[Tasale, Exarch Station] Bad Medicine

"Kirok."

Shirin was ragged.

"It's been all of ten seconds since we started on the balloon patch. If waiting less than a minute offends your krogan sensibilities, then by all means, feel free to storm out into the hallway and, I don't know, shoot the guards in the face and set off the alarm and bring down a full quarantine. This is, of course, assuming you're prepared to deal with getting through the security lockdown and local law enforcement response while also juggling a hospital full of screaming useless civilians--"

It had been a long week full of suboptimal situations, and at the moment she had a lot of factors to account for.

"--not to mention the risk of a missed shot down on the quarantine floor, which could break open a containment chamber, which could release all kinds of exotic diseases and specifically-engineered bioweaponry all over the space station, none of which we are prepared to deal with in the spur of the moment, and assuming we survived, would then bring down a multiple-cluster terrorist charge on all our heads until Spectres or Sector Response or the Illium fleet started full-bore hunting for us--"

Good manners were secondary to her cause.

"--so if you want to deal with all that then by all means feel free to step into the leadership role here, but otherwise I'm utilizing my scant modicum of executive power to politely request that you SIT THE FUCK DOWN and wait the thirty seconds it'll take us to finish the balloon, because you are on my last nerve right now and I swear on the Lower House of Parliament that if you keep going on about this, there is going to be a reckoning.."

Yeah, she was cracking. It'd been a really, really bad week.

There was a quiet snicker from the gurney behind Shirin. The sound was quickly squandered a second later, when Cerastes pretended to be clearing his throat in his sleep instead.

Even after 668 years, some things were new to Kirok. Being spoken to in such a way was one.

The krogan in the elcor suit quietly shrank in the corner.

There was an awkward pause as Ana coughed, affixing one of Jil’s jury-contraptions to a balloon. The moment seemed to swell, stretching on longer and longer as various glares and stares crisscrossed the room. Finally, she spoke up.

“Aaaand not to make things more awkward, buuuuuuut Ithinktheballoonsarereadynow.”

Indeed, the quarian was standing back with his hands on his hips and looking from balloon to balloon, seeming quite pleased with himself.

"Well, that was a lot less than fifteen minutes."

Three point two-five-one.
Which could also be described as?
...'a lot less than fifteen'.
Exactly.

Hah. He'd won that one! Things were looking up! Maybe this wasn't the clusterfuck it was vaguely starting to look like!

"So we distribute these, replace the guards by popping them all at once? Some of you go down below while I hole up in the security office and become the god in the machine, we grab the shit and get out of here, right? Couldn't be simpler! Let's do it!"

"Good work. You and I are staying in here until the balloons do their thing, and then we're hiding the bodies in the security room and going about 'business as normal'." Shirin tapped her comm. "Ali, keep the distraction up and see if you can direct traffic away from the checkpoint hallway."

The tac cloak was charged and good to go - and although they were trying to keep casualties to a mininum, if things went south, she was well prepared to pop a couple heads.

She passed the balloons over to the 'nurse' and 'elcor', careful not to accidentally jostle them (just in case). "All right, you two. Go spread some cheer to the guards."

"Obediently: On it."

Kirok zipped back up his costume and walked out of the room, his krogan voice ringing with elcorian cheer.

"Pretty happy: Hello dere, I'm th' elcorgram, come t' give you all a dash of elcor cheer. Ho ho ho. I'm an elcor."

"Sorry ladies I've got to answer." Ali stepping away...

"Roger that... is that Kirok in an elcor suit?" he asked as he saw the elcor leave the room.

"That's ... something else," surprisingly his scalp wasn't itching just yet. "Okay give me minute here."

He snuck away to one of the patient room in the hallway... a few seconds later the life support alarm started to ring. He slipped in another one to do just the same thing.

He slipped out the room just as the first crash-cart entered the first patient's room "Boss, whatever you're planning do it now. The hallway was much emptier.

Two Minutes Later, Down a Different Hallway…

“Helllo, dear-are-you-having-a-good-day-today-faaaabulous, this lovely young man here has come on behalf of the Shepard Memorial Children’s Fund, raising awareness for Type 2 Diabetes – did you know that’s the second-worst eezo-related disease striking young humans down on Earth these-days-such-a-shame-will-you-take-a-balloon? You won’t regret it, brings a cheery warmth to the hearts of the little ones, poor dears-oh-isn’t. He. Adorable?!…”

Kirok looked at Ana expectantly, then shuddered to life when he remembered his queue.

"GREETINGSLY: I AM THE ELCORGRAM, UH, AND I BRING YOU-" He awkwardly held out one of the balloons like some twisted automaton. "-A HAPPY HELPFUL LOAD OF HOLIDAY CHEER. HO HO HO."

As Kirok and Ana left the balloons at the outpost, Shirin pulled up the breath mask on her stealth suit. She affixed the catches with one hand, running a perception module on her omnitool with the other so they could watch through the wall. (There wasn't much to watch, really; this kind of tech was limited both in range and power, and so here she was watching a pair of white smudges interact with another pair of white smudges. Supposedly the geth had a much more sophisticated version (this was a statement that applied to basically everything tech-related), but good luck getting them to part with it. Maybe if she asked Ensemble nicely...

"So far so good. Once the gas does its thing, we move. Uh, let me check the security room before you head in and get to work; after that, I'll be hiding bodies and throwing on a guard suit."

Well, two of the white smudges were starting to move away...

"Here we go."

Meanwhile, Ana was strutting around another guard, this one (being a turian) naturally having the personality of a half-empty jar of peanut butter.

“…and of course they’re having a bad time of it on Dekuuna, too – did you hear how that one Reaper just up and exploded over the plains? Just so. Dreary. And they’re having to deal with all of the effects of it too, all that radiation sickness, not to mention all of the shrapnel – of course, it’s not like it’s been on Earth or Palaven, and definitely not like it’s been on Khar’shan, I’d bet that even our friend here would be willing to say that—“

She stopped to suck at her stylus, the end of which was beginning to look well-worn at this point. It took barely three seconds before she continued blathering on, though, which really wasn’t enough time for Kirok to open his mouth, let alone get a word in edgewise.

“—but of course, that’s like saying Tupari’s a bit more sugary than Paragade, I mean, at some point it really doesn’t matter anymore, at some point it’s all sugar, so why complain about who got the most? We should all just sort of suck it up and take the sugar, you know?...”

Was her speech getting faster?

Kirok, meanwhile, was spreading some of the holiday cheer around by letting the balloons go randomly around the hallways and such. Each one had a big cartoon smile and a "HRRPY HLOIDAYS BI TE ECLROGRAM" written on them. They were possibly the worst balloons ever made.

Which would be why one of the human guards was looking at the balloon with some doubt.

"Hey, you misspelled Holidays on this. And Elcorgram."

"Uhhhhhh...."

And that was the moment Ali's fringe started to itch... he looked over towards the 'elcor' and then the 'nurse' and couldn't really determine who was causing it but he was sure it was one of them...

*POP*

"Whoops. I hope that wasn't too early."

"Eh, they're competent enough to hold their breath. Our guys, I mean. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand..."

At six (long enough for the gas to take effect, not long enough for it to have dissipated totally), Shirin pushed the door open and let Kirok and Ana back into Cerastes' room so they could grab respirators, then zipped towards the guards. The turian was slumped, unconscious, by the security scanner, while the human was still trying to crawl towards the lobby - a good punt to the side of the head put those efforts to rest. Opening the door to the security room, Shirin peered around. No additional guards. Excellent.

She turned to flash a thumbs-up towards Jil, and then set to work dragging the unconscious human into the security room. "Securing the checkpoint. Get on your assignments." There was a set of lockers in the corner, and upon checking, the drell discovered a set of security-issued hardsuits - perfect. She removed one reasonably close to her size and replaced it with the human, then headed back out and started dragging the turian.

So far so good.

The moment the balloons started to pop, Kirok took one deep, krogan breath. He could hold his breath for... well, up to half an hour, honestly. Redundant lungs worked wonders in this type of situation. Pulling open his omnitool, he texted a brief message to the rest of the team as security personnel started to collapse around him.


Message sent, he wriggled out of his elcor suit, revealing the battle-worn golden ceramic armor he always wore in situations like this. Ah, Vakosh Armories. They weren't in business any more, not after getting shut down for sketchy business practices three centuries ago, but goddamn did they make armor to last.

For the record, Ana technically wasn’t. When the balloons went off, she’d simply continued to blather on, that droning voice of hers grating into the guards’ ears like a monotonous hum as they fought to sustain consciousness. The moment the eyes rolled up on the guard she was talking to, she grinned…and sucked in a deep breath.

“Well! That was fun. Let’s do that again some time!”

As she stepped over to pick up a hazmat, she unscrewed the top of her stylus and jammed it up her nose, giving a deep HNNNNNNK of a snort.

Ali put on his rebreather the second the balloons started to pop.

He sent a message back;

Then he moved swiftly towards the security station.

It was probably for the best. Aliquam would at least provide a moderating influence - Shirin had originally planned on going down there herself, but directing traffic up top and making sure there wasn't any interference was probably a better use of her skills.

Having fastened the catches on her security disguise, she dragged out a pair of envirosuits for Ana and Ali - there was nothing for krogan, which was fine because Kirok could probably shake off anything down there. The drell held off on giving orders, since there was no need to weigh Jil down with tasks - right now, all he needed to focus on was getting into the network so they could figure out where the target was. Everything else (erasing the camera footage, removing Cerastes' DNA from the records, and so on) could wait another few minutes.

After all, if the plan went properly, there wouldn't be much to do over the next hour. With backdoor access, she could probably take care of the lesser tasks herself.