They take a balloon up.

Halfway through Bal says. "Oh, fuck. I forgot. If you don't have shapes then you don't know, but getting a shape hurts a lot."

"The mage guild offers those flowers that make you sick afterwards, but reduce the pain."

Garrus shrugs. "I got half my face blown off last year. If it's worse than that I'll be surprised. Also, anything you can eat is poison to me, so that's a no."

"Ah, okay. The pool will take care of your face too."

It's not really a long flight. Most of it's about going vertically, they are soon docking.

Garrus steps out carefully. "You guys just lead the way to whoever I need to talk to, and I'll talk to them."

"Okay, I think the mage guild might be easier and they might give you room or something."

They get moving. The place is really not meant for people constrained by walking. At some point they ask to go through someone's house to avoid a long detour.

The mage guild is very obviously distinct by the fact it's main entrance is adorned by glowing symbols. There is someone purple-skinned at a desk.

Garrus reaches into his bag, fabricates a decently sized diamond from the monstrous stone within, and pulls it out with a friendly click of his mandibles. "Hello! I'd like to use your Ventari pool."

The clerk drops the book they were holding and blinks at the diamond. "Okay. I will talk to the scheduler. Is this an emergency? Ah, we need to get someone to evaluate that first. Hold on a second." They poke their head through a door and then a woman emerges from it.

She is very obviously a previously unseen kind of shape, dark-blue skin with bright yellow eyes, her contours seen to blend to the shadows. The purple-skinned individuals has a quick chat and then goes to talk to people.

"I am mage, I prefer not to disclose my exact power, but you can guess it's something that will let me know if you're trying to trick us. Is that stone real? Did you steal it?"

"The stone is real and I didn't steal it," Garrus says dutifully. "It's not precisely an emergency, but I'd like to get it done as soon as possible, obviously."

"Mmhmm," she says noncommittally. She touches the diamond with her thumb, very obviously not trying to take it. She might or might not getting some information. "So, what do you do for a living?" She asks in a very casual tone.

Garrus sighs. "I... was a cop. Then my vehicle exploded and I landed here with nothing but my backpack and these." He gestures to the guns. "So... I don't know what I do for a living now."

"Heh, tough day. If you were a cop maybe you could pick a similar job? How do you feel about killing monsters?"

"...depends on your definition of monsters? I don't kill people unless they deserve it. Animals I'll kill. Anything in between, case by case basis."

"Man, you don't have monsters?" Bal says, they have been watching this whole exchange.

"Monsters, are this abominable deformed things that look like dozens of body parts melted together, they roam the surface, are hard to kill and often have unstable magical powers."

"Oof. Yeah, I can kill that."

"Neat!" She says running her fingers lightly through a gun. Either she is getting some information out of it or she is bullshitting him hard. "I would recommend you to offer kill one for the mage guild in exchange for a form and keep the diamond. Or get the form first and let the mage guild keep the diamond as a collateral as long they sign a contract overseen by the local church. They hate each other enough that they won't try pull something on you." She says this very brightly.

"Wow, employer of the year."

Garrus twitches as she touches the gun, but he doesn't move it away; he doesn't want to piss off a local biotic-or-whatever-she-is. "Sure, I can do that. Do you want a specific monster killed, or should I just go out and shoot one?"

At least she isn't touching anything that's dangerous to touch.

"Specific one, though it's more the guild that wants to kill it for the bounty. You could probably get some reward over a random carcass though."

Garrus wonders internally if he could just claim the bounty himself, then pay the guild out of it. Then he decides this is complicated enough already. "Alright then. I formally offer to kill this specific monster for your guild in exchange for a Ventari form. Just tell me what it looks like and what approximate direction it's in, and I'll bring you its head. If it has one."

"The last report claimed it had three, actually!" She says brightly, "it was the day before yesterday, so it's probably still accurate," she proceeds on describing a very... unusual configuration of anatomy, "...and the feathers come out of the black carapace. Deal?"

"Deal," Garrus says brightly. It's been a while since he hunted something.

He walks out of the guildhall and looks over the edge of the island. He locates a clear spot to land and steps off the edge.

Turians are heavy. He falls like a bullet. Just before he hits the ground, there's a flash of blue light, and he lands lightly on his feet.

Those two dudes decide not to join him in his hunt for a monster. No one is bothered by his apparently suicidal jump.

The monster roams an area surrounded by creeks and the occassional cluster of trees. The rock formations are rarer here but more jagged and with more spaces to hide.

Garrus treads lightly, his tactical cloak concealing him from view. Just in case the thing has echolocation or thermal vision, he carries his assault rifle instead of the sniper rifle; if the sniper rifle turns out to be a better fit, he'll have time to switch. His visor maintains the 360˚ vision effect, even though he's starting to get a headache.

He keeps an eye out for monster tracks.

He finds monster tracks, noticeable for how they look more like someone dragged a rock through the earth than anything as sensible as footprints on the ground.

The tracks become... less dragged through and there are breaks, like the monster learned how to jump.

Without his 360º vision the ambush would've been inevitable. The thing was hiding on a floating rock and it leaps at him from above. It uses it's asymmetrical wings to control it's fall and aims an uneven number of claws to render through him.

Fuck!

He dives forward and rolls a few yards away, then whips his gun around and fires in three short bursts.

Mass Effect technology has done some truly miraculous things to weapon design. Garrus Vakarian's Phaeston-class assault rifle fires flecks of metal not much larger than a grain of sand, but each "grain" carries enough kinetic energy to blow a hole through steel plate.

Chunks of rock-covered skin blow up in a explosion of blood and gore. The creature shriek sounds like thousands voices at once. It lifts a leg and a pale blue glow emanates from a claw before being hurled at Garrus.