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1) Starting with Torfan.
What exactly happened there? From the snippets we’ve gathered. Somebody named General Tyrson, Shepard messed-up with some pretty ass – ‘the wish of the SA’ of messing up the operation and getting the SA more ships. And Dragunov, killing said General.
Was there some other motive, beside wanting more ships against the Batarians? And, how did Dragunov manage to execute a General so easily – since as I’ve read, all high-ranked military commanders are supposed to be nobles. So wouldn’t Dragunov, have gotten a court-martial for simply killing a General?
Mindoir was basically a mess.
General Tyrson was a very highly placed general who was also involved with certain black projects, specifically ones that were not covered in the Cerberus Files. Tyrson was extremely distrustful of the Citadel Council and felt limited by the funding given to the SA Military and the Treaty of Fairaxen.
He felt that the SA was too confident in the forces they had, and if he could engineer a crushing defeat that he would be able to pitch the concept that they needed more money and to lift the treaty restrictions.
Tyrson also hated Preston Kyle, since the woman Kyle married was one that Tyrson wanted, and that Kyle was rising through the ranks so fast after Mindoir.
Tyrson was ultimately the pawn of several influential figures (no I’m not saying who) that wanted to profiteer from a wider war. They sent in an attack force that was woefully understrength to take out a Fist of Khar’shan base, and then they alerted the batarians to the attack, with a hint that if the batarians could crush the human forces, politically it might make the Alliance back off from the Skillian Verge.
Tyrson used a woman to distract Shepard, and bribed one of her teammates to turn on her. Shepard ended up killing both, and once the N7s managed to pull off a victory, Tyrson’s nominal allies cleaned up anything that lead to them and threw him to the wolves — i.e. Dragunov.
Tyrson was not a noble — he achieved his rank via being made a Knight of Grace.
2) What is the stint with Mindoir here?
As it has been written, Mindoir had happened. More, to the scale – that the SA has written of their Officer Edition Manual; that any and all batarians are to get a bullet. And you become more reliable the more batarians you kill.
So, what the heck did the batarians did to Mindoir?
Mindoir was the very first raid batarians made on humans. They massacred hundreds of children because they felt they were not worth taking captive, same with pregnant women. And they broadcast the shit, thinking it would terrify and cow humanity.
Kyle tore them apart, along with enraged marines, and that got transmitted too, which resulted in a lot of bad blood as batarians got to see their elite solders getting owned before the propaganda filters in the Hegemony went up.
3) Elysium and Admiral Branson
Same question here. All the snippets have said – is that Elysium was a honey-trap/fake-glory moment for Branson. And that Branson, is more-so, somekind of puppet for somebody.
What are Elysium’ skeletons?
Elysium was a setup.
The SA knew the batarians were going to raid the world, and the general in charge was out of favor. They could have easily shattered the raid en route, but instead they allowed it to hit, and then rushed in six DACT units to back up Branson, making him look like a hero despite the fact that the batarians killed thousands.As to the why? Branson’s father had discovered the same things Shepard did about Victor Manswell and had blackmail material.
4) Dirth
No information ot this, in canon. Or much on the Cerberus Files.
What did happen on Dirth? The only information the OSABC has revealed: ‘it might have been a cluster-fuck’, ‘some major fighting happened’, ‘marines went through the meat-grinder as usual and pulled the batarians along with them’ and ‘then victory-statue was erected’.
That’s pretty much it, except that the SA wanted to write off colonists and Shepard wouldn’t do that.
5) Suggestion: Batarian Squadmate?
Any ideas or hopes, of Shepard recruiting a batarian as a teammate? Since it has been stated in canon, to gather the best fighters and agents in the Galaxy. So, wouldn’t there be somebody experienced and good among the batarians? Not all of them, could be butt-murdering slavers…right?
Not … likely.
6) Speculation: Only Normandy
Why was it a retarded idea, to only send the Normandy through? It had been stated that the Tartarus Debris Field, would demolish any ship coming through. Unless it had the Reaper IFF – and also added the Relay Drift. Any large fleet would be torn to shreds – so a single ship does seem, workable in theory.
It’s retarded for a couple of reasons. First, no one could have known about the debris field before they went through, so planning for that would have made zero sense.
Second, it assumes the Collectors did not put up any static defenses around the relay. Which would be pretty stupid on their part. If you have one ship and its taken down by defenses on the way in, now what?
Finally, and most importantly: You’ve spent billions on bringing back the dead and gathered up some of the most impressive fighters in the galaxy in a one-shot attempt to take out the Collector HQ…and you send them in BLIND? With no recon? No attempt to replicate the IFF and send in a probe? No backup?
No military commander would go along with that plan.
7) Suggestion: Anti-Matter plus Eezo
What would the result be? If you mixed eezo and anti-matter. Large explosion or nothing?
There seemed to be some fuel-air-eezo mix bombs around. How do they work in practice? Fuel and air, well we know how those work. But how does the addition of eezo factor into this?
Eezo wouldn’t really react any differently than any other matter, big boom.
Fuel-air-eezo explosives work because they use eezo to power compression fields. The fuel is supercompressed and when the bomb goes off, the eezo detonates and releases the fields. The rapid expansion means a higher fuel air mix and a much more powerful explosion that also scatters eezo contamination everywhere.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Minsta is one of those people who can justify almost anything, and he has a pretty dim view of commoners and the public to begin with.
That being said, its extremely unlikely that Minsta would react well to the concept. Not because it’s horrible, but because his own Family and himself would lose power and prestige. He’d be far more likely to recommend keeping it quiet and just eliminating the Manswells.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
…to be more clear. I never said Ilos was destroyed by the Nova.
Just that it was ‘gone’.
You grasp quite quickly what should have been an ME plot hole about the Conduit. Consider also that Vigil was the one who turned it ON in the first place … yet did not attempt to destroy it himself.
Again, Vigil is a machine, and is hard coded to ignore or not even consider certain things. And the Inusannon are fucking trolls. This cannot be overstated.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Well, I can tell you that Ilos is definitely gone, and the star definitely went nova.
*smiles tightly*
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
I think I listed a few in the Human Cerberus files.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8689163/7/The-Cerberus-Files-Addenda-The-Systems-Alliance
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
1) Why did humans, get the short end of the biological stick?
There are two main reasons, one in-story and one out of story.
The out of story reason is that I hate the whole “Humanity, fuck yeah” thing with a passion. I hate stories where you have aliens who’ve been in space since humans were fucking around with swords and yet we catch up to them technologically in no time at all and then surpass them easily. I’m also sick of making humans out to be special.
In both physical and mental terms, humanity has three advantages: First, we are far, far better at improvising and adapting technology, or the creative use of technology, than most other races. Second, humans are the most resistant to indoctrination out of any of the Premiseverse races. Third, human can survive on less food and water, and under higher levels of pollution, than other races.
These things will be very valuable when the Reapers come.
2) What is the damn deal with those Dreadnoughts?
Concentration of firepower, forward basing and psychology.
The cruiser and heavy cruiser are actually the main killing power for most massed fleets, but only so many ships can transition a relay at one time, and with drift comes the chance of collision or emerging from a relay inside another ship. A dreadnought carries enough firepower and armor that no single ship of the line or even group of ships can take it out in the time it can hold the relay steady for other ships of the line to show up.
DN’s also carry specialized facilities and equipment smaller ships don’t have space for — asari and salarian DN’s carry ship repair facilities, turian DNs carry Palavanus-manned medical clinics and spirit shrines, human DNs carry large amounts of fighters, etc. They also carry staggering amounts of both supplies and generation equipment, specialized C4I gear, etc. They can therefore act as forward mobile bases, supply depots and repair facilities.
Finally, dreadnoughts are psychologically powerful. Most of them were modeled after the huge ships the Hanar fielded in the very first combat they had with the asari and salarians, and the images and impact that had stuck with the races. The refit and creation of the Destiny Ascension also played a role.
The Treaty of Fairaxen was mostly put in place to give the turians the feeling they were ‘important’ or in charge. Salarians and asari focus much more on crusers than dreadnoughts, and so giving up an advantage in that regard didn’t mean much. It also allowed them to cripple the military forces of associate races to the point where none could hope to build enough military power (in DNs’) to perform a rapid decapitation strike on the Citadel.
3) What made Kai Leng, what he is?
I can’t answer that question yet, Dave.
4) Why does the Council have a ‘AI-kill-it-kill-it’ fetish?
They have had several scares, but when I get around to writing up the Salarian stuff on the Group of Zero this will make more sense. To put it shortly, AI + nanotech + lots of unmonitored stars off the beaten path = Von Neuman machine nightmare.
The Geth were not the first time they’d been threatened by AI, as both salarian and turian experiments with it went out of control and threatened their races.
5) Why are there no pets?
Because I am a shit writer and have not included any in the story. They exist (well, cats do. Most dogs … did not survive. Rabbits are actually the most common house pet on Sol.)
6) How did Premise!Cerberus and its bases, fall so rapidly in OSABC?
The AIS knew of some. The STG knew of some. The Shadow Broker knew of some. The Shifter knew of some. All of this data was combined and Cerberus, despite its cell structure, did not maintain good information security at some of the Iron and Shadow facilities.
But when you think further, there is only one person inside Cerberus who could have benefited from the destruction of most of the organizations physical assets and the death or removal of The Shadow Hand and the Iron General, and it wasn’t Jack Harper.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
In the Premiseverse, that side mission happened already, as Liethr points out — it’s why Watson is so fortified now.
The Batarian Empire , however, would not want to antagonize the SA at this point in time given their smaller forces and territory.
Several other side missions in both ME1 and ME2 are handled by Delacor, including the fallout of a certain Dantius.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
It’s not a bad idea at all, but I don’t have the bandwidth to do it, considering all the other stuff I have going on right now.
I have no problem with someone else taking a stab. Or even a round robin kind of thing.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
That time of the week again. When the brain-itch has resurfaced. Just shows you kids, wear a full-sealed hazard-suit when handling hanar.
Goody 😀
1) Who is P.?
So, is there something to this guy? Is he a simple turian!clown-Joker? The result of the Palavanus playing with trans-turianism? Or something else?
NPC200 is both correct and incorrect. P. is a position passed down. P. is also a single identity. P. is … both a living being, and the ancient artifact that enables P. to be P.
P. is the result of some very unwise decisions and experiments on the part of the Palavanus with some very ancient, very dangerous technology, in trying to correct the failings of the turians.
What they unleashed instead is, luckily, not a friend of the Spirits.
I’d tell you straight out, but that would ruin all the fun!
2) Shepard as a Commissar…
This is a ‘what if’ kind of scenario. But she has stated, or has been recorded stating in the STG/Cerberus files – that she ‘kinda’ liked how the Commisars were.
If the unthinkable happened – how would Shepard had been as a Commissar? Would she have reached a point high-enough to get her brain, under her own control? Been another ‘mook’ or been that ‘OMG-its-that-Commissar-run-for-the-hills’ kind of Commissar?
Shepard very well could have been picked up by the Commissariat press gangs if she’d not fallen into the clutches of the Tenth Street Reds. As a biotic, she would have become a Second Gen Commissar, probably a Brute rather than a Seducer.
Ultimately without the further violence and drug use to fuck her up more, she might have recovered from her childhood in much the same way that Susan did. It is unlikely, however, that she would have amounted to much more than any other run of the mill commissar.
3) How much of this, is Liara’ fault?
In the end, as you will see, all of it. 😀
And by that, I mean – how much would have changed, if somebody had slapped the ‘my-way-or-high-way’ attitude out of Liara in her youth. Bashed into her skull, that her mother ‘might’ have been just looking out for her – like any normal mother or parent. Where would she have been now?
I think a point has to be made here about exactly why Benezia did what she did even before Saren.
Benezia learned a horrible truth about Athame not long after watching Aethyta walk out of her life. By the time Liara was old enough to make any kind of choices — or even talk — the damage had already been done and was slowly festering.
Benezia ultimately, despite rising to the highest ranks of the Temple, despite being the matriarch of one of the most honored of the Houses of the Thirty, despite being named ambassador, despite being the leader of a huge matriarchal cult, felt powerless.
She’d never been intended to rule, seeking instead simply to be a historian. She’d never thought much on mating, being manuvered and twisted into bonding with a turian and then watching him be murdered. She’d never intended to be a Justicar or spend two centuries sunk into that hellish cesspit of anger. She never expected to have to fight in a war, and watch her family die. She never expected to have to save the family, and then to have it all fall apart on her, and watch the person she loved more than anything in the universe walk out on her.
Aethyta, ultimately, set events into motion that she could hardly forsee, and ensured that millions would die. Liara’s stubborn nature only accelerated the process, and even if she had been obedient would not have been able to stop it.
Would Shepard have died in the Normandy attack – if she just had, jumped into the escape-pod with Joker and Pressly and not minded, if any of the other escape pods had been shot down?
If Liara had not changed Shepard, Shepard would have lost her mind to the Beacon. Assuming that the Alliance had a mind-healer step in and stop the degradation long enough to let Shepard finish the fight?
Hard to say. Shepard, even before Liara, was not a person to throw away the lives of her soldiers for no good purpose. She may have made the decision that the Alliance needed to know that the Normandy had been compromised and get detailed scans of the attacker back to them if not for Liara.
On the other hand, if not for Liara, Shepard would have died at the hands of Rachel Florez. Sort of a moot point.
4) Why this Cycle – and not the others?
It has very little to do with this cycle, or anything in the Milky Way at at all, and more to do with the fact that the Leviathans have determined there are now enough Reapers to do battle with the Darkness and have the outcome favor what they want to happen.
Ultimately, Lethath has manipulated a great many events, tweaked the flow of time and even ‘cheated’ in a few places to make things happen. The Reapers are not incompetent enough to merely overlook the Inusannon and Tho’ian — they were shielded from detection by Lethath without even knowing it. And when the time was right, he adjusted their mental state to begin his plans.
Inusannon and Tho’ians can laugh off indoctrination because it’s a weak, fake-ass imitation of the real power of the Influence a Leviathan has.
In the end, this cycle isn’t special. Many of the moving pieces — and the ability to survive what happens in ME3 — is solely due to the intervention of Leviathans.
They aren’t any better than the others. Merely in the right place at the right time.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
The brain droppings are actually a good thing, as I see it, since they cover lots of stuff the story itself doesn’t cover.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
I fear I gave away waaay too much in that thread, especially about Uressa.
1) Not sure where you get that there’s not a lot of anti-turian sentiment in the SA. Both Earth First and Terra Firma are frothing at the mouth angry at the little-guy level at the Hierarchy even today, at least the older people.
But it was thirty years ago, and the younger generation has forgotten or never experienced it. Part of the problem is the stories don’t show much from the view of older people who lived through it. Ahern commented on this in his interview with Wong.
Wong checked her datapad. “The war was deeply traumatic for many people. A lot of humans still dislike and distrust turians for it. Given that you lived through it, what do we who were born after it need to know?”
Ahern rubbed his chin as he thought. “Damn good question. I think the biggest take-away is that most of the bitterness and dislike us older citizens have towards the turian is not racism. We saw their armies burn and kill our loved ones, shatter our cities, blow our fleets out of the sky. They thought themselves perfectly justified to commit all out genocide, and from what I heard if not for one asari woman with a spine, the Citadel would have let them do it.”
He folded his arms. “None of us are going to forget or forgive that. I won’t make very many friends by saying this, but the reaction to anything going wrong with galactic stability appears to be pretty hostile. They offed the rachni, damn near offed the krogan, and didn’t bother to help the quarians. Cut the batarians aloose at the first sign of a problem.” He gave a cold smile. “Kids today who tell us we need to ‘let go of the past’ didn’t live through it. You didn’t grow up in shit, struggling to make ends meet, and just when you get things going good again lose everything to a pack of cowards who’s idea of ‘honor’ is to assault people weaker than them while outnumbering them ten to one.”
He exhaled. “It’s a touchy issue, ma’am. I think the Alliance has done a good job in closing many of the old scars of the First Contact War, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to forget what caused them in the first place.”
Turians can’t go anywhere in Alliance space without pretty shitty treatment. Now, outside of the Alliance? A lot of the wildcat colonies had no issues with the turians beating the crap out of the Alliance, and most humans who leave Alliance space are live and let live types.
But AAT also has a good point. A lot of people ‘in the know’ realize the turians are at least trustworthy, whereas while many civilians idolize asari and hate turians, most of what the asari have done for humanity is less an equal trade and more pats on the head.
Ultimately? Marines in the SA have trained with turians in various war games for the past twenty years, and are less inclined to blind racism because they can see the turian as a person. Rachel Florez’s ‘turian kill it kill it’ viewpoint is held by a good third of all humans, while another third are distrustful of the turians and the Hierarchy.
2) Military Gear:
The main reasons are simple: the same reason our American soldiers are sent out with out fucking interceptor plates in their armor, or decent spall linings in the APCs, or fuck-ass fuel hoses in our attack choppers. Money and politics.
The High Lords don’t give a flying fuck about wasting money or resources, and they CERTAINLY don’t care about casualties. What they worry about is open revolt, and that the military will turn on them. That is what is the primary reason why they tend to enoble badasses, why they make knighthoods a thing for command officers, why they have Commissariat bombs on every ship and spies in every unit.
A more subtle reality is that the Alliance hasn’t faced open war with anyone but the batarians for a long time — and against anything but the Fist or the SIU, even the crap gear marines had was sufficient in most cases. Unfortunate attacks like Mindoir and assaults like Torfan were rare, while fucking assbeatings like Dirth — where even with half the marines shot out of the sky they fucked up eight times their number in batarians — were the norm.
They expend so much money on the Solguard and First fleet because 85% of humanity still lives in Sol or Arcturus. The rest of the Alliance primarily only provides raw materials and food. To a point, the High Lords don’t worry much about their borders because with only a few exceptions there’s no real gain in taking those worlds.
The military sees the problem quite clearly. But they are all, almost to the last, now members of the nobility or knights themselves. There’s a very sharp and wide divide between most officer types and their people — Shepard didn’t do that because she was never ‘trained right’, but she is very much the exception.
3) Richard Williams cares about Richard Williams.
To the extent that he cares about his family, he’s equally convinced that they simply not in line with his thinking. He is also a vast hypocrite in most things. At the same time, he still would not be the heir of the Family if it were restored.
But ultimately you are asking the wrong question. A restoration of the Williams Line would focus IMMENSE scrutiny on him — something he certainly does not want now that he has been ‘adopted’ by the Manswells. He’s powerseeking above sentimental.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
The STG and the SIX:
I’m not sure this will even come up until the ME4 piece, or late ME3. Less spoiler, more backgroundy.
The STG’s whole purpose is to asses threat and proffer guidance that allows the SIX to ensure salarian dominance. Not survival, dominance. Anything else is seen as a threat to the race.
Obviously, they’ve always come in second to the asari, even if you don’t factor in the Hanar Ascendancy. The STG faithfully followed every order until the SIX fucked up multiple times in a row (nearly sparking a war with the Asari over the life-extension shit, bad tactical analysis that almost got them wiped against the Rachni, letting Okeer stop them from genociding the Krogan, getting involved in the Second Refusal War).
The STG finally said, no, this is bullshit, and went to the Wheel Priests, pleading that the SIX needed to be deposed.
In canon Mass Effect, the internal wars that tore apart the Union destroyed the Wheel Priesthood and shattered the SIX, with only Linron’s clan and bits of the Solus surviving, and the STG becoming fully independent.
In the Premiseverse, however, the Wheel Priests stated the SIX being deposed would weaken the Union too much. The STG instead reached an understanding with the Priests and the salarian military, called the Inception Agreements.
The salarian people’s survival was the goal of the SIX, the grasping for dominance had endangered the race. The SIX were still in command, but if they failed to provide proper leadership, the STG, Wheel Priests, guilds and the military would depose them and place new dalatrases from younger members.
There was a lot of resistance until the League of Zero threw in with the STG — at that point the SIX had no options. AT the same time they began quietly pooling their own resources and working on the larger aspects of the Alteration Framework, with the ultimate goal of making a shadow-STG loyal only to them — Counterwatch.
In the centuries since then, the SIX have built up private military forces and slowly turned the thinking of the League of Zero back in their direction, but they still are not utterly supreme.
The STG is aware of this, but most feel this is actually a natural state of affairs, and that counter-plotting and scheming keeps the race as a whole more agile and ready.
2) Brooks
So. In the comics, there was a younger woman, an agent of the Shadow Broker who called herself ‘Brooks’. She ended up sort of adopting a boy (who was actually a girl) who called herself Rasa.
In the comics, the woman tried to abandon the girl, and the girl killed her and took her name, eventually becoming Maya Brooks.
In the PV, Brooks was double crossed by the Broker, and ended up going over to Cerberus, taking Rasa with her. Along the way Brooks (who is … severely fucked up) raised Rasa in a very questionalbe, troubling manner.
Basically, to have no real self-identity, and to be loyal, and eventually as a sex partner.
Rasa eventually called herself Maya, and named herself after her adoptive mother/sister/lover whatever, and is indeed suffering from a very bad case of MPD. But the original Brooks now calls herself ‘Rasa Brooks’, although no one is sure why.
Rasa Brooks is now in her early forties, while Maya Brooks is twenty five. Both are fucking crazy, but are so good at imitating other people that Maya holds rank in the Alliance Military and R&D, while Rasa lives a triple life as a Cerberus Agent, ‘resource’ for P., and working for Aloxius Manswell.
Even I’m not sure who Rasa is really loyal to — she’s using Maya for comfort and as some kind of anchor for the shreds of her actual personality that are left. Maya isn’t much more stable as Rasa is her entire life and years of pretending to be people she isn’t, to sleep with aliens she hates, to sleep with men when she’s lesbian, to defend positions she doesn’t hold has also damaged her psychologically.
Cerberus: You literally have to be fucking crazy to work here — Trellani, Maya, Rasa, Kel, Ezno, etc etc etc.
3) Aish Ashland is really the Darkness.
No, seriously — I have bits of a document worked up on the noble houses (it’s not done yet) — here’s the entry on the Ashlands and Eldfells.
The House of Eldfell:
Aesthetic, socially libertine and extremely controversial, the Eldfells are shocking to most nobles. Descended from Bourbons, they are articulate and passionate, but given to excess of all kinds. The family is a set of contrasts – fashionistas and artists who are also brutally efficient businessmen. Their Eldfell Construction Corporation was highly instrumental in the rebuilding of Earth and did most of the work on the colonies before merging with Ashland Energy.
Today most of the younger members bury themselves in partying and entertainment, while older members are patrons of fashion, music, and continue to run elements of Ashland-Eldfell’s construction business. Lesser members are active in the French government and some colonies. Eldfells are in love with attention, and many have entered military service in search of glory and honor.
The Eldfells are known for their wild and atavistic parties, and younger members are encouraged to ‘sow their wild oats’ with asari maidens. While there have been no marriages, the Eldfells and the equally decadent asari House Vabo seem to be having a competition on how many scandals they can get into, with the most recent incident having young Miraud Eldfell and Sisana Vabo arrested for public indecency on the Citadel, along with a highly intoxicated and drug addled Farmas the Denied. That isn’t to say the older Eldfells are any more serene, merely more circumspect.
They disdain the use of the official Bourbon coat of arms, instead using only a fleur-de-lis in gold on a sable field. The family motto is “Ne laissez pas passer la vie par un”, or roughly, ‘Don’t Let Life Pass You By”.
The family color is a wild and passionate red.
The Eldfells do not bother with cadet houses per se – there is the devoir Famile (Family of Duty) and the Déchargé (the Unburdened). Anyone with even a stitch of Eldfell blood – out to the fifteenth degree – is considered part of the Unburdened, and shares in some of the benefits of the noble house. But they are not ‘formal’ members – the children of the current High Lord and those within six degrees of them are the formal house. When there are not enough descendants, members of the Unburdened are adopted into the ranks of the Family of Duty. The Unburdened are mostly tasked with running the French government.
There are more Eldfells than any other noble family – by last rough census, the Family of Duty boasted over four thousand members, and the Unburdened numbered almost twenty thousand. Their Knights Irregular are known as the Chevaliers de l’Amour (Knights of Love) and strangely enough spend much of their time in humanitarian assistance, or participating in mock battles for the entertainment of French children.
The House of Ashland:
Starkly cold, socially liberal and nearly legendary for their avarice, the Ashlands are the most unlikely ally of the Eldfells. The two families are quite close, with over a dozen marriages between the two, mostly of Ashlands who don’t fit the cool, emotionless mould of the rest of the family – this is likely the fate of the wild party girl Aish Ashland, who has already been stripped of her title as heir.
Descended from a motley collection of Scottish and Finnish royalty and nobility, the Ashlands salvaged Canada, turning it from a ravaged wasteland in the aftermath of the Days of Iron to the cultural, economic and financial capital of Earth. Vancouver, in particular, was rebuilt from the ground up by the Ashlands.
The Ashland invention of the hyperscoop, using the science of the Mars Archive, has proven more effective by a factor of thirty than any other HE3 mining device known in the galaxy, ensuring their vast wealth and profits.
The Ashlands are by far the wealthiest Family in humanity, and their riches are only outstripped by the Solus and the T’Armal. For all of this they are incredibly grim, serious and focused on business. Their family name is actually taken from the old American energy company they bought out, as they descended from the admixture of the Scottish family of Kerr in Lothian, and they use the sun-and-chevron symbol of that House, quartered on a shield of argent and sable. Their motto, however, is from their Finnish ancestors, “Ken ci työdy tie, sil ei syvvägi pie” – roughly, “He who does not work shall not eat.”
The family color is, unsurprisingly, gold.
The Ashlands are almost entirely focused on business – both in running Ashland-Eldfell and in many other investment ventures. They disdain patronizing the arts, instead often attending and funding various charitable foundations and gatherings.
They do not have a cadet family or restrictions on who may join, but only recognize relatives out to the third degree of separation as formal members, although many more distantly related than that are employed as middle managers in Ashland-Eldfell.
The family abhors military service and usually only enters in engineering capacities, preferably on Earth itself. There are only about a hundred of them that are properly recognized as nobles, although many distant relatives work for Ashland-Eldfell or in the Canadian government.
The Knights Irregular of the Ashlands are known as the Emberguard, all grimly competent and icy cold as their masters. As an aside, the Ashlands tend to use the most brutally violent types in the Emberguard, and their viciousness is well known and feared. Only a fool attacks an important Ashland-Eldfell facility, although their outlying facilities are much less well guarded.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
WARNING: SPOILERS. READ AHEAD AT YOUR OWN RISK.
1) Manipulation and seeing the Fourth Dimension (Aka Time)
You have written, that the Reapers and Leviathans could see upto the Ninth Dimension, a few less for the Reapers. But couldn’t they seen into the Fourth Dimension – the see, past, present and future stuff.
Haven’t none been able to simply, look into the future or past – to see WTF was about to happen. How the Reapers war with the Darkness would end. Or the Leviathans, seeing their entire playing ‘god’ would end with everything going F*CK.
This is one of those warp-level fuckery questions to answer, so … put on your brain hats.
Being a multidimensional creature is not an experience we can truly understand on some levels. Our brains simply aren’t wired for it. Our understanding of ‘time’ as an arrow is probably simplistic.
Being able to see into those dimensions is something else again.
The main difference between things like the Darkness on the one hand, and the Leviathans and Reapers on the other, is that the Darkness is a truly 11-dimension creature. We are only seeing a fragement of it any time, a slice that is present in our section of time and three dimensions.
Leviathans (and by extension Reapers who are merely weaker, inteferior copies) are NOT four-D or higher-D creatures. They can see, and in some ways affect these forces, but they don’t have the capacity in most cases to move through them.
By that, I mean to say merely seeing does not give one the ability to perceive clearly. Time is a river consisting of any and every possibility. The best one can do is peer into this and try to determine what will happen, and sometimes clumsily affect things.
The lower the dimension, however, the more ‘energy’ it takes to fundamentally change how it works. Many of the higher-dimensions are ‘string’ realities, affecting high-order physical concepts like the nature of symmetry itself, or the interaction of time/space.
(If you REALLY Want to break your head in, here is a thread discussing the ‘listing’ of such dimensions. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/m-theory-listing-the-11-dimensions.273388/)
Keep in mind that defining ‘time’ as we do means the understanding of how a being who can see into it is fundamentally off.
The math is not simple either, but the most pared down I can get it is this:
For any given value of X of Z, where X is a possible state or action and Z is a given point in time, Y is the intersection of all X of Z across however many units of Z one wishes to view.
If ‘looking’ at time, and you have a person sitting at a table, reaching for a glass. He might pick it up. He might knock it over. He might just touch it. He might get halfway into the motion and get distracted by the phone. He might be almost touching it when a meteor strikes, or his wife walks into the room asking for him to take out the trash. Each of these values happens, with almost endless variation.
Like a very wide, fast moving river going in one direction, I think beings of this sort can see the rough outlines of where the river is going, what’s in it, and that kind of thing, whereas we are trapped in it, only able to see the stuff near us and only able to see where we’ve already been.
The problem comes because of our understanding of time as an arrow, so you could ‘go back’ and change things and have it affect ‘now’, which leads to paradoxes like going back to kill your own grandfather — if you succeeded how were you born to do so in the first place?
In a river, making changes creates ripples. These ripples in turn create their own alterations. When the Leviathans try to use their sight to change something, it ends up creating many more values of X and many more values of Z, exponantially increasing the amount of Y they have to look through to find what they are seeking.
The more changes they make, or try to make, the worse the effect gets.
Here’s the fucked up part : for us, time is stable. For those who can SEE it though, observation results in a collapse of quantum possibility. For example, the old Schrodinger’s Cat theory about a cat in a box with a timed poison capsule being both ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ until the box is opened. Thus, in a quantum sense this gives you a hard value of X of Z. The Cat is either Dead or Not Dead.
Observing the time-stream collapses that quantum effect. You now know if the cat is dead or alive even before the box is opened. To the 3d observer you were able to see into the future. This is not the case.
Unfortunately, most situations are NOT so easily paired down into a single value for X of Z. Leviathans can try to ‘collapse’ the quantum state of observation by ‘looking’ at events with a large amount of Y, but the rules of information and energy conservation means that to do so you have to create enough energy to nullify EVERY OTHER possibility of X of Z, or else only partially collapse the quantum foam of such choices.
In laymans terms (And goddamn it there isn’t such a thing for this kind of crap) If you try to predict the future, you can do so — but only to a degree of knowing general ‘things’ that will happen, and the cost to do so is TREMENDOUS.
How does this apply to Reapers and Leviathans, or the Darkness?
Reapers don’t have the skills in manipulating higher-order strings to ‘rob’ energy substrate to pay for fucking around with time. Their limited skills in this regard are limited to playing about with ‘tricks’ to shorten the amount of time they spend on travelling or to throw off targeting.
Leviathans have much nastier tricks, including ‘plucking’ certain SU3-symmetry strings to cascade quantum collapses in a very short time span — this allows them complete fucking hax like dodging faster than light weapons, being able to hack or penetrate any security, or generating waves of ‘degenerate time’ that would instantly age and kill anything they hit. When it comes to longer range observation, the main drawback is finding ‘paths’ or ‘streams’ of likely events is very diffciult when you see everything that could ever possibly happen everwhen everywhere, and they have to expend considerble energies to collapse this down to a form where they can make predictions.
Amusingly enough, this quantum uncertainty is why there are three different ‘camps’ of Leviathans. The ‘Bright’ Leviathans, under Lethath itself, the last of the true High Ascended and the asshole responsible for most of this mess, can see ‘the furthest’ and much of what is transpiring is due to their meddling.
The ‘Secret’ Leviathans are operating out of Hanar space and making deals with unlikely partners. Their views of the future are less concerned about Reapers and more concerned about the unexpected consequences of their defeat.
Finally, the ‘Black’ Levithans on Khar’Shan, the Dark Gods, are just batshit insane and even I’m not sure what the fuck they think they’re seeing.
Ultimately, the Darkness itself is not just viewing time, it can move through it, thus it can be anywhere instantly. To it, the outrages that drew it into our space and the war against the High Ascended are contemporaneous. The main reason it doesn’t see the future is that it is the gestalt of a thousand murdered races that were like weaker Ascended, and while it’s power is unbelievably vast its control is shit. It ‘knows’ that a Call is coming and it must respond, but beyond that it is barely even sentient, much less sapient.
If you want to really break you head in, here is a resource that tries to explain more. (https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-understand-and-visualize-4-dimensional-hyper-cubes-and-11-dimensional-strings-with-the-3D-eye-of-a-human#)
2) Since asari, are natural biotics and gain extra eezo over their livespans – and have big tits. Is it likely, that eezo is simply accumulating or gathering in their giant mammal-glands? xD.
…sort of.
Asari were modified genetically to resemble humans, both to ensure contact was made so that both halves of the Message could be used, and also because there were certain economies of scale better achieved by mammalian than ichthyosaurian concepts.
Breast-feeding and ensuring a continuing link of resources from mother to child is why, generally speaking, mammals are superior to any egg laying creature in terms of parenting. Offspring requiring such force mothers to remain with and protect the child, while egg-layers have no such impulses, resulting in higher infant mortality.
Asari mothers breastfeed children and some of the eezo stored in their bodies does move through the milk. (This is also why, hilariously, breast sexplay with asari matrons is strongly not recommended as one human died from eezo poisoning doing this. The moar you know!)
Eezo in asari is stored in sacs behind the jaw and down into the neck, and then distributed by a secondary distribution system that follows their nerves throughout the body. (More details on this in the Encyclopedia Biotica, I think).
3) If reality did pop like a soap-bubble in the PremiseVerse universe – how would the average dude comprehend it?
Would it be a simply, everything fine then BOOM-DIE. Or slowly everything going in the WTF-way.
There are two ways this could happen — vacuum collapse or energy-substrate exhaustion.
Ignore the former, as if that happened everything would be dead before you even realized it.
The latter is what is happening now. To ‘cheat’ the laws of physics, the Leviathians basically violated the laws of energy conservation by drawing in energy from the universal substrate. (The word has much the same concept as in bodily function).
This substrate is usually not accessible, but with enough manipulation of 10th dimensional strings you can ‘tap’ the strings of other ‘realities’, to so speak, and create a shockwave that transmits energy into your own reality by collapsing sections of the other one into yours.
We see this effect as dark matter. In effect, dark matter is the amount of ‘used and expended’ dark energy drawn from the substrate.
Keep in mind that merely using dark energy is NOT cheating — the energy, once here, is stuck here. But for the dimension its being taken from, every time it happens that universe gets closer to vacuum collapse.
And for THAT google False vacuum and try not to have nightmares for the rest of your life, lol.
4) Is that Outsider, actually your hand?
No, that would be too cheesily meta. I’m afraid the Outsider is…much, much worse than that.
Exposing it at this juncture would be premature, considering that I intend to eventually use it in some of my original fiction.
Suffice it to say this:
By definition, everything we know — matter, energy, laws of physics — is maintained by certain laws. These can be bent, twisted, or nullified, or even cheated, but never outright ignored. Other realities have completely different laws, forms of matter, energy states, etc.
But ultimately any region of space/time/string/quantum foam that is perceivable fits inside this … area.
The Outsider is from beyond that. From where every physical law is not only mutable, but the primary method of existance. Where energy and matter and anti-matter and entropy are like colors, and where time is like a doorway.
It is so utterly alien, so completely wrong on every possible level, so far outside what we perceive as possible, that even nightmare-level godshit like C’thulhu, the Flood, Yawgmoth, Time Lords — none of that shit would even tickle it.
The Outsider is literal UnMaking, worse than even Azathoth or Yog-Sogoth, worse than the Downstreamers or the C’Tan. It is corrosive quantum entropic decay … given a malicious, hateful and above all else predatory intellect.
You can’t fight it, and you can’t run from it, only hide. And the main thing it hunts is the debris left by sentient beings playing with the laws of physics…
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
I missed some earlier.
Why are Drell fascinated with humans? Do the Drell view the SA as the bad boys? Where the Drell have accepted Hanar sovereignty, we chafe against the Asari.
Drell see human morality and notions of sin (something you will note no other races believe in) intriguing, as well as the idea that our God would sacrifice of Himself to save His creations. Their own naturalistic gods are almost mechanical in their ritualistic demands.
As far as soverignity goes, most drell do indeed see the humans as the analogues of themselves, and the hanar as the match to the asari. While the Refusal Wars hurt the Citadel Races for a few years, each one has nearly crippled the Ascendancy, despite how badly they seem to have beaten the citadel.
In a matchup, the Drell are not as advantageous as they might seem — all of humanity’s worlds are so wet that drell would be operating basically at half speed and power wtihin days, and developing Keprals in weeks. Earth is a nightmare environment for them, a drell force could never even hope to survive for more than a week or two.
Has Vigil cracked Optronics for TIM? Seems like it would be a big card for TIM to have in his hand when it comes time to “make nice” with the Council.
Vigil is pretty tight with actually handing out technology for a number of reasons. That being said, most of Insunnanon electronics relied on phase-shifted positron nets and other exotica that wouldn’t even mesh well with any of our stuff. It’s like trying to make modern fiber optic systems work with ancient semophore tech.
Vigil has also not bothered researching such things — if he did he’d tell the humans to give up, as the more advanced optronic pieces are clearly being forged using something like a Prothean Forge.
Hint. Hint.
In the STG Files: Benezia Incident, the narrator says that the three Batarians cruisers spotted by the Normandy over Eden Prime couldn’t have been from the Hegemony and pirates don’t operate anything that big. But in OSABC, Sara is fighting a pirate battlecruiser and several frigates in the first battle on Alamor! Perhaps the ‘local’ pirates don’t operate anything that big would be a better description perhaps?
Typically speaking, when documents say one thing and the story says another, you should ask yourself why. Given my hatred of plot holes, you can almost always be sure that such discrepancies are done on purpose.
Interesting to note that Sara is going to have to face the same situation Victor did. Victor thought to take over Earth, because of his noble blood and zealotry, from increasing corrupt governments and terrorists organization intend on destroying the Earth. Is Sara going to really give up power when faced with the incompetence, corruption, power hunger, and cruelty of those who came before. It would be so easy for her to conclude that the weak need her protection so criminals like the ones in charge of all the governments don’t happen again. The galaxy needs a firm hand after all. Those who don’t want power are often the vary ones who should have it. I think the continued existence of the Commissariat is an indicator that she wan’t willing to give up everything. You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the villain indeed.
This is an interesting concept, except that Shepard tends to doubt her own judgment and abilities to ‘lead’.
The biggest difference is that Victor felt most of humanity was useless. The poor, the uneducated, and the unemployed he had no use for. He felt the weak should perish and only the ruthless and virtuous (in his eyes, basically the ‘strong’ cultures that make the membership of the High Lords) should survive.
Shepard, on the other hand, believes everyone deserves a chance — even criminals. But people only get one chance with her. That’s a different kind of intolerance, one not based on cruelty but on expecting that others can do what you did.
I strongly doubt most people, exposed to the horrors of Shepard’s childhood and teen years, would be able to do much of anything in later years except break down like the survivor of the batarian slavers in ME1 showed us.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
