Joe's Note: Since I made it more than clear that Kasumi wouldn't be involved with my version of the story - or at least involved in the same way - due to me cleaning up the timeline, I'm sure you're all wondering who has taken her spot shadowing our protagonists and who her 'Sylléktries' are. Well, since this was where Kasumi insinuated herself into Harry's life in Lightning among the Stars, it seems as good a place as any to introduce one Óasi Cytherea Paralía Yaan Calia. And if you looked at that name and thought something other than 'Mary Sue', you're either a hardcore Mass Effect geek like me, have read LogicalPremise's work, or quite likely both.
Dedications & Thanks: Nicolas, Alexander, Howard, MJ, Daniel, Christopher, mpop, Riley, bloodylord, Luke, Zachary, Marc, Ziryo, Elliot, Crusifikz70, Timothy, Leigh, Jason, Chris, George, Koby, Ken, Thyatira, William, Invernos, Paul, Pat, Warren, Mitch, and Jess for sponsoring me on , and making it easier for me to spend more of my time writing. Additional thanks go to the incomparable LogicalPremise for his amazing set of references covering many untouched facets of the Mass Effect universe, as well as listening to me ramble about ideas for the future of this story.

"Technically, I'm not a voyeur. I'll admit to watching you two go at it and enjoying it, but I enjoyed it in a 'I wish I could get in on that' way. Not a 'oh goddess yes, I love spying on sex so much' way. I was just doing my duty to my people and then… well, moving on. My name is Óasi Cytherea Paralía Yaan Calia, and I may have a solution to your problems."

Harry eyed the asari suspiciously as he holstered his pistol and drew his wand. If she'd been spying on them for as long as she was implying, he reasoned, she already knew all about their abilities. No point in pretending they were muggles. Besides, his wand could be used for a great many more things than his pistol if she proved reluctant to answer certain questions. "Oh? And what problems do you think you can help us with? Although before we start, what out of that entire mess is your actual name?" Pausing, Harry realized that his last question could probably be perceived as offensive or at least culturally insensitive at best, and so he rephrased it a bit. "Your given name? What should we call you in conversation?"

"Calia. Or Yaan if you're feeling formal or unfriendly." Slowly making her way across the room with her hands raised in a clear sign of surrender, Calia took a seat in the middle of the couch and leaned back. "Based on your reaction, I'm guessing you haven't met a salarian yet?"

Holstering her own pistol, Luna activated her omni-tool and brought up an image of one of the lizard people that had been accompanying Gavorn when they first met him. "Salarian, yeah? We've seen a few. What do they have to do with your name? You're an asari."

Calia rolled her eyes at that. "Only half. My father was a salarian."

"Ugh, you're one of those types." Krína's words and the accompanying groan made Harry shoot a curious glance at the teal asari, prompting her to elaborate. "Considering you generally can't tell us apart, it's something that some of my kind do and I really can't figure out why. Oh, you're half-krogan, one-quarter batarian, your aithntar was some species the rest of us haven't met yet because your mother was part of a Council contact team… it doesn't matter who your mother melded with. At the end of the day, you're still an asari. An asari who acts a lot like her aithntar, maybe, but still an asari."

Reaching up, Calia ran her fingers along her crests before interlacing her fingers behind her neck and stretching. "Yes, because I look just like your average asari, don't I? Clearly nothing different here. Especially nothing that would possibly remind you of my salarian ancestry in the least." She had a point there; while Harry had limited exposure to asari as a whole given that he'd only been on Omega for roughly a day at this point, she was noticeably different from any other asari he'd seen thus far. "My name is traditional salarian nomenclature, meaning it lists my place of birth from the planet through any political divisions to the city, then my clan, then my given name. So in the future, if you meet a salarian or another asari like me, focus on the last two words out of their mouth when they introduce themselves. That's the information you really need. The rest is just salarian cultural posturing."

Harry nodded, filing the information away for future usage. It made him wonder about the rest of the species that now surrounded him. Krína, Aria, presumably the 'Pelesa' that Luna had mentioned after melding with Aria… one name. Gavorn likewise, unless 'Captain' was a given name in his people's tongue in addition to being a rank in Harry's. Did they have more than one name? If so, what order were they presented in? These were the kind of things he needed to know if he was going to be mingling with aliens from now on. After all, he was no longer the 'Anglocentric bag of dicks' he'd been when he met Su, and understood that a little bit of respect for other cultures went a long way with people. "So noted. Back to the subject at hand… you're claiming that you can help us?"

"After a fashion, Harry. Can I call you Harry?" Calia waited until he nodded before raising her hands and ticking points off on her fingers. "As far as I see it, your problems are thus. You're currently existing purely on Aria's good graces, and you have to hope that the pirate queen doesn't get bored of you, opt to impress you due to your powers, decide you're a threat to her power and kill you, et cetera and so forth. You're stuck in that situation because you're flat broke until you can take that trunk full of precious metals to a human colony and convert them to credits at a respectable rate. You can't do it here because what your people did - and still - value isn't the same as what the rest of the galaxy does, and so you'd get more selling your kidneys than you would for a trunk full of what we see as industrial metals. You can't fly to a human colony and sell things because you're currently broke. You're basically stuck in a vicious cycle: you can't get money without spending money you don't yet have. Unless you put yourself in someone's debt… or find someone willing to help you out."

Harry let out a snort of disbelief at that before drawing his wand, waving it and conjuring an ornate chair for himself. "I see." Slipping his wand back into its holster, he sank down into the chair before patting the armrest with his right hand. As Luna settled in at his side, he wrapped his arm around her waist before fixing Calia with a distinctly unimpressed look. "Let me guess. Despite just hearing you admit that you're spying on us for someone, we're supposed to believe you want to help us out?"

"Well, not me personally. Not that I don't feel for you, because I do, but I don't have my own ship. Which should be evident by the fact that I'm on this rock to begin with; if I could go wherever I wanted, I'd be pretty much anywhere other than Omega or Khar'shan right now." Calia shot a glance out the window at the reddish cityscape of Omega, shuddering faintly before continuing. "I'm just a scout for my people: I identify interesting specimens, observe them, and then report back to Óasi. I'm authorized to negotiate on behalf of the matriarchs if I find someone who just barely qualifies for our attention, but-"

The longer he let Calia speak, the more confused Harry found himself getting, and so he whistled softly to interrupt her so that he could get a word in edgewise. "Not that these extra details aren't fascinating and all, but you're sorta tap-dancing around the erumpent in the room. Who are 'your people'? Who do you represent? Because if you've been with us since we got to this apartment, you know that we know pretty much nothing about the galaxy and I'd really like a name I can bounce off Encyclopedia Krína here."

"The Sylléktries." The utterly alien word made Harry frown and eye his omni-tool suspiciously, but Calia was ready with an explanation. "We routinely hack the government servers that push out translator updates and make sure that word goes untouched. It's a word from an old asari dialect; it's modern counterpart has recently become what the asari call another species entirely. So if we let translators do their jobs properly, we'd end up getting confused with the creepy bug aliens from being the Omega 4 relay anytime we talked about ourselves."

A name that he didn't recognize and another question to add to all of the others that he had about the galaxy, Omega, and now Calia. And her 'people'. Harry groaned, bringing his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "Krína? Can you help me make some sense out of all this?"

There was a soft whir as Krína's shotgun collapsed and then she stored it at the small of her back before throwing herself down on the left arm of his chair. "I would love to, but… by the goddess. I thought the Sylléktries were a myth."

"Evidently you were myth-taken." Luna loosed a tinkling, bell-like laugh at her terrible joke even as Harry and Krína both groaned loudly, sliding off the arm of the chair and rising to her feet. "You know, Calia, you're lucky that I'm with Harry these days." Circling around behind the couch, she leaned down to rest her chin in the space between the twin, horn-like bundles of crests atop Calia's head as she lay her hands on the asari's shoulders. "It means I can't employ some of my favorite interrogation methods from the war."

Calia tipped her back, trying in vain to meet Luna's gaze. "You don't think I'm trained to resist torture?"

Snickering, Luna slid her hands down so that her fingers brushed against the tops of Calia's lightly armored breasts. "Who said anything about torture, luv? The way I do things, I'd make you beg to give me your secrets… and then beg me not to stop what I was doing even when you'd run dry and had nothing left to tell me."

"I hate to break it to you, 'luv', but I'm older than you. And I've been living all these years, not jumping ahead to this time." Reaching up with both hands, Calia summoned her biotics and wrapped a field of glowing blue energy around Luna. Harry raised his wand threateningly, only to relax when all the asari did was float Luna up and over the back of the couch, settling the blonde on her lap before releasing her. "You might be an amazing fuck where you come from, but I was probably more experienced back when you were learning to write your own name."

Leaning in, Luna wrapped her arms around Calia's neck as she pressed her nose against the asari's and stared into her eyes. "Is that a challenge?"

"Maybe after the hired gun leaves. Unlike you, I'm not into having an audience."

"Well then I suppose it's a good thing that Harry's not letting me bring girls home yet, because you wouldn't last long in my bed. Oh, and since you were kind enough to bring me face to face with you?" Reaching up, Luna drew her wand from where it was tucked behind her ear and then jabbed the tip against the side of Calia's head, freezing her in place before casting one of the few spells either of them still had to verbalize. "Legilimens."

Sitting in his office, Jack Harper allowed himself a moment's respite as he stared out at the slowly shifting mass of colors on the surface of Anadius before sighing and pulling up the footage attached to the latest report from one of his agents on Omega. While he sincerely doubted that one more viewing would make the video any more sensical, he also knew that his obsession with solving mysteries would keep him from moving on until he finally understood what he was looking at. So the sooner he got back to work, he reasoned, the sooner he'd finish.

A bright flash of white light. Two humans - and their very unusual, yet to be identified pet - appearing out of nowhere. A few minutes of motionlessness. The male awakening, followed seconds later by the female. The male drawing some sort of device from up his sleeve, and using it to emit several colored bursts of light with varying effects. The female producing a damaged version of the device for a few seconds before tucking it away again. The arrival of the vorcha. The male assuming a defensive position in front of the female, and then using more bursts of light to drive the vorcha back. One burst sending them flying out of sight - forcing his agent to have to cobble together footage from a second security camera - and a last burst of red light that caused the vorcha to explode. The humans being approached by one of Aria's lackeys and then led off.

From there, according to reports collected from lower-ranking agents and collated for easy reading, the two humans had met with Aria briefly before being escorted to one of the more heavily defended apartment blocks that was firmly within Aria T'Loak's personal domain. Two separate agents claimed to have seen the woman's eyes turn white and glow while she linked with Aria. A single report could be written off as a trick of the light or an agent indulging in a drink too many with customers in Afterlife. Two warranted investigation. According to an eavesdropper, their names were supposedly Harry Potter and Luna Lovegood. Given that neither appeared in any of the numerous databases that Harper had access to - and Luna Lovegood sounded like something out of a Fleming novel - he'd noted them as probable aliases and told his analysts to focus on facial recognition. Today, the pair had emerged briefly from their apartment under the watchful eye of one of Aria's subordinates, touring the more secure portions of Omega's core and acquiring weapons before returning home. And-

An alert blinked off to his right, signifying the arrival of priority traffic from a field agent. From the same field agent as the report he was reading, Harper noted before opening the message. He stared at it for a few seconds before swearing under his breath. While he normally appreciated initiative, the intercepted messages that his agent had taken hours to crack could have been done in seconds aboard Cronus Station if only he'd attached them. Now Harper was stuck playing catchup and if there was one thing he hated above all others, it was being forced into a reactionary position.

The Sylléktries were after his mystery humans. Personally, Harper respected the asari sect's goals because - save for their largely isolationist stance - they weren't terribly different from the guiding principles of Cerberus. But that respect came to an abrupt end when there was the possibility of advanced human specimens or unknown, advanced technology falling into the hands of a group of eugenics-obsessed aliens. But competing with them for the favor of Potter and Lovegood would be… difficult, to say the least. Countering whatever offer the Sylléktries made in terms of money or materiel would likely require a sizable financial outlay, and then there was the nature of the Sylléktries themselves…

"Jana, contact Operatives Lawson and Brooks and have them come to my office immediately. And have someone create a new set of papers for Brooks; I refuse to have one of my people walking around using the name 'Tabitha Rasa' of all things…"

Tapping his fingers together as he stared at the reports filtering in from both Omega and Cronos Station, the Shadow Broker smiled widely. "Oh, Harper, you almost make things too easy for me. If only you were humble enough to work with the salarians or quarians, you might actually stand a chance of keeping me out of your systems."

It was nice to have confirmation that his agents weren't dosing up on red sand while on the job, which had been his initial thought when reports started rolling in about a human male with a 'stick' that shot beams of light and a human whose eyes glowed when she linked with an asari. While the latter was still unsubstantiated, albeit backed by the reports of Cerberus's own assets on Omega, he now had video of the former. The fact that he was resorting to stealing said footage from Cerberus was intolerable, though, and the Broker made an idle note to either turn or kill the Cerberus agent who had collected the video. He didn't recognize the attached name, but the Broker assumed they were in a position superior to his own agent within that corner of Aria's organization and that was to explain for his person's failing.

If not… well, there were ways to handle that eventuality as well.

As for the Sylléktries, the Broker had known about them hours ago thanks to his agents remembering what they were paid to do and what was supposed to be passed on to their superiors for handling. It hadn't been of any particular concern to him, given that he had no plans for 'Potter' and 'Lovegood' beyond continued observation. He even had a handful of Syllektrión maidens on his payroll, which allowed him to keep an eye on anyone who accompanied them back to Óasi. But if Harper was sending Lawson and Brooks in, that meant a honeypot operation to try and counter the Sylléktries' interest in Aria's new pets. While the Broker may not have any plans of his own for Potter and Lovegood? That didn't mean he wanted Harper succeeding in any plans that he might have had involving the pair.

"Operative Macaria. I have an assignment for you."