A/N: More than one person has commented that Pel's remarks work best if you imagine them with Zaeed's voice, and I encourage you to do so. Pel has much of the same sort of accent, albeit deeper.

This is an experimental chapter for me – it may or may not work well. I had a very scientific sounding paper for the turian physiology drawn up, but I couldn't make it work with Trellani's voice at all, and finally resorted to this. If you dislike it let me know.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

Due to a scheduling conflict and certain delays out of our control, Matriarch Trellani was delayed on her own mission, resulting in the need for someone to perform a write-up of my initial medical examination of the turian captives forwarded to Minuteman. Normally I would have written it up myself, however on extended review, I decided to have Pel make an attempt at the report.

I made this decision for two reasons. One, it will lead to a better usage of what comes of my findings. While I'm sure my detailed insights into asari biology were appreciated, it struck me somewhat later on that I probably did not consider combat related or interrogation related aspects. Pel, despite that outrageous accent and less-than-stellar educational background, is cunning and will pick up on certain things I would miss that might be useful in Cerberus's fight against the alien creatures.

Second, and equally important, is that I will grudgingly admit you were correct about the man's intellectual capacities. Pel is frighteningly intelligent, merely uneducated and with manners that would offend a krogan. More than once he's given me suggestions or asked questions not out of place from a graduate level student. I think that allowing him to , as he insultingly puts it, translate what I find into more common parlance may create additional insights I may otherwise miss.

As Pel himself extrapolates, I have taken the liberty of editing his final file before transmission. I have not touched any of his … words, but I have interjected comments for clarity or restatement where I felt such was needed.

-Minsta

Cerberus Thought of the Day: Ethics is a human concept, and can only apply to fellow humans. Ethics with an alien being is simple: us, or them.

Against my better goddamned judgment, somehow I get stuck with putting together a section on turian bodies. I'd go over the clusterfuck that lead to this, but I'm sorta enjoying imagining the look on the Shadow Hand's face when he has to listen to my dumb ass ramble on about how turian dicks work and whatnot.

Rather than put y'all through me fumbling through my omnitool to figure out how to pronounce 'thesical torsion process' and finally understanding that's High Geekese for 'shoulder', I'mma just put in my thoughts on the line item shit Minsta figured out by cutting up some spikes in T&I.

Trelly is all caught up in some kind of discussion with one of the slimy Palavanus fuckers and sent a code indicating she was fine but unable to disengage.

Minsta will probably edit the fucking file once I send it off, so if there's any kind of snide comments on what I'm getting out of this, I ain't responsible for them.

Addendum – Minsta: Yes, yes. Laugh all you wish.

Overview of basic physiology

First off, that word physiology pisses me off, so we're not using it any goddamned more. Turians are big bastards, the shortest stands a little over six feet, and I've seen spikes that top eight feet tall, but most are six and half to seven feet. Broad through the shoulders and chest. The boys tend to have wider shoulders, the lady turians have wider hips and skinnier builds.

Addendum – Minsta: A depressingly inexact description. Turians are bipeds of a cold-blooded extraction. They share many features with both Terran avians and dinosaurs, specifically hollow bones, saccule respiration, serial chromatic scaling vision with possible low-light sensitivity, etc. They are articulate in all joints at a fixed two hundred and fifty five degrees, except the hips and shoulders which are completely condyloid.

No asses, and no tits. Goddamned depressing. At least with blues or even bucketheads you got something to look at.

Unless you live in a cave everyone knows turians are dextro. Way Minsta explained it to me, living things – strippers, taxi drivers, aliens, hell, even parts of ol' Richard – are made up of proteins. Normal people have 'right handed' and turians and quarians have 'left handed' proteins. We're all told that levo can't eat dextro food and vice versa.

Minsta says that's all shit. The problem isn't the proteins being weird, its that their shape fucks up enzymes in the other type's body. You eat a turian hamburger and your body incorporates the proteins, which makes the enzymes and sugars or whatever come out all fucked up and THAT causes the toxic shock, vomiting blood, blah blah blah.

Addendum – Minsta: Astoundingly, he managed to mostly understand my point. Common science tells us that there can be no real harm in merely dextro amino acid groups – even some things on earth share such. Dextro proteins can be found in cell walls of many plants, and most sugars on earth are actually dextro in conformation. Even some nervous cells have dextro configured proteins, mostly alkaline off-shift channels for deionzation of nervepaths.

The dextro amino acids of both turian and quarian extraction, therefore, are fully capable of being consumed and used by humans. The problem comes in that some – not all, but some – of these amino acids use long-bond chains that inhibit certain peptide reactions. Enzyme misreads and malformed prions are also likely. Such prions and refolded protein chains can be extremely dangerous to humans – the old 'mad cow' disease that affected the 20thand 21stcenturies is a good example. Those, ironically, were caused by dextro contamination of feed food sources from neural matter.

To sum up, some turian food and bio-matter will likely cause allergic reactions and has a chance to cause something more serious. A more serious issue is that turian body chemistry is much more acidic than human, with a baseline of 5.2. That is why chemical burns and the like can happen from turian blood exposure.

Bottom line, the spikes are low-level toxic, and you can be blinded if they spit in your eyes. Hurts like a bitch, too.

Addendum – Minsta: Ahem. See above.

Anyway, back to bodies and shit. Turians are covered in plating (more about that later) and walk on two legs that are more or less like giant goddamned springs. The spur things they have sticking out the back of their legs are anchor points for bigass muscles, and the bones actually slide inside one another, allowing them to run like crazy and to jump twelve to fifteen feet with one leap. I've seen it, scariest shit you'll ever see, five hundred pounds of claws and teeth leaping on you.

They have claws, about six to seven inches long, made up of compressed bone and iron from their bodies. Do not underestimate these fucking things, even unaugmented they can rip your throat out with a single flick. And most turians like plating them with metal or inlays of omni-blades or Jesus fuck knows what else. I saw a turian disembowel a batarian once with one slash.

From behind.

Starting to understand why Minsta drinks so goddamned much. Anyway, turian muscle is 'long-strand' , which is a fancy name for muscles like the ones in your calves. It bunches and unbunches real quick and has lots of impact power, but doesn't give the turians a lot of stamina. Minsta told me humans evolved to run their prey down through exhaustion. Turians didn't, they leap out and claw shit to death, so they have lots of raw power but not lots of endurance.

Addendum – Minsta: A simplification of what I said, sadly. Turian muscles pack enormous hitting and striking capability not just because of strand composition but ATP distribution. Turian muscles have mitochondria more … aggressive than human versions, which break down sugars and provide large bursts of energy very rapidly. The muscle cells are literally saturated with them, as well as a form of rapidly discharging fat-storage cell that breaks down into high energy lipids under heavy stress. A turian therefore can power through exertions that would exhaust energy in a human rapidly.

Moreover, turian muscles regenerate and rebuild themselves at an equally faster rate, enabling them to recover quicker from exertion and build muscle mass and power far faster than a human.

They have fucking fangs, like a bad vampire movie. Lots of them, in a jaw that can crack a human femur with one bite. Those little mandible things on the side are leftover from when turians also had a venomous bite. Glad that they lost THAT shit. When they get edgy or upset, they flicker a lot, because back when they could bite you that was how they pumped venom into the mandibles.

Goddamned lovely.

Turians have three hearts, all shitty two-chamber pieces of crap that work like fish hearts, and instead of a set of lungs have big sacs all down their ribs that take in and filter what they breathe. Makes 'em resistant to gas, airborne infections, and shit like that. Air is constantly going into this sac, but only part of it dumps oxygen into the body, so they can have a backup of air all the time.

Addendum – Minsta: Ugh. He only got half of that it seems. Much like Terran birds, a turian inhales through narrow passages which lead through a large sac-like arrangement in the torso. This sac is full of filtering fibers and clamps shut on exhalations, storing air. The breathing of the turian inflates the smaller lung sacs lining this larger air sac, pressing fresh air into the lungs and stale air out a series of expulsion holes.

The beauty of this method is that turians have a limited supply of fresh air at all times, and can hold their breath for an astonishing six to eight minutes as a result. I would recommend against gaseous agents in any assaults, as they are unlikely to be fully effective.

Nerves are 'fairly standard', according to Minsta, although they have more than we do.

Turians have a bunch of weird organs that do some of what our human organs do, but in different ways. Turian blood is blue because it uses cobalt (a blue metal, I guess) to carry oxygen around. They have a liver-thing, three or four kidney-things, and all that jazz. The backup organs means that most torso shots are a fucking waste of time.

I can just imagine you three rolling your eyes at 'kidney-thing', but I don't care. I mean, seriously, Bossman, do you give a shit what their liver is called? Didn't think so.

Addendum – Minsta: The turian liver is actually of some interest to me. It is highly efficient and utilizes a serial enzymatic cleansing pattern that can filter most harmful substances in short order. It not only filters blood but also the lymph-analogue the turian immune system uses, and it builds up reservoirs of harmful materials as a sort of guide. When a hostile element (a poison, for example) is introduced into the turian bloodstream and hits the liver-analogue, the liver can actually utilize tailored enzymes to break it down faster once it has done so at least once before. We should aim to see if this adaptation can be copied bio-mechanically for our own use.

They have a thing like a gizzard – ya know, like a chicken. Minsta says it's because their teeth are for ripping and tearing meat up, not for eating plants or grinding. The crazy fuckers will swallow small rocks with their meals to aid in digestion. The spikes have two stomachs, one for plant matter and the other for meats. Here's a tip – a good shot just to the left of center in their torso will hit the meat-stomach, and acid from that will usually disable them.

Addendum – Minsta: A suggestion that did not occur to me.

Turian blood vessels are more like human veins, according to Minsta. He...ah, god, let me just quote the fucker, I can't even translate this shit. "Vessels are surrounded by vasoconstrictor muscular nodes at major joint formations. This, along with cup-like muscular valves, assists in prevents hypovalemic shock from blood lividity..."

After pulling up that shit on SirtaNet, basically their blood vessels have lots of little muscles to help their hearts pump blood and keep it from pooling, and they can pinch off broken blood vessels. This is why even after taking shots and wounds that would bleed out and kill a human, turians can survive.

Addendum – Minsta: I shudder to think what uses Pel is putting a database of medical and anatomical knowledge to, but he is (basically) correct. Based on my examination of the turian corpses, key points to hit would be the head, hips, and the areas of the stomach he pointed out.

Other than that, turians are stronger than humans and batarians, and about half as strong as a krogan. They have to eat more than humans do, but they don't need anywhere near as much water. Turian strength is greatest in slashing motions with the arms – those big ass shoulders are mostly muscles to power a clawing backhand – and in the legs, so don't let the fuckers kick you.

Turians are really good climbers and natural pilots, but bad swimmers.

Addendum – Minsta: I shouldn't be surprised he stops here. There is some minor but possibly useful information he left out.

The turian bone structure, as I mentioned earlier, is mostly hollow. The bones themselves contain a soft-tissue lining of erectile tissues that stiffen if a bone breaks to hold it in roughly the correct shape, allowing them to heal from simple fractures and soft breaks very easily, but making more serious bone injuries a potentially dangerous hazard.

Turian blood is very slightly acidic and also acts as a debonding agent for several kinds of adhesive.

Without getting caught up in medical minutiae , it's worth noting that turian immune response is multi-tiered, with several competing immune systems providing a layered defense. Most biowarfare is contraindicated for short term reactions, and they make extremely good test subjects for broad-spectrum viral testing.

Turians can operate on significantly less sleep than humans, and can induce sleep in less than twenty seconds. Their brain matter and nervous system also allow them to fight off fatigue effects from lack of sleep for up to a full week, and they are very difficult to knock unconscious.

Turian Senses

Short version: Turians were predators as they evolved, and they've got some incredible senses. Not as good as salarians, but close.

They have really, really good vision – Minsta said they have more cones and rods in their eyes than eagles do, and they can see at a hundred feet what a human can at twenty. The nerves from the turian eye to their brain are more complex than ours. That means they can actually react to more of what they see – even peripheral vision. Each eye is independent or they can be locked together, so a turian can focus on one thing, or have one eye focus on something and use the other to keep looking around. This does mess up depth perception, though, at least Minsta is pretty sure it does.

Be glad you don't have to translate this shit into English, the bastard is using the most complicate words he can find. He actually described color as 'a non-monochromatic reflective artifact of ambient visible light'. I may choke him out when we get back to Minuteman.

Addendum – Minsta: Cretin.

Anyway, turian eyes are covered by a membrane they can open and shut to keep out dust and the like, and a second eyelid that blocks bright lights (like that crazy ass star over Palaven. Who in FUCK inhabits a world with a B class super-giant?) The eyes have all these other weird things, but the bottom line is they see real good, better than humans, and they can keep track of shit like crazy.

Addendum – Minsta: The man has a talent for reducing medical terminology into street babble, I will give him that much. A few things he glossed over – turian eyesight is adjustably telescopic, with a maximum magnification of 3X, achieved by several clear 'lenses' that can slide behind the primary lens in the eye. They may or may not have augmented cone structures in the eye to allow ultra-low-light vision, and I am unsure if they see in the infrared spectrum or not.

Turian have hearing that is incredible. They can hear a heartbeat and tell if you're lying or not from that, and they can do so reliably. More than that, they have four ears. Well, not ears, but ear holes. They can use this to pin down where sounds come from.

Their taste is about the same as ours, and they have a weak sense of smell.

Turians can also see patterns and shapes in low light better than we can. Thankfully, they don't have any thing weird like shark-senses in asari or goddamned UV vision. On the other hand, they really don't need it.

Addendum – Minsta: Actually incorrect, I'm almost certain that, just like Terran avians, they can see some UV reflections. They cannot, however, see using only UV lighting like salarians or drell can.

Turian Plating

Turians are not entirely covered in plating, but a lot of their body is. The plating is like a cross between bone and the stuff that fingernails are made out of. When they are growing up, they eat lots of stuff with iron in it, and this travels to their skin. The plating is grown out of a mix of bone, what Minsta calls a keratin analogue, and bits of iron and other metals from their foods.

Addendum – Minsta: For the uninformed, keratin is the material your fingernails are made out of.

The purpose of the plating is to bounce soft rads and UV radiation. Alpha radiation, the weak stuff, is stopped by clothing and what not, but is the most dangerous. Get this shit, turian skin is thinner than human skin, and so the plating blocks that. It also blocks beta and some gamma radiation.

Under the plating is a bunch of blood vessels and sacks of gel. This gel stuff is mixed with something like graphite and helps block more radiation (as well as cushion shocks, like punches and kicks). It also glubs up when exposed to air, helping to reduce bleeding from punctures and slashing wounds.

Plating is hooked on to the skin and muscles by boney spars that you can see here and there, except on their face, where it hooks right to the skull. The plating gets hot, and the channels and blood vessels vent the heat upwards, to the head. The fringe thing on turians are like big radiating vanes that let it bleed off, contracting in cold and expanding in heat. Females have smaller fringes because they are smaller in size and also because turian eggs need more body heat than the males do for incubation.

Huh, this is kinda interesting to read. Minsta's running out of fancy ass words.

Addendum – Minsta: I simply see no point in damaging the elocution of the document any further if any time I use technical language it's glossed over. However, while there are several other interesting things about turian plating, none of them have any … practical application.

Turian Reproduction

Turians breed like cockroaches. Just putting that out there. We'll never be able to outnumber the spikes, they pop babies all the fucking time.

The naughty bits are pretty much like ours, actually. Turian nuts are tucked away inside the body behind plates of bone (lucky bastards) and their dicks retract deep into the body when not in use. (They don't use 'em to piss, apparently.) They pop a fairly normal boner just like everybody else does, but it's only when they want to – voluntary control. Stays up as long as they want, too. Fucking spikes, hate them more now.

Addendum – Minsta: I regret letting Pel write this now...if the fool starts using pornographic references...

The chicks … ah, god. Turian females like being knocked up. For human women, it's a pain, for turians, it's pleasurable. A turian female has six or eight eggs inside them at any time, ready to go. Only one can be impregnated at a time, but usually they end up banging four or five times just to get one eggs ready to go.

Addendum – Minsta: sigh The eggs use a rather unique form of protein surface lock to require multiple breeding sessions, borrowing multiple strands of modified XY/XY pairs from each sperm match to filter out potential hazardous mutations. This has the interesting effect of ensuring that male-dominant genetic disorders rarely pass down more than one generation – possible adaptation to higher radiation rates on Palaven, no doubt.

Once it's, uh, hot, it takes about three or four weeks to grow and develop before the turian female lays it. During this time, the hormones of the females even out, but being pregnant is like some kinda turn on for them, the turians actually have a word for it, something like 'glow of life' or some shit. You can't really tell a preggers turian bitch from one who isn't, they don't show or anything. At least not to human eyes, turians can smell a difference or something. The egg laying itself is also some kind of turn on for them – I didn't ask for details and for once, I'm so very goddamned glad Minsta has a stick up his ass and didn't try to find out more.

Addendum – Minsta: It appears to trigger certain involuntary orgiastic responses. I'm not interested in the sick fetishes of aliens. Pel and I are, for once, of like mind.

Details? Jesus fuck, go find a turian porn movie. Parts of those have birthing sequences. Shit you not. All aliens are fucking freaks.

Getting sidetracked – the egg. After it's layed, the turians put it in a hatchery – climate controls, sonic isolation, nutrient baths, whole nine yards. From there it hatches about two weeks later, and a tiny as shit turian baby is born. The level of development is about on par with a premie human baby – lots of them don't make it. Turians don't have maternity wards – the egg laying is, as I said, in pornos, so it's not debilitating to the chicks – they do have egg wards and wards for the babies. Pretty high-tech stuff.

I'll warn you right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing will piss off turians faster than blowing up their child wards. Blowing up hospitals with adults, meh, two points. Cacking small children, frowned upon but nothing nasty. But killing turian babies or blowing up eggs is going to get you fucked up quick, fast, and in a hurry. Once saw a krogan skull on display in a baby ward and asked about it. Krogan from the Ganar Clan wanted to kidnap and sell eggs to the batarians to start a breeding farm. The turians skinned the krogan alive, and then waited for him to regenerate and did it again and again until he went crazy from the pain and starved to death from the regen.

Then they burned his body and mounted his skull and encourage their kids to throw spitballs at it.

I know you guys like sending messages, but that's an envelope that will blow up in our faces. The Dog don't need to be fucking with kids anyway, if you ask me.

Back to the science. Ha, I always wanted to say that.

Addendum – Minsta: Jesus wept.

Except during the three or four weeks the egg is actually growing, turian female hormones are telling them to get laid. I've actually heard the males complaining about it (hate the fuckers so much right now). That means turians females who end up with non-turian mates are pretty much non-stop horny.

As far as the mechanics go, like I said, watch some porn movies if you have a goddamned interest. There's only so far I'm willing to go for Cerberus, and that does not extend to detailed examination of alien bird-lizard poontang, sorry.

Addendum – Minsta: Compared to asari filth, it's actually fairly tame. The turian phallus is not much different than human or batarian versions, and the turian vaginal analogue is slightly larger to account for egglaying, but that's about it. Turians have a more robust nervous and erogenous zone placement than humans, which lack pain nerves (probably due to issues with pinches from plating and talon cuts.)

Turian Life Cycle

Turians start off as babies, duh. They have, in their own language, four stages of life. As a hatchling they are weak , only about the size of a human baby and even less coordinated. Parents chew up food for the baby and vomit it back up into a disgusting mess the kids lap up. A hatchling basically sits around all day, eating, shitting, and learning to crawl and talk. This takes about seven years, give or take a couple for really stupid spikes.

Addendum – Minsta: Turian learning rates during childbirth are markedly inferior to humans, which is hardly surprising for people who took tens of thousands of years to get from sticks to sticks with rocks at the end.

Once they're old enough to walk and start growing in teeth so they can feed themselves, they are considered 'half-adults'. That's their term, I guess we'd call them teenagers, but turian teens are nothing like human teens. They focus heavily on school and learning to fight, while growing their plating and shooting up. By the time a turian is twenty, they stand nearly full size and weigh almost as much as a full grown turian. Another big difference is that turian teens don't have a sex drive or even urges.

That kicks in when they hit full grown adult – for males, the deciding factor is when they can pull a boner, for females, when they start making eggs and wanting to shag everything in sight. At this point, they formally enter the military and all that jazz and get their first citizenship rank.

When a turian gets really old, their sex drive finally shuts off. Females stop making eggs and males can't get it up any more. They call this 'Fading', and it basically is the turian slowly falling the fuck apart. Plating gets thinner and thinner until it doesn't stop radiation anymore. In the past, that was a death sentence , but with modern clothing and colonies, it isn't so bad. Still, once a turian goes into the Fading, their time is about up.

Turian Lifespan

Spikes live about a hundred thirty to a hundred and fifty years. They hit full adulthood about twenty five, and the Fading usually strikes about a hundred and twenty and up. Up until the Fading they are pretty active, the only difference between a young buck and an old man is the old man will be a bit slower and less endurance.

Males tend to live longer than females – the constant production of eggs is harder on the body of spike girls, I guess.

Addendum – Minsta: I am astonished he managed to figure that out on his own, but he is correct.

Turian Modifications

Spikes love cyberware and bio-modification.

Most turians have their kids fitted with cybernetic rangefinders and internal clock-compass sets when they hit their 'half-adult' stage. Losing a limb in battle and getting a cybernetic replacement is seen as a badge of honor, while getting your goddamned limbs hacked off to get replacements so you can be a better fighter is a sign of sacrifice.

Lunatics.

The biggest and most common cyber they get are gyroscope implants for wrists and vision-spotter enhancements for snipers and sharpshooters. Lost of them get mods for their claws, like I mentioned earlier. All kinds of crazy shit – omni-implants or full on omni-blade edges, polyalloy coatings, bonded metallic cores – one fucker I knew back in my Alliance days had monofilament tips and kinetic impact gearing shoved in his hand.

There's nothing quite like seeing a turian slash completely the fuck through a steel door and filet the stupid bastard behind it.

Muscle enhancers, especially in the legs, are also common, as is armor plating. Subdermal plating is pretty easy to fit on a turian, they can just shove it beneath their regular plating or bolt it directly to it.

Turian Diseases and Bodily Disorders

Given that their homeworld is an irradiated shithole orbiting a giant ball of nuclear fire that puts out enough UV and hard rads to sterilize every surface it hits, the bacteria and shit like that on Palaven have to be pretty ugly shit. Thankfully, they don't do much to non-dextro life – they rely on enzymes and those protein patterns to infect, and none of the dextro shit fits the levo stuff. Even if they did manage to get inside, like some turian viruses can, they end up blowing themselves up trying to convert cells, according to Minsta. You'll get a day of high fever and some sore muscles from being exposed to turian diseases, but that's about it.

The spikes have about as many sicknesses and illnesses that we do, but only a couple really stand out. There's some kind of plating rot that ends up with their plating decaying, if it gets bad poisons and toxic shit gets in their blood and they start decaying like goddamned zombies. Gross as shit, most times it's lethal so they just put a bullet in the spike's head and keep stepping.

They've got a disease that acts a lot like the flu. Turians don't sneeze, but they do cough and spit up a lot, and that's how it spreads. Other than that, I think they have a few other things like muscle disorders.

The biggest thing the spikes deal with is cancer. Shockingly, living on a planet made of uranium is going to give you some really nasty problems. Cancer (mostly of the skin and heart) is the leading cause of death that isn't violent among turians. They've gotten it under control mostly in the colonies (the big drivers of cancer there is genetics, according to Minsta.). On Palaven...not so much.

Addendum – Minsta: There is, as you might imagine, a great deal of technical specificity left out of the report, but all in all this will suffice as a primer. The turian is a superior close-quarters fighter and has excellent adaptations for long-distance combat as well, but they are mediocre at mid-range fights. Their speed, strength and senses give them a strong edge over human combatants, and they have sharper reaction curves even when undersupplied or exhausted.

That being said, they have weaknesses that have not been compensated for. They are not very well equipped to take damage – once bleeding and plating breaks reach a certain level, their inferior heart design will drop their blood pressure. While their vascular system counteracts this to some degree, blood loss from multiple wounds will kill them, and the blood pressure loss weakens their accuracy and strength considerably.

They have very poor ability to handle heavy physics shocks due to the hollow bone structure and lack of a truly segmented spine – theirs is fused in sections along the reinforced back plating. While quick and agile in CQC, they are not good brawlers or wrestlers, and once those nasty talons are taken out of play, less than impressive against a truly skilled unarmed combatant.

While their various sexual curiosities may seem pointless, the fact that the females are often distracted by breeding urges means they are typically less alert than the males, which can be used against them. Likewise, turian biological protectiveness of their children can be used to stage distractions, even if you accept Pel's statement that actually harming turian children would be counter productive.

Their resistance to poisons and diseases is somewhat limiting us in our rapid reduction efforts, as we have no fast method to disable large amounts of turians with one deployment, but there is some promising research concerning sonics. Visual-assault weapons will also work wonders, given their enhanced vision.

I will finish my dissections of the turian corpses I was forwarded and present my findings in an attachment in a few solar days, but for now I think Pel has managed to convey the gist of my findings well enough, if only by covering them with enough invectives to shame a sailor.