Jacob wrote:

1) How representative is the Shadow Broker of Yahg as a species?

Due to issues with spoilers, the STG report on the current Broker won’t come out until he’s dead. His name I can reveal: Ty’tra’yect, or roughly, “Rage of Elegant Death”

In general, however:

Yagh are not a numerous species. There’s less than twenty million of them, all told. The Broker was, before his capture by the previous Broker’s forces, one of the most powerful yahg on the planet. There is one stronger yahg still on Parnack (with seven fucking names, which is like Chuck Norris + He-Man + Charles Bronson) but even by yagh standards Ty’tra’yect is an amoral asshole.

In terms of physical ability, Ty’tra’yect is the asshole you see at the gym who is lifting more shit than you weight but never breaks a sweat. He’s pretty much the Ahern+Kyle of the Yahg species. The old Broker had crazy ideas of cloning him and implanting the clones with mind control chips until Ty’tra’yect ate him.

Most yahg fall into two camps of thought: the weak should be food, or the weak are irrelevant. “Good” yahg fall into the latter group and are the majority, but most yagh leadership and military forces fall into the former group.

When Ty’tra’yect vanished, a bunch of yahg pretty much said ‘good riddance’

Jacob wrote:

2) Who is Almnrut? The character is mentioned by Tetrimus in ATTWN as a possible replacement for Tazzik and the Broker dismisses the idea with a growl and hand wave. Surprisingly emotional reaction for Broker when making what is effectively a logistical or HR call. Could it be personal? Does the Broker have a fellow Yahg on board, or even a mate? Or is this just a throwaway comment on their behalf, the kind that those two would have dozens of times a day when running the whole Broker network, and I’m pondering nothing here? Is the Broker even capable of having what we would recognise as normal relationships and a personal life? I rather enjoy seeing a little snippet of the deeply personal when we see the Broker/Tetrimus/Tazzik/Illusive Man/etc, but always at the edge of frame and subtly implied. It’s bittersweet in a way.

Almnrut is an asshole. He will be revealed towards the end of of Arc III.

The Broker himself is … weird. He pretty much raised Tazzik, but is willing to dispose of him in a heartbeat over failure. “Friendship” is not a term yahg use for most people until the other has had a chance to kill you for profit and has declined to do so.

The Broker sees himself as a chessmaster, and his people are playing pieces, not companions. That being said, Almnrut is probably more dangerous in certain ways than the Broker or Tetrimus, given what he is.

No spoilers. 😀

Jacob wrote:

3) Have any factions or players encountered the Black Leviathans or gotten a taste of what’s really happening in the Lake of Black? Even at a distance or by creepy pasta proxy. If I ever requested an STG report it’d be a tossup between one on the Shadow Broker and one on Lake of Black/Pillars of Strength/Batarian Emperor/Imperial Caste.

haha no.

The Black Leviathans are, in a phrase, batfuck insane. They were directly exposed to the worst of the fighting with the Darkness and didn’t take it well (not to mention they were beaten half to death).

The STG, AIS, and other groups have tried many, many times to infiltrate the Black Palace or the Lake of Black. Not a single mission has succeeded. Not a single operative has returned.

There’s five Leviathans in the Lake of Black — anything getting within five hundred miles is detected. All non-batarians in that range have their minds instantly wiped and drained of knowledge, then the Black Levithans basically warp them into the sun.

Yours is a cool scenario if the Black Leviathans were sane. But they aren’t. They’re preparing for the Reapers, and the rest of the inhabitants of the galaxy actually don’t concern them at all, except for Katha.

Jacob wrote:

4) Okay, last one, I swear. So we’ve discussed Vigil quite a bit and you’ve mentioned how he’s not entirely reliable. He’s a troll created by trolls and his programming and perspectives are limited. What I’m wondering is just how much of his advice, narrative and even his own memories is suspect? Is what he remembers of the Inussanon accurate, or even real? How much has been edited? The more we see of Vigil the more he seems like he’s not entirely stable or healthy. He’s this incredible picotech creation engine…and he and his creators have had the shit kicked out them regardless. He’s still so arrogant and dismissive. I wonder if the Inussanon were really what he remembers them to be. If he and they really had hundreds of thousands of years to prepare for the Reaper invasion, surely they could have literally filled the galaxy with Inusannon death-ships and war-forms. They would have outnumbered the Reapers 10 000 to 1, right? Something is missing. What do you guys think?

The Inusannon and Tho’ian beat the Reapers harder than any other race has since the Reapers were created. One on one, an Inusannon battleship was more powerful than a Greater Reaper… until you threw in the Godpower.

The fact is that the Inusannon lost mostly due to the Reapers using Godpower. On a technological basis the Inusannon weren’t that far behind the Reapers. Their own sequestration abilities made indoctrination useless, and they didn’t rely on relays for travel which made fighting them a mess for the Reapers.

Ultimately, remember — the Inusannon main fleet was destroyed, but the bulk of the Inusannon people just vanished. They were NOT defeated by the Reapers. If the war had gone to it’s bitter end, the Reapers would have won… but it’s very likely they would have had to abandon their works in several galaxies to keep the scale of the Godpower used quiet, and they might have failed.

Vigil has not yet realized that he himself is being trolled by his creators. On the other hand, Vigil is very important to the Inusannon, and when everything is over they’ll apologize to him for the deception.

Vigil took way more than a fifth of the resources of the Inusannon — pretty much ALL of the resources of both the Inusannon and the Tho’ian went into making him.

Most of his arrogance and dismissive nature stems from the mess that was the Prothean fight against the Reapers. The Protheans stole alot of shit from Ilos that was intended for other purposes and wasted most of it in a hopeless fight.

Pretty powerful. Although…you can’t really measure it by the gram.

Degenerate matter weapons are on the high scale of damage, as they cause severe impact damage, huge temperatures, radiation, and inflict several thousand G’s at detonation.

There are three degen-matter weapons. Neutronium flex explosives, like the Kyle class torpedo, and operate primarily by re-expansion of the neutronium and destabilization of local space time due to intense gravitic distortion.

Quark-degenerate devices, which use a pile of collapsed-string quark strange matter. Anything this weapon hits tends to undergo a shift from normal to strange quarks… which tends to reverse the strong nuclear force of the object hit. You can imagine what that does.

Finally, electron degenerate implication beams, which cause instant collapses of matter waaaaaaaay beyond the Bose-Einstein limit. This basically instantly pushes the target beyond the Chandrasekhar limit.

Yes, it’s basically a black-hole generator.

Probably not.

The primary reason the hanar acted to process the drell was that Katha told them to. He had ‘observed’ the various races remotely and was well aware of the situation on Kahje.

The hanar were perfectly content to let the drell die, otherwise.

Also keep in mind, the hanar were discovered by the drell almost five thousand years ago, before the other races had even developed spaceflight.

The hanar haven’t done much roaming around en masse since the asari took to the stars.

Katha would not, I suspect, have bothered to interfere with the humans. In the current day and age, the technology used to salvage the situation would have been … difficult to keep hidden.

I’m also not sure the situation would have been as analogous. Drell have a natural tendency towards sublimation, reverence of older figures, and mysticism. Humans are independent, stubborn and improvisation.

Evacuation of the humans would have presented other issues, given that the hanar would have had to leave some behind, and they could have managed to hang on to bits of civilization for some time (like the valkhana drell did).

While it is an interesting scenario, it’s not one I really developed. Most of my ‘changes’ are intended to fit between the existing lines of known canon, or to tweak a single value and see where it leads.

Having the humans join the Hanar would require the hanar expending a great deal of time and energy on uplifting them to the proper technological level and conditioning them. Remember, Katha had eons to tinker with the hanar and a good few thousand years to ‘adjust’ drell populations before they had their first interactions with independant alien star empires.

Given what’s in the Mars Archive, once Katha processed it, he probably would have had it removed, then slagged the relay.

The Great Reapers are unable to exist without minor exorcise of the Godpower. Even after they are ‘killed’, this influence remains, streaming backwards and forwards in time.

I could explain it with math, if anyone is REALLY that interested, but the simple way to put it is that the netronium layer was phase stablized for eternity, and only another act of Godpower would breach that.

To be more specific, the main damage the phase-destablization device (The Crucible) would do is negating all ongoing Godpower effects over the Reapers. That would result in an instant Bose-Einstein collapse too fast for the Reapers to react, and the neutronium would collapse and then destablize … violently.

The weird phenomena have to do with the arrow of time being messed up. Godpower is the cessation of natural law. It insults what we think we understand, makes time act like a color, distance like an echo. Minds and psyches without the capacity to grasp it instinctively reject it and replace it with something their mind can handle…or go quietly insane.

It’s actually a composite of various materials and methods, in three layers.

The outer layer is a thick shell of programmable matter, that reconfigures itself based on limited (four to six seconds) ‘look ahead’ into the timeline to absorb or negate damage. Against kinetic attacks it is a shock absorber, against anti-matter it generates a powerful magnetic repulsive field, against lasers it is reflective, etc.

The middle layer is hypercompressed wurtzite boron nitride interlaced with diamond nanotubes. This is energized in a hexagonical lattice by a variation of the kinetic barrier technology used by most species, although this version is point of impact.

The inner layer is a quarter-inch thin layer of phase stabilized neutronium, held in place by the tiniest bit of Godpower and the oversized mass effect core of the Reaper. This inner layer doesn’t cover the entire inside of the Reaper, only the critical areas, and accounts for a THIRD of the mass of the entire Reaper.

Really, only degenerate matter, strange matter, extremely high energy attacks via magnetohydrodynamic burst, or anti-particle weapons do any significant damage.

The hull material that breaks off (and is used in shepard’s sword) is the middle layer.

Delan is the hanar version of Ahern. And hoo boy, he’s modified to fuck and beyond, including a nifty little device that pretty much nullifies most direct biotic attacks — it would stop a flare or a Beam, but not a piece of metal thrown with biotics.

He’s also got a weapon that’s pretty much a man-portable Prism Lance, and he’s got a built in teleportal device that lets him jump all over the fucking place.

Tetrimus would have to rely on his actual military skills, cybernetics, speed and weapons to take him out, using kinetics to corral him, and I’m not 100% who would win TBH.

Tetrimus could PROBABLY drop Ithorex the Unready in a single fight, even with Ithorex’s bullshit phase jump crap.

It pretty much happens not too long from now.

Not sure if people had questions about that or not