Author's Note: Don't forget to check in on the Turian Codex later today! Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!

Chapter 61: Palaven Part 3

15M 20D 22H Until the Colossus Fires

Neither of them could move, there was only the ever constant screaming of the ancient Turian's anti-reaper technology trying to rip their bodies apart and even then only being held together by the Thorian. Alpha walked into the scene of the two of them and their work force writhing on the ground in pain. She could end them both right here and now, she wouldn't even have to bend over just step on their necks a little too hard. But she didn't, not because of misplaced sense of honour or anything of the like but because that wouldn't give her the satisfaction of confronting her sister's killers. So instead she decided to go slay some gods.

The Turian's didn't leave much of their gods behind to slay, a bunch of decomposing corpses the size of some mountains, even dead she could hear their cursed thoughts trying to infiltrate her mind and rot her brain out of her skull, a pity for them that her's is made out of tougher stuff. Alpha climbed onto the ancient corpse of a dead god and went straight for it's exposed heart ripping out a cylindrical meter long crystal from each of the dozen or so remnants of a ancient long forgotten civilisation. After nine more times all the ZPM chambers inside of the hearts had been yanked out and stacked off to the side before Alpha took her box that she came there for the first place and used it as a chair as she waited.

15M 20D 10H Until the Colossus Fires

It took considerable effort on the part of the Thorian in order to put Liara and Shepard back the way that they needed to be in order to be able to function again. When they did get up though it had a message for them.

"You have a visitor. Down in the hole. One of the 'Synthorgs' you're so on guard about."

Great.

"Anything you can tell us about her?" Shepard was not in any condition for a fight, and neither is Liara, that is to say nothing about what these weirdos are capable of doing when they get into a bad mood.

"She has you by the balls, she gathered up all those exotic particle containers you all were so worried about from the Titans."

"And what would she do with those?" Shepard asked rolling her shoulder. "Do you think she's really mad enough to-"

"She's done it before. She had willingly subjected herself to the unreal gap that you crawled out of just to see what kind of effect it would have on her and find an easy way of curing it."

Shepard needed a moment to process that information, sadly she didn't get one.

"Despite my best efforts I have no effect on her. More important, she is serious, I don't know what you two did but she's pissed."

Lovely. Liara's armour was not in good condition. Lots of small delicate pieces that relied on precise electrical application. Not the kind of thing to stand up to that kind of hellish shrieking. Shepard's was a little more rugged but she wasn't in much better shape. They were in no condition to fight that thing down there for the ZPM's in her possession, especially when they don't know what condition the devices are in, 65 million years was a lot of time for erosion to build up and whatever circuitry those things are made of to break down.

"What do you think?" Liara had already detached large portions of her gear just to be able to move, clearly a design flaw they will have to come up with a way to correct, worse yet her biotic implants were likely in the same kind of condition which they would probably have to fix and replace when they got back up to their base of operations above Palaven, and at her age that means surgery.

"Well she killed the thing we came here to kill. At the very least we owe her thanks." Letting out a sigh Shepard moved to the hole as she imagined that 'giving thanks' would be the last thing that she does tonight. Shepard prepared a length of cable and attached it to the hole before she repelled down, without knowing how deep the hole was it was best that she err on the side of caution. In lieu of a non-functioning light source, the Dragoon snapped her fingers and produced a ball of fire. It was deep, you'd expect that from the Grave of Gods but that failed to describe it, Shepard threw a spear of fire down into the dark and watched it disappear without striking anything. Loosing a jet of flames from her fingers and spinning around on the cable gave Shepard a better idea of her surroundings, as she looked at the ancient mummified skeletons of long dead giants staring back at her.

"What would you do if you had the chance to confront your sister's murderer?" The question echoed in the chamber, it's exact point of origin unknown, worst, if Shepard didn't know better she would've thought she was the one asking it.

"Context matters kid." Shepard replied as she looked around the caverns. "Your sister, as you so elegantly called it, was interfering with a search and rescue mission, on behalf of a known mad scientist! And as the person who was being rescued I take offence to it!"

"Scientific research is conducted on cadavers all the time." Shepard's same but different voice again echoed back at her, higher pitch as if coming from someone younger and smaller, worst yet it's contents were simply infuriating. "You know that better than anyone after putting someone else into my sister's body."

"Are you implying that I was dead so it was alright to experiment on me?" Shepard liked this conversation less and less.

"I'm saying that you should consider your own actions before you mouth off at people!" Shepard looked up at the person glaring down at her upside down while holding on to the cable she had been descending on, she was only wearing a string bikini top and short shorts exposing the scaley grey skin that covered her body and the long clawed tendrils that she was using to hold onto the cable with. More concerning than that though was the device being held in one hand, a aged and worn ZPM cylinder, and the other a familiar device composed of bluish crystal, a Unbidden Disentegrator. "Where is the Shadow Broker?"

"The Thorian is quite impressive." Liara pressed her finger into the back of Alpha's neck, floating in mid air her body covered in a Mass Effect field. "It would take top of the line Implants and Amplifiers and centuries worth of dedicated training to reach this level of mastery normally." Held between Liara's middle finger and thumb was a single pebble, harmless under normal circumstances, but with the right application of biotic fields that stone can hit like a tank shell. "Now why don't you drop that before someone gets hurt?"

"I was thinking the exact same thing." The claw released the ZPM, Naturally Liara caught the device before it could fall very far. A huge ball of fire lit up the chamber for yards, revealing four more ZPM devices that were floating above their heads in Biotic fields at the edge of the darkness, which then began to fall as Alpha extinguished the light again. Shepard immediately spread fire out hoping to light up the chamber, Liara soon locked onto each of the cylinders and dived after them, which was good because Alpha interrupted Shepard's pyrokinesis by clamping one of her tendrils around her face. Naturally Shepard grabbed hold of the tendril and pulled yanking it off of her face and the person it belongs to off of the cable in the process. The Synthorg then glowed with Biotics as the two of them were pulled off of the cable and sent tumbling into the deep dark pit of the grave of gods.

Shepard hit the ground, a lot sooner than she had expected, which means that she didn't hit the ground at all. Instead the Dragoon pulled herself to her feet, a busy market place on one of the worlds from her childhood surrounding her.

"Do you think your meagre life compares to what we are fighting for? What you are sticking your nose into!" A fruit stand shattered like stained glass in a church, a formless void of every colour and none behind it, a clawed tendril reached through the void and pulled through it's owner, a figure white as a ghost with eyes burning like coals in a furnace.

"The ambitions of mad men and monsters." A rifle spun in Shepard's hand before she clamped down on the lever and fired, putting a single round into the head of the ghost and backing her into the void.

The weapon was familiar to her, an antique from Earth, a Lever Action Winchester Rifle. Shepard's mother told her stories about this weapon in her youth, how it was used to slay monsters and win wars, to her there was no weapon more powerful, and in the deepest most primal part of her mind there was no greater force than a gunshot fired from the barrel of this weapon, it was the first and strongest line of defence in Shepard's mind.

"Who is your father to decide what is and isn't 'perfection?'" The path behind the Dragoon was torn open as the ghost tore through and attempted to plunge her claws through her head, being stopped by Shepard before both of them were pushed away into a familiar sight. Istavan IV? Earth's Amazon forest? One of the countless swamps the Custodians terraformed for the Tebrids? Yes and no, it was a simulated environment, one of hundreds that they had been put through in the course of their Dragoon training, but this was the very first that she had stepped into.

"Who are you and your masters to decide that?" The Ghost clamped onto a tree as she glared down on Shepard.

"Have you not looked through your file lately? Do you not see what they put into you? You are every bit the abomination I am." Another boom was let out as the ghost was scattered back into the void. "I volunteered for this, for a procedure that killed four out of five of the people that it was tried on, I hold no delusions about being inherently better than anyone else, do you?"

"I am the fruit of two worlds never meant to cross." Shepard rolled out of the way as the next set of tendrils slammed down on top of her. "I am the ambition made manifest of ten thousand cycles!" The Ghost called forth blue energy on her arm and formed a weapon like a gauntlet. "I am what will be!" The fingers of the gauntlet sprayed out and loosed streams of lightning through the air.

"You are a slave!" The Lever cranked as another gun shot echoed out. "You are the perfect slave created after ten thousand cycles of trial and error the hold onto whom will never be broken again." Shepard's eyes scanned the environment and she found it, the second line of defence and the weakest.

"I am no one's SLAVE!" The Ghost swung her arms upwards and brought down a war hammer made of blue crystal. Shepard jumped away as she ran to a door, the inside of a landing bay door standing alone in the swamp with serial number like lettering etched into its surface. Shepard spent her childhood on one of the ships her mother commanded, each time that it opened a strange new world would open up to her, to her this was a gateway of worlds, and a bridge between them. The best defence was a good offence, if someone has invaded your mind, invade theirs instead!

For the briefest moment, Shepard awoke back in the real world, staring straight into the eyes of the red eyed ghost that invaded her mind, and now it was her turn.

The place that Shepard arrived to was more... homely than she expected, a space station based on the black void that was on the other-side of the nearby window she had been looking at, comfortable furniture was in every direction as well as plants, so obviously a high class space station.

"Were you expecting a laboratory?" Shepard started looking around for the source of the voice that she was hearing. "Or perhaps a windowless concrete bunker miles beneath the surface?" The voice had changed too, even higher pitched than it was before almost as if... "I'm down here." Almost as if the owner hadn't gone through puberty yet. Shepard looked down at the white haired, red eyed child with literally ninety percent of their body, including most of her face, wrapped in a heavy parka.

"Well this is disappointing." Shepard stated as she sat down in a nearby chair.

"What's so disappointing!?" The Child whose personal space Shepard had invaded asked in a whiny tone.

"I can't shoot a child in the face, even I'm not that cruel." Shepard stated bluntly as she let out a sigh.

"You do realise this body is closer to my actual age than my real one?" The Child asked sounding incredulous.

"Are you trying to make me feel bad?" Shepard asked sounding incredulous in return.

"Yes! My sister's dead and one of you two are to blame!" Alpha shouted angrily.

"I do not know the details of what happened to your sister." Shepard could only let out a sigh. "I only know that she died as any other soldier would die, fighting against an enemy that they would've killed had they not been killed in return. That is sadly one of the unfortunate realities of life."

The little Girl's eyes started to glow.

"Do you know what this place is?" Alpha asked as the shadows grew long.

"Your mind palace, some place that you are not only deeply familiar with but also extremely comfortable with. Which tells me that not only were you born wherever this place is but you are also in all likelihood living here as well." Shepard had already scanned the place several times, looking for details about where this place was and memorising details of it's architecture, which given that most of it looked purely decorate probably meant that it would be relatively easy to track down.

"It's the place where I keep the monsters." The Little girl stated expression blank as she stared ahead. "Why don't you meet them?" As Shepard raised her brow at that question she was suddenly smacked away. Crashing through several of the benches off to the side she was met with the sight of a monster, a small Thresher Maw with green skin had poked itself out of the floor to knock Shepard away as it growled menacingly at her. "Thorian, you do seem to like your Thresher Maws, but I wonder why you're on her side." Several pale veiny hands grabbed the edges of a nearby elevator shaft and pulled itself into view, revealing a bulbous mass of twisted alien faces and organ sacks that together with the arms went up the elevator like a giant centipede. "Scion, so a Reaper. Well it's nice to have confirmation that you're on the enemy side." As Shepard was about to go on the offensive blue lightning appeared behind her, and so she turned around in time to witness an Unbidden Wizard manifest behind her. "The Shroud are you doing here?"

"If I was you I'd be running!" And then all three of them went on the offensive at once.

15M 19D 23H Until the Colossus Fires

Liara had been punked, and she was not happy about it.

"The canisters aren't going to explode?" Liara asked again for the sake of confirmation.

"They appear to have a mechanism to slowly disarm themselves if not in use, slowly absorbing energy from the surroundings if not in use for a prolonged period of time, after all this time it appears that they've been able to pay off their energy debt that they had been exploiting." After several Hours Liara missed her scheduled checkin, EDI was able to get a rescue team down to Liara, and a technical team to study the Reaper devices.

"So we wasted all this time on chasing down a doomsday bomb that disabled itself?" Liara asked sounding increasingly angry.

"It's really a sophisticated design, we should look into making it stand-"

"Answer the question!?" Liara was bleeding patience from the throat at this point. "The Doomsday weapon has dismantled itself yes, this place is still filled with Reaper technology that needs to be dismantled or destroyed before the Turian's can get their city back, not to mention that there is something here that Lawson was after as proven by his daughter being here." So not a complete lost then, but she still had to chase those two down and figure out where they landed before she left this place, assuming that Shepard didn't need to be put back together again and that Alpha hadn't already left. Lovely.

Shepard explored more the station as she was being hunted by the little girl's monsters, it wasn't just her memories in here either. On more than one occasion Shepard disappeared into one of the rooms on the station in order to avoid the attention of one of the creatures in question, she also had to deal with the Censors too, little masses of the mind's immune system that regulate stray thoughts, and stomp out foreign invaders, like her. But on the subject of the rooms that Shepard arrived in, she found herself in underground caverns, desert plains, deep space, the ruins of a burning city, a variant of unreal space limited to what a mortal mind can comprehend. There were thousands of different locations hiding aboard this one station. Right now Shepard was sitting inside of a cave as she pondered the implications of the situation she was in.

"Psi therapy 101." Shepard pulled up her tablet as she accessed information from her own mind. "'A censor's purpose is to help defend the mind from extra psychic intruders and other mental threats, their presence is to be treated as a sign of a healthy mind.'" Shepard was holding onto one of the censors right now, the really difficult thing about them was that Censors aren't universal, they don't look the same for every mind that you enter, so identifying it comes down to a matter of behaviour. A censor will leave most of the thoughts that it encounters alone, occasionally though they will attack other thoughts, ones that are disruptive to the mind, they will also be the first one to attack a intruder in the mind as well. The ones in this mind resembled small shadowy crab things, and this place was crawling with them. "'A censor's behaviour will help to identify the other elements inside of the mind. Unhealthy thoughts will be hunted down and destroyed while healthy ones will be left alone, what is considered healthy and unhealthy will vary from patient to patient.'" Shepard opened the door that led outside, to the Thresher Maw that was still looking for her, the one that had not been attacked by the Censors. So that's considered to be a normal part of the mind then. "What's going on here?"

15M 17D 12H Until the Colossus Fires

Liara was not having a good couple of days, it was a brutal battle of logistics to get Shepard and their prisoner out of the hole, the tomb was too deep for the Grav shute which meant a more conventional cable lift to get out of the tomb. Then she had to help the rest of the team to get out of the temple as well. Liara considered leaving Alpha behind, or better yet killing her in her sleep, but it was no surprise that both Shepard's and Alpha's tangled bodies were holding each other at the bottom of the hole, not because they had somehow made up when she wasn't looking, but because they had been put into a life or death struggle that ended with the both of them having chosen telepathy as the final deciding form of combat, and now they were here.

Medics and engineers were sent down first, treating the duo's injuries and strapping them down to Omni-stretchers before they began ascending the way back up. Additional teams were deployed to round up the rest of the people lost throughout the temple, and once they confirmed that the titans no longer posed a threat to anyone the chamber was filled with exotic gas and turned into the galaxy's largest incinerator. With the most immediate and severe threats taken care of the Turian's could once again move on to dealing with the various plans they had in place including the construction of their new laboratories.

"A gas giant?" Liara asked as she looked at Primarch Victus.

"Quite, I assure you that all of our facilities are quite secure against anything that cannot survive the crushing pressure of our laboratories." Victus assured through the video chat he was having with the Asari information broker.

"Do you have any idea how the Synthorg we met in the tunnels managed to get down there?" Liara was rather displeased by the notion that this Synthorg was able to slip through the Turian's security.

"I was hoping you could tell me." Victus stated bluntly. "You took her prisoner, surely a mind probing or a dissection..."

"You have telepath's on loan from the union as well, though not as many, they should've been specifically probing the minds of the people coming into the system and coming down to the planet. Clearly they have methods of hiding their intentions, a better question for Shepard. As for dissection, her defences have proven to be quite thorough." Footage played, attempts to cut through Alpha's skin was met with a biotic barrier that was covering her body, so they used a exotic plasma torch to cut through the barrier though neither the torch nor the blade could get through her metalic skin, when they tried to cut through it anyway the tendrils coming out of her back snapped to life and tore through the mechanical arms holding the cutting blades.

"She's unconscious not defenceless." Liara stated letting out a sigh. "Whatever Shepard's doing in there we need to let her finish, we have other things to worry about, the Synthorg was already here when she spotted EDI in the body of her sister, walking around your facility."

"Which if true means that there is an entirely separate reason for her being here other than picking a fight with the two of you over said person." Victus's mind was already swarming with counter measures. "You mentioned before that the Synthorg's use Thorian spores as part of their construction."

"The Thorian on Tuchanka immunised itself against the Fungicide, I can't promise you that these creatures haven't done the same. If we find a chink in her armour I'll let you know." For now the transmission was closed as Liara sat and thought, about what this mad woman and her mad father's goals were and why they were on Palaven. Some piece of technology from the temple, the most likely answer came down to the beacon, the one that turns regular life forms into husks, they had to find it, and hope it had withstood the test of time worst than the Titan's hearts.

15M 17D 12H Until the Colossus Fires

"Dad isn't going to be happy about this." A group of young women surrounded a case they had just opened. After deciding to detour to confront Liara and Shepard Alpha had activated a automatic device that would bring the case back to the surface for her, sadly it didn't survive the trip to the surface, and so now as a result both the case and the beacon inside of it that it carried had been irreparable ruined.

"Alpha isn't going to be happy about this." Each girl was identical to each other with pale concrete coloured skin, night coloured hair and bright blue eyes. "She was the one who was supposed to bring it back."

"Well dad doesn't really care about losing a few Reaper Artefacts." The others nodded their heads in unison. There are a billion worlds the Reapers have invaded over a thousand cycles, not to mention a thousand dead reapers that have been scrapped in the terminus system, not to mention the fact that the council has been reverse engineering Reaper tech for thousands of years. "Well now that the site has been cleared up maybe we'll get access to the research site that Dad actually wants."

Review Section:

RonaldM40196867: Omni-tool.

Guest: Reverse engineered Reaper Tech. I'm going to update the Turian Codex with the information later.