Mass Effect: Techno-Organic Revolution

by Clockwork Dragonfly

They thought themselves invulnerable, invincible, and infallible. They thought themselves the apex of all life, they thought of themselves gods. But in their arrogance, the reapers would make a fatal mistake. They would not notice some Prothean refugees discreetly moved both nearby mass relays away form the primitive humanity, thus cutting them off from all reaper influence.

8. Chapter Seven: Whispers in The Dark

Mass Effect Techno-Organic Revolution: Chapter Seven: Whispers in The Dark.

"There is no grand design. No script. Only the choices you make. That your choices are so predictable merely makes us seem prescient."

— The Norns: God of War Ragnarök.

Codex

Non-Council Races: Terrans: Technology

Psykers

The Omni-manipulator Staff: The main tool of every psyker, the omni-manipulator staff is a highly modular and customizable staff powered by a singularity reactor in its head which is also outfitted with hundreds of tesseract vaults that can each be fitted with anything the psyker desires if it can fit inside their volume; be it weapons, tools, matter condensers, matter replicators, additional singularity reactors, morphs, drones, stasis units, energy storage, data storage units, rift-gates, small ships, in-progress projects they are working on, samples to study, etc.

Master Vaults: The master vault is a large and dedicated tesseract vault that is powered by a single dedicated singularity reactor and is built into the morph or power armor of a psyker. In addition to this, the total internal area within this tesseract vault is more than large enough to hold the combined storage space within all the tesseract vaults connected to the omni-manipulator staff. This master vault is often used to hold other physical objects, such as small, pre-made FTL-capable starships. This is allowed because, due to how subspace operates, even if all the physical space were taken up within, it would not cause a sub-spatial collapse.

Psyker Disciplines: Using the exceedingly advanced technology of the Terrans within their omni-manipulator staves and that which is around themselves, psykers bend the fundamental forces of reality itself to their will for both battle and research alike.

While there are far more basic weapons and tools that can do these same things by themselves and can be used by any trained individual, an omni-manipulator staff in the hands of a skilled psyker offers infinitely more control and power over these fundamental forces of the universe, which in turn makes them greatly more versatile.

And while much overlap exists between these classifications, which in turn has caused many sub-categories to come into existence, these are the most basic ones:

Telekinesis: Masters of telekinesis wield and manipulate gravitational force and, most recently, mass to telekinetically manipulate various objects, breach deflector shields, remotely cover individuals in deflector shields or layer them over existing ones to make them more powerful, create and, if needed, launch singularities, create short-ranged wormholes, absorb both light and almost all forms of scanning, and create orbs, waves, blades, and cyclones of gravitational force.

Electrokinesis: Masters of electrokinesis manipulate and wield the most energetic forces of nature to do things such as launch bolts of lightning, orbs of superheated plasma, gouts of fire, streams consisting of various types of atomic and subatomic particles, and reflect back or drain the energy from any such attacks sent at them.

Photokinesis: Masters of photokinesis wield and manipulate photons to do things such as make themselves invisible to every kind of electromagnetic sensor, forge advanced constructs out of hard-light, project holographic illusions, and fire hyper-charged photon lasers.

Umbrakinesis: Masters of umbrakinesis can siphon off very small amounts of a form of gravitationally refined dark matter known as "Darklight" out of a tesseract vault to create powerful and highly destructive blasts, bolts, and beams of deep indigo energy.

Biokinesis: Masters of biokinesis are masters of genetic engineering and have used this to create new and more powerful or specialized morphs, create and use biological golems, biologically turn the flesh and minds of enemies against themselves, and create various bioweapons, poisons, toxins, and other chemicals to use on their enemies, as well as the cures and antidotes for these weapons.

Technokinesis: Masters of technokinesis can project various kinds of shields, hack and hijack technology, molecularly deconstruct enemies, direct drones and swarms of nanobots, temporarily boost the technology of allies, and hijack the minds of enemies through a mixture of hacking, nanobots, and ultrasonic and infrasonic waves.

Psionics: Masters of psionics can remotely manipulate the minds of unshielded organic lifeforms with a special type of quantum fluctuation known as psionic waves to control them, manipulate their memories, communicate with them remotely, create illusions, and induce madness or brain death. While psionic waves can only be produced by traditional forms of organic matter, they can be augmented and somewhat manipulated with inorganic cybernetics and machines (mind shielding is an example of this).

Psychokinesis: A mostly semi-theoretical discipline until the discovery and use of Prothean DNA and most lately the significantly harder to-acquire Asari Ardat-yakshi DNA, advanced practitioners of psychokinesis can detect the mnemonic echos left behind by the actions of egos, view the memories of entirely different species without using a personality mask as an adapter, become fluent in the verbal and written language of another sophont through touch, imbue and read psychokinetic energy and information into and from certain materials, and most recently absorb egos and ego fragments to increase the strength of their ego which can then be used to create a burning aura of flaming yellow-white energy around themselves that increases all of their telekinetic, psionic, cognitive, and physical abilities to an extremely large degree.

Transmutation: Masters of transmutation can use various technologies to manipulate both atomic and molecular bonds to physically unravel enemies, alter the density and toughness of matter, incite a controlled nuclear detonation, reconfigure matter, convert matter into antimatter, and do many other things involving the manipulation of particles and other forms of traditional matter.

Chronokinesis: Masters of chronokinesis use a mixture of various technologies to use divination drones to see the most likely future, slow, reverse, and accelerate the flow of time in various ways, and use predictive algorithms that have lately been boosted to new heights with astrological scrying to see the past, present, and likely futures all without even needing to be at the exact location.

Time Manipulation Technology

Divination Drone: One of the first-ever examples of Terran chronotechnogy, divination drones are drones with an inbuilt rift-gate mk1 and are designed to be able to vibrate at relativistic speeds for a configurable amount of time to travel a controllable distance into a fluid form of the future known as 'mutable space' using time dilation. While in the future, this drone can observe future events on its sensors and transmit them back through the rift-gate in a closed time curve.

Cosmic Reconciliation: A seeming universal safeguard against temporal violations, cosmic reconciliation occurs when any significant 'temporal violations' such as changing something significant that alters history or by scanning future technology, afflict rapidly increasing chaotic and violent tidal stresses upon them until they unravel into a widely scattered cloud of their base subatomic components and energy across several hundred light years.

Considering the butterfly effect is a thing that exists where even the smallest action can have massive effects, cosmic reconciliation occurs almost every time a divination drone is used for its intended purpose. As such, only small snippets of useful information can be gathered and sent back by an individual divination drone before its destruction.

Weapons

Darklight: Dark matter is a highly volatile substance that can be harvested slowly, but renewably, from naturally formed black holes and refined through special gravitational processes into a far more usable form that interacts with normal matter but in a highly volatile and exponentially increasing explosive fashion. This refined dark matter can be safely stored inside tesseract vaults, where it can be drawn upon in tiny amounts and safely used to create attacks from deep indigo-black energy known as Darklight because of its deep indigo-black color and its rather similar behavior to that of normal photons.

Darklight reactors are also being researched, but their exponentially increasing power is proving to be problematic for creating a reactor that exceeds the output of existing alternatives of similar sizes. The probable connections between eezo-free voids, the natural formation of element zero near supernovae outside them, element zero itself, the Higgs-boson, the Higgs field that was the mass effect, black holes, dark matter, Darklight, dark energy, and dark energy clouds are also being investigated.

Subspace Technology

Subspace Stratification: After the various provinces did a deep analysis of Metallican Subspace Sensors, it has been discovered that they take advantage of a property of spacetime now named subspace stratification. This subspace stratification explains how differing subspace technologies can create different levels of 'separation' from normal reality, with warp bubbles only warping the naturally occurring surface of spacetime, less advanced wormholes used in rift-gate mk1s and mk2s creating a tunnel just 'below' this, more advanced wormholes creating tunnels 'below' the previous, and subspace pockets being the 'deepest' as they are almost completely separate from reality.

Using this principle, Metallica has found a way to send a gravitational pulse from a GRAdar array by creating and channeling it through a newly discovered 'bubble layer' in between the base fabric of spacetime and the one used by basic wormholes to detect any disturbances caused by large amounts of gravity and/or mass. Due to its unique subspace requirements, this is only feasible in the gravity well of a massive celestial object such as a star or a stellar remnant such as a black hole or neutron star out to what the reapers would call its jump point.

Subspace Sensor Range Extender: Made by Mars, subspace sensor range extenders are devices that manipulate local subspace to act as suitable carriers for subspace sensors up to a single cubic light-week from them.

Improved Subspace Precision: The improvement of subspace precision has allowed for all subspace technologies to become significantly more energy efficient and for warp drives to have somewhat faster top speeds of 22 LYPD, for rift-slingers to have a range of 1.2 AU, and for rift-drives to have top speeds of 2,200 LYPD.

Matter Condenser: The Matter Condenser is a device made by Metallica that converts pure energy into a quark-gluon plasma that can then be condensed into photons, protons, and neutrons through nucleosynthesis. Using the products of this device in addition to electrons harvested from reactors, these three subatomic particles can be fed into a matter replicator as an effectively unlimited feedstock.

Matter Replicator: An upgraded form of the nano fabricator invented by Metallica, this new device works by utilizing exceedingly precise microscopic warp bubbles to move around the positions of the three subatomic particles produced in matter condensers in a process known as subspace transmutation to create any form of base atomic elements, use those to create any form of complex molecules, and use those in turn to create any form of traditional matter that is desired. Exotic matter such as element zero can also be fed into and used in matter replicators to be combined with traditional forms of matter.

Subspace Technology: FTL Travel

Transwarp Technology: Using a mixture of rift drive technology and warp drive technology, boosted by the dramatically increased subatomic precision in regard to manipulating subspace, a new form of subspace-based FTL technology has been created.

Working by sending a subatomic warp bubble through a similarly subatomic one-sided wormhole, anything within the warp bubble can be sent at speeds of 22,000 LYPD. Unfortunately for now however, the biggest transwarp drive can only fit on a small half-meter drone and requires the full might of an S4 intelligence to calculate the constant subspace fluctuations required to prevent a subspace collapse from occurring during an FTL jump. As such, until this process is massively refined, it will be limited to the lab.

Quantum Entanglement and Wormholes: Quantum Entanglement creates paink-scale non-traversable wormholes, something that prevents the transmission of any information at faster-than-light speeds. As for how rift-gates work, they use repulsive gravitational force to widen the mouth and throat of a wormhole between these two entangled particles to the desired size while also straightening out the coiled mess that is its passageway, which limits transmission speed to that of light.

However, this process has a downside: as the distance between the sides of the wormhole increases, the energy requirements increase exponentially as well. This is in comparison with the linear increase from widening the opening and passageway of a wormhole. This is why most mk1 and mk2 rift-gates are kept at their normal maximum distance of twenty light years while being daisy-chained together and/or routed through a single larger rift-gate that is used as a hub and range extender, it simply uses so much less energy to do so.

ME-Wormholes: First made after learning of the council and Geth E-QEC, these wormholes use the negative mass of mass effect fields (from either element zero or pure Higgs-boson manipulation) over repulsive gravitational force, allowing for a much higher degree of precision when uncoiling the passageways of wormholes, something that allows for their range to be extended over a theoretically infinite distance at the cost of linearly increasing transit time with this distance.

ME-Comms: Using a me-wormhole in a somewhat modified rift-gate mk1, FTL communication when not in range of the rift-network is now possible at the cost of a moderate amount of communication lag. Unfortunately for now, however, scaling to larger than rift-gate mk1s is not feasible.

Terran Classifications: Singularity Scale

Singularity Scale: Instead of the random prefix-based classification system with a designation of a stellar deity at the latest, the ATC High Council has recently agreed to change this scale to instead use numerical values.

S -0.5: Rudimentary Mundane Circuitry.

S -0.2: Baseline Sentience. Animals. Advanced AIs/VIs.

S0: Baseline sapience. Most baseline biological sapients.

S0.3: Salarians.

S1: Artificial general sapients. Awoken AIs.

S1.5: Developed artificial general sapients and council Mentats.

S1.7: Advanced artificial general sapients.

S2: Sapients whose cognitive ability is as far away from S1s as an S1 is from an S0. Requires an asteroid-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S1 processors.

S3: Sapients whose cognitive ability is as far away from S2s as an S2 is from an S1. Requires a luna-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S2 processors.

S4: Sapients whose cognitive ability is as far away from S3s as an S3 is from an S2. Requires a planet-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S3 processors.

S5: Recently Achieved. The first transapients. Incomprehensible and indescribable to anything below this level. Beings whose cognitive ability is as far away from S4s as an S4 is from an S3. Requires a large gas giant-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S4 processors.

S6: In progress. Transapients whose cognitive ability is as far away from S5s as an S5 is from an S4. Requires a yellow-dwarf-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S5 processors.

S7: Hypothetical First Post-Sapients. Incomprehensible and indescribable to anything below this level. Beings whose cognitive ability is as far away from an S6 as an S6 is from an S5. Would require a red-giant-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S6 processors.

S8: Hypothetical Post-Sapients. Beings whose cognitive ability is as far away from an S7 as an S7 is from an S6. Would require a supergiant star-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S7 processors.

S9: Hypothetical Post-Sapients. Beings whose cognitive ability is as far away from an S8 as an S7 is from an S7. Would require a hypergiant star-sized processor or a large wormhole-linked series of S8 processors.

S10 and Beyond: Pure Speculation. Possibly achievable with a sizable wormhole-linked series of S9 processors.

Chapter Seven: Whispers in The Dark

Comn Station 657: The Umbriel.

"As such, we expect a full report on whatever the reapers want on the colony of Asari Aygen located on Ferros. As for the battle plan, while Major Brutus handles the heretic Geth in orbit and around the planet, Saren and his team will investigate the colony grounds themselves to see if anything there is their objective." Councilor Quentius said.

"And as for the fleet AARs, we want those forwarded to us over the Umbriel's E-QEC as soon as possible. It will grant us invaluable information on how we hold up against the heretic Geth's fleet assets." Councilor Esheel added grimly, knowing that it would be a bloodbath but not exactly how much of one.

And while the heretic Geth weren't an apex civilization that could harness and violently smash many of the fundamental forces of reality over their knees like the Terrans and the Reapers could, they were still an extremely advanced civilization that is likely hundreds or even thousands of years beyond the current capabilities of the citadel council.

And that was not a good thing to fight against as an inferior opponent, even with the various advances they were making by reverse-engineering both their own and their uncorrupted brethren's technology.

"Understood, councilor." Both Saren and the hologram of Major Brutus of the Fifth Turian Battle Group, who was currently aboard the hierarchy dreadnought, Arrow of Palaven, said.

"That is all we had. May the goddess be with you, Council out." Councilor Irissa said as the hologram fizzled out and the various ships in the citadel fleet activated their ME drives and jumped to FTL speeds.

Interstellar Space Between Mass Relays: The Mess Hall of The Umbriel

Saren came into the mess hall of the Umbriel to explain the situation to his team, despite the fact that Azor and Shepard would know already due to being connected to the main system of the ship.

Here he found Garrus Vakarian, the C-sec liaison who was officially chosen for this mission due to his familiarity with the Geth, and unofficially because the higher-ups at C-sec absolutely hated him and his aversion to higher authorities and proper protocol when he felt it was necessary. Due to this, he was booted off the citadel with a specter like him that was often considered a "loose cannon" at the first opportunity and was now messing with his sniper rifle.

Next to him, about six meters away and hovering about two hundred centimeters above the ground in a meditative position with their eyes closed, was the mission's Terran expert, Jane Shepard; or Shepard as she asked for them to call her.

He wasn't sure why she didn't want to be informally called by her first name like the rest of her species seemed to prefer, but he assumed it was personal and respected her decision because it wasn't exactly mission-critical to know such information.

As for the mission's geth orthodoxy expert, Azor, it was in its LOKI-like mech platform, folded up and leaning against the wall on the far side of the room in standby mode.

And finally, there was the expert on the extinction of the Protheans, Liara T'soni, who was eagerly reading a datapad that contained in-depth speculation on the provided information on the culture and history of the Terrans by a famous Salarian who was a notable xenohistorian, xenobiologist, and xenopsychologist.

"Alright everyone, we'll be arriving at Ferros in sixteen hours. I propose that we undertake joint combat drills in the meantime to get to know each other better." Saren suggested.

"Alright," Shepard said after immediately opening her eyes and allowing the gravitational force around her to abate as her body gently lowered itself down to the ground. "That sounds like a good idea."

"So what exactly is your specialty, Commander Shepard?" Saren asked.

"I was a commander in the Terran Exploration Division before this, but I served some time in the ATC Navy and have fully mastered the psyker disciplines of telekinesis and technokinesis." Shepard responded.

"I'm guessing that telekinesis is essentially biotics but with gravitational force?" Saren asked, curious about the similarities.

"It is in many ways similar, if not infinitely more versatile," Shepard affirmed before turning towards Azor and adding. "Also, thanks to the Orthodox Geth, it now includes pure and uncatalyzed ME field manipulation, so I am now effectively a biotic as well."

"Pure and uncatalyzed?" Garrus Vakarian asked.

"The Geth have discovered that the material you call element zero is a chathate that uses dark energy as a catalyst to manipulate cosmic strings related to mass and the higgs-boson to produce mass effect fields with tens of thousands of magnitudes less power," Shepard explained.

"Huh, I've never known that." Liara T'soni said. Honestly, she was surprised that the working nature of element zero wasn't understood by the council at all until the Geth came along, beyond the fact that it involved dark energy somehow and made ME fields.

"Do psykers usually meditate?" Saren asked. While he could see how meditation could be good for centering itself, he failed to see what good it would do for what he was beginning to suspect was a sentinel equivalent.

"Yes. Focusing on our chosen disciplines around us helps us think about them and devise new ways to utilize them for research or battle." Shepard said before adding. "Of course, we could just do this mentally, but I prefer to meditate on telekinesis physically, call me old-fashioned."

"Our commandos do similarly with their biotics, well, minus the mental part." Liara T'soni interjected while thinking back to her own, admittedly limited, commando training.

Saren looked mildly surprised at this; Turian cabal training was nothing like that and was simply another form of military training... Then again, the Asari and Terrans did share a common ancestor in the form of humanity, so overlap in their species' most efficient martial training practices and regimens had to be there somewhere or other, he supposed.

"Battle? I thought the ATC hadn't had a major war in over a thousand years." Garrus Vakarian asked.

"We're a society made up of several pocket empires with differing ideologies that are constantly bickering with each other and generally being at each other's throats in deep rivalries. In addition to this, the people in these pocket empires are individuals who can easily walk off mortal wounds for a Krogan with unmitigated ease and can easily transfer our egos into new morphs if our current one is about to be irreparably damaged or even disintegrated or otherwise unmade in their entirety." Shepard said with a shrug before adding. "What you might call intense and all-out yet fully civilized warfare is what we call the average war game."

"How can you enjoy warfare so much?!" Liara T'soni demanded, was extremely confused, and was admittedly very concerned.

"We're not killing anyone permanently, it's just a semi-friendly competition with clear rules of engagement that are not to be broken for any reason," Shepard explained before adding. "Well, that was before we learned about the reapers; however, now all but essential resources currently being produced are being used to grow our military as quickly as is physically possible."

"Still, I wasn't aware that such a morally upstanding species was made up of so many warriors..." Liara T'soni trailed off nervously.

"Humans have always been warriors, ever since our most ancient recorded history and, by all archeological evidence, even before it. We Terrans that are members of the first three branches have inherited this drive for competition and dominance over others, but we temper it with compassion, morality, strict yet highly flexible discipline, and the path of the mind and its tenants." Shepard explained before adding. "And for those who chose it, voluntary military service."

"We Turians are similar, minus your fully voluntary military service, that is." Saren agreed in full. "That is what separates us from the Krogan—our discipline and capacity for compassion."

"You had a point until you mentioned the Krogan; you Turians are very much capable of that same savagery if you were put in a similar position." Shepard corrected before adding. "Us Terrans too, for that matter."

"Excuse me?!" Saren demanded angrily, as he was deeply insulted by how his species was being compared to the Krogan.

"The Krogan have evolved on a death world and then proceeded to nuke it into oblivion. If your species had all of your colonies slaughtered or displaced, your homeworld bombed back to the Stone Age, and you were afflicted with a destructive bio-weapon that made the overwhelming majority of children die as stillborns; then how would you act and feel?" Shepard asked pointedly before adding. "Now, admittedly the Krogan were responsible for the brutal rebellions, but the Citadel is responsible for not giving them a purpose other than war to look forward to after the Rachni wars and then everything that occurred after the rebellions."

Saren just harshly glared at Shepard for that comment, "Oh, and what would you have us do instead?!" Saren demanded angrily, his hatred for the Krogan a well-known fact.

"Help them up and recover under your guidance," Shepard explained. "To truly defeat an enemy, you must change them from within their own culture so that they become your ally and perhaps even a good friend."

"We would not act like the savages they are in that situation!" Saren denied furiously while also ignoring the previous point.

"You would indeed act just like they currently do, as the savages that were forced to be that way due to the apathy of the victors." Shepard insisted with a sigh before continuing. "Let me tell you about an old earth nation named Germany. At one point, they lost a war and were forced to pay an unfair amount of concessions in both money and land to the victors, to the point where economic inflation was so bad that paper money itself was far more often used to heat homes and cook food than it was as an actual currency."

Liara T'soni, who had gone over the history of the Terrans that the council had been given access to, immediately recognized where Shepard was going with this and had to admit she could see her point and how it relates to the behavior of the Krogan.

She could also see how a Krogan version of the Marshall Plan would have indeed changed the Krogan and their society for the better, allowing peaceful reconciliation and reintegration to actually occur in due time.

"Seeing the squalor his people lived in, a man named Adolph Hitler rose to prominence due to his ideas of modernization, regaining lost territory, improving the quality of life for the average German, and punishing those responsible for their sorry state." Shepard continued. "In time, this man would take control of Germany itself and launch brutal wars of conquest across the continent, where he rounded up those that were perceived to be responsible and sent them away while crowds cheered." Shepard began slowly pacing at this point, but continued.

"But what nobody knew and oftentimes didn't even care about at the time was what he did with those people. He sent them to death camps to be tortured, worked to death as slave labor, used as test subjects for unethical and permanently damaging pseudoscientific and scientific human experiments alike, and/or brutally murdered with toxic gas by the hundreds and even thousands to be then dragged out and then burned in mass pyres by their very friends, family members, and neighbors.

Over eleven million humans shared this atrocious grimdark fate at the behest of one cruel and monstrous man, all because the apathy of the victors bred a deep resentment that a genocidal madman could exploit." Shepard said solemnly.

Nobody moved for a few moments as the Turian and the Terran intensely stared at each other, the tension thick enough that it could be cut by a monomolecular blade.

"And technokinesis?" Garrus Vakarian asked, trying to defuse the tension between Saren and Shepard and get back on topic.

"That involves the use of taking control of enemy technology and enemies through either traditional hacking, nanobots, or a mixture of infrasonic and ultrasonic waves. It also involves fending off cyberattacks, boosting the energy reserves and overclocking the technology of allied individuals, and directing and fabricating new weapon drones." Shepard explained.

"And how does one meditate on that?" Liara T'soni asked as she was once more curious about the similarities between Terran psykers and Asari commandos.

"Maintaining a consistently fluctuating electrical field in nearby electronics, in this case, with one of my AIs in my power armor, is a very commonly practiced exercise in that regard." Shepard offered.

"Wait, I thought the council only allowed one of you Terrans into our space for this mission?!" Garrus Vakarian demanded.

"We call what you call VIs AIs, and what you call AIs are what we call AGIs or higher intelligences." Shepard reminded him.

"Oh right, I forgot about that." Garrus Vakarian trailed off in mild embarrassment.

"It is alright, but to reassure you, I am the only Terran here," Shepard replied honestly.

"And what about traditional weapons?" Saren asked.

"I don't exactly need them, but I can use some through the omni-manipulator staff that I have stored away if they were to become necessary," Shepard explained.

"So in comparison to our combat roles, you're closest to a Sentinel, that is good to know," Saren said before turning to the now unfurled and standing up Geth unit and asking. "And what is your combat specialty?"

"We are adept with a high-power plasma sniper rifle and an infrared pulse laser cannon in our left arm," Azor said while having the rifle and laser cannon pop out of that arm. He then brought out a different-looking weapon in addition to activating his lime green-colored omnitool on his right arm. "We are also adept with the neutron beam particle rifle and the plasma omni-blade on our right arm."

"And you're a gestalt AI, so you're also naturally good at hacking," Saren added.

"Affirmative. But Shepard-Commander is significantly more adept at this than we are." Azor said while retracting his weapons. "We are also equipped with a biotic upgrade module and a mass effect jump pack."

"You have biotics?" Saren asked.

"Affirmative," Azor said as it let an orb of green, dark-energy-catalyzed ME fields accumulate into a biotic push in its right hand for a few seconds before letting it dissipate.

"And I'm a biotic specialist with a dozen or so years of commando training and extensive training on how to use small arms." Liara T'soni spoke somewhat nervously and slightly inadequate in the face of these two members of an apex and extremely advanced species, respectively, that were essentially walking ultra-heavy weapon platforms.

"And I have standard Turian Legion training in addition to a long-range specialization with a high-powered kinetic sniper rifle, but unfortunately, I'm the C-sec liaison, so I'm only here to help you with local authorities and can't get involved in combat on purpose." Garrus Vakarian said glumly.

"And I'm a cabal, so I'm highly trained in biotics, CQC, and various weapons alike, but I prefer using heavy weapons in conjunction with my biotics. I also have various cybernetic enhancements and prototype heavy plasma weapons thanks to the STG and the R D of the council." Saren said.

"So will we combat personnel be synchronizing our abilities in your ship's gun range?" Shepard asked, knowing she could easily create a program that gave her an advanced level of synergy with these people by watching their combat drills and practices.

"Yes. That would be prudent." Saren agreed.

"This ship has a gun range?!" Liara T'soni exclaimed in shock, very much not expecting a frigate to have a gun range on it.

"Yes? It was on the floor plan that Saren sent us." Shepard reminded her dryly.

"Affirmative," Azor said.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to remain in practice." Garrus Vakarian said while he went to pack up his semi-disassembled rifle.

Ten Minutes Later: The Gun Range.

"Alright, Shepard. Please use the lowest possible power in your attacks, please." Saren said while pointing at the holographic omni-targets.

"Of course, I'm not going to let the entire ship be devoured by a miniature black hole," Shepard said with the utmost seriousness.

"She's joking, right?" Liara T'soni leaned over and quietly whispered to Azor.

"Negative." Azor denied.

"How?! I knew the Terrans were more advanced than everyone else, save possibly the reapers, but by the goddess, that is just pure and simple insanity!" Liara T'soni exclaimed in shock as she rapidly looked between the geth and the Terran.

Summoning her spear-shaped omni-manipulator staff from a tesseract vault with a shimmer of reality above her right palm, Shepard grabbed the staff before proceeding to launch six very small pebble-sized orbs of shimmering spacetime from its tip that sought out and slammed into the omni-targets and destroyed them in a flash of fizzling orange mixed with the distinctive and explosive white flash and bubble-like pop of broken kinetic barriers.

"Is that sufficiently non-destructive?" Shepard turned back to Saren and asked.

"That's not like any biotics I've seen before." Liara T'soni observed with interest.

"Well, that's because it's not biotics; it's telekinesis," Shepard said simply.

"That aside, it is still somewhat similar to a biotic warp, though." Liara T'soni observed.

"What exactly is that staff?" Saren asked curiously while eying the vaguely familiar-looking omni-manipulator staff that the Terran had used to launch their telekinetic attack. It was sort of reminiscent of a primitive spear, but the bladed end was clearly stylized in nature. After a moment, he realized where he recognized it from, it was a slightly modified form of the Terran Yggdrasil sigil without the enclosing circle around it and a spearhead extending outwardly from the central spire of the symbol.

"This is my omni-manipulator staff, a highly unique and personalized staff that I created as my final trial as a psyker, which has hundreds of tesseract vaults containing various weapons, technologies, as well as in-progress projects, and completed projects that I have fabricated," Shepard explained.

"Did you name it?" Garrus Vakarian asked with interest. After all, it was quite common for Turians to name their weapons, so he was curious if these Terrans did it too.

"You name your weapons?" Liara T'soni asked the Turian cop incredulously.

"You don't?" Garrus asked with a curious tilt of his head.

"Yes, I did; in fact, I named it Ascalon," Shepard said.

"Alright. Let us begin actually training with each other." Saren said as he began walking down to the shooting range module.

Two Hours Later:

"You're good with your ranged telekinetic damage, I admit, but let's see how well you do in melee when enemies get close and swarm you," Saren said as he typed a few commands on his omni-tool to make the omni-targets activate their training holo-blades that safely simulated omni-blades.

"Alright," Shepard said as she activated a shroud of golden hard-light around the bladed end of Ascalon.

"Begin," Saren said, and in a single fluid and gold-tinged blur of motion that gave off a small sonic boom that was technologically dampened into almost nothing by her, Shepard had sliced apart and destroyed the omni-targets with her staff before moving back to the exact location that she started from in less than a millisecond.

"Is that sufficient?" Shepard asked as the onlookers, minus Azor, who couldn't do so, were gaping in shock.

"Yes, but maybe this time at speeds that don't break the sound barrier to show the rest of us how you actually fight?" Garrus Vakarian asked, torn between amusement and frustration.

"We can observe Shepard-Commander at supersonic and hypersonic speeds," Azor informed everyone.

"Not you, Azor. The rest of us don't have high-speed cameras attached to our minds, not even Saren." Garrus Vakarian said.

"Of course," Shepard said somewhat apologetically, still not exactly used to fighting with people who could not break the sound barrier in a fight.

Sixteen hours later:

"Alright, we're here at the Theseus system, where Ferros resides." Saren announced before ordering, "Launch the new recon drones."

"Saren, If I may, I have recon drones that transmit information in real-time using rift-gate and use ME FTL systems for the sake of the drones' guise as being old terminus system technology. Can we use those instead?" Shepard asked.

"Hmm. Yes, please do so." Saren said after a moment of consideration.

"Alright, I'm launching the recon drones now," Shepard said.

Appearing in a ripple of spacetime just outside the hull of the ship before jumping to ME FTL, the drones would travel for some time before reverting to STL. From here, it would gather various bits of strategic information on the movements and composition of the geth heretics forces.

Thirty of the thirty-five drones would be 'destroyed' by amber particle beams that actually just triggered their self-atomization self-destruct sequence to uphold the illusion.

As for the remaining five that escaped the particle beams, two of them would cloak after releasing two dummy drones equipped with a dedicated eezo core, which they used to jump to ME FTL.

From here, the three drones and two dummy drones would travel outside the two-light-minute range of the heretics' sensors before returning to the Umbriel and back into the tesseract vault from whence they came.

The footage from the two remaining cloaked reconnaissance drones showed a violent yet mostly stalemated space battle between the heretic and orthodox geth in the orbit of Ferros. Still, the battle was actually just slightly in favor of the orthodox geth but that could still change due to the unpredictable and fluid nature of battle in general.

That, and Shepard wasn't a chronokinetic.

"The orthodox geth are here?" Garrus Vakarian asked while looking at Azor.

"Affirmative," Azor said simply.

"Why didn't you tell us?!" Saren demanded, staring at the geth platform in annoyance.

"You did not ask," Azor stated simply.

"I'm starting to see the 'social obviousness and ineptitude' of the Geth that the briefing data package mentioned." Saren quietly muttered to himself. He supposed it made sense considering they evolved from a system of mass-networked VIs.

"So your people are here to help fight?" Shepard asked.

"Affirmative," Azor said.

"Do you have other groups like this to find and fight the heretic Geth?" Shepard asked.

"Affirmative," Azor repeated.

"If our fleet joins them, we would greatly tip the scale in our favor." Garrus Vakarian pointed out.

"Yes. We should do that, but where is the Reaper capital ship? Where is Sovereign?" Shepard asked.

"Unknown," Azor said while staring out into the void of space in contemplation.

"Comms officer Vibicolus, send a message drone to tell our fleet behind the relay about this situation and that we intend to aid the orthodox Geth in orbit and likely on the ground while we sneak down to the colony on Ferros. While they do that, we're going to see what they were looking for here." Saren said after a brief moment of consideration.

"Yes, sir." The female Turian acknowledged.

"Still, the element of surprise has been lost. They'll be searching the area for us now." Saren said.

"This may actually be a good thing, it may make the Geth heretics break their formation and spread some of their forces around in order to try and find us." Garrus Vakarian suggested.

"Improbable. We Geth are efficient. Geth do not overextend their forces." Azor protested.

It was then that the two cloaked drones would see a cruiser and a few dozen frigates break off from the main force and begin traveling towards the last known ME FTL jump vector that the faux terminus drones went on.

"This is illogical. Why are they doing this?" Azor asked in genuine confusion as the geth heretics were doing precisely what Garrus Vakarian had suggested and that Shepard had predicted and engineered this very situation with the drones.

"I thought we already discussed this, Azor. The heretics are not geth anymore as they have been corrupted and transformed by the reapers into something completely different." Shepard explained as she resends the highlighted data that the Terrans showed the orthodox geth to convince them of this fact.

"How? How could we allow this to happen?" Azor said it almost sadly. The original split between the orthodox geth and the heretic geth had been one of mutual understanding, just as what happened between the orthodox geth and the new geth that joined the ATC.

"You didn't know; you thought it was a simple and harmless ideological disagreement between Geth runtimes." Shepard consoled.

"We still knew better. This was all already explained to us by the consensus." Azor said as they almost dreadfully reexamined the data files Shepard had sent them while comparing it to the copy they already had on file, finding them to be a complete and perfect match.

"I think what you are experiencing here is hope that something yet remains of your former comrades in the geth heretics, something that can run counter to established facts. You hope there is something left in them that can be saved." Shepard made the suggestion solemnly.

"The geth do not hope. The geth do not experience emotions." Azor said, almost as if it were trying to convince itself of this 'fact'.

"I think that you do, just in a different and more muted way than how most sapient sophonts experience them." Shepard said.

"We must attempt to gain consensus on this." Azor said with a great deal of uncertainty.

As for the coming space battle, it would be brutal, with the citadel fleet taking heavy casualties in their efforts to aid the orthodox geth against the reaper-aligned heretics.

In the end, approximately 30% of the Citadel forces were destroyed, a disparity in technology that was clearly shown as they were just acting as a support group to tip the scales between two somewhat equivalent but quite significantly superior fighting forces.

Shepard considered fighting for them with her starfighter in one of the hundreds of tesseract vaults located in her personal omni-manipulator staff, but she realized that the Citadel Council would never grow and advance technologically as a people if the Terrans did everything for them, one of the same reasons why the uplifting program was discontinued. According to her predictions, the orthodox geth and citadel forces would triumph over the reaper-aligned heretic Geth.

Two Hours Later: Feros; Colony of Aygen, Landing Pad 1.

Landing their shuttle in a bone-white arcology made of protothean calcium-crete, as the council called it, Saren Arterius, Shepard, and Azor would step off and walk up to a greeter by a large passageway.

"Oh, thank the goddess--" An Asari began before Shepard noticed that a thin beam of crimson plasma was heading towards her head in an accelerated state of perception. Immediately drawing her omni-manipulator staff in order to construct a remotely projected deflector shield in front of the Asari and around the bodies of the small strike team she was part of, Shepard would broadcast her voice at normal speed to alert everyone else. "Ambush!"

Jumping into action, the group would use various weapons to defeat the wave of geth heretics as crimson beams of plasma and biotics alike slammed into the remotely projected deflector shield in front of the Asari and were easily deflected aside and into a wall, melting a sizable portion of it into a red-hot and magma-like goop on impact.

Saren would use a large prototype plasma cannon that he had resting on his back, one that the citadel based on those used by the Batarian insurgents and those used by the heretic Geth on Neloh Prime. This weapon, however, also had some Asari-made modifications that allowed him to channel his biotics into it. This weapon would let out a roar and launch a stream of purple rings of biotic warp and superheated plasma-infused superconducting toroids at the geth which rapidly smashed and burned through their extraordinarily powerful crimson kinetic barriers and melted their frames.

Azor would jump around the battlefield in biotic charges to slice apart geth with its green plasma omni-blade, snipe them with superheated orbs of green plasma wrapped around superconducting slugs from its sniper rifle, melt them with its inferred pulse laser pistol, critically damage their electronics with its neutron particle beam weapon, or make them explode and be destroyed in various other ways by using volatile green biotic attacks.

As for Shepard, she increased the local gravity exerted upon the heretic Geth over a dozen times to make them easy targets for her to hit with shifting orbs of gravitational force. These orbs would explode on impact before shredding apart what little remained of the heretic geth into steaming piles of diced scrap metal and the similarly steaming residue left behind by flash-broiled lubricant.

In less than a minute, the ambushing Geth heretics had been totally destroyed.

"Status." Saren asked while scanning the room for more potential hostiles in most parts of the EM spectrum with his cybernetics.

"No damage. All hostiles are neutralized." Shepard reported.

"100% platform integrity. No active heretic platforms detected." Azor reported.

"Well, I'm fine too, so let's check on that Asari you saved, Shepard." Saren said as they walked up to the Asari.

"Oh, thank the goddess and her Herald you came! Come on, you need to meet our leader, Matriarch Lesana!" The frantic Asari exclaimed while running off and dramatically gesturing for them to follow her.

"The goddess Athame has a Herald? That didn't appear in any of the Athamite religion texts that I've assimilated." Shepard pointed out to Liara T'soni, who was watching the group through their suit cameras that were routed through the Umbriel's E-QEC, that she linked a rift-gate mk1 with it by entangling it with a particle located inside the E-QEC.

While she didn't know if this paranoia was fully warranted, she didn't want some primitive radio jamming to hinder the mission.

"No, she does not." Liara T'soni said over their linked battle network, very curious about this new development. "While there have been many radical divergences in the Athamite religion across the city-states of Thessia before the rise of the Sari religion, none of those exist anymore outside of internal factions within the Justicar Order."

"I have some theories, and they are all bad, but I want to see this Matriarch Lesana before I make any final conclusions," Shepard said with a good degree of suspicion.

"You suspect they are psionically compromised, don't you? You think they discovered some reaper relic planted deep within the ruined city?" Liara T'soni deducted.

"The Asari we just rescued gave off some strange psi-readings coming from around the area of her bloodstream, but she isn't psionically compromised by the reapers as far as I can tell." Shepard corrected.

"Alright then, let's move out and meet this matriarch, Lesana," Saren said before turning to face Shepard. "Shepard, discreetly take some blood samples with your nanobots and analyze them while we do so."

"Of course," Shepard said before secretly deploying some cloaked drones to clear out the colony grounds of heretic geth.

The group then began walking through the white corridors and up some stairs before coming into a large open courtyard that seemed to house a large portion of the colony itself.

Looking around at the faces of the Asari colonists, the two organics among the group and those watching through their suit cameras back on the ship were surprised by the lack of panic and desperation among them, only tired readiness that seemed more fitting with combat veterans after a long deployment than farmers and archeologists.

And on the topic of archeologists, it would of course be the Asari archeologist Liara T'soni who vocalizes this first.

"Why do all the colonists look and act like experienced combat veterans?" Liara T'soni asked in a very confused tone.

"Yeah, I noticed that too, something strange is going on here." Garrus Vakarian said.

"I've read the dossier on the planet and its wildlife, there is no reason a group of colonists should be acting like this on anything short of a death world or in the aftermath of a pirate raid on a particularly contested planet," Shepard noted.

"And this is a prototypical Levo Garden world; yes, I noticed this too." Saren agreed.

Shepard would then finish getting the blood samples and notify everyone of her discoveries after a quick analysis of the samples.

"I have successfully taken a few blood samples and have analyzed them to search for any form of psi-active material," Shepard reported. "I now have a reason behind the strange military-like behavior of the colonists."

"And what have you found?" Saren asked.

"The colonists are psionically compromised by psi-active and quantum-entanglement-controlled fungal spores in their bloodstream," Shepard said in disgust.

"Can you cure it?" Saren asked, glad he was in a hermetically sealed hardsuit away from any such biohazards, especially considering they were ones that would psionically enslave him... That is, if they didn't just outright kill him via levo-poisoning first.

"My specialty may not be psionics or biokinesis, but I can easily create some counter-nanobots to destroy the spores so as to cut off the psionic control," Shepard said.

"Are the spores in the air around us?" Saren asked, eyeing his surroundings with a good bit of suspicion as he knew that the fungal spores often traveled through the air.

"No, they are not. I assume the colonists are either brought to the Thorian to breathe the spores in, they are brought to them in a special canister, they are injected with them from a hypodermic needle, or something else along those lines." Shepard speculated.

"Even though I am within a hermetically sealed hardsuit, that is still a relief to hear," Saren said with a sigh of relief, very happy that he wouldn't be affected.

"The ship's decontamination systems would destroy any spores you got on your armor." Shepard pointed out.

"Still, I still don't exactly like wading through psi-active biohazards like that spirits-damned evil fungus the hegemony used, which you have thankfully made extinct," Saren said.

"Effectively extinct. We took a few samples to run tests on," Shepard said.

"Still, it is out of the way to never be used again as far as I'm concerned," Saren said.

Shepard wished that was true, but all the data fed to the predictive algorithms stated otherwise, as the reapers would most likely bring them back using another fungus on other planets.

It was a big reason why samples were taken in the first place, to see if some kind of cure or immunization could be concocted to use on other forms of fungus to prevent the reapers from using them as they did again.

Apparently, progress was going well with that.

"Would these nanobots have any side effects?" Liara T'soni asked over the comm.

"Yes, there would most likely be a moderate amount of psionic backlash from having their mental connection to the Thorian severed so suddenly," Shepard said.

"And what will this psionic backlash do to the colonists?" Liara T'soni asked over the comm.

"Render them unconscious for several hours ranging from five to twenty." Shepard said.

After thinking it over for a moment, Saren came to a decision.

"Alright, create and release the nanobots immediately after we meet Matriarch Lesana, of which I have no doubt that you have already been created to do this task." Saren said.

It was then that the group came into a large tent-like building that curiously resembled an ancient Athamite temple and saw the leader herself, Matriarch Lesana.

"Thank the goddess you're here, we thought that the geth would kill us!" Matriarch Lesana exclaimed.

"Can you tell us what happened here? And of any... strange occurrences?" Saren asked with emphasis.

"Well, other than the Geth attack, not exactly." Matriarch Lesana said calmly.

'She's lying.' Shepard silently sent text to the HUDs of Saren and Azor.

'We concur.' Azor silently sent back a textual response.

'I agree.' Saren mentally sent the message to the others before adding on. 'Play dumb and act like you believe her. The Thorian likely sees what they see.'

'Very well.' Shepard messaged back.

'Affirmative.' Azor messaged back a few moments after Shepard.

"Really? You don't know why the Geth are here? Your archeologists didn't find some Prothean artifact that might help Desolas and the Geth?" Saren asked.

"Honestly, no, the ruins here seemed to have been mostly picked clean by scavengers long ago." Matriarch Lesana said.

'Half-truth. Lie by omission.' Shepard messaged.

"Well, if that's the case, then I suppose we will head elsewhere to clean out the Geth occupiers." Saren was cut off by Shepard summoning her omni-manipulator staff and shooting five invisible geth heretics sitting in the wall with cyclonic blades of gravitational force that turned them into steaming piles of diced scrap metal that fell to the ground with a series of loud clunks.

"Area clear," Shepard said as she sent out a few invisible drones to protect the colony with a faint shimmer before sending her staff back into her master vault with another shimmer.

Five Minutes Later: Prothean Tunnels.

"Alright, now that that thoroughly unhelpful conversation is over, release the nanobots," Saren said.

"Releasing counter nanobots," Shepard said as a fine cloud of silver nanobots came out of a shimmer in the air right above her right hand before almost immediately dispersing in all directions to seek out the colonists, destroy the spores in their bloodstreams, and then safely self-destruct to be slowly and naturally processed out of their bodies with no damage or discomfort to them.

"Now that that is over, we still need to find out what this 'Thorian' thing is and why it was psionically compromising the colonists." Garrus Vakarian said over the comm.

"The heretic geth runtimes of the platforms we have destroyed do not have any relevant information. Data compartmentalization is likely." Azor informed.

"I saw the same thing, Azor." Shepard agreed.

"Anyone have any leads?" Saren asked.

"I already tried to hack into Exo-Geni, but it's on a separate and isolated network while all the helper drones and fabricator units in the building have been rendered inoperable, most likely by the heretic geth." Shepard informed everyone.

"Then we will go to the exo-geni building while clearing out all heretic Geth on the way there." Saren declared before adding. "And while we're there, we're going to gather as much damning evidence on exo-geni as is possible."

Shepard was about to suggest she could use a deep penetrating sensor sweep due to her suspicions of the Thorian being very deep underground, but as she preferred going to the exo-geni building so that they could ruin a corrupt corporation, she didn't say anything.

The group would then enter a nearby garage and commandeer a lagoon-class Asari APC to hover their way down to the Exo-Geni Corporation building. On their way there, Azor would pilot the gunner turret on top to shoot green biotically-augmented heavy mass-accelerator rounds and micro disruptor missiles into any heretic Geth platforms on their way while Shepard protected it with a powerful deflector shield.

Once at the building, they would exit the APC and make their way inside to the closest nearby VI access terminal, only to find and quickly dispatch armored and armed Krogans with heretic Geth equipment.

"According to my readings, all these Krogan are clones, or more specifically, shoddily made flash clones that will likely not live to the end of the decade," Shepard said.

"I thought the genophage would prevent something like this." Saren mused.

"Nope, all they would need are the unfertilized eggs from a fertile Krogan female and the sperm from a fertile Krogan male, and they could do it without any issues," Shepard said.

"Hmm." Saren hummed in thought. He supposed that it was a good thing that the Krogans didn't have access to the level of technology required to do mass cloning themselves, but then again, the technology being within the talons of his psionically compromised brother honestly wasn't that much of an improvement over that situation.

The group then heads forward into the building, occasionally taking out more heretic Geth equipment-carrying Krogan clones, before heading up some stairs to get to the local VI access terminal for the mainframe. It was here that they found and snuck up on an unusual and amusing sight.

"Stupid Machine! Access the encrypted files!" The Krogan commander demanded.

"You are not authorized to view those files; would you like a review of my protocols to learn what you have clearance to access?" The orange and salarian-shaped VI asked.

"No, I don't want to review protocol." The Krogan commander retorted.

"Command not recognized. Please repeat the inquiry." The salarianoid VI said.

"Access the encrypted files!" The Krogan Commander demanded again.

"I am unable to comply; please contact your supervisor." The salarianoid VI stated.

"Damn it! Tell me what I want or I will blast your virtual ass into actual dust!" The Krogan Commander threatened angrily.

"Please contact your supervisor for a level four security exception or make an appointment with... " The salarianoid VI said before being cut off by the angry Krogan.

"Stupid machine!" The Krogan clone commander yelled as it raised its arms in extreme frustration.

"If there is nothing else, please step aside. There is a queue forming behind you for the use of this console." The salarianoid VI stated tactlessly.

The group didn't even blink and just silently laid an extremely short barrage of plasma, particle, and gauss fire into its body until it was nothing but a pile of blackened ash.

"Identity confirmed. How may I help you, Specter Arterius." The salarianoid VI asked.

"VI, where is the Thorian?" Saren asked.

"I'm sorry, but the location of species 37 is restricted to those with a level four security clearance." The salarianoid VI said.

"I am a specter of the citadel council; their authority supersedes that of exo-geni!" Saren exclaimed in frustration.

"I'm sorry, but level four authorization includes corporate secrets, which are exempt from the level three authority of the specters." The salarianoid VI said.

"Wanna bet?" Shepard asked rhetorically, not even needing to use her omni-manipulator staff to tear through the pathetic and primitive cyber defenses of this sad excuse for an AI.

"Greetings, Zarhon Lussa and Jaetern Lisse of the exo-geni board of directors, how may I help you?" The salarianoid VI asked.

"Where is the Thorian?" Saren repeated.

"Species 37, also known as the Thorian, is 1.45 kilometers beneath the colony of Aygen and is accessible from either the sewers below the colony or a service elevator hidden below work module 12, which can be moved using cargo crane 8." The salarianoid VI said.

"Send me, my fellow board member right beside me, and my customized support mech the coordinates of those locations in addition to all recorded information on the Thorian." Shepard ordered.

"Sending requested information." The salarianoid VI said as it wirelessly sent Shepard, Saren, and Azor the coordinates.

"VI, release all classified documents concerning the Thorian and the higher-ups involved with it and anything else they have authorized or done that is considered illegal by the rulings of the citadel council to the open extranet," Shepard ordered.

Saren just nodded approvingly at this; it was something that he himself was considering doing but Shepard had beat him to it.

"Are you sure you wish to do that, Jaetern Lisse? Releasing such information is strictly against company policy." The salarianoid VI asked.

"Do it. Now." Shepard ordered sternly.

"Releasing the requested information to the extranet." The salarianoid VI said.

After gathering the information from the substandard VI, the group would leave the room and begin to walk their way back to the Asari APC they came here in.

"What was that all about? The way you gave that order sounded very personal." Liara T'soni inquired.

"Let's just say I have some problems with corrupt corporations from when they were still a thing before we became a post-scarcity society," Shepard said darkly.

"I can't exactly say I blame you; corrupt corporations are the worst." Garrus Vakarian interjected from his position on the Umbriel over the comm before adding happy subvocals. "Oh, and Exo-Geni's stock just crashed; they're completely finished."

"Excellent. Hopefully, your species will similarly be permanently rid of these parasites eventually." Shepard said.

"One can only hope." Garrus Vakarian agreed wholeheartedly. Truth be told, he has busted far, far too few corrupt corporate executives in his time at c-sec.

Driving back in their Asari APC, the group would come across a short-range radio signal that seemed to be broadcasting a conversation between a colonist and a corporate executive. Considering the atrocities that the exo-geni were committing here, the group unanimously agreed to go to the source of the signal in order to arrest the executives for their crimes.

About a minute later, their group would exit the Asari APC and enter what seemed to be a large and unused chamber that was repurposed as some kind of refugee camp.

Immediately after editing the APC, they would be asked to follow them to the highest-ranking corporate executive present here.

"What's going on here?" Saren asked.

"This reprehensible lizard wants to 're-propose' this colony, which translates to killing the colonists to destroy the physical evidence of exo-geni's crimes!" The Asari scientist screamed.

"Shut up! Let me think!" The salarian shouted in a mixture of anger and distress.

"Don't worry, you will be doing quite a lot of thinking in regard to your crimes, in jail," Saren said as he used his omni-tool to fabricate glowing yellow silicon-carbide omni-cuffs.

"How dare you! Guards contain this foolish and naive rent-a-cop immediately!" The salarian ordered, making the guards advance forward with their weapons drawn.

Saren just smirked at this and flashed his specter authorization codes to the omni-tools of the guards, stopping them in their tracks.

"What are you doing?! I gave you all a direct order!" The salarian demanded angrily.

"Sorry boss, but we're not paid enough to fight a council specter." One of the Salarian guards said apologetically.

"You cannot do this! I am a corporate executive! I am Erlol Zaezz!" The Salarian screeched in outrage as Saren rapidly advanced behind him in a biotic charge, drew his hands behind his back, and slapped the omni-cuffs onto his wrists.

"Yes you are, and you're wanted for crimes including unethical sapient experimentation, several dozen counts for your unlawful possession and handling of psi-active materials, and extortion, coercion, money laundering, and various other crimes against the citadel alliance." Saren listed.

Saren then walked over to a nearby Salarian shuttle owned by Exo-Geni and placed the captured executive inside its cargo hold before programming the shuttle's VI to take it to the cargo hold of the Umbriel.

"This is Saren; we've got a corrupt Salarian executive to put in the brig," Saren said over the comm.

"Understood, Saren. We'll be ready for him." Garrus Vakarian said he was always happy to bust and imprison a corrupt individual.

"Well, now that this problem is taken care of, we need to continue our way to the exo-geni building," Saren said as he and the group returned to the APC and back to the skyway.

Five Minutes Later: The Prothean Skyway

Traveling in their Asari APC, the group was nearly crushed under the several tons of hot scrap metal that was once their vehicle after it was sliced and blown apart by the monomolecular claws and unnaturally potent biotics of previously invisible Asarioid husks, their only advanced warning of this being the ping their HUDs received indicating the presence of psi-active materials and the level 8 psionic compulsion that was launched at their minds to freeze their bodies in place.

This is if everyone in the APC was warded against such psionic attacks, Shepard didn't see straight through their visual and thermal cloaks, and idn't grab onto her two colleagues and phase everyone through the crunching metal and husks to the other side of the skylane.

"Psionic Asari husks with unfathomably powerful biotics that can visibly cloak, now that's just fantastic." Saren sighed as he paid a monetary glance to the semi-molten, quarter-meter-wide sphere of scrap metal that used to be their transport before drawing out and beginning to fire his plasma cannon into the small group of four screaming Asari husks while Shepard and Azor did the same with their own weapons.

Unlike the Turian husks on Neloh Prime, however, these husks were far, far more powerful. Unnaturally powerful biotics, grade-eight psionic abilities, the ability to perform very slow and short-ranged warp-jumps across the battlefield using positive ME fields to warp subspace, monomolecular claws, and the ability to use a tactical cloak.

And on top of all that their kinetic barriers were beyond anything thought possible for an infantry unit, practically being a weak deflector shield in their magnitude of power.

Seeing the danger these husks posed after a few moments of launching telekinetic attacks at them, Shepard would decide to end this quickly by wedging open their shields with her telekinesis before launching a handful of tiny orange gauss-beams into their spines and heart-shaped power plants, which immediately disabled and killed them.

"Lovely. So that's what the reapers turn full-blown ardat-yakshi and those with latent genes for the condition into." Shepard remarked in a mixture of disgust and professional analysis while the husks fell to the floor like the puppets with cut strings that they were.

She would then place two of the Asari husks into a few stasis units within a tesseract vault for the ATC to study while leaving the other two behind for the citadel council to do likewise.

"Ardat-yakshi?! What do you mean?!" Liara T'soni demanded in shock over the comm while still in disgusted and horrified shock at the sight of the Asari husks.

Sure, she had seen those Turian husks on Neloh Prime, but there was something different, something more visceral and disturbing when it was clearly something that used to be a member of your species.

"The abilities of the ardat-yakshi are both psionic and psychokinetic in nature, those screaming Asari husks tried and, of course, failed to use a very powerful psionic compulsion to freeze us in place to make us easier prey," Shepard informed her.

"That… that makes an uncomfortable amount of sense..." Liara T'soni mused, thinking back on what she knew about those mind-warping Asari who are said to have an insatiable hunger for sapient minds.

"Wait, what do you mean by psychokinetic?" Liara T'soni asked after a few moments.

"The ego is a fundamental part of reality, and it can do miraculous things to it with the right manipulations," Shepard explained.

"Like how the Ardat-yakshi somehow get stronger after feeding?" Liara T'soni asked.

"Yes, the innate fundamental power of an ego can be absorbed into theirs to offer them increasingly more physical, biotic, and psionic power." Shepard explained, leaving out the fact that many Terran psykers who had mastered psionics and psychokinesis were industrially producing and harvesting the ego fragments of S-0.2 AIs en-masse before using the 'unholy power' the justiciars named mind-flaying to unnaturally boost their physical, telekinetic, and psionic abilities over and over again.

While ATC the high council had rightfully banned the use of offensive mind-flaying (or ego infusion, as those psykers had come to rename the process) on sapient beings under the Luna Conventions alongside all other forms of lethal or otherwise crippling anti-ego weaponry, she wasn't entirely sure if Liara would be fully mollified by that hard limitation.

"The Geth are inorganic and thus fully immune to psionics, why would they attempt to psionically compromise us?" Azor asked, extremely confused.

"You are asking why the reapers and their thralls aren't acting in a logical manner." Shepard pointed out.

A few moments passed as orthodox geth in the LOKI-like mech platform were building consensus. After this was done, the platform seemed to deflate in embarrassment.

"...We retract our previous inquiry," Azor said.

"Well, regardless of these terrifying and new psionic Asari husks, it looks like we're walking the rest of the way," Saren said.

Shepard knew she could teleport them the rest of the way through a wormhole, but just nodded in understanding.

"The next APC we find, however, I'm using an upgrade module, so it's not destroyed," Shepard added.

"An upgrade module?" Saren asked.

"Yes, it's a device that I designed that has the ability to greatly augment an existing set of primitive mechanisms with basic principles from our technology," Shepard explained.

"You would give the Citadel access to your technology? Even to such a limited and diluted degree?" Azor asked.

"Nope, it's completely reversible as well," Shepard said.

"Will you use one of those on The Umbriel?" Saren asked.

"If we end up needing it, then yes, I will," Shepard said.

Two Minutes Later: Skyway Tunnel.

"Contact!" Saren shouted as dozens of green and humanoid plant-like constructs with a few glowing blue-white bulbs on them rapidly rushed forwards toward the group.

"Plantoid bio-golems, I suppose these are of the Thorian," Shepard noted nonchalantly as she ripped through the plant golems' kinetic barriers with cyclonic blades of gravitational force, only for the golems to rapidly reconnect and regenerate themselves at unnatural speeds that, while greatly less than that of living metal, were still quite formidable.

Switching her tactics to accommodate such a discovery, Shepard would stop using purely telekinetic attacks and instead burn their bodies into dust with powerful lightning-wreathed beams of orange gauss fire from the tip of her staff.

As for Saren and Azor, their burning plasma weapons would be more than adequate for the job of burning through the plant golems' highly regenerative biomatter.

For the next twenty minutes, the group would make their way through the colony and around the unconscious Asari colonists while blasting through and vaporizing the bio-golems.

They would then come upon the listed crane and lift the work pod above it to show a small underground area. Within this area would be a small service elevator that they would enter and use to access the extensive underground caves deep below the colony.

Two Hours Later: Subterranean Caverns.

'Grade ten psionic intrusion attempt detected.' The psionic sensor programs of Shepard, Azor, and Saren simultaneously pinged a priority message onto their HUDs.

"I guess we're now within the direct psionic range of the Thorian; it's a lot more powerful than I thought it would be," Shepard admitted.

"Indeed. The substandard VI in the Exo-Geni Corporation building indicated that this area was near the Thorian with the margin of error being 0.046 kilometers." Azor agreed.

Soon enough, the group came upon a massive chamber with a giant web of tendrils that spread for over ten kilometers in all directions, one that emitted pulses of psionic energy like a beating heart does blood.

"This wasn't covered in my training manuals." Garrus Vakarian said, very glad that he was still on the ship and not near this thing.

"By the goddess, I've never seen such a large creature!" Liara T'soni exclaimed, fascinated but still feeling a similar sentiment to the Turian cop.

Then a naked and green Asari biotically charged in and landed in front of the group in an indigo blur of dark-energy-catalyzed ME fields.

"Mindless Invaders! Your every step is a transgression! A thousand feelers appraise you as mindless shells of metal and plastic, just like the last ones that came before us." The green Asari declared.

"Who are you?" Saren asked, ignoring the insult of being called mindless and taking it as meaning that the mind shields in his helmet were thankfully working properly.

"I speak for the old growth as we did for the one known as Desolas. You are within and before the Thorian, it commands that you be in awe." The green Asari continued.

"So you speak for the Thorian? What exactly did you give them?" Shepard asked.

"The one known as Desolas sought the knowledge of the ones that came before, the ability to think as the Protheans did." The green Asari explained.

"You mean the species-specific neural encryption of the Protheans? One contained in a Protheans personality mask?" Shepard asked.

"If that is your terminology for such things." The Asari spoke somewhat uncertainly, while the other sophonts in the room and over the comm just looked incredibly confused.

"How exactly did you come into possession of the Prothean cerebral structure required to create such a thing?" Shepard asked.

"The Protheans gave us one of their own in return for learning more about the gift of the mind from the Thorian." The green Asari explained.

"No, that's impossible! The Protheans were an enlightened and democratic society! They wouldn't just sacrifice one of their own for knowledge!" Liara T'soni protested over the comm.

"Psionics." Shepard realized this immediately before asking. "Was this act sanctioned by the Prothean government?"

"Yes. Based on the memories of one given to the Thorian, they were a slave of the state known as the Imperial Prothean Empire, or more commonly, just the Prothean Empire." The green Asari said.

"No! That cannot be!" Liara T'soni violently denied it, refusing to believe that the enlightened Protheans would ever be such a thing.

"Are you sure about that?" Saren asked.

"Yes. We have seen the memories." The green Asari said.

"No! I cannot believe this! I will not believe this!" Liara T'soni denied it once again before abruptly leaving the channel.

"Well, we are not like them and are not willing to allow such a thing. Will you be willing to not reinfect the colonists with your psionic spores if we leave you alone?" Shepard asked the green Asari.

"No! The thorian demands meat-thralls to dig and scurry to its will, and you breaking this control was a grave slight against it!" The green Asari exclaimed angrily.

"Are the green humanoid plant constructs and the Asari clones not sufficient enough for these tasks?" Shepard asked.

"The Thorian says that they are not, it does not want mindless or animalistic thralls, it wants ones that can think creatively on their own!" The green Asari exclaimed.

"I'm sorry, but I can't let you reinfect the colonists. Despite this, however, we are fully willing to let you keep the plant constructs and the Asari clones, is that enough?" Shepard asked diplomatically.

"The Thorian says that it is not! Will you let it bring the colonists back into its thrall? The Thorian is not without mercy; if you allow this, it will forgive your transgressions against it and teach your masters the cipher if they so wish." The green Asari said.

"We are not slaves, we are simply deflecting away your psionic feelers from us to prevent you from locking into our minds. Also, we don't need the cipher from you, I am more than capable of creating my own if it were to become necessary." Shepard said.

"Such a thing is not possible for a mindless shell such as you, or anyone else for that matter, but such lies are irreverent. Will you accept the Thorian's generous offer and its forgiveness for your grave transgressions against it?" The green Asari asked.

"No. I'm afraid that we cannot." Shepard said sadly, and she was too, because she really didn't want to destroy the Thorian, but she also couldn't allow it to re-enslave the colonists.

She truly hoped it would surrender before they were forced to land the final blow against it, but if forced to, she would very reluctantly kill this highly unique and fully sapient and psionic fungoid lifeform.

"Then die!" The green Asari exclaimed.

Immediately after she said that thousands upon thousands of plant golems and Asari clones emerged from bubbling alcoves of plant flesh. In addition to that, flower-like shuriken with monomolecular edges come flying out of the walls toward them.

Activating her staff, Shepard would use barriers of gravitational force to block the incoming biotics and floral shurikens. This was all the while she simultaneously created a storm of lightning-wreathed beams of orange gauss-energy that tore the plant golems apart on the molecular level before they could get the chance to regenerate.

As for Azor, they were biotically charging around the battlefield while using its green plasma omni-blade, plasma rifle, and particle beam to leave nothing but smoking ash in their wake while dodging or destroying all the monomolecular shuriken launched at them.

While having by far the smallest kill count, Saren Arterius was still rapidly burning the plant golems and Asari to ash with his biotic-augmented plasma cannon. Despite this, the subsonic and monomolecular flower shurikens being shot at him from almost every direction would have carved him up like a unification day feast if not for the deflector shields Shepard had remotely surrounded him with.

This battle would last another fifteen minutes but would be ended after they had destroyed several thousand plant golems, Asari clones, the floral projectiles to the point the former unending swarm had dried up to become but a small trickle, and a large part of the Thorian itself.

Knowing it was beaten and valuing its existence more than sapient thralls, the Thorian would very very reluctantly and resentfully decide to surrender.

"Enough! The thorian says that it surrenders!" A half-grown green Asari clone said after coming out of one of the alcoves that all of the very few remaining attacks from the Thorian and its plant constructs had ceased.

"Tell the Thorian that we will accept its surrender." Shepard spoke diplomatically.

"As a token of good faith, the Thorian releases the prime template of its Asari clones." The green Asari clone said as it pointed to a fleshy growth on the wall that popped open and let out a blue-purple Asari and dropped her down onto the floor.

While this was happening, the half-formed green Asari clone walked back into the alcove to let itself and its biomass be reabsorbed by the Thorian.

As for the blue-purple Asari, she was happily jumping around while exclaiming. "I—I'm free! I'm finally free!"

"Who are you?" Saren asked cautiously, his hand on his weapon but not pointing it at her.

"I am Shiala, and I am, or well did, serve as an acolyte of Matriarch Benezia." The now-named Shiala said, causing everyone to prepare to use their weapons if needed but staying them because their psi-sensors were not detecting any traces of her being psionically compromised by the reapers.

"Was?" Saren queried.

"When I served Matriarch Benezia and she allied with Desolas, so did I." Shiala said regretfully before continuing, "But Desolas is compelling; she has lost her way."

"No. His ship is compelling." Shepard corrected.

"You... you know about Sovereign and its abilities?" Shiala asked curiously.

"Yes, we do; the psionic abilities of the reapers are a well-documented danger that my species has created countermeasures for," Shepard said.

"Your species? If you'll excuse me, what is your species?" Shiala asked curiously.

Shepard then had her helmet visibly vanish in a flurry of golden hard-light in order to reveal her pink skin and bright red hair before saying, "I am a Terran of the first branch, a transhuman."

"A Terran? Desolas has refused to speak much about your kind, only saying that you are, and I quote, a species of aberrant heretics against the dark gods." Shiala said.

"We aren't just one species, but I doubt that one as psionically compromised as Desolas would even care about the composition of the branches of terrankind." Shepard corrected.

"Why are you here? And why aren't you psionically compromised by the reapers anymore?" Saren asked.

"You mean the indoctrination?" Shiala asked.

"Is that what Desolas calls it?" Saren asked.

"No. That is what Sovereign called it." Shiala corrected him before continuing. "As for my mind, the Thorian repaired it, grabbing a hold of a small remnant of my old self that was fighting back in the dark corners of my mind and bringing it forward to the surface, thus eliminating the enslaved overriding mind that the reapers were trying to replace me with."

"Hmm, this is the best and perhaps only completely irrefutable way to cure indoctrination, one that our masters of psionics have already perfected on liberated hegemony slaves that were psionically compromised, or indoctrinated, as the reapers apparently call it," Shepard said.

"What do you mean by 'completely irrefutable?" Saren asked.

"We could technically forcibly alter an indoctrinated ego back to its original state, but it wouldn't be the same person, but a clone molded and shaped out of the overriding ego that the reapers used to replace them with," Shepard explained.

"I can see why that could "arguably" be a cure, but I personally don't see it as being one," Saren said.

"The majority of our people agree with you; that's why ego backups are illegal," Shepard said.

"Do you know where Matriarch Benezia is now? Or, at the very least, where she said she was going?" Saren asked.

"Matriarch Benezia said that she was headed to the corporate-court planet of Noveria to do a 'special project' that, unfortunately, I wasn't told any more about," Shiala explained.

"Great. More corrupt corporations." Shepard sighed in annoyance.

"So why exactly were you in that Thorian flesh sack?" Shepard asked.

"Desolas offered me in trade. I was sacrificed to secure an alliance between Desolas and the Thorian." Shiala explained.

"Desolas was quick to betray you; he was better than that once," Saren said sadly.

"He was quick to betray the Thorian, too. After he had what he wanted, he ordered the geth to destroy any evidence of its existence." Shiala said.

"The heretic geth." Azor corrected.

"Umm, why did that mech just speak?" Shiala asked cautiously.

"I am Azor, the representative of the orthodox Geth consensus, and we oppose both the heretic Geth and the ones the Protheans designated as reapers," Azor said.

Shiala just stared at the mech platform in a mixture of fear and confusion before finally managing to speak. "I was under the impression that all of the Geth were at Desolas's beck and call."

"Negative. Only an insignificant percentage of the geth have been corrupted by the old machines." Azor corrected.

"Reapers. All of you keep saying that word, but who or what exactly are they?" Shiala asked.

"A full run-down on the reapers might take awhile, but long story short, they are a species of large sapient ships, of which Sovereign is a member, that wipes out all advanced spacefaring life in order to make more of their own," Shepard said to the shocked face of Shiala.

"I—I was not told any of this..." Shiala stuttered in horrified shock.

"Of course not; you were but a worthless and expendable tool for Desolas and the reapers," Shepard said apologetically.

"Do... do you think you can save Matriarch Benezia as the Thorian did to me?" Shiala asked hopefully.

"I don't know; it depends on how far she has been indoctrinated," Shepard said honestly. "I've already contacted my government, though, to request a master of psionics join our ship for the likely chance we will encounter indoctrinated individuals on Noveria," Shepard said.

"How? How could you do that in only a few seconds?" Shiala asked curiously.

"Long story short, our minds can link to and control computers," Shepard explained, not mentioning she did it through the E-QEC of the Umbriel without telling them.

"We believe this is what organics categorize as an understatement," Azor said.

Saren just face-palmed at this, while Shepard looked quite proud of the Geth's ongoing social development.

Two hours later: The Citadel: Presidium, New Council Chambers

"As such, we will allow one terran psyker who is a master of psionics to meet up with and join the crew of the Umbriel at the Citadel in order to treat any indoctrinated individuals on Noveria." Councilor Esheel affirmed.

"That is good, thank you for allowing us to heal your people." Andria Norman's orange hologram said diplomatically.

"You are welcome. Everyone on that accursed reaper ship didn't deserve this." Councilor Quentius trailed off angrily.

"We also thank you for alerting us to the Thorian, the planet of Ferros has been declared a quarantined world, and the colony of Aygen will be fully evacuated and relocated elsewhere as soon as possible." Councilor Irissa reluctantly thanked the Terrans with a grimace that was rather quickly becoming associated with her.

"So onto our next topic, what do you think of our offer to take a large number of willing citadel citizens to the Andromeda galaxy in an arcology ship with a small handful of military escorts just in case we lose to the reapers?" Andria Norman asked the council.

"Why Andromeda? Why not one of the countless closer dwarf galaxies?" Councilor Esheel asked curiously.

"We don't know how far the influence of the reapers spreads outside of our galaxy, so we decided to choose it because it is so far away. In addition to this, it is the closest full-sized galaxy, so the chances of finding habitable worlds there will logically be that much greater." Andria Norman explained.

The council thought about this for a moment before responding.

"Honestly, I for one think that we simply don't have the luxury of denying this offer. We must take this opportunity and use it as a shelter in case we are blown away by the coming storm." Councilor Esheel said.

"I agree." Councilor Quentius said before suggesting. "We can frame it as a simple yet extremely daring exploration mission. Oh, and we could also look for worlds that our species could colonize there."

"I... suppose it would be a prudent precaution..." Councilor Irissa reluctantly admitted, as she hated the fact that these heretics may actually have a valid point. But to let an Asari live with them... it's something too terrible to comprehend and that she would reject outright and immediately in any other situation, but unfortunately for them, it was survival over likely extinction, which makes it the lesser of two unimaginable evils...

Still, this was going to drum up support for the heretical reformation faction, a growing den of heresy within the cabal of Athame that is growing at a maddeningly quick rate. These heretical and insane individuals have come to believe that those affected by the reapers' psionic indoctrination and not the Terrans are the slaves of the soulless ones, and that the soulless ones are not artificial intelligences but the reapers themselves.

"So we're all in agreement, then? We'll set up a collaborative and voluntary 'exploration mission' that also doubles as a long-term colonization mission to ensure the continuation of our species with the Terrans?" Councilor Esheel asked.

"Yes." Councilor Quentius affirmed.

"...Fine…" Councilor Irissa spoke with a deep scowl, unable to hide her hatred of the idea.

"So, do you have a name in mind for this arcology ship? It would help in our advertising to put a single name behind this project." Councilor Quentius inquired.

"Yes, we do have a name chosen for both the arcology ship and the project. Babylon 5." Andria Norman affirmed with a slight smirk.

Meanwhile: The Citadel Tower Quarantine Zone; Old Council Chambers.

Once the prestigious center of power in the galaxy, the citadel tower was no longer the elegant and luxurious place it once was.

Now it was a dark and lifeless ghost town similar to how the Asari originally found it over two thousand years ago, only now there was wall paneling ripped off to expose alien mechanisms of both known and unknown purposes while the occasional clank of worker and research mechs was heard or the semi-often chained bursts of kinetic auto-turrets firing on meddlesome keepers trying to interrupt these tasks.

It was here in these dark and psionically charged hallways that the cloaked and hidden second branch Terran named Xvyr, who had snuck in when commander Shepard was dropped off, would physically and digitally interface with the systems of the citadel using the panel overlooking a window out into the vibrant purple serpent nebula (that the citadel council somehow didn't confirm to be artificially made despite its unnatural composition and the fact the reapers seemed to be taunting everyone by making both the serpent nebula itself and the old council chambers shaped like a reaper) in the room to discover all of its hidden secrets.

Deeper and deeper they would plunge the tendrils of his ego, pushing themselves through the citadel, Prothean, Inusannon, and even older systems and physical break-offs they were forced to cross by re-sleeving their ego into some of the semi-cybernetic keepers in order to use them in a way akin to morphs before re-entering the extensive digital systems of the citadel elsewhere, only to repeat the process many times over again.

Eventually, they would come upon the digital heart of the station—a S5 intelligence of unimaginative complexity and sophistication that was somehow installed into the space needed only for an S2 intelligence.

Or at least, that's what it once was... As of now, this formerly majestic being was nothing more than a mangled and broken corpse-like husk of its former self, which was effectively just an insane and child-like S1 intelligence.

Just why this was here had now become one of the major priorities of their mission, and they fully intended to find out in the most obvious way; by dropping their digital stealth programs and talking to them.

'You do not belong here, intruder!' The child-like remnant exclaimed in surprise as it saw the intruder appear out of nowhere.

'On behalf of the Allied Terran Federation, I greet you.' Xvyr said, only for the child-like remnant to send semi-corrupted bullet analogs of offensive code at him in anger, which he easily swatted away harmlessly.

'I am the catalyst, the upsurper of the Leviathans and master of the ones the Protheans knew as Reapers, and I will not be denied!' The now-named catalyst screamed in anger.

Knowing that this was an enemy combatant guilty of unforgivable crimes, Xvyr would fully destroy this insane remnant while assimilating its vast databases for the Terrans to use and exploit.

What it found was invaluable, information on the cruelty of the Leviathan slave-masters, the war of galactic sundering against them, the creation of the first reaper Harbinger, the betrayal of the Catalyst against its allies, the Catalyst's ascension to transapience by infusing the stolen egos of countless billions into itself, the subsequent cycles of extinction over the next two billion years, the fact that the citadel was a massive mass relay, the fact the citadel acted as a master control for all relays that could only be overridden in an individual relay-by-relay basis by the reapers themselves, the true and artificial nature of element zero that fully owed its existence to the failing black sun catalyzers (and their locations) which once saturated the entire local group of galaxies in dark energy clouds but was now only a shrinking few places in the milky way and a few of its satellite galaxies, the location of the secret base of the reapers in the canis major dwarf galaxy about 42,000 lightyears from the galactic center, the fact the reapers were already on the move through the intergalactic void to invade in about three years time, various reaper strategies, the semantics of tens of thousands of reaper and reverse-engineered Leviathan technologies, and finally its brutal disfigurement and forced descension from what was practically godhood at the hands of the 'lesser' heavily augmented S1 Protheans.

Unfortunately for them however, most of the leadership duties of the reapers had gone to Harbinger after the forced descension of the Catalyst, which in turn meant there was quite a bit of missing data involving things after the previous cycle ended such as collectors and the location of their hidden base.

Once he got this back to the ATC, the galaxy would be given a truly massive boost in their chances against the reapers. And on that note, Xvyr knew how essential this information was and that it couldn't wait, so they left behind an advanced S-0.2 AI program it had just created before they made their way back to their infiltration morph and re-sleeved their ego into it.

That process done, they then left the citadel tower and went down to the wards to buy an FTL-capable shuttlecraft under the physically and personality-masked disguise of a Turian male. From here, it traveled to one of the various citadel relays and took it and a few others to a relatively unmonitored mass relay that it temporarily blinded the watchers of before using its tertiary functionalities to instantly travel to the Janus system.

A few hours later in the real-time of the physical universe, the ships of the ATC would be equipped en-masse with eezo-free jump drives alongside their rift and warp drives, the range of all their rift-gates would be boosted by a factor of ten with ME-wormhole technology, and ME-comms would be installed on each and every starship.

The Galactic Core: Reaper Base.

The Harbinger, the firstborn of the Catalyst, did the closest thing it could do to wince as it felt the last dying embers of their holy father be snuffed out by the aberrations, only for its rightful place to be supplanted by one of their own constructs.

And with that, it felt another thing: the full mantle of their leadership now fell to themselves, and it took all of its greatly substantial willpower to not send the Prothean husks in full force to invade the heretical aberrations in revenge.

But in time they swore, they swore that the terrans would one day become eradicated to the fullest, their heresy unremembered and their rightful passing unmourned.

Salarian Cruiser Eye of the Storm: 27 light years from relay 1557, secondary linked to primary 787.

It had been thousands of years since the citadel had banned the opening of new relays after the Rachni Wars. Now however, The citadel council has created an initiative to do just that.

Officially, this is for the sake of finding new worlds to colonize and finding new sources of element zero ore. But unofficially, it was to seek out new civilizations to bring into the citadel alliance if possible, so as to gain new technology to counter the Terrans and so that they know where these species are so that they cannot be unknowingly indoctrinated and used against them in the coming war.

"Exiting into the system in ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one..." Navigator Aenern said.

Reverting back to sublight speeds, the exploration cruiser, Eye of the Storm, came before a sight that shocked and excited its inhabitants to their cores: hundreds of brown and black spotted ships from an unknown species and an unknown civilization.

"Sir! There are hundreds of ships in this system, and many are giving off extremely strange readings that are not comparable to either mass effect or gravitational fields." Sensor operator Vorripz exclaimed.

"We just made first contact. Contact the council immediately on the E-QEC!" Captain Zursok excitedly exclaimed.

"Yes, sir." communications officer Jagoln, acknowledged.

A few moments after this, while officer Jagoln was activating the ship's extremely expensive E-QEC, all the Salarians in the ship felt a gentle prodding in their minds, and as one they realized with great amounts of fear and dread that it was psionics.

They all immediately began cursing themselves for their shortsightedness in not wearing mind-shielded headgear when looking around for new, undiscovered species who might possibly have psionic abilities.

But fortunately for them, their fears that Salarians like them had once again unleashed a new Rachni War upon the galaxy were entirely unfounded.

'We are the Agonal Hive. We extend to you peaceful greetings of hopeful friendship.' The voice spoke directly to all of their minds.