Shepard strode out of the stairs, giving a quick nod to Pressley as she mounted the short platform for the galaxy map. "Joker, set us a course for Virmire," she ordered, the comm carrying her voice up to the pilot station.

"Sure – uh, wait one, priority communication from Admiral Hackett, Commander. He wants to see you in the message room." Shepard raised an eyebrow at this, staring up the length of the ship, managing to catch Joker's shrug. "He won't say over an unencrypted channel."

"Understood. Tell him it'll be just a moment." Turning, she walked around the bulkhead separating the briefing-slash-message room from the CIC. Once the door closed behind her, the left-most holographic display lit up with the scarred admiral. "Sir, what can the Normandy do for you today?" she said, her voice slightly humorous. Certainly her team had cleared up any number of problems for one of the most decorated officers in the Alliance.

"Shepard, I know you're hot on Saren's trail, but I want a stealth ship on this. Head for Eden Prime. After the beacon was stolen, the remaining archeologists went back to the dig site in the hope of finding something else of importance." She raised both eyebrows at this, and he nodded gravely. "They did. Buried twenty meters below the beacon was an intact human corpse."

She knew her jaw dropped at that one, but the news was rather astounding. "Ah, sir, are we sure this isn't some diversion from Saren?" Hackett nodded decisively. "Then we'll head straight there in full stealth mode until we land on the planet."

"Thank you, Commander. Try not to run over anything important in the Mako?" he asked rhetorically, his hologram blipping off before she could respond.

Muttering under her breath, "That was one freaking time! In basic!" she turned around, striding back to the galaxy map. "Joker, engage stealth mode, and set EMCON Alpha." She waited, looking around the CIC as her crew made the adjustments, turning off various systems to fully mask their presence. "Set course for Eden Prime."

Several people, including Pressley, turned to look at her in surprise. "You heard me. We're making a quick run for the Alliance that could have much further-reaching consequences than a couple of hours chasing Saren." She hoped, anyway. If she saved evidence of Prothean interference in human development, only to have the geth destroy the Citadel, she was going to feel really, really dumb.

They arrived in system, pulling quickly into orbit around Eden Prime, remaining in stealth mode right up until Joker dropped the Mako less than a hundred meters away from the dig site. Their vehicle roared up as Shepard stepped on the accelerator, ignoring the protests of Kaiden and Liara from the back.

The scientists nearly opened fire before realizing the roaring metal beast was a friendly vehicle, and they slewed to a sudden stop next to one of the new pre-fab buildings. "Are you quite certain that Commander Shepard is qualified to operate moving vehicles?" Liara asked as they disembarked.

"Mostly. For all I know she got a black-market counterfeit license," Kaidan replied, winking at Shepard as she rolled her eyes.

Two of the scientists, sensibly carrying handguns, approached quickly. "I'm Commander Shepard. Admiral Hackett sent me to retrieve the newest artifact," she said simply. Their protests died, and moving into guard-escort positions, they led her to a more secure pre-fab in the rear of the dig site. A trio of Alliance marines saluted her before letting them in.

Inside, laid out under a stasis field, was a human corpse, though "intact" wasn't how Shepard would have described it. The body was covered with so many scars, injuries and tattoos, that the skin resembled something more like leather. The odd part was the utter lack of decay, since as far as she could see, even the soft tissue like eyes and nose were still intact. He was dressed, if it could be called that, in a rough loincloth and a baldric made of bone pieces held together with metal wire. His hands were clasped around a skull clutched face to his chest. "By the Goddess," Liara whispered.

Shepard looked around the lab, deciding on a scientist at random, and gesturing him over. "Give me all the details," she ordered.

"Ah, yes, our friendly Spectre," he replied with ill grace. "Several hundred pages with all the important details and every theory right down to the tinfoil hat have been encrypted and sent to Arcturus already, but I'll give you the highlights. When we did our scans, we found an area of higher density that roughly matched that of a coffin. Hoping that we'd managed to find a Prothean burial site, we excavated as rapidly as possible, and found him." He waved one hand irritably at the corpse while sipping a mug of coffee. "Yes, we've done all the tests, and came up with wildly inconsistent readings. The soil surrounding him was, on all sides, almost uniformly dated back to sixty thousand years ago."

"The beginning of the expansion of the Prothean empire," Liara spoke up, already taking notes on her omni-tool.

"Yes," he drawled out, glaring at the alien before continuing. "The corpse himself, who we took several small tissue samples, dated back to a 'mere' thousand years, which as you understand, had us quadruple-checking all of our instrumentation."

"I've got a quarian mechanic on board," Shepard replied dryly, "if you really want to be sure of your equipment."

"As far as we can tell," he continued, ignoring her reply completely, "there was no stasis field surrounding the body, so no one even knows what the hell is going on."

Shepard turned around towards Liara. "You're the Prothean expert," she said, "Have you even heard of Protheans keeping dead bodies of any other species? We know they observed us from Mars, and were on the Hanar homeworld."

The archeologist took the question seriously, moving to a chair and thinking deeply for several minutes while Kaidan circled the body, examining it from all angles. "I've never heard of anything like this. What actually concerns me is that based on the soil samples, this body pre-dates the Mars installation by nearly four thousand years."

Kaidan whistled, looking up from the body. "That's … kind of scary impressive."

"Indeed," Liara answered piously. "Did your orders from Admiral Hackett forbid us from taking any additional samples or recordings?"

Shepard shook her head. "No, but we do need to get it to Arcturus as quickly as possible." She turned back to the angry scientist. "Get me as many bodies are needed to move this thing into the Mako."

An hour later, they were back on board, Chakwas and Shepard watching as Wrex casually pulled the entire stasis pod out of the Mako and set it on the floor. "Where did you want this body, anyway?" the krogan asked. "He's kind of ugly looking. Scars are good, but this guy took it too far."

"Follow me up to medical," Chakwas said. "We're going to keep it under observation for the couple of hours we'll take to get to Arcturus." With some awkward maneuvering, the three of them all managed to fit into the elevator with the pod, and Kaidan and Ashley kept the curious crewmembers on the far side of the tables.

Inside medical, Wrex set it down on the table, and the rest of Shepard's team filtered inside. "Alright, turn off the stasis mode," Shepard ordered, and with the press of a few buttons, Tali deactivated the shimmering energy field. "Liara, Doctor, get your samples now. We might not get another chance to see anything like this ourselves."

They set to work rapidly, standing on opposite sides of the tables. Garrus and Wrex, both quickly bored with it all, left after a few minutes, though Tali remained for several more, running her own set of scans with her omni-tool. Shepard figured the quarian would forward the data to the Migrant Fleet, but she didn't see how yet another mystery would help the homeless nomads. Eventually she left too, preceded only briefly by Ashley and Kaidan.

"Liara, can you pull gently on that arm? I want to see if I can turn the skull enough to see the teeth on the skull he's holding," Chakwas asked, tweaking her own omni-tool. The asari closed both hands carefully around the forearm of the scarred corpse, and tensing, pulled gently as the doctor took hold of the skull top and bottom and moved to rotate it.

Instead, the skull slipped completely from his grasp, rolling down the table to stop between the feet of the corpse, staring at Shepard. Literally staring, she took in with a moment of detached shock, as the pair of completely intact eyes rolled in their sockets and gave her a lavicious feet-to-face once-over. "I've died again and gone to Celestia!" he said.

Liara screamed as the skull floated into the air, drifting off towards the back corner of the med bay. "I don't suppose you can tell me what you were doing buried on a colony underneath an alien artifact?" Shepard asked calmly, trying very hard to ignore the senseless gibbering that one corner of her mind was doing while she carried on a conversation with a disembodied floating skull.

"Ah, no, can't say that I do." The skull then turned back towards the corpse, floated over him, and quite calmly facebutted him. "Boss! Wake up! There are some incredibly hot women here!" The skull turned towards Liara, who had circled behind the last med bay in line and was glowing with biotic power. "I don't know what species some of them are, but they're worth it!"

Shepard's sense of incredulity was stretched even further as the scarred corpse suddenly raised one hand to his face, rubbed it hard where the skull had just bashed him, and then opened his eyes. "Morte?" he rasped out, "What are you doing here?" He sat up, staring around an unfamiliar metal and glass room. "What am I doing here?"

"What's the last thing you remember?" Chakwas asked, moving in right away with her omni-tool, murmuring quietly to herself, "heartbeat normal, respiration 90%, blood pressure slightly elevated."

He looked at her, then down at his hands, then at the skull, then at Liara, and finally at Shepard. The skull, Morte he'd called it, was floating on the other side of the table from Liara, obviously respecting her power without recognizing it, and not stopping from waggling his eyebrows and grinning at her nervousness.

"The last thing I remember was standing on the Negative Material Plane, surrounded by the bodies of my friend, and willing the destruction of my soul," he answered harshly. A moment later, he reached one hand up to his shoulder, peeling off a patch of skin with a tattoo of a sigil Shepard felt like she should recognize.

"That sounds a little extreme," she responded, and he returned his gaze from the doctor to her. "I'm kind of glad it didn't work."

He blinked, looking down at his hands again before looking back at her. "That's the thing – it did work," he said. "I felt my soul destroyed in the same instance that oblivious came crashing down upon me. Yet I still only feel as though my soul is missing instead of destroyed." Frowning suddenly, he leaned over, grabbing Morte across the top of the skull and yanking it over to him. "How did you survive?"

Struck with a sudden bout of nervousness, the skull began flicking his eyes back and forth while he answered. "Eh, you know, your mortality couldn't touch me the way it did the others. I didn't have a life to turn into a shadow." The nameless man lifted Morte to stare into his eyes for several moments, then released it.

He stood up, and Shepard, no slouch herself, found herself looking up and up at him. The man hadn't seemed that large on the table, but now he seemed to rival a krogan for size, and was nearly a full head taller than her. "Do you have a name?" she asked him.

He considered the question very carefully. "For a long time, I did not, because it served me better to remain hidden." Carefully, he held out one large hand to her. "I think, for now, I will continue that habit. You may simply call me Nameless." She shook his hand, noting idly that his hands were the size of her armor gauntlets.

She glanced at the tattoo he'd peeled off like a cheap decal and cleared her throat. "I'm Commander Shepard, Alliance military," she watched his face carefully as she made her introductions, "This is Doctor Chakwas, and that is Liara T'Soni." He gave a respectful nod to both of them. "I'm under orders to bring you to Arcturus Station for, ah, investigation by the Alliance military." He frowned, obviously not liking the sound of that. "I think they'll understand rather quickly that they're dealing with a very confused person, not a recovered thousand-year-old corpse."

"But I am a thousand year old corpse," he said. Without warning, he lunged for her, ripping the pistol out of her pocket. Liara threw a singularity at him, and Nameless started floating up into the air along with several pieces of medical equipment, but instead of turning the gun on them, he held it in his hand, puzzled with the device. "This is a weapon, I could tell from the way your hand twitched towards it when I sat up, but it has no cutting edge and is too small to strike with force. Is it enchanted?"

The singularity popped, sending him crashing to the ground, and when he stood up, he had dropped the pistol for a laser scalpel. "This looks more like I'm used to," he said, and then suddenly reversed the handle, plunging the glowing energy blade into his chest. In shock, all three simply watched him crumple to the floor.

"Eh, give him a minute, he should be up and around like new," Morte piped up from where he floated. Shepard turned to look at the skull incredulously as Ashley and Kaidan came pounding back in, weapons at the ready. Both Alliance stopped at the door, staring in shock at the disarray and the body on the floor.

"Hold fire … I think," Shepard said, watching Nameless. A few seconds later, he suddenly inhaled sharply, the laser scalpel falling away from his body as he lurched to his feet. Despite the command, Ashley immediately leveled her assault rifle, blowing several rounds right into him, and sending him crashing back to the floor. "Tell me you all saw that?"

"Yeah, the freaking sixty thousand year old corpse just got up off the floor!" Ashley said, her eyes wide with shock. Crew members were gathering around behind her, though leaving a wide gap after the sudden weapons fire. "Commander, what the fuck is going on?"

With some trepidation, Shepard retrieved her pistol, holding it mostly for reassurance. "When he gets back up again, try not shooting," she said.

"Yeah, he might get a little annoyed at that," Morte replied as he floated over everyone's head to end at breast height a few feet away from Ashley.

"Holy shit it's a floating skull!" Ashley all but shrieked, swinging the butt of her rifle at the skull as it nimbly dodged just out of her reach.

"Sounds like I missed all of the … excitement," Garrus trailed off as he stepped up behind the two Alliance soldiers, looking over their soldiers as Nameless rose again to his feet. "Wasn't this guy dead an hour ago?" he asked rhetorically.

Nameless turned to look at Ash, examining her weapon closely as she agonized over whether to shoot him or Morte. "That is quite puissant wizardry," he said. "Commander, was it? I hope you don't require any more demonstration of what I am."

"What just happened?" Wrex asked, shoving Garrus and Kaidan to one side as he came lumbering up. He locked eyes with Nameless for several moments. "You look fairly lively for a dead man," he said.

"You have no idea," Morte said, bobbling a little as the krogan whirled to the side, eye to eye with him. "How many people are going to ask that question, anyway?"

Almost as though waiting for the question, Tali came threading her way through the crowd, stopping between Wrex and Kaidan, pausing and pointing a finger at Nameless. "Wasn't he dead?" she asked.

"Alright!" Shepard shouted loud enough for the gathered crew to hear her. "I need to debrief our archeological visitor first. Anything important will be passed down to the crew. Return to your duty stations!" As almost everyone started to disperse, she gave a mental sigh. "Not you, Tali. Everyone in my squad, to the briefing room. Follow me, Nameless," she spoke the last word with a clear helping of doubt.

They trooped up the stairs together, striding past the CIC crew that couldn't leave their stations and into the briefing room. "Joker, get Admiral Hackett on the line, now." After a few minutes, during which Shepard got a rather confusing overview of Sigil, the holographic display came to life. "Admiral," she spoke before he could, "I'd like you to meet Nameless, the body found under the Prothean beacon." Without any preamble, she then drew her pistol and shot him right in the heart.

"Commander Shepard! What the hell is wrong with you? The body turned out to be alive and you just blew him away?" Hackett had gone from confused to furious in the length of a gunshot, and she felt fairly sure that if, for some reason, Nameless didn't get back up, she would see a firing squad.

"How do you get the ghost to appear on command?" Morte asked, and the admiral's anger was, if not deflected, at least greatly confused by the appearance of a floating, talking skull.

"Sir, from what I've come to understand, well," she hesitated a moment to try and phrase it correctly, "this sounds like something from a bad fantasy novel, but Morte here, and Nameless, seem to hail from some kind of alternate dimension. They can't tell us anything about the Protheans."

"Don't even know what they are," Morte added. "Or the incredibly beautiful blue chit, either." He waggled his eyebrows at Liara, who looked vaguely horrified at the mere idea.

"Shepard, are you trying to tell me," his voice suddenly cut off with his own jaw-dropping moment as Nameless suddenly sat up, picking himself up from the floor and flicking his own blood off his chest. "How … how did you do that?" he quietly asked Nameless directly.

The scarred warrior sighed heavily. "It was a curse, of sorts. Unique, and with a heavy downside that I would not wish on anyone," he said, the very air seeming to ring with truth.

"Alright, Shepard. This is highly unusual, but," he paused to look at Morte one last time, "continue with your mission. Bring Nameless in for a debriefing after you've managed to stop Saren."

"Understood, Admiral. Shepard out." She disconnected the communication, and leaned heavily against the railing next to the display. "Nameless, I'll have Pressley assign you to a bunk, and we'll see what we can do to integrate you into the crew. I don't suppose you have combat experience?"

He smiled wanly. "Only in melee combat, though I'll see if there's anything I can do to reconstruct my spellbook."

"Your … spellbook?" Kaidan asked skeptically. "You know what, on second thought, never mind." The group slowly filed out, Nameless and Morte still trailing Shepard and Liara, respectively.