Author's Note: And that's another week down. One of these days I'm going to take a break from publishing this so that I can focus on getting a actual story put together. Read, Review, Favourite, And Enjoy!

Chapter 82: The Great Rift Part 3

?M ?D ?H Until the Colossus Fires

A armoured hand soaked through with Grime grabbed hold of a tree branch and pulled the rest of the body that the hand belonged to out of a deep peat moss like swamp. The golden figure looked up to the sky as she took stock of her surroundings.

"Well it ain't Kansas, that's for sure!"

It also wasn't the desert world she was on either. Her suit's sensors told her that she was under roughly three times the normal pressure of an Earth like atmosphere, further more the contents of the atmosphere were toxic. For now Shepard's suit and Dragoon organs would protect her, but getting off this planet as quickly as possible was pivotal to her survival. That was the other point of concern: Aratoht's desert was long gone, instead Shepard was in a swamp. There were two possible explanations. The first was that the Unbidden's bridge had transported her to somewhere else, the other was that something had come through and changed the planet, given the kinds of horror's Shepard's experienced inside of the Rifts she couldn't rule out the possibility. If she did crash here then her ship shouldn't be too far away, even if it was broken it was better than nothing.

"Current planet unknown, classified as Swamp, chances that it's the one I was on yesterday seems... low."

Ignoring the matter of one being a desert and one being a swamp, one having a normal but hot atmosphere and the other having thrice the atmosphere of a normal world mostly made up of poison, none of the plants had Lawson's synthorganic aesthetic. Which left Shepard alone, on a hostile unknown world, with limited life support, with potentially everything from violent savage predators to primitive man eating tribes.

"I hate my life some days." And then Shepard tripped, falling face first into the swamp water in the process. Pulling her face out of the muck, Shepard turned around to look at the offending root in question, before she angrily kicked the damned thing letting out a loud snap in question.

"OOOUUUGGGHHH!" Three glowing yellow reptilian eyes opened up in the tree the root had been attached to. Part of the tree suddenly broke off, including the root Shepard just broke, and stood up, producing a barely human shaped figure that looked down and glared at Shepard. "Ah damn-" Shepard's curse was cut short as she was gut punched through several trees, bouncing off of at least one before rolling through the water again. "Another... bloody... Tree!?"

Who exactly said that sapient plant based life forms were rare again? Shepard pulled herself to her feet. She needed to find dry land before whatever was in this water got into her armour, she needed to find dry land that wasn't going to round house her, and she needed off this planet!

"Alright!" Shepard was something beyond furious now. She had looped back around to calm as she stared down the creature that was slowly lumbering towards her as she went through her options. She somehow lost her weapons! Just like she somehow wound up on this mud ball of a planet to begin with! And when she somehow found the little bastard responsible then she was going to personally see to it that he's singing a different tune! For now Shepard knew exactly what she was going to do: It's a tree, she was gonna set it on fire! "Alright you leafy bastard! I need you to cool your mel-!" The Fire ball that Shepard conjured from thin air suddenly exploded in size. It wasn't enough that the atmosphere was toxic, it was also incredibly flammable as well. Shepard dropped the ball fire into the water, which was apparently covered in something highly flammable because it was set on fire too.

"OOOUUUGGGHHH!" The tree thing let out a roar as it charged towards Shepard and the part of the swamp that she just set on fire.

"Yah know what I think I can work with this."

Shepard dived below the water as the tree monster started trying to put out the flames, however it was interrupted by Shepard jumping onto it's back and beginning to tear the wood apart with armoured hands. Shepard broke this thing's foot, maybe it's toe, just by kicking it, so the combination of her brute strength and heavy armour was enough to do some serious damage, even if she was without her usual weapons to fight with. As Shepard was about to cold cock what she believe to be the monster's face it tore an arm free and reached out and grabbed Shepard by her face.

The swamp disappeared, or more accurately the hellish rotten landscape moved away, replaced by a place that, while it was still a swamp wasn't so bad? The sun was shining, the water was relatively clear, the trees weren't trying to kill Shepard anymore, in comparison to where she was this place was paradise. There was one caveat though. There was a grotesque, corpulent creature sitting off the side, with sickly boils in lieu of fat that contained something other than pus, tuning a guitar that was made out of something that wasn't wood, plastic, or anything guitars are normally made out of while opposing rows of yellow teeth set in rotting gums smiled darkly.

"Okay. What is with today?"

"Let me tell you the story, of the Blooms of Gaia~" A loud boom echoed out as a pound of boils were smeared across the thing's flesh. "I have had enough of musicians for one day!" Shepard was holding up a familiar Winchester rifle. "Who are you? What is this place? And why the Meld are you singing!?"

"I am the Composer of Strands little girl." The fat thing spoke in a voice that sounded sick, Shepard sincerely doubted there was a single organ in this thing's entire body that wasn't pumping the not pus. "And what I have say is worth hearing. Without the threats." At worst the creature looked annoyed with Shepard as he re-tuned his instrument.

"Considering that this gun is supposed to be mounted on my mother's mantel I suspect this is a mind palace."

Which is unusual, because normally this would be a mixture of scenes from both parties mind, but the uniformed swamp instead implied that this was a memory, but then Shepard wouldn't be able to interfere with the scenery. This was a technique she wasn't familiar with, and worst yet it was being done by someone powerful enough to cut through her mental defences like a hot knife through butter.

"A palace, that's cute, is that what you call that disorganised mess in there? Reminds me of the Whisperer."

"How many of you freaks are there?" As Shepard gave that exasperated question a figure suddenly splashed down next to Shepard.

"Shh. The Story is starting!" The fat thing made a entirely pointless attempt to clear his throat as he continued. "Gaia's people love the water, live for the water~"

Shepard tuned the fat monster out as she looked down at being in the water, she(?) looked like a amphibian, vaguely frog like person that on a good day she might ignore, however this one had three yellow reptile like eyes. Also despite her best wishes the grotesque Composer was still getting through the gist of his song despite Shepard's attempts to ignore it. The people of 'Gaia,' and Shepard wasn't convinced that it wasn't just a mistranslation of the planet's name, were amphibians who spent most if not all of their time in the waters of their swamp home. Perhaps if they knew what was in the water or what it would do to them they might've avoided it. They absorbed the Algae and other plant like organisms in the water, in their eggs, through their skin, through the food that they ate, it became a part of them, mutating their bodies over the course of generations as larger and larger portions of their DNA was made up of Algae. That said, they were also affecting the Algae with their own DNA as well so they reached a symbiosis after a while. But then they became infested by Fungus, and like the Lichin of Earth or the Algae they were already familiar with a new symbiotic alliance took form as they continued to mutate into even more plant like beings. The Fungus in the mean time acquired more of their host's traits, in fact it learned how to rebuild The Gaian people from the ground up, and then it learned how to do more of it.

"The Thorian? Or is it an early ancestor?" Shepard looked around at the swamp suspiciously.

The Gaian people learned how to shape their environment as a extension of themselves, the Thorian learned the shapes that they taught it, through this process they developed their own brand of technology, not rooted in metals and electricity but rather organic matter, psychics and biotics. It was when they reached the stars that they found evidence of other civilisations that came before theirs, Multiple governments spanning several systems at minimum and the galaxy at most, having appeared one after another before it seemingly destroyed themselves, ones that grew stagnate with time and died out.

"Somehow I don't think that was the case." Shepard knew how this ended. The Blooms of Gaia would advance to a certain point, the Reapers would swoop in, kill or harvest them all and then leave.

"You believe that don't you?" The Composer smirked with that disgusting mouth of his. "Put two and two together why don't you. The Blooms never relied on synthetics, they didn't even develop the technology or industrial base to build them." In the mean time the whole reason why the Reaper's are a thing in the first place is because they were trying to prevent the Rise of Synthetics.

"The Thorian rendered the Bloom's immune to their indoctrination." Shepard gave a follow up with what she thought was obvious information.

"A simple fix. All that the Reaper's would really have to do is integrate the Thorian into themselves, or transform it with husk technology." The Composer knew that Shepard knew this because he got the information from her mind.

"...then what wiped them out?" Shepard asked as she narrowed a glare and kept her gun glued to the entity.

"I did!"

The Blooms looked for a way to escape the decay of the civilisation. Their beliefs in the inevitable fall of their civilisation led to the birth of a new entity living in the warp, The Composer of Strands, a embodiment of entropy and decay. The Blooms wanted a way to extend their lives? The Composer gave them a ritual, one that upon their death would trap the souls of the Blooms and forcibly stuff them back into their original bodies.

"Are these Lich's?"

The Blooms changed as their bodies decayed, their plant like bodies calcify as they rotted away, turning into a material resembling stone, or rather the 'flesh' of the Lithoids, and as they consumed increasingly larger amounts of stone other changes took place as well, the atmosphere growing thicker and deadlier as something resembling exotic gas was released into the air. Soon the number of Lich-Blooms exceeded the number of normal-Blooms. A perfect stagnant paradise for the Composer of Strands, and then The Reapers came. The Ancient machines weren't expecting an attack on their minds though, they didn't expect competition for their perfect slaves. The Composer tore through their minds, his stagnation leaving a star field of broken rotting minds in his wake.

Then he encountered a stronger monster, Harbinger, it's mental defences were stronger than the Composers offensive power, then that was followed up by a planet wide swarm of insects infesting the bodies of his followers and mutating them into Synthorganic horrors, that were then pooled together into a new born Reaper. That is until now.

"Why tell me this though?" Shepard kept her weapon trained on the horror as she circled around the entity peppering him with her rifle as she did her best to end it. The revelation that she was talking to a Reaper was not a pleasant one.

"Why? Because it suits my purposes." With a casual wave of the arm from the Composer the swamp started to collapse into a wormhole of pus and other unpleasant materials that Shepard was sucked into.

10M 28D 19H Until the Colossus Fires

All over Union territory, worm holes appeared. It was one of the biggest concerns that they had about the Reaper's, that they had gained control over the Gestalt and through them their ability to create wormholes.

It was a moot point for the most part, a worm hole required stable defined space both at the point of origin, and at the point that it travels too. Or so the Union likes to believe. Now however, something has changed. The wormholes opened up into Union Territory, near as any one could tell not leading anywhere into stable space, at least in Union space. That left two other equally bad possibilities: the first is that it connected outside of the Galaxy, meaning the Reapers, or it connected to somewhere in the Great Rift, which violates their understanding of wormholes, or violated their understanding of the territory within the Great Rift. For now attempts at contact were made with the new ships that appeared from the wormholes, long rod shaped with 'leaves' of combination solar panels and solar sails riding forth. They were met by one of the Union's patrol fleets, equipped with sufficient fire power to deal with a Reaper, and fight several for long enough to evacuate nearby planets.

"Tech looks pretty funky boss." Helmsman SensorFreak28 squeaked as he looked at multiple screens at once. "Lots of Reaper inspiration but not a lot of their design philosophy."

The Tebrid observed. For instance there wasn't a neutron dense hull, in fact there wasn't much synthetic material at all, it was less like they were looking at a ship and more like some large organism, albeit when with a semi-inorganic shell. Even then said hull had an uneven and mishappen mineral layout of differing densities but mostly resembling carbon cubrates, less like they were looking at a professionally made hull and more like a fossil of some great beast. But the amount of psychic energy was enough to make the Formless drool. There was a powerful psychic presence however, paired together with an intensive biotic field in order to protect the ship and lock its hull into place. It was impossible to tell from here, but they should consider the strong possibility that there was one of the Reaper's dark hearts inside of it somewhere. Intense shield technology had to be deployed to protect the crew, and even then they were hit with intense feelings of apathy. If it was a weapon, it was an insidious one that robs the will to fight back or offer resistance. The enemy forces should be preparing to try and board the ship right around at this point. Unfortunately for the newcomers, Union ships have AI on board that can operate the ships in just such case of emergency.

"Attention unknown vessel." If the enemy was attacking the minds of the crewmen then they could hear EDI's branched AI. "You have attacked a Union Vessel, surrender yourselves for boarding or be destroyed." Each of the Crewmen had universal translation software in their respective grey boxes, if these creatures did have the capacity to read their minds then they should have access to it, there was the possibility that the Universal Translation Software wasn't compatible with whatever language they used to communicate but then so be it. Saving individuals who weren't part of their forces or their allies weren't their top priority, well below protecting their own forces. "You were warned." The Patrol Ship opened fire with a Tachyon lance, if struck even a Reaper would be destroyed. If struck. Instead yet another worm hole opened and swallowed the beam whole, the other end opening up above the Union's patrol ship and spat out it's own attack back at them, destroying the ship in the process.

10M 25D 15H Until the Colossus Fires

Word had gotten back to the Heads of the Union about the unknown forces that had attacked the patrol fleet. The first of many to encounter patrol fleets from the Wormholes that opened all over Union territory. Critical area's were already reinforced from invasion, specialised jammers were acting to block the forming of new wormholes so the new ships travel would be limited.

"For now we need to take the ship in one piece and determine the identities of the new enemy." Admiral Hackett was operating a command centre inside of the Formless's Crystal Spire, right now he was managing the flood of new reports that were coming in concerning the mystery ships. It was a method of defence they didn't think of before, using wormholes to redirect their attacks, on a theoretical level such things have been considered but the power requirements would be insane, especially if they use it repeatedly. A even worse possibility is if they use it to snipe targets instead. The Tebrids had been experimenting with worm holes big enough to barely fit a missile through but it seems that whenever they create one that was too small it collapses on them. Now if the new enemy can find a way of making smaller more energy efficient worm holes for sniping...

"Admiral!" A Tebrid flew in on a hover platform, going at such speeds that he nearly fell off, handing a data slate over to the Admiral with a desperate glint.

"What am I looking at?" Admiral Hackett took the data slate and began reviewing the contents.

"It's the planet that the invaders have past by, they've been hit with various viruses and bacteria that we have never seen before!" Various pictures floated in on the slate, various viruses, bacteria and DNA strands with smaller pictures highlighting similarities and differences. "Are the ships dumping viruses into the atmospheres of the worlds that they pass by?" Admiral Hackett had just upgraded the new ships from 'third faction' to 'enemy' in his mind.

"We don't believe so. The plagues were preceded by massive headaches, a pulse of psionics, which was then followed up by these diseases suddenly appearing." A group of Salarians got turned to Jellyfish because they got hit with this phenomena, mutations kept appearing in the various refugees they were pulling out of the Great Rift. In comparison to that, creating viruses and diseases in people's bodies would be easy. "So far the viruses are highly aggressive, turning the immune system against the body and forcing it to eat itself at an accelerated rate, leading to insanity, aggression and eventually death." The virus had only be active for days and there were already casualties incurred.

"Those worlds are now under quarantine." Admiral Hackett stated in simple terms that it broke no argument. "Deploy the Custodians to the worlds in question, none of the physical samples are to leave these worlds, nor are any organic personnel to enter or approach them. I want those diseases unravelled and dissected at once! The sooner we know about how they are put together the sooner we can start taking them apart! Have back ups prepared for their grey boxes immediately, if there are deceased I want their deaths undone as soon as possible!" With the matter of handling the existing crises taken care of the next course of action was to deal with the crises that were about to happen. "I want a way of neutralising those ships and their constant wormholes at once!"

"Perhaps turnabout is Fair play." The Tebrid stated shrugging his slug like body. "The council still has the rift artefact that turned the Salarians into Jellyfish right? If we can do something similar we might have a way neutralising those semi-organic ships."

"Get on it." One Tebrid flew out and another one came careening inside of the logistics area. They do realise that they can just send the information in an email right?

"Admiral we have information on the New ships!"

"Yes we were just discussing the plague ships-"

"Not those the other ones!" The Tebrid snapped as he handed the data slate over to the Admiral. "Aside from the plague ships. We've been able to identify three makes of ships all with radically different design philosophies that have just appeared across Union space!"

Oh Joy. More 'new friends.'

?M ?D ?H Until the Colossus Fires

Near as Grunt and the others could tell, the Animator of Clay ran off to chase the Hunter down, along with the Gestalt forces, which probably meant that one or two of them were going to be leaving the Great Rift soon. Either way, it was time to escape. A task that was easier said than done.

"We're lost aren't we?" Grunt asked as he looked down at a star chart and scratched the side of his head as he went along.

"We don't have the Mass Relays any more." Miranda stated as she let out a sigh. "Not to mention that the force of their explosions offset several planets in all likelihood, multiply that by the total number of celestial bodies affected, and the laws of physics launching their little rebellion and we can assume that existing maps are useless."

The same went for Union Jump Drive technology too. At this rate the Hyper Lane leading back to Union space would be hundreds of years away.

"Javik's teleportation ability still works right?" From that suggestion, Miranda led the group's efforts to study the Pasharti's ability to teleport riding on the Astral threads.

Lawson had most of what they'd need, machinery to spin the exotic particles to thread. It would be one thing if they were working by themselves, but if they could latch onto the Astral Thread shield of a passing Union ship there was a chance of getting off this rock. Is what they thought would be happening. Instead their rope of Astral Threads latched onto another region of real space, as if someone or something was working to actively stabilise the Great Rift creating a pocket of Real space in the process. They knew that the Unbidden were building a tunnel somewhere, maybe they connected to that. If true then there was also a good chance that they could find Shepard, wherever the rest of the Unbidden had sent her off to. For now they were sending probes through, in the hopes that they would have a gander on what was on the other side, with luck the grass would turn out to be Greener as the saying goes. Greener, and Meaner. The planet they spotted was unrecognisable from it's original configuration, assuming that it wasn't one of the unknown number of worlds that cast into the rifts by he Zroni, the atmosphere was too thick to punch through with any sensors, and mostly composed of exotic gasses. The whole thing was one stray spark away from turning into a big ball of plasma. Assuming that Shepard's life support systems and enhanced physiology could keep her alive this long they couldn't get to her through the atmosphere. The situation was simultaneously worse and better than that though. The planet was surrounded by worm holes through which ships of unknown make and model were exiting the planet's atmosphere through the worm holes, entering who knows what territory.

"No. No this isn't going to work." Even if Shepard was down there the atmosphere was so toxic they couldn't follow her, if she wasn't anymore then she's instead in any of thousands of worm holes leading all over Union territory. "It would appear that Shepard's on her own again."

Review Section:

Monster King: So you keep telling me. Still I wished the words came a little easier.

RonaldM40196867: Very Fine. I personally don't see what.

Pomni: Hi.

Halo: I'd say strongly dislikes more accurately. A Jump gate is like a mini-instantaneous wormhole with another dimension as a go between. In Stellaris it allows to travel huge chunks of the galaxy instantly, though it comes at the cost of calling the Unbidden. This is true. The Keepers are the insect like aliens that the Citadel uses a maintenance units throughout the Mass Effect games.

Coment9: Glad you like it so much.