Javik was aware of the threat. Vigil did warn him of that much.

When his ship was taken over, the only reason he didn’t fully give into complete despair was that he was a raging badass…and one other reason I won’t spoil. I will say he dropped five great Reapers in his battles, including killing one with an eezo infused asteroid strike, and two more by overloading and detonating a Relay.

Reapers are actually … really fuck-ass creepy.

What you have to remember is that the Reaper form we see is much like … mm. A salarian Shieldbreaker, I guess. Only Harby is actually the entirety of his form. Every other Reaper is a stylized form of their race, sealed into the Leviathan form (for the Greater Reapers) or a mass of commingled racial slurry shoved into a pre-built warform (lesser and destroyer Reapers).

Harbinger claims it is an efficient shape, but of course he’s the arrogant intelligence of cuttlefish so fucking arrogant they actually thought they were God. In reality, he’s too stupid to figure out how to alter the forms the Catalyst came up with, since he doesn’t really UNDERSTAND the Godpower or Leviathan technology. (The process of turning a bunch of Old Ones into a Reaper robbed him of about ninety percent of their intellectual capacity, but left their arrogance and hubris intact.)

A Reaper is not an AI… nor is it organic. The best way to describe it is that the process that converts things to Reaper Slushy has several steps. The entirety of every being’s mental abilities — memory, knoweldge, and outlook — is scanned and mapped using Leviathan technology. The biological slurry is used to create a large scale organic supercomputer, which is then augmented heavily by Reaper technology, and the organic components ‘grow’ over and around this framework.

Using a form of time compression, teh entirety of the race’s gestalt intellect is shoved into the computer framework and aged — usually hundreds of thousands of years pass. The Reaper components perform a kind of indocitrination and brainwashing on the mass, carefully adjusting the collective memory and knowledge of the race. Each Reaper only has one personality — that of the exemplar of the species that was used as the most basic template.

Almost all of the time, this exemplar is the person who lead the fight against the Reapers. Nazara? Bastard used to be a champion of light before the Reapers beat him and his people down and made him into that.

Just like Javik. Just like Shepard.

But it’s worse than that. Harbinger, as part of the conversion process, exposes the newly formed Reaper mind to the full, mindshattering truths of the Godpower, forcing changes onto the gestalt to ‘see’ multiple dimensions. Even with the mental strength of entire races, many Reapers simply cannot handle such, and are driven insane.

The AI component, on the other hand, is modeled after Harbingers own mind…and basically rampant from the get go. Melded together, the resulting ‘mind’ is immensely powerful, highly emotional, tormented by fragments of a billion souls and driven by impulses it rarely understands.

As time passes, the ‘gestalt’ personality tends to warp further. Reapers believe themselves to be gods, and yet live in fear of the Darkness. This scism between thinking themselves allmighty and yet knowing they aren’t has only further made them unstable.

Understanding the mindset of a being so mentally twisted is … hard. Their ‘morality’ is so large-scale that even the survival of entire galaxies is not really worthy of their attention. Muddled by having to deal with seeing future and past events mixed with the present, with viewing dimensions and energies very few of the orignal species were ever meant or evolved to see, most end up lost in internal musing.

Harbinger’s control over them is shaky at best. The Catalystt could control them on both a mechanical and intellectual level, but the best Harbinger can do is fuse each Reaper with a copy of his own mind and rely on his greater control of the Godpower to warp their emotions and focus to what he wants.

Ultimately, the Reapers are masses of emotion and confusion, sealed behind emotionless bars of a prison of indoctrination and mind control, confused and frightened and arrogant by turns.

Warpfire is my own take on the warp power. To be perfectly scientifically honest, warpfire is even more ridiculous than warp.

Contratary to what you might think, breaking bonds (chemical or molecular) takes energy, it does not cause energy. However, since we’re using mass effect field space magic here, I decided that warp works by using the mass effect field to unbalance the strong nuclear force binding a molecular bond together.

While certainly not oxidation, this would produce waste heat as long as all of the bond-breaking energy is actually supplied by the mass effect field

Functionally, a fission reaction is more akin to what flare does. Warpfire is more like fire in that it is not an instant effect. More practiced users of warpfire can actually have the warp feed on the energy of molecular bonds and use that to quicken the burn or increase the damage.

A warpsword does not actually ‘hold’ it together. When it is ignited, a thin mass effect field generated by the eezo core of the blade covers the metallic facing, and the warpfire floats atop this. As warp itself must be sub-monomolecular as it breaks bonds, this provides infinite sharpness.

I actually got the idea from the canon description of tech armor, and wondered what would it be if the ‘top layer’ of the armor was removed?

I can touch on a few of these.

Sadly, your first suggestion is both accurate … but also inaccurate. While I won’t go into details here, the primary realization of the Inusannon and the Tho’ian was very much in line with their cultures. While I usually despise the idea of racial stereotyping and having ‘hats’, the Inusannon were, sadly, primary defined by one thing.

Trolling. No, really.

Your suggestion certainly fits their culture, but Vigil’s existence and the plans they told him about are actually the exact opposite of your suggestion.

Jack’s Imprisonment: stop sneaking into my house and reading my notes, dammit.

A good listing of the Terminus Systems is an EVENTUAL nice idea of the Cerberus files, but there are basically two main power blocks. The Traverse is a completely separate beast from the Terminus Systems. The Traverse is primarily infested with ‘small scale’ threats — local warlords like Helena Blake and Nassana Dantilus’s sister, along with independant turian, human, and batarian settlements. Given the distances and the masss relay topography, there’s no real powers in the region that can reliably move in but such scum — the Turians could, but they’re overextended already. The Terminus Systems, on the other hand, are ‘larger scale’ threats — much more powerful warlords who control multiple systems.

A document about the economy of the Terminus is an idea I had not given thought to. Some of the economy is actually semilegit — especially in terms of mining, HE3 refining, and the like. Some of the illegalities are literally industries. The biggest things — red sand, hallex, psychotropics, illegal weapons, and tainted eezo — are simply so profitable that under the table deals have prevented serious attempts to stop them.

The WMD of the Premiseverse basically falls into three catagories: nanonic weapons (black and gray nano), tiered kinetic impact multipliers, and exotica. There is little reference to such because the Council frowns extremely hard on the use of such and they are much more difficult to obtain and maintain than simmpler biological or chemical agents.

Black nano is nanotech designed to primarly replicate itself inside living creatures, to tear apart a living being from the inside out to produce more of itself and a toxic, explosive or otherwise hyperlethal vector. Some black nano simulates blood, nerve or toxic agents like the shit Shepard used in OsABC I. Other uses are more virulent — some begins converting some fats to a form of nitroglycerin, others alter body acidity. The reason it’s called ‘black’ is that there are no positive or constructive applications for it.

Gray nano is dissassembler pattern nanotech, that breaks down inorganic compounds to form others. While not as badass as turning a bunch of junk into a hovertank, it is often used in battlefield cleanup to break things down to something that can be converted to omnigel. It is restricted mostly due to fears of gray goo outbreaks, even if it is tightly programmed and limited to prevent such. At times gray nano has been ‘hacked’ to make the stuff it turns inorganic compounds into a weapon, such as nanotech that turns most armor compounds into, say, strong acids.

The array of kinetic impact augmentation devices is extremely long and will result in the Council going apeshit on your ass. The most restricted thing , of course, is slamming pure antimatter packets into planets for any reason, or radioactive products such as strontium or thorium that will poison a biosphere for centuries. Krogan pioneered the tactics — relaying or FTLing into a system, firing a hail of such rounds from a mass accelerator and retreating before defenders can respond. Such impactors can wreak untold damage beyond the mere blast of a kinetic impactor.

Exotica includes things like the human’s Kyle class torpedoes (or the asari Ancient class missiles, which are twice the power and can be fucking ripple fired, but are actually old leftover inusannnon devices). Salarian exotica tends to be complicated, eezo driven phase shift constructs that can erupt into plasma bombs literally tens of miles in diameter, while the turian love of particle packets has resulted in advanced weapons that are like siege-class particle acceleration cannons, scaled up to throw anitparticles at a signifigant fraction of C. Exotica is disliked by the Council as it is a disruptive technology — as seen in ATTWN, if one can absorb the ruinous cost of such, a fleet equipped with Kyle Class torpedoes can punch WELL above its weight.

While I would certainly be interesting to read I’m already far overtasked with things to write already.

I would be overjoyed if someone were to take up such a challenge, though, and would provide any assistance I could.

Telanya has not realized that she was, back on Thessia, involved in a group that encouraged more immigration from Thessia to alien lands. (As mentioned later on, she’s something of a xenophile, having even slept with a vorcha — that didn’t start with the A/Y).

The hit was sanctioned.

The change is simple: there are gradiations of armor for Non-N7 and N7 troops.

For example, the ‘stock’ N7 armor is Onyx armor, just like the stock SA Marine armor is called Onyx. But Onyx-N7 is much thicker, higher grade, with more built-in stuff and better systems.

Devastator armor was far too useful to be sidelined to a small number of troops, given that powered armor is a big force multiplier. In the Premiseverse the ‘stock’ N7 is assigned to all heavy weapons units. The N7 version of the Devastator has better actuators and the red haptic lighting to differentiate it from the stock version, as well as (again) thicker fields, omni-armor and the like.