Author's Note: Gonna be busy for a while. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 56: Tuchanka Part 1
16M 28D 22H Until the Colossus Fires
Wrex was suspicious. Last time he heard about Shepard she had been caught in a blast that was apparently so big it had managed to tear a hole into another dimension and threw her through it. Couple that with reports coming out of the Union about these Terminator things and well... Things happen.
"So you thought I was...!" Shepard didn't hold her composure long enough to keep herself from laughing again.
Wrex knew it wasn't because she found the situation funny. The blasted plants were getting 'Creative' with how they screw them all over, and for a while it had decided to use the Union's patented happy gas to remake the atmosphere so that they can't even go to the surface without gas masks on like a bunch of Blasted Quarians, what's worst is that this was just a by-product of a much bigger problem that the creatures were causing them. Shepard and the others entered an isolation chamber that acted as the entrance to the bunker, Garrus and Liara, once they calmed down they noticed the variety of Graal Throwers aimed at them.
"Oh not this again!" Shepard looked more annoyed than anything else. With a Glare Shepard's eyes glowed and everyone winced. "Do you believe me now!?" The Krogan all nodded their heads as Wrex led Shepard deeper inside the bunker.
"Things have been crazy here Shepard. The bloody Thorian's gone mad. The Robots keep coming to cut down all the trees and kill us all. And the bloody energy ghosts keep sucking all the life out of the environment, which includes all of our crops." What was left unspoken was exactly whose fault all of this was. Now Wrex was a magnanimous warlord, he wouldn't turn against his allies, especially ones who had been so generous to him, over something like a few dozen monsters inconveniencing them, provided that the problem is being addressed.
"Yeah." Shepard at least had the common decency to act ashamed on behalf of the union. "Union's working on something right now, it'll hopefully cure the Gestalt and fry the Contingency."
"The Unbidden?" Wrex asked noting that Shepard deliberately left one of those out.
"Shoot them until they stop moving. It'll help when we can use synths on them again." Shepard stated bluntly.
"Cause they can't feed off of them?" Wrex asked just to be sure. "What about the Reapers?"
"Organic core." Shepard stated bluntly. "It's the main reason why the Union went from having one of the damned things loose to millions."
"How long will this take?" Wrex asked sounding suspicious.
"At this point? Little under 17 months." A pause as the group arrived at the war room. "I wouldn't want to be on the same planet when the Union's 'cure' gets here." Extreme solutions for extreme problems.
"You forget that we were living on an irradiated post nuclear hellscape when you got here." Wrex snorted as he walked to the meeting but Shepard grabbed him by the arm and looked at him straight in the eye with a look that was drained of anything that remotely resembled humour. "Understood." Wrex stated in an understanding tone before he walked into the meeting. "My contact from the Union." Wrex gestured to Shepard. "Here to hopefully explain to us how we're going to get our planet back."
"An Update on the Thorian for a start would be appropriate. It would be nice to know that the Union isn't on its way with a weapon that won't work." Shepard stated leaning in on the holo table.
"Your fungicide gas doesn't work anymore." Okeer brought up a containment tube, a clear glassteal container, which had the remains of a severed Varren head with fungal spores crawling up the side of the tube. Okeer took a second smaller tube full of ominous gas, plugged it into the second tube, and released it inside to no effect. "The Thorian adapted Vorcha spores and learned how to immunise itself against it." Okeer brought up a hologram of a familiar looking chemical structure via the holographic table. "The plants are all releasing the happy gas you used on Omega into the atmosphere, and what's worse." A specific chain was isolated and enlarged in the chemical structure before being identified as Exotic Gas. "We can't even risk setting a fire without the whole area turning into a ball of plasma." Shepard clicked her tongue.
"Yeah that might be a problem." In more ways than one. "Anything that we need to look out for when dealing with the Thorian?"
"Most of the animals it's throwing at us we're already familiar with, Varren, Klixen, Thresher Maws." The Hologram that appeared next wasn't any of these things, instead they were greeted by a huge four armed brute like a gorilla. "We think this came outta one of the Reapers that crashed into Tuchanka."
"EDI I got a picture here for you to look at." Shepard stated as she connected to the holo-terminal. "I heard. It's not from the last cycle." EDI's voice sounded different than when Wrex usually hears it but he didn't know why.
"Well if we can't use the fungicide then this is a 'kill it with fire situation.'" Shepard stated bluntly.
"Did you not hear what we just said?" Okeer stated almost in a growl. "I did. Which is why we need a skilled pyrokineticist in order to contain the flame." And Shepard knows one, course given the fact that most of the galaxy seems to think that she's dead it might be better if Liara is the one to talk to him. "In the mean time where's the big baby at? It'd be nice to see him again."
"Big baby..." Wrex mused the implications for a few moments, and cringed. "Grunt disappeared a few days ago sabotaging a herd of Thorian monsters. We have the signature for his omni-tool to narrow his location to a general area but none of our scouts have been able to find him when they went looking for him, only more Thorian creatures."
"Where?" Shepard's tone had no inflexion to it, as if what she was asking was not some question but a immutable statement of fact, or like she was keeping herself from grabbing the nearest Krogan and head butting him.
"Even if we could find him..."
"He's still alive." Okeer interrupted the other Krogan speaking. "His death would've triggered the immortal machine."
"Unless his signal was cut-" Several of pipes behind Shepard were crushed, slowly the group turned around to face the psyker.
"I'm sorry do I need to repeat the question?"
Wrex just shook his head and got the tracking program for Grunt's omni-tool ready and downloaded to Shepard's.
16M 28D 20H Until the Colossus Fires
Liara's biotics to lighten Shepard's weight, and her own telekinetics to drag them through the sky, using that combination Liara was riding on Shepard's back as they flew towards where Grunt's omni tool was. Grunt's goal had been to set up a Spiral of death to essentially make the monsters walk themselves to death, but someone had broken the carefully laid scent trails that Grunt and his team had set up, the herd was accompanied by several Thresher Maws occasionally snacking on them but more in general acting as giant sheep dogs to direct them as they wished, which might explain how they escaped the spiral Grunt had set up. They would make a devastating one two punch if they made it to the Krogan's bunkers, the Thresher maws to break them open and the herd to spill inside and eat everyone there in, and yet saving the bunkers would be just a fortunate by product of what was bringing them here in the first place.
"Alright lets see just how effective your 'Familiar Grenades' are!" The black glove with blue circuit patterns that Shepard had been wearing glowed and an electric blue ball appeared in her hand. "Boo! I choose you!" Shepard threw the grenade at the hoard and watched as it cackled and burst into the form of a wyrm, completely under Shepard's control of course, the creature landed on the back of a Thresher Maw and it no more wasted time than the herd of monsters did.
Psychic Lightning arc'd and dried and desiccated husks appeared one by one as the wyrm grew in power, it wouldn't be reproducing, there was only one control device after all. Instead the creature mutated, turning a dark green as it put its newly developed skill set to work. With each arc of psychic electricity the Thorian spores of the herd were super charged, the creatures swelling like cancerous masses and exploding into great highly infectious tendrils spreading cancerous masses through the hoard of slamming into other creatures causing the mass to continuously grow.
"Good Boy!" Shepard praised her new pet like it was a best in show Labrador retriever, Liara didn't have the heart to tell her it would probably be dead by the end of the night. One of the Thresher Maws took offence to Boo's antics and so moved to swallow him whole, alongside a good chunk of the remaining herd, only for a singularity to appear next to it's head, followed up by a laser beam filling the sphere up, turning the exotic gas in the air around it into plasma and detonating the Singularity in a slashing light show and setting the creature's head on fire.
"Dogs who bite their owners get put down!" The exotic gas in the air continued to light up as the Thresher Maw flailed, resorting to slamming it's mass into the ground repeatedly in a effort to put out the flames crushing more of the herd in the process. Liara of course was happy to add to the creature's suffering with several rounds of warp ammo blowing off chunks with each shot. Between the rampaging Thresher Maw, the highly flammable atmosphere and Shepard throwing more 'Boos' at the herd needless to say they ended up being wiped out in no time. The group of Krogan waiting in the wings swooped in, grabbing whatever chunks of meat from the herd was still good to use as food while searching every piece of meat for and traces of Grunt's omni-tool. The device was eventually salvaged and brought back to the Krogan's base of operations.
16M 28D 18H Until the Colossus Fires
Staying on Tuchanka was one of the best decisions Mordin had ever made in his life. Where else was he going to get a fortified base of operations full of trigger happy Krogan to bring him so many extinct, heavily mutated or simply bizarre flora and fauna samples for him to research and experiment on? Mordin noted that getting the life extending cybernetic augmentations from the Union was another one of the best decisions he ever made. Right now though he had been side tracked.
"What happened to Omni-tool?" By Mordin's estimates the device had been crushed, set on fire and partially digested.
"Had to dig it out of a Varren. Well I think it was a Varren?" Shepard honestly wasn't quite sure by that point. "In any case can you get anything from it that'll tell us where Grunt is?"
"Shepard. This device appears to have been smashed, at least thirty percent of it is missing and it's been soaked in fluid of some kind. It would take a team of SGI students a week to repair let alone getting the original data." Mordin stated as he started flying his hands over his omni-tool.
"SGI?" Shepard asked sounding concerned.
"Salarian Inter Galactic University." The Acronym was lost in the translation it would seem. "Very prestigious, top of the line students." Mordin explained while he kept working.
"Is that a no?" Shepard asked knowing when someone was trying to stall for time.
"Giving context so that I can make myself look more impressive." Bloody Salarians. His preparations complete various machine's whirled to life. Taking the omni-tool Morden secured it in a clamp, before using a surgical saw to carve away at the device so that he could remove his prize from the inside, a small chip approximately the size of a grain of rice. The chip was placed on a pedestal, taking a can Mordin shook it and sprayed the contents on the chip for a few moments, liquid nitrogen. The chip was sealed into a container and Mordin pressed a button to suck all the moisture in the container out. Taking the chip with a pair of Tweezers Mordin reinstalled it into a computer terminal.
"Cut the Mot. Shepard would've shoved a hello into my head by now you Varren Whore." By the sounds of things the conversation had already started by the time Grunt thought to turn on his Omni-tool to record the conversation.
"Grunt. I am Shepard." A familiar voice, as in 'in this room familiar.' "Prove-ECK!" By the sounds of things the chat had degenerated from there. It was hard to tell the fight just from the sounds they were making but gun shots, the swish of laser blades, the repeated thuds of blunt attacks. "Cease your pointless resistance." The Shepard impersonator's tone of voice had taken on a clear synthesised echo. "You are to be captured alive."
"To torture me for information?"
"To serve as the basis of Krogan Terminator." That took a moment to think about but it made sense. The Tebrids didn't have the time or the inclination to design Synth parts for Krogan before the introduction of the Thorian and Medi-gel combo offered a much better alternative to synthetic organ replacement, that isn't to say that they weren't working on it anyway, only the sheer difficulty of trying to make something better than what the Krogan already have, so if a Krogan Terminator was to be created then they needed to start from scratch, towards that end they needed reference points.
"Good to know." And then the recording cut off from there.
"Omni-tool likely removed at this point." Mordin stated something rather obvious. "Omni-tools power down as soon as removed from client." Shepard started to pace back and forth as various thoughts went through her mind.
"To recap only Grunt's omni-tool has been showing up correct?" Shepard asked sounding suspicious. Grunt's Tool was still giving a signal after being half digested and smashed, if the others aren't giving a similar signal then it probably means that someone is blocking it.
"Correct." Mordin stated similar conclusions flying through his mind at a much faster rate. "Signal blocker extremely easy to build, hard to say the same for Union based models, might be a different story for Contingency."
Grunt was confronted by someone who looked a great deal like Shepard to the point that he accused them of being an impostor not by their appearance but by the fact that they refused to use telepathy on him, so a terminator, that and the content of their conversation. Course there was another possible group of individuals who could be using terminators, Shepard hasn't had the chance to talk about the Synthorg that EDI ended up hijacking when she had to go chasing after leads on Grunt.
"There's something we need to show you and Wrex, and he's gonna want to hear about this in relative privacy."
16M 28D 16H Until the Colossus Fires
Shepard, Garrus and what was left of the Omega strike team and went to where the Contingency had made their base of operations as they harvested the local materials, but while they were gone the resident Shadow Broker had the chance to show their findings to Mordin and Wrex.
"A synthorg?" Wrex asked as he circled around EDI and Mordin, the latter taking various notes. "Why would someone even go through all this trouble?"
Whoever did this basically took the one thing stopping Terminators at the gate going into restricted area's like the Citadel or the hyper-lanes going into Union space and then turned around and made it so that any idiot would stop them at the gate.
"Genetic sources draw from a wide variety of species but mostly material that has been decoded and made publicly available." Even Thuban's scaly skin had been decoded after more Dragons had started to be bred, many of the faithful were getting the treatment to have the same scaly metallic skin as their goddess. "Majority of Cybernetic designs experimental grade, power requirements too high for actual use." Yet far from a invalid with a dead battery, here they had a monster that could 1V1 a Fenrir and would've won if she didn't self destruct near the end of the fight. A second sweep gave a possible answer. "There's Reaper technology here..." Mordin was more stupified by the revelation than anything else.
"The nano-tech and my third heart which we think uses Mass Effect fields and Exotic matter as a power source somehow." EDI naturally provided the follow up. "Not to mention the Lithoid minerals used as raw material."
"Body fat composite of Exotic gas, Similar to some observed Prethoryn, similar to what's in atmosphere of Tuchanka."
"Yeah we noticed that." EDI stated apparently done being prodded by the mad scientist and pulled her arm away in response. "This body isn't going to last long without a Exotic Gas based atmosphere."
Oh Wrex didn't like that.
"Meaning that whoever is responsible for getting the Thorian to remake our atmosphere is also the one who made you?" Wrex looked ready to snap someone's neck. They weren't even attacked, they were being experimented on just like the bloody Salarian's all over again.
"We should assume so yes." EDI stated as she prepared a file of her own.
"Hard to determine one responsible from available data." Mordin held his hand on his chin as he thought through the situation. "Technology and genetic information comes from a wide variety of sources, hard to pin point source of origin."
"Henry Lawson." Liara stated and both Wrex and Mordin turned to face her.
"Excuse me?" Wrex was keeping his tone of voice very, very even.
"Miranda Lawson was a vanity project of Henry, a 'Daughter' created by taking his own DNA and altering it, doubling the X Chromosome to change the gender to female and countless other changes in a effort to create what he considered the perfect human being." Liara indicated EDI's current body. "When you ignore the fact that she has a bunch of weapons coming out of her body her biometrics are a one to one match with Miranda's."
"Oh that's very good to know." Wrex started cracking his fingers. "Where is he?"
"If any more biotically capable psionic terminator women show up you should ask them." Liara replied bluntly.
"They all look like her?" Wrex asked indicating EDI's body.
"There's one." EDI stated all of a sudden looking glassy eyed. "I have some of the memories belonging to this body. All of the Synthorg's so far have the same appearance bar one."
"What's so special about her?" Wrex asked crossing his arms.
"... I think I'm scared of her."
16M 28D 16H Until the Colossus Fires
A drop ship let out the members of the search party near the Contingencies base of operations. A nearby chemical sprayer had been attacked by the foliage, if Shepard had to hazard a guess the Contingency would use it to keep the area clear for their camp, which led to them over using it, which led to the Thorian based creatures in the area developing an immunity to it, which was then spread to the rest. Thus it appears that the contingency was in the midst of packing up their camp to leave, or to nuke the area from orbit. Personally speaking Shepard didn't think that Wrex cared very much either way, so long as they were out of his crest, but Grunt was still missing and more personally to Shepard the Terminator that did it used her face.
So Shepard was holding a grudge, the Justicar with their group threw a singularity into the middle of the Contingencies base, the various gasses in the air being gathered together into a ball while the rest of the group went on the offensive. Many 'modern' fire arms shaved off grain sized pellets, pumped them up with Mass Effect fields, but these features meant that the weapon generated a lot of heat necessitating the use of Heat Sinks, necessitating either a cool-down or a clip of them, Naturally you want to avoid exposing a super heated mass to highly flammable gas, the group didn't even want to risk setting off a EMP in this air, and the Contingency felt the same way so everyone was using melee weapons.
The contingency was coming out swinging with huge clubs designed to break bones so Shepard was engaging in a brutal melee with the machines, the rest of the group wasn't strong enough to contribute anything to the fighting with exception to the biotics wielding Asari. Instead the rest of the group sneaked around the brawl, Shepard's advantage was her telekinetics grabbing masses to attack the machines from multiple angles, their's were numbers and strength. Another advantage the machines had was that this was their base of operations, which meant that they had things like surveillance cameras to watch the inside of their base.
"You sure this isn't going to set off a ball of fire or something?" Garrus asked as he finished adjusting his laser rifle.
"Positive." Sidonis stated as he got his own rifle ready. "Trome, you have that nasty surprise ready yet?"
The Batarian gave the others a thumbs up. Garrus and Sidonis acted at the same time using freezing weapons to ice over the hallway covering the surveillance camera's with ice and blocking their vision. From here the group had a limited amount of time to act. The Three aliens unfolded metal shields and hid themselves into the corner of the room at the same time that the Contingency stepped through the door. The mines went off with a bang that was mostly sound and kinetics, but it was enough to light up the air and consume the entire hallway in fire. The door had already closed so instead the rapidly expanding gases expanded, frozen Exotic Gas melted and expanded too. Garrus and company was protected from the fire and the expanding pressure thanks to their metal shields, the walls that had their structural integrity weakened by being frozen on the other hand didn't have the same luxury, the end result was shattered walls as the three aliens ran deeper into the base.
"Finding Grunt would be easier with the telepath on our side." Garrus stated as he kept running down the hallway, icing over any camera's, turrets or other Contingency that they met along the way.
"Something don't make sense." Trome stated as he planted explosives on the wall and then used the freeze ray to cover it in Exotic Gas Ice. "All the Contingency outside are fighting Shepard right? Unless Grunt is in Cryo somewhere then he and the other Krogan should be taking their chance to go on a rampage. So where are they?" On Cue two massive fists tore through the wall. A fully armoured Krogan ripped down the wall compromised by ice and emerging from the other side was the familiar form of Grunt.
"Stay cautious." Garrus swung his arm out to back the others away. "We have no idea how far along they are..."
"If you mean to talk about the Machine's research into Krogan terminators then they will have to start from scratch, I already broke most of their computers." As he said that Grunt swept one of his legs backwards, like a bull getting ready to charge. "Another thing. I don't know any of you well enough that you can prove your identities to me with Trivia, nor do I possess the power to read people's minds."
"What does that mean?" Garrus and the others had already started to back away.
"It means that Guilty until proven innocent is far more expedient." Grunt deployed his Omni-Shield, lined with various pyramid shaped spikes, and Charged.
"Just the bastard I was waiting for!" Shepard was greeted by the sight of a terminator version of herself, already she was cracking her fingers ready for the full on brawl as she punished this piece of garbage for what it did to Grunt. But expectations were soon met with harsh reality.
"This site has been compromised." Thus the Terminator turned around, whipped out a pistol, and fired a single flaming projectile at the ball of Exotic gas and Singularity that was in the middle of the work area and Shepard's world became fire.
Author's Note:
RonaldM40196867: Beyond your wildest imaginations. What mwah? Upset that one of the most beloved Sci-fi Video game franchises of the century has been reduced to a soulless, bug ridden, lazily written, generic open world with copy and paste characters and a bland storyline? Heavens no what made you think that? But yes I have been sinking a lot of thought into Andromeda's storyline, however little of it there is, and I assure you that when I reach that point, should I still be writing this story, that it is going to see the realised potential that it deserves.
Monster King: Thank you for saying so.
Guest: Figure it out yet?