"No, and that kicked ass."

"This job just keeps getting more interesting," Warhead agrees.

Basking would be fun. "Let's go." She fits in a pat on Garrus's shoulder though. Guys on the back line need all the coddling.

Garrus seems to appreciate it.

They enter the mine in formation, and are greeted with... an elevator.

"Well," Garrus sighs, "I guess it is a Prothean ruin. They did love their elevators."

Snrk. Teddy gets to press the buttons since she's the ranking officer.

The elevator is faster than the ones at the Citadel, at least. They descend into a large chamber. There's a mining laser pointed at a shimmering force field. Behind the field is an asari, suspended in a T-pose in midair.

"Hey!" she yells, slightly muffled by the massive barrier. "How's it going?"

Lacking very many tactical options, Commander Terentin decides to... wave. While consulting her files to see if this is Belara's daughter.

Yep. Arela K'Bael, daughter of Belara K'Bael, graduated with significant honors from the University of Serrice, became a mercenary in her fifties and has stayed in that line of work for the intervening fifty years.

"Are you guys rescuers or looters?" Arela wonders. "If you're looters you have to tell me or it's entrapment."

Oh no she's hot.

"It's more like we're here to interrogate or possibly arrest you, depending on how things went. Wasn't really expecting you to be sort of pinned up, already." Teddy might have hacked the laser, done some cool stuff with that. Bummer.

"...arrest me about what? And on whose authority? The Human-Turian-Krogan Axis of Brotherhood that I missed the founding of last week on account of being trapped in a mass effect field?"

"Sisterhood, actually. Garrus is an honorary sorority member." Wait. "Wait, you haven't actually been in there for a week, have you?"

"I don't have a great handle on the passage of time in here. Probably hasn't been a week, I haven't been able to eat or drink anything and I'm not dead yet. If you guys wanted to get me out of here that'd be great, by the way, I might not be dead but I'm not feeling too hot either."

Teddy fans the squad out by gesture and ping to cover more of the chamber. Standing in the doorway is for chumps. Hack, hack. Assert dominance over mining equipment. "Someone already try the laser?" Let's see if Arela has any allies hanging around, that she'll admit to.

"Caught that, huh. You may have noticed the geth hanging around? They wanted in. Not super clear on their deal, but the fuckhuge mining laser didn't imply a ton of regard for my personal wellbeing."

Aww. No laser. "Zanna? Kick the tires on this field for me."

Zanna thoughtfully lobs a biotic orb at it, focusing intently on the eye-watering spatial warp that occurs when the fields intersect.

"Wow, the Protheans really knew their shit. Uh, this thing is not going down to conventional biotics. It kind of - interleaves itself in such a way that incoming biotic fields get shredded before they touch the important -"

She pauses, glancing at the mining laser.

Then she looks at the basalt wall into which the field is set.

"So, there's this statistic people like to throw around, that burglars in the twentieth century didn't actually use lockpicks very often," she says tangentially. "You know what's a lot easier than picking a lock?"

"You're kidding. There's no way it doesn't just, like, grow to fit..." Zap. Basalt crumbling noises. Result?

Big hole in rock, through a couple of layers of Prothean wall (which took a few seconds to drill through, even at max power), into the grand chamber in which Arela is suspended!

Also, vaguely ominous rumbling sounds.

"Fucking sweet!" Arela yells. "Shoot the terminal on the wall to my right and I'm pretty sure it'll get me out of this fucking thing!"

They'll have to be more ominous than that if they want a woman on a mission to notice.

The terminal gets zapped, and Warhead is on guard for any funny business from Arela. Who has acted in nothing but good faith.

Arela collapses to the floor, wobbles up to her feet, and jumps in place a couple of times.

"Whoo, bloodflow. We getting out of this joint? I've played a lot of I-Spy over the past however long it's been."

"The hell does that mean?" Colony world kids, go figure. They will, in fact, get out of this joint. Terentin will need to do something about Arela's setting-the-objectives habit, that's her job.

The elevator appears to have been commandeered by a small troop of geth!

Arela makes a sweeping gesture, and a field about the size of a rugby ball materializes in their midst, yanking them off their feet.

And Zanna flings a ball of her own, creating a massive detonation of shimmering force.

The elevator... is not looking so hot.

"Whoops," Zanna winces.

"I was so careful with the squad makeup. And for what." She turns everyone back around. Into the tectonic, trapped, Protean ruins. They're called ruins. That's not auspicious! Next time she's going in alone, she could just climb up the elevator shaft by herself, strap the target to her back. Argh. "Warhead is my new mercenary supreme. Elevator-respecter-in-chief. You love 'em, don't you, Yakol."

"Sure I do. Go elevators go."