You shouldn't think too hard about it, really.

At first I was trying to keep it as close to the way the mission goes in-game, but then I remembered what sort of story this is and stopped caring. It is silly and is supposed to be silly.

Commander Shepard was not so much surprised as he was disappointed to discover that the local-boy-done-good megacorporation ExoGeni had been conducting clandestine, unethical experimentation on the colonists of Zhu's Hope without their knowledge.

Though he would also be the first to admit that learning this experimentation involved an ancient, mind-controlling plant monster was at least unexpected. Not the sort of thing you ran into every day. For that at least he would give ExoGeni both credit and also bonus points for originality.

Definitely not the kind of activity he was just going to let stand, though, particularly as it was pretty obvious that the ancient, mind-controlling plant monster was fairly obviously the reason why mean old Mr Saren had come to this planet in the first place and brought his apparently limitless supply of Geth goons with him.

So the plant monster had to go, both because mind-controlling ancient plant beasts were probably not a good thing to have sitting around, shady corporate conspiracies were bad and anything that Saren wanted should be smashed to bits. Two (three?) birds, one stone, etcetera.

In an ideal world of course it could all have been resolved with a nice chat and a handshake (or whichever part of a giant alien plant you politely shake after a nice chat) but this was not an ideal world, and so guns were likely to be involved. Shepard had a feeling in his waters, a twitch in his gut. It just always seemed to be the way things went whenever he got involved.

Therefore, after a brief spell of industrial espionage, a pleasant diversion whereby a pressure door was used to detach a Geth dropship from its anchoring point and a chat or two with a handful of surviving ExoGeni personnel - from whom he had learnt about the whole mind controlling plant situation in the first place, and its position bang-smack underneath Zhu's Hope - Shepard headed right back there to sort it out.

A quick jaunt across the Prothean Skyway followed, during which someone was still firing overhead from one tower to another and also a lot into nowhere at all, just into the sky in a general sense. Long streams of fire, aimed at nothing and hitting it dead on.

Who was doing this or why remaining unclear

"Who's firing? And at what?" Garrus asked from somewhere back in the Mako, giving voice to this mystery while Tali continued to cling on for dear life. Shepard's driving often had that effect.

"Best not to ask, Garrus. Best not to ask," Shepard said, wrenching the wheel about wildly and still somehow managing to steer an expert (albeit expertly harsh and jolting) course through the wreckage, rubble, ruins and incongruous tanktraps littering the skyway.

A handful of Geth popped up now and then to pester them but Shepard didn't slow overmuch, just blasting them from the skyway with the main gun or else driving over them. With the ultra-smooth suspension the passengers barely even noticed! It gave them some time to further mull on the odd situation instead.

"Kind of unsettling thinking that that thing is filling all the air back in the colony with spores, isn't it?" Garrus said after having put his helmet on in preparation for disembarking, feeling, given the spores, a helmet would be a good bet.

Shepard had put his on too (while still driving, no less; man of many talents) and Tali - who didn't need to worry about this sort of thing - was busily double-checking the seals for him before doing the same for Garrus.

"I know, right?" Shepard, voice now coming clipped through a speaker. "Wish I'd worn mine beforehand. Or taken shallower breaths, urgh. Oh well! Onwards and upwards..."

Spying a humanoid figure that appeared to be squatting down by the blast door back towards the colony Shepard brought the Mako to a halt and he and his crew dismounted. What they found was not a person, as had initially been suspected, but rather a creepy, person-shaped monster thing that rose up on their approach.

It had big empty eye sockets, a big rictus grin and big, menacing-looking talons. All in all not what you want to see welcoming you back.

"Okay, now someone's just taking the piss," Shepard said, pointing accusingly at the space zombie. He'd gone his whole military career without having to shoot space zombies, now in the space of a month or so he'd had to shoot through hordes of robo space zombies, and now weird plant space zombies were apparently a thing, too.

He hadn't signed up for this.

The creature then lunged for the three of them. A mistake, given that Shepard and co were enormously heavily armed interstellar murder artists and the monster was, well, a naked monster thing. It did not take more than three steps before pretty much just disintegrating from the weight of fire that got put its way.

"Well, that worked," said Garrus, continuing to keep his gun pointed at the smear that had been the target until a few seconds ago, you know, in case the smear tried anything funny.

Shepard sighed. He often found himself sighing these days.

"More monsters. Is weirdo plant zombies an improvement over weirdo robo zombies?" He asked.

Odd to think he missed the days when it was mainly shooting at slavers and pirates. At least those made sense. You could understand the motivation of a pirate, and they tended to understand warnings. Ignore them, sure, but understand them too.

"It's different?" Tali ventured.

Shepard sighed again.

"Suppose different will have to do," he then straightened, set his jaw. "Alright. Original plan was just to waltz through Zhu's Hope and get to the Thorian, now it looks like there's going to be a lot more shooting. But that's fine. Now we just waltz and shoot."

"What about the colonists?" Garrus asked.

It having been mentioned that the colonists, enthralled by the Thorian, would most likely put up a fight to protect it. Against their better interests, of course, but that's mind control for you.

Shepard slipped a grenade out of his handy-dandy (and surprisingly roomy) grenade box-stroke-pouch and held it up for demonstrative purposes. It looked rather like a sciencey hockey puck.

"Colonists get the gas, we're keeping those guys alive. You two just gun for those weirdo zombie things - my HUD is marking them as 'Thorian Creepers', thanks HUD, not sure how you know that but whatever - I'll sling the grenades. Alright?"

"Right behind you, Shepard."

And so it was.

They came under fire from mind-slaved colonists almost the instant they'd made it through the door, rounds peppering the ground about them. Shepard and friends broke for cover, the Commander himself flinging a grenade off at the colonists as they ran.

Shepard's throwing technique was singular, to say the least, as he somehow always managed to get his grenades to fly in a perfectly straight, flat line, often from an underarm toss, often a lazy one to boot.

How he managed this was, he said, a trade secret.

A second or so after the grenade hit and stuck he detonated it, sending up a great bursting cloud of anti-Thorian gas that saw the two attackers immediately keel over, stone-cold out of it but otherwise unharmed. Hopefully.

"Hah! Works a treat!" Shepard shouted, pumping a fist.

And on they went. Colonists got gas, those handfuls of Creepers that came sprinting towards them - mouths-agape and arms outstretched - got blasted to bits by Garrus and Tali. It was a good system, and with it they cut a swathe through the colony in very good time indeed.

At least until something brought them up short.

They came across a few more Creepers that inexplicably were not reacting to their approach. Even when Shepard walked right up and nudged one with his boot they didn't so much as move a muscle.

"Hello?" He asked.

Nothing happened. Dead to the world.

Not wanting to waste such a golden opportunity Shepard strolled up and shot the thing in the back of the head with his pistol. Nothing happened. Again.

Well, something happened - a big spray of oozy, green blood and goo came spurting forth with much squelchiness - but nothing actually useful happened. The creeper stayed curled up, and its head did not appear unduly damaged.

Shepard tried again, getting similar results.

"This Creeper is all curled up, which makes it invulnerable? That's - that's some technique you got there, son," he said, firing some more, achieving nothing of value.

"Shepard?" Tali asked, crouching behind a wall next to Garrus who was similarly hunkered. Shepard did not hear her.

He'd switched now to his rifle and was happily unloading a constant stream of rounds into the creeper, making a horrible mess and a lot of noise but achieving nothing of value.

Normally such wanton lack of fire discipline would see your weapon overheating, but Shepard's guns were expensive enough and modded enough that he could (and did) just keep the trigger down without concern.

What an age to be alive. In a darker time he might have to reload or else, say, eject a thermal cell or somesuch handwavey techno-device in an action roughly analogous to reloading! Can you even imagine such a thing in the future?

Thankfully, that wasn't an issue, and probably never would be. He'd die before he saw such a thing happen!

"I mean, look at this! Look! It's bleeding but it's not dying! Who can fight something like this? What counter is there to this sort of determination? HOW CAN WE STAND AGAINST THIS DEMONSTRATION OF WILL?!" He asked, having to shout over the sound of gunfire.

"Shepard, the colonists?" Tali asked, poking him in the side. That got his attention.

"Hmm?"

The colonists were still firing on the squad, a clutch of them squatting behind a stack of crates and popping up every so often to take a few shots. Tali and Garrus were holding off on returning fire on account of them wanting to keep everyone alive, focusing instead on keeping their heads down and hoping Shepard paid attention and dealt with the colonists so they could move on.

Rounds zipped overhead and paffed into concrete, a few of the luckier ones pinging harmlessly off Shepard's ludicrously powerful shields. It was not a safe place to be standing around.

"Oh right right, sorry. Hang on," Shepard said, whipping off a quick brace of grenades and sending the firing colonists keeling over in more puffs of anti-Thorian gas.

"Sorry. Got carried away," he said.

The Creeper he'd been shooting chose this moment to finally rise to its feet and Shepard, without looking, pulled his pistol again and shot it in the face. This time it worked a treat, whatever invulnerability the thing had possessed while crouching apparently not applying when it was upright.

"On we go, eh?" He said, slapping his pistol back onto his hip.

"But-" Garrus started to say, pointing to the now-dead Creeper, likely about to ask some very pertinent question about how it was able to soak up infinite fire while curled up and immobile but not when moving. A good question, just not one Shepard felt they would find an answer to, so he raised a hand and cut him off:

"No, no. Don't question it. Let's just not think about it."

The other Creepers then followed the first, standing up and suffering similar, abrupt fates.

"Let's finish this. Shall we?" Shepard said, leading the way.

More tossing and shooting followed, though not a whole lot. It was quickly discovered that the colonists - cunningly - had used a crane to shift something big and heavy over the way downward to the Thorian, thinking that perhaps Shepard would be flummoxed by the crane controls, give up and go home.

No such luck, colonists. Commander Shepard was and is both a master of just about every weapon ever made and also crane controls, too. He is a man of many talents.

"Ta-dah!" Shepard declared, having opened up the way down.

Then there came Fai Dan, leader of Zhu's Hope and their previous main point of contact, swaying out from behind a corner, pistol in hand. He looked to be in a bad way, and that he was clutching his skull and not immediately shooting seemed to suggest he was doing a better job of resisting that mind control than the others had.

"It gets inside your head. You can't imagine the pain," he groaned.

"I bet," Shepard said, readying a grenade. "Now be a good chap and-"

"It wants me to stop you but...I...won't...I WON'T!"

And he then shot himself in the head. The three space adventurers winced in unison.

"Oh dear. That's rough. This job got a lot less fun a lot quick. Hope that's the last person I see shoot themselves in the head," Shepard said. The others gave quiet, non-committal noises of agreement.

A pause.

"Be real unfortunate if I, oh, talked someone into doing it. Can you imagine? Now that'd be traumatic!" Shepard said, breaking the silence, hoping to lighten the tone. In this he failed, and the awkward pause returned with a vengeance.

Shepard cleared his throat.

"Uh, right, anyway. Let's carry on, shall we?" He said, pausing, then saying: "Hey, if that guy just shot himself how come my HUD is still telling me we got sixteen colonists alive? You know what, nevermind. Onwards and downwards."

Down they went, down down deeper and down, into the bowels of the tower.

And there hung the Thorian. It was kind of hard to miss.

Shepard threw a rock at it, just to test the waters. It let kind of a low, angry groan. Probably a bad sign.

"Fleshy so-and-so, isn't it? Doesn't look like any plant I've ever seen. Glad I never went into botany, it doesn't look as much fun as they make it out to be. Still. This may be problematic. Should have brought a bigger gun. Hell, wish I owned a bigger gun."

Shepard had often felt that it was a personal slight against him that, despite living in the future, there were no guns available that were the size of himself and no powered armour the better to carry these huge guns around. Perhaps some sort of armoured feed cable from a backpack ammunition supply? Surely there was a gap in the market for that!

It seemed like an oversight.

Maybe once Saren was dealt with he could see about getting a business started with this niche in mind. After all, surely nothing important could follow on from this particular adventure. It'd all be nice and calm once all this was dealt with. He'd have time to spare!

"Something's happening," Garrus said, nodding to the Thorian. He wasn't wrong, either.

"Oh God, what's it doing?" Shepard said, before the Thorian gobbed up an alarmingly green and shockingly slimy Asari. If any of Shepard's team were to say they'd seen that coming, they would be lying.

"Invaders! Your every step is a transgression!" Said the slimy green Asari, remarkably composed for someone who'd just been spat out by an ancient alien plant.

Shepard blinked.

"Right. That's not something you see every day."

He then shot her, the blast of his shotgun powerful enough to fold her up like a card table and - somehow - send her careening over the edge nearby and yelping into the gloom below.

"Maybe you should have tried talking to them, Shepard," Garrus said in tones that could be read as dangerously close to reproachful. Shepard spread his arms defensively and gestured to the huge bulk of the still-looming Thorian. The Thorian drooled.

"A mind controlling plant monster just vomited them up! That's not how any kind of constructive dialogue starts!" He protested.

"You could have tried…" Tali said.

"Oh come on! You too? Quit ganging up on me! Anyway look it's fine there's another one of her just over there," Shepard said, pointing.

"I will destroy you!" Shouted the freshly-arrived slimy green Asari, glowing blue as she flung something biotic their way.

Further fighting followed.

It was quickly decided that some of the larger, fleshier growths visible on the walls (there were a lot of growths to choose from) were probably something important. It had been Tali that had suggested this, and on blowing the first such growth to bits they had all been rewarded with a tower-shaking grumble of displeasure from the Thorian, which seemed to suggested that she'd been onto something.

So they carried on with that, working their way around and down and up and over, gunning their way through hordes of vomiting Creepers and very persistent green Asari clones (who were very vocal about how they were going to destroy Shepard), blowing apart the fleshy growths one after the other.

With each one that Thorian sounded more and more pained until, with a lurch, the thing seemed to lose whatever grip it had managed to get on the structure of the tower. With a planty wail it tumbled down into the gloom below, crashing wetly onto something that sounded hard and lethal.

Things felt almost painfully quiet after that. Shepard could see the dust settling.

"Phew," he said.

The team's guns then whipped over to a horrible, pulsing blister on the wall which chose this moment to burst and disgorge yet another bloody Asari, flopping her out limply onto the ground in a frankly unnecessary gush of fluids.

"God the Thorian is disgusting, let's just - wait, hang on," Shepard said, holding up a fist and belaying what had about to have been an order to obliterate another target. This Asari wasn't green.

Unsteadily (and slimily) she got to her feet, swaying in place a moment before only then noticing the trio all pointing guns at her. She didn't seem overly phased. Given where she'd some just come from it'd probably take a lot to ruin her day, really.

"Let me tell you what: never get into a position where your employer feels comfortable sticking you inside an ancient alien plant so you can absorb some of its genetic memory and pass the information across," she said, rubbing her head.

Sage advice. Shepard could appreciate the value of this.

"Noted. Now, don't take this the wrong way but I am slow to trust people who fall out of gross, slimy blisters on the wall. I've been hurt before," he said, gun not lowering.

"That's fair. You're Shepard, aren't you?" The Asari asked, squinting at him.

"You knowing my name isn't doing a whole lot to make me feel secure."

"That's also fair. Okay, right, let me break it down for you."

And break it down she did.

Shiala, she was. One of the Commandos in the employ of Benezia. She spun a brief, expository tale of motivations fraying in the face of an inexplicably charismatic Saren who had come here specifically for the Thorian, not for its insidious mind-controlling abilities but rather for the Ciper - what was apparently some ancient, racial memory sort of a deal that'd serve to help unravel the meaning of the otherwise garbled info-blast from the beacon back on Eden prime.

Shepard was kind of annoyed that all of this made perfect sense to him.

How Shiala had come to be inside a foul pustule on the wall was as a direct result of Saren's scheme, her being used basically as a conduit through which Saren had received the Cipher, whereupon he'd made the logical decision to abandon her to her fate and destroy the Thorian to stymie Shepard.

Given that Shepard had been the one to destroy the Thorian, it seemed that plan hadn't gone, well, to plan. But such was life.

And now Shepard was all caught up.

"So how did you get the Cipher over to Saren, then?" Shepard asked once Shiala had wrapped up, knowing in his bones that he was going to have to get it, too. Shiala knew this too, thinking clearly for the first time in weeks and seeing that Shepard was going to have to be the one to put a stop to all this.

"The usual way," she said, limbering up.

"What's the usual way?" Shepard asked.

Shiala paused, closed her eyes. When they snapped open again they were not the eyes she'd had a second previously.

"Embrace eternity!"

"Jesus Christ!" Shepard exclaimed.

A mind journey followed.

Shepard was not a fan of mind journeys.

###THIS IS A LINE BREAK WHY IS FANFICTION SO BAD AT LINE BREAKS ### THAT SCENE IS NOW OVER###

Later, elsewhere in space - a planet named Nodacrux, specifically - Shepard was taking the Mako bouncing and cartwheeling down the side of a mountain towards yet another mysterious bunker lurking in the middle distance, promising adventure and secrets and swag. This sort of thing happened a lot.

Jets flaring he sent the vehicle pinwheeling wildly to a halt just before the entrance.

"Can I drive next time?" Garrus asked, stumbling out of the hatch on unsteady legs while Tali stood nearby, trying to get her head to stop spinning. Shepard strode past, steady as a rock.

"No. Never," he said, stopping just in front of the door to gaze at it longingly and ask himself: "What exciting secrets might this bunker hold?"

It did not take long for the answer to this question to present itself.

"Creepers? Again?! For the love of God!"

Another fluid-soaked firefight through stacked crates followed as Shepard and team fought their way through the bunker to the rear, where hopefully they might find some answers. In the event, they actually found survivors - much to Shepard's surprise.

"Man alive! There are men alive in here. And women, too. Hello there, Commander Shepard - available for miscellaneous shooting and invisible mending. Catch you at a bad time?" Shepard said, giving a wave and then standing with his hands on his hips.

The survivors appeared to be a clutch of scientists and a handful of men in armour. The scientists looked as you might expect any civilian in a crisis to look, which is to say haggard. The men in armour - mercenaries, Shepard assumed, or else some sort of corporate security detail (so basically the same thing) - just looked suspicious and angry. Which is what they were paid to look like.

"Oh thank heavens, you got our distress signal! We're a perfectly benign and above-board research outpost and none of us have any idea how those monsters-" said who looked to be the lead scientist, stepping forward. She didn't get to finish though, as something had caught Shepard's eye.

"Hang on, those are ExoGeni uniforms. This is some weird spin-off of the colony on Feros, isn't it?" He said, wagging a finger at the scientist who came up short.

"I...don't know what you're...talking about…?" She said, convincing absolutely no-one.

"Oh, come off it. This is Thorian bollocks. The place is lousy with Creepers! I shot my way through them to get to you!" Shepard said, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder.

At this the scientist seemed to relax, seeing clearly that the game was up.

"Ah. So you know about the Thorian," she said.

"Know about it? I killed the bloody thing," Shepard said and the scientist's face turned to thunder.

"You killed it? So it's your fault they went out of control!"

Shepard sputtered, not having schlepped across the stars and bounced down mountainsides in a Mako just to have accusations flung his way.

"My fault? You're faffing about in a secret evil bunker with the disgusting spawn of some ancient, malicious plant thing and I'm the one responsible when it goes wrong? When you stick your head into a turbine do you blame the shuttle?"

She ignored this questionable bit of imagery, which was probably for the best.

"We had been making excellent progress. We managed to turn them into a labour force," she said, to more sputtering from Shepard.

"I'm sorry what? Why?! What's the point?! Just pay normal people! Or use fucking robots! It's the future! There has to be a better way! Here's a start: don't bother!"

"Just think of the potential!" The scientist said with a fierce grin and a glint in her eye, clenching a fist before her dramatically.

"What potential? Vomiting plant zombies! I mean, conceptually sure," Shepard continued, turning to his crew for emotional support and not really getting any because they had no idea where he was going with this. "I can see the appeal of a giant evil corporation wanting to research the mind-control side of the thing - that makes sense to me. But these? What the hell is the point! They're gross zombie things! We live in space! I have a device attached to my arm that can literally make spare parts out of goo and you thought this was a good idea? You are so going to jail."

A space jail, presumably.

"You'll never take me alive!" The scientist cried, opening fire and immediately starting to strafe wildly from side to side.

Shepard just stood with his head in his hands, enormously overpowered kinetic barriers flickering more out of politeness than anything else as the rounds did absolutely nothing of note.

"Oh for - you have a pistol! Do you have any idea what my bodycount is at this point?"

Agreeably her bodyguards had actual rifles and these were also adding to the incoming fire, but these were still nothing to write home about. At this point in the endless meta-cycle (of which he was only dimly, distantly aware), Shepard could probably have stood there for five minutes without feeling any the worse for wear.

"I will destroy you!" The scientist yelled.

Shepard sighed. Again.

"I'm so tired of hearing that…"