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ichorous april has a time in mass effect
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"Good plan."

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They're only harassed by a handful more Collectors along the way to the spaceport. Mostly, they encounter Collectors withdrawing - carrying human-sized chitinous pods, with paralyzed colonists inside.

"Done with surgical strike and preparing for extraction, or fleeing when detected?" Mordin wonders.

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"I'd hope for the second, if I weren't so cynical. Let's go fuck them up."

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They reach the spaceport in pretty short order. There, they see...

someone in full-body N7 armor! With a field of turrets set up that are threshing Collectors as fast as they can, aided by occasional blasts of plasma from the figure's omni-tool. The bugs are pretty persistent, though, and the outer turrets have already fallen to the press of bugflesh.

A familiar voice projects itself into June's earpiece. "Shepard? - you shouldn't be here, aren't you with Cerberus now?"

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"Cerberus is a bag of dicks, I broke up with them and took all their shit in the divorce. What are you up to, besides kicking ass?"

Speaking of which, she should assist with the kicking of these buggy asses.

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"...oh. I think the Alliance would say I still shouldn't tell you anything but I know you suck at lying, so... uh, I went in for N7 training. As you can probably see. And the Alliance assigned me to Horizon so I could intercept a Collector attack and hopefully cripple that flagship of theirs, but the AA towers they had me set up need active management and I wasn't at the wheel when they showed up, which is really irritating actually, so instead of crippling their flagship I'm fighting for my life against Collector footsoldiers while they abduct the colonists. I actually think I might have been assigned here to bait the Collectors? They're abducting the colonists but they're dedicating a really unsustainable amount of resources to trying to abduct me."

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"Well that sucks. Can I back you up here? Actually no: I am backing you up here whether you like it or not, what can I do for you? Is it feasible to get you back in your AA tower with sufficient badassery or is that a goner already?"

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"I would love if you could get me to the tower. Unfortunately there are all these fucking bugs."

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Harry glows, and there's an earthshaking detonation which sends Collectors flying in all directions.

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"- ah, you brought a mobile artillery unit."

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"She's a very good mobile artillery unit! I appreciate her enormously! C'mon, let's kick some ass."

Onward!

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Wading through the bugs is much easier with four highly trained special forces agents than one. Morty reaches the tower and clambers up it like a spider monkey, eventually positioning himself in the cradle by the top guns. "I'm going to need a couple of minutes to set up the GARDIAN lasers," he calls down. "Can you keep them from destroying the tower for that -"

There's a thud as a massive thing crashes into the soil nearby. It unfurls into a crab the size of a transport shuttle, its barrier glowing, and opens its mouth to emit a fucking laser beam aimed at Mordin and Harry, who jump out of the way just in time.

"Fuck shit fuck Goddamn -" Morty mutters as he dives into the tower's internals. He runs out of novel combinations of English swears pretty rapidly and switches to Batarian.

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Shepard shoots the thing. Shooting it does not appear to help. Shooting it some more after that, likewise. Perhaps setting it on fire? Can she get a setting it on fire?

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The plasma doesn't do much to it. Harry does her artillery thing, which causes its barriers to flicker briefly, but in addition to its barriers it's thickly armor-plated.

It sends out a biotic shockwave, which Harry can't counter in time because she's busy doing artillery. She flies into a stack of crates. "Motherfucker!"

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"All right, fuck this then," says Shepard, unbuckling her armor and rolling out of cover. As she strides toward the creature, something moves under her loosened cuirass in a decidedly unsettling way. She's still shooting, holding her sniper rifle in an awkward grip necessitated by her expanding torso.

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Harry extricates herself from the crates and starts repelling some encroaching Collectors rather than watching the oncoming horror.

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Shepard—at least, it's probably safe to assume that this is still Shepard—reaches the thing right around when her body finishes reconfiguring itself. Her spine has doubled in length; she has to shoot one-handed because she can't get her arms across her chest now that her ribcage is blossoming into a huge Venus flytrap of a mouth. Several tongues emerge, dripping with a tar-like substance, to wrap around the creature and drag it into the embrace of her rib-fangs; it really, really doesn't look like it should fit, and yet, with one final point-blank sniper round to drop its barrier, she swallows it in one unholy gulp.

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Morty emerges from the tower's innards even as the crabmonster vanishes into Shepard's.

"GARDIAN laser's charging, it'll be -"

He stares, paralyzed.

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And one of the Collectors Harry's throwing around abruptly starts glowing. Light shines through the seams in its chitinous armor.

"Assuming direct control," it buzzes.

The rest of the Collectors... stop. Harry stops too, cautiously.

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Shepard, still shrinking back down to human form (with a couple of stray tongues darting out to lick drips of Ichor off the ground before her maw closes completely), gets her sniper rifle back in both hands and takes aim at the glowy one.

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"Shepard. We would speak with you. Your nature is not known to us."

 

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"Yeah, I get that a lot. What's your bullshit, Genocide Boy?"

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"You are extremely anomalous. Your very existence implies not just missing information but a drastic paradigm shift. It is possible, given our lack of data, that our modus operandi is inherently flawed. If you submit to thorough inspection, we will possess more information about the nature of reality, and our goals may shift. We offer you this chance to surrender."

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"Yeah? And what's in it for me?"

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"Once you have been analyzed, your consciousness will be integrated into the Reaper network and you will live for eternity in an unimaginable paradise. As will everyone else, assuming our goals do not change based on the information we extract from your physical form."

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