Author's Note: Okay I'm not even bothering with the note today that's what this week has felt like.

Chapter 53: Omega Part 1

17M 20D 13H Until the Colossus Fires

Liara looked at the room where she had been keeping the Syntho Organic Organsm that she and EDI had incapacitated, or rather the Synthorg. EDI had been in a not too subtle war with the entity for some time now as it ate away at the room, and her personnel, trying to fix itself. EDI had vented the atmosphere in the room, she set it on fire, filled it with poisonous gas, but no matter what she did the figure inside lacked the common decency to die, at most EDI had delayed it's attempts to heal itself. Instead EDI had assigned several of her hacking programs to infiltrate the annoying machine and bring it down from the inside out. Sadly though she had underestimated her opponent. The native programs and the hacking program entered a short war with each other, the Synthorg had the superior energy source, some kind of mystery device that was inside, while EDI had the over all superior resources with all the hardware of the ship.

After a week-long struggle, EDI prevailed even though the ship had sustained some damage. The various threads that were being produced by the Synthorg had damaged several sub systems on the ship, it also didn't help matters much that the Synthorg had access to Exotic Gas and Mass Effect fields that it used to attack with. Now Liara was looking at the room where the fruits of the battle were being kept.

"Are you sure that you have it under control?" Liara asked looking at the door suspiciously.

"The answer to that question is complex. I don't think I'm the only one in there." EDI explained bluntly. "The Brain has three components, the positronic brain that my program has taken control of, the Second is the Thorian which has taken on the form of a organic computing gel that was favoured by the Protheans, the third is... something else. A psionic being bonded to flesh, I've only seen phenomena like this Lich's but the psionic signal is vastly different."

"So in other words there's you, there's an insane lunatic, and there's some other third part we don't yet know. Is that what you're saying?" Liara stated letting out a sigh. "Personally I still feel inclined to shoot it into a star."

"There is some unknown faction that is on the loose in the Terminus System, part of our job is supposed to be finding information on them." A Faction that this thing is a part of, a faction that she could have information on. "I recommend a Divine Enforcer."

"You brainwash it?" Liara asked sounding rather incredulous.

"I will use the opportunity given to us to determine the full extent of the effects of the madness that has affected the Gestalt hive mind and how deeply it affects this subject. I will thoroughly determine the extent of this creature's knowledge and memories and I will determine an appropriate course of action from there, most likely involving forcibly bringing this creature's mind back in line." EDI corrected bluntly. "In the mean time you should check in on Shepard."

Shepard looked a lot better than she did a week ago. Still an ice sculpture yes, and still in several pieces but her body had undergone significant improvements. The Limb inflated stone material had been shaved down and refined, a bony arm had been left behind and receiving cybernetic implants, while the harvested material was being refined into cybernetic implants specifically for Shepard's jaw and part of her face. The giant tumor of a rare crystal was removed from her skull and was now being remade into another Greybox into which all of Shepard's memories would be downloaded again, the excess Thorian material was harvested and used across the body to build an organic scaffold, that was then dissolved away via Anti Thorian fungicide and replaced by Medi-Gel that took on the form of the proper body part.

Skeletor believed it to be necessary to recycle as much material from Shepard's body as possible, the binding of her soul to her body meant that all of this material carried bits and pieces of it, so it became a absolute necessity to recycle as much of the material in question as possible to ensure that the soul remain intact. The Lich's have performed experiments on themselves in the past, mixing parts from different Lich's, reusing elements from different bodies, cutting them apart and replacing them with other materials. Do you wonder what it's like to have your soul cut apart? Because the Lich's do now. So take the body apart, repair as much of it as possible, and then put Shepard back together again. Simple.

"You lot are working surprisingly fast." Liara stated bluntly as she looked over the condition of her lover, already back in on piece but still in Cryo.

"The Thorian is a huge time saver, even if we do after to waste time taking it apart again." They've only been working on this for a week and that was 'wasting time?' "I personally worked on the first round of enhancements on this woman, I personally know where every organ is located and their exact structure. Now pair that with the monitoring devices inside of her body and I know extensive details about how her body is built and the steps necessary to rebuild it in the exact structure that she had before the incident."

And yet despite that the Lich had a fully armed security force on stand by to put down whatever came out of the cryo-pod in the event that it was not Shepard, already the pod was in the process of thawing it's occupant out. The Door of the pod swung open, white gasses were released from inside as Liara and the rest of the people present waited with baited breath on what kind of reaction was about to be had.

"Dragon Damnit what the hell did I smoke!?"

17M 17D 21H Until the Colossus Fires

Shepard's rehabilitation took several days to complete, the bulk of that time was spent eating, performing exercises with Liara to build back up and improve muscle strength and sleeping while her body's in built medical implants fixed her. In the mean time EDI could finish her assessment of the individual that they had taken captive.

"She's a child." EDI explained in simple terms. "She hasn't had time to develop or mature mentally."

"She hasn't matured physically either." Liara was sitting in front of a small human like child, human if not for the long tentacles that were coming out of her back, clawed pincers at the end of them.

Apparently the first thing that she did after she finished putting herself back together was cry for several minutes, then EDI gave her a tub of Ice-cream and she stopped while she ate.

"Aside from the need to consume exotic gas her nutritional needs appear to be mostly human." The Artificial intelligence stated bluntly. "I should also point out that she seems to have no memory of her time from before waking up. I'm currently trying to recover her data files." Liara just let out a sigh.

"Alright. Lemme know when you're done."

Shepard couldn't remember anything after she left for the suicide mission. She'll never give her mother a hard time about making her back up her grey box as long as she lives. At Most Shepard just thought that she would preserve her memories to get shoved into a new clone body, never did she think that she would be putting the contents back into her own body after being turned into a Lich! Even then she wasn't like any Lich she ever heard of with all of this living tissue around as opposed to a cybernetically enhanced corpse. Welcome to the future as the saying goes. And it was full of shinies!

"Liara you've been holding out on me!" So while she was in a coma Liara it seems has been hard at work building an arsenal. The Terminus system was full of a variety of different warring factions, each of them building weapons to wage war, weapons that Liara and her agents were hard at work procuring.

The Rogue Synthetics were busy finding new and creative ways to kill people which often involved integrating weapons directly into their bodies, the Quarians took advantage of that, weapons were being pulled directly off of downed Contingency bots and had triggers and the like hot wired in. Shepard looked as a rack of rifles that had been built through this process, the heads of Geth leapers with a built in rare crystal laser eye, of course EDI insists that the positronic brain has been thoroughly wiped ensuring no digital infiltration, the other weapon to come out of the contingency was a cross between a plasma rifle and a rail gun, with explosive results as far as projectiles go, apparently they're strapping these things to their heavy units.

The Gestalt's weapons however were just plain bizarre. Apparently when the Gestalt ate the reapers they learned how to duplicate their weapons too, the end result of this process was a variant of the Collectors rifle, now heavily mutated with the Gestalt's influence, the dust like projectiles that the weapon use to fire was replaced by Volatile Mots, each of them the size of a pea but their explosiveness enhance by Mass Effect fields with the ability to replenish their ammunition via eating mineral materials. The second weapon to come out of the Gestalt was a long semi-organic blade, one that when she gripped the handle vibrated with huge cutting power, definitely a keeper.

"Now what do we have here." The Unbidden gave the strangest rewards yet. As a start there was a glove, made from the same crystal like material that makes up the Unbidden's bodies, and when Shepard pressed a button in the palm of the glove a blue ball appeared in her hand. Shrugging her shoulders Shepard threw the ball into a nearby open space and watched the space around it distort into existence an unfamiliar looking snake like creature made out of the same blue crystal as the Unbidden. "I shall name you boo!"

When Liara did come looking for Shepard eventually after getting a read on the headache that EDI was raising she discovered the sight of Shepard playing fetch with one of the experimental familiar grenades.

"I see you found the armoury." Liara stated as she let out a sigh.

"Speaking of what's all these things for?" Shepard asked while she rubbed the belly of her new pet. "You look like you're getting ready to start a war."

"War's already started, while you were wandering around the shroud getting your soul rearranged the Reaper's already came and went." Liara stated as she let out a sigh.

"They came and they went?" Shepard asked sounding confused.

"Their advance force came through the Relay's, and were beaten back when the Union dropped surprise after surprise on their heads." Liara stated as she pulled open a console. "Now the rest of us are stuck trying to clean up the mess." Liara brought up a video file.

People arriving in the citadel were being checked by security, rather than standard X-Ray devices however they were getting bled in random places, hands, arms, legs, forehead, one guy even got stuck in the ass. As Shepard was wondering about why this was happening one of the people who was about to go through suddenly started going on a rampage with a couple of concealed weapons that were up his sleeves. C-Sec security pounced on the poor bastard knocking him over and started unloading their shot guns on him blowing him apart, revealing muscles made out of rubber and a metal like endo-skeleton underneath, which was still fully functional even as C-Sec continued to frag the poor guy with their shot guns.

"The Hell?" Shepard asked looking confused.

"Union's calling them Terminators, ultra life like synths designed to mimic the appearance of specific individuals for infiltration, assassination and terrorism. The Brain Child of the Contingency." Liara brought up a schematic next. "They weigh the same as the beings they're trying to match the appearance of. Thanks to the Union's research in artificial organs their internal anatomy lines up too. They're even giving the bastard's fingerprints, the only thing they can't seem to duplicate is blood, so they draw it out of the people they take captive and put in their terminators." Shepard wondered how many Terminators they let through before they figured that out, it explains why the security forces were picking random parts on people's bodies and drawing blood. "5, on average 2 out of 10 still manage to slip through anyway. And they're coming up with better and better methods of getting through too." Liara stated as she let out a sigh.

"Did you just read my mind?" Shepard asked sounding suspicious.

"Not so nice when it happens to you now is it?" Liara asked as she moved on. "The Gestalt isn't much better."

"The Thorian being a pain in the ass? I thought we shoved the other three personalities in there to corral its influence." Shepard made her confusion known. "All four of them are being a pain in the ass. They ate a bunch of Reapers, dissolved the tech inside of their bodies leaving behind only the organic minds to contend with, which apparently were driven utterly mad from the several millennia as being Reapers." Liara explained as she brought up data files. "Point of interest, their claims that the people they're melting down into goo and turning to Reapers having their minds preserved inside of their bodies? Yeah that was true."

"Really?" That part surprised Shepard more than anything else.

"Yeah. Only I think they were left in the pickling juice for too long, because they've gone rancid." Liara brought up more data files. "Before the Gestalt went insane, they uploaded a bunch of data into a whole host of isolated servers that a bunch of Tebrid's have been picking through getting lots of scientific data in the process. Little things so far, improved metallurgy techniques, some nanite technology, Neu Eezo is pretty much stable right now, we have a pretty good idea on Reaper Mass Effect based Deflector Shield Technology and propulsion but are still figuring out the finer details." Liara summed up the situation with the several million digital refugees that they've managed to take on with the usual grace that she had become known for. "The main problem that we're dealing with right now is this." A picture was brought up of a familiar entity made out of pure energy.

"I thought you looked kinda funny Boo!" Shepard stated as she looked at the picture of a group of Unbidden.

"You ever fought these things before?" Liara asked looking at Shepard concerned.

"No but I remember fighting them." Shepard stated as she tapped the side of her head. "Nasty bastards with a tendency to reproduce explosively-"

"-via draining the life out of organic beings that they encounter. Yes I'm aware." Liara stated, which made it really bloody inconvenient that all of the synth's in that area was already under the Contingency's control. Clogging the battle field with disposable mechanical bodies that the Unbidden couldn't eat was pretty much how they were brought down the first time.

"So any kind of organised resistance going on?" Shepard asked making a big smile.

"Hmm. Rannoch, Tuchanka, Omega." Liara stated as she smirked knowingly. "Tali, Wrex and Aria have mostly been the big pains in the side to the monsters." Liara suddenly made a frown. "Aria though might just be as much of a threat as the monsters." Liara produced a vial full of suspect liquid, a rainbow of cyan, green, red and purple as if the liquids refused to mix with one another. "She calls it 'Monster' a combat stim, made using what she and her people squeeze out of the Gestalt and the Unbidden as the main ingredients." Oh Shepard didn't like where this was going. "Highly addictive, temporarily gives psionic and biotic abilities, renders the subject highly aggressive. If Aria had the common decency to limit the spread of her stims to her own people I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed as I am now." Liara put the vial down and brought up another video. Palaven, a young man went on a rampage Lashing with biotics, causing people around him to scream just with his mere presence, after a three hour long rampage played X25 speed he died, not because he was brought down by the Turian's but because he dropped as a by product of the drug in his system.

"She's smuggling this into citadel space?" Shepard asked eyes narrowing in anger.

"Yeah pretty much." Liara stated bluntly. "We should probably head to Omega first, Garrus isn't doing so hot."

"What's Garrus doing on Omega?" Shepard liked absolutely nothing about where this was going.

17M 15D 18H Until the Colossus fires

Contrary to common belief Aria was not fond of clearly marking out her outgoing cargo. For reasons she has yet to understand people are fond of shooting red barrels, and attaching a logo onto a container only gives a target that you can destroy, which is why everything instead has a QR code on it. Food, incoming shipments of Gestalt flesh, Zro, processed exotic gas, all indistinguishable from each other bar the use of a omni-tool to examine the contents of the crates. Thus even when they're left in the open it's theoretically impossible to snipe the crates from a distance. Not unless you knew which crates had what inside in advance, say for example from someone attaching a tracking device to a crate in question. The rifle shot pierced through the crate full of monster releasing it's contents into the area as a aerosol, the gas was soon breathed in by several individuals that had been handling the materials in question.

Five hours later it was finally safe to enter the area again but by that point there was almost no trace left of the attacker left, Aria had the rifle round dropped on a table in front of her, a holographic projector with the stamp of a bird with spread wings on the side. Aria had one of her people press down on the symbol while aiming the back of the round at a wall. The figure in the hologram wore blue Turian armour but beyond that their identity was indecipherable, why they bothered with the holo-projector in the first place is beyond her.

"Keep your poison away from citadel territory and I won't have to come in here to make you." And then the message ended.

Aria thought about it for a moment. Ah. The Junkie from Palaven.

"Increase shipments to Palaven." Aria bluntly stated feeling especially spiteful. Once upon a time she had a good relationship with the citadel. Then the Union came along all high and mighty and decided that they were a eye sore and decided to wipe them out, then the Reapers came and the Union on top of that threw them at the ancient horrors and new monstrosities that they unleashed on top of that with the intention that they would die before the Union did and what's worst? The Citadel was fully content to let them. Aria was spiteful enough to personally see to it that they would be the last ones standing in a burning galaxy, and the passive income was nice as well. "Now then." Aria picked up the holographic projector. "Go find out where the person who fired this came from."

It was an old mining base deep within Omega. In the days of yore this place would be used to refine harvested Eezo into a usable form, perhaps once matter Decompressors started to be built in Terminus space this refinery would see use again. For now it was as close to a fortress as any of them were gonna get, a massive three story tall vat with 3 meter thick durasteel walls, additional renovations had been made by Garrus's group, a roof where the entrance was located connecting to the catwalk above supported by a central pillar that was also supporting two additional floors, a armoury and living quarters. The twelve man team was a interesting lot, a mixture of former Salarian STG, Batarian SIU and C-Sec officers that Garrus managed to pull together with the over-arching intention of ending Omega's borderline terrorist attacks into the citadel.

Having just completed his job for the evening Garrus returned to their base of operations where he found his allies working on their secret weapon. The area leading into the base was a sniper's wet dream, a long narrow bridge that only had enough room on it that only one or two people at a time could fit side by side.

"Ripper!" The Salarian in question flipped his welding mask off as he looked to Garrus. "How she's doing?" Garrus asked looking at the key to shutting down all of Aria's operations.

"Fast, not as fast as she would be if I had any of the proper materials. We got lucky catching that terminator Cloaca!" The Salarian stated assessing his work.

"You sure she ain't gonna go rogue on us?" Garrus asked legitimately concerned.

"With what processor? You shot her in the head, and that was before I removed what was left." Just to emphasise his point the Salarian picked up a nearby jar that he had been keeping a twisted mass of rare crystal that had a hole punched through it.

"Man why are you keeping that thing?" A Familiar Batarian was sitting off to the side moulding a ball of clay like material, turns out with all the exotic gas in their bodies Prethoryn fat was a pretty good approximation of plastic explosives.

"I'm going to study it to gain insight into the contingencies Terminators thought processes and identify new ways to pick them out. It's not my fault that she ended up seducing you Trome."

"Oi! Nix the real names!" Another Turian off to the side snapped while he worked on getting a rifle cleaned. "I'm not letting any of us get our families killed by that psycho cause you let slip a paper trail to them!"

"Says the guy who goes by his real name Sidonis." Ripper piped up as he cleaned his hands off, apparently done working on the machine for the time being.

"Everyone I ever cared about is already dead, except for maybe the eleven of you." Sidonis stated bluntly. "I'd rather none of us manage to get ourselves killed during this hair-brained scheme."

Indeed. This wasn't their exact plan coming into Omega to cut off the supply of Monster going into council space. That plan had a lot more time spent killing smugglers, scientists and mercenary thugs, Aria might be holding enough of a grudge to try and push through the sale of monster into Council and Union Territory anyway but if none of her subordinates were willing then she'd have to go back to cooperation with the Council, she wouldn't like it, but she couldn't afford another mutiny in this situation. Then Trome, or Butler as his call sign went, got seduced by a Terminator, and after Garrus shot it in the back of the head they realised they had an opportunity.

"Now for the hard part." Ripper explained as he brought up the schematic for the last component of their plan. "Right now this thing doesn't look like anyone, let alone who we need her to. We have a couple of different options on how we can do this, I however recommend this!" Ripper planted his finger on one of the more recently installed facilities on Omega.

"Oooohhhh!" Everyone collectively moaned at that.

"Security gonna be tight there." 'Butler' stated making his suspicions known.

"For one thing, the plan is still to force Aria to back off." Garrus stated making his opinion known. "She's a competent military commander, and we need all of those that we can get our hands on, especially against those infinitely spawning monsters." Garrus stated making his opinion known. "Our last resort is just that, so we continue with plan A in the mean time." Everyone nodded to Garrus's words. It only makes sense to start with the plan that they had already been working towards instead of skipping to their most extreme resort.

Review Section:

RonaldM40196867: Among my new ones or the Mass Effect ones? I think I introduced a few here.

Trife: Sorry, my mistake. It is based on a pressure suit, one of Nasa's answers to throwing people into a Zero Pressure environment was to wrap them in inflatable material, a concept I borrowed from Bioware's significantly less successful Sci-Fi game Anthem.