Joe's Note: If the way Quana is was described in the last chapter sounds vaguely familiar to you, you're probably a fan of Star Wars. Lost-Translations-of-Quantum-Foam's pet thrall race is completely unashamedly based on the Twi'leks, mostly because I never really intend to utilize them in any capacity beyond what you're seeing here. They're part of me addressing what I thought was a fairly obvious plot hole in the original Mass Effect trilogy: we're told the yahg won't be harvested in this cycle because they're new enough to spacefaring… but there's no equivalent race from the previous cycle? Literally every sentient species that evolved in that era was absorbed by the protheans and then eliminated by the Reapers? That's… suspiciously convenient. Granted in this case, the thorian's pets exist off the relay network by design and so they might even predate the protheans and have escaped more than one cycle's harvest… but my point still stands.
Dedications & Thanks: To Nicholas, Alexander, Howard, Alonsis2, MJ, Christopher, Daniel, Brian, Crusifikz70, Rollin, Chris N, Fablesrogue, Morgan, Janne, Joseph, Jason, mpop, Riley, bloodylord, Luke, Zachary, Marc, Ziryo, Elliot, Timothy, Leigh, Chris, George, Koby, Dimitria, William, Mauday, Stephane, Ken, Warslick, Paul, Pat, Mitch, Joel, Warren, 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.

"So if sparring is foreplay to you, what's this?"

"Tonight's going to be the night we see if that Unbreakable Charm you put on our bed actually lives up to its name." Thalestris accompanied her words with two shots of her pistol followed by a flash-step forward, only to find her sword's blade deflecting off the same glowing orange tech armor that had absorbed both her shots. "Right. Thralls can still use technology that the original was familiar with. And…" A roiling warp field caught the statuesque asari in the chest, hurling her across the room until a wall interrupted her flight. "…biotics. Why the fuck was there a biotic turian in a Blackwatch unit? I thought they still kept all of those in the Cabals?"

Harry rolled his eyes as he twirled his wand over his head, wrapping a shield around his body as he assessed the situation. Did it really matter why there was a biotic turian? There was one. That was the important thing. While Thalestris's charge through Harry's literal cover fire had caught the thorian off-guard, the thralls were definitely ready for them now, quickly spreading out and encircling the pair as they drew their own weapons. It was a questionable move from a tactical perspective: it would deny Harry the ability to utilize area of effect attacks while forcing him to worry about friendly fire in certain directions, but open the thralls themselves to a far greater chance of a friendly fire incident. But unlike most foes that the thorian had probably faced, encircling Harry didn't actually restrict his mobility and he definitely intended to take advantage of that.

Spinning on his heel, Harry apparated over to join Thalestris, offering the asari a hand up as he continued formulating a plan in his head. That proved to be a terrible idea as he found himself yanked off-balance by the significantly larger woman, dropping to one knee in an effort to avoid being pulled down on top of her. The two stared at each other before sharing a chuckle, Thalestris releasing Harry's hand and climbing to her feet before returning the favor by pulling him up next to her. "Right. No trying to be gallant without using popping those potions of mine first. So, do you want to try showing off again or are we going to tackle them as a team? Because that seems to have worked pretty well the first time."

Growling softly, Thalestris hesitated for a moment before holstering her pistol and then pressing the palm of her free hand against the small of Harry's back as she sidled up on his right. Dark energy rippled around her form before spreading across his as she raised a barrier, creating yet another layer of protection to supplement his shield charm and their respective kinetic barriers. "You have a plan, then? From what you told the others, I'm assuming that it involves staying in close to them."

"Except for that one biotic turian. And maybe the giant guy." Harry eyed the thrall in tech armor for a moment before thrusting his hand forward and loosing a blast of wild, unstructured magic from his wand. Even as it failed to form a coherent spell matrix that would have any sort of appreciable effect, the burst of energy served its desired purpose and disrupted the emitters projecting the glowing orange armor. Wrapping his magic around Thalestris, Harry apparated forward and promptly dropped to one knee so that his companion's sword could pass by safely overhead, bisecting the thrall. A quick burst of flame from his wand incinerated the still-animated head, neutralizing the remaining threat. "The key is remembering that the thralls can only do what the originals could. So even though Quana is familiar with magic, her thralls have no defense against it. Which means that there's a good chance I could take them all on my own if I needed to… but I thought it could be something that we shared, instead. You know, as a way to end our nice leisurely walk through a ship graveyard?"

Thalestris reached down to again yank Harry to his feet, this time brushing her visor against his seeing as how she couldn't actually go in for a kiss. "Aww, that's so romantic." Pulling back, she glanced around at the nine remaining thralls for a moment before amending that statement. "I'm coming to the realization that I have a very warped idea of what's romantic… but fuck it. You seem to like it well enough." Raising her left arm in front of her, Thalestris generated a biotic barrier that rippled and pulsed as it began turning aside a hail of incoming fire, buying her the time to glance over at Harry for instruction. "Next target?"

Having missed who threw the warp field in the first place, Harry raked his gaze back and forth in search of some hint as to the biotic thrall's identity. His eyes narrowed as the faintest of blue sparks began rippling over one turian's hand, quickly coalescing into rippling dark energy. "This one!" He wound an arm around Thalestris's waist before twisting his way into another side-along apparition, allowing the larger asari to spin out away from him a step as he brought his wand up and unloaded a blasting curse into the thrall at point blank range. The orange light skittered over a hastily raised biotic barrier, leaving Harry to stare at it in dumbfounded surprise; Thalestris was the only Sylléktria who had figured out how to block his magic so far, and even her ability was pretty hit-or-miss. He didn't have long to ponder that, though, as the thrall thrust one hand out before pulling it back as it made a gripping gesture. Harry found himself lifted up off the ground and suspended in midair as dark energy swirled around him. Attempting to apparate out of the thrall's grip was only partially successful; Harry found out the hard way that it had some method of tracking his jumps as he emerged straight into the path of a biotic throw. Rather than try to apparate away again, he threw a cushioning charm backward and allowed himself to hit the wall, sliding down it as he watched Thalestris leap into battle. "Oh yeah, you definitely need killing."

That turned out to be easier said than done, Harry quickly discovered, for no reason other than the fact that the thralls were actually fighting like the elite military unit they'd been before being sequestrated by the thorian. Thalestris quickly came under a withering hail of fire and was forced to retreat back to Harry's side, raising a domed shield with her biotics that he quickly reinforced with his own shielding charms. The wizard's eyes narrowed as he noticed that at least part of his initial assessment was wrong: the thralls were completely unconcerned about friendly fire, easily shrugging off any bullets that hit them. Even discounting that inhuman quality, though, the situation was entirely unlike anything anything he'd ever experienced before and Harry felt like kicking himself for allowing Deianeira to focus almost exclusively on biotic combat during their training sessions.

But while they were tough foes, perhaps some of the toughest that he'd faced since his final duel against Voldemort? Harry quickly realized that they weren't unbeatable. Yes, they had superior firepower. Yes, they had superior numbers, although that one was largely the fault of his hubris. And yes, at least one was a biotic. But that biotic turian appeared to be the sole reinforced link in an otherwise unremarkable chain. Because if his suspicions were correct? Narrowing his eyes, Harry sent a set of flame lancing out at one of the mundane turians. The thrall stood there calmly as it went up in flames, actually daring to offer its opponent a mocking wave before the magical fire consumed it. Harry nodded in satisfaction; while the biotic thrall couldn't properly defend itself against magic, the thorian was able to feed it the knowledge it needed to manipulate its biotics to do a passable job. The others, on the other hand, were completely unprotected from his powers.

Although assuming he was still alive when this was all over, Harry decided, he definitely needed to ask Quana if he could pick her brain on at least one subject of personal interest. Not only were biotic and kinetic barriers remarkably similar, meaning that her knowledge could very well pave the way for technological anti-magic shielding units? But learning to manipulate her biotics to slough off magic more reliably would allow Thalestris - and Epipsychidion and whoever else he ended up with - to protect themselves if the day came when he reestablished contact with the wizarding world and they proved themselves to be just as backwards and racist as they'd been when he left.

Harry quickly thinned the ranks of the thorian's thralls two further with the judicious application of magical flames, allowing Thalestris to retake the initiative and hurl herself at the biotic turian with another spear kanquess, sending dozens of tiny mass effect shunts stabbing into her foe's barrier as she emerged from the charge. The resulting detonation sent both combatants flying backward away from each other, Thalestris landing lightly on her feet as the turian thrall tumbled across the floor for several yards before hopping back to his feet with a begrudging look of admiration on his face. Spinning almost elegantly, the turian gathered dark energy around himself before hurling it at Thalestris in an attack that seemed to be made of far more lines and angles than Harry was used to seeing in biotics. He almost intervened as Thalestris took a hurried step back, only to stop himself as the asari straightened up and spread her arms wide, letting the attack hit her with no discernible effect. "Flay, huh? So the batarian is a biotic too. Good to know."

His cover blown, the batarian thrall surged forward to attack Thalestris from behind, only to be met with a rippling shockwave as the asari spun to meet him. Her momentum carried her all the way back around in one fluid movement, allowing Thalestris to thrust both hands forward and unleash a hail of plasma bursts into the turian's face. It sent him stumbling back, only to chuckle and become the first thrall outside of Quana herself to speak. "Salvo's usually a good technique to employ against an enemy biotic at close range… but I don't have a nervous system for you to disrupt. And I don't feel pain from the plasma itself."

"Do you feel this?" Dashing forward, Thalestris brought her foot up between the turian's legs, her leg glowing with biotic power at the last second to add genuine injury to the insult. While Harry doubted there was anything even remotely resembling genitalia left on the thrall, the sheer force of the impact stunned the turian and lifted him an inch or two off the ground. That left him vulnerable to a one-two punch to the abdomen that came from fists wreathed in the eerie, black-laced energy of an annihilation field. The turian came apart with what sounded distinctly like a screech of pain as the energy field spread over his body, consuming it utterly. "Probably should have tried the annihilation field earlier when they were all close together… but that's the first time I haven't managed to eat my own armor off with it. Go me."

Picking himself up off the floor where the cascading pulses of Thalestris's shockwave had deposited him, the batarian thrall began gathering energy around him. That energy continued to build even as his form wriggled and shifted, transforming into a green ferret wreathed in dark energy. "Combat transfiguration is so much easier when you don't actually have to worry about what it'll do to your opponent if you mess up." Harry kept his wand trained on the thorian ferret as he made his way over to join a dumbfounded Thalestris, bouncing the ferret up and down a few times before blasting it into the wall hard enough to reduce it to a green smear. "And yeah, I was going to suggest you use annihilation fields but I didn't want to risk a suit breach. All's well that ends well, though, right?"

"It's funny how arrogant you are, acting like things are over already and that you've won." The oversized thrall of unknown origin let out a low chuckle as his remaining allies abandoned their previous tactics and flocked to him, scooping one of the turians up and pressing it against his side. Harry watched in mute horror as both thralls' flesh began to ripple and warp, the larger thrall growing another half a foot or so taller as it grew an extra arm from each side. It quickly repeated the process with another turian, creating a ten foot tall being with six arms that could simultaneously wield two Phaeston rifles, a pair of omni-shields, and a massive shotgun that Harry was fairly certain was of krogan origin. Where that had even come from, Harry had no idea. "You two chewed through my thralls faster than I thought you would; wasn't counting on those flames of yours, Harry. I was planning to slowly increase the difficulty to test you, but I guess we can jump straight to the big finish. Got the idea for this from the Reapers, actually. They love sticking together groups of lesser beings to see if they're more useful that way."

That was… a horrifying little bit of information that had somehow escaped the Prothean records on their war against the Reapers. Probably more so to Harry in particular given that he was familiar with sentients beyond what the Council races - or even the Collective - were familiar with. What sort of creature could the Reapers create by melding his kind with others? Or veela? Or giants? The possibilities were endless. And frightening. But that was a matter to ponder later, when he wasn't still locked in a life and death struggle for another being's amusement. Harry glanced over at the thoroughly smug Quana before nodding in the direction of the massive thrall. "Just out of curiosity, does that thing have its own… essence? Life force? How deeply is it tied to you?"

The question visibly startled Quana, and she frowned as she looked back and forth between Harry and her oversized mutant thrall. "It's an extension of my will, but it's entirely self-contained in a biological sense. Why?"

"Because I'm assuming it has eezo nodes and therefore biotics to go along with all of those conventional weapons, omni-shields, and presumably tech armor and kinetic barriers. Which in turn means that the two of us would be in for one hell of a fight." Harry glanced over at the other asari who had accompanied him to the surface, studying them speculatively before shaking his head. "Hell, in this close of quarters, I'm not sure that all seven of us working together could take that thing without at least one casualty. So I'm going to cheat. I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't accidentally kill you in the process. Avada kedavra!"

During his time with the Department of Mysteries, Harry had been carefully instructed in how to focus his thoughts and emotions to cast the Unforgivables the same way he cast a patronus, manipulating his own mindset to fuel them rather than allowing himself to be consumed by darker emotions the way that dark wizards were. It still wasn't something that he enjoyed doing, the mere act of casting any of the spells leaving him feeling unclean for days afterward… but against something like the monstrosity that he was facing? He didn't really have much of a choice. So Harry watched with as impassive an expression as he could muster as the bolt of green light crossed the space between them and slammed into the thrall's chest. Bits of plant matter exploded outward from its body, presumably owing to its unique nature, but the corpse remained largely intact as it collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

Silence descended on the room, stretching on for nearly a full minute before Quana gave a full body shudder and groaned. "That felt… disgusting. If you'd told me that you were going to do something like that, I would have conceded the fight. Never do that to me again. Ever." Making her way over to the fallen form of her best chance at defeating them, she poked it a few times with her toe before looking back over her shoulder at Harry and Thalestris with an unreadable expression on her face. "Consider me impressed, though. I knew that the asari were vastly superior biotics compared to the other Council races, but that was… actually, you're still pitifully inept compared to the sethani much less the races of my cycle, but you're better than anything I've seen in the past fifty thousand years. Oh, and I noticed that your pistol uses corrupted prothean particle beam technology. Again, pitiful in the grander scheme of things but far and away above what anyone else this cycle has to offer. It means that you have potential, though. Harry, on the other hand? You actually stand a chance of holding your own against the Reapers' ground forces and perhaps even their destroyers."

While the kanquess was far from silent - and not just because it tended to end with someone dying - the flash-step that the asari employed in lieu of apparition was close to it, allowing Deianeira and the others to join Harry and Thalestris with minimal fanfare. The Fedelma's grand master took up a position on his left, acknowledging his preference for Thalestris at his right hand… and leaving space behind him so that Philaenisa could sneak up and grab a handful of his bum. Charming. "So what does that mean? You're impressed and we're not entirely worthless. Will you help us?"

"Well, I'm still not entirely certain that you're not all going to die horrible deaths at the hands of the Reapers. And I'll need to evaluate you as a people far more thoroughly; the last thing we need is for me to hand you knowledge that you're simply not ready to handle. That's how stars end up spontaneously going supernova." The corner of Quana's mouth quirked up as she regarded Deianeira for a moment before turning her attention back to Harry. "But I think I'd be willing to help you, on the condition that any records you make of our dealings point to one of the other thorians still extant. I haven't gotten this far by being sloppy."

Just like that, huh? It seemed… well, far too easy to Harry. Especially given what the STG had gone through to get their thorian to be even mildly cooperative. Then again, Quana admitted to being less than entirely thorian at her core, and she already had a steady supply of thralls to sustain her. Maybe she genuinely did want to deal in experiences and thoughts as a way of spicing up her otherwise dreary existence. But given that the matriarchy had put him in charge of opening a dialogue with the thorian, the call was his to make… and at least until she gave him a reason to believe otherwise? Harry refused to judge Quana by the sins of her ancestors and peers, and so he'd treat like someone who was genuinely interested in working with him. "I think we can work something out."

"…in addition, Hypatilia's team managed to isolate and extract several tons of potentially viable technology, although she admits that viable is relative in this case. She understands it about as well as a primitive asari would understand a Spear of Athame, which is to say that she can point to individual systems and tell me that it's a weapon or a fusion drive or a barrier emitter but she's no closer to understanding how they work or how to reverse engineer them than she was when we started the mission. In other words, Lost-Trans… Quana's help is going to be critical to put any of it to use within my lifetime." Standing at attention, Allura stared up at the hologram of Matriarch Luciana, tapping her datapad of notes against the small of her back rhythmically as she spoke. "To sum it up? While it's only the first step down a long road, I feel that it was as close to an unqualified success as any mission could be and an excellent first showing for the Fedelma and her crew."

Luciana hummed softly in agreement, her gaze flicking back and forth between Allura and a projection of the more detailed after action report on the mission to Eingana. Allura absently noticed that the matriarch was wearing glasses today, presumably an affectation she'd acquired from her new human bondmate but precisely why, she had no idea. She wasn't much more sure when it came to 'how'; Luciana didn't exactly have ears to rest the frames on. "I agree. Excellent job, Captain. And I see from your grand master's contributions that even after living among us for a year, Harry continues to be full of surprises. Particularly this… death spell… of his."

The question elicited a frown from Allura, the diminutive asari glancing to her left at the bulkhead that separated the comm room from the area that Harry had converted into a living space for he and his. "I'm not sure how viable of a weapon it is. Ma'am." Turning her attention back to the hologram, she considered her words carefully as the matriarch fixed her with an inquisitive look. "It's certainly effective, there's no denying that. A weapon that can pass through any personal shielding and kill on contact? It seems like a game changer, the sort of thing that would revolutionize our small unit tactics. But if you notice, Deianeira states that he became distant and withdrawn after using it. Upon returning to the ship, he isolated himself in his quarters with his wife, her bondmate, and their daughter; he hasn't been seen since and everyone save Thalestris and Adikia have been denied entry to their quarters. It's impossible to ignore that casting it took a toll on him… one that I'm not sure we can afford to ask him to pay frequently."

"Especially given our plans for him in the grander scheme of things? So noted, Captain. Disappointed, but noted."