Author's Note: And another week of brutal writing cram only barely meet my self imposed deadlines. Lovely. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 83: The Great Rift Part 4
?M ?D ?H Until the Colossus Fires
When Shepard had regained consciousness she was on top of a building in the middle of what looked like a city, made out of a sprawling spiderweb of streets, tunnels and other things that Shepard couldn't identify at a distance assembled together with seemingly little to no rhyme or reason. Holding out her hand, Shepard attempted to summon a weapon to her hand, the Winchester rifle, and nothing happened. So this was not another of those weird mind palaces. The Dragoon looked up at the sky, no worm holes, no sign of one either, and looking down at the building she saw no docks, no transmitters or receivers, and looking at the horizon there were plenty of buildings that were taller than this building, shorter, thicker, thinner, and a few that were the same dimensions of this building. Near as Shepard could tell from here there wasn't any reason why she should be on this building nor had she any idea how she had gotten here.
"Well this is a fine mess that you've gotten yourself into Shepard." The telepath let out a sigh as she tried to find a way down. "At least it's not a swamp." Shepard had a look around, the building didn't have any visible seams to indicate an entrance, neither the walls nor the floor, nor any control panels to indicate a place that could lead to an entrance. Shepard had a look off the side of the building, at a well over one hundred story drop and shook her head in the negative. "Well. I'm not getting down that way." Shepard went back to the wall and started rapping her knuckles against it looking for a hollow spot, and after finding wound up her fist and delivered a punch hard enough to put a hole into the side of the building. Looking through Shepard saw a hallway, leading away from the wall she just punched and towards another blank wall. Then Shepard's peep hole, along the entire wall that it was a part of, melted and reformed into the same wall that she started with.
Shepard had a thought at that.
"Omni-gel can be broken down and reformed into virtually any shape and is extremely hard but brittle." It reminded her about something else too. Part of the Citadel's maintenance processes involves a collection of genetically engineered insectoids who as needed melt down and reshape the various parts of the Citadel into new forms to accommodate various races as they arrive at the Citadel or repair damage that was done to it. "Yet another bit of technology they reverse engineered from Reaper tech." Shepard just let out a sigh as she looked around at the city before her. "And by the looks of things they got it from these guys." The Reapers are scavengers, or they were in their early cycles. They trick other races into developing technology along their guide lines and take the most useful pieces for themselves when they destroy their civilisations.
"Which means that I've landed on another ancient civilisation that the Reaper's have 'restored' lovely." For now Shepard needed to get off this building. Remembering where the wall was located when she tore through the actual building itself and stabbed her data-spike into the building's wiring. A few moments the wires from the Data Spike found what it was looking for, the fabricator, or the fabricator of several cycles ago, and hacked into it commanding it to break down the 'door' that was obstructing the Dragoon's path as she entered the hallway. "Haven't these people ever heard of doorknobs?" Shepard put the Data Spike away as the 'door' closed back up behind her.
"Or maps? How do they even know where the bloody doors are anyway?" A thought occurred to Shepard. "Of course they are."
Shepard tapped the side of her helmet and switched the vision mood, going from 'normal' to 'Sonar' and it was like a layer had been pulled off of the world around her. She could see the thickness of the walls, and the devices built into the walls. Shepard tried tapping on the devices, waving her hand in front of them, even did hand shadows against them before she resorted to stabbing it with her knife again. The 'Room' was another windowless, doorless box with a pole in the middle of it, Shepard's radar told her that the device this time was located around the middle of the pole and when she grabbed it the floor gave way beneath her feet.
"Strong Grip." Shepard noted lightly. "This pole isn't making any motion to move me either." So Shepard let go, fell where her radar told her there was another door wall, and then the floor reformed around her. "And what's behind door number one?" Hacking the thin wall open Shepard entered the new location, a large room, seemingly empty but only at first. Shepard found another of the fabricator devices in the middle of the room and stabbed her knife into it, thus the room soon started to change. Off to the side the floor broke into rings and started to float into the air and expand. Miniature contraptions were built from within the rings and produce a loud high pitch noise and soon several worlds appeared in the room orbiting around each other like a orrery.
"What the?" Shepard disabled the sonar function on her helmet, the floating rings were still present but not the worlds. And then Shepard reactivated the sonar and she got feedback that there was indeed something there that she was looking at. "A hologram for blind aliens that are relying on sonar." Shepard concluded as she scratched the side of her head. "Well I guess that confirms my earlier theory." As Shepard was thinking about this the pole wall opened up again, from inside of the subsequent tubes a set of unfamiliar limbs and tendrils emerged. "Look buddy: I don't want any troub-"
Shepard felt the familiar pull of someone grabbing their with her mind and slamming her down face first into the floor before dragging her over to the tube. Shepard flew a ball of fire down the tube as she grabbed her data spike from the console that she left it in and connected the data back into her Grey box. Learning this thing's language means opening a line of communication, preferably without getting sucked into another mind palace again.
"Cic cic cic cic!" A loud clicking noise sounded out as the creature that the various limbs were attached to pulled themselves out of the shaft. A vaguely humanoid figure with a bulbous head, there were several unnatural bulges throughout the figure's body, which based on the obvious scarring over them were clearly surgical implants, as well as several obvious cybernetic enhancements most notably a red artificial eye piece that looked like it took up a quarter of it's face. Shepard's helmet turned the clicking sound the creature was giving off into something legible. "Unfortunate." Shepard was hit with a telekinetic push smashing through the wall in the process.
"Great. This again." Shepard spread her arms and legs to slow her fall, not much considering she weighs a few hundred pounds but it would help, in the mean time she measured her rate of fall and flared her jump pack as the last moment in order to nail a relatively safe landing that only managed to land a few cracks in her leg bones that her implants were already taking care of. The city was strange, bulges in the sides of the buildings, various nonsensical twists, it was like this entire civilisation had something against straight lines. That left another question though. Where was everyone? Aside from the one guy with arms and tentacles Shepard hasn't seen anyone around here yet. "If I was a tentacled bat where would I hide?"
Shepard sat on what she assumed was the side walk and closed her eyes as she began to meditate, probing for any sign of organic intelligence. There weren't anyone in the buildings, at least none that Shepard could find, instead her search took her deeper. Underground kind of deep. Through alien senses Shepard learned of Cybernetics abounded everywhere she looked, as did the slightly too large heads and blue skin of the one she met before but there the similarities ended. Bulky and robust organic/cybernetic bodies, two legs and a dozen aside from the tendrils, transparent jelly like skin. As the aliens bumped into each other their tendrils wrapped around each other and when they pulled themselves apart the tendrils were torn off and recombined prompting the crying of children.
"The hell? Did they build an entire city just to cram everyone under ground?" They didn't seem very well adapted to it. People kept dying, before being dragged off to elsewhere and dropped down a hole, and Shepard wasn't sure of the reason why they kept dying off either.
"You're still alive." A familiar clicking noise. The tentacle cyborg thing floated down from the building while tapping his fingers together. "Unfortunate." A piercing headache signalled Shepard having her mind invaded.
Shepard immediately fired off her gun at the first thing she could see, though what she hit was a less obvious answer. The Dragoon was soon brought into a psychedelic fever dream landscape, with constantly shifting rainbow colours drawing faint outlines over solid objects like water flowing around stone.
"The Meld's going on here?" Shepard made a few educated guesses.
If the people of this world saw things through the use of echolocation then their minds might be hyper specialised in it, she's already met a race of creatures that see sound and hear light, this ugly ass rainbow might just be one of the tools the bat squid things use to accurately judge the distance and shape of an object. Even so for someone who was used to seeing light and hearing sound this place was giving her a headache. And even then it was only the second biggest headache in this place.
"Greetings! Salutations! Hello! Welcome!" The Creature was a kaleidoscope of tentacles, arms, eyes, mouths, ears and shifting rainbow colours like the environment, it's voice constantly shifting from deep, high pitch, masculine, feminine, hoarse, young and old and none of the above, and then the position of the walking headache changed too, getting into Shepard's personal space. "Do you wanna hear a-" A loud bang echoed out as Shepard gave her answer to the creature.
"Suck back and reload you ugly freak!" Shepard snapped as she made her displeasure known. "Turn this hellscape into something that doesn't give me a headache or shut up. Your Choice!"
Shepard was met with a crushing power, like a being vastly larger than her decided to squish her.
"Oh you're a mouthy one aren't you? Telling the Whisperer of Secrets to shut up?"
"Oh you made things a little heavier have you?" Shepard's surroundings changed, the Prethoryn acid pits, the hellish environments of the jungle, arctic and desert, various monsters of the Gestalt, the Contingency and the Unbidden. "So what?"
"Hahahaha! Yes! It should be exactly like this full of chaos! Too stubborn to back down! Quick to adapt!" The creature screamed in a thousand voices. "Very well!" The World was replaced by the sonar vision that Shepard was use to, she would prefer to be able to see normally but this would do for the time being. For starters it was easy to tell what kind of state the locals were living in before what ever happened here happened. There weren't any cities built yet, everything here was carved out of the ground in a massive canyon as far as the eye could see. "This planet was strip mined." The Whisperer at least didn't sing what it was saying, in comparison constantly switching voices was much better. "Vast canyons were dug in the mantle offsetting the planet's axis and leading to a irregular orbit. Once the planet's resources dried up, the planet itself was abandoned alongside the people who were mining it." Shepard was treated to the sight of yet another variant of Alien that she saw earlier. Skinny, malnourished, blue skin so pale it was almost white. "Well as I'm sure you can imagine this had what you call an effect on the locals-"
"The planet's electromagnetic pole was intensified several times over, which attracted all the signals from up to a parsec away to the planet. The extra signals and intense electromagnetic pull resulting in a denser ionic sphere which intense electromagnetic forces at play resulted in near constant electrical and lightning storms to bombard the planet and the people that were still trapped on it. If there was anything left on the planet that can read and understand the signals being attracted to the planet then there would likely be hundreds of different stations all playing at once." The Whisper looked, well not surprised because it was hard to look like anything when you're a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of different body parts and rainbows, but the Chatter box shut up so progress. "The Lithoids did something similar by mistake to one of their worlds. I hear they're using it like a radio relay station now." Shepard explained not making a big deal about it.
"That is one interpretation yes." The Mass of parts looked awkward before he soldiered on anyway. "The miners are the Gortheki, a Pre-spaceflight species that were taken from their home world to work on this planet, and the majority subsequently abandoned when the planet's resources dried up." A group of the Gorthekian aliens were gathered huddled around a machine like homeless gathering around a flaming trashcan for warmth, that said though they were equally desperate that isn't what they were doing here. "They began to examine the machines and other technology that their former masters had left behind. Among the other discoveries they made was over tuning."
"Over Tuning?" Shepard did not like where this was going.
"Surgical, cybernetic and genetic modifications designed to optimise them for specific roles in their meagre little society, their masters had already modified them to receive signals remotely after modifying their hearing and other senses." Thus explaining the sonar. "Mind you, their obsession with amateur self modification came with a fair share of what you call... side effects." Lovely. Shepard was given a view of familiar looking aliens, large and bulky, extra arms, grotesque surgically implanted tumours, as well as a wide variety of rather obvious cybernetic enhancements. "A reduced life span due to health complications chief among their modifications side effects, an extreme predisposition towards mutation was another, last but not least was intensive paranoia."
"Which when combined with the fact that they kept hearing the Galaxy's radio chatter gave birth to a ugly thing like you, Whisperer of Secrets." Shepard already knew where this was going.
"They interpreted the signals they were getting and came to their own conclusions." None of which denied Shepard's accusation. "Though that isn't where their predisposition towards conspiracy came from." Shepard looked up to the sky. Even limited to the funky sonar vision it was obvious that something kept coming down from the sky above the aliens in a meteor shower. "The irregular orbit and strong magnetic pull kept attracting debris from the sky. One of the few reasons why the Gorthekian people were able to survive on a world depleted of resources." The various Gorthikian variants worked together to salvage the scrap, the muscle variants tearing the ships off and moving them to relative safety underground while the ones tuned for intelligence and engineering worked to fix, recycle, reverse engineer and adapt the technology that they scavenged. "Then they started learning the answers to the signals that they were receiving, and from there they started to ask more questions."
"Lemme guess 'who destroyed all these ships?'" Shepard already knew the answer to this, or at least suspected she did. "Reapers?" Sky scrapers were assembled together from the scrap and what stone that the Gorthekian people could assemble together, a complex network of roads were built around them as well, held together with the innovative Omni-gel that they created based on their old master's technology. "Who the hell first came up with that stuff!?" The various ships were of different makes, models and ages, ancient war machines from millions of years in the past, even the various transmissions going to the planet included a disturbingly high number distress signals from dead civilisations. From here they concluded that there was a conspiracy going on, spanning millions of years by an ancient alien race that wipes out civilisations as they peak, why the Gorthikian people couldn't figure out, but between that and constantly hearing voices inside of their heads it was only inevitable that they would dream this twisted fever dream here talking about 'secrets.' "And that's where you came from, cute, cute. What they do next?" Shepard asked as she looked at the Whisperer of secrets.
"They couldn't stay." The surface of the world was being ravaged. The Ships came with a steady supply of Eezo, mixed together with the electrified atmosphere and constant storms and the end result was biotic storms. Eezo dust and vapours gets sucked into the air, and gets electrified by the positive current running rampant in the atmosphere which projects an super-gravity field increasing the weight of objects coming to the ground several times over, while Eezo on the ground was negatively charged creating a anti-gravity field that kept throwing objects caught into it into the atmosphere. Combined the results were horrific and actively tearing what was left of the planet apart. "They couldn't stay, but they didn't want to leave either." Among the ships that they salvaged were those that belonged to their old enslavers. What wiped all these people out? And are they still out there?
"So between the trauma's of their past abusers, the voices they kept hearing from all the transmissions they kept intercepting, the side effects of the implants on their bodies, and the broken ships that kept falling from the sky they became a culture ruled by fear and paranoia. The collective beliefs and culture of an entire race forcibly fused together into a ugly thing like you." Shepard knew how this story ended. "I can't imagine that the Reapers took kindly to their attempts off world or cybernetic enhancements."
"That's the thing. The Gorthekian Alliance never made it off world, even if they weren't racked by paranoia and fear the planet itself made it almost impossible to get off world." Which meant that by the standards they know that the Reaper's have set for their grim harvest then the Gorthekian's shouldn't have been targeted, by all accounts they shouldn't been the problem that took care of themselves and that they would never know existed. "Then did the Reaper's come for you freaks? And if they did why were you made into a Reaper anyway?"
"Shh." The creature made an exaggerated shushing motion with one of it's tendrils. "That's a secret!" As the creature did that the Biotic Storm intensified, and Shepard felt herself pulled into the sky and thrown off world.
10M 25D 07H Until the Colossus Fires
Union and Council data analysts were poring over the contents of intelligence reports about the new ships that were coming through the wormholes, another major threat after the 'Plague Ships' were the 'Psi ships.' The Ships in question deep strike into Union territory and unleash groups of aliens on to the planets in question. One group focuses on fighting the local defenders while the other group acts as spies and saboteurs, the creatures having even taken damage and an autopsy was now being conducted.
"Genetic tests come back largely as unknown, though genetics similar to the Space born super organism the Tiyanki have been confirmed, which falls in line with the tendrils." Skeleton had one of the infiltraitors sprawled out on a dissection table, the corpse cut open and exposed to the world. "Aside from the extra appendages we've been able to confirm the presence of extra brains as well, usually connected directly to their additional limbs. Their insides are a mess of cybernetics, including a memory wire based suture device that seems to be designed to stitch the body back together whenever it suffers internal tearing and provide a stream of something similar to a medical adhesive. The tendrils contain a type of ovipositor and testicle, which also falls in line with their Tiyanki heritage."
As the mad doctor was explaining one of his Tebrid assistants flew in on his hover pad and deposited a data-slate with the latest on their prisoners. A group of the prisoners had been left in a cell together, bumping into one another their tendrils wrapped around each other and when they pulled themselves apart parts of their flesh were torn off in the process secondary brains from both of the individuals involved and some of their redundant limbs. Rather than die off the two pieces of flesh joined together and became wrapped in a ball of tendrils, before receiving zaps of lightning from the other prisoners. In the mean time the two who had lost pieces of their flesh curled into balls and wrapped their extra limbs around themselves as they slowly but visibly healed.
"Yes this is like the Tiyanki too!" When Tiyanki reproduce, both of the parents in question wrap their tendrils around each other and tear them off along with pieces of flesh from their bodies. The pieces of flesh join together while the tendrils mix together spermatoza and ovum cells to form embryonic fluids, which are released into the body and rather than giving birth to new Tiyanki instead grow into Tiyanki body parts and through this process a new Tiyanki is born. "If these new aliens are from as far back in time as we think they are then they could even be the Tiyanki ancestor!" Psychic probing with now broken Thorian computers revealed additional relevant pieces of information. "Similar to the Rachni the new race, self named the Gorthekians, see sound appearing in their minds as various colours, they do not appear to have organs for light reception. At least not natural ones." Though how the Gorthekians perceive the world is not the only relevant detail Skeletor has been able to dig out. "Combing through their minds I've found exactly that. Corresponding with my discovery of redundant brains I've also found redundant minds to go along with them existing inside of the body, albeit in a far from harmonious state. Rather than delegating and multi-tasking these minds are intensely paranoid and distrustful, ruled by paranoia, fear and anxiety. As the brains grow and the minds develop they acquire an intense desire to be separated from one another, which leads to the aforementioned unusual reproductive cycle."
Another Tebrid flew in.
"The Status of the Legions." While Skeletor's scientific discovery was important, it paled in comparison to the status of his own projects. "At this rate, we'll see full deployment in a matter of weeks."
Ten Legions of warriors were being trained in the depths of the server world Galatea, a ball of ice only good for keeping quantum computers composed of super Conductive materials at below freezing temperatures, their minds were ready, soon to be joined with bodies crafted of the finest gene tailoring and cybernetics that thousands of hyper enthusiastic Tebrids wrangled by his own hand and skills in the subject can create, and then false starts be damned, the war in Heaven could finally begin.
Review Section:
RonaldM40196867: I dunno 'Don't be a dick and the universe won't implode?' Not really things I'm good at or interested in.
Monster King: I am trying to.
Coment9: Glad you're enjoying yourself.