mandibles tight against his jaw. "All that's really left is finding the pieces to actually wake them all up at the same time. Why did the Arcann pull this place apart anyway?"

P.'s voice was musing, and almost calmly sane sounding, compared to his usual singsong tones. "They were panicking. The Harvesters arrived early. They were still mucking with the Arca Devices and the turians, not to mention the salarians. Nothing was even close to ready."

He turned away from the cliff face, eyeing the pillar of the AI. "After they stuck me in the machine, they shut everything down and pulled all the important things to keep it from making noise, I think. It doesn't matter. Nothing I've achieved has turned the facility back on to its full capacity, and frankly, the AI is too stupid to realize the facility is fucked."

The machine pulsed as it spoke in a dead language, one that P. understood innately, but Rolan only got parts of. "Cessation of optimals incurred by non-Vibrants remains within Forecast parameters. Repulsion and Punishment systems remain functional. Secondary production lines are functional. The Host remains viable. Your implication illogical."

P. waved his free hand. "Machine, machine, machine. Your perspective is all wrong. You don't pet a vakar, you don't fist android girls, and you don't ever ignore the fact that the primary purpose of your facility doesn't fucking work." He flung his hand backwards. "If the damned Core did what it should do instead of sitting there like a sirefucking Celebrant at a Vabo orgy, there would not be anything left of this galaxy, borne under a tide of me."

The Sentience Engine pulsed. "Optimal procedure execution not litigated with Sky-caste or Mountain-caste cell workers. Components primary sourced to Foundry-Forge World Seventeen, location at absolute four nine six kathar from galactic core spinward."

Rolan shut down the panel, folding it seamlessly back into the wall. "Boss, it says the same shit every time. And we don't know how to get that far outside of FTL-range. That's like a thousand light-years into fucking redspace." He referred to the large spans of the galaxy not reachable by relay or by FTL due to charge buildup.

P. nodded, then tilted his head. "…Perhaps not. I have always simply gone with the first statement ever made, that we didn't have the parts here to start the circus. But I'm having a clear day, and this rithe is some very good shit, so… I have a question. Define: 'primary sourced.' "

"Define: Solar-caste authorized storage area. Vibrant defense systems, full Repulsion and Castigation-level defenses. Isolated from primitive-race discovery by utilization of Gate-fall distance."

P. bared his fangs. "The fact that there is a… primary… indicates that there must be a secondary, or tertiary."

The Engine's crystalline structure shuddered, lines of frost erupting along its surface. "Tertiary sources were HighForges responsible for initial facility load. Present on Arth itself."

Rolan gave a guffaw at that. "Beyond rekt. The Harvesters threw that shit into a black hole."

P. shrugged. "You can never trust a carrion eater. They don't like sharing, they have atrocious manners, their smell resembles that of batarians, and worst of fucking all, they don't let their prey suffer. But you can trust carrion eaters to pick bones clean. If Arth had anything worth taking, the Harvesters already took it. And even if they didn't, Arth is less reachable than the primary location."

P. wasn't sure what happened to the Arcann, but given the half-sane ramblings of the Arthenn energy ghosts, it sounded like the entire planet had been… dropped… into some alternative dimension, or possibly subspace. What he did know was the Arthenn ghosts had been driven insane by the deaths of billions of Arcann still linked to them psychically, so Arth was a non-factor.

P. puffed on his cigar again, before tossing it over the side. "If the primary is gone, and the tertiary is gone… what about secondary facilities?"

"Thirteen Secondary sites isolated. Nine destroyed by Mountain-caste containment protocol Black. Two overwhelmed with Contagion, appeal to Nova-caste resulted in Highforce String collision. One remaining fallback site, loss of onsite Sentience unit very likely. Last remote comms and scans revealed multiple automated Resonant Knights destroyed by local bioform classification: Inusannon. Twenty-seven Force-Core engine units recovered by Inusannon Warshapers and likely located on Ilos, absolute thirty-seven twelve kathar from galactic core, anti-spinward."

Rolan Quarn blinked. "…Why did it only tell us this shit now?"

P. narrowed his eyes, the blue circles rotating. "You can't expect pudding to do much besides sit in the cup until you eat it, my herald. The problem with artificial intelligence is that it isn't, it is just mimicking the glorious actions of our meat brains. This thing sat here for eons without fixing itself when the spirits-be-damned repair parts were literally right in front of it because it didn't have instructions to do so."

Rolan laughed at that. "No, that's not smart. If the tank holding you hadn't failed…"

P. snorted. "Arcann tech is the best at failing. It fails in ways you can't even get. I once saw an Arcann think machine eat itself because it ran out of resources. It was coded to always reproduce some kind of furniture but not authorized to obtain any kind of new raw materials. Arcann were shit coders, worse programmers, and had the foresight of a particularly dim tark deciding it just had to check out a nest of rabid vakars."

He gestured. "For all the power of my creators, after all, what happened to them? Most of them blew themselves out of existence, and the rest turned themselves into glowsticks then acted shocked when they couldn't get out."

His voice lowered. "And now they're a pack of sirefucking cheerleaders to brainwashed, mindfucked lunatics so drunk on their own power they think they are invincible. I'm almost cheering for the damned Harvesters at this point, if only to see the kicked-in-the-face look they'll all get when Palaven gets served up like muri cheese at an asari midnight party."

Rolan flicked a mandible. "Those are so messy. Food and fucking just do not mix."

P. turned away. "What interests me more than the fact Big Stupid didn't mention secondary sites until now is the nature of the secondary site. I seem to recall that Ilos, according to the reports I got from that asari secretary, was destroyed by Vigil to prevent it from falling into Harvester hands and to cut off Benezia's army."

The Engine made a grinding sound. "Incorrect. Nova-pulse bomb detected. Ilos used poorly understood phase-jump and Highforce energy system to move to a temporal sink location."

Rolan stared at the machine. "…The varking fuck does that mean? Can't you just talk in sirefucking clawspeak?"

P. was silent for several seconds, then began to laugh. "Tell me, oh machine of mystery. Just where is this temporal sink location at?"

"Gryt-III. Location, absolute one point one vithrkar from current location, spinward. Warning: Highforce energies and extreme temporal dissonance detected. This is not an Arcann location, recommend engaging District-level Resonant Knights. Inusannon classed as a High-White moral threat, High White physical threat, Solar-White corruption threat."

P. turned to Rolan. "Well, well, well. Gryt-III, the spooky house original. Who would have thonk it?" His fangs gleamed in the faint light as he smiled. "Put together a pair of scouting teams – disposables, not any of our Bad Dudes. Standard contract ops. Have them plant two Rendering Spikes nearby and one of the Shining Mirrors so we can get a better look at this place."

Rolan was already tapping on his omni-tool. "Got it, Master. Anything else?"

P.'s voice dipped. "Yeah, get ready to hit the airwaves again. If a Core really is there, we can't afford to be… interrupted. I think it's time we did a little bit of politicking, and pot licking too. Load up everything we've got on the Broker, send it to Cerberus. Load up all the shit we have on Cerberus, send it to Aria, and everything on Aria, send to the AIS and Deathwatch. Cover codes, of course."

Rolan twitched. "…Ilium and Shepard coming back to life wasn't distraction enough?"

P. turned and headed for the massive doors leading out of the facility, Rolan trailing him. "As my dear, dead friend Ulvu Palavanus was always saying… 'the best way to deal with a problem is to kill it. The second best way to deal with a problem is make more problems.' I don't know what the Players in the Game are doing or thinking… and honestly, figuring out all of that is boring, boring, booooring. I just want enough chaos and double-crossing and chute-ripping to keep everyone not thinking about poor old P."

Rolan only sighed.