Title: A Season of Sorrows Unending -- the Cerberus Files : Citadel Races
Category: Games » Mass Effect
Author: LogicalPremise
Language: English, Rating: Rated: M
Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Published: 03-06-13, Updated: 03-26-15
Chapters: 34, Words: 182,779
Chapter 1: Chapter 1 - Introduction

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

Per your request, I've completed my econo-historical analysis of Citadel space. Working with Dr. Uraj and Dr. Nielson-Kahn, we've attempted to pull together coherent studies , military data, and relevant cultural analysis on all current threats to Humanity.

I remain puzzled by your initial request, a 'neutral-observer' historical overview of humanity since the early 21st century, but I've complied with that as well. The outline covers every event until the most recent assault on Eden Prime, per your instructions.

The studies of alien species include the psychological workups requested by the Illusive Man required heavy use of the Shadow Cell's .. experimental projects. I would again like to (respectfully) recommend full review of said projects – we're an organization devoted to human supremacy, not goddamned terrorists.

We lost several of our Trojan operatives compiling this data, which has set back the Illusive Cell's forecast projections. As a result, we've been ordered to use resources from Shadow Cell and Iron Cell to make up the shortfall. Hopefully, the insight from this document will further the Illusive Cell's operative ability to find areas of manipulation in alien stock markets and investment opportunities.

Dr. Galen Minsta

Cerberus Thought of the Day: A mind empty of it's duty to humanity is fertile ground for the weeds of alien corruption.

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To Dr. Minsta,

Excellent work, Doctor. This is exactly the sort of thing we need to ensure our focus remains on the topic at hand – the bright future awaiting humanity.

Your comments regarding the direction of the Shadow Cell's work, however, were not well received by the Shadow Hand. While I understand and sympathize with your frustrations, we keep each cell tightly segregated not just due to security, but so that those with the taste for certain kinds of work are put where they can contribute the most.

You are a psychological historian, not a general, a financier, or a researcher. If you knew what we knew, you'd be less upset at the cost victory sometimes requires.

Illusive Man

Cerberus Thought of the Day: The opposite of sadism is altruism, but the opposite of nihilism is mania. We must all remember never to cross lines that leave scars, and never to avoid a hard act in the name of mercy.

Author's Note: My main fic story, Of Sheep and Battle Chicken (OsaBC) is set in an alternative universe to the 'canon' Mass Effect. My initial intent with the story was to do a 'show, not tell' reinterpretation, similar to but with a different focus than Renegade Reinterpretations. It wasn't intended to be a complete rewrite at the beginning, and it has grown faster and more AU than I originally intended.

The purpose of this document is to outline the AU world I work in. It is a more renegade place, if that word has any meaning at all, which I doubt. The difference between Paragon and Renegade is that Paragons do things the right way, and Renegades do things any way that achieves what they want. Not all good is nice, and not all bad is evil. But at the end of the day, both Paragons and Renegades end up doing the right thing.

Even some of the darkest fics out there, such as RR , set humanity as taking rough or even horrific actions because they had no real rational choice. Renegades do what must be done, right or wrong, because there are no other choices. Shepard didn't make the call on Torfan because of anything else than being too bloodthirsty and perhaps too compromised by events. All the 'evil people' are neatly put into little terrorist groups so you can kill them without having to argue the grey-and-grey morality of things.

The Premiseverse dispenses with such rose-eyed sentimentality. People do what is evil, because it's the quickest way to power, and damn the consequences. Paragons like Branson due so mostly because people worship heroes, but they have no belief in their own actions. Renegades like Shepard are so broken by what has occurred to them that they would be sociopaths in any other society, where killing is merely another reflex response and regret NEVER stops them from pulling the trigger again.

Humans are evil, most are either xenophobic or distrustful, and all see themselves as innately superior. Sneering at aliens who took a thousand years to do what humanity did in a century, they are still bearing the scars of a century of the darkest, sickest warfare in human history, where two madmen fought each other to a standstill to determine the fate of the world, and sixty million innocent souls died in a single, horrific day due to chemical warfare by a doomsday cult. The SA is a brutal regime, a good old boys club that has plans to dominate the galaxy in short order, seeing all before it as the modern equivalent of the Chinese during the medieval ages – stagnant and is kept in line by brainwashed secret service agents, a rogue intelligence wing, and is heavily tied to Cerberus. Worse, the true leaders of the SA are monsters the likes of which even Saren pales next to.

Salarians are disassociated from the morality of acts by the speed of mental processing and the logic they are bound to, and do not even have a word in their language for morals. Obsessed with control, with knowing all there is to know, their government is at war with itself, as dalatrasses lost in the evolutionary drive to further their families risk killing their own race with mad genetic sabotage, and transmortal experiments are crippling the race's ability to maintain birthrates. Much of their energies are wasted on this mad goal, their own intelligence justifying it with the brutal realities that efficiency tops all other concerns. Unable and unwilling to compromise on their concept of total war, they have planned ways to kill off or neutralize every other race in the galaxy, some through horrific research into genophage-like viruses, others through carefully prepared sickeningly, they have begun experiments into producing supersoldiers built deliberately to interface with soul-crippling levels of cyberware.

Asari are going through a cultural civil war, as some asari have become obsessed with humanity – the chances of a race looking and being shaped almost exactly like them being so small as to be impossible. Sexual and social tensions have turned the asari against themselves, as asari grow tired of suppressing their naturally guiding natures and desire to sleep with and have children with at least something that looks like them. They want a humanity that is a kneeling, adoring slave of the asari, willing to be it's cats paws, brute muscle and sex slaves. The rulers of the asari know more about the Reaper threat than they let on, even while hiding a horrific secret from the galaxy. The asari manipulate all around them as reflex, and have plotted the downfall of the turians, the embittered nature of the volus, and more. Yet these plans now tangle with the ugly stirrings of the commoners, and the Thirty look for scapegoats and distractions.

The turians are utterly and totally more brutal than in canon, especially after the Unification Wars, becoming more bitter, more hidebound, and above all else, more schizophrenic. Their colonial tensions run higher and higher as the meritocracy is diluted by the play of politics and the subtle sabotage of salarian and asari agents. There are those who remember the resurgence of the Valluvian Priests under Desolas Arterius, and feel the government is suppressing turian culture. Worse, the Council's support of humanity has enraged many turians, the First Contact War being far more brutal of a lesson to Turians and the raging threats of the human ambassadors still leaving an unpleasant taste to the mouth. The situation is complicated by the fact that the Salarians and Asari have compromised the Turian economy, leaving the Hierarchy in debt to the other two races to the tune of billions upon billions of credits.

The Batarians are not just slavers, but a religious movement bound into the Fist of Khar'shan that prophesies the destruction of all enemies of the batarians. This religion is tied in with the strange reactions of the upper Batarian military castes, who since the recovery of the Leviathan of Dis have been acting... strangely. Worse, their biotics are drugged, super-augmented religious fanatics, more than capable of facing down even asari matriarchs...and they claim they hear the voice of the Dark Gods in their dreams. The voices from beyond compel them towards strange acts, and water worlds have gone dark and under heavy military guard.

The Hanar fascination with the Protheans is magnified to unhealthy degrees, and their Drell servants are pawns in a game of intergalactic know something others do not, and have stumbled onto secrets best left alone. In their arrogance, however, they see no dangers.

The geth are no simple machines, the quarians are more vicious and selfish, and perhaps worst of all, the fall of the krogan was not simply done at the hands of salarians and turians, but one of their own.

This is a universe where cynicism , petty revenge, and hustling for a credit are the norm. Every race has been victimized, and the evil in the hearts of people is not suppressed for the sake of the common good , as the common good is rarely seen. Smoke and mirrors, rather than honesty and openess, are the victors of diplomacy, and each race's secret intelligence services commit atrocity after atrocity in the pursuit of a psychotic and skewed ideal of 'balance'.

Humanity's shining hero, the Savior of Elysium, is a fraud, a human supremacist, and a megalomaniac, a constructed figure who would happily butcher aliens but actually sees himself as a heroic messiah. It's Butcher is a criminal psychopath turned unfeeling killing machine, made a hero when a SA plot to get her unit killed blew up in their faces and then used to brutally suppress any threat.. The Sole Survivor is a broken figure, losing his family, his unit, his fiance and finally his sanity and becoming a terrorist threat to rival Cerberus, convinced only he understands the sacrifices needed to bring humanity to a shining future – of human dominance.

The other races commit atrocities worse than anything in canon ME : salarians experiment with asari captives to lengthen their own lifespan, and turian Blackwatch units support pirates to drive volus separatists back into the Hierarchy's arms. Biotic cults , secretly backed by asari matriarchs, infiltrate alien societies, scattering Ardat-Yakshi as they go to weaken the upper classes of their foes. Batarians play with Reaper tech in their slave implants, and the volus scheme to destabilize economic markets and amass increasingly worrisome amounts of mercenaries for no known purpose.

Colonies are written off, refused even the slightest protection from the SA if they do not bow to heavy taxes, mental conditioning, and constant monitoring. Earth is a polluted cesspit, the mass of humanity living in massive arcologies stuffed to explosive overpopulation, ruled by iron fisted 'democracies' where only those with the money to prove their history can vote. The SA is a private club of member nations and early colonies that only allows newer members the right to pay a larger share of taxes for the minimum protection possible.

Mega-corporations are small nations-states, Noveria an armed presence that shoots Spectres on sight and has stood off the Citadel Fleets twice. The average colonist is an indentured servant, required to pay back his 'citizenship tithes' and 'colony debt fee' before he can even vote , bunkered in communal flophouses and worked 15 hours a day, and is pathetically grateful for it, since at least he has a chance to one day own a home and not pay 85% tax rates , or be shot on sight for protesting.

The SA's armies are stiffened by penal legions, with explosive implants in their head. Sniper-guards enforce their discipline, and biotic commissars drive them to fight, or to die at their hands. Political officers and bio-monitor systems monitor military officers, and the darkness between the stars is so much greater – the Reapers control not one galaxy, but dozens, and are hiding from something with the power to snuff out entire galaxies at a whim.

And yet .. hope can still flare brightly. There are those who refuse to bow to despair, to greed, to hatred and fear and the erosion of spirit. There are those who long for freedom, who dream of a bright future where all races work together. There are corporations who refuse to commit atrocities, gang lords who won't enslave children, even serial killers, barely in control of themselves, who force themselves to prey on evil men instead of the innocent. And even humanity's vilest sorts can have flashes of conscience on occasion.

In the end, which is more inspiring? The banality of doing the right thing when it's rewarded, or the light that refused to be smothered by the darkness all around it?

The Cerberus Files is a story,written around a series of reports gathered by the leadership of Cerberus during the events of ME1 and parts of ME2. The key actors are:

-Dr. Minsta, a brilliant doctor, historian, psychologist and economic guru

-Matriarch Trellani, an outcast asari matriarch who has joined Cerberus after discovering the truth of Athame, and now plots to eradicate the Thirty

-General Petrovsky, much the same as in canon but with a different focus.

-Pel, a cruelly dispassionate wet-work operator and assassin for the Illusive Man, who's past is a jagged mess of regrets

-Kai Leng, an equally cruel murderer who is more subtle and nuanced than the canon version.

-Prime 302, a battered survivor network of the Geth which is captured by Cerberus

-Shades-Of-Examined-Views, an Ascention Protocol Level III Collector captured by Cerberus

The first part of this work is a review of the galaxy overall, including the Citadel, and a quick review of the races of the MEVerse. This guide covers the primary council races : asari, salarians, and turians.

Other documents will cover the other races.
Chapter 2: Chapter 2 - The Galaxy

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

A short primer on the state of the galaxy. I trust you will forgive me for reviewing this, but I am still organizing some of my notes on the asari, filthy witches.

Cerberus Message of the Day: Aliens are not as humans. What disgusts us delights them, what we find evil they prosper and pursue. Collaborate not.

An Overview of Aliens in the Galaxy

Before I begin my analysis of the various alien species (which will take some time), a high level overview is called for, if only as to set down some common points of knowledge.

The most powerful races in the galaxy are currently the asari, the salarians, and the turians. These three races have populations more than double that of humanity, fleets more than twice our size, and technology in advance of our own. More importantly, these three races compose the membership of the Citadel Council, the intergalactic government that controls all space with the exception of the Attican Traverse (which answers to Aria, T'Loak, an asari, so in effect the aliens run the entire galaxy.)

Below the three leading races are the races with an embassy – humanity, the elcor, and the volus. All three of our species are roughly on par with one another in terms of influence. Humanity's fleet is stronger and larger than the elcor or volus fleet. but the elcor outnumber us two to one, and have more advanced technology. The volus economy is one of the strongest in the galaxy. Collectively, the "secondary races" each are under the aegis of one of the primary races. In the case of humanity, the asari claim us as near kin, and are protective of us. The salarians have taken at least a technical interest in the elcor, and the volus are a client race of the turians.

The remaining races – the batarians, the hanar, the drell, the quarians, the krogan, and the vorcha – do not maintain embassies on the Citadel. The batarians, quarians, and krogan all had theirs removed for various reasons, while the Hanar feel the use of the Citadel for anything but worship of the Enkindlers is blasphemous. The drell follow the lead of the hanar. The vorcha , collectively, would not know what to do with an embassy if they had one, aside from eat everyone in it. There are a few other races in the galaxy – the geth, Collectors, yahg – none of which have any form of friendly contact with mainstream galactic society.

It is curious that things of this nature occur in threes. There are three primaries (asari, turian, salarian), three secondaries (human, elcor, volus), three outcasts (batarian, krogan, quarian) and three who have nothing to do with the Citadel governance (hanar, drell, vorcha).

Galactic Cartography

The Galaxy is divided into nine sections.

The Inner Rim is asari and salarian space, and is traditionally referred to as "Council Space". This is the richest segment of the galaxy, with over five hundred colonized worlds as well as the Citadel.

The Outer Rim stretches from the 'south' of the Inner Rim to the Attican Traverse, and is turian and volus space. Some four hundred worlds make up this area.

The Bright Rim and Dark Rim are on the outskirts of the 'west' Inner Rim, and form, along with a tiny glob of space between them, salarian space. Another large area, comprised of over three hundred worlds, it is nearly as rich as the Inner Rim.

Just on the edge of the Dark Rim is the Solian Traverse, or human space. Directly 'east' of that is the Attican Traverse, which is a mix of unincorporated systems, independent human colonies, and batarian space (as well as what passes for vorcha space). Roughly two hundred worlds form this area.

East of the Inner Rim is the Terminus Systems, under the control of the 'Alliance of the Fallen', an intergalactic mercenary and crime ring lead by Aria T'loak of Omega. Some three hundred worlds form the Terminus Systems, most ruled by petty warlords, corrupt corporations, mercenary bands or slavers. The krogan homeworld of Tuchanka falls into this area as well.

The 'northwest' of the Rim is called the Volian Traverse, and is home to the elcor, hanar, and drell. Some two hundred and fifty worlds form this area.

Finally, there is the Perseus Veil, a segment of the galaxy poorly explored. The rachni emerged from this area, and the quarians once lived here before the geth overthrew and exiled them to wander. It is currently unknown how many of the sixty or so quarian worlds the geth now inhabit.

The Inner, Outer, Bright, and Dark Rims all answer directly to the Citadel, and are considered under it's protection. The Solian, and Volian Traverses all answer indirectly to the Citadel. The Terminus systems and the Attican Traverse, as well as the Perseus Veil, do not recognize Citadel Authority.

Galactic Commerce

The largest corporate entity in the galaxy is the Noverian Development Corporation, followed by the Serrice Council, Aoegr Industries, Haliat Arms, Vol-Prime Banking, and Ashland-Eldfell Energy Corporation.

Most commerce is conducted via the extranet for information services and via secured freighters for physical goods. The Citadel provides merchant escorts for a small fee for travel within the confines of Council space but not beyond it.

The galactic GDP is 1.3 quintillion credits. 28% is asari, 17% volus, 15% salarian, 8% turian, 7% human, 6% elcor, 6% hanar/drell, 4% batarian, 3% Terminus Systems and 4% Noveria Development.

Asari dominate eezo mining, dark energy technology, shipbuilding, biotic technology, plasma manipulation technology, sports entertainment, heavy industrial work and civilian vehicle manufacturing.

Salarians dominate computer and information technology, extranet technology, armor manufacturing, optronic and biosynthetic circuit technology, medical surgical technology, precision machining, heavy metals processing and mining, and electronic entertainment.

Turians dominate weapons manufacturing, light metals mining, military vehicle manufacturing, food processing, dextro-compatable medical technology, and hardened computer systems.

Volus dominate banking and investment banking, venture capital firms, missile and torpedo technology, and hostile environment suit manufacturing.

Elcor dominate gravity manipulation technology, heavy weapons manufacturing, ion manipulation technology, toxic and hazardous materials processing, and superheavy metals industrial technology.

Humans dominate HE3 mining, light industrial technology, bio-genetic modification technology, racing entertainment, and shipping concerns.

Quarians, despite their nomadic status, are still the leaders in VI technology, advanced cybernetics, organic-synthetic interface technology, and rapid mining.

Krogan barely have an economy, but have maintained their dominance in hazardous metals mining and survival gear manufacturing.

Hanar dominate deciphering Prothean technology, terraforming and climate control technology, and sensor technology.

Galactic Politics

The current state of the galaxy is somewhat in flux.

The asari dominate all nearly all matters, although the salarians are dominate the scientific fields and the volus dominate matters financial. The most recent war was the First Contact War between humanity and the turians, and the Batarian Insurgency between humanity and batarians. Before that it was the so-called Second Krogan Rebellions some three hundred years ago, and several turian Colony wars.

The galactic economy is in a slight slump, with most political efforts swirling around the efforts of the volus to break away from the turians and get their own council seat. The increasing power of the VDF, while still small, is seen as a definite improvement, and in a year they are scheduled for their first military tithe of ships to support the Citadel Fleet.

There is a great deal of discussion about the Treaty of Fairaxen, as well as certain turian-asari trade negotiations.

Increasingly the Terminus Systems are falling inline with Aria's leadership and goals, with only a few major warlords maintaining any level of true independence. Her criminal empire, boosted by eezo mining and slave trading with the Batarians, has reached a level of GDP roughly half that of the elcor. Their military is on part (in numbers if not quality) with the SA, although she only has one dreadnaught.
Chapter 3: Chapter 3 - The Citadel

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

The second half of the introduction is completed. As requested, I've reviewed the Citadel Council itself.

Cerberus Message of the Day: Humanity's survival is never enough. Human dominance ensures not only that we survive but thrive - a slave can survive, but that is no existence to pursue.

The Citadel Council

The governance of Council-dominated space is the ultimate responsibility of the Citadel Council. Rather than an elected government, each one of the primary races of the Council seats (in addition to their ambassador) a single powerful representative. The three decide on laws that are proposed by the various subcommittees and interface with the racial ambassadors to communicate their wishes.

This is, bluntly put, a three-part dictatorship. There is neither appeal nor redress from the Council, to disobey it's mandates is to have your race's ambassador removed and to have no input on galactic law whatsoever. This has happened to the krogan and quarians, while the batarians did so voluntarily. The hanar and drell did not ever 'qualify' for ambassador status.

The Council is comprised of an asari (Tevos T'Sael), a turian (Tarren Sparatus), and a salarian (Erdat Valern). I plan to detail these figures in more detail in the relevant racial sections. In short, however, Tevos (she prefers going by her first name, like most asari) is cunning and manipulative. Sparatus is militaristic, sarcastic, and cynical. Valern is crafty, looking for angles and cold. The three rarely fully agree on anything, with some seventy four percent of votes being 2 to 1 in approval or disapproval. Notably, the outlier more often than not is the turian.

The Council does not officially answer to its member governments, nor does it technically command them. A Councilor is functionally a head of state equal to that of the SA President or turian Primarch, but may end up honoring requests of their member governments. Tevos, in particular, is little more than a mouthpiece of the Thirty, while Valern is usually acquiescent to the requests of the High Dalatrass. Sparatus is more deviated from the wishes of the Primarch, but is normally at least somewhat in line.

The Council has a staggering level of power – they command a full 20% of the ships from each member race, as well as several private armies. They can levy taxes across the entire galaxy as well as duties and excise fees, giving the Citadel government staggering levels of income. Furthermore, they control the rents and property taxes on the Citadel itself, adding more to their coffers.

Council Subcommittees

The Council has six subcommittees that meet to discuss laws, proposed taxes, military orders, and the like.

The Subcommittee of Defense controls the Citadel armed forces and sets laws on military behavior, fleet sizes, and approved weapons.

The Subcommittee of Commerce regulates taxes, commercial laws, commercial regulations, inspections and tariff rights.

The Subcommittee on Sentient Rights regulates the laws that pertain to criminal behavior, the rights of sentient beings, slavery, trans-mortality and treatment of aliens.

The Subcommittee on Health deals with matters medical and cybernetic, as well as regulations on food and drink products and workplace safety.

The Subcommittee on Habitability deals with the Citadel's infrastructure and the conditions aboard the Citadel, sets rules and laws for colonization rights and legislates settlement fees.

The Subcommittee on Science regulates research laws and limits, biotic research, experimentation, testing protocols, and research into VI and AI technology.

The subcommittees are comprised of three representatives from each Council race, along with three additional representatives for the asari, salarians, and turians each. They meet twice monthly and the meetings are open to the public. Membership is decided by the race in question, using whatever methods they prefer. Anyone can petition to have an issue discussed by the subcommittee, but they chose what they will and will not review.

Council Military Forces

Every Citadel race must contribute either goods and services or military forces to the protection of the galaxy. The turians contribute 50% of their fleet, the asari and salarians 35%, the humans and elcor, 20% and the volus 40% plus a sizable economic fee.

This makes the Citadel Fleet a powerful tool. For the lesser Council races, their contribution fleet is left in the hands of the respective races. For example, Fifth Fleet is humanity's contribution, but most times it takes orders from the SA. In times of war or danger command is transferred to the Citadel. The turian, salarian and asari contributions, on the other hand, are permanent assignments.

The Council also has access to some sixty thousand asari commandos and two million turian soldiers, as well as three thousand salarian Shieldbreakers, that form the Citadel Defense Force. Only twenty percent of this force is active at any one time, stationed aboard the Citadel to prevent a hostile force from taking it.

The Council also controls C-SEC, or Citadel Security, a two-hundred thousand person force that acts as the police for the station and as customs investigators and agents for the galaxy.

The SPECTRES

The Special Tactics and Reconnaissance branch of the Citadel Defense Force is comprised of roughly ninety elite-level special agents with complete legal immunity and top-level equipment that handle difficult issues for the Council. Their stated goal is to preserve galactic stability.

Spectres are usually gifted with a command vessel by their sponsor, which can be a government or a group of corporate sponsors for a race. Spectres are paid outrageous sums by the Citadel, can requisition anything they need, and have total carte blanche to do their jobs. Assassins, saboteurs, spies, and lethal fighters, Spectres are commonly seen as super-agents doing the Council's bidding. Their records, operations, and activities are completely classified.

The Council Special Tasks Group

Some fifteen salarian STG teams answer directly to the Council, usually to aid in Spectre operations.

The Council Special Operations Group

Nine units of the elite Turian Blackwatch and two storms of asari commandos lead by three war priestesses form an additional emergency reaction force for the Citadel. There are rumors that this force is backed up by salarian biotics, but no proof exists of such.
Chapter 4: Chapter 4 - Asari History

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

Asari history is a cesspit, one that makes me feel deeply filthy and offended. The asari are no mysterious zen maidens, but feral savages, sex-obsessed and splintered by psychology and social structures into quibbling bands that only agree on how to manipulate those around them.

Although their history is quite lengthy, the focus of this document will be only on the most broad aspects of how it has shaped their culture.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: The Martyr's grave is the foundation of Humanity. Survival is it's own glory.

Historical Overview: Ancient evolutionary history

From what paleontological research has uncovered, the asari evolved from a group of semi-amphibian mammals on the world of Thessia. The seas of Thessia, awash in eezo from a series of massive asteroids strikes, lead to not only much higher rates of mutation but strange levels of adaptation to rapidly changing climatic shifts.

The asari ancestor was a bizarre cross between what would be considered mammalian and reptilian characteristics for Terran animals. Endothermic and bearing live young, the proto-asari were most similar to something like ichthyosaurs at some point. When an ice age lowered sea temperatures, killing off certain algae-analogues that enhanced the oxygen content of the ocean, they began the long road to evolving away from living in the sea.

Upon becoming fully amphibian, the proto-asari continued to evolve, moving more and more towards mammalian ideals. Some twenty nine million years ago, these proto-asari evolved legs and began moving inland from the oceans. They slowly moved towards brachiating arboreal hunters, using primitive bursts of biotic energy to stun prey and lurking in the many rivers and small lakes or ponds in the Thessian forest climes.

There is evidence that the asari had evolved to a form similar to their current form as early as three million years ago. Like all Thessian life forms, heat management was critical – submersion in the sea could help with such, but most land animals, due to the high levels of humidity and generally high temperatures, had problems with overheating, leading to the highly efficient head crests and the split-spinal arrangements with heat venting.

There is also evidence that the Protheans may have interfered with asari development, based on some of the texts found in the Mars Archive. These materials were removed early on, due to the Manswell Doctrine, and our researchers at the Mars Facility only have partial copies to work from. The gist of the information seems to suggest the Protheans shaped and altered asari and human evolution towards more congruent paths – certainly, no other races have the same similarity of features, down to both humans and asari having eyelashes, ears, etc. The purpose of this isn't known at this time, all we do know is that the fossil records show rapid changes in asari evolution from about 80,000 to roughly 50,000 years ago, moving from a semi-amphibian, partially erect form with features more similar to fish to a basically human looking being, fully upright, with the only vestiges of aquatic ancestry being faintly scaled skin and slight webbing of the hands and feet.

Prehistorical Age: the rise of the Thirty

Asari historians and practitioners of the old asari religions both maintain that some form of greater being – be that of divine nature or merely some kind of aliens – took part in early asari history. The worship of Athame and other asari goddesses appears to be central in their ancient history.

The earliest civilized asari were organized into hunting clans, ranging across both land and sea. Natural powerful swimmers and innate hunters, the early asari mainly focused around two regions – the coastal areas in the northern continent, and the wet arboreal forests in both the north and south. Asari more inland tended towards more purple coloration, while asari closer to the eezo choked seas remained the color of element zero, a bright, striking blue. In any event, asari in both regions subsisted mostly on hunting-gathering, rather than any form of agriculture, for millennial, and there was very little organization in such groups.

At some point 'Athame', in their history, taught the early asari about fire, agriculture, mathematics, logic, and astronomy. These innovations were only taught to a handful of the hunting clans, which rapidly grew in power and size as their relatively advanced capabilities allowed for not only much faster growth but the outright absorption of smaller clans. Eventually, these became the Thirty Families, each of which claimed a direct relationship with Athame and her guides, and founded the Thirty Cities of Thessia.

Due to the wide divide between the mountain and forest clans, and the seacoast clans, over time wealth and power accrued to the later. The Thirty were all from coastal areas, and without heavy industry or the need for large amounts of timber or ore, the mountain and forest clans had little to offer aside from meat and furs. The bounty of the seas – fish, seaweed, and a sort of whale-analogue that provide oils, bones, and meat of it's own – was matched by the ease of agricultural in the flatland near the coast, while growing in the forest and mountains was much harder. In time, this would result in a great deal of racism and discrimination, but at least in the prehistorical eras, clans tended towards their own.

Pre-industrial age: Changes, and the ardat-yakshi

The asari method of reproduction was similar to other animal life on Thessia, a modified XO/ZW determination system wherein genetic information in protein chains was manipulated by discrete organs connected to the nervous system. Low level mass effect manipulations of these fields could alter the based used to build the DNA chains, which themselves were tied to template protein 'ladders' that created genetic pairs for fertilized eggs. This process was low-yielding and somewhat inefficient, since it didn't ensure that all desired traits would be passed along to offspring.

Due to the high mutation levels from eezo in the oceans, however, this randomization of genetics ensured that lethal or dangerous recessive combinations did not occur even with heavy inbreeding of gene-related groups. As asari became sentient and achieved the first hints of civilization under Athame, however, the asari method of reproduction altered sharply.

Asari, unlike every other life form on Thessia, have conscious control of the mapping of genetics during sexual intercourse and fertilization. This gave the asari a staggering leap forward, moving from Darwinian models of evolution to near Lamarkian models, with parents capable of passing on acquired traits – or the basis of such traits – to their offspring. Based on experiments (see documents 44-3, asari dissection series V), there is clear evidence of high-order genetic modification in asari DNA, leading to these alterations.

It seems clear that 'Athame' changed the asari's sexual patterns, for their own good. However, two unexpected results came from this tampering, around 50,000 years ago. (The fact that the trends were not corrected and the timing of the Prothean extinction further lends credence to the idea that the Protheans were indeed tampering with the asari.)

The first change was that, due to hunter clans being able to select traits they found pleasing, the asari DNA and genetic diversity became much more homogenous. Older records of asari, and some archeological evidence, show that any differencing features (retained amphibian traits, etc) were weeded out around this time. The result seems to be that close-knit clan groupings and regional barriers created a sort of taboo about wide-spread interbreeding. Clans bred with clans living near them and like them and avoided more distant clans.

With no serious model of civilization to build upon, and the might of the Thirty Families drawing in many far and wide, it should not be surprising that the lightly civilized asari never developed the concept of the nation. Political allegiance was built on sexual relationships and the advantage of linking strong clans to weaker ones, the stronger gaining numbers, the weaker gaining technology and advancement. Each of the Thirty began to dominate areas around them, with lesser clans forming a loose confederacy that mostly involved the coordination of seasonal hunts and sharing of resources, not political dominance. (More on this in the psychology section).

Without any central governance, the ability of asari to work together to further their own civilization was blunted. Focused on consensus and cooperation within the clan, they did not link their efforts with other clans. Rather than build large cities and borders, asari preferred smaller, more diffuse settlement patterns. Matriarchs bound together large amounts of maidens and matrons through mental domination in ritualized mass sexual encounters. With the swapping and trading of genetic material something that could be controlled, in many instances the relationships between clans were based solely on sexual exchanges and which matriarch could dominate another.

The result was loosely organized chaos, with no one focusing on the advancement of the race or even their local group, and instead focusing on survival and positioning. While there was some limited warfare, it was usually in regards to hunting grounds and the limited amounts of space available for proper agriculture. Rather than identify by nations, or even by locale, asari identified by clan and bloodline and matriarchy.

Two, three, or even four clans might dwell in a region of several hundred square miles, with dozens of small agricultural villages mostly held by matrons raising their families, and hunting grounds dominated by maidens stalking prey. Trade was for meat and hides in exchanges for grains and, as civilization progressed, manufactured goods – weapons, tools, and the like. All of these exchanges were enhanced by a network of sexual relationships and mental bondings, often between up to thousands of asari in various lines of relationships. A hunter who bonded with a matron and delivered her meat would have her innermost thoughts shared with the other hunters who vied for the matrons favors, as well as other maidens, who might then bond with yet other matrons.

Sociologists have long sneered at the asari fixation on sex as some kind of deviancy, but asari are not humans and have very fine control over birthrates and needs. The lack of loyalty to concepts in favor of loyalty to a group, often poorly defined, meant that no leader could unify asari under anything larger than the city state. This point cannot be stressed enough, as the staggeringly long life spans of asari mean that this sort of social structuring occurred less than sixty asari generations ago. Sixty generations ago, humans had moved through several iterations of social structures (clans, tribes, city states, nations-states, empires, and ethnic national groups) and government types (autocracies, democracies, monarchies, republics, etc).

The asari, for being such an 'old' race with much longer recorded history than humans, are still 'young' in terms of social development. This has had ramifications in how their history has unfolded (see the government section.)

Another side effect of the tampering was, some ten to fifteen thousand years ago, the emergence of deviant asari with a flawed melding process and increased ability at mental domination. The results of this were the rise of very rare and powerful asari who could not meld to reproduce, but instead somehow absorbed the memories and eezo charge of the asari they bonded with. This action had several possible strengths, the weakest ravaging the neural system, the strongest burning it out. Additionally, the mental strength of these strange asari was much higher than other asari. They were capable of dominating other asari, through as yet unknown methods of subtle mass effect manipulation of the bio-neural fields of other lifeforms. In effect, they could put others at ease and force them to submit to the mistress's will.

The asari have been very careful in hiding the existence of these monsters, which they style ardat-yakshi, but their existence precipitated a crisis in asari history. For the first time, a single strong individual could amass enough power to face down multiple matriarchs. Several ardat-yakshi 'queens' arose, bidding their collective clans to fight one another for dominance.

By this time, asari records become more coherent, and no further influences of Athame can be seen. Some forty thousand years ago, the asari moved from a hunter culture to a communal one, under the pressure of the queens.

Imperial Industrial Age: The War of Queens

Most of the ardat-yakshi seemed to arise in the smaller, stubborn hunting clans of the forest near the mountains, where distance from other clans was high and none of the Thirty had arisen. Over the course of several hundred years, while the Thirty played political games and maneuvered with and around each other to slowly begin to control asari society, the ardat-yakshi battled for dominance. The weaker version of their kind was killed off, with only the strongest surviving, and two figures stand out in this historical context.

Queen Shatha was the strongest ardat-yakshi known, recorded multiple times in ancient records as being able to kill dozens of other asari with ease using biotics alone. All records of her indicate she was rapacious, cruel, delighting in sadism and dominance. She arose from uncertain circumstances in the fringes of the Skypillar mountains, among the mountain and forest clans. The disparate clans she brought together were on the verge of starvation, due to climate changes driving off the prey they depended upon and blights afflicting their crops. Never prosperous, the clans inability to even feed their young and their hatred and jealousy of the prosperous seacoast clans gave the ardat-yakshi a way to dominate them. Shatha lead these clans on a conquest of neighboring areas, driving a long cone of bloodshed all the way from the Skypillar Mountains to the Canthas Sea, bringing over two hundred and fifty clans under her domination.

Near the Sensha Sea, where none of the Thirty had arisen and the fishing was somewhat poor, the so-called Silent Queen arose to prominence. Legends and rumors surround this figure, who the stories claimed was so powerful she did not even need to speak, merely imparting her will directly on her followers. The Silent Queen was icy, cold, calculating, and meticulous. With an interest in mechanical devices and the sciences, she pushed her clan towards both military conquest as well as improving technology. It didn't take long for her to simply dominate the matriarchs of her clan, and from there control other clans. The Sensha Sea, an inland sea linked by a narrow natural canal to the ocean, was rich in seaweed but not fish, and the surrounding rocky flatlands were not suited for much agricultural, but were laden with ore and eezo deposits.

By this time, asari were operating at a level of knowledge roughly on part with Ancient Rome, but with clear understandings of biology and medicine and good working knowledge of astronomy. The asari hunted with various weapons, mostly light metallic spears hurled with biotics, slender metal rods imparted with biotic energy and weight, and a ranged device called the cerric that was akin to a cross between a slingshot and a crossbow. Clan warfare only broke out over hunting areas and occasionally breeding rights, and until the rise of the Queens was very rare

Shatha developed most of the concepts of the asari military that they still use today. The hunting pack, the scouting and quick strike, the use of biotics to wear down and demoralize enemies, and only then striking with overwhelming force – these were her strategies. She would send forth spies in the guise of battered refugees (often times mentally dominating actual refugees to do so, editing their memories) and spy out promising areas, clans with strong matriarchs, and natural resources such as iron, copper, and gold. The strike that followed would be overwhelming, focusing on crushing and killing matriarchs and gaining access to the areas where children were hidden.

In addition to her brutality, Shatha was a talented herbalist and healer. Ironic for someone of such a vicious disposition, but she is credited in multiple accounts for several advances in medicine and in agriculture. Her ability to bring together so many clans allowed, for the first time, the mass levels of agricultural development needed for dense populations. Since none of the Thirty were nearby, her achievements were all the more remarkable, and before long she had added nearly every one of the thousand clans that occupied the arboreal forest areas inland under her banner. Upon reaching the Canthas Sea, she built a magnificent capital, and assaulted the remaining clans in the area, who fled south to the protection of the Thirty.

The Silent Queen, on the other hand, focused on technology, and initiated the beginning of the industrial era. Her cohorts built metalled roadways, invested in (and mastered) both water and steam power, and in less than three hundred years, began producing primitive firearms and bombs. Their ability to use biotics to mitigate the weight of armor, based on the Silent Queen's research in to biotic abilities, allowed them to use heavy interlocking plates of metal to protect themselves. The Silent Queen conquered over a hundred clans, and used a complex method of favor and arbitration to organize hunting areas, breeding rights, water use, logging and more.

It is said that the Grand Temple of Athame was built by the Silent Queen, who was, according to legend, a priestess of the Goddess. What is known is that in less than two centuries, the asari of the coast had advanced from swords and bow-analogues

Between the two ardat-yakshi, nearly a third of the race fell under their domination. Shatha declared herself a goddess, promising a freedom from the restrictive, poor lives lead by the mountain and forest clans, using increasingly deranged and perverted sexual practices to form a cult of personality around her and her 'daughters', weaker ardat-yakshi who appealed to her for protection. The Silent Queen declared herself the Hand of Athame, calling the Thirty pretenders, and inciting the poorer clans of the far southern coasts towards war.

The Thirty were trapped between the two, and while their walled cities and larger wealth would serve them in the short term, they saw all too clearly that the ardat-yakshi would win in the long run, given time. The Thirty thus formed the Concordat of Armali, at the city of that name, binding the Thirty together as rulers of the Asari and promising to aid one another in times of war and famine.

The most powerful of the Thirty, Houses T'Armal and House T'Shora, lead the assault first against Shatha, the first large scale war in asari history. Sometime during the war, the Silent Queen lead her forces against the Thirty as well.

Much of the historical record of the so-called War of the Queens is lost, or mingled with legend and myth. What is known is that it was bloody and violent in the extreme, and the majority of the ardat-yakshi were slain in the conflict that raged for some six hundred years. The mountain and forest clans, with no real cities and dependent on numbers and biotic strength, were routed in short order, with the Matriarchs of the Thirty engaging Shatha in a battle recorded at length in the Justicar Memory-Oath chants. If this tale is to be believed, Shatha's biotic might was enough to destroy over two thousand asari before she was brought down by the combined might of over a hundred Matriarchs.

The war with the Silent Queen dragged on for centuries, as the Thirty slowly adapted and increased their own technology to match the level of their adversary. Many military historians puzzle over the Silent Queen's actions and activities, many of which make little sense, such as building faculties devoted to manufacturing or libraries of information in forward areas and allowing them to be captured by the Thirty. Every time the Silent Queen seemed to be defeated, she would bring forth new innovations.

There are some who believe the Silent Queen was acting to advance the asari race, believing that she could crush the Thirty who would do all the work of upgrading and improving the technology of the asari under their dominion. In a series of attacks, the Silent Queen crushed three armies of the Thirty and crushed the majority of the matriarchs of the Thirty. She drove over five hundred miles into the territory of the Thirty, slaughtering tens of thousands of asari who would not kneel, and managed to pin the largest armies of the Thirty into a trap that cost them almost a quarter of their forces.

In year 1 of the Asari Calendar, the remaining forces of the Thirty met on the plains of Miathra, the southernmost of the cities of the Thirty, against the full force of the Silent Queen's army. Historical records and artifacts indicate the Thirty's forces had developed primitive matchlock firearms, cannons, and begun the process of moving into molecular manipulation in biotics, moving beyond mere kinetic shifts. Their army numbered nearly half a million asari, the largest fighting force of huntresses and battle-priestesses assembled for many millennia, driven by desperation. If Miathra fell, the Silent Queen would have access to the largest dockyard and shipyard in the world, and an assault on Armali would soon follow.

The forces of the Silent Queen were less than half that, but they had repeating rifles, rotary barrel large caliber weapons, steam-augmented armored wagons that used what appears to be some sort of Greek Fire in a flamethrower-type arrangement, and over a hundred aerial balloons equipped with bags of naphtha.

The fighting was severe, the Silent Queen's armies breaking the lines of the Thirty with their more advanced weapons and inflicting devastating casualties. While the Thirty had the edge in numbers, their more primitive weapons were not a good match against the arms of the Silent Queen, and the ardat-yakshi's biotics were devastating, capable of crushing entire groups of asari under sheer kinetic force. Her barriers were so strong that she laughed at cannonballs and musket balls that rebounded from her slender form, and at a distance of two miles was able to crush the gates of Miathra with the wave of a hand.

It was the bravery of the Paladins of Athame, battle-priestess serving the Thirty, that broke through the Silent Queen's bodyguard just as the city was about to fall. The sixty or so warriors died nearly to the last asari, but they managed to injure the Silent Queen, using biotics the ardat-yakshi had never seen before and crippling her.

With her mental domination weakened, some of those she had controlled began to rebel, and fighting broke out in her own forces. Gambling everything, the forces of House T'Soni and House Vasir charged into the enemy, slaying many and, according to legend, shattering the guard of the Silent Queen and slaying her.

The Age of Unity: the Peace of the Thirty

With smashing of the Silent Queen and the death of most of the ardat-yakshi, peace descended over Thessia. The Thirty, shaken by the experience, began a process of outreach and moving their core habitations more widely across the planet. The Thirty were very quick and focused on applying the advanced technology of the Silent Queen as well as the improved agricultural methods of Shatha, incorporating these into their various exchanges with lesser clans. Many clans, on the fringes of asari exploration of their world, were able to advance from semi-primitivism towards civilized towns and modern medicine in a handful of years. This widespread gifting of technology and industry cemented the Thirty's control over asari society, and even today most asari view the Thirty with awe as saviors of the race.

Over the next thousand years, the Thirty spread themselves widely apart, rather than concentrating on the seacoast near Armali. The premier house of the Thirty, House T'Armal, abandoned it's ancestral home to the houses of T'Soni and Vasir, heroes of the War of Queens, moving deep inland towards the mountains. Other houses spread across the sea, or into the forests.

While this allowed the Thirty greater control over the areas they moved into, it also served to sever the tight bonds of the Thirty. Over the next five millennia, the cities became the centers of small city states. With no real need to go to war and the memories of the Queens firmly in their mind, conflict was avoided whenever possible.

The shift to attempting to understand each other rather than fight was improved by the rapid technological advancement that had occurred. But the natural conservative nature of the Thirty served to stifle innovation for many years, as they focused on spreading influence and control.

The asari had reached a level of technology roughly on par with early 20th century technology some six thousand years ago, and from there the pace of development slowed down drastically. Asari began the practice of siari as worship of Athame faded, focusing more on philosophical understanding, relationships and mastering their biotic abilities.

Periodic outbreaks of ardat-yakshi, and increasing amounts of crime and moral deviance, lead to the formation of the Justicar Order almost three thousand years ago, bound by oaths of subservience to the Thirty. Charged with the defense of the asari people, the Justicars acted as a vicious supra-natural police force that slew murderers, rapists, mind-dominators, ardat-yakshi, and anyone else that was a threat to the race. Refusing to become a political tool of the Thirty, the Justicars withdrew from society, giving up family ties and even children to focus on their duty.

Meanwhile, the city states of the Thirty had broadened, blooming into free-wheeling democracies dominated by not utterly controlled by the Thirty. While the Thirty owned well over half the race's wealth, they allowed the growth and prosperity of others, tying them to the fortunes of the Thirty through sex, bonding, trade agreements, and rumor. Society became stratified – at the top, the Thirty and their vassal clans, then the trading and warrior clans, then the merchant and agricultural clans, and at the bottom the so-called clanless, those common asari who's clans had melted away in the mixing of peoples after the War of Queens.

Such segregation was mostly limited to who one would have offspring with, but since offspring were the ultimate tie between clans, effectively the power of a clanless was limited to her lifetime, since it was unlikely she could parley her achievement beyond mere wealth to her children, and wealth was not the primary factor in affluence in asari culture. Indeed, while the Thirty were wealthy by dint of ancestral control of lands, mines and herds, much of the rest of the wealth was in the hands of the clanless, with the clans between beholden to the Thirty for social advancement but dependent on the good-will of the clanless for financial backing. This dance of position and control and submission fitted the asari personality perfectly and continues into the present day, not much changed.

Some four thousand years ago, increasing use of communication devices (electrical transmission devices, similar to telegraph but with a biotic component allowing stresses and emotions to be transmitted) began to link together various city states. The increasing unity of the asari people on a global level did not lead to further nation building – the change of the war now pushing consensus and accommodation as primary values meant there was little impetus to form larger principalities. Additionally, larger groupings would have required closer cooperation between the Thirty, who had by this time become warily antagonistic to one another.

Age of Flight : The Stars beckon

Thirty five hundred years ago, a massive asteroid broke away from the asteroid belts of Parnitha and smashed into the southern sea of Thessia, sending up tidal waves that smashed the city of Antai to ruins and slew most of the House Chansai. The devastation was horrific – six million asari lost their lives in tsunamis, millions more died from starvation in the famine that followed due to the darkening of the skies due to dust.

The Thirty began a heavy program of research and invention, creating over the next century a new clan structure out of whole cloth, that of the inventor clan. The inventors were given vast sums and broad goals by the Thirty – find methods to survive the asteroid strike, ensure it didn't happen again, and secure the safety of the race.

It took them some three hundred years to perfect flying machines, and another century to develop primitive spaceflight. As astronomers turned increasingly good telescopes to the skies, they realized to their horror that a rogue planet was traversing the system. It would circle back through the asteroid belt in but a few more centuries, and all calculations showed the results would be a wave of asteroid strikes likely to completely devastate the world.

Driven by desperation, the asari achieved rocket-assisted spaceflight around 600 AD on Earth. The Thirty financed a series of ships, exploring their solar system. They focused first on the barren, nearly airless world of Piares, mining it heavily for raw materials to build additional ships, then on Lucan, the super-massive asteroid in the belt that offered large amounts of bauxite and other industrial metals.

The force-march of the asari through such staggering technological changes ushered in significant cultural upheaval. Over time, avoiding inter-clan inbreeding, even with the ability to manipulate genes, became harder due to cultural limits and clan restrictions. Birthrates began to fall, and the number of asari with higher dispositions on the ardat-yakshi scale rose. With the lack of strong centralized leadership, matriarchs took even more power in society, but rarely retained family attachments at such an age, instead gathering groups of maidens to their side to spread their philosophies.

Families became strained, tense arrangements, with social standing, economic status and breeding quality all adding into clan politics and the constant swirl of social rumors and bond-enhanced sensitivity stirred in. Divorces became common and ugly, and increasingly, young maidens turned away from the pastoral life as hunters or priestesses, instead offering pleasure to lonely matrons, serving matriarchs, or falling to crime. The long-view asari viewpoint on these immature acts was amused tolerance, but some in asari society did not like the changes and called for a return to older, simpler values.

This was cracked down on by the Thirty as well as the inventor clans, now gaining influence due to the value of their skills. The space push increased, driving unemployment to almost zero percent, and the ecosystem of Thessia began to suffer as mining and industry took a toll on the planet. Increasing numbers of clans began to move from the hinterlands towards the cities, increasing the control the Thirty had over the population.

Unlike humanity, the asari appear to have no Prothean ruins of the sort we found on Mars, so we are unsure how they came to discover the mass relay in their system and how to utilize it. But they were able to do so, and began to explore space in hesitant jumps. With no centralized government, and no single family of the Thirty capable of funding a fleet of warships, the Thirty came together to form a loose confederacy of interlocking financial obligations and military cooperation known collectively as the Asari Republic.

The Republic had no ability to control the asari city-states, nor anything on Thessia itself, but had top priority in resource allocation, and was the central arbiter of funds moved towards space exploration. With this centralized repository, the pace of asari development and technology moved forward rapidly. It didn't take long for more powerful orbital satellites to pinpoint the path and trajectory of the rogue planet.

Fifteen years saw the construction of several large (roughly cruiser sized) ships, equipped with the first primitive mass accelerators the asari could produce. This fleet spent several months methodically bombarding the rogue planet before it shattered into varying large chunks, all of which hurled out of the path of Thessia – most being captured by the large gas giants in the system. Platforms with mass effect weapons and missile banks were also erected around Thessia, as were massive barrier shields to protect the cities from further asteroid impacts.

The Age of Silence : The trek to the Citadel

Asari exploration in the early years of their spaceflight era was cautious and hesitant. Asari colonized slowly, as Thessia was overpopulated but still the center of society. Clans who moved off planet were trivialized in terms of their relationships to the home world, although over time they came to dominate the planets to which they settled. New powerful clan groups and alliances sprung up on the handful of asari colonies, and suddenly the clanless realized true freedom from the wheeling social controls and tight constraints of Thessian society were available.

The colony wave moved more quickly after that, and Prothean ruins discovered by asari explorers further sped exploration along. The asari stumbled across the gory ruins of seven other sentient species, all slain by nuclear war or ecological disasters, and increased the weapons and size of their fleet-ships. Their cautious approach was given further reinforcement when asari researchers, plotting the links between the mass relays they had opened, discovered they were leading to a point near the outer rim of the galaxy core.

On a single fateful day, some five hundred years before the birth of Christ and the Rachni War, the Asari ship AEV Graceful Gaze discovered the Widow Nebula and the Citadel. The asari approached with trepidation, curiosity, and above all else caution, but the station was deserted save for the Keepers, the living maintenance drones that repaired and upgraded the Citadel.

The asari quickly realized that the Widow Relay connected no less than a dozen primary relays, each of which connected to dozens and dozens of secondary relays, and was a nexus of the entire relay system. They rapidly moved to dominate this space station, bringing in greenery and water to the central ring to simulate the environment on Thessia, and building on the five arms a variety of apartments, factories, warehouses and military facilities to secure their discovery.

They were in the midst of this effort when the salarian ships arrived at the Citadel, barely forty years after their own arrival. The meeting of the two races was a staggering, shaking event for both salarians and asari.

The lifespans of salarians was brief in a way that left the asari literally disbelieving, but their activity and intellect was equally swift. With a fifth of the history of the asari, salarian technology was significantly more advanced, refined, and flexible in many areas. But the asari had an edge in mass effect technology, and that, combined with their naturally mysterious aura, powerful biotics, and immense lifespans, gave the salarian dalatrasses pause.

Rather than take the chance fighting a clearly powerful foe, the salarians and asari decided to work together. And in many ways that partnership is the core of what Cerberus fears, for humanity and on a lesser scale for all races. Asari history had shaped these alien women into creatures completely incapable of understanding concepts such as liberty, privacy, or even dignity – a race who turned from violence to embrace a smothering level of almost incestuous self-reflection, an economy half based on social, sexual, and even cultural postures and cues and not on actual profit or merit, and a religion that quickly took up the concept that asari were destined to guide, lead, and dominate all other life in the galaxy.

The Modern Age and the Change of Focus

History after their capture of the Citadel is well known to all. They combined forces with the salarians and grew strong, strong enough that they could dictate terms to other species who arrived. The combination of asari political maneuvering and salarian intelligence gathering was unbeatable.

The quarians and batarians, each more wrapped up in their own cultural biases and loci, were easily manipulated to subservience. Turians were manipulated from the beginning, duped into overextending in the Krogan wars and then being reliant on asari and salarian financial aid to stabilize their culture. The hanar-drell compact was tolerated by the simple dint of being able to manipulate the hanar through the discovery and relinquishing of Prothean ruins after everything of use had been stripped. The volus, vorcha, and elcor were not even worthy of being considered for a place on the Council, and the only reason the turians were is due to the worrying size of their military.

Asari culture underwent another startling shift during this time period. A few asari had experimented with alien lovers – mostly quarians and salarians, but the occasional krogan. They believed, based on the results of their offspring, that mating with aliens produced superior results, and that they could manipulate the DNA of their offspring and match it to certain patterns in that of their mates to pass on traits that were desirable.

The Thirty investigated these claims and found that, at best, all that was passed on was various proto-racial memories, An asari with a krogan sire would be more prone to violence and strong emotion, but certainly had no real mental or physical differences.

However, such offspring were never found to be ardat-yakshi. With the problem of the ardat-yakshi growing with each year, the Thirty began to encourage breeding with aliens. Subtly, over several centuries, breeding with other asari for the purpose of offspring came closer and closer to outright taboo. At first, many asari embraced this craze. After years of byzantine mating and breeding rituals, the ability to simply pick a mate based on personality and desire was refreshing for many asari.

The asari ability to meld, to pick up surface emotions during a meld and memories during a bond, quickly became asari trump cards. Maidens were increasingly encouraged to mingle freely with aliens, and over time fell into further patterns of immature, impulsive behavior. Exotic dancing, prostitution, mercenary work and more all became the past-times of the young. The Thirty themselves took mates from other species with connections or vital information, and it was often joked among salarian intelligence services that an asari could achieve more with a smile and a night in bed than an entire spy unit.

As time progressed, and the number of ardat-yakshi dropped precipitously, the Thirty moved to ensure they did not arise again – as the only real threat to the power of the Thirty at this stage, they were seen as the primary danger. Worse, if aliens discovered the ardat-yakshi, the Thirty feared backlashes or reprisals, and a loss of trust. Thus, using all of their influence, control and manipulation, the Thirty steered asari society to the concept that asari having children with other asari was bad.

(An aside: of all the aliens, the asari are the most repulsive in their attitudes towards humanity, and their innate inability to trust and be truthful with other races is the core of this. The salarians are lying, shifty, and immoral, but they at least are not hiding the nature of who and what they are or what they want. The turians are hidebound, racist, and probably racially schizophrenic, but they do not betray or pervert the very nature of their enemies. Only the asari do. And only the asari see nothing wrong with doing so.)

This did not always work, however, and many asari, repulsed or at least not attracted to most aliens, refused to do such. While the quarians were extant, many asari found them attractive in an exotic fashion, and the females similar enough in some ways, but the Morning War sealed quarians into their suits and away from the gazes of asari maidens, who forgot them.

Increasingly, asari raised far from Thessia and the influence of the Thirty turned to their own kind for romance and comfort, and questioned the harsh social taboos against having children with their own species. Meanwhile, the efforts of the Thirty to reduce maidens from a potential army for troublemakers to very nearly a class of whores and mercenaries had succeeded in a generation of matrons who were very weary of such endeavors, returning home to raise families. The short lived races around them lived long enough to cause their asari mates great grief when they finally died, and as a result many asari did not even think about starting families or made any planning for such.

Humanity's arrival on the scene was another shock for the asari, who were the primary reason the First Contact War was stopped. With the exception of hair instead of crests and skin color, female humans might have well been asari, and male humans were different enough in just a minor way to be utterly exotic yet still close enough that asari natural species attraction affected them.

Asari went mad over the conflicting, rich cultures that humanity brought with them, and the energy and drive of humans was seen as something incredible to the asari. In the span of a few asari lifetimes, humans had driven themselves from fighting with sticks and rocks to gracing the corridors of the Citadel. To the Thirty, they seemed dangerous, but also an opportunity.

Currently, asari seem to favor humanity, although in a way that Cerberus finds disturbing at best. Asari matriarchs start biotic cults among our populations, and asari maidens seduce away men and women their service. The asari ability to enthrall their lovers, the addictive nature of bonding and melding, and the fact that asari are extremely attractive to humans, all combine to make them a lure few humans bother to resist.

And yet, any view of asari culture shows their fundamental nature is to adapt to changing circumstances and then bend them to their own purpose. The early asari, rather than use their nature to aid one another, bartered sex and advantage in a way that seems truly repulsive to us. Their inability to control their own kind, and the desire for matriarchs to rule, lead to scattered, weak clans. Even the Thirty, with all their vaunted wisdom, repeatedly made mistakes that ended up trivializing many asari who were not of importance to the Thirty, making them prime fodder for ardat-yakshi in the War of Queens.

Rather than rein in these impulses, they nearly let them destroy their entire culture, then rebuilt it using bribery and political manipulations. The Thirty care nothing for the clans, or even the asari race, only their own dominance. The clan structure isolates asari from one another, ensuring that only events that threaten the race as a whole can unify them, and even then, they are likely to hide behind an ally.
Chapter 5: Chapter 5 - Asari Psychology

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

Asari psychology and social structure is baffling. I worked closely with the teams from Shadow in compiling this document, but be aware that understanding asari mindsets is akin to comprehending quantum physics – it is more of a matter of grasping principles than true understanding. Asari psychology is a mess of deviant sexuality, obsessions with social relationships, species-wide mind sharing, and an almost casual disregard for other races due to their long life spans via ours.

I'd also like to point out that Agent Cole's relationship with the asari called Sapphire is completely inappropriate.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: To withdraw in disgust is neither apathy nor cowardice, but prudence. One cannot find pearls among swine.

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Dr. Minsta ,

Agent Cole has had an unfortunate accident, along with his asari lover. We appreciate your attention to detail in ensuring none of the agents we use in infiltration and data gathering is .. compromised by their duties, however pleasant they may be.

The Iron General

Cerberus Thought for the Day: The rewards of tolerance of the alien are treachery and betrayal.

Asari Psychology:

If the basis of human psychology is the study of motivation, needs, and self-perception, then the best way to describe asari psychology – and how alien they are – is the study of relationships, desires, and posturing. Asari are not humans. This may seem like an obvious and silly thing to point out, but due to the near identical appearance of the asari to us, and their ability to comprehend and absorb information about races they have melded with, the point needs to be made, and made repeatedly.

Humans have a hierarchy of needs. While much of Maslow's work has come under question from deterministic researchers and sociopsychologists, the framework is sound enough to comprehend what drives humans – basic needs such as shelter, food, sex, followed by social needs such as family and acceptance, topped off by goals and self-actualization. Asari do not function anywhere close to this.

If one is to construct an asari 'hierarchy of needs', then the bottom layer could be termed hunter-like survivalist instinct. At the most primitive, asari are hunter-gatherers still, focused on individual achievement linked to furthering the clan. Thus, the basics are food and water, shelter, and clan identity and acceptance. Rogue asari who are rejected from their clans end up retaining this hunter-like mentality, rarely if ever rising above a sort of selfish and brutal outlook until they can establish their own clan structure, however flimsy it may be.

Above this tier is the powerful and overwhelming need for esteem, acceptance, and influence. Many researchers would put sex somewhere in these tiers, but for the asari, sexual contact is of astonishingly little importance or value. What matters is that a person is accepted, that they are part of the consensus, that they are trusted enough to be brought into bonds and melds and made part of the greater whole. There is no such concept in asari relations as fidelity in terms of sexual behavior, nor is there taboo about it – to the asari, casual sexuality is roughly on par with how humans view gossip.

After fulfilling needs of the body, clan, and being accepted, the third tier of asari behavior becomes something akin to human self-actualization. Asari who have achieved this stage begin to question the fundamental nature of who and what they are, and to work with others to build consensus, cooperation, and a tighter network of bonds and melds and the sharing of memories.

This urge is very deep seated, and is why the asari do not seem to have (with the exception of the ardat-yakshi) ever had any real intercene warfare, only minor skirmishes over hunting areas in their very early years. Conflict resolution is very high in the asari mindset, as is comprehension of what the other – the other being a rival clan, a personal foe, or an unknown entity – is thinking, feeling, and expecting.

Asari Psychology and Age

As asari age, their mindset and outlook on life changes. This is due to a host of physiological changes, the vast perspective and wisdom that living well over a thousand years brings, and the cumulative experiences of hundreds of melds with other asari or aliens.

Maiden psychology is one of exploration, lack of responsibility, and enjoyment. With the exception of the Thirty (who are held to higher standards by their families and public perception), most asari maidens are raised within clan and family until they are around 80 years old, at which time they are let free to roam. Maidens are intensely sexualized as a result of both cultural upbringing and evolution, which forced clans to push maidens into matron stages as soon as possible to boost birthrates. Maidens are often involved in what humans would see as horrific trades for the equivalent of young teenagers – prostitutes, exotic dancers, escorts, mercenaries. Something like 95% of asari end up in one or more of these occupations for the first hundred or so years of life, before moving into something less dangerous, often in asari corporations where they make up low-level positions and begin learning actual trade skills.

Asari maidens, psychologically, are simply not mature adults. They are prone to wild emotional swings, vulnerable to flattery, and quite capable of fixating on certain goals to the exclusion of all else. For most asari maidens, these goals are to have fun and live wildly, but there are maidens who have fixations on making money, acquiring art, studying music, history or other pursuits, and who take up these concepts with almost frightening focus.

At some point, usually after two to three centuries of life, asari begin feeling urges to have offspring. In earlier times, maidens were pushed into this as quickly as possible, but in modern times most maidens are allowed to indulge themselves until they are ready to become mothers. It is worth noting that the idea of not having children is utterly and completely alien to asari. While maidens do not think about it very often, if at all, we have not been able to find even a single instance of asari who are childless past five hundred years of age, either in historical records or after interviews. The staggering birthrate of the asari, combined with the fact that literally every single one of them (with the obvious exception of ardat-yakshi) will have at least one child, explains why they outnumber humanity four to one and boast over a hundred well-settled colony worlds.

Even the most timid and frigid of asari is likely to have melded with a few dozen asari and/or aliens by the time she reaches the matron stage and begins feeling urges to begin a family. The shift to matron from maiden brings about strong conservatism and concealment of emotions, focusing on the partner or partners with which children are to be brought about. (See physiological studies for further information – but in brief, remember that asari pregnancies can end up with both partners pregnant with the others child, or even circular pregnancy arrangements among three or more asari. Truly revolting.)

Matrons foremost priority is raising their children, and on providing for their children's future. Matrons are hardworking, quiet, focused on their family and clan and do not take risks or chances. Matrons that undergo the bond with a mate tend to settle down into a single relationship for the life of the mate, which in all cases but krogans, is only a small span of time. Even with the most advanced medical care genetic improvements, and cybernetics, a human can't live much past 140, most turians can't live past 180, and salarians rarely break 40. As such, matrons can afford to lavish attention and care on their bondmate.

Matron psychology focuses mostly on basic needs and is about the only time where sexual rampancy is dimmed. While many matrons become active again after the death of their bondmates, most are more hesitant to get involved on such a tight, personal level with aliens, and they begin non-childbearing relationships with other asari. These are rarely monogamous events, often being clan or regional connections that number in the dozens, more for comfort and friendship (and pleasure) than any lasting emotional bonds of what we could recognize as romantic. Again, romance and sex are utterly divided in the asari mindset.

Matrons are rarely seen in combative positions, preferring to take up more mediating and life-affirming pursuits, even after their children are grown. Matrons rarely get pregnant more than during one period in their life – they may have one child, or several children in a row, but almost never do they have a child at, say, three hundred and another at six hundred. (More can be found in the physiological section, but asari pregnancy is extremely untaxing due to physiological adaptations – asari can have upwards of eight offspring in a handful of years with no ill effects, and little pain.)

Once a matron has raised her child, she focuses more on reaching out to other matrons, building a network of social supporters and either following the teachings and guidance of a matriarch, or beginning to plan her own advancement to that state, depending on her level of self-confidence and social status. This part of asari psychology is poorly understood, but some asari seem naturally inclined to lead, and other to submit.

At around seven hundred years of age, sometimes later, a matron undergoes a physiological and mental shift. Most of the details can be found in the physiological section of this document, but the mental and psychological changes are profound. They gain a measure of mental strength and confidence that is stunning, while undergoing a complete psychological shift.

A Matriarch is an ancient creature, one who has ties to dozens, possibly hundreds or even thousands of other asari through linking and bonding. The mind of the asari shifts to encompass these memories on a conscious rather than unconscious level, and testing has confirmed the raw intellectual capacity increases by a factor of three for most matriarchs. The entire hierarchy of needs of an asari up to this point – survival, esteem, influence, consensus – fades, replaced by a single-minded desire to influence and control others. Matriarchs seemingly live to guide and lead other asari, often aiding in raising children, determining cultural influences, leading companies and participating in political and social leadership positions.

Matriarchs literally require a level of submission from those they lead. It is theorized that the asari mindset becomes so warped by linking and bonding and the influx of other memories that the original personality of the asari, over time, simply becomes an amalgam of various other linked personalities. The original asari becomes a semi-gestalt of what she has absorbed, changing her from a person to virtual group of persons operating with one viewpoint.

While this sounds ridiculous to the average human, for asari it makes sense. Early evolution would have put great stress on asari clans, and matriarchs acted as both natural leaders and living recording devices, incorporating the gestalt knowledge and personality of the clan or family unit they lead. In the modern era, however, this has slowly become a matter where many matriarchs lead tiny cults of personality, biotic groups, or even religions.

Truly grasping the psychology of a being such as a matriarch is nearly impossible. They have so many connections and submissive followers that concerns such as survival and esteem, or even self-actualization, must appear ridiculous to the asari. Matriarchs define success in a holistic, group based view, such as the success of the asari people, of their corporations or religious groups, or on a fixed long-term goal of staggering complexity.

Many matrons simply do not really become matriarchs. They age and die at around eight hundred years old, content and fulfilled with the lives they have lead. This explains why the asari population is about 10% adolescents, 30% maidens, 40% matrons, and only 20% matriarchs.

Asari Linking and Sexuality

One cannot divorce the asari from their overly sexualized presentation and reputation. That is because asari have a viewpoint on sex alien to almost every other known species in Citadel space.

Batarians, turians, volus, and drell sexuality is almost identical to human sexuality – attractions between two people, be it physical, mental, hormonal or situational, leading to a relationship of a sexual nature combined with some level of romantic affection, and a formal bond relationship that leads to children and a longer-term relationship involving living together. Salarians do not present this due to their method of reproduction and rapidly shifting emotional states, and krogan cannot presently afford such things, although there is evidence they fell into this model before the genophage. The mating rituals of the hanar do not allow for such, and elcor have communal mating that, while incorporating several partners, still results in the same effect.

Asari do not link sex with romantic feelings, or even the desire for children, in any way, shape, or form. For them, it is merely an activity, with no more significance than humans going out for a beer together, or turians going shooting together. Asari promiscuity is beyond staggering, trending into the truly ludicrous, as the average asari may have hundreds of casual sex partners in the years of being a maiden, and even after having children may take on dozens of further casual sex partners.

Since the asari have complete control over when they choose to become pregnant, and since it's very difficult for maidens to have the level of biotic control necessary to be able to induce a pregnancy, this casualness is to be expected to some degree. Additionally, since the asari sex act is not penetrative, at least among asari, it is of little concern.

One cannot approach asari culture and psychology without looking at sex, which is related to their methods of communication – linking, bonding, and melding. At the lightest level, linking is the practice of hooking the asari's own nervous system to that of their sex partner. This enhances the pleasure of the act, heightening sensitivity and even drawing out and intensifying the sensations. There is some light emotional transfer in such an act as well, but no exchanges of memories. Linking is apparently practice

for bonding, where an asari pushes the link deeper, binding together two beings on a mental level.

This allows for some exchanges of memories, of emotions, and for the asari to have a very deep understanding of the person she's engaged in the bond with. As such it is hardly a casual act, but one of a more romantic or emotional level.

The highest level of asari link is the Meld, where an asari tries to unify herself fully with the person she is linking to. The Meld is not something done lightly, nor is it reversible. Two sentient beings literally become one for the purposes of sentience while it is ongoing, and after there exists a low level bio-electrical link between the two, which allows for long distance transfer of emotions of a strong nature.

(This has been confirmed, see paired asari enhanced interrogation series VII). Melding is also required when asari wish to have children, as they claim to be able to use the partner's DNA to enhance the offspring.

The end result is that almost all sexual encounters with asari end up with linking at the very least, usually bonding if repeated. In the days before spaceflight, asari clans would trade maidens and sexual aggressiveness was used to bind and link groups together, to show there was no hostility. As breeding complications arose, either from trying to avoid the creation of ardat-yakshi or incompatibilities between seacoast and mountain or forest clans, casual sex for the purpose of entertainment and lowering tensions went from commonplace to almost required.

As populations grew more dense, the amount of linking between asari, and bonds, resulted in a nearly communal memory with clans and clan groupings. Social status was closely linked with the influence and control a bond-mate had over her partner (more commonly, partners) and the secrets and understanding they had of those who those partners had bonded with. The Thirty were the absolute masters at this technique, targeting those asari with liaisons who had wide networks of link and bond-mates and wielding disproportionate influence as a result.

Asari Outcasts: shorn from the clan

For whatever reason (research suggests recessive ardat-yakshi traits), some asari simply integrate poorly with other asari. These asari tend to lead solitary, depressed lives, unable to fit into asari culture. They recoil from melds and links, suppress their emotional states, and tend towards extremes, either focusing on some form of criminality or some esoteric method of study.

These outcasts usually end up gravitating to pastimes that give them no way out from the lives they live. They avoid their own kind when possible, and have an easier time mingling with aliens, although they remain awkward there as well. Unlike most asari, outcasts tend to value loyalty and sexual fidelity immensely, often taking only one mate their entire lives.

Outcast psychology is more understandable to humans than standard asari psychology is. They are lonely, vulnerable people, unable for whatever reason to participate in the crazed social maneuvering of their own kind and seeking some form of replacement for the clan. This makes them some of the most valuable targets for Cerberus infiltration operations, as they become more bitter and hateful of their own kind over time, and may even turn on them.

A high number of outcasts are those who are considered 'purebloods', offspring from the union of two asari rather than an asari and an alien. As such, they end up more likely than not to also pursue unions with another asari, usually to be rebuffed, and to cling to whoever ends up accepting them in whatever manner. Outcast asari place acceptance over even survival, being willing to risk their lives in almost suicidal situations if only to prove they are worthy.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : turians

Asari and turians have little in common at first glance. Turians are alien in chirality and shape, having few common features with asari, and their culture demands absolute loyalty among mates, places values on intangibles such as honor and tradition rather than virtues of the moment, and rejects more subtle political intrigue as weak.. As a result, the average asari finds the turians to be staid, rather boring and quite naive. Maidens find their aggression and valor attractive, but usually don't get involved with them due to their fixation on fidelity.

Turian and asari military methods clash, as the turians believe force answers all questions while asari see force as the stick used only when the carrot fails. Justice and law are also clashing ideals, with asari absolutism seen as repugnant to turian sensibilities, and the turian refusal to separate civilian from military assets seen as barbaric by asari. Turian art, music, and culture, all designed to enhance the glory of the Hierarchy and the ancestors, is seen as mind-crushingly boring by asari, while asari culture with it's rapidly shifting social links is seen as insane by the rank-obsessed meritocracy of the turians.

Asari are more than capable of manipulating the turian mindset, which is fixated on goals and patterns, the social demands of honor, and intense and truthful self-examination. While few of these concepts translate cleanly to the asari focus, asari find turians attractive due to the turian's natural acceptance of authority when demonstrate to be competent.

Asari outcasts, those who do not fit into traditional asari society, find turians fascinating, and literally every known asari outcast has taken up with turians as mates and business partners. This is understandable – an asari outcast, shorn of the comfort of clan and the race, needs someone utterly devoted to them and them alone. Turians mate for life and even the most disgraced turian would hesitate before ever betraying their mate.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : salarians

The asari attitude towards salarians can be described as disinterested amusement and collaboration. The two species are opposites in every way. Salarians prize inventiveness and change, while asari cling to conservatism. Salarians live for short spans of time and refuse to dwell in the moment, focusing on what lies ahead, asari cling to every second of existence as valuable and live for centuries. Salarians devalue sex as only for procreation, and that dependent on biological breeding values and at the control of the dalatrasses, asari see sex as communication and vital to understanding, and base breeding values on compatibility and emotional context.

Yet both races have strong submissive streaks towards the elder females, and both prize the resolution of conflict through methods other than force. Asari rarely take salarian mates, as sexuality is simply not something many salarians care about. Yet it does happen, most often with maidens, since salarians place zero value on fidelity much like asari do.

Salarian 'values', such as they are, provide a delicious counterpoint to asari subtle manipulations, and the two races have a deep respect for how the other manages to infiltrate and coopt other races and enemies. The military and combat guidelines for both races are also very similar, as are asari and salarian concepts of justice and law.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : batarians

Asari and batarians have never gotten along – the asari find the batarians to be repulsive, cruel, mindless and all to devoted to an utterly male viewpoint that they cannot understand. The batarian reliance on slaves, and their cavalier attitude towards crime, also repulses them.

Asari views on almost every cultural aspect clash with batarians. Asari are collectivist and strive for consensus, social submission, and understanding. Batarians prize individuality and posturing, care nothing for agreements, and don't want to understand others, feeling that other races are inferior. The batarian slaver's preference for the capture and rape of asari maidens is also a point of ugly contention between the two races.

Asari outcasts sometimes mingle with batarians, but even this is rare. On the whole, asari and batarians do not interact.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : hanar, volus, elcor, and drell

Asari's relationship with these highly alien races is usually limited. Some adventurous (and deviant) asari seek out relationships with the hanar for the purposes of sexual partnerships, but for the most part, the asari simply don't deign to bother with what they consider their lessers.

The asari have carefully manipulated the drell and volus in certain situations, raising tensions in the relationships between volus and turians, or drell and hanar, but this appears to be the moves of individual matriarchs. On some level, psychologically speaking, races that simply don't stand out much are not of much interest to asari.

While investigations of how asari culture clashes with other alien cultures could be performed, the lack of interaction makes it of value only in the sense of morbid curiosity.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : vorcha

Really? Hopefully, this isn't even worth researching, and the only results we had so far in interviews resulted in slapped faces.

It shouldn't need repeating, but the asari rarely bother with inferior races. A few have made efforts at raising child vorcha in hopes of altering their behavior, but this , again, appears to be the act of a few matriarchs, not the race.

Asari Psychology and Aliens : krogan

At the current time, no research has been completed. Anecdotal evidence implies that unions such as this are rare, and that the asari have written off the krogan as both dying and too stubborn to manipulate.

Krogan find some asari attractive in only that offspring are possible, even if said offspring are asari. Some asari have had krogan mates in the past, the lifespans of the two races being very long and thus conducive to long term relationships. This does not appear to be commonplace in modern times, however.

Asari Psychology and Humans:

The discovery of humanity was a large shock to the asari collective psyche, and even decades later it's effects are still being felt. Humans became, in short order, the asari race's collective obsession, with literally millions upon millions of asari taking human mates both male and female.

The bizarre asari psychology, their inability to link fidelity and emotional attachment to sex, and their disassociated, long-view way of looking at things has proven a barrier to them fully understanding human psychology in turn. However, asari clearly understand that their appearance, sexuality, mystery and biotic power makes them appealing and intriguing to humans, and have parlayed that into a series of advances into human society and industry that are worrying.

The attitude of most asari towards humans is equally confusing. Asari look down on all other races, seeing themselves unmatched in terms of knowledge, power, lifespan, wealth, achievement and destiny. Yet they also are hesitant around humans, fearful of the drive and energy of our race. Unlike salarians, who waste much of their energies in internal bickering or paranoid planning, humanity's focus on concrete goals meshes well with the asari focus on dominance.

Maidens are particularly enamored of humans, particularly those from Thessia. The unending push to mate with aliens and not their own kind has exhausted the well of xenophilia most asari feel, and humans (especially human females) are identical enough for natural urges and attractions to take over. The short lifespan and energy of humans is also attractive, and the primacy of sexual actions in human self-esteem and social standing gives the asari powerful tools to manipulate humans with.

Matrons find humans to be better parents than salarians and better matches than turians or krogan. Humans have, compared to other races, extremely strong protective instincts towards their children, and most, if satisfied emotionally and sexually, are unlikely to wander off. Matrons also find humans more stable than salarians, more flexible than turians, and less aggressive and hard to control than krogan mates.

Matriarchs seem equally fascinated with humanity as a whole, if not humans on the individual level. Many matriarchs have had considerable success in forming religious groups, biotic cults, and other organizations in human society, while others have gone on swathes of sexual conquests, practicing the tactics once used in their pre-history to influence and dominate key human government or business figures.

The inter-relation between humans and asari is complicated by the current cultural backlash in some asari circles towards asari-asari offspring. Humans are seen as alien enough to avoid that taboo, yet enough like asari to be fulfilling. As a rule, asari are faintly, if reliably, protective of humanity, albeit for their own purposes and manipulation.

Asari Mental Diseases and Conditions:

Despite their great mental strength, asari are not immune to psychological or mental breakdown. Younger asari are no more resilient than humans to mental breakdown. They resist torture poorly, especially if they have such torture inflicted on a link-mate at the same time, and while many can practice biotic arts to suppress nerve reactions, anti-biotic drugs can remove this impediment.

Matrons, and especially matriarchs, however, due to the long life experiences they have and the grounding effects of so many bonds and links, become increasingly resistant to mental trauma, shock, and psychosis. Even the most brutal torture or horrible events are born by matriarchs with little to no series mental stress, although they will certainly be emotionally affected. Torture to bond-mates, however, breaks them even more quickly than maidens, since there is appearance no defense against such close mind linkages.

Asari have a condition similar to schizophrenia, which is caused when maidens attempt to bond too deeply in their youth. This causes confusion of their core personality and can lead to madness in short order, which is why most asari shy away from such deep bonds in their youth. Asari can also suffer from depression, most often after the death of a bond-mate or exile from a clan.

Asari have the ability to 'force-bond' and suppress or eliminate memories in another, which is the prime tool by which asari mental health professionals use to combat depression. However, this method can fail in times of stress or when heavy bonding occurs again, with often devastating results to the mental health of the asari in question.

Finally, there is a form of cancer that afflicts some asari, which damages the portion of their brains that regulates emotional control. While eventually lethal, the early stages can be treated if caught, but the resulting irrationality remains. This does not incapacitate the asari in question – the leader of Eclipse, Jona Sederis, suffers from this ailment – but makes them difficult to predict or control, and can often result in criminal activities or worse.
Chapter 6: Chapter 6 - Asari Physiology

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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To the Three:

Asari physiology is , to put it plainly, ridiculous. There is no goddamned way any reputable scientist can refute the fact that the asari are flat out genetically engineered. It's infuriating, not only because the asari deny it, but because of the fact that humanity has no real way to counter such awesome advances woven into the very genes of the asari.

It makes me wonder if it was actually mere chance that sent eezo-laced asteroids into the seas of Thessia , or if that also was by design?

Cerberus Thought for the Day: To embrace the alien is to reject the human. To coexist is to become perverted. One does not embrace the viper, nor coexist with the plague.

Asari basic physiology:

As mentioned in the historical section, asari are mammalian creatures with many amphibian ancestral traits. It is perhaps easier to define what asari aren't than what they are, but for the purpose of the requested research, such definitions are probably superfluous.

Asari are fully humanoid, with a range of height and builds that is almost uniform. Unlike humans, almost all asari stand between 5'2 and 5'10 in height, and weigh around 130 pounds. No obese asari have ever been observed, nor particularly thin asari. Asari proportions are also alarmingly homogenous , with most asari having strongly defined muscular proportions.

Asari have two eyes connected , as in humans, directly to the brain, although with a far more limited range of eye coloration. They possess no ears, but have tymphanic membranes in roughly the same area, covered by sheathes of thin skin, that at in much the same fashion. The head structure is almost identical to humans – asari have 34 teeth, a muscular tongue, and a larynx – with the exception of the asari crest, cartilaginous 'tentacles' that are actually a covering for heat-venting from the cranium, tied into a subcutaneous network of capillaries. The crest is semi-flexible, and can be bent down and against the skull for hours at time when an asari needs to wear a helmet or other head covering.

The asari bodily structure is also very nearly identical to the human form. They have nearly the exact same jointing as humans (with the caveat that asari joints are built differently and, as noted later on, more flexible) and the same locomotive pace as humans. Asari hands have five fingers, and even fingernails indistinguishable from humans.

Minor differences of course, do exist. The asari are clearly not humans, from their skin tone, but there are minor differences even there. Asari skin coloration ranges from pale blue to dark purple, and is pebbled in nature, retaining a certain level of amphibian background. A series of capillary tubes in the skin leads to internal bladders set in the upper chest that act in a similar fashion to gills. Asari can not fully breathe underwater but can absorb some oxygen while submerged , allowing them to to spend a great deal of time underwater without noticeable fatigue. Asari lungs are strong, with a complicated hexagonal lining structure of air-absorbing hairs that is markedly more efficient than human lungs.

Asari have a single, three chambered heart (much like a terrestrial frog) and two glands that store oxygen for emergencies, enriching the blood when stressed or exhausted. The asari digestive system is almost identical to the human system, complete with stomach, small and large intestines, and rectum. (Again, the similarity is just flat out ridiculous, anyone claiming this is parallel evolution should be stripped of their degree). Asari have two liver-like organs that filter blood , while kidney analogues work on ingested materials. They have a lymphatic system similar to that of humans, although without nodes, and the asari pancreas is also similar to that of humans.

There, most similarities end.

The asari nervous system is staggeringly complex, no less than three different nervous networks, two running under the skin and a third wrapped around the bones, with neural nodes found in the neck, chest, hips, and arms. The asari brain is the size of humans but twice as dense, folded even more compactly and showing signs of clear alterations – there is almost no vestigial brain stem, unlike humans, and most of the mass is pure cerebrum.

Within the brain are structures that are poorly understood, but believed to be related to asari biotic strength. The brain runs hot, which is why the skull is vented , the crests on the head acting as a heat exchanger and allowing the skull to swell slightly as the asari ages. Nerve bundles from the brain split at the base of the neck and run down a split spinal column, heavily armored with bone and muscle, joining at the base of the spine into a secondary nerve cluster that aids in bodily control.

Asari blood is cyanohematic, similar to humans, but does not use iron in binding oxygen, bizarrely instead using bauxite as a binding agent, giving asari blood a deep purple coloration. The blood is fortified with an adapted form of platlet-stemcell hybrid, which reacts to wounds and injuries by forming clots and bruises and then initiating rapid cellular regeneration. While certainly not true regeneration as the krogan do it, it is nearly on par with that of terrestrial starfish. Minor bruises and wounds are healed in hours, and even lost limbs regrow in weeks.

The asari skeletal structure, again, shows clear signs of design, with heavily cushioned double-jointed pivot joints the standard. The asari skeleton is capable of taking severe physics shocks, such as from biotic attack, and the bones, while hollow, are several times stronger than that of a human. Asari musculature is more long-strand than human muscle, with a different pattern to the muscles (asari muscles work in triads rather than opposed pairs.)

Asari sexual organs are limited to a birth canal, several nerve sensitive erogenous zones, and a large organ that seems to serve in a fashion similar to that of a human ovary. The asari uterus is tiny and expands out during pregnancy, and asari muscles in the hips are designed for maximum give during pregnancy. Most importantly, the asari pelvis itself is jointed in the middle, meaning pregnancies rarely cause asari much pain.

Asari senses

Asari have the five basic senses humans do. Asari eyesight is no better or worse than human baseline, nor is their sense of smell. Asari taste is slightly more sensitive, while asari hearing is somewhat worse, as asari do not have the cupping effects of the human ear. Asari are clearly still adapted for underwater activity, as the ear-analogue is sealed behind small muscular shields that open or close depending on moisture.

Asari have three senses humans do not. Like sharks, they can sense electrical currents in water, and can detect them through air at a much lesser range. As a result, it is very difficult to sneak up on asari without being grounded. Asari have an innate ability to sense bio-electrical fields when melded or linked to partners, and can apparently manipulate these during sexual acts to induce pleasure. Asari can also , in some cases, pick up on powerful biotic fields, even at great distances.

Asari biotics

As Thessia is fairly drowning in eezo (about 1 part per million in atmosphere, with concentrations as high as 1 part per 500,000 in the oceans) , the powerful natural biotic abilities of the asari should surprise no one. Unlike humans, which require pre-natal eezo exposure to develop biotics, and which end up coopting both the nervous and lymphatic system, asari are evolved into internalize, distribute, and even store eezo. A series of semi-permeable membranes in the area behind the jaw and in the lower back hold a slurry of protein, glucatonic suspensions, and eezo, circulated throughout the body in a secondary distribution system closely following the main arteries. Circulation is achieved through involuntary muscle contractions , and this eezo system is interlaced directly with both the asari's multitwined nervous system and a portion of the brain that acts much like an electric eels electrogenesis organs. This allows the asari nervous system to carry far higher voltages and charges than any other race, and provides a weak bio-electrical mass field by itself in combination with the body's natural eezo.

As a result, asari are fully capable of using powerful biotic attacks without any form of neural amplifier. Most wear a neural amp, against the skin, not surgical like that of humans, but this is mostly convenience and for focus and discrimination, not raw power.

Asari absorb eezo and are able to sustain electrical charge at varying rates. The Thirty (and their subsidiary descendant clans) have even stronger biotics than the average asari, due to the electrical node organ being larger and the nervous system more intertwined with it.

Nullifying asari biotics is not hard, compared with some other races. Pulse disruptor fields break up their innate bio-electrical field, and phase dissipation devices make it impossible for them to form a real mass effect field. Cerberus has developed a class of injection-action piezoelectric-inhibitor prion chains that can disable biotics permanently in an asari with sufficient concentrations, but is harmless in humans.

Asari reproduction

The asari reproductive cycle is based on the fact that asari are not asexual but mono-gender. In every other species we've encountered, there are two (or three in the case of the hanar) genders, and offspring are produced by the direct combination of two DNA segments , one from the father and one from the mother.

The asari clearly evolved from amphibian egg layers capable of self-fertilization. Somewhere in the evolution of animals on Thessia, either fate or a scientist of dubious sanity decided the process needed a complete derangement.

Asari become fertile when their nervous system is developed enough to handle nervous electrical energy from another being alongside their own. This usually does not happen until around the time most asari become matrons. Pregnancy before that point is very risky to the asari.

When the nervous system is prepared, asari sex is completely non-penetrative, and no actual transfer of DNA strands occurs. Rather than totally unfertilized eggs that are infused with a mate's DNA and hydrolyzed against further intrusion, asari eggs exist in a state of meosistatic incompleteness. The mother provides two complete sets of DNA to the egg, but only one is fully that of the mother, the other is a blank template, bracketed by protein 'frameworks' to prevent illegal or lethal DNA productions.

The cycle is closer to zygotic than gametic – this unfertilized egg is actually ( from the viewpoint of meiosis) 'fertilized' – but until and unless the asari generates certain hormones, no actual cell division occurs.

When engaged with a sexual partner, the asari is stimulated with direct skin contact to a series of folds in the skin in the lower back. These folds, sealed until the asari is aroused, cover sensitive nerve tissues and a direct connection to the secondary asari nervous system, with nerve bundles leading directly from this area (called the midnight) towards the egg organ.

When bonded fully with a partner, the asari draws upon the partner's bio-electrical nervous energy through the folds. The direct linking of these fields is needed to reach an energy state in the nervous system that triggers certain protein restrictors to release, and certain hormones to trigger.

Asari can consciously make certain alterations to the DNA of the blank genetic set in the egg during this process. These alterations fall into three main categories. By focusing pure electrical energy into the egg organ, asari build a higher baseline of DNA instructions from their own current genetic makeup. This means the asari child in question will be more like her mother in terms of physical attributes. Due to the bizarre nature of the process however, some of these alterations appear to also include improvements after the birth of the mother. A slender asari who works out and becomes very muscular tends , at well over 95% of the time, to give birth to strongly muscular children. Asari who become highly educated have asari children that demonstrate nearly photographic memory. It does not cover all aspects – strength, dexterity, raw intellect , biotic strength and memory capacity seem to cover it – but it means that every generation of asari is a bit stronger and faster and smarter than the last generation.

The second category of alteration deals with biotic strength. The asari mother can seemingly (again , 90% tendency, too high to be mere chance) 'channel' some of her own biotic potential into her child. This is done primarily as the child develops in utero, through commingling the eezo-laced protein slurry in their secondary circulation system through the placental membrane, but it certainly appears that the stronger the asari is in biotics, the stronger her child will be in biotic strength as well. A child of two young matrons is no where near the raw potential of a child of two matriarchs, for example. It is worth noting that the Thirty, unlike all other asari, usually wait until they are matriarchs before having children.

Finally, the asari believe (with little actual empirical evidence) that during this process they can make alterations to the child's DNA that brings in the attributes of the 'father' – be that another asari or an alien. We know that the process binds certain traits into the DNA and then randomizes the rest until the DNA strand fits within the protein framework, but we can't find any evidence that alien neural impulses could convey DNA information the way asari nervous impulses could. There seems to be a tendency for some (not all) asari children of alien parents to demonstrate some behavioral tendencies of their sire, but how much of this is due to the influence of the parent on the child's personality as it grows is uncertain.

Once fertilized fully, the development of the child occurs much as in human women. The asari uterus expands during pregnancy – asari do not have egg cycles or menstrual cycles, only building up a uteral lining when actually pregnant. This lining becomes a placental analogue, complete with a umbilical cord, fairly early on.

is hardly different than that for humans, except that asari have a much easier time of actual childbirth than humans do. The asari birth canal is larger than that of a human woman, and the asari pelvis is hinged in the middle with cartilaginous 'spars' linking the two halves. Additionally, during childbirth, certain organs pump out a constant stream of natural painkillers and muscle relaxants, and the entire process is aided by natural biotic effects.

Asari pregnancy runs for 11 months, and childbirth usually takes less than an hour, with little or no pain and no stretching or tearing noted. (As an aside, the Shadow Team's method for testing asari childbirth was brutal even to me – I expected them to steal or procure birth records from asari hospitals, not kidnap a dozen pregnant asari and see how the pregnancies occurred. It works, but it's unpleasant to watch small babies being killed. Please reign your lunatics in).

Asari life cycle

Asari infancy lasts about as long as human infancy does. Given their long, long lifespan, some expected asari to mature more slowly than humans, but they do not in any long term way. An asari child of 8 and a human child of 8 look much the same.

Growth (and maturity) slows at around 16, with the asari only slowly reaching full physical maturity at around 25. The primary difference is that asari at 25 are not adults, or even close to adults. They can best be described as teenagers.

From 25 to roughly 125 years old is the stage at which most asari consider being an 'early maiden'. After 125 years, maidens begin to slow their frenetic activities, and over the next 70 to 100 years hormonal changes begin to alter their bodies again. Most asari enter the matron states near 200 to 250 years of age, and maintain that until they grow much older.

At around 700, asari begin shifting into matriarchs. As indicated elsewhere, the process is not usually successful. Most are called matriarchs once they reach 800, but the vast majority of these die off soon thereafter. The move from matron to matriarch consumes a great deal of biotic energy and erodes the telomerase caps of the DNA of the asari in question, and if they are not thick enough for the body to rebuild, then the asari ages and dies of natural causes.

Asari life span

The oldest known asari , Matriarch Sihana, lived to the age of one thousand six hundred and fifty four. However, most asari that make the translation from matron to matriarch either die soon thereafter from systemic shock, or life to roughly twelve hundred years old.

Lifespan appears to be determined by the transitions from the stages of life. Asari who are forced into matronhood early tend to experience a harder time transitioning to matriarch, but truly, while many asari live long enough to become matriarchs, the abrupt physiological changes are hard to survive for any asari. Natural death (cascading cell necrosis) is caused by the exhaustion of the telomeric caps on DNA strands. This substance (telomerase) is consumed in large amounts during the shift to matriarch, and it's believed that exhaustion of this (which prevents normal cell division) is the primary cause of natural death.

There are other factors – nutrition, mental health, etc – but the sheer weight of numbers of the asari means that many make it through to matriarch status and closer to the end of life. As a result of the regenerative aging process, there is almost no difference between asari who are 200 and 1200, either physically or by mental degeneration such as dementia.

However, as asari age, the nervous system becomes more and more eezo infused and some nerve degenerative disorders can appear very late in life for asari that work heavily in the oceans of Thessia or in other high-eezo environments.

Asari and Modifications

As a rule, asari do not need and try to avoid cybernetic enhancement. Their natural regenerative abilities, while quite slow, make long-term cybernetic enhancement almost impossible without strong anti-rejection drugs and tailored therapy.

Asari also eschew cosmetic augmentations offered through genetic therapy, as they feel this pollutes the purity of the asari race.

Asari have no problems with biological modifications, and since the advent of alien contact, one such modification is pretty much universal, conducted at the birth of a child. One or several cloned strips of nerve-sensitive material is harvested from the azure and the midnight and surgically implanted in the asari birth canal. This allows asari to enjoy penetrative sex more fully – without this alteration, it would be merely faintly erotic. (Some more … adventurous maidens later in life go on to have such material grown and implanted in other areas. Disgusting whore creatures.)

Asari are also fond of biological modifications to enhance physical or biotic strength, such as lacing their bones with metals and implanting field boosters inside the marrow of their bones to increase their mass effect field power.

The wide array of human cosmetic surgical modifications (particularly breast enhancement and plastic surgery combined with nano-repressive 'reprogrammer' bots to make sure such things don't just regenerate away) has fascinated the asari since they discovered humanity.

Asari and disease

Asari have incredibly robust immune systems, with three different T-cell analogues, a natural ability to produce antibodies using protein coat fragments from the slightest infection, and a fever reaction that tends to kill all cells in infected wounds and force regenerate them. This , combined with tailored viral therapies to breed hunter-killer controlled monokyetic cancer analogues in nodes in the body, as well as the advanced state of asari medicine, means asari very rarely get sick.

Asari nasal structures are hooked into the crest's ventilation system, which has a series of passages that are lined with hairs and cleared through ejection through the crest, and asari mucous membranes are tied closely into the immune system, so they are somewhat resistant to airborne pathogens.

Asari are no less vulnerable to a few STD's than humans or turians. Syphilis , in particular, has managed to make a jump from human to asari DNA in less than twenty years. AIDS and other retroviruses are incapable of disabling the asari multi-T-cell structure and are not a threat, and most other opportunistic infections can be fought off.

Asari and bodily disorders

Aside from disease, asari suffer from cancers, although they are rare since the large caps of telomerase at the ends of each cell's DNA strand and the templated 'patch patterns' found in some bodily repair mechanisms can often derail cancers before they can even get established.

The asari heart is markedly inferior to the four-chambered human heart and undergoes a great deal of regeneration through the asari's lifetime. Heart attacks are common both in youth (due to stress and inadequate rest) and old age, although asari have proteins in the blood that prevent most cholesterol and oil plaques from causing arterial blockage.

Asari suffer high blood pressure, liver failure, and a variation of acid-reflux disorders much like humans. Asari skin is resistant to parasitic infections, and both the basal layer of skin cells as well as asari nail beds are hooked directly into gliotic concentrations of the immune system, so skin and nail disorders are rare.

Asari crests can become stiff and less heat-dissipating over time, which can lead to dementia and loss of memory or even death.
Chapter 7: Chapter 7 - Asari Culture I : structure

A/N: Updated to fix some things 11-9-14

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

It is with sadness that I have to report Dr. Uraj was killed in his duties of gathering information for this document. Shadow Cell and Iron Cell operatives neutralized at least one of Night-Wind assassin bitches that killed, him, but not before they were able to free several captives, and escape. Without the force to pursue, we have since relocated from Panji to Illum, although we have not managed to obtain enough operating space to allow Iron Cell reinforcements to arrive.

The move to Illum is perhaps useful, as it is a study of the rapacious and incestuous nature of asari culture in a microcosm. Our research thus far has garnered some significant side benefits, and I'm sure our researches here will be no less fruitful.

Asari culture is inseparable from the asari clan system, both of which are throwbacks to the asari prehistoric period. For humans a gulf of fifty thousand years is beyond comprehension – something on the order of twenty-five hundred generations. The span of all of human history would, in the measure of asari, be akin to the difference between the modern day and the late 20th century. When lifespans are measured in centuries, a great deal of very old ways of interacting becomes apparent in asari culture.

This is probably why , despite leading the galaxy in technological prowess, economy, and influence, the asari are so terrified of humanity. We are free of the chains of social stigmas, of the stupid jockeying for position of the salarians or the mindless adoration of the past of the turians. In the span of a few asari generations we have come further and faster than any other species they know of, and while they desire to subjugate us and place us as their slaves at their feet, their disgusting mindset means they think we wish the same.

We , thanks to your guidance, do not.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Reason begets doubt. Doubt begets mercy, mercy begets hesitation, hesitation begets a damned alien bullet through your head. Reason with your rifle, never with your mouth, when you face the alien.

Asari Cultural Basics

Human cultures are defined by four things – locale, language, ethnic groups, and customs. The difference between a young black male raised in the San Angelos Arcology group is utterly alien to a Hindu woman raised in the Calcutta Arcology. They think in different languages, with different foci. Their homelands are different, and the history therein. While humanity has moved beyond thinking there is any statistically important difference in race, we acknowledge that they have an effect on mindsets and the customs embraced by each ethnic group.

But the beauty of human society is that we are individuals and prize individuality even while being strongly drawn to our cultural backgrounds. We do not embrace the wonder of a home-cooked meal , or cry at the old national anthems , or smile helplessly at the laughter of a child merely because others do, but because it speaks to us as humans, as people. There is no independent nation of France, nor a French Foreign Legion any longer, yet soldiers still cry at the yearly parades at Cambrone. There is no longer a Swahili nation, yet millions each year still take up the language and the practices of that culture. One cannot find the empire of Rome on a map, or Carthage, but thousands of years after they died, do you not thrill at the name of Hannibal, or Caesar? The loss of Jerusalem has not destroyed the Jewish faith, and no matter how advanced humanity may get, baseball is still here, the sonatas of Mozart are still here, the beauty of zen poetry remains.

Put all of this out of your mind when dealing with asari, for they feel and embrace nothing of it.

Asari culture is enshrined and upheld by a single, overriding, overwhelming concept – that all must be one. Siari, the asari religion, states this no less strongly than the old Athame religious concepts did. Every trait of their biology, from their increasingly homogenous appearance to their linking of memories and emotions in sex forces this. Every aspect of their history has shown when one rises above others without the support of all the entire race suffers. Their psychology cannot even embrace the idea of the lone ruler without the understanding that a ruler without subjects and allies and partners is alone.

Asari culture is based on the blending of ideas, on the consensus of culture, on the de-emphasis of the differences and the comfort of the identical. Unlike humanity, asari identify as asari first, then by clan, then by citystate, then by family, and finally by self. Asari art is the expression of many artists, it's music designed to bring about the state of mind that all are as one, it's cultural norms and even myths reinforcing that, over and over.

A human is his own or her own unit, but before everything else is family, then ethnic culture, then nation. A human only embraces 'humanity' as an intellectual concept when every other aspect of life lines up with it. There very simply is no such thing as an asari traitor to the race.

Asari culture is not rich in the way of human culture. There is only one language, although it has evolved over time, because these beings who share innermost emotions and thoughts in their casual sex do so with the frequency you or I might engage in gossip over morning coffee. An asari sees their 'nation' as nothing less than all other asari, and it comes before all other considerations – before family, before personal desires, before city-state and certainly before any alien.

The asari see neither value nor beauty in diversity among themselves, although they prize it and cherish it in those around them. They see the myriad cultures of other races as interesting, finding different viewpoints and opportunities to manipulate and hold. They appreciate it in the same way a pimp might appreciate the beauty of his prostitutes, or the banker the gleam of his gold. It is beauty in that it represents that which they seek to profit from and control, not out of any aesthetic tastes.

Asari Social Structures

Asari culture, for all it's unity, is also highly stratified. This stratification is based neither on merit nor solely on bloodline, but rather on the ability to manipulate, convince, cajole or unify, which should surprise no one.

Atop this structure are the Thirty, the powerful clans that claim descent from Athame herself. The Thirty themselves are divided into ranks, with High Houses, Greater Houses, and Guardian Houses forming those ranks. Below the Houses Proper are the Lesser Houses, related cousin clans that provide additional members and allies.

Below that are the extant Asari Clans, which are picky about their membership and the activities undertaken by them. The Clans each oversee certain aspects of asari business, culture, or governance, but most take their guidance from the Thirty, either directly at the hands of the Republic, or indirectly via influence and manipulation.

Below the Clans , acting as the common people are the clanless, who form the bulk of the asari population.

Social standing is fluid , both upwards and downwards, and has no real absolutes. A commoner clanless can, with hard work and talent, find membership in one of the Clans. The clans can provide contact and influence with the Lesser Houses, and a Clan member of sufficient skill, talent and above all else poise and the ability to manipulate can be inducted into their ranks via bonding. The offspring of such a union are considered fully a part of the House, and with time can impress the members of a Full House enough to be inducted into their ranks. Indeed, Matriarch Lidanya T'Armal, one of the most powerful matriarchs in asari space, began life as a clanless orphan on the streets of Serrice, and now stands at the right hand of the most powerful and noble house in all of Thessia.

This freedom of social status , however, is hardly achieved by the average asari, who usually sublimate personal ambitions for group aims. An asari too focused on her own achievements is seen as gauche at best, and dangerous at worst, by her associates , and finds herself locked out of the asari network of commingling that provides them with so much of their cultural unity.

Asari Clans

In ancestral times, all asari were organized into clans, the most basic social grouping that asari have devised. The nuclear family – mother, father, children – is something utterly alien in many ways to asari until recent times, and only then is it found mostly in those asari who have , by dint of being cut off from other asari by work or location, been forced to assimilate more heavily with aliens.

Asari clans were the real grouping and remain that way. Clans are usually formed of anywhere from four to ten matriarchs, who will each have between two and as many as eight offspring each. These matrons will be equally fertile and press for as many possible offspring as they can. Once the original matriarchs die and the matrons ascend, the clan grows, until such time that either internal strife causes some matriarchs to leave to form a new clan or the clan becomes a formal bloodline.

Asari in pre-historical times would intermingle extremely heavily. An asari matron would have an offspring with one 'father', then turn around and impregnate the 'father'. Her own offspring might then sleep with said father, or with other clan mates. Given the high amount of control over DNA anomalies their physiology and mating methods allows, 'inbreeding' was not a clearly taboo concept.

However, such close concentrations of genetic traits were not desired, and as such usually clans would try to intermix and intermingle from the separate matriarch lines as heavily as possible. By four or five generations of breeding later, literally everyone in the clan would be distantly related to others. As this point a clan would begin making matches with other nearby clans. Eventually , even religion played a part in this, with their mythical god Janis taking a portfolio embracing law, travel and sex, as clan negotiations became so byzantine that courts of adjudication became necessary, and swaps might include journeys of many months between dozens of neighboring clans.

These matches would be for supplies, hunting areas, or for desirable mates. As society evolved, they became more a matter of the quality and depth of bloodlines involved in each clan. In modern times, most such clan interchanges are to boost the clan's genetic diversity, and to push for traits the clan desires. A clan of strongly biotic asari might mingle with a clan known for the agility of it's members, or with a wealthy clan for positions in their corporation. Some asari clans even barter themselves on public exchanges! (Truly, there is no end to the foulness of these alien women.)

Clan structure is fluid, and based on social maneuvering and perceptions of both sensuality and control. Many asari relationships are dominant/submissive in nature, with one asari being in charge and one submitting. As such, usually the clan is controlled by two or three dominant matriarchs, who lay out the course of the clan's activities and goals.

Clans that reach a sufficient size and stability, that can last for more than a handful of generations, become more permanent fixtures. These trace their ancestry back to a powerful figure or figures, usually powerful matriarchs, and this is called a Bloodline. Clans mingle bloodlines to form a nexus of possible traits in offspring, which is connected to the prestige and influence of the bloodline as a whole.

In the modern era, the clans also have varying dedicate focus areas. These include (listed roughly in order of importance to asari society, from highest to lowest):

the Moondance Clans: the most ancient clan structure, the Moondance clans are the ancient religious clans that once worshiped Athame and now focus on the practice of siari. They are philosophers, mediators, diplomats and priestesses rolled into one. Moondance clans oversee rituals of bonding and burial, the creation of new clans and Houses, and work with the Hearthwatch clans in mediating interclan discussions as well as reaching out to aliens. They are also what passes as an informal civil court, with powers by law to mediate disputes between asari and handle minor transgressions. While their numbers are small – there are only sixteen clans in this group, numbering barely a half-million asari – their influence on society and the Thirty is massive.

The Clan of the Justicars – This is not really a 'clan' for the purposes of sex and relationship so much as for social structure and comraderie. The Justicar Clan contains the members of the Order of Justicars, the terrifying elite police that enforce the ban upon the Ardat-yakshi and ensure asari society is well served by it's leaders and clans. Justicars have absolute , utter authority on any asari world – the least of them could execute every matriarch of House T'Armal with not a whisper of protest – and even on asari-dominated worlds with aliens, such as Illum and Cyone, their power is not to be underestimated or gainsaid. There are less than a thousand of these elite asari warriors, but the clan also includes biotic instructors, support personnel, builders – anyone who supports the order severs all other clan and family ties to focus solely on the Order and it's code. All told, the clan numbers well under ten thousand souls, and joining it even in the most peripheral fashion is considered one of the highest honors in asari society. (Strangely, these justicars are about the only trustworthy asari around, as they eschew the asari mindset in favor of a cold-blooded, implacable destruction of anything and everything that violates their code. Almost admirable.)

the Hearthwatch clans : The Heathwatch clans were originally a series of settlers on the dangerous plains between the coastal clans and the Thirty, and the mountain and forest clans. They often acted as the only conduit for trade, news, and diplomacy between the two. In the modern era, they continue this – they are lawyers, mediators, news reporters, investigators, and they make up the bulk of the judiciary, the police, and travel agencies. The Hearthwatch clans , above all other asari, prize racial unity and clan cooperation, and they are also the most in-tune with the constant social linkages and shading of memory and emotions that occurs between the various relationships that link the clans. With their ear to the pulse of all of asari society, the Hearthwatch are the most critical component of the asari mindset of racial unity. They are numerous, boasting over four hundred clans and over a hundred million members.

the Lifeshaper Clans : In the ancient times, the Lifeshapers were the crude version of farmer-scientists, struggling to bring forth crops, tending to fishing areas, and ensuring the forests were not overcut. In the modern era, these clans run the large agricultural communes on Thessia and other life-giving worlds, as well as most of the hospitals, biological research centers, doctors and other medical facilities. They are additionally responsible for the schools and colleges, the local libraries, and the maintenance of the Asari e-democracy network of voting and information networks. They ensure there are no famines, and regularly inspect food and water for impurities, fight disease outbreaks, and work to improve asari birthrates (as if the bitches don't breed fast enough). There are roughly one hundred and forty such clans throughout asari space, totaling around fifty million members.

the Skywatch Clans : The Skywatch Clans are the old inventor clans, updated for the modern era. They work closely with the Steelshape and Lifeshaper clans, but their focus is on science , research, and exploration. Skywatch clans make up the researchers in colleges, scientists and astronomers, as well as scouts and explorers. The Skywatch clans also spearhead and produce ship designs for the asari fleets , and are the caretakers of asari knowledge of the Protheans and other ancient lore. The Skywatch are not numerous in clan strength – there are only ten such clans – but each clan is staggeringly huge in size, with over fifty million asari among the ten.

the Steelshape Clans : the first of the 'newer' industrial clans to arise, the Steelshape Clans focus on industrial work, construction, and infrastructure, as well as building and supporting colonies. They are more businesslike than all the other clans, parlaying their Clans' duties into profit and influence, but are also very traditional and spiritual, attempting to infuse siari and grace into everything the asari build, fly, or create. They are also very specialized, with many clans only doing one or two kinds of work – one clan may only do interior decoration, another only automotive work, etc. That explains why there are a staggering six thousand Steelshape clans, but their numbers are barely 300 million.

The Shoreside and Skyside Clans : The Shoreside and Skyside Clans are what remained of the ancient hunting, fishing, and gathering clans after the clans began to fall apart in modern times. Traditionalist to the core, they refuse to assimlate into the more modern societal functions, and thus cling to very ancient jobs , albeit ones updated for the modern era. Mining , cooking (including most restaurants), fishing, hunting , eezo gathering, and not least of all bodyguard duties are what this clan focuses it's efforts on. The Eclipse mercenary group is the most successful (and independent) of the many mercenary companies that are part of the Shoreside and Skyside Clans. These clans also act as domestic servants, often fill posts in the asari military, and undertake aspects of asari culture that no one else wants – the maintenance of graveyards, handing and caring for the insane, and the like. They are neither numerous nor powerful, barely twenty such clans remaining, numbering only a few hundred thousand, but their numbers have rapidly grown in the past twenty years as more and more asari become disenchanted with modern life and seek older, simpler times.

Two other clan structures exist – the Thirty Families, and the clanless.

The Thirty – princesses and queens of Thessia

The Thirty Families are the clans originally designed by Athame to rule the Asari, according to history, lore, and myth. Certainly there is considerable historical and paleoarcheological evidence to back their claims. The Thirty breed only within their clan and their affiliated descendant lesser houses, with no known exceptions until the advent of alien contact, and since then, even given the taboo nature of asari-asari breeding leading to ardat-yakshi and the imprimatur to avoid such, the Thirty have pureblood offspring at nine hundred times the frequency of the lesser clans.

The Thirty are physical larger, stronger, smarter and far more biotically powerful than lesser asari. The average asari is around 5'2 or 5'4, the average member of the Thirty is 5'10, with some topping six feet. The Thirty have sharper eyesight, stronger levels of eezo, even more robust immune systems.

The Thirty also developed many technological innovations far ahead of other asari. They were forging iron when other asari were still using stone, and the Silent Queen's innovations were rumored only to be possible because she had studied in her youth with the Thirty's innovators and scientists. Even today, something like 85% of all discoveries and research papers come from the ranks of the Thirty, rather than asari society in general.

Regular asari defer to the Thirty almost instinctual, hesitant and almost worshipful. The Thirty, in turn, are by turns both arrogant and brutally protective of lesser asari. The Thirty see themselves as the guardians of Thessia, the guidance of the race as a whole, and lesser asari simply have no problems or jealousy at this.

The culture of the Thirty is even more twisted and sickening than standard asari fare, with each Family jockeying for position , prestige, and power. Unlike most asari, who focus on building their clans and families first and then only on their position, a member of the Thirty lives or dies by manipulating the emotions and perceptions of others. The most inept and shy of the Thirty is capable of reducing most living beings to mere cats paws wrapped around their finger.

Each family of the Thirty has one House Matriarch, who is undisputed leader of the house, and usually between two and (depending on the size) up to fifty lesser matriarch, with a strict line of ascension that is constantly fluctuating dependent on social maneuvering that would make even Machiavelli weep. The matriarch's offspring are formally styled as "shlantha", a word that roughly translates to "princess" in English. Unless a princess is somehow disgraced or shunned, they will become the new House Matriarch upon her mother's death.

The Thirty are divided into two 'bloodlines' – the line of T'An, and the line of Vaas. T'An and Vaas were the semi-mythological figures that received the wisdom of Athame directly (and as fitting asari whoredom, by of course, having sex with her. Studying the asari makes one long for a hot shower sometimes). The descendants of T'An all prefix their house names with a T, such as T'Armal, T'Soni, T'Chath, etc. The descendants of Vaan all start their house names with a V, such as Vasir, Vabo, etc. The main difference appears to be interaction – the T'An line is more aggressive, the Vaas more passive. New adoptees into a house are given a slightly alterered name - for example, the asari ambassador is addressed as Te'Shora rather than T'Shora, as she is a recent member adopted from a lesser house, or Urala S'Vasir, who was adopted from the Clans.

The Thirty have had to replace houses only thrice. Since these Houses do not directly descend from Athame, but rather from interbreeding and absorbing the remnants of shattered Houses, they take names that do not start with V or T. House Chansai was the first of these, replacing the fallen House T'Urna, which was utterly destroyed by the Silent Queen in the War of the Queens. Chansai was obliterated in the asteroid strike that lead to the asari space age, and was folded into a new house, House Eala. The other replacement house, House Devir, was cobbled together from smashed Paladins of Athame and a handful of lesser family members, to replace House T'Curth, annihilated by plague just prior to the War of Queens.

The undoubted primary Family of the Thirty is House T'Armal, boasting over five thousand clan members and over half a million descendants in lesser clans. As the so called "First Among Equals", the members of T'Armal are unwaveringly arrogant, prideful, and vengeful. (Aria T'Loak, the warlord of the Traverse, is a T'Armal princess hurled from her Family due to youthful indiscretions that shamed the House. That's what just ONE of them can achieve – the conquest of the entire damned Terminus.)

Below the might of House T'Armal are the two greater houses, House T'Vaan (boasting four Spectres and half owner of the Serrice manufactory corporation) and House T'Shora (boasting several dozen massive corporations and owning a third of Illum.) While conceivably the three are almost always at odds, this infighting is strangely complacent, mostly revolving around keeping the other houses from ascending to challenge T'Armal. These houses are still massive, boasting well over two thousand members each, as well as at least a hundred thousand relatives in lesser clans.

Together, the three form the so-called "House of Storm", the high houses of Thessia, and between them they control most of the actions of the Asari Republic.

Below these are the 'greater houses' – T'Mal, Vallia, T'Suon, Vabo, and T'Rome. The "group of five" are heavily involved in the primary 'first landing' colonies that the asari settled heavily prior to their discovery of the Citadel, and as such, wield great strength in the galactic community but little on Thessia itself. House Vallia, in particular, is the most outspoken of the Thirty in calls for moving more and more asari from Thessia to mingle with the galactic community as a whole, to 'lead' them. They are much smaller than the main Families, each having between 300 and 500 members, with ten or twenty thousand relatives.

The remaining twenty two houses are much smaller than the Greater or High Houses. Known as the Guardian Houses, many of these had their ancestry in the Paladins of Athame. They rank in varying strengths. The larger houses, boasting between 100 and 200 members each, are Vakas, Vael, T'Yana, T'Sael, T'Moinda, T'Purice, T'Chmath, Vhira, T'Koro, T'Baela, and Vakassa.

The smaller Guardian houses, mostly focused on one or two areas of interest, include T'Soni, Devir, Vasir, Vathan, T'Zeli, T'Serrice, T'Cathus, Vurth, T'Appa, T'Benna, and Eala. These have very few members – usually between only a few dozen to about seventy actual members, with one or two matriarchs. They are constantly absorbing other lesser clans to boost their numbers, but most of these lesser clans end up spinning off again in a few centuries to lead House endeavors elsewhere.

Some of these families used to be highly placed. In ancient times, House T'Serrice and House T'Soni were High Houses, boasting thousands of members, and House Devir was so powerful at one point that there was serious discussion about breeding in with House T'Armal and honoring Devir by renaming them T'Devir. However, these houses have fallen on hard times, as they were conservative, clinging to power on Thessia, and missed out on the vast wealth and influence available in the first colony waves.

The Lesser Houses

Associated with the Thirty are the so-called 'Lesser Houses', although they style themselves as Families rather than true Houses. Each Family is associated with a given House, and modify their name accordingly. They are basically groups of associated clans that follow the House's lead.

Some of the larger, and more famous, Lesser Houses include Family Zeli'a, Family Devir'a, and Family Vathana'a. These lesser Houses are actually larger and more powerful than the House they answer to, and have been repeatedly tapped for the ability to rejuvenate the ranks of their superiors.

The lesser houses primarily serve as new members and allies of the greater houses, but are also the link to the lesser clans and the clanless. As such, each of the Families is seen as a filter, allowing only the best and brightest asari to ascend to the top of asari society , while retaining many of the most talented asari in a small, contained social environment for the use and profit of the Thirty.

The Clanless

After the War of Queens, many small clans simply fell apart , unable to support themselves and moving to the rapidly growing cities. With society moving from a hunter-gatherer, agriculture supported existence to industrially focused, the need for tight self-sufficient groups was less.

While many existing clans continued to exist, focused around their duties, many of the old hunting clans simply had nothing keeping them together in a coherent form. As a result, these clan members still associated with one another, but drifted apart, moving to support individual matriarchs rather than clan councils.

Over time, the majority of the asari population either joined the existing clans, or became clanless. Facial markings, once used to indicate clan membership, became instead expressions of personal beliefs, and the rise of siari further pushed the concept of 'race as clan'. The loss of clan control over breeding led to a marked increase in rampant sexual contacts and rapid-fire relationships or multiple relationships. As they migrated from clan to clan, taking new jobs and skills, their disassociation became more and more complete. Finally, with the exception of a few diehards, the old hunting and gathering clans were dead.

As it happened, this evolution occurred near the time many advances in technology occurred, making city life preferable to a hand-to-mouth clan existence in the wilderness. As asari have moved into the modern era, many asari see the clans as ridiculous cultural throwbacks, and work hard to build industries, businesses, and the like answerable only to the Asari Republic.

On the other hand, many of the clanless understand that without clan structures it becomes much harder to achieve any lasting permanence in the game of social standing and alliances. There are many rich and powerful asari who, by lack of clan support, have to go their own way, carefully trying to build alliances with other independent asari who may or may not betray them for personal gain. The lack of unity in the clanless is a major reason why the Thirty approve of this structure, for lacking personal clans any longer, many of the clanless instead aspire to positions in the Lesser Houses, or in the ranks of the many matriarchal groups that follow influential leaders in the Thirty.
Chapter 8: Chapter 8 - Asari Culture II: Expression

A/N: the next chapter of Of Sheep and Battlechicken has been ready for a while, but I'm waiting on feedback from my beta reader. There will probably be several more chapters of the Asari section (military, government, fleet structure, and important personalities) before a break to work on OSABC, then I'll alternate between the two.

Every single race is going to get the same treatment as the Asari, so this is going to be a BIG document. After I finish each race I'll do corrections and updates, so keep the reviews and ideas coming - if there's an idea you'd like to see explored, let me know.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

I'm finished with my more detailed examination of the actual components of asari culture. I'm extremely confused why this interests you, but I've done as you asked. I can only hope the sacrifice of Dr. Uraj is worth it.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: There is no such thing as an innocent in this dark galaxy. The innocents of humanity was lost the day we met the first Turian. The alien was never innocent.

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

ICARCUS-TWO-THREE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Doctor Minsta ,

It should please you to know that the Night-Wind cell responsible for the tragic death of Dr. Uraj has been located and dealt with. You'd think that given the asari history with asteroids they'd be more careful with their colony worlds in a system with two asteroid belts. All we had to do was nudge several large nickle-iron stony asteroids into the proper trajectory and disable the tracking systems for the colony , and Panji is no more.

The Shadow Hand is pleased with your work, as am I. The Illusive Man is also highly interested in asari culture for his own reasons, most of which have to do with his attempts to infilrate their economy. We would prefer an unfettered examination of the society, as distasteful as it is, rather than focused insights.

The Iron General

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Pity the misguided who follows the alien, but only once they are dead. The living traitors need only your bullet to serve Humanity best.

Asari Culture: Art

Asari art is a variegated thing, most of it what human artists would deem sublime, focusing on tenets and images of unity, exploration, the vastness of nature and the spirit, and pensive reflection. Asari statuary is always highly stylized, even iconized, with little to no realism, and asari paintings are biotic reactive, designed to be viewed with asari senses of electrical sensitivity and through the lens, in some cases of partners linked or bonded with the viewer.

Asari practice very little decorative arts , and eschew needless or gratituous ostentation or ornamentation. They prefer clean, curved lines, yonic or arched shapes, and curves that evoke the shape of an asari body. The colors white, blue, and to a lesser degree, yellow are very important to them, while reds and browns are disliked. Asari associate blue with life, oceans and biotics, white with cleanliness and an open mind, yellow with energy and freedom, and black with sexual release and intimacy. A pale green is the color of death, as the asari blood deoxidizes rapidly and the subcutaneous fluids that promote biotics give the skin that tinge. Purple is emphasizes stubbornness and determination, red speed and motion, and brown safety (associated, most likely with the vast brown stone walls that encircled the Thirty Cities).

The asari dislike haptic art and, while they do enjoy movies, prefer dance and a sort of biotic acrobatic mix of opera, religious service, and drama called the maress. They have a great attachment to themse of history, the valor of a single asari to save others, and of course, the triumph of cleverness and manipulation over brute force.

Artists are rarely individuals, almost all asari art is made by two, three or even more asari. A singular artist is seen as shallow, the more hands in the art, the more complex and worthy it tends to be.

Asari Culture: Music

Asari music is often muted and flatly polytonal to human ears, and is presaged on the concept of a theme that invokes certain memories. Rather than original works, many asari songs and musical works are cobbled together from a series of about a thousand songs and chants that date back into antiquity called the Atherion. Music links choruses or chords from songs in the Atherion into varying arrangements, each one thick with interpretations based on the musical components.

A good example of this is the asari song "Irirsai T'Va Kassa", often conflated as the closest thing to an anthem the Asari have. It is an interesting construction. The pieces of the song are from movements that imply supremacy, guile, the darkness of fear, the glory of the Matriarchs, the sensual delights of a group of lovers who all have taken one another, and the comfort of unity in allies. It is linked by various original pieces of tonal music, but these have no meaning aside from moving from one segment to another.

After exposure to turian and especially batarian music (whose complexity continues to amaze , the brutes have the souls of a Bach), some edgy asari composers have attempted to link pieces of alien music together in the same fashion, sometimes mixing in with the Atherion, others even drafting original pieces. This musical style, known as northess (the mixture) is seen as either a testament to the unifying beauty of asari music or jumbled garbage.

Asari entertainers are often group based, but in recent years, several solo musicians have arisen, although these remain more popular with aliens than asari. Asari musical stars are even more controversial, immature and tawdry than human ones, if that can be possible.

Asari Culture: Entertainment

Asari have a wide variety of team sports and games, most of them incorporating biotics. Swimming , biotic acrobatics, and biotic assisted gymnastics are popular, as is race hunting and clan-compettive sports. One game, tarass, is very nearly soccer with biotics and a dash of polo, using a biotic implement to score goals.

Asari popular culture has given rise to many shows , movies, and extranet venues. Gambling and games of chance are popular, as are puzzles and events that pit two asari against each other in tests of wits and daring. Asari eschew physical violence in all their entertainment, and there is not a single asari activity that doesn't incorporate some form of team play or at least have the option of it.

Asari adore parties based around communal tale-telling, casual sex and linking, and a sense of community and friendship. Often including feasts and drinking, dancing, and possibly even maniacal orgies, these parties are often thrown at the drop of a hat, but rarely if ever for serious events. Births and marriages are celebrated by more serious, somber and less carnal activities.

Refreshingly, asari children are more likely to engage in rough-and-tumble play and honest, simple games of individual achievement rather than stultifying unity than their parents , although most asari work hard to curb these tendencies at a young age.

Asari Culture: Tourism and Events

Part of the asari soul is in travel and mingling with other clans, so it is no surprise that asari tourism is a heavy part of their culture. Most asari make pilgrimages to holy sites, historical markers, and of course, the grand capital of Serrice, at least once in their life, but vacations to exotic, beautiful locales with a new lover is something of a regular occurrence with asari. Tourism is aided by the widespread belief that every new bonding should involve something memorable , to aid in keeping those memories available when one links with a new partner.

Aside from that, asari holidays and the like are sprinkled throughout the year liberally, almost twice as many as on the human calender, and the asari are devoted in breaking off from business or other serious pastimes to celebrate and explore. Asari are reverent about travel, and indeed some of their old religions saw travel and exploration as holy. As such, asari are usually quite mobile in their lives, willing to uproot and move to new cities or even new planets unless their network of companions and linked lovers is too large to support such.

Asari Culture: Religion and Siari

Very little is known about the old asari Athamian religion – even under truly horrific torture, the few asari priestesses of Athame we have captured and interrogated would only smile maddeningly and tell us it was not for the likes of us. We know bits and pieces about the rituals and the locations of a handful of temples, but every single holy site is locked down with military encryption, heavy defenses, patrols of multiple Justicars, and backed up with packs of Night-wind operatives or even Spectres. All of them are also rigged to blow with thermonuclear devices and are shielded with more than two feet of sensor-disruptive material. We know SOMETHING is going on, but the amount of resources to determine what is simply beyond us.

For all of that attention, however, only a few million asari still venerate the old gods. Most now embrace siari, which is a mix of religion, philosophy, and cult of personality. Siari is based around the concept that all is one – all asari are one, all things in the universe are one, all ends spring from the same beginning. It is a faith that implies that regardless of outcome or impetus, all actions are caused by a single primal cause and end with a single primal effect.

The mystery of siari is that each worshiper must find that cause and effect for themselves. Asari define it as the ability to let go of the needs of the self to embrace the other that is akin to you, but siari has attracted alien practitioners who come to very different results. Turians find siari to suggest that turians must be one with the ancestors to find their way. Salerians identify it as a sort of unified theory of everything. Humans who go in for this kind of metaphysical garbage imply that siari gives them the insight to see that humanity is strongest when it is threatened from without and that we must unify our urges towards a better form of humanity.

A key part of siari is communal mediation and linking with a matriarch, so it's no suprise that these people have garbage in their heads that makes them susceptible to further manipulation by the asari. There is no moral framework in siari – it claims morality is an attempt to bind others to a single point of view, but all points of view are important – nor does it champion anything aside from the asinine concept that individuality and uniqueness are bad somehow.

Even stupid turian ancestor worship is more truthful and honest than that. Asari have created a religion that justifies anything if it leads to unity, defines unity as oneness, and oneness as everything. From this completely psychotic stance, asari feel that any action they take, as long as they intend it to further the unity of all, is permissible.

It should be no surprise that siari also incorporates a great deal of meaningless mystical claptrap: that the entire universe is a conscious being, and that every life within it is an aspect of the greater whole, akin to a cell in a body. Siari claims that death is a merging of one's spiritual energy back into the greater universal consciousness , and that what one brings together during life adds to this greater energy, which drives all things.

Asari Culture: City-states

While asari have no overarching government (see the government section) , they are divided into varying colonies and , upon Thessia, city states. Each one of these acts as a completely autonomous and sovereign entity, although all bow to the needs and desires of the Asari Republic.

The city-states each have minor variations in cultural influences. Some are more or less focused on warfare, science, the arts, etc. When an asari must think in local terms, beyond the constraints of race but above clan or family, the best they can often do is on a colony or city-state level. There simply is no larger frame of reference – an asari who becomes an SA citizen defines loyalty as first to all of humans, then to the SA, and maybe then possibly to the city they live in. National concepts with widely varying languages, backgrounds and traits are utterly baffling and confusing to asari.

The City-states are quietly passive-aggressive towards one another, as are the colonies. They cooperate fully on the things that require interactions, but beyond that are standoffish, each defining it's own purposes as being the most paramount importance in improving asari society. Even this seeming individuality is a sham, though, as the Thirty are careful in balancing the power and influence each grouping has on asari culture as a whole. It is as if the Senate could somehow make one nation focus on the glory of making cars and another on the value of producing HE3 fuel, with little else mattering. This compartmentalization of cultures means the asari have many, many specialists for any task, but generalists are very rare.

Asari Culture: Language

The asari language became unified nearly ten thousand years ago, and is a complex mix of verbal communications, subtle pheremonal emissions, and electrical discharges that the asari can sense. Almost a good fourth of the language is tied up in the concepts and sensations from linking or bonding, and such is a vital part of asari communication.

The asari language structure is primarily noun-verb paired, with subjects leading a sentence and descriptors and verbs acting on it, based on where they are placed in a sentence. People and other nouns are often paired with what describes that persons relationships, or that thing's ownership, and events are often tied to motivations.

For example, "Mary walked to the store to buy a cake" would be rendered something like "Mary, who is paired with John, desired a cake to eat for sweetness, and thus journeyed there, alone."

"The car has a malfunction of the engine" would be rendered as "The conveyance of mine, which I value for speed and comfort, is not acting in the manner that it should, for it is flawed in the engine."

The result is a strangely formal , eloquent and long-winded language, which is often foreshortened by emotional and mental commentary mixed in.

Asari writing uses an alphabet mixed with very old pictoral 'image-thoughts'. These pictorals are akin to hieroglyphics, and are only used sparingly, mostly in the context of religious or sexual concepts. The written version was originally written in a series of curved lines , circles, and half circles, with location of the glyph noting pronunciation.

Asari Culture: Facial Markings

At one time in the past, each clan had it's own facial markings, which were applied with long-lasting paints of white, blue, purple, green or black from certain inks in fish bladders and bodies. As clans disintegrated, a great many markings ceased to have any relevance, but were carried down by descendants anyway.

In the modern era, most facial markings indicate a certain way of thinking, sexual preference, occupation, or mindset. A series of white lines and black dots that line the crests indicates someone who is focused on mental pursuits , with a sideline in warfare. There are thousands upon thousands of variations, and some are purely artistic.

A more common and recent facial marking is the mimicking of human eyebrows, started by Matriarch Benezia T'Soni some twenty-five years ago when she acted as the ambassador to Earth. Millions of other asari have taken up this craze, which basically indicates that the asari finds humans attractive and prefers human values to certain asari ones. Asari with these markings have begun to mimic human expressions such as raised eyebrows or the lowering of eyebrows during a frown.

Asari Culture: Linking and Joining

As I have stated many times, the asari view sexual contact as utterly banal, of no more import than a human inviting a neighbor in for a cup of coffee could be seen. Akin to this is the paramount importance of joining mind-to-mind in such sexual encounters, which enhances the memory transfer and web of connections between various asari.

Linking, the more casual version, is done during almost every sexual encounter, and is best described as a light joining of nervous systems. The asari feels her partner's pleasure, surface emotions, and physical sensations, and vice versa. This obviously makes sexual encounters with asari more pleasurable and intense than with any other race. It is addictive. I can't stress this strongly enough – Cerberus operatives and agents who link , however lightly, with an asari, are not going to forget the experience and will want to do so again. This must be avoided at all costs.

Linking can and does often lead to the second level of closeness, joining. Joining links deeper emotions, surface thoughts, and often the very nature of what it means to be a person, with that of the asari. Joining, at the very least, is required for an asari to become pregnant, and there appear to be varying strengths of such joins. Most of them also involve some level of memory transfer, bits and pieces that are emotionally important to a partner, sometimes involuntarily shared.

The cultural importance of these two activities is both casual and not-casual. Asari see no harm or real danger in linking and joining, and find it the best way to both explore potential partners for a bond, or fully enjoy themselves in sex, delighting in the companion's deepest emotional states. The linking is not a religious thing, nor is it particularly seen as life-altering for asari.

For many of their lovers or partners, however, who are alien, it is often overwhelming. Consider your spouse. You have lived with her for ten years, had two children. You have made love, had years at each other sides, knows how she likes her breakfast, and understand her very well, you think.

Then you link with an asari. There is no wondering if she's really enjoying sex, or if she cares for you or does not. There's no question that the party you went to she liked, or if she's cheating on you, or if she feels bored in the relationship. Every act of lovemaking is overwhelming, every gentle romantic evening is intense and you know more about her body than you do your own.

This is the danger, the allure, and the sickness that the asari bring. Once sampled, it cannot be forgotten, or ignored. Once fathomed, one cannot pretend any other sexual encounter is as sweet, or as intense, or as rewarding. We have tested this over and over, and the stupid joke about once you go blue you never go back is a hard, ugly truism.

Are there instances where one has linked, or even joined with asari, and left that relationship for other partners? Of course. Many such linkings or even joinings occur with exotic dancers , prostitutes, or merely free-spirited maidens unwilling or unable to pursue long term relationships. Certainly after some kind of traumatic event or hardship, especially if such is brought about by the link-partner, one could pull away from such allure. But the vast majority of such liaisons end with the partner snared for the rest of their lives.

Asari consider this the beauty of siari. I consider it mind-rape and Stockholm Syndrome.

Asari Culture: Bonding

While asari take linking and joining very casually, the act of bonding is taking with the utmost seriousness and even hesitance. Asari are, by their nature, beings that do not value one-on-one relationships over that of community, but many times two asari or an asari and an alien fit so well together that separation is not really an option. When asari feel that not having a given lover in their life diminishes them, they move to become one person.

For that is what bonding entails – the linkage of neural systems on such a total level that when it's done you have two people that are basically utterly and totally known to each other. Every thought and memory, every hope and dream and fear. Every physical impulse, ugly thought, and even subconscious drives or issues. These are all laid bare.

Asari bonding is , for all intents and purposes, permanent. While asari may go through hundreds, even thousands of lovers in their lifetimes, very few seem to take more than one or two bondmates in that time, and they focus on them to the exception of all else.

Asari bond with other asari only after having children (usually), more towards the end of their lives, while bonds with aliens usually occur at the start of the matron stages, for the purposes of producing offspring. The bond fundamentally alters the brain patterns of a human – scans show definate wave functions that are distinctly asari in shape and form. Bondmates often claim to be able to communicate telepathically (or rather, we suspect, through the bio-electric field of the asari, acting as a channel between the two now that their nervous systems are so fully aligned.)

A bonded asari who loses her bond-mate through separation is often embittered, taking up risky relationships to hope to recapture such closeness or burying themselves in sex to avoid emotional ties. An asari who loses her bondmate to death, on the other hand, is often shattered, with over half of such widows quietly withdrawing from society for a hundred years or more before recovering. Only the strongest willed asari would undergo such a harrowing twice. Every single known asari who has had three bondmates die has killed themselves, the pain is simply too much.

If linking and joining are fundamentally dishonest, due to the asari ability to control such and the overwhelming effect it has on aliens who undergo it, then perhaps bonding is the most honest thing the asari can do. It is the only real individual act that the asari have culturally, tying themselves to a single other person. Some asari have experimented with triple or quadruple bonds, but these usually fail, as very few people are strong enough to have such a multitude in their head their entire lives.

Bonding ceremonies are dignified and strangely touching. Far from the carnal , frivoulous and empty "all is one" siari garbage that occludes most other events such as childbirth, bonding ceremonies are intensely romantic and almost always private, between a handful of close friends and the bonded. The various clans and the Thirty have different methods of tying such bonds together. The Thirty use intricately braided cords to handfast the couple, the colors and patterns of the cords based on the family linage, hopes for the bond, and ancient fertility symbols. The cords are left to tie the two lovers together for a full day, and each must compensate for the loss of one hand by drawing on the bond to aid the other. The cord is severed at the end of the day, with it refashioned into a bracelet set into precious metals, or , on occasion, an armband, which is never to be removed even for a moment except in a handful of situations (like getting into a magnetic imager, etc).

Clans each have distinctive ribbons that are braided into a bracelet, one for each partner, which are exchanged, then ritually burned in a midnight ceremony under the moons of Thessia (or in a pinch, beneath any night sky). There are clan-specific dances, and the pair is given new facial markings, and finally the Clan Matriarchs will gift them with hammered silver bracelets of unity. Plain and unmarked, these serve the same function (and have the same limits on removal) as those of the Thirty.

The clanless have a simple, dignified ritual, where bondmates exchange slender bands of synthetic crystal, colored based on various themes. The crystal modifies it's coloration during a ritual bonding, shifting hues based on the deepest desires of the pair – blue for fidelity and a hope for children, white for unity in love, red for energy and long life, black for desire. The percentage of each bracelet's coloration is decided by each bond-mate's innermost thoughts, and are a public notice of why each has chosen the other. A mostly black bracelet is seen as a poor match, while a mostly red bracelet has overtones of more friendship than lust. A mostly white bracelet is seen as romantic and somewhat naïve, and a mostly blue bracelet as sweet and family oriented. Most successful bondmates have about equal proportions.

Bondings can and do fail over time. Divorce is an ugly thing, as each bondmate must go through a ritual debonding, forcing out memories and severing connections. This is only really possible with an asari bonded to another asari, alien mates are stuck with the link and the emotions it causes. Many divorces end with suicides. Broken bonds are seen as bad luck and a curse, and asari act quite superstitiously to such. Several once powerful matriarchs had their personal cults or even entire Houses laid low by the stigma of such an act – Matriarch Sorei abandoning her bondmate caused the Steelshape clan to expel all her bloodline, and almost a full third of House T'Soni angrily renounced their House and left when the century long bond of Matriarchs Benezia and Aethyta was sundered.

Asari Culture: Death Rites

Asari live a long time, but are neither invincible nor immortal. Death, for asari, is not feared, as many believe they return to the universe upon death, surrounded by the light of those who have gone before and dissolving into some sort of metaphysical eternal mind.

As such , asari death rites , while solemn, are neither the wild, angry fetes of the krogan, nor the dirgeladen sobfests that our own human funerals devolve into. If asari die on a planet, they are carefully lathered in preservative oils and laid in state under the sky for three days. Preservatives and mass effect fields keep away insects, predators, and bacterial decay. After this period, the deceased is ritually bid farewell to, and is immolated, with the family performing a shallow , non-sexual link to share memories and happy thoughts of the departed. There has been more than one occasion, when a bond-mate has died, that the widowed survivor throws herself on such a pyre, and never is this prevented or stopped. (Savages. You'd think a race of natural mind-rapers could invest in some mental health support for grieving widows.)

If the asari does not die on a planet, but dies in space, on a ship, or upon the Citadel, the body is immediately and forthwith ejected whole and unburnt into space, on a course for the nearby star, which will consume the body. Again, if more than one asari is present, linking and the sharing of memories occurs. If all the mourners are aliens, any asari present will attempt to give a recounting of the deceased's life.

All such funerals are coupled with a song , usually sung by a maiden, called a Remembrance. The Remembrance is one of the most ancient rituals the asari have, and one of the most mysterious, as it dates , according to myth, directly from the time of Athame.

The Remembrance is sung thrice, as the body lays in state or is being shot into the sun. It sings of how the asari lived, of the lovers she found and the things she explored, of the fears she conquered and the chances she took. It sings of any children she had, of her bondmates, and her accomplishments as the asari see them.

The final stanzas are the interesting part, and I apologize for the quality of translation, but the language of the Remembrance is the very oldest spoken form of asari, stubbornly not updated to the more modern grammar.

Remember, as Athame remembers Thessia

Remember, as guardians of truth hidden behind a face of stone

Remember, as protectors of a truth too Dark to be seen

Of shores unseen, forests unwalked, mountains unknown

There is a Darkness that lives beyond the Last Star

There is a Rain of Black Leaves that will fall once more

Remember, when Mighty [Cytha?] does pulse thrice times

That in death, the Darkness can be breached to it's core

The asari are not given to allegory, nor are they fans of subtle hints buried in cryptic wordings. The reference to Cytha is particularly troubling – if we are interpreting it correctly, Cytha is a neutron-star struck by a micro-black hole some twenty million years ago. The blow destabilized Cytha's usually rapid rotation, resulting in a spin-cycle that would spray x-rays across the ecliptic of Thessia's skies every fifty thousand to fifty two thousand years.

But when the stanza was written, by any measure, Cytha was in it's invisible phase, it's poles aimed no where near Thessia's view. And Thessian scientists didn't discover Cytha was a neutron star rather than a regular star until less than a thousand years ago. And yet, somehow this canto references this event.

It's worth noting that Cytha began to pulse roughly nine hundred years ago, visible to the naked eye on Thessia. We don't know what "the Last Star" is, unless the author of this maddening verse is speaking of the space between galaxies. Nor do we know or have any reference to a 'rain of black leaves'. The primary theory is that perhaps at one time Cytha was somehow synched up with the rogue planet that threatened to send asteroids crashing into Thessia, but then one must figure out how the writer knew that a rogue planet would cross the star's path and be captured in the first place!

We will continue to research this, as something bothers me about it, as if it's at the edge of thought and I can't quite place what I'm trying to say.
Chapter 9: Chapter 9 - Asari Government

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Asari government is both extremely transparent and extremely corrupt. a juxtaposition in human concepts but fitting for the asari. Their government is barely more than a conceptual agreement between leaders with very different visions beholden to a mob that emotes more than it understands, and is underlain with the true leadership that drives the asari race. Only the asari could craft a government that is little more than a sham and a distraction, and yet have more effective control over every aspect of their civilization than the most repressive dictator could dream of.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: To embrace the alien is to embrace that which is inhuman, to reject what you are for what you should never be. Oil and water do not mix for a reason.

Asari Government Structures

On paper, and on the lips of the average asari or outside observer, the asari government functions on but three levels – interstellar, embodied by the Republic; regional, embodied by the city-state or colony-state, and clan, embodied by the iron-fisted whim of the Matriarchy. There is very little administrative depth of the government on asari lives, and it's light foot is supposedly a demonstration of the unity of the asari race.

As with most of the truth behind these witches, that statement may be the most damnable lie ever uttered by a sentient being. The asari government that is seen is near upon to powerless, little more than a clearinghouse and coordination center for moving resources whence they should go. Asari do not need but a handful of laws, and to violate the least of them is death at the hands of a Justicar. Rather, asari unity (read, brainwashed idiocy) can be laid at the feet of the Thirty, who have masterfully ensnared their entire race and themselves in a fantasy story of who leads what.

As I have touched on in both the history and psychology sections, strong leaders that act by fiat rather than with unity end up falling to bad ends. Asari psychology does not – indeed, cannot – truly fathom that one being can command, that the input of the many is not somehow valuable. The rare asari outcast that operates beyond the light of the asari culture is so cold, icy, brutal and efficient in such leadership because they doubt all other beings. And the asari who lead the Republic are simply not cut of the same cloth.

Asari government operates in layers – a surface layer, to confuse and mislead, a middle layer, to coordinate and compel, and a final, hard layer, to restrain and discipline.

Asari Government : Clan Councils

For those asari in the Clans, it is the clan council that rules and guides their lives. Comprised of the matriarchs of the clan, gathered together on regular intervals, the council acts as a primitive, relationship and sex-based version of the more robust e-democracy system. Matriarchs know the whims and pulse of their children, their children's lovers and allies, and their followers. Each acts as a sort of group adviser and mediator, sifting through issues, spats, feuds, gossip. information and ideas to bring forth the balance of what that matriarch's followers desire, filtered through the experience and judgment of the matriarch. A cynical observer might doubt such impartiality, seeing the matriarchs as playing their own hand and paying but lip service to the wishes of their followers, but this does not seem to be the case.

These councils meet within the many clans, arguing, gossiping, cajoling and plying influence in information, memories, ideas and the swapping of young, promising maidens, business contracts, cash, favors or even an afternoon of sexual bliss, coming to a slow consensus that is at best the lower denominator of all needs. Humans would call it the worst kind of political gridlock, as such decision making is always slow, but combined with the conservative nature and long life of the asari, even the most minute decisions can take months, years, even decades.

As clan councils decide, they push representative matriarchs up to the Grand Clan Council, that makes decisions that affect all clans within that specialty. These are but the smaller councils writ large and with a pomp and gaiety that makes them seem akin more to a riotous party or orgy than a meeting of leading asari. Conducted once a decade, the Grand Clan Councils have the potential to shift the course of tens of millions of clan members and billions of affiliated asari. As such, issues brought to the Grand Council take even longer to decide – they have been arguing over whether clans should license their works within Thessian law or Citadel law for over five hundred years with no decisions in sight.

The spectacle of clan council is grist for rumor mills, information brokers, and the media, attracting great amounts of attention while granting remarkably little insight into true results. For in the aftermath of every Grand Council, the Clan Matriarchs report to a meeting of the Thirty, and the real decisions are made swiftly and quietly. Our discovery of this was a happy accident, brought about when a matriarch we bugged to determine if she knew information on a target ended up in this meeting with every House Matriarch, rattling off issues of real import and not bringing up trivial ones, and with the House Matriarchs swiftly saying yay or nay to each issue.

The clan members can be secure that their trivial desires do indeed receive a great deal of attention, but only those matters that impact the Republic or the Thirty are resolved with any real speed, the rest are allowed to languish or be buffered in endless debate until the issue dies or influence is brought to bear for one outcome or the other.'

Asari Government : The Republic

The asari republic is a construct, not a true government. It has no head of state, no senate, and no structure. There is no capital building, nor is there a civil service. Indeed, the very concept of "working for the government" was such an alien idea that the asari word for "civil servant" is a borrowing from salarian.

The Republic is an organization that functions much like a logistical resource center. As issues of importance to the entire race are brought to the attention of data management analysts known as Seekers, they prioritize each one. A request for new ships is balanced against the cost and benefits of additional funds for road construction on Illum or research into a disease on Panji. The Seekers will try to eliminate projects or requests that are too partisan, narrow in scope, or those better handled by clan actions or appeals to the Thirty. In order to make it past the Seekers, the asari bringing forth the project plan must be able to rapidly convince the Seeker that the goal is both public in scope and in the rewards it brings.

Seekers have wide latitude in determining an initial categorization, which is then moved up to a circle of matriarchs, who are chosen randomly during each election. The matriarchs have their own staff of information brokers, data analysts, financial advisory specialists, lawyers and public relations types. They carefully research each issue for exactly five days before rendering a decision. This period, called the Review, is never shortened, and lengthened only if absolutely necessary.

During the Review, the matriarchs in question can be lobbied intensely – indeed, this is expected. Bribery, seduction, the trade of opportunities and secrets, clan maneuvering and more all are both allowed and even approved of. The more effort spent in trying to convince the matriarch, the more influence and support must have been brought to bear and thus the more important the project obviously is.

Finally, spending and other financial requests are approved or denied, with resources and money routed to the correct clans or businesses. Military decisions are forwarded to the Hunter Circle for execution, while new laws or legal challenges to existing laws pushed to the open Democracy for e-voting.

That is, very literally, it. There are no ministries, no departments of war or the interior, no vast numbers of government workers rushing about, no budget negotiations, nothing but a few thousand data engineers, and a few hundred specialists working under a handful of matriarch's chosen utterly at random. The system ensures that no clan, or even the Thirty, can acquire any permanent advantage, that no political theory can hold sway for long, that no party politics or dictator can seize power. There isn't even a building to meet in – most of the participants work from their homes, or from small offices they share with clan officials. Some years the government has even met out in a park, tapping away on haptic screens while splashing in fountains.

It's quite a shock for alien lobbyists. a shift of thinking that most of them can't make. So used to politicians who rely on the goodwill of their subjects and being bound to campaign promises and the usual wheeling and dealing, they don't know how to handle hard-nosed and tired matrons who give them little give when inquiring as to the value or use of their proposals. The Seekers are chosen from the clanless solely, while the matriarchs that stand for office are all of the Thirty and their support staff from the Clans, so not even one segment of government can said to be ascendant.

Of course, this puts matriarchs of the Thirty in the ultimate position of saying "yes" or "no", which should shock no one. Asari insist these matriarchs, chosen at random, have little to no stake in what issues they usually vote one. And they may be right. But it is no government as we see it. The only asari who is a career politician in the entire race may be the Citadel Councilor.

Asari Government : Hunter Circle

Just as there is no unified government, military command is also not unified. Each city-state and colony raises it's own militia, formed by clanless maiden hunters, with matrons as NCO's and officers and commanded by the fierce asari commandos, paladins, or even matriarchs.

The closest thing to a central military command is called the Hunter's Circle. Here, in times of true interstellar war, will the military commanders of the Thirty take council and discuss strategy with the militia commanders of city-states and colonies.

The asari military is bizarre (see the military section). but it's command structure above the rank of Telsharess (roughly, war-princess) is truly baffling. The circle usually consists of a matriarch from each of the so-called "Guardian" houses, which are responsible for the Calling, a levy of militia conscripted from their affiliated Lesser Houses, city populations, and allies. These war-princesses do not coordinate their forces to attack an enemy, but to mislead him while each defends her own city or colony primarily.

The battle leaders of the High and Greater Houses, on the other hand, are there solely to plan strategy of a large-scale interstellar nature. For the Asari Navy is little more than the combined private fleets of the Thirty, along with a handful of ships built by and maintained by the Republic for planetary defense. This fleet is large – dwarfing that of the Systems Alliance – and supremely well equipped, but has no internal command structure. Rather, the leaders plot and work hard to ensure there is a strategy for every ship and fighter, so everyone has their own place.

Killing asari military leaders is utterly useless. They do not become demoralized, and their high command gives each one such wide authority that even the most fierce assault would result in asari units coming together and renewing the attack or defense.

Asari Government : Legislative e-democracy

The selection of the Governing Matriarchs, the Judges, and the slate of candidates for the Citadel Councilor are all decided upon by race-wide vote. Every asari that is an adult (as well as aliens who are bondmates of asari) gets one vote. These votes fall into two categories – votes on approved actions from the Republic, in terms of laws, or votes on which matriarchs can take which offices.

Many aliens see the e-democracy as the true asari government, and again they would be wrong. The issues are only decided upon by the masses once they have been vetted, altered, researched, and cleared by the Thirty. There is no such concept as populism or catering to the needs of the masses – these are usually defined by the Thirty.

That being said, the e-democracy is very robust when it comes to demonstrating the shifting nature of asari mindsets as a whole. Over time, asari governance has become less bound in tradition and focused on Thessia, and increasingly focused on expansion, economic dominance, and legislation empowering the clanless. The Clans have seen their powers and numbers erode sharply over the past two centuries, to the point where they represent less than 5% of the asari population, and while they remain important to the asari economy and culture, they are increasingly being sidelined as the average asari wishes more of a say in the events that affect their daily lives.

Asari Government: The Justicars and the Law

Asari law is very compact, with the exception of Illum, which is devoted to interaction with alien corporation and has thousands of laws designed to protect the asari and foster investment. For most asari worlds, the law is a handful of prohibited actions, all of which are punishable by the justicars.

Murder (premeditated or not, manslaughter is not a concept the asari recognize, nor is temporary insanity), rape (physical or mental), collusion against the government, fraud of any amount, theft of any amount, the sale of narcotics that can lead to mental damage, the enslavement of asari, and betrayal of the race are all punishable by death. The idea that an asari who steals an apple being put to death is probably shocking to many, but consider the unified asari culture. There are no asari homeless – the unemployed are given some level of work, either by the Thirty, the Lesser Houses, or the Clans, to ensure that no asari suffers. The only reason to steal becomes greed, and an asari who is willing to put her own desires ahead of other asari is seen as a danger. Likewise, fraud and drug dealing are also unacceptable as they injure the many for the benefit of the one.

Asari lawyers are quite common, although the vast majority deal with alien laws. not asari ones. There is no such thing as a trial in asari culture. Potential lawbreakers are detained and a link is forced, which allows no questions – innocence or guilt is known immediately. Incorrectly detained suspects who are innocent are let go immediately with apologies, the guilty are (depending on the offense) either fined heavily or given to the Justicar Order for execution.

Asari are inherently law abiding when surrounded by other asari, but most of the laws only apply to asari themselves. An asari who defrauds aliens is merely seen as clever, one who enslaves aliens as distasteful. Some crimes (rape, murder) are given no such exoneration because taking advantage of or even ruining an alien (a lesser being in the asari mindset) does not mean the asari would do so to another asari, but murder and the like imply a disregard for life itself, which is unacceptable.

Asari have a regular police force, which investigates crimes and regulates public safety. They have Clans that handle this, as well as smaller legal issues. The offenders against the primary laws, however, must deal with the Justicar Order.

Justicars enforce the law according to the Code, a long poetic document memorized by each Justicar. These asari several all familial connections, taking no permanent mates nor bearing more children, devoting themselves utterly to justice in the asari eyes. They do not have mercy, pity, or hesitation, they kill quickly and without malice. Their power is utterly absolute. While the Code limits the actions they can take against the Thirty and government in general, violation of the law puts every asari under their jurisdiction.

It's important to note the Justicars do not take note of, or care about, minor crimes, or the criminality of aliens. An asari who speeds her aircar through a restricted speed zone is going to get a ticket from the local police, not be murdered by a Justicar. Justicars only act when they know of a crime, one is reported to them, or they identify a potential ardat-yakshi.

Asari Government: the Thirty and the Citadel Council

The true organs of government, the Thirty meets four times a year in a vast conclave known as the Council of Matriarchs. Other than that, the Thirty spend most of their time maneuvering around one another in the other government arenas, manipulating and cajoling the asari to the outcomes they desire. The Thirty are the absolute rulers of their own domains, but the e-democracy means that they often end up having to work through various proxies. other members of the Thirty, or even the Clans.

The position of Citadel Councilor is made available to any matron or matriarch of the Thirty every ten years, along with the position of asari ambassador. The two work together to exemplify the will of the Thirty, often having weekly teleconference meetings with the gathering of House Matriarchs to discuss talking points and petitions placed before the Council.

The Thirty see the Citadel Council and all of Citadel governance as a game, a way to advance in stature and influence while aiding the power of the asari. Those asari with strong tendencies towards personal advancement and ambition often gravitate towards such positions.

The current Councilor, Tevos T'Sael, and the ambassador, Irrissa Te'Shora (an adoptee, hence the altered name) demonstrate this perfectly. Tevos is from a very minor house of the Thirty, one that one had less than 20 main members and under 200 affiliates, but she has parlayed her impressive skills at manipulation and persuasion into the chance to be one of the rulers of the galaxy, and as a result her House has grown tenfold. Irrissa. a recent addition to House T'Shora, one of the High Houses, is there to make sure Tevos does not act counter to the House of Storms and the wishes of the great Houses of Thessia, while making a name for herself to justify her own ascension.

Asari Government: The Council of Matriarchs

As mentioned in the last section, it is the Council of Matriarchs that is the closest thing we can find to actual governance. This shadowy conclave, comprised of the House Matriarchs and their advisers, meets four times a year in a highly secured fortress on Thessia, either directly or via heavily encrypted teleconference. The average asari sees rumors of the Council in the same way humans once thought of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderburger Group, a consortium of elites operating in the shadows. But for asari, the concept that the mighty of the Houses meets to determine the course of the race is comforting and proper.

The Council acts with a haste and directness that is almost un-asari, eschewing the usual sexcapades and endless social games to work with admirable speed, directness, and ruthlessness. The Thirty do not trust one another, and in the modern era each has their own agenda, so when the Council meets only the most urgent and dangerous issues are discussed and plans put in place to nullify them.

Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to penetrate the security that surrounds such meetings. The Hall of the Matriarchs is guarded at all times by military security and Justicars, not to mention the private security forces of the Thirty themselves. Scans for bugs and other surveillance devices occur hourly, and the encrypted transmissions that link far away Matriarchs are done with one-time pads using keys in the hundreds of trillions of digits, sourced based on random background radiation from some arbitrary direction in the sky.

Nor can we dare attempt to kidnap and interrogate a House Matriarch – that would be tantamount to a declaration of war on all asari. The best information we have on how the Council operates is from rumor, hearsay, and the occasional rapid action taken by the Republic when no such issue has been put before the e-Democracy.

There are many unanswered questions as to why the Council meets in the Hall, which is a Temple of Athame, and why the Council is solely comprised of matriarchs who have lost a bondmate. We are not sure if such is some arcane requirement or a custom, although the Thirty are usually dismissive of such limits. Further investigation is required.

Asari Political Parties:

It surprised me and others. given the nature of government, that asari could have political parties, but on further reflection this is not so strange. These parties are less like organizations and more like loose mindsets and customs, designed to place asari thinking in lockstep with one another.

The parties do not operate as political parties in human government do. Rather, they are very loose social structures that define a framework of beliefs and proper actions to improve the unity of the race.

As such, there are only three political parties, each named on the core of it's beliefs. The first, the Collective Clans, focus on the output (and influence) of the Clans. Conservative, financially careful, and focused on the long term, the Collective Clans are the least reactionary of the political parties, and the most inward looking. When they ascend to power, the asari retreat, regardless of the cost. The party focuses on driving the Clans as the primary force behind asari industry and expansion, reining in the power of the clanless and rejecting new approaches and alien influences. While the Collective is not xenophobic, they are not very impressed with aliens and are the most outspoken in their belief that the asari are strongest when they focus first on asari matters and only then on aliens. The Collective submits grudgingly to the Thirty, but sees the future as being with the Clans, and the return to older values, and not in outward expansion.

The second party, the Hope, is both more liberal and yet somehow more cautious than the Collective. They are the party of the lesser houses, far flung and distant from Thessia. Cosmopolitan, in touch with alien cultures and sensitive to galactic events, they are very liberal when it comes to social issues, embracing change and incorporating (or perverting) alien cultures whenever they can. Yet. much like the Collective Clans, they also remain focused on the long-term and see alien influence as less of a opportunity for the asari to grow and more as a buffer for the protection of the asari. The Hope's caution is in the realm of changes to the structure of society – they are strong supporters of the Thirty, rejecting any idea that goes against the wishes of the Thirty and implying that without that divine leadership, the asari are lost.

The last party, the Vision, is the party that best represents the wishes of the clanless masses. Reactionary and often vitriolic, it rejects Clan influence and House manipulation in favor of a further leveling of society. The primary drivers of most colony expansions, the Vision's stance is one of accommodation and flexing the asari economic muscle to spread asari values. They prize aliens, seeking to use and manipulate them rather than merely profit off of them as the Hope suggests, or to ignore them as the Clans would. The Vision has no use for the older methods of asari collectivism, suggesting the best way to implement siari is to suffuse asari throughout the various races until each is little more than a different flavor of asari-dominated control. Thankfully, the reactionary nature of this party is not supported by the movers and shakers of asari society, only the powerless clanless.
Chapter 10: Chapter 10 - Asari Military

A/N: I've recently updated my main fic (Of Sheep and Battlechicken) , but I still have some more on the asari before moving on to Salarians or Turians (not sure which is best to write about first, but probably salarian.) I'm also getting closer to releasing my Encyclopedia Biotica - an examination of what biotics is, how it is enabled in each race, measures of power, biotic and anti-biotic equipment, and dozens of new powers I've thought of. After I finish that I will probably move on towards more OSABC, before doing a series of one-shot stories and preparing to wrap up the ME1 segment and begin OSAB: Downfell. The goal is to finish A Season of Sorrow no later than the end of 2013 so I can focus entirely on the other two books in 2014. Then, finally, I will go back and update the Reaper Story and start on my post-ending fic.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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The asari military is a mishmash of city-state sponsored elite units, packs of asari commandos, huntress militia from the clans, and a fairly professional navy sponsored by the Republic. Despite the population of the asari, few of them take up military service, but one must keep in mind that almost all asari have biotics, even if they never bother developing them. Basic biotic defense and combat techniques – barrier, a simple throw, and a warp field – are taught to literally every single asari, and as such, the militia fielded by the city states is more dangerous than it might appear.

Interestingly, except for certain prestigious command positions, the asari military is fairly free of the social maneuvering and manipulations of the rest of asari society. This is probably due to the freewheeling, often shifting nature of military deployments, which makes building up a network of associates difficult, but also due to the asari focus on merit in terms of being able to be put in charge of the lives of other asari. One must prove their skill at fighting to be given such a chance.

My analysis of the military doesn't include the Night-wind, as these creatures are being researched by a different cell. After watching them pull Dr. Uraj apart like taffy, while I regret the loss of life caused by our retaliation, I'm more reconciled to the acts I once called terrorism in dealing with these witches. Thankfully, the asari military prefers not to work with them – even aliens being able to see the depravity of the Night-wind is not a good thing.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Analysis is the bane of conviction. One cannot risk survival by embracing that which is corrosive to it.

Asari Military Doctrine – ground combat

Asari do not practice attritional or asymmetric warfare concepts within their ground combat units. With few wars in their history, the asari focus has always been on scouting, infiltration, the use of small special forces units to decapitate enemy leadership, and biotic-assisted static defense. Given the overwhelming strength of the asari navy, this is hardly surprising – the asari have never faced planetary invasion, colony revolts, or even large-scale wars since the War of the Queens in ancient asari history.

Asari military doctrine follows the concepts set down by the ardat-yakshi queen, Shatha. Her tactical and strategic genius is held in the asari mindset much as humanity looks at the writing of Sun Tzu. Shatha had zero confidence in the ability of large numbers of asari to fight in coordinated battles, which is why she eventually lost – the sheer size of the armies of the Thirty were able to beat her in attritional warfare. But this left millions dead, and proved her point to the Thirty, who were quick to take up her tactics instead, and used them to defeat the Silent Queen.

The core of asari ground doctrine is called the Concordat of the Strike. Asari units are assembled into what is called the Echelon. At the lowest rank are the independent city-state militia and mercenaries. Above that are the clan huntresses, above that, the commandos of the Thirty, and atop the echelon are battle priestesses, war matriarchs, and Justicars.

The Echelon formation is designed to tie up and occupy an enemy force – be it a landing party, invasion, pirate assault, or even a firefight between a few dozen combatants. The front ranks of the echelon, under the cover of the back ranks, fight defensively, pinning enemies down with biotics and automatic fire whenever possible.

The middle ranks of the echelon provide defensive barriers and, once the enemy is stopped, begin to flank. Huntresses and commandos strike swiftly, sowing chaos and confusing in enemy ranks, forcing enemy commanders to try to adjust on the fly to multiple lines of attack. The goal of the flanking attacks is not to panic or rout the defenders, but to force the commitment of any reserve forces.

Once the enemy is framed and prepared, the senior ranks of the echelon swing into action. Prior to that point, they occupy themselves with hurling powerful biotics into the ranks of the enemy, demoralizing them, and bolstering defensive barriers. Once the enemy is committed, the senior ranks will charge the enemy command, often using kanquess (vanguard biotic charge) to close distance rapidly. They will destroy the enemy command structure and utilize biotic explosions to cover their retreat.

Once central command is down, the asari will use pressure tactics to encourage routs and retreats, while flanking commandos will rush ahead to set traps and further disrupt enemy fallback.

The asari are masters at this, such tactics proving devastating in the war against the krogan. The asari take care to prevent such tactics from working on them by ensuring that sub-commanders are placed in the ranks of the first two echelons, with careful orders to protect their own lives and take command if and only if the senior commanders are defeated. This, along with asari unity and biotic abilities, means that asari military forces have never been routed or broken in combat.

Asari do not fear death, and most are convinced their fights aid all asari. By human norms, almost all asari units can be considered to have fanatic morale. Even when the echelon is broken, as with historical records showing happened during the Rachni Wars, the asari retreat in good order. They are not as unshakable as turians, however – despite their high morale and battle unity, if the echelon is disrupted so severely that even sub-commanders are lost, they will fall back very rapidly, spreading into guerrilla style hit-and-fade bands that mimic ancient hunting packs rather than stand and die to the last asari.

Asari do not have a 'male' culture, and as such, war is not seen as glorious. They place soldiers below intellectuals, artists, and even craftsmen in terms of social standing in most cases. Most asari drawn to the military do so out of a sense of duty to the race. This means that there is no 'machismo' culture in the military ground forces. Unlike humans and krogan, the heroes of asari military lore are neither strong fighters or even clever generals, but cunning huntresses that lead enemies astray and dismantle their assaults before they can find any purchase. A bloodthirsty asari is reviled, and most of this disposition end up in bands like Eclipse or Azure Kiss rather than in the military proper.

Asari are allowed to fraternize fairly freely, although the asari military will not accept bond-mates in the same unit, instead moving most bonded members to non-combat positions. Asari feel that their soldiers will fight all the harder if their lovers and friends are in the line of fire, and asari never leave their dead behind.

Asari Military Doctrine – space combat

The asari navy is unmatched in Citadel space, even by the vast turian forces. While the turians have more ships, and the salarians have higher overall technology, asari ships have three advantages that they have never surrendered.

Asari ships have vastly more effective mass effect cores than any other race. Even the cutting edge Tantalus core recently placed in testing by the Systems Alliance is no match. The asari "Cascade Cores" use shifting multiphase mass effect fields, balanced by a team of specialist biotic engineers, to allow both faster mass shifting and something like a short-range FTL jump. Nicknamed the flash-step, after the short kanquess move many asari soldiers practice, the Cascade cores allow asari ships to effortless dodge most long-range kinetic shots and even some heavy torpedoes. Despite constant and ongoing espionage efforts, no real progress has been made by any race to replicate this technology – only the asari have the biotic and mass effect field sensitivity needed to run such powerful, large cores.

The second advantage of the asari has been incredible advances in armor technology. The city of Silaris, the home of House T'Rome, pioneered a new kind of starship armor based on carbon-nanotubes. These tubes are heavily woven with a vaporized diamond substance, forming a crystalline lattice that is crushed by mass-effect driven plasma forges into super-dense, inflexible, heat resistant layers. The resulting material, called Silaris armor by most, is incredibly resistant to both laser fire and kinetic shots, requiring obscene amounts of direct hits to break through. An asari frigate sheathed in this material stood off two batarian cruisers for an hour before help arrived, despite taking over a hundred clean shots from 25mm guns. While the techniques behind making the armor have been discovered by other races, the expense is ruinous. The massive asari economy is the only one that can handle the cost of equipping ships with such armor – any other race would simply not have the resources. (Indeed, something like 4% of the entire asari GDP can be attributed to this cost alone. Given that it makes their ships nearly invulnerable, however, this expense is borne. Remember, asari like profit, but devotion to the race trumps even that.)

The final attribute of the asari navy's dominance is the nature of asari governance, and the flexibility given to the city states and colonies. As I mentioned in the government section, there is no back and forth between defense departments and governments – the navy gets every asset it thinks it needs, with astonishingly little graft or waste. Unlike other races, where disbursements compete with other government expenditures, the asari government has no real upkeep costs – most of the taxes it collects go straight to the navy, army, and to civil engineering with little overhead.

The asari fleet, as with other races, is built around the power of their dreadnaughts, supported by heavy cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. Asari military doctrine in regards to space combat is a faint mirror of their old surface naval tactics. Rather than forward deploy ships in bases from from home, the asari have a wide array of scouts and frigates looking for trouble, and rapid deployment strike forces to respond to incidents.

In battle, asari are graceful. They disdain brutal tactics like boarding for elegant plans, using their frigates and destroyers to harry an enemy and keep them distracted while dreadnaughts line up their shots carefully. Asari prefer to not engage fully in the fight at first, launching overwhelming numbers of extremely accurate long range bombardments with dashing close-in strikes by frigates, softening and tenderizing the foe, dancing in and out of his range using their flash-step maneuver. Their superior heat dissipation and armor mean they can trade shots for far longer without consequences, and when the enemy is damaged enough, only then do they go in for the killing blow.

Asari Military Doctrine – ship design and influences

Asari ships can be classed into the same rough approximation as human ships, but they were designed for very different tasks and functions. All asari ships have the same basic frame, a Y-shaped arrangement of three wings around a central, hollow core, which is due to the ring rather than ball shape of the Cascade Core in their mass effect drives.

Asari ships are (by human standards) luxurious, with even the smallest ships boasting comprehensive entertainment and exercise facilities. Asari shun sleeper pods for private, cozy quarters for everyone on board,and asari are not only allowed to freely fraternize but encouraged to do so to bolster unit cohesion. It must be noted these private quarters are shared spaces, like a mix between a den, bunk-room, and lounge. Asari in space do not like sleeping alone, as the ship's mass effect field, so much weaker than the gravity of a planet, makes them feel somewhat adrift and often leads to bad dreams.

Asari ships are not built for endurance at space – most patrols last less than two weeks, and asari naval personnel are fairly intolerant of longer patrols. Amusingly, asari sailors are far less rowdy than other races naval personnel, preferring to keep the drinking and orgies on the ship, presenting a calm, professional appearance to aliens ashore.

Asari build very solid ships, with good damage control, full medical facilities, and strong survival and evacuation modules even in the smallest frigates. That being said, asari ships are not good at fending off boarding parties, and most of their ships are either purely military or purely non-combatant in nature, lacking the labs and research facilities of SA ships, or the intelligence components in salarian vessels.

Asari do not use fighters and prefer lighter to heavier ships.

Asari Military Organization – The Echelon

As described in the military doctrine section, the echelon formation is what asari use in ground combat, designed to amply their natural mindset and ensure the destruction of foes.

The echelon is comprised of 'ranks' – the kasha (beaters, from when asari huntresses would have younger hunters make noise to flush out prey), the mishaan (archers), and the kalaqus (spears). These ancient terms are used both to embrace olden culture and as reminders of one's place in the military formation.

The kasha are usually light militia – independent, mostly – arrayed in a broad front, stiffened here and there with Republican Guard units. While they are going to take the most losses, they are also afforded the most protection from biotic fields generated by the next two ranks, acting as shields to take cover behind.

The mishaan are commandos and battle matriarchs, along with some more professional militia members and lead by impetuous Royal Paladins. Utilizing the charging force of kanquess, cover, or cloaking, they will slip to the flanks of an enemy and attempt to turn them. The goal is not really to achieve a flanking maneuver, but to force a division of strength and the committing of the reserves of an enemy force, which would normally surround any command units. The mishaan also contains Lifeshapers and powerful biotics, both of which work to mitigate damage taken by the kasha.

The final rank, the kalaqus, is almost entirely war priestesses or powerful matriarchs from the Thirty, wielding titanic biotic abilities and coordinating events with a handful of leaders. Their job is to hurl pure biotic power at the foe, shaking and scattering their lines, until such time as the mishaan have drawn off defenders, and then to thunder in, carving a path through the enemy lines and slaying their command staff.

The echelon formation is built to the strengths and weakness of asari combat. Unwilling to field large numbers, and unfamiliar with stand-and-fight tactics, the asari must find ways to leverage their power as a force multiplier. The echelon formation prevents close quarters or melee combat, which would be disastrous for the lighter built asari against turians, krogan, or other foes, and also ensures unit cohesion by having each part of the military force work with the others.

Asari Military Ranks
Asari do not have 'enlisted' or 'officer' ranks as we understand them. They refer to three graduations of rank bands, in order of seniority. But all asari, with the exception of the Thirty, start at the bottom and must work their way up. Even Justicars must, for those who wish to join the order without military experience must serve for years in the military to prove their skills.

The bottom ranks of the asari are called the lasha (shoreline). There are five ranks, roughly translating to : beginner, novice, practiced, skilled, and master. By our best estimates, skilled and master are about the same as human chiefs and master chiefs. There is no such thing as 'time in rate' in these system – there are ancient tests of skill involved, for coordination, targeting, biotics, and the ability to think on the battlefield. An asari who can master them all can go from beginner to master in a day, one who cannot can spend five hundred years in the military and not advance at all. For most asari, becoming a Master takes about ten to twenty years, sometimes more or less.

Those who achieve the rank of Master are allowed to move from the various independent militias to more prestigious units, or to advance to command the independent militia. Militia commanders have no rank beyond that of "grand master", but often when dealing with multiple militias, the various leaders will elect one of their own as a "high grand master".

Masters who go on to other units enter the furlasha (shallows) and must climb five new ranks. Three are for warriors (rough translations would be cleared, enlightened, aspirant) and two are for leaders (seeker, finder). These leadership ranks are not officers, but just that, leaders – they inspire by doing, by leading from the front and acting more like NCO's than true officer corps.

Rarely, asari enter the Republican Guard, or the Republican Navy. The mirlasha (deeps) is the rank structure for these rates. It is more formal than the other two, with four junior and three senior ranks. The junior ranks (trainee, trained, skilled, and master) mimic the ranks of the basic military, but the senior ranks (lieutenant, captain, war mistress) mimic more alien rank structures.

The asari military rank structure, as I mentioned earlier, is refreshingly merit based. To ascend its ranks asari must prove themselves both in battle and in testing. Asari do not often participate in cross-species training, with the exception of asari commandos, who do so to further their knowledge of enemies they might face. Asari have no war-fighting colleges or N7 academies – the closest thing they have is the Lodges of the Hunt, and those are more akin to finishing schools for assassins than professional development centers.

Likewise, the asari have military structures no one else has, such as the incorporation of siari into the military training routine, and the lack of any form of logistics, which are instead bidded out to asari private corporations.

Asari Military Units

Independent Militia: Clanless militia raised directly by the Republic, these are usually young maidens with little experience. Given light armor and assault rifles, they are where most asari begin their military career. As they are sponsored directly by the Republic, they are not responsible for paying for their gear, and most of these militias have identical equipment. Most serve for ten to twenty years in a militia, upon which they either take up a new task, or move further into the militia. They lack support units and equipment, but most can use their biotics fairly well, and their rapid-fire fragmentation assault rifles are good at both medium and long range. On occasion, House or Clan forces will join independent militia for training.

Clan, City State, or House Organized Militia (Spear of City): City-states, colonies, Houses, and the Clans each have the right to raise up to three full battalions of troops for defense. Better equipped than the independents, at least some of these militia have already served their full term in the independent militia and have good experience. Some of the militia are mechanized, using light hover-tank troop transports or gunships to move from place to place. As with the independents, most militias require a ten to twenty year commitment. They have their own leaders, either commandos or in the case of a House unit, a Royal Paladin.

Elite Guard : Lifer asari military vets, these are the hardened soldiers of the city states or Houses. Often backed with armor elements, this force includes both war matriarchs and asari commandos. Flexible and using state of the art equipment of either asari or alien make, the Elite Guards often are the main battle units of any large asari military deployment.

Republican Guard Unit : comprised of Republican Guards, this unit answers only to the Republic, and is often dispatched to support other forces. This is the closest thing the asari have to a regular infantry military, and it shows in their higher level of organization and discipline than the often disorganized packs of huntresses seen in the militia.

Fist of Athame: Clan armed forces, roughly the equivalent of the Elite guard of a House, but lead by War Priestesses of Athame, these traditionalist forces use only asari weapons and armor, and rely more on biotics than technology.

Royal Hunting Party : Occasionally, a band of Royal Paladins from one or several Houses will band together with battle matriarchs, commandos, in some cases Specters or even alien assassins, and follow a Justicar into battle to deal with a criminal or other threat to the Asari Republic. This sort of event hasn't happened in over three centuries, the last occurrence to hunt down a krogan warlord who'd killed a matriarch. The Hunt is considered sacred, a revenge killing for an affront to the race, and aliens invited along are given the highest honor the asari can give another being.

Asari Infantry Types

A note about the soldiers: regardless of rank or what kind of soldier they are, all asari are equipped with top of the line equipment, either of asari make or the best money can buy. Even the greenest asari maiden fresh from the Clans will be sporting Mark X armor and brand new weapons. The asari have no real concept of 'garrison units' or sacrificial forces, and their economy allows them to outfit each and every soldier with the best gear and equipment.

Additionally, remember: even the militia units have years of training. A 'green' asari militia unit would not match up unfavorably to a mainline A-level infantry unit of the line in the SA military. Even fresh soldiers have limited biotics and five to ten years of training behind them. Despite my disdain for their culture, do not underestimate the asari or think them weak. They are the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy bar none.

Finally, asari units do not specialize in rates like humans or turians. Commandos are cross-trained in a bewildering litany of tasks, but as a rule asari don't have dedicated support soldiers other than Lifeshapers. Logistical and organizational aspects are outsourced to asari companies, and technical and repair services also outsourced. Sailors do have functional rates, such as navigation and gunnery, but asari sailors are expected to cross-train so heavily that the loss of anyone on the ship can be filled in by another asari seamlessly.

Militia Soldier: Militia are maidens with limited battle experience, acting mostly as garrison units, guards, and the front rank of assault forces. Usually they wear light, form-fitting armor, carry the asari frag rifle, and perhaps a handful of grenades. Quick and agile, they use barriers and can throw basic biotic attacks.

Militia Huntress: a more senior militia member, huntresses have at least 20 years experience, and have been trained in stealth, stalking, tracking, and info-war techniques. Using the old asari hunting methods, these warriors are equipped with sniper rifles, sub-machine guns, and asari close-quarters hunting blades charged with biotic energy. They wear packs with compressed rations and water, and can forage and operate far from lines for long periods of time.

Lifeshaper: asari medic, usually with some military training, but mostly deployed to mitigate casualties. These medics are deployed with heavy armor and actual shields, eschewing biotics, and packs of medical supplies and medigel. Armed with the heavy blast pistol, they rarely engage in fights except when forced or covering the evacuation of the wounded or civilians. Lifeshapers are all very brave, but are not real combatants.

Republican Guard: Professional trained infantry, the Guard is the rough asari equivalent to Salarian Shieldbreakers or human A-rate marines, long-term lifer military soldiers. The Guard is small, barely number a half million asari, but is heavily trained. Each Guard wears light powered armor, with built in weapons systems including a neural whip and dual shield generators, and carries a scaled up version of the Acolyte blast pistol called the Spear of Athame. Fully automatic and equipped with an under-barrel frag grenade launcher, this weapon is vicious against enemies in ranks or other tightly packed locations. Guard members practice support biotics, cross train with Lifeshapers to learn first aid, and generally act as a thin line of stiffened defenders around locations the asari prize above all others – the Citadel, the Destiny Ascension, certain temples, factories, etc.

Commando: asari in the Republican Guard, or more rarely, clan Elite Guards, who catch the eye of their instructors are tapped to go to one of the many "lodges of the hunt" on Thessia, who train the asari special forces known as commandos. Most are matrons, with over two centuries of combat experience, and almost all of them are master biotics. Equipped with powerful sniper rifles, rapid fire light machine guns, and even augmented-strength bio-modification of their muscles, these are some of the finest light infantry in the galaxy. They are specialists at sabotage, flanking, biotic defense, and above all else intimidation. Most of them are religious devotees, spouting siari garbage even in combat, and believe they sacrifice half their life so that the asari can grow stronger. Commandos have no set load-out, armor, or weapon – each is granted a gift of funds when they complete their training to equip themselves. Most answer to the Clans or the Thirty, but some city states and even corporations have sponsored commandos.

War Priestess : religious fanatics who worship Athame, these are even more deadly (and crazy) than asari commando forces. They wear no armor, only robes (or in some cases, go stark naked) and powerful barrier fields, and wield no weapons other than a ritual curved sword charged with biotic energy and a powerful set of biotic attacks they teach to no one else. Yet almost no one has ever even survived an encounter with them, much less triumphed. Their biotic strength is anomalous, enhanced with a large, overlapping gauntlet and pauldron that appears to be a scaled up, powerful bio-amplifier. The swords, charged with shifting warp fields, can cut through the armor on a Mako like butter, and their lack of armor means they are incredibly agile in combat, often using mass effect fields to render themselves nearly weightless as they flip and dance through combat, singing praises to Athame and killing everything in their path. Other asari hold them in a mix of awe and dread, and they are rarely deployed.

Battle Matriarch: Asari commandos usually retire upon reaching 600 or so, settling down finally to start the families they delayed in service to the race. But on occasion, after raising their children, these women put on their leathers again, as leaders of the commando forces. Battle matriarchs are as to asari commandos as the commandos are to regular asari. With biotics that can crush a gunship in flight, or knock aside a main battle tank with a throw, each one is a living siege engine. Too old for the gyrations of their younger days, these matriarchs wear heavy armor, and wield heavy weapons to match, using them to break shielding and then letting fly with powerful biotics. As befits their age and power, most asari forces are commanded by these asari.

Justicars: the supreme ground combatant of the asari, Justicars are feared for more than their ability to dispense justice. Only those asari who display the most titanic of biotic strength are accepted, and then they are often doused in Thessia waters for months on end to augment their power. Justicars wear no armor, often instead wearing flimsy, sexualized jumpsuits and trusting in their barriers for defense, and using a horrific combat shotgun called the Disciple. The shotgun fires clouds of microscale flechetting submuntions, which break into armor piercing needles that explode, tearing open armor, creating craterous wounds that burn and boil. The Justicars are all master biotics, using some biotic abilities that we can't even really classify, such an ability to rip the life from foes and leave their twitching corpses without a mark on them or their armor, right through their shields. Justicars do not retreat, do not falter, and are impossible to intimidate. They can shrug off wounds that would kill a krogan in their single-minded determination to complete whatever task they have set themselves.

Royal Paladin: when the Thirty go to war (which is extremely rare), they kit themselves out in war-gear and panoply that would shame the House of Windsor. The Thirty usually have at least some of their house given over to the role of paladin, a professional warrior and champion of the House who fights for the glory of the House and leads any House forces in combat. Equipped with highly decorated powered armor suits standing seven to eight feet tall, wielding biotically charged monomolecular blades and surrounded by hovering combat drones, each Paladin is a nightmare on the battlefield. A natural general and leader, they are inspiration for other asari forces, capable of defeating dozens of foes with flashy biotics and sweeps of those great blades. When they use ranged weapons, most rely on Adept rail cannons mounted to their oversized battle armor. Out of their powered armor, they wear top of the line kinetic barriers and ritualized light armor decorated in ivory, blue and gold. It sounds ridiculous, but watching these asari in combat is chilling, and it's easy to understand why the Thirty embrace this sort of drama for their warriors.

A final note of caution: human military forces are built around an attrition-specialist-leader pyramid, where he rank and file protect those who are more equipped to deal with threats, and the leaders guide events but are not usually combatants themselves. Our officers are trained in academies, picked from a social elite, trained for leadership and inspiration, tactics and only then military skill.

Asari value all of their troops. While their echelon formation, on the surface, seems to be willing to sacrifice lesser troops, the middle and last ranks are constantly providing biotic barrier protection to these lesser troops, significantly lowering any casualties. But more than that, asari have no concept of officers as we do. The only way an asari goes through the ranks is by service. An asari Battle Matriarch spent at least 50 and probably more years in the militia, before serving in the Guard, and then becoming a commando, and finally returning to their ranks. As a result, the higher ranking an asari is, the more dangerous they are.

Asari Armor and Support Assets

The asari have a fascination with hover vehicles, not surprisingly since such vehicles handle well on land or sea, and much of Thessia is ocean. Asari armor has never had a severe test, however, with most of its classes only seeing limited action in the war against the Krogan, and much of it's usefulness is theoretical.

Asari have four main battle vehicles:

The Moonrise light scout craft is a ground hovercraft, with light armor and dual mass accelerator cannons, holding about five combatants, and is often used in scouting. Moonrise class scouts have been updated for the past thousand years and haven't changed much except to incorporate modern shielding.

Sunrise light battle tanks are high speed flanking units, designed to goat and break infantry, equipped with plasma flamethrowers and microwave emitter weapons, as well as a light cannon. These strangely vicious machines were used to great effect in the war against the Rachni, and were hated by the Krogan as well, making them a primary target of missile and rocket fire. To counter this, auto-targeting warp flak generators were installed with VI fire-control systems to track incoming missiles.

Storm Main Battle Tanks are huge, forty foot long behemoths equipped with triple mass effect cannons and a wide array of anti-personnel weapons and a small GTS missile battery. They were built in the years after the discovery of the turians, when there was tension about the Hierarchy joining the Citadel races or declaring war, and have been updated repeatedly since then. They serve as the anchors of the echelon formation back ranks, combining the functions of main battle tank and artillery. Slow and lumbering unlike other asari hover units, their armor is thicker than some starships.

Windsong gunships are similar to the A-61 aerospace superiority gunship used by the Systems Alliance, with multiple rocket pods, integral barriers, and a dual-phase rapid firing mass accelerator in the nose. Less well armored but more maneuverable, these units have SSTO capability and can fight in atmosphere, low orbit, or deep space with no issues. They are the only real air units the asari field, as asari do not use fighters of any kind.

Asari troop transports are tracked, heavily armored and fitted with ECCM and jamming technology to keep their contents safe from missile attack.

Asari Ship Classes

The asari mindset to naval forces is different than most navies. Asari ships are designed to work in tandem with each other, covering blind spots and enhancing performance based on overlapping fields of fire, rapid VI coordination between ships, and communal comms relays. Unlike human ships (designed to draw a force into dreadnaught range and to flank them with fighter assaults) the asari navy is strangely capable in direct throw-downs, shrugging off shots with arrogant grace and evading heavier fire to deliver surgical, almost elegant blows.

Asari seem to prefer larger number of frigates and cruisers, with fewer dreadnaughts. They have never maximized their allotment of dreadnaughts under the Treaty of Farixen, but have vastly larger numbers of cruisers than other races, even the turians. The overall turian navy is larger, but only by a few dozen vessels – and all of the asari ships have Silaris Armor.

Frigate: The asari frigate is a deceptively fragile looking thing, a hoop with four small wings off coming off of it. Equipped with heavy mass accelerators at each wingtip, the ship can easily blow a SA destroyer in half with four direct hits. They boast a collimated GARDIAN array of pulse emitted blue-green lasers, which are more focused in atmospheres than standard red-orange lasers, and can tear apart fighters in a spray of burst fire. Frigates are used as scout ships, flankers, and to drive into enemy lines clearing the way for heavier ships. They are named after fish on Thessia.

Raider: A cross between a destroyer and a landing assault craft, the raider serves as the delivery vessel for asari commandos and other special forces. Raiders are more heavily armed than frigates, but are primarily designed to batter through station defenses or landing zones and disgorge asari commandos to wreak havoc. Raiders have superior GARDIAN defenses, but can be overwhelmed by missile fire. They are named after famous hunters and warriors throughout history.

Light Cruiser: The four cruiser variants are all built off of the same hull, but each is equipped in a unique manner and given very different roles. The light cruiser is a scouting cruiser and a leader of frigates into battle, using heavier weapons to pick off challenges from enemy cruisers. Equipped with top of the line sensors and optics, light cruisers most often operate on the asari frontier, or act as first-alert responders for remote colonies. They are typically named after stellar events.

Storm Cruiser: The storm cruiser is equipped with very heavy shielding, redundant armor, shock absorbing struts, and a host of other damage mitigation features. It is designed to deliberately close in and take hits for other vessels, spraying GARDIAN fire to shoot down missiles and jam incoming weapons. Equipped with powerful ECM and ECCM suites and heavy missile batteries, it gets up into enemy lines, fouling maneuver warfare attempts and generally acting like an ass. Assaulting these ships is pointless, as when they go into battle they discharge atmosphere to suppress fire and the whole crew is in battle armor. I've seen footage of storm cruisers taking direct hits from krogan dreadnaughts and closing in, the crew singing and laughing. It is no surprise that these ships are mostly crewed and lead by religious fanatics of siari, or worse, priestesses of Athame. They are named after asari priestesses of fame.

Battle Cruiser: The polar opposite of the thuggish storm cruiser, the battle cruiser is a command and control ship, coordinating the actions of other vessels and the fleet as a whole, packed with communications equipment and repair labs. Boasting long range weapons and precision targeting, it tends to act like a sniper, hanging back and making sure the asari formations do not get flanked. These are capable warships on their own, however, and when required they are capable of getting into the line of fire – but they prefer not to. They are named after philosophical matriarchs.

Torpedo Cruiser: The volus love of missile and torpedo technology (taken to utterly preposterous levels with their dreadnaughts, which has more missiles than fucking Arcturus station) has influenced many other races to rethink how they approach missile weapons. The volus defense of Irune in the Krogan war, where lightly armed volus merchant ships with strapped on missile pods blew apart an entire krogan war fleet, was an eye opening experience for the asari, who had written off the volus as money-obsessed wretches. The torpedo cruiser is the final result of this reassessment, built in the past forty years and viciously effective against pirates who can't afford the expensive ECCM gear needed to stop masses of disruptor torpedoes. The cruiser has a lighter weapons load otherwise, and once it has disgorged its packs of missiles and torpedoes is likely to withdraw, but it can crush a dozen ships with easy if it can connect with it's shots, and the asari like jumping them into a battle about midway, swamping unsuspecting foes with a sudden wave of missiles that are too close to evade. Amusingly, the asari name these vessels after the the family of Matriarch Semanya, who spent millions of credits to ensure she could be the first asari with volus-asari offspring. (Needless to say, volus lovers are not highly sought after by asari.)

Dreadnaught: The asari dreadnaughts are massive, equipped with some of the biggest guns and best shielding in the galaxy. Larger than human dreadnaughts, they have a crew of a thousand, and said crews tend to form 'military clans', fiercely devoted to their ships. The Thirty sponsor most dreadnaughts, but the Clans as a whole sponsored two, and Illum five. Dreadnaughts, unlike most races ships, do not act as the center of the fleet but are deployed forward, aggressively, and then fire when flanking disruptions end up turning the line of battle to one side or the other. Unlike the other asari vessels, which are graceful enough and have powerful enough mass effect cores to operate in atmosphere, the massive dreadnaughts can't even enter low orbit. Serviced only in space, dreadnaughts tend to spawn their own cultures and quirks, and over the centuries, almost all have been customized in one way or the other. Dreadnaughts are named after concepts found in siari.

Destiny Ascension: The single most powerful ship in Citadel space, the DA was the joint effort of the Salarian Union and the Asari Republic to build a flagship for the Citadel fleet. The salarians wanted no part of having the ship as part of the salarian fleet (to them, prestige is like painting a big target on your forehead) but were happy to show off their technological prowess to their new allies. As a result, the DA is, even after hundreds of years, probably the most advanced ship in space. Boasting a main spinal weapon nine times the size of the largest SA dreadnaught guns, three synced mass effect cores, and three feet of Silaris armor under kinetic barriers adapted from city shielding units on Sur'Kesh, the Destiny Ascension is a dreadnaught killer. Every war-game scenario run shows that it requires between six and nine dreadnaughts to inflict significant damage on this monster, and that there is only a 35% chance that such an action would end with victory for the attacker. The DA is crewed by only the finest asari specialists, and commanded solely by members of the Thirty. The name is the highest study of siari, where destiny ascends to reveal fate or some other such gibberish.

Asari Military Equipment

Asari weapons tend towards the repeated utilization of a few common themes. Asari never applied the mass accelerator to personal weapons in the same way most races have, instead focusing on the capability of the mass effect field to hurl plasma or micro-explosives. The asari also never forgot their roots as nomadic hunters, and their natural biotics means that blades and spears (usually poisoned) are very common.

The natural asari flexibility and agility means that most younger asari dislike heavy armor, and the strain of lugging around lots of gear on the body means they rarely use heavy weapons either. That isn't to say you can't find asari with huge sniper rifles or giant shotguns – but most prefer lighter, more subtle weapons, and the use of biotics to back them up.

All asari weapons take advantage of the asari's natural mass effect field to reduce kickback. This has the side effect of tiring the asari a bit faster than normal, but being able to fire light machine guns with no recoil can't be discounted.

Asari weapons are manufactured by two companies : the Serrice Council (based in the capital, a Clan Organization) and the Armali Council (based in Armali, dominated by two Guardian Houses, T'Soni and Devir). Serrice provides weapons and gear mostly to the Clans and clanless, while Armali focuses more in supplying wealthy off-world asari and has exclusive contracts with the Thirty.

Asari units also use weapons from Armax Arsenal, and a handful of sniper rifles from Haliat Armory. However, since these weapons can't take advantage of the kickback reduction, most asari prefer to use traditional asari weapons.

Both asari warp swords and Disciple shotguns are handcrafted by the Steelshape Clans. While they have updated many of the methods used to produce the Disciple, a warp sword requires over fifty years of crafting to produce, and each one costs millions of credits.

Asari weapons include:

Devotee: this asari submachine gun fires explosive submuntions at a blistering rate. While each impact is minor, it can stagger and knock down foes reliably, and is very good at overloading and cracking shields, allowing biotics to take effect.

Initiate: the asari sniper rifle, this is an elegant vicious weapon. Firing a hollow slug in a double-action, the rifle is lightweight and easy to carry. The slug explodes on impact, scattering corrosive particles and polarized magnetic dust, which disrupts mass effect fields and biotics for a few moments. Against shielded or armored foes, this is dangerous enough, but against other biotics relying on barriers for protection, it's lethal – the blast shatters the barrier and sprays corrosives into the target's face, leaving them wide open for a second shot or biotic assault.

Spear of Athame: a savage assault rifle, this is a larger version of the Acolyte, coupled with a grenade launcher under the barrel. It fires 'warp bombs', impact triggered mass effect canisters that when detonated created uncontrolled and out of sync warp fields. These have the effect of breaking molecular bonds on what ever they hit, generating a blast of plasma that explodes outwards. This weapon has an element of EMP, devastating to shields and electronics, and can stagger foes with the blast.

Disciple: the Justicar shotgun, now beginning to see use among commandos after centuries of wrangling. Each one is hand-crafted by Clan artisans, custom fitted to it's owner. It's mass generator fires clouds of explosive micro-munitions, that break into detonating needles. Each blast thus blows a large chunk out of whatever it hits, and continues to burn with minor plasma fires for several minutes afterward. The multiple explosions ensure it almost always knocks down what it hits. Even a krogan hit by this weapon would stagger to their knees, and Justicars use this moment of weakness to execute their targets. I would strongly advice using long-range sniper weapons against anyone equipped with this shotgun – we simply do not have any armor strong enough to prevent our forces from being pulped by it.

Adept: the asari version of heavy weapons, the Adept is a rail-cannon, using both mag-chains and mass accelerators to hurl a slug of metal at a significant fraction of light. Nothing less than a shrunk down version of a dreadnaught main gun, the Adept creates a shocking explosion of blue-shifted light and a terrifyingly loud sonic boom when it fires, and only powerful biotic stabilizers and powered armor allow it to be fired without sending the wielder flying. The Royal Paladins wear these weapons on their power-armored battle suits, allowing them to bring down light fighters and crush enemy armor like tin cans. Nothing, I repeat, nothing this side of a light cruiser is going to repel a half-kilo slug going at .05 of light-speed, not a gunship, not a building, not even a damned tank. Thankfully, the weapon has only a few dozen shots, and requires a charge time between blasts.

Asari warp swords: The first time we saw these, we thought someone was playing a joke on us. The asari version of a goddamned lightsaber, indeed. These weapons are composed of phase-compressed, highly carbonized plasma-forged steel, coated in a magnetically charged coating of transparent aluminum crystal, and ground down to an monomolecular edge. That alone would be bad enough, as the swords are unbreakable without applying tons of force and can cut through most materials with a single swipe. But the reason for their unnatural toughness is that the asari have filled the inside of each blade with finely dispersed eezo, allowing them to channel biotic warp fields through the blade, engulfing the sword in warp energies. I can't overestimate how lethal this kind of weaponry is. I know we've played around with monomolecular weapons, but these swords cut a krogan clean in half with a single blow. The good news is that they are rare, ruinously expensive, and require decades of training to use one. An inexperienced user will melt the blade, or worse, over charge it and make it explode into a cloud of burning, warp charged, mono-edged fragments. The last time that happened it killed six hundred asari.

Asari armor tends to be light, non-ferrous (magnetism interferes with their natural biotics) and with a free range of motion. It also tends to emphasize their form, with leather analogues hugging the chest and rear. Asari rarely wear heavier armor, and when they do it is very heavy indeed, often powered by myomer bundles to augment their strength. On the whole, however, since most asari prefer to rely on their natural biotics for defense, armor is seen as as matter more of style than protection.

There are no longer any real asari armor makers, as once they began trading with salarians, the salarian craze with impenetrable, flexible armor showed up asari work as inferior. As such, most of the armor worn by asari these days is actually produced by Aegohr Manufactory, the premier salarian armor and weapons corporation who also supplies the STG. However, the Asari Republic recently signed contracts with Jormangund Technologies of Earth to provide modified Crisis and Hazard suits for asari militia and the Guard.

The only 'native' asari armor made are the suits of of the Royal Paladins. These battlesuits are handcrafted by the Steelshape Clans, and customized for each generation who wears them. The suits are staggeringly expensive, crafted in the same method as Silaris Armor and warp swords, and even House T'Armal, worth tens of billions of credits, can only afford about five of them, with most Houses having only one.
Chapter 11: Chapter 11 - Asari Figures of Note

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

Thankfully, my assignment in asari space is at an end, as we have completed all the tasks assigned. The compilation of important figures required a great deal of interactions – I'm not sure that our cover story fooled some of the matriarchs we came in contact with, but the brilliant linguistic ability of Agent Lawson came in great use in helping us decipher the asari news stories and tabloids. (I remain vastly amused at the idea that the Terran Enquirer and the Sun are both widely read in asari space. It almost humanizes the asari at times, until you take a closer look at the tramps.)

Also, the assistance of Matriarch Trellani was invaluable and far-reaching. Her disdain for her own kind nearly matches my own, and interviewing her lead to some concepts and points I think will follow this section. Trellani pointed out that the greater the power an asari wields the less she is inclined to use it, and that most become paralyzed by the ever-shifting flows of intrigue and influence in asari culture.

Our investigations touched on a couple of very troubling figures, including one of the most terrifying aliens I've ever met or hope to meet, and I've been mugged by krogan.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: It is not in my mind to ask questions that cannot be answered. That is the soul standing upon the crossroad of vacillation. You search for wisdom, but achieve only a stasis of will.

Notable Asari :

The asari are strangely picky about their mode of address. A maiden is usually referred to only by her first name, clan or family references are rare. Clanless family names are usually the first name of the bloodline they come from, while Clans have no last name, only referring to their Clan. Matriarchs are almost always referred to as Matriarch first name, and to skip the Matriarch is a severe faux pas unless you are friends.

The Thirty are even more haughty. The rough translation of the prefix of asari members of the Thirty is "Her Grace", and this is a formal title used only in announcements. A reference to their title – Queen or Princess – is only required in formal introductions. Even so, it's best to be very polite around the Thirty. Most are insufferable.

Her Grace, High Matriarch and Queen Thana T'Armal : without a doubt the single most powerful being in the galaxy, Thana T'Armal rules House T'Armal and most of Thessia. Her personal fortune, not even counting the assets of her House, is in the low tens of billions, and her personal fleet is larger than a SA squadron. Thana is a regal, ancient figure, over 1300 years old now, but showing no signs of age or slowing down. Boasting nine children and over twenty grandchildren, she is the closest thing to a ruler the asari species has. Unlike most asari, she is not arrogant, dismissive, or absorbed in social maneuvering. These are beneath her. A former lunar high priestess of Athame as well as an asari commando in her youth, Thana now spends most of her time administering her business holdings and training her successors.

The queen plays politics only on the highest level, with the Citadel Council or directly with the rulers of other races. She is an avid patron of the arts, sponsoring thousands of artists, musicians, poets, and other creatives from her own pocket, as well as amassing a private museum of cultural artifacts conservatively valued at six billion credits. She travels under extremely heavy guard and her bodyguard consists of two Royal Paladins, a Justicar who has sworn a life long oath of obedience, and two cybernetically augmented krogan she raised from birth.

It is extremely difficult to determine the motivations and goals of such a creature. She seems to honestly believe asari should dominate, but not out of racial pride but mere understanding that the asari military, economy, and population are supreme in Council Space. Our best political projections suggest she's waiting for humanity to make a move before deciding whether to back us or backstab us.

Her Grace, High Matriarch Uressa T'Shora : There is a belief that Uressa is the most beautiful asari who has ever lived, and it is hard to debate this. Even Agent Galis, who hates asari more than anyone I know, was struck stuttering and wide-eyed upon seeing her in person. Taller than every other asari I have met, she is blindingly beautiful, voluptuous, and graceful. Her voice is sweet and gentle, calming, almost hypnotic, and she seems capable of putting even the most aggressive at ease. She is a brilliant musician, has written a dozen books of poetry, and painted Misery In Joy, a painting that has reduced krogan to tears. Educated, polite, and interested in alien cultures, she dresses demurely and eschews the pomp and regalia most of the Thirty embraces.

By all indications, nearly all asari revere her, calling her Athame returned, a title she embarassedly denies with great force. Uressa T'Shora focuses her efforts on expanding medical care and outreach to the Clanless, building schools, touring disaster sites, and funding charity efforts, while the rest of her House is obsessed with making money and ever more debauched parties. Uressa was the deciding vote on the Council of Matriarchs to dispatch the Asari Fleet to stop the First Contact War, and was the only house Leader to ever tour Earth. She does not seem very asari like to me, to be honest.

Unlike the Queen of the T'Armal, Uressa's only goals are aiding others, particularly the helpless. She was horrified to see the homeless of Earth's arcologies, and has dropped a good billion in credits on building shelters and even arcology expansions in New York and Bangalore, donating the money and offering asari Clan assistance where plausible. She is a quietly firm believer in siari, but feels it only should apply to the asari people, and that each race must find it's own path to unity, not merely hobble themselves by mimicking the asari.

Despite myself, I can't help but admire her. Trellani implies Uressa is uncommon among asari, a truly noble soul, and she may be right. She is the only figure among the Thirty that seems to be free of the corrupted nature of asari, as she quietly bonded with her childhood sweetheart and does not play the usual sexualized games of her species. I am not sure what to make of her, but despite my admiration, something feels off. She's too perfect, too … everything. I would recommend closer investigation.

Her Grace, Princess Shaltha T'Vaan : House T'Vaan is still reeling from the death of Matriarch Ynnal some six months ago, and they have not confirmed Princess Shaltha as High Matriarch, but it is only a matter of time. Shaltha is a quintessential asari, obsessed with social status, arrogant, haughty, and wasting her time and energy more on maneuvering House T'Vaan in murky political games than anything else. A narrow-faced asari of rather plain looks, she was a commando in her youth and a friend of Jona Sederis from childhood. A vicious shrew of an asari, the deaths of two of her cousins in strange accidents has many wondering if she is behind their deaths to cement her rule.

Shaltha is a cool political player and is rapidly maneuvering through companies on Illum to boost her wealth and portfolio. She is just as rampantly sexualized as most asari, with a bewildering menagerie of lovers that changes weekly and includes the most fucked up matches I've seen, including a pair of hanar twins, (don't ask) , krogan (please don't ask), and even elcor (really, don't ask). She's a thrill seeker, often participating in aircar races and biotic fighting exhibitions. Hardly a dignified figure, she has no real goals that can be perceived. Her only redeeming feature is her curious rejection of siari and the worship of Athame – amusingly, she's taken up an obscure turian ancestral honor religion, one that she thinks can link her with the 'spirit of Athame'.

Clan Matriarch Thessial, Clan Steelshape : Thessial is a salarian stuck inside an asari body, it seems. Rambling, constantly inventing and researching, disorganized and disheveled, Thessial doubles as the asari ambassador to Sur'Kesh and is a great favorite among the salarians. Her mind is brilliant, with a staggering thirty four hundred patents to her name, among them vectored mass effect gunships and the humble and ubiquitous datapad. Her most famous invention however, the omni-tool, cements her as a genius among geniuses. Thessial technically leads Clan Steelshape, but in practice, her subordinates do most of the organizing. Thessial's only weakness is her hunger for reckless, drug-crazed orgies with maidens or (more recently) human women, these binges seemingly acting to reset her mind and drive her onto new inventions. Over nine hundred years old now, she is one of the very rare asari to continue to have children throughout her life – she has 'fathered' over sixty children and given birth to twenty eight more, and is probably the only asari to have children by a salarian dalatrass. Her rail-thin, slim figure is hardly beautiful but her intensity and personality are overwhelming.

Thessial is also curious in that she practices miari, a mix of siari, aspects of Zen Buddism, salarian circle worship and nature worship. Thessial has, over the past decade, become increasingly focused on humanity, and most of her recent investments have been in human corporations. She has a minority stake in the Sirta Foundation, and has been working with variants of medigel that will incorporate asari regenerative functions to attempt to make the gel capable of healing almost any injury.

Thessial is the devoted friend of more than one salarian dalatrass, keeps an estate on Sur'Kesh itself, and is the unofficial pinup girl of the STG, apparently. More than one observer has noted the utter and complete failure of many industrial espionage attempts against Clan Steelshape can be traced back to affectionate STG interference. A common joke is that if she ever decided to run for High Dalatrass of the Salarian Union she'd probably win by a landslide.

Matriarch Lidanya T'Armal : Commanding officer of the Destiny Ascension, Lidanya began life as a mere clanless orphan, making a hand to mouth existence selling herself to turians visiting Thessia. She managed to convince one such turian to train her how to fight and learned some turian biotics, before enlisting in the salarian mercenary band Forethought to pick up info-war tactics. By the time she was 200, she was a veteran mercenary, and returned home to join the asari military. Legendary for clearing her status to master in one day, and then immediately applying to the Republican Guard, she made her name in the so-called "Second Krogan Rebellions", when krogan mercenaries attempted to take the asari colony of Urana. She defeated a krogan warlord in biotic hand-to-hand combat, before killing the brute with his own hammer. She left the military at around 400, appealing to join Clan Steelshape and learn to be a master-crafter, spending a century learning to build and craft the famed asari warp swords.

Lidanya had a plan, carefully using her great beauty, skills, and wide range of allies to rise upwards in society. By the time she was 600, she'd had children with three lesser House members in Family T'Armala, who sponsored her into the Family. She then gifted then Princess Thana T'Armal with a magnificent warp sword, six feet long but with mass effect lighteners built into the hilt, and a special diamond-matrix alloy that allowed the destructive force of a singularity to be channeled through the blade. Called Tsunami, the blade was probably worth twenty million credits, and was given to the Princess just before her ascension to High Matriarch.

Lidanya was adopted into House T'Armal and continued to rise, spending a century as an asari commando and even several decades back in the asari military as House Advisor for their dreadnaught captains. When the commander of the Destiny Ascension died of infections related to off-duty injuries, the struggle for the prestigious position was fierce, but Lidanya had the backing not only of House T'Armal, but Clan Steelshape, several military units, and a host of other influential matriarchs.

Lidanya is considered 'proof' of the asari democracy and that it's social system is truly fluid. Now nearly eleven hundred years old, Lidanya has worked hard to master naval combat tactics and is considered a masterful admiral and administrator. Working closely with the Citadel Council, there are rumors she has her eye on moving into the position of asari ambassador one day. Of course, there are also rumors that if Princess Nathesia doesn't meet the critical eye of Queen Thana, it might be that Lidanya would be the next High Matriarch.

Citadel Councilor Tevos T'Sael: a slimy woman, Tevos is the asari Citadel Council member, and the pivotal swing vote between the salarians and the turians. Calm and usually gentle in speech and manner, she strives to present an image of grace and wisdom, but she is rather average looking and is not particularly eloquent. Tevos's greatest strength is the backing of her network of friends and lovers, boasting contacts among literally every house of the Thirty and many Clan contacts as well as alien lovers. She seemingly sees nothing wrong with conducting diplomacy on her back, and rarely offers initiatives to the Council, instead seeking to twist whatever proposals arise to the asari advantage.

We have no real insights as to her goals (aside from banging anything that moves), but rumor states she is not really the one in charge, and that Irrissa Te'Shora calls the shots. This would not be that surprising, as T'Sael is a small Guardian House whose fortunes have waned in the past few centuries, and they have not really gained any advantage from having Tevos as Councilor. It's quite possible that Tevos is nothing more than the grasping hedonist she seems, and in analysis of previous Councilors, it's more than likely that this is deliberate and that EVERY Councilor is actually the cats paw of the associated ambassador.

Rumors link her to Aria T'Loak, but , then again, they also link her to Elvis, Sharblu and Aish Ashland, so go figure.

Asari Ambassador Irrissa Te'Shora: The more public face of the asari government, Irrissa is a frequent verbal sparring partner with Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani of Westerlund News, and is a common guest on her news segments. She is what passes for a human specialist among the asari, and is surprisingly blunt in her views. She sees humans as needing guidance and protection, and sees the asari as the natural and correct providers of such. For all her blinding arrogance, however, I will grudgingly admit that she seems to actually respect human culture, and has worked to introduce aspects of it to asari worlds to stir up critical thinking and reflection. Her viewpoint on Cerberus is equally shocking, as she is the only asari to publicly admit, in her own words, "The only difference humans and aliens is the humans are honest enough to put their black-ops groups in the public eye." Even so, she is hardly an ally and remains convinced of asari superiority.

Irrissa is a deft political operator, eschewing the normal asari methods of using sex to get her way in favor of old fashioned glad-handling and an amusing skill at charming children of all races. She is an amateur astronomer and often pushes projects to the Skywatch Clans, who in turn are useful in providing her with investment insights into new technologies.

Rumor has it she is romantically involved with Khalisah al-Jilani , which would be .. curious , given al-Jiliani's on-air attitude towards her.

Matriarch Serisa T'Suon : This ancient hag is the master of the Lodges of Hunt on Thessia, a group of informal training and conditioning groups that produce the feared asari commandos. One of the oldest asari known to history, currently over fifteen hundred years old, Serisa is still active and vital, often training commandos herself. Ancient enough to remember the times BEFORE the Krogan wars, she is bitterly conservative and hates modern asari culture. We're not even sure if this creature is aware humans exist yet, as she has not left the vast hunting preserves on Thessia in over six centuries. By all accounts, the Matriarch is more focused on simply ensuring the continuance of the commando as the premier aspect of asari military culture than any political agenda, and doesn't even bother to engage in sexual contact any longer. Pictures of her show an average looking asari woman, with thin angry features and facial markings so thick they cover her entire face, one for each enemy she's killed. Serisa is the wielder, in ritual occurrences that happen once a century, of the Sword and Shield of Athame, ancient artifacts supposedly granting mystical powers to their wielders. We managed to get our hands on some photos of these artifacts in the last Showing, and we don't recognize the metal used for the objects, but one thing is very clear – that sword wasn't designed for an asari hand.

Justicar Mistress Layana : the head of the Justicar Order, this icy woman is chilling to behold. Scarred by plasma fires so intense even asari regeneration didn't heal it, her left eye is gone, replaced with an iron patch screwed directly into her skull. Layana has killed well over ten thousand criminals and monsters in her life, including one of her own children, at least a dozen rogue ardat-yakshi, a yahg, and not one but two wild thresher maws. On foot.

Over twelve hundred, she is emotionless and unyielding, having lost two bondmates to batarian slavers before joining the order. On her word, no batarian is allowed with her sight or she will kill them, and she has warned that if the Batarian Hegemony raids another asari world she will kill their entire leadership. The fact that there haven't been any known raids on asari worlds in the past sixty years, when she uttered that threat, should remind everyone that even the arrogant batarians fear this woman. The asari have built her into a myth, but there is ancient combat footage of her fighting pirates on Kantah who ambushed her three hundred years ago, and it is terrifying to watch – she crushed a gunship out of the sky with her biotics while fending off a dozen attackers with insulting ease, armed only with a single pistol and dressed in a bathrobe. There is a pirate bounty on her head offered by the Blood Pack of a hundred million credits that, to the best of our knowledge, not a single fool has even TRIED to collect.

If this hatchet-faced asari has a 'plan' or a 'goal', it probably involves smashing something or someone to paste. Layana has no investments and does not participate in asari culture to any real degree. Her only real interaction with others is an on again, off again relationship of some kind with the ancient krogan warlord, Ganar Okeer. It is not romantic or sexual, the two appear to have a highly ritualized unarmed combat once a century. The significance and meaning of this is currently unknown, but given Okeer's extremely long and sinister history, it's probably nothing good.

"Midnight's Kiss" : The name refers to a certain asari sex act, which I have no intention of detailing. The title refers to a brilliant asari thief and assassin, believed to be an ardat-yakshi who has killed six Justicars and killed a pair of Spectres some five hundred years ago. Our intelligence on the ardat-yakshi is sketchy – only a tiny handful are known to exist, and most of them bury themselves under layers of deception and fake names. Midnight's Kiss, however, is unique, as careful peeling back of rumors and assistance from Matriarch Trellani indicates the ardat-yakshi in question was once actually some kind of royal executioner! The rumors are very hushed, but if the intelligence is true, Midnight's Kiss used to be the ultimate sanction, and was once the leader of the mysterious Asari Night-wind – ardat-yakshi, conditioned with mind controls and cortex bombs. How she slipped free is a matter of myth, but now she is on her own, and, according to Trellani, working with the Shadow Broker.

Midnight's Kiss is implicated in a string of thefts and deaths, most of which seem to be targeting the Thirty who have opposed shifts in Asari culture, as well as the Clans and the siari and Athame movements. Trellani believes that Midnight's Kiss may have uncovered the same shattering truths she did, and is now acting out to disrupt the asari unity and reveal the truth. We made several attempts to make contact with her, but all were rebuffed – non-violently. The last one got a brief response – "let humans tend to their own flock, I am busy with mine". We will defer further action to your response to this strange missive.

Matriarch Trellani, Clan Moondance : We are all of course familiar with Matriarch Trellani, as she has been one of the few aliens who have proven their worth to humanity. Trellani's past is known to us, she was once a ranking priestess in the Moondance Clan, the religious practitioners of siari. As she rose through their ranks, she discovered disturbing intelligence indicating the asari were nothing more than Prothean test subjects. She reached out to human elements at the Mars Archive to try to confirm this, but of course fell afoul of the Manswell Doctrine's wise containment of any kind of information like that. But Cerberus reached out to her, and when she confirmed the truth of her revelations, she severed all contact with her own kind.

We have watched Trellani carefully, and we can find no sign she is anything but what she claims. It's possible she's no longer entirely sane, as the Council of Matriarchs responded harshly to her claims on the extranet, slaughtering her entire family and killing several close allies and her bondmate. Such casual cruelty for merely expressing the truth is, of course, why humanity must defend itself.

Many Cerberus operatives are uneasy working with Trellani, but for her part she is rather laid back and does not have a superiority complex like so many asari. In asari circles, Trellani is hated widely, but her public pronouncements have shaken some asari's faith in the precepts of siari and asari history.

Trellani has been very helpful in making sense of some of asari culture and history, and recent events among the asari have proven her dire predictions about the course of asari culture very correct. She fears that in any real conflict, the asari will simply be paralyzed by indecision and social maneuvering, and that they are so convinced of their own correctness that they will eventually corrupt and destroy other alien societies.

Trellani's greatest assistance, however, has been in identifying the hallmarks of the idiotic biotic supremacy cults that matriarchs have begun to craft in human space. Her training as a priestess gives us great insight in countering siari babble, and her ability to link and ensure the sincerity of certain Agents in risky assignments can't be duplicated by any other method.

We have first hand evidence of Trellani's allegiance to Cerberus and her combat ability, as it was her attack on the Night-wind who assaulted our research base that saved my life, and that of Dr. Nielson-Kahn and Agent Lawson as well. She was over-matched by the Night-wind but was able to put her warp sword to wicked effect, and severely wounded three of the assassins.

Lunar Priestess Matriarch Benezia T'Soni: recent events have refocused a great deal of attention onto this mysterious woman, but even if she was not involved with Saren we would have done a workup on her. Benezia was the Priestess of the Moon, one of two of the highest figures in the worship of Athame. As House Matriarch of House T'Soni, she also had vast wealth and influence. As CEO of Binary Helix, her business influence and research into human and asari genomic links was both far-reaching and disturbing. As the leader of the Triuna Siari movement, a political action group with links to those filthy alien lovers in Northstar, she was the leader of a charismatic cult movement implying humanity should let itself be lead by and dominated by the asari, with humanity as children and asari as caring mothers.

Her background is remarkable – the older of two sisters, Benezia sacrificed her youth in the service of Athame, leaving only to join the ranks of the commandos when she was a matron. After this she began dabbling both mystical cults and business ventures, and with House Devir, renovated the aging city and sagging fortunes of the City of Armali, revitalizing it's Clans and being instrumental in the formation of the Armali Council corporation.

Sometime after an acrimonious split from her bondmate, however, Benezia began to change. She was a known associate of Desolas Arterius, and had contacts with Saren twenty years ago. Benezia became cold and focused, moving further and further into business activities and founding a wide array of charismatic cults. She resigned her position as Priestess of the Sun in 2175, but political scandals force her to return to the role in 2180.

Given the security around the Temple of Athame, her use of House Commandos in defense of her properties, and the many security precautions she took with Binary Helix, her movements and motivations were hard to discern. We do know she probably started a relationship with Saren of a more serious nature in the 2170s and that by 2180 they were bondmates.

Benezia is extremely dangerous. As a commando she was lethal even among that group, and has trained over a hundred commandos in her day. As a war priestess, she has devastating biotic abilities unmatched by lesser asari. As the House Matriarch of House T'Soni, she has access to (and by our intel, probably took with her) the House's suit of Royal Paladin armor, and the house warp sword.

Worse, Benezia's cult movements were popular both in asari space and in human space, and it's possible even now she has a network of agents reporting events to her that are hard to root out.

We have only fragmentary reports on her house and family. She had one child, a pureblood, Dr. Liara T'Soni, who as you know is serving with Commander Shepard currently. Her bondmate, a Matriarch Aethyta, disappeared from popular society nearly a century ago and hasn't resurfaced. A good third of the family left with her after the split, the remainder have fallen onto hard times as Benezia took 90% of the House assets with her when she fled to Saren's side.

Solar Priestess Thana Vathan : Benezia's counterpart, the Priestess of the Sun is a highly visible figure who has never liked the turians and is mostly focused on asari society. A vicious warrior who spent four hundred years as a Justicar before retiring from the Order with her tasks complete, she took up the worship of Athame with a militant eye, and has been instrumental in growing the church in recent years. Thana preferred to let Benezia handle the political and economic policies of the Church, instead focusing on preaching and swaying converts through her titanic level of combat prowess and feats of biotic might. She is more than a little arrogant, a figure I liken most closely to P. , and I have my doubts about her religious devotion. She is, very simply, in love with attention, and her antics have grown more desperate in the wake of Benezia's actions. For all her frivolity, however, she is very serious when it comes to security, and Athame's temples have gone even deeper into lockdown since Benezia joined Saren. She is almost obscenely muscled, rippling with power, and usually parades around stark naked, dancing under the sun and crying out the glory of Athame.

Her motivations and goals remain a mystery. Certainly she is focused on growing the Church, but unlike Benezia, she has no personal investments, no real wealth, and only faint connections to her House. She is charismatic but inept at politics, and despite her wanton and lewd appearance has only ever maintained a pair of lovers, one a salarian with which she had children, and her bondmate, an asari lesser priestess.

Her combat ability transcends amazing, bordering on the flatly ridiculous. She once defeated an entire raiding band of batarians with nothing more than her sword, cutting apart two armored vehicles and using kanquess to leap to their airship and carve it to pieces in midair, literally dodging ground fire and moving so fast the video blurs. She has faced down (and defeated, usually in seconds) rogue ardat-yakshi, krogan warlords, turian separatists, and even asari criminals that the Justicars couldn't bring in.

Much like Benezia, Thana is also extremely dangerous. She is not the House Matriarch, but is it's Royal Champion, giving her access to a suit of the royal paladin armor and other such gear. While she rarely uses anything but her warp sword, she spent over four centuries as a Justicar, and and probably more as a commando in her youth. Her biotic barriers are strong enough that she can bounce light cannon fire from a Mako – do not underestimate her.

Siara Grace Matriarch Nelanya : the so-called "Living Power", the Grace is the leader of the siari religious movement, if it could be said to have one. Her origin is rather humble, an orphaned clanless woman, she claims she felt the call of unity as a child and has spent her life preaching it's strictures, freedoms, and tenets. A true fanatic, she eschews all forms of violence and is constantly calling for ever greater unity not just among asari but all life forms. While her message is tritely revolting, her biotic power is anomalous – she rivals the strongest Justicars in her abilities, bizarre given her clanless background. A small asari of average features and a hesitant manner of speaking, she currently acts as a sort of goodwill ambassador to various races, and is conducting a pilgrimage to visit the home worlds of every race to share siari with them. I hope the batarians have fun with that.

The Grace is well known at charity functions and other such events, using them to springboard her preaching. A frequent ally of Uressa T'Shora, she seems (key word, tricky phrase) to be fairly sincere in her efforts to alleviate suffering. That being said, quite unlike Uressa, she is very quick to to accrue the financial benefits of such displays. She also writes books and lectures frequently, charging huge fees to do so, and her home on Illum is palatial.

The Consort Sha'ira : Nothing else quite exemplifies the nature of asari whoredom like Sha'ira. A normals society would not make a folk hero out of a prostitute, much less a prostitute who doubles as a spy and pimp, but that's the asari for you. Sha'ira, who styles herself as the Consort (ha!), operates out of the Citadel in a vast complex gifted to her by a besotted admirer two centuries ago. The Consort entertains influential guests, offering poetic 'gifts of words' and political insight. By linking and melding with every damned politician on the Citadel, she has amassed tremendous insight into politics and has secrets even the Shadow Broker would probably kill for. She also has thousands of allies, giving her enormous reach and power. Despite this, she's still a jumped up, clanless whore, and the Thirty laugh themselves silly at her when she makes an attempt to enter their rarefied level of influence. The fact that she has the nerve to imply her services are tied to the siari religion really brings it all home, how despicable and corrupted these aliens are.

Trellani (displaying exactly why she's superior to most of her kin) is utterly dismissive of the woman, suggesting that the only people who fall for her act are rarely the true movers and shakers of society, and that anyone with sense is not going to meld with her or any of her sluts. She has started accepting turian and human females into the ranks of her previously all asari band of followers, which given their lack of ability to meld implies she's either trying to really branch out into full-on prostitution or is actually believing her own bullshit about being a poetic philosopher of siari love or whatever such babble justifies it in her mind.

Matriarch Jona Sederis, Umbral Queen of the Eclipse : There's no real nice way to put this, Jona Sederis is completely insane. Once a powerful commando, she was driven mad by the death of her bondmate and daughter in a botched pirate raid on her home world. Having bonded at a very young age, right out of maidenhood, she was not mentally tough enough to really understand what had occurred. Jona went on to found a mercenary group to hunt down the pirates, and along the way, picked up increasing numbers of clanless huntresses and bitter matrons tired of service to the state. Thus, the Eclipse mercenary company was born.

Jona Sederis has built the company up brilliantly, incorporating all races while lacing it's ranks and structure with mystical overtones. While no one can deny her biotic power and brutality in combat (the krogan even have a song about her), the woman is not stable, and has murdered her own associates more than once. Eclipse is now a popular destination for rebellious maidens to join up with, and the wealth and power she has acquired has gone to her head. She styles herself "the Umbral Queen" and considers herself the House Matriarch of "house Sederis", a made-up family comprised of her many children.

Sederis may be crazy, but she serves as a useful outlet for asari outcasts and malcontents who would disrupt the unity of asari society, so thus far the Thirty have tolerated her brutality and outbursts. As long as she doesn't hurt asari interests, she'll be tolerated, much to the disgust of the Justicar Order, who have been grimly waiting for their chance to crush her skull for centuries now. They only reason they haven't acted is that Sederis hates ardat-yakshi and has killed or captured six over the years, which implies she's not so crazy as to be completely gone off her nut.

Her Grace, Princess Aleena T'Armal, Aria T'Loak, Pirate Queen of Omega : Of all the asari on this list, none are more dangerous, more lethal, more cunning, and more amoral than Aria T'Loak. Our investigation into her past cost us a dozen agents, but we got lucky and discovered exactly why the Asari Republic has never acted against this legendary rogue.

Aria T'Loak (the last name is not even a family name, it literally means "of no House") was born as Aleena T'Armal, the eldest daughter of Thana T'Armal. In her youth she was legendary for her biotic strength and charm, her beauty rivaling that of Uressa T'Shora. She gave herself over to training to be a priestess, isolating herself from other asari and becoming something of recluse, and then began working with the Temple of Athame to aid the poor and build shelters and medical centers for clanless in the cities of Thessia.

But something happened that changed her life forever. Aleena had a daughter, a dangerous and unexpected result for a maiden, only possible by dint of her overwhelming biotic strength. The father was, unexpectedly, another asari, and even more unexpectedly, a clanless. Such things were simply not done – children were either links to other Houses, on that rare occasion where such a thing was needed, or were with influential aliens, not gutter trash. Aleena was ordered to have an abortion.

She refused, and the ruthless nature of her mother came out, planning to imprison her daughter and her lover and hush the whole thing up. But the act was botched, in the raid her bondmate was killed, the shock driving Aleena nearly mad. She managed to fight her way out of the T'Armal complex and off-planet, but was wounded and miscarried in the escape.

This was made aware to us by finding (based on leads provided to us by, amusingly, mislead STG teams who thought we were Alliance Intel working to counter Aria) an old krogan who served as a house bodyguard at the time. He informed us that Aleena was definitely the same woman as Aria T'Loak, and that, given how long ago it was and how few people knew Aleena at the time.

We know very little of what she did during her middle years. We know at one point she was definitely a commando, an entry for one "Aleema, of no clan or house" was found in records at Lodge of Four Stars in southern Thessia. On the run from her House, Aleena must have been very skilled at manipulation and misdirection to operate in a lodge four hundred miles from her estates with a single letter changed in her name.

At some point about half a century ago, Aleena vanished. Rumors suggest she met her end on a space station fighting mercenary krogan forces. It was some fifty years later that "Aria T'Loak" emerged and within half a century had conquered Omega.

It seems inconceivable that the Thirty did not recognize Aria as Aleena, and indeed, there are hints that the Thirty sent assassins and other measures to attempt to stop Aria, but she destroyed them all. According to Trellani, Aria sent an ultimatum to the Council of Matriarchs, warning them that if they continued to harass her she would unveil information from "the Temple" that would shatter asari society. At that point, the attacks stopped.

For Aria to have stood off the Thirty implies she knows something incredibly damaging. Unfortunately, we have little to no way to gather what that intel might be. Aria is a very strong biotic, with skills that are roughly on par with a war priestess, sans biotic sword. She has a wide control of Omega, with innumerable spies and informers, and is considered the premier warlord in the Terminus, with all of Omega and a dozen independent or pirate worlds answering to her directly. The Omega fleet is a bit dated and somewhat mismatched, but has well over five hundred ships and probably triple or even quadruple that would answer her call to war, making her effective strength in ship counts if not weight nearly equal to the Systems Alliance!

Aria has an intelligence network nearly as good as ours, and does regular business with the Shadow Broker. Among her many, many allies are at least two krogan warlords, several STG specialists, and dozens of asari mercenary leaders.

Aria ultimate goal appears to be nothing less than building the Terminus into a nation-state of it's own, capable of containing the expansion of the Citadel races. Omega's vast eezo reserves give her staggering wealth, and her cult of commandos trained by her gives her an advantage in infiltration and counter-espionage – all are basically trained courtesans and prostitutes, more than capable of hiding their true capabilities under a layer of sensual innocence until they can strike.

Aria has repeatedly been linked to Councilor Tevos, but we have no evidence either way of this being true, and in any case, Aria almost never leaves Omega, which she governs (in true tawdry asari fashion) from a goddamned strip club. If Matriarch Lidanya is a measure of the fluidity of asari society, Aria is a sobering reminder of the capability of one of the Thirty when driven to extremes.
Chapter 12: Chapter 12 - Trellani's Notes: Asari

A/N: Thus ends the Asari section. I'm actually interested in feedback so far – it it too much detail or not enough? Should I focus on turians or salarians (or some other race) next? I can't finish the human history yet, as it has a few spoilers and will get done after some more OSABC updates.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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My lovely Jack,

I was amused by your private request for me to comment on the body of work your fanatical little doctor is putting together for you and your fellow travelers. The poor man was quite shaken with the death of Dr. Uraj , but that is what you get when you are fool enough to spin and dance in the webs of the Thirty, fear be upon their enemies.

I fear the rest of your compatriots dislike me – not that I care. I understand their anger and rage, their rejection of anything not of their species. One reason we asari cling so tightly to our blind seeking of unity and comfort in one another is we are all very afraid of the darkness beyond our warm seas and comforting forests. Our ancestors looked up at a sky we worshiped, only for it to split apart and rain death and calumnity upon us, our only comfort the warm bodies and open minds of our clans.

Humans never embraced one another as we asari have. You divide yourselves over the most inane of concepts, of invisible lines on maps, over pieces of cloth with designs, over imaginary 'nations' that can't be found by the naked eye. You derange your languages and cling to your quaint food dishes and curious clothing, as if the universe cared for such effrontery in the face of it's majesty. You tell yourselves that the amount of dye in your skin somehow determines your intelligence and personality.

You hate and burn so brightly because you fear, each of you, deep inside, that you are insignificant. Not for you a god that merely guides the dreamer into a deeper sleep, or a unity with all life. You have to have a God that is responsible for all things, knows all things, and grants immortality. You have to punish and reincarnate yourselves, or submit endlessly without relief in pursuit of a wisdom that sounds not that much different than siari when you shave away the fancy words.

No, Jack – your people hate aliens because you cannot stand the idea that you are not , indeed, superior. You are not as blind as my people are, who have no hate because we cannot even conceive of such a ridiculous concept that some race might be our equals, much less superiors.

I think some asari insight into some of the questions and issues your little doctor did not touch on are in order.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: – file error – not found – error 404c

Jack, your average asari is no powerful biotic warrior, mystical and wrapped in shimmering, body hugging silks. I am sure that is what the human ideal of my kind is , and I remain just as sure that such images are the exact public face the Thirty, grace unto their houses, place before you constantly.

But most of the clanless are but people, my friend. The average asari grows into a family that is almost always bifurcated, between asari culture and whatever the race of the father is. Salarians make poor fathers in most cases, distracted and unused to raising children, while turians delight in turning their blue daughters into tiny little soldiers. Krogan lovers are rare, but no one will spend more time , or show such unexpected gentleness, with a child as a krogan. A batarian is usually a brute, but those who were slaves are more gentle themselves, but they remain stern, unyielding and distant power figures.

Human fathers are often the best, be they male or female humans, as they can simply enjoy the growth and joy of a child's live. An average asari child knows nothing of the games of the Thirty, grace unto their houses, or the machinations of the Clans, or the smeared, unending dance of the agile wit that plays across asari culture. They are children, innocent and pure.

The average asari, then, is usually a mere worker. She provides for her child, loves her bondmate, and works to ensure their comfort and safety. If there are other asari nearby she is open with them, but in this modern age more and more asari turn away from the communal clan parenting of children and dote upon them personally.

Your average asari studied biotics in her long-ago youth, and maybe , if she was daring, used them for a few years when she ran with wilder sisters. But despite what Dr. Minsta thinks, most asari girls don't spent but a handful of years with that crowd. Few indeed are cruel and hard enough become a Sister of the Eclipse, who require you to kill another being in cold blood. To fully embrace such a life is to turn away from siari, to make it hard to ever come back into the fold.

Most will do a bit of dancing or mercenary work, then find work on the Citadel, Illum , the five colonies, or on Thessia. Secretaries and analysts, legal assistants, legates, medical workers, clerks and hostesses. Poor trembling Minsta would have you believe every asari girl is a hardened veteran. It is more akin to the dangers posed by a human who served two years in the military reserves as a clerk. They may remember a few things, but most is gone , and they have not the nerves or the mindset for battle.

The average asari votes diligently, with a firm belief that regardless of what happens, the Thirty, honor and peace upon them, will act in the best interests of all. She is not fool enough to believe she is important ; rather, she trusts that with enough grains of sand, even the ocean must stop it's surge. What point a large and powerful government which expends most of its efforts trying to coordinate that which is best handled by mere common sense?

Jack, the average asari is too wrappped up in her own life, in the joys of it, in the little things, to give much thought to humans, or the fate of the galaxy. Minsta's points may be correct in terms of the powerful of my race, but the average asari is just … a person. We are not all biotic witches, grim of eye and voluptuous of form, capable of magical feats of arms and sleeping with a legion of exhausted lovers out of sheer carnal hunger. They are just people, and if they are a bit given too much to pleasure and love to intrigue over little social clans or who is sleeping with who, what matter that to such as you?

Minsta dislikes our practice of siari, and finds our casual embrace of pleasure disturbing, as if it is somehow unclean or wrong. But how much of this is human views on sex, and not really our views? Are we to be judged, then, on humans and their practices, without judging in turn? A society of humans sees nothing wrong with letting billions starve, or for the masses to struggle to eat while the rich have palaces they do not even visit. You poison your own kind in the empty pursuit of wealth and influence, and then use said influence to oppress and control others, without even reaping gain for your selves. You prate about empty sexuality but are the first to sexualize every bit of advertising, news, fashion, even military service, and you denigrate females as weaker and frailer, mainly to serve the strong sexual urges of your males, whose genes bid them to spread their children among many mates, while females want to retain the father of their children for defense and aid.

One wonders where Minsta finds his moral compass at nights. (And who he fills his bed with). Asari sex with other asari is merely a sharing of sensations and pleasures. It is not the gross and frankly insipid insertion of body parts into other body parts, the splattering of fluids and diseases that every other species practices. It is a beautiful glimpse into the wonder of another being, a way to find and open your mind to concepts, memories, feelings you never experienced, and the warm glowing release that shivers both your frame and theirs is united.

We do not believe in Original Sin. Minsta's narrow-minded Christianity defeats his understanding of the meld and our focus on unity. The average asari may link shallowly with two or three friends, but not while she is bonded. Her life focuses on her children and her bond, her exploration...

Oh, how to make you understand? You with your devil-may-care belief in your invincibility, your optimistic hopes? Women are drawn to you like a moth to the flame, for your power, your calm, your iron determination, your looks.

But do you even enjoy it, I wonder, as asari do? Is all human sex guilt-ridden? Is it because every act can lead to children your kind rarely seems to want?

Can you understand the beauty of laying naked beneath the stars with someone so close to you that every breath is as one, to know and feel and exult in such closeness that it seems the very sky touches your skin, that your whole world is suffused with this glow? How can I explain the comfort from the ties that bind each asari to each other, and to others beyond, to see the joy of an impish young maiden in the ghost of an aging matriarch, and her smile as you discuss things neither you nor she ever lived?

I have turned away from the purposes to which our unity has been twisted, and the filthy black tide that spills from the worn stone steps of Athame's so-called temple, but siari is not some game of sex and titillation. You cannot understand , and Minsta should stop trying to do so. Siari is a feeling, a touch of something beyond the grasp of one or many minds. You would, I suppose, call it a gut feeling, a hunch. It is the unseen flicker of something , perceived by a million million asari memories throughout fifty thousand years. There is something beautiful and mystical there. I have no words for it, but I know it.

That being said , siari is not for humans, and shouldn't be perverted in such a fashion. I understand, in a way, where he comes from with his distaste. A human using sexuality to influence others would indeed be a whore, as the sex act for your kind is so much different than for us. No flower of a field of Thessian blue can thrive in Terra's green grasses or Sur'kesh's moss, and forcing such a mesh is exactly why your group is needed. There are those, I will admit, who have turned our glorious unity into a weapon, a tool. It is akin to shoveling snow with a famous painting, or cleaning a counter-top with the documents of a brilliant author from ages gone past.

Minsta's insights into our culture mostly on target, but some regarding the Clans are … skewed, at best. He sees the Clans as tribal throwbacks, when they are specialists, in a culture and world that now calls for each to be all things. There was a time when asari workmanship and ethics were all about pride, when a woodworker would spend six years merely finishing a table , every detail so utterly perfect that you couldn't even find a joined edge that didn't look natural. Now, we have fallen into the consumerist trap, that ease of convenience that is the mire of the extranet and free shipping. The Clans refuse to give up that core of patience that made asari what we became, that loving attention, when a mere sword, or the work of a stone-cutter, was an asari's very name and pride, her skills linked and passed to her descendants.

No human can or ever will surpass a Clan artesian, who has the memories of an eon of fine crafting in her mind. The pride of the asari Temple of the Moon, the Serration of Unspent Blood, is a warp sword over nine thousand years old, before we had plasma forges or fancy metals or nano-composited alloys. Made of nothing more than thin sheets of the purest silver and steel, banked in snow drifts, hammered and folded seven million times, quenched in volcanic ash and tempered in pure ocean water.

It took six hundred years to make one sword, Jack. One blade. A blade that was wrought so fine that when the Priestess of the Sun took it up it rivaled the very life giving orb in brightness, so sharp it would send razoring cascades of rainbows along it's edge with every movement. What human culture could expend such effort on a mere item? You are as mayflies. You forget your own history, your cultures melt and flow like taffy, and your memories are as water.

We do not forget, and we do not move on. We remember, and we build on what we know. That is our strength, Jack. That is what fools like Minsta fail to see, despite his genius and skill and wide education. He sees only what the Thirty allow, he sees the corruption, yes, the failure, yes..

But not the glory, not the pride, not the bitter, unyielding remembrance that has built us up. He sees those who lie to themselves, who turn their gaze to nothing more than existence, when our love and dreams are so much more rich, more moving, more keening in their grasping , hungering needs.

An asari poetess once spoke it best, I feel. I fear the translation does not rhyme, but you should get some sense of the emotions I speak of.

Long days have slid past the vault of the sky

As sun and moon chase each hour across the blue of sea and shore

I long for the days of my life givers and life bringers

I am weary of toil and proud of the rings I bear on each arm

My daughters, straight and proud, carry my name and blood

My fine lovers are my supports when the nights grow cold

But under this vault of sky

I am alone, within myself, a multitude of those I know

My fingers touch air, but I am made of many

I have seen shores I will never walk upon

I have danced with smiling princesses I will never see

Lips have tasted mine that are long dead

I have chased the narhwan upon the bright waters in boats

though I love the mountains and have left them not once in my years

Now I am fading from this light, laying full upon the lucid blue of the waters

I can feel all of those in my life around me, the darkness of the moon

and the glory of the sun, burning through dark spaces to bring forth

Dawn? A light that I cannot comprehend. A face that is sweet and dear to me

My daughters kiss my ancient flesh, my bondmate wipes her tears from broken eyes

I am weary of toil and proud of the rings I bear on each arm

I will live on forever, in the minds of those who remain

and dance beneath midnight skies, thighs damp with the sea-mist upon the grass

I will soar under clear blue skies, in the minds of those who follow

Under this vault of sky

I am never alone, I am asari, I am one, I am all.

If you can grasp that, Jack, you can grasp siari.

On a more practical note, having spoken my little piece... I want to touch on three things Dr. Minsta did not.

First, the biotic supremacist cults that rage across your world are indeed no natural evolution of siari, nor are they the hands of any but the Thirty, blessed be they. The Thirty , sharp are their swords, are not something I can explain, except perhaps to suggest that your kind would feel the same if Jesus Christ had children who to this day were the leaders of your nations. To gainsay them is –

Difficult.

Even cut off from my own people, by my own choice. Even knowing the Temple is hiding the truth and that those who call themselves the Thirty are frauds... my very soul rebels at speaking their title without one of the hundred blessings to follow. The Thirty. The Thirty.

Shift to non-verbal command by user. Recording begins of verbal output per Cerberus protocol six. Output suppressed to user interface

My mind moves under it's own power. My spirit gives me strength, my strength fuels my thoughts, my thoughts embody motion. My mind moves under it's own power.

Shift to verbal command by user. Recording begins of verbal input to datapad

I am no weak fool , and even my own mind rebels against casting imprecations against the Thirty. Suffice it to say that biotic supremacy is not something asari give much cause to think of, and that in humans it is a dark concept indeed. Your kind is naturally given to discrimination and self-sectioning. Skin color, the place you were born, what language you speak, what nation you hail from, what gender you prefer in bed – the divisions and separations in your culture drive one mad to ponder long upon. Biotics, feared and distrusted, used by the SA to check the ambitious and the proud, are the natural focus of hatred and rage.

I fear these biotic cults are not trying to infiltrate society so much as ensure your biotics are fearful of asari power. I have seen some of your better biotic students. A few of the would best me with ease, and a very few would give pause even to that crazed hag who styles herself Priestess of the Sun. But most of your kind are simply too weak to battle the best the asari have to offer. The Thirty –

Intolerable. They , rather, are disinclined to see humans develop further down the path of biotic mastery. And thus, I fear the L2 issues your early biotics had, using implant designs of asari make, were flawed on purpose. I fear the asari would prefer if human biotics were distrusted and ostracized, because it gives them an easy inroads to power. Not to hurt humanity, but to apply leverage.

Asari dismiss violence...but manipulation? To control without lifting a finger? That we admire. Destroy these cults wherever they appear and you will thwart whatever plan … They .. have put into place.

Secondly, Minsta's assessment of the military is far off the mark, although I understand his confusion. Asari do have officers, I assure you. But they are concealed and often in positions of safety. They wear no pins of rank and attend no war college, but they are known to you already. The matriarchy. Lesser, younger asari naturally defer to their elders, by blood and instinct and biology. We do not need to train leaders in a corps because each matriarch is already a leader by nature. Yet Minsta stares right past this obvious fact, because when he looks to see patterns, he is too bound by human concepts to understand what is right in his face.

This is the truth behind our military – any losses dire enough to kill off all the matriarchs in a force is usually devastating enough that no military force will be left alive in any condition to fight anyway. It is a common mistake, made by every race who comes against us. Few can identify a matriarch from a maiden at a distance, fewer still when everyone is in the same armor and wearing full face helms.

Because (despite knowing better) I love you above all others in this vile galaxy, I will share with you a little secret. The asari matriarch does not, despite what the rumors say, have larger breasts than a maiden, nor do we grow taller or shorter. The trick to picking out a matriarch from maidens is the way one holds themselves. Our skeletons are cartilage, and it stiffens over time. Look for those asari who move more slowly, who are careful when evading and who rely upon heavier armor – those are most likely your matriarchs.

Minsta's summary of our history was .. good. But he continues to wonder what lies inside Athame's temples. Shall I tell you, Jack? Of artifacts that predate any Prothean dig? Of swords of a metal we have identified as being of Insuannon make?

I am fairly sure, although I cannot prove it as I did not rise to the proper rank, that our temples are actually sites of Prothean technology, much akin to your Mars Archives. I have seen ancient paintings of Athame and her 'servants', and they are no asari, nor any being I have seen. I am almost certain that the Thirty , may honor trail their days, know of this, and keep it a secret, and it is the core of why our mass drives and certain aspects of our technology are so vastly beyond even those far smarter than us, such as the salarians.

Of proof, I have none. I can see you narrowing your eyes, inhaling on one of those vile cigarettes, smiling to yourself. I have no proof, but I know what is in my mind, and the reaction of the Council of Matriarchs to my simple questions – the vile murder of all I held dear – is proof enough for this old fool.

A final thought, Jack. I know there are those in your organization who are distrustful of me, or my motives, although you know them clearly. I do not hate Cerberus, even the vile acts that your Shadow Hand has committed on innocent asari do not change my beliefs on that. Your people are acting in the name of survival, and while I feel Minsta is too vitriolic (and anthropocentric) to understand some parts of why my people act how they do, his argument that the asari wish humanity to kneel at their feet is all too accurate. There are a few who mean well, and many who have no ill will towards your kind, but as I said, one cannot be anything but dismissive of the creatures who need pills , injections, and accidents to touch biotics, who die in the span of an asari youth, who burn so brightly and so briefly. It is akin to fearing the action of a pack of sheep. Your livelihood may depend on them, you may be outnumbered by them, the rams might, if they get upset and charge you, injure you badly if they surprise you, but they are not going to suddenly one day take over your home, or take away your guns and shear you in turn!

You are being herded, and while I find some of what Cerberus does to be distasteful, I cannot in good conscience say that other races do not do the same or worse. I stand by my words, at least humanity is brave enough to put it's terrorists in the public eye. The vile nature of the Night-wind (damn all ardat-yakshi) should be proof enough that we asari are far more monstrous than even your Emperor Ardiente could ever hope to be.

I find I miss your easy company , your smile, your hands and your deft touch on the skyball court. Minsta is becoming boring to talk to, and Agent Lawson hates me because I make her feel plain and small. Perhaps a few weeks on Bekenstein would be agreeable for you, while your team removes to their next assignment?

Know that I love you, even if you tell yourself you are beyond such things.

Trellani
Chapter 13: Chapter 13 - Author's Note and Shift

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

A reaally long authors note:

I'm very pleased so far with the reaction to the asari. I apologize for not finishing the human history, but realized immediately that quite a bit of it would spoil things I have planned for OSABC, and had to put that part on hiatus.

There have been a lot of general questions about some of what has been written, and in general I'll probably end up addressing most of these via PM, but at least one I feel like I should address directly. Before I do that, I'd like to thank Michael1110 for the ridiculous hard work he does on the recap reviews. These are needed for me to measure where chapters are hitting or missing, and if everything I'm trying to say is actually making any kind of coherent sense.

Also thanks to Jaensa, because figuring out how the hell asari reproduction would actually work was impossible until she told me about framing protein shells in some forms of Proterozoic life forms.

Finally, I appreciate all the feedback I have gotten – I've replied to some with PM's and some via email. I do take it all into account. About 70% to 75% of what is written by me is already kinda set down in note form, but a lot of it ends up being adjusted on the fly. If you have a particular theory, insight, or question about a given race's culture, let me know – I can take a stab or we can work together to figure it out.

Now, some people are concerned about the relative strength of humanity vis a vis the asari, in that the asari are seemingly much stronger in the Premiseverse than in stock ME. That is true – the asari are about five to six times stronger , I'd say. And by comparison, the turians are about half as strong as in stock ME, and the System's Alliance is nearly twice as strong by weight of ships and soldiers.

But I feel the issue is more of "humanity should be equal to the other races". I simply can't buy that, and it's something that always bothered me so much about stock ME.

Let me get this straight, the asari have literally THOUSANDS of years on us, along with a beacon and being handcrafted by the Protheans, and yet humanity's technology is up to par with theirs to the point in less than 30 years, to the point that when ME3 rolls around the asari are helpless against the Reapers?

It makes for good story, but that sort of progression doesn't hold together logically, and there's no point in rewriting the whole thing in an AU if you're just gonna trope it all out and rely on Rule of Cool to explain away everything.

Yes, if you were to match the asari up against the humans in a straight fight, humanity would lose it's ass off. If you matched the rest of Citadel Space against the asari I'm not sure who would win, but I wouldn't bet against the asari. That is how it should be. In the Premiseverse, it's one of the key drivers of why everything is so nasty – the top dogs want to stay there, and the under-dogs are willing to use any trick they can to equal the odds.

That being said, yeah, the asari are the top dogs in the game. They're supposed to be , according to the Codex, but we never get to see any of it. We never see the unity. We never hear about siari. We never see this 'massive fleet' or 'huge economy' or anything but Illum, which is overrun by non-asari. Asari culture – a massive blank. Writers like PMC65 and Melaradark (yay! DE5! Go read it!) have created more asari culture than Bioware ever did.

Humanity Ain't No Punk : the triple threat

Humanity is dangerous because it looks at things in ways the asari don't – drop assault teams, penal legions, carriers, and the use of flexible tactics.

Also, please keep in mind – this document is written from the viewpoint of a Cerberus guy who's been thinking this whole time how badass humans are , getting an eyeful of just how badass aliens are. The guy has eaten up supremacist, propagandist bullshit all his life and is now seeing the truth, and it scares the shit out of him.

Humanity's primary strengths are simple. First, while our population is much smaller than other races, we grow very quickly. The vast number of colony worlds we have will explode over time, each driving more revenue and taxes to the SA. This growth is quadratic, while the other races, who rarely colonize these days, grow in a linear fashion. The human economy may never surpass the asari economy, but it will go from 2% of asari GDP at the start of ME1 to 24% by the end of ME2. Anyone familiar with economic growth can tell you how staggering that is.

Second, humanity has laid claim to many, many more worlds than the asari , salarians, or turians, and while our economy is smaller in terms of cash outlay, the human industrial complex is titanic, something that will be touched in the salarian and volus segments. Humans can bring a new dreadnaught online in seven months, compared to a year and a half for the turians and six years for asari.

Finally, humans have one advantage the asari simply can't match – independence and reactivity. The very asari mindset is one of collaboration, of follow the leader, and the asari are used to having plenty of time to decide and make up their minds on things. In the Reaper War, and after the Reaper War, that kind of hesitance will cost them again and again.

Asari and the Systems Alliance : the trolling of humanity

The asari are not blind to these advantages, nor to the fact that humans have a culture more steeped in political maneuvering and treachery than the gullible turians or self-obsessed salarians. But as with most things in life, the asari have a plan for everything, and the fate of humans is part of that plan.

As hinted and touched in the document, the asari have some big issues. They got tired of carefully crafted and controlled relationships back in the old days, where customs and clan politics and who was with who controlled who'd you could have kids with. A lot of asari found freedom when the Thirty steered the asari culture towards instead sleeping with aliens, instead of letting the clans control that aspect of life. This had the side effect of disrupting and destabilizing most of the clan structure, which was just a bonus for the Thirty.

For a long time, it worked. You didn't (and often couldn't) spend your whole life with the alien, just long enough to have kids by them. Then you could find yourself a nice asari and live out the rest of your life. But the asari didn't think about the long term, and given that it's the asari, long term is everything. You can't have a few thousand years of asari being bondmates with short-lived aliens, and having those bonds broken by death, and then spread all across the asari race, without some kind of backlash.

In the old days, bond-mates would usually follow each other into death, because both were asari. Now, you have the shadow of that bond-death trailing you for the rest of your life. A few are brave enough to try twice, but most can't. They still have relationships with other asari...and that bond-death leaches across the link. It enters that asari's memories, who passes that pain to another, and another.

If you're a maiden, and you link with an older asari who's lost a bond-mate, feeling that razor pain is the scariest thing in the universe. It's the literal death of siari, it's losing someone who you've made a part of you in such a fundamental way that it terrifies. Even the Thirty aren't immune to it. It makes you nervous when you think of it happening to you. Makes you reluctant to bond with an alien down the line.

Subconsciously, the asari as a race began to associate this feeling taking alien mates. It's already hard for asari to be as sexually attracted to an alien as it would be for them to do so with another asari. You may think Garrus or Thane are dead sexy, but that's your choice to do so. When it becomes driven down by custom, by gossip, by fiat of the Thirty... some asari rebel. (Doesn't help that the Thirty indulge in having pureblood kids whenever they like because they think they're too good to produce ardat-yakshi.)

Somewhere along the line, some asari decided they wanted something a bit closer to home, and humanity has fit that bill. The Thirty have decided to take a page out of the salarians book, to use an entire species as a tool. Humanity fills many of the weaknesses , such as they are, that the asari have. The Thirty plan to alter and change the very course of human culture.

They've started with biotic cults, because they feel that in a few more generations (ten, maybe twenty – not long to asari, after all) that humans may start manifesting biotics on a genetic level. They can't help but look down on people without biotics, as somehow lesser. And they see the cruelty of the SA government as their way in.

The Thirty , planning for the long haul, will eat away at the SA from within, starting siari cults on the outlying worlds the SA has not bothered to firm it's hold upon. The independent colonies. The average human is already in awe of the asari, and every human knows the asari were all that stopped the turians from declaring total war on humanity in the FCW. So their influence will be greeted with open arms.

The Thirty aren't worried about human supremacists, because the asari know that most humans only look down on what is different from them, and the asari are very much alike to humanity. Gazing on a galaxy full of things on dog-legs, with spikes and plates and tentacles and chlorine and four eyes, the asari might as well be kissing cousins to humans.

The Thirty know the SA expects an assault on their economy and political structures, and they have no intention of trying such. They will instead focus on the biotic leadership, the commissars that the SA uses to keep it's outlying leaders in line, the disgruntled L2's who are slowly being driven mad by their deliberately flawed implants. They will start charismatic cults and use their vast wealth on charity and winning hearts and minds. The hard-nosed men of the SA government are rich and isolated, divided from their own people. The Thirty will simply appeal to the base masses of humanity.

And , in fifty or a hundred years, when enough humans are enthralled with asari-led cults, when human biotics turn to the asari rather than their leaders for guidance, when the poor and isolated feel loyalty not to their cruel leaders but the graceful, gentle, loving asari – then , and only then, will the Thirty start playing dirty politics. By that time, however, the SA will be riddled with asari lovers itself.

The Thirty want to eventually make humanity a part of the asari race, a new caste at the feet of the asari race, providing comfort and energy, drive and protection, and all in a package that protects them from producing ardat-yakshi but is close enough to the asari form that it quiets the rebellious classes of asari clanless.

Above that, even, the asari think humans would make good replacements for the turians, who have begun to slowly pick their way through the manipulations and controls put upon them by the asari and salarians. The turians have served their purpose – pacifying the krogan , keeping the Terminus in line, and providing a stable base of power to keep the other races down. But it wouldn't take much to destabilize the Hierarchy, to send it spiraling into unending civil wars.

The Thirty plot, and they know what is coming...

The Thirty and the Beacon : Yeah, it's that bad

The Thirty have listened to the wisdom of Athame and her Beacon now for many long years. They know that their 'goddess' was in fact , an alien being. They discovered this a very long time ago, and the Thirty keep it a tightly controlled secret. Each House Matriarch knows. The Priestess of the Sun and the Moon know. The Priestess of the Unseen Star (who used to be Trellani) is in a position to know some but not all of it. The leader of the inventor clan, Clan Skywatch, knows bits and pieces as well.

Each one, when given the secret, is forced to practice mental walls that prevent anyone they bond with to know the truth, which is also why they prefer (and in recent millennia, only allow) House Matriarchs who have lost their bond-mates, since hiding such a thing from a bondmate is almost impossible.

Benezia knows. That knowledge , indeed, is what drove her to listen to Saren's insane rambling about Reapers, rather than have him dragged off and killed. The Thirty have heard the words, they have been told a Great Darkness is among the stars, and that some day it will return, and the asari must be strong. The asari have prepared. They mothball ships , they train their military, they expand their economy. They are convinced they have time, that the Returning is centuries away, that they can forge the Citadel races into swords and shields for the Asari and drive back whatever is coming.

But the Thirty does not realize the power of the Reapers. They think it but a few ships, not a rain of thousands. They do not connect yet, except for Benezia, the Fall of Black Leaves with the shape of Sovereign.

Benezia knows what the Thirty do not. The Remembrance has already stated the truth – a bit of lore they forgot in the chaos of the War of Queens. The Returning is now.

The Thirty , effectively, have technology they have never unleashed yet. Some of it would be put into effect quickly if they knew what was coming – proton rifles and regenerating metals. But the end-game was disrupted by the fall of the Empire. The Protheans that discovered the Crucible (from Inusannon ruins) had no time to build it completely. They hid what they could in the Mars Archive , icing the mass array to try to protect it, and scattering beacons to lead survivors to Ilos. If that failed, they made sure that the two races with the information – humans and asari – would be drawn to each other, by dint of looking almost identical.

The secret, the truth of Athame, has not dimmed the worship of her by the asari , or even by the Thirty. They genuinely believe Athame was god-touched, that they in turn are holy. The Thirty have lied to themselves for so long that when Trellani, the first Priestess of the Unseen Star who wasn't a member of the Thirty , panicked at what she discovered, they figured she'd get over it. Now that she's gone to Cerberus, the Thirty debate on how to .. react.

Liara T'Soni : I haz a sad

Liara's little problems stem from a number of events in her life that will be revealed in my main fic, Of Sheep and Battlechicken, and I'm not about to spoil it here. I will say that Liara was never big on religion, and never was very interested in Athame or her worship. Benezia encouraged Liara's Prothean studies for some time, convinced a better understanding (and fascination) with the Protheans would make Liara more accepting of the truth.

But events did not turn out that way, and Liara ended up a social cripple. She does not fit the pattern of asari described , or even that of an outcast, because Liara is wounded , mentally.

Liara's biotics are stronger than most because she is a pureblood of the Thirty with an ardat-yakshi index about half a point below the mark at which melding turns into mind-reaving. Liara is bigger and stronger than Telanya because Telanya is a clanless commoner, and the Thirty used the knowledge of the Beacon to breed themselves to be better than their inferiors in every way.

Liara isn't using Shepard, or manipulating her. But once Shepard dies, Liara will indeed begin to display many of the traits of the Thirty.

Other Mysteries

A few questions remain that I haven't figured out yet, and can't think of good answers to.

With the mental power and sensitivity of the asari, why is it that Saren , not Benezia, activates the Beacons?

Was Benezia really indoctrinated into doing all the things she did, or did she believe this was what was best for the asari race? Again, her entire belief system should have lead her to reject Saren and what he was pitching, and indoctrination is a slow process. At some point, she believed she could gentle Saren's impulses...or did she just tell herself that?

Given the advancement and advantages of the asari, why were they so woefully inefficient in ME canon?

Perhaps most importantly (and this has been bothering me for ages) , if the asari were the Prothean's chosen agents, did the Protheans perform their alterations the asari with the intent of the asari dominating other races as the Protheans did? If so, can the failure of the Citadel races to stand up to the Reapers be chalked up to the asari simply not being evil enough to want to rule everything?

Up Next: Salarians – ancient Greys

Seems like most people want to see the Salarians , so we are off to Mannovai after a short transitional piece. Enjoy.

The man in the center of the room folded his arms over his massive chest, frowning slightly. The tableau before him was not one he'd ever thought to see, and he clamped back on his anger, forcing his mind to think about the situation logically.

The Shadow Hand was, for a human, gigantic, topping seven feet and thick with muscle. His dark neo-French cut suit was made of black velvet, slashed with panels of silver down the sides and shoulders, open to reveal a silvery-white collarless shirt. His brown hair, tied back as always in a severe ponytail, was just starting to frost with gray at the temples, and the hard lines of his face were made more narrow and cruel looking by his eyes narrowing.

Matriarch Trellani barely came to the Shadow Hand's sternum, but the force of her presence was nonetheless there, like walking into the wind. She dressed demurely as always, so unlike the other asari whores he'd seen, wearing a long and elegant black gown belted with silver, and a sort of asari shawl of semi-transparent silk that was like smoke across her shoulders. Her only concession to her allegiance was a tiny Cerberus pin set against her collar, but it was enough – no other alien in the galaxy wore such a device. Her eyes were amused as she faced down the person seated across from her in the meeting room.

Dr. Minsta was a tall, lanky human, with long, spare, almost patrician features, limp iron grey hair, a long nose, and cool, almost arrogant gray eyes. He affected a thin goatee, which he liked to stroke, and his Cerberus uniform was immaculate under a white lab coat.

The Shadow Hand grimaced. "Doctor , she has a point. Sending your team into salarian space would be a red flag the STG is sure to spot. Humans are not common on Sur'kesh or Mannovai, and the STG would shadow you just out of curiosity as to what you were up to." He paused, grunted, and sighed. "Matriarch Trellani, you will conduct the direct investigative portions of the research. Minsta's team will perform electronic and curatorial intelligence gathering on the Citadel. I'll detail at least one person to go with her to Mannovai, but it will be one of the Operatives, not an agent."

Minsta rose, and with a stiff nod, left the conference room. The doors had barely closed behind him before the rich laughter of Trellani bubbled forth, the slender asari woman finally sitting down and glancing up at the huge figure before her. "You do not trust me, do you , Richard? I don't need anyone to go with me on a jaunt to salarian space."

The Shadow Hand grimaced again. How confident and brazen the witch was! "You are a resource , nothing more. Jack finds you valuable and interesting. I merely find you alien." He turned away, muscles in his shoulders tensing as he did so, glancing over the status reports and recovered artifacts from the asari excursion. "I don't have to trust you to realize you need us, as well. That's why I am agreeing to this. But Jack has an interest in you, and I don't want to send you off ... defenseless." He paused. "And yes , I do wonder why you would volunteer your services like this. It makes me wonder as to motive."

Trellani's voice was light, still amused. "My association with your band of outlaws is solely due to Jack's 'interest' in me, Shadow Hand. I am hardly defenseless, as the Night-wind discovered. And while I do appreciate your aid in avoiding my former associates, I am more driven by my own views and desire to not see humans become lapdogs under the rule of my kind than I am by any ulterior motives."

She smiled again, and he scowled back in return. Her voice was unperturbed, though, as she continued. "Your little group is admirably energetic, but about as subtle as krogan berzerkers in a show of antiquities. I do not wish to .. humiliate … the good doctor, but his conclusions and fixed biases make his analysis of any alien race less than accurate. Perhaps I wish merely to aid in your endeavor by giving a viewpoint less slanted by bigotry that serves no real purpose?"

The Shadow Hand half turned, snorting. "Bigotry? Truth! It took your kind an eon to do what took my kind a few hundred years to accomplish. Humanity has it's own strength, and as you do not need us, we do not 'need' you."

He turned to face her fully, folding his arms once more. "And while you worry that Dr. Minsta's slanted viewpoint will blind us to something vital, the point of sending a man like Dr. Minsta is that he is Systems Alliance trained, and his viewpoints are often those of the AIS investigators and their ilk. We cannot always trust that my overseers in the Systems Alliance will remain a constant factor in assuring Cerberus's survival. The insights he may have give me a good idea of how the Systems Alliance looks at these same issues."

She tilted her head at that, placing her elegant features into repose, and then nodded slowly. "I can see a certain value in that, save for the fact that you are still getting an invalid viewpoint on many things. Confirmation bias is the bane of any attempt to understand the enemy. And seeing as you have defined anything non-human as the enemy...it seems to me that you perhaps need an outside hand at interpreting this information."

Oh, the witch was clever. Despite himself, the Shadow Hand smiled. "And I suppose you feel your own nature is such that you would make a better filter of alien cultures than a man who's spent his life specializing in psychological historical analysis and xenopsychology?" Even as he said it, he saw her smile widen.

"Richard, Minsta has been doing this for about as long as I have been studying human art. Does that make me an expert at human art? The fact that 20 years is a long time for a human does not mean it is of any moment. I have been dealing with these aliens since your race was stabbing each other with pieces of sharpened metal."

She rose, with effortless grace, and he got the feeling it was all she could do not to laugh in his face. "But do not worry, as you said. Dr. Minsta can certainly review my findings and, if it turns out my more balanced approach doesn't give you the .. insights you need, well, you can always send in your teams to Sur'kesh once I am done." The smile widened. "The STG will probably take them apart and send you each one back in some charming fashion, like reduced to their base elements and mounted on a periodic table, but as you said … Minsta is an expert."

With that, the matriarch turned away, not even bothering to wait for any response, gliding from the room before he could recollect his thoughts. With a grunt of frustration, he tugged at his chin, before leaving the meeting room as well, stomping down the corridors of the base towards his office.

Once inside, he calmed a little, sitting at his desk to consider his options. Trellani had an undeniable point – Cerberus could not afford to underestimate or overestimate foes based on racism or feelings of human supremacy, even if such were clearly the case. He pulled up files from his work center, bringing up maps and projections of Minsta's original planning and timel ine for the salarian investigation.

Trellani would fare better in STG space with her own resources. Still, as much as it galled him, he couldn't afford to send her in alone. The asari Matriarchy was still looking for her, and anything that infuriated that pack of harpies brought a smile to his face. He'd have kept Trellani alive and well just to spite the Matriarchy, truth be told, even if she did nothing but sit around on Jack's arm and gossip. The fact that she was useful to their efforts – and shockingly non-judgmental – was a bonus.

He pulled up the files of his Operatives – independent operators with no known ties to Cerberus, used when they needed tasks done that couldn't be traced back to their organization. There was Pel, the clean up man, but while he had a good mix of military and espionage skills, he was usually sent out to eliminate loose ends, and Trellani would probably react poorly to that. Then there was Ekko, a brilliant financial saboteur. But Ekko was no good in a fight, despite her other skills...

The Shadow Hand grimaced. As much as he disliked it, he'd have to utilize someone with a touch of both class and ability, and most of them had at least a tangential connection to Cerberus. He brought up another profile, carefully reviewing the operations undertaken, looking thoughtfully at the picture of the agent, then nodded, tapping the comms link on his desk.

"Have Agent Lawson report to me. I have a request for the Illusive Cell."
Chapter 14: Chapter 14 - Asari Miscellany

A/N: As the Cerberus Files are mostly geared towards providing an understanding of asari, they are light on many aspects of asari culture. I do not want people to think the asari culture is blandly sexualized – that's merely the rather hide-bound take of Dr. Minsta. The following is some out-of-character (neutral tone) notes on asari that didn't fit anywhere else properly.

I'm already working on the salarian history, but I wanted to get this out of the way first.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space : Out of character notes: Asari

Asari Social Interactions

Asari are very much creatures of ritual and habit, and they practice a wide array of social interactions that are unique to them. Introductions are very important, as are times and places for asari to meet that are deliberately shorn of social politics.

When two asari of equal social stature meet for the first time, they introduce themselves. Clanless will state their bloodline and mother, members of the Clans will state their Clan affiliation, and lesser Houses will state their family. A member of the Thirty will state their House, their mother, and the key figure of their ancestry. For example, Liara T'Soni would announce herself as Liara, chatelane of House T'Soni, daughter of Benezia, scion of the Line of Nathess T'Soni, who slew the Silent Queen.

If the introduction is in a formal setting, they will partake of an alkaline tea called chathesi. The chathesi ceremony is simple, pouring each other the drink and taking turns sipping while the other person defines themselves by achievement. The ceremony usually has several formalized topics – one asks about one's bondmate, their matriarch, their sisters, and their pursuits.

When two asari of unequal stature meet, the senior introduces themselves first. Depending on the gulf, chathesi may or may not be partaken. If the gulf is large – a member of the Thirty introducing herself to a clanless, for example – offering chathesi to her lesser would be a tremendous complement. Otherwise, after the introduction, the lesser is expected to withdraw.

Asari coming together for social interactions often prefer to eat before any other activity, usually small finger foods and light drinks. Maidens are not held to high standards of behavior, most of them being obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, excitement, or their own fixations. Matrons will usually talk about their families. Matriarchs, when they participate in such things, will usually talk about their pasts and what they have learned from them, and otherwise remain calm and watch their younger peers enjoy themselves.

Asari have a love of the dramatic, and storytelling with a certain level of embellishment is a fine art among asari parties. Asari are particularly enraptured by the cold and dangerous Justicars, who have enormous followings among the maidens of Thessia. The Justicars, of course, find this ridiculous to the extreme, but there are magazines, fan clubs, action figures, books, even movies about the Justicars and their achievements.

Matriarchs

The asari matriarch is a powerful force in asari society. Even a clanless matriarch has the respect of the highest, for surviving so long and maintaining herself. Typically, matriarchs will have an idea, concept, or motivating goal, one they've had all their life, and move towards this as they age. Often times, this concept attracts the attention of others, and these become followers of the matriarch.

Some matriarchs have enormous responsibilities , such as duties to the temple or running corporations. They do not let this interfere with their duty to act as guides for their people, and matriarchs are highly respected in whatever they turn their hands to. However, most matriarchs end up setting rather modest goals and , as such, their followings are rather small.

Matriarchs (especially on Thessia) continue to gain biotic power from absorbing eezo as they age, and thus are some of the most frightening biotic figures in known space. A clanless matriarch who has not paid much attention to focusing her biotics is still capable of overmatching a trained turian cabalist or even an STG biotic specialist just by dint of sheer biotic force. Fighting a civilian matriarch is difficult enough, as her barriers are about as strong as that of a MAKO and her biotics throws hit with about 1400 to 1700 N (stronger than most humans biotic charges can hit). A trained matriarch, or worse, one who has studied the teachings of Athame and thus the ancient and mysterious abilities of the Protheans, is even more deadly.

Matriarchs are not invulnerable. Despite everything they are very old, and as time goes by , while they don't age as humans do, they do become slower. The lithe movements and extreme flexibility of a maiden are gone for the vast majority of them. Also, matriarchs have gotten so used to having plenty of time to determine and react to events that they can be taken by surprise.

As a daughter matures, she often links with her matriarch for guidance. In the houses, this is done by the House Matriarch, in the clans, by the Clan Matriarch. In clanless, they often form informal family groups where two or three matriarchs provide guidance. Almost no asari venture, from fire deparments to dancing troupes, is lead by anything but a matriarch.

Asari Titles and Formality

The asari are big on formality, especially in social settings involving the Thirty. That being said, titles like 'princess', 'queen', or even 'matriarch' have human overtones that are not exactly correct. The best translation of shlantha , for example, is something like 'daughter-of-they-who-fell-from-Athame's-blood-respected'. Asari 'royalty' does not wear pink dresses and jewelery, nor do they ride around on massive estates. These titles are used to indicate a level of deference and even fear of the lower asari towards the Thirty.

Other titles are used as markers of respect. The asari prefer to use titles only during formal introductions. Liara would be introduced as a princess of the House T'Soni, but no one would call her 'Princess Liara' – princess , for the asari, is a title of her status, not her position. She would be called Lady Liara, or perhaps (in a truly stuffy formal setting) Chatelaine Liara.

Formality among the Clans is even more strict, as each Clan has it's own byzantine hierarchy where titles are used whenever discussing Clan business. Clan titles depend on one's position and social standing in the clans.

The clanless do not put much stock in the use of the ritualized titles. They are more casual in introductions, at least in that respect.

The Thirty and Asari Society

In the eyes of the average asari, the Thirty are directly descended from Athame, making each one of them divine. Their larger size and power only reinforces this. While many asari no longer worship Athame solely, preferring to focus more on siari, this is not due to dwindling believe in the Goddess, but the slow infusion of awe leading to most asari feeling that the Thirty should be an intercessor between Athame and the asari people.

The Thirty's beliefs range from acceptance and mania to tired and quiet unconcern. Most are used to the concept of being divine, and tend to take themselves a bit too seriously. This leads to accusations that the asari are 'elitist' or 'stuck-up'.

Asari Foods and Drinks

Asari foods cover a wide variety of fish, seaweed, fruits, and leafy vegetables. The most common asari food is pancres, a light sweet breadlike wafer filled with a mix of seaweeds and spices. Asari love all forms of seafood, prizing salarian blackfin and terran sea bass above even some asari fish, and prefer seedless fruits from the flame-tree, which are round, sweet, and pale grey in color, tasting somewhat like a mix between a pear and grapes.

Asari usually prefer small serving sizes, but as all asari are biotic and burn a lot of waste heat , they have very high calorie diets. As their bodies have measures to prevent arterial blockages, they consume a great deal of fatty meats and sugars, without gaining much weight. Rather than set mealtimes like humans have, they tend towards snacking when hungry.

Asari drinks include those fermented from fruit and a very strong, powerful series of drinks based on animal extracts. Some of these are potent enough to intoxicate krogan. Asari also brew a wide variety of seaweed and fruit-based teas, although some of these are seasoned quite bizarrely for human tastes, including salt, cinnamon, or even chocolate.

Asari delight in salarian cuisine, and have become very fond of human whiskey and gin. They obviously cannot partake of turian dishes but oddly enough turian cooks, with their meticulous eye for detail, are quite popular in asari space. Asari discovered chocolate five years after humans came on the galactic scene and now purchase and consume six times more than humanity does.

Asari Romance

The asari concept of romance is much different than that of humans. Asari have a belief that being with one person limits both them and the lover to a narrow range of experiences, so asari are free with their dalliances. That being said, as asari move out of the maiden state, they begin to desire some form of stability, and even wish for the devotion of someone to them.

Given the asari are about the only race that widely dallies with other races, they've gotten very good at figuring out what makes alien hearts beat faster. With turians, they focus on fidelity (however stupid that seems) and on their own ancestors – turians are immensely impressed by being introduced to a matriarch. With salarians they focus on the here and now, with krogan they tend to become more rambunctious and even combative.

Asari romances with humans are complicated, as asari don't really get humans. This ends up with both partners being emotionally hurt, sometimes quite badly. The more emotionally hurt an asari gets, the more she is likely to cling and try to fix the problem, which only excacerbates the breakdown. Humans are insanely jealous and even the most jaded can't handle the utterly open relationships asari often enter into. The number of suicides for broken relationships of this nature is sadly quite high.

Asari clanless have begun, with the seeping into the general asari psyche of bond-death, to take on more casual relationships, sometimes not even going beyond linking and melding to the true bond. The wild nature of many maidens means they're unlikely to do so in any case, but some asari are experimenting with red-sand and other biotic drugs to aid them in achieving a nervous system energy to achieve pregnancy without the bond.

Asari Literature

The asari genres of literature have some overlap with humanity – they have romance dramas, historical thrillers, etc. Two genres specific to the asari are echas and kalthos.

Echas, roughly "seeking", is a mix of asari philosophy and autobiography, written by asari who have lost a bondmate. Echas novels are searing emotional manifestos, laced with poetry , art, rambling discourses and even stories of the relationship. They are often read by teary-eyed maidens who promise themselves their own relationships will be different. Aliens find them touchingly sad – the ever famous Nekkia Corridor was based on one of the earliest, near mythological Echas sagas.

Kalthos , meaning "to grasp" , is asari poetry written by matriarchs, tied into the wisdom they have gained, and arranged around essays defining what each poem and piece of wisdom means. These books are immensely popular, but are almost impenetrable to outsiders.

Asari of course have a full range of literature, but epics, sagas, and memory-chants make up the largest part. The Code of the Justicars is one such chant, composed of many sutras, but longest of all is the Long Dirge, sung upon the destruction of one of the Houses of the Thirty, literally cataloging all the long honors, victories, and joys of the House.

Relationships between the Asari Clanless, Clans, and Houses

Asari society is not divided by economic status but by social standing, and as such, it's hard to define the relationships of the asari in a way that makes sense to humans. The easiest way to envision it is if the clanless were the lower class working poor, the clans were the upper middle class, and the Houses were the filthy rich.

The Clanless are focused mostly on their own lives, families, and friends. Few if any have aspirations higher than being successful in their work, raising their children, and being one with their peers. They tend to look at the Clans as backwards and yet elitist, since some jobs and professions are closed to those who aren't a member of the Clans. In turn, the Clans look upon the clanless as mostly unskilled commoners, unable to sacrifice to achieve the sort of focus the Clans have achieved. But the Clans are also jealous in a way of the Clanless, who have no social control over their lives, or who they mate with, etc.

The Clanless look upon the Thirty fearfully and with awe, often having been raised to utter a short phrase of blessing after even saying the words "The Thirty". Most Clanless do not understand the Thirty or what it is that they do, only knowing them as the mighty. Some outcast Clanless resent them for the fact that as clanless they rarely if ever will rise to such heights of power, even though this resentment is mixed with a grudging admiration. The Thirty, for their part, look upon the clanless as helpless children, needing of guidance and protection. The Thirty feel it is their responsibility to protect the clanless, even while it's their right and privilege to guide them.

The relationship between the Clans and the Thirty are complicated and vary from Clan to Clan, but for the most part the Clans, being traditionalists, are even more subservient and respectful of the Thirty than the clanless are.

Purebloods and Asari-asari offspring taboos

Among the clanless, purebloods are seen as disgusting throwbacks, and distrusted as being possible latent ardat-yakshi. The taboo is very strong the poorer the asari go, with the offworld clanless being even more opposed. That being said, the clanless also embrace relationships with other asari more often, and many , after a short-lived life with their alien mate, return to asari for comfort. But comfort is not having children, and the clanless almost never indulge in such. Those who do often do so out of emotional instability. Samara ended up having children with her childhood friend because both of them had alien bond-mates die on them before they could have children with them and were extremely traumatized.

The Clans are even more restrictive – asari having offspring with another asari are ejected from the Clan forever. While clanless merely look down on the purebloods, the Clans reject them utterly.

It is only the Thirty that are known to do such things. Even there, purebloods are not seen with any favor, and most will not be popular as House Matriarch. But such joinings happen, especially with smaller houses who seek to link their favor to larger ones. Benezia's and Aethlya's relationship was the scandal of the century for many asari, but it was intended to heal the vicious breach between House T'Soni and House Vasir. It ended up only making it worse when the two split up.

Purebloods who are not ardat-yakshi are usually biotically stronger than other asari, meaning that a Pureblood of the Thirty is often a match for whatever she may encounter. But the stigma against such in the Houses is very strong, and most such Purebloods end up mere plays in the politics of House relationships, shunted aside to less important positions or even sent to the Citadel.

Asari religious practices

About 7% of the asari follow the tenets of Athame , not counting the ranks of the Moondance clans. About 32% of asari are devoted to siari, while another 51% at least follow it's tenets. The remaining ten percent usually follow siari mixed with some other alien religion – salarian wheel rites, turian ancestor worship, or more recently, human zen Buddhism. Human Christianity and Islam, fixiated on concepts of sin and submission, have not made any real inroads into asari society, nor has hanar worship of the Enkindlers.

Asari Morals and Ethics

Asari morality is scaled and set different than human morality in some ways. They cherish life and see murder, rape, theft, and slavery as mortal sins, but they do not attach morality to relationships, sex, or friendships. Asari morality is more about why an act was committed than the act itself , but even then, most asari are forgiving of trespasses against the individual, and hard on those who go against the asari race.

Asari ethics are also mostly based on cooperative natures and consensus. Unethical acts for asari include deliberately injuring a person's emotional or mental state to gain advantage, the misuse of public funds in any capacity, or serving outside influences before the needs of the asari. Human ethics, with it's focus on fair play, is strange to asari, who will angle for every benefit and advantage they can without doing any permanent harm.
Chapter 15: Chapter 15 - Salarian Intro, History

A/N: I'm starting the Salarian section, but I still have some work left to do on the asari piece, based on feedback. I apologize for the very long length, but as it turns out this took DAYS to write, because so much of it is new material that one must come up with from scratch.

There's a lot of influences in here – sixties revolutionary culture, Starship Troopers, a bit of neo-Platonic thinking, psychosomatic planning, and of course, a touch of Three Kingdoms bickering. It's probably also not a good sign that most of this was written to the background accompaniment of Orochimaru's Theme, is it?

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Dearest Jack, clever Richard, and lovely Rachel,

I've arrived safely on Mannovai, and with the help of my friends in the University of Sur'Kesh, have already amassed a staggering amount of historical data. Agent Lawson is attempting to learn something of the art of being seductive without relying on one's body to do so, but she remains a dull stone in many regards, despite her intellect and fierce skills. Still, her background in analysis helps when I must sort through this morass of trivia – salarians are so savage and yet fussy about the events in their history!

Minsta's work, while certainly interesting, was almost ham-fisted and certainly inelegant when it came to describing my race. Do not think such a droll document sums up the asari. There is no mention of the many rituals and ceremonies that define the life of the least of us, nothing about the relationships between mothers and daughters, no indication of so many aspects of our culture. As a guide to familiarity with asari, it lacks the touch of true experience.

Asari, however, are used to such brusqueness from creatures who live a span of time that wouldn't even be sufficient for an asari to master her craft. Salarians, with their blazingly short lives, are more complex and nuanced. The keyword you must incorporate into your understanding of salarians is awareness. They are aware, of every second, on many levels that not even the finest asari minds can comprehend.

Salarian history, of course, is something that truly requires a deep and open understanding of the nature of the species in question to grasp what is significant and what is merely gilded pride, or even mere happenstance. One could argue that, despite the reshaping of human morality and society that was inflicted on you by Emperor Ardiente and the Manswells, that human history even at this late date is still shaped by events such as World War II or the inability of China to master it's inward-looking focus. Such is it with the salarians as well.

I will of course provide an overview of salarian history, but I will try to indicate those points and people that truly altered the flow of their narrative. It is not enough to recite dates and dry facts, with salarians you can feel a glimpse of what it must be like to be an asari, when in the span of a single human life three or even four salarian generations pass.

Salarian culture is hyperactive, polymorphic and yet anchored on concepts that haven't changed in thousands of years. It's languages are complex and laced with mathematics and logical precepts in a way that shows the bend of salarian thinking. And salarian religious concepts are perhaps more influential in their daily lives than with any other race.

I will attempt to enlighten, but it is your choice as to if the light of my words falls upon the waters or the hands.

Trellani Thought of the Day: A system that doesn't encrypt it's footer messages and yet has root access to every outgoing message could carry protoformed VI hacks through your entire network. You should really secure that.

Prehistory

The earliest salarians were salamander like creatures dwelling on the rich, wide rivers of the Mantha Forest in central Sur'Kesh. Sur'Kesh is a tropical planet, with two continents – Ikkune, or 'core', and Irukka, or 'beyond'. Ikkune is a large, heavily forested continent with lush jungle between three huge river vales that spill into the sea. Irukka is a long chain of massive mountainous isles that was once a shield mountain range before it began to subsume into the warm oceans.

These early salarians were clever little creatures, and their cousins, simka, still can be found today. Doglike and agile, with quick reflexes and masterful senses of sight and smell, they were engaged in a vicious evolutionary contest with heavier, larger mammalian creatures. The salarians were forced to rely on their minds and reflexes in the dangerous environments of the Mantha Forest, and were able to survive by dint of preying on the children of their competitors.

A series of tectonic events has been postulated for a global rise in sea levels, with many of the forests becoming wetlands and swamps, tilting things in the advantage of the proto-salarians. However, the lizards were never amphibious, and ended up mostly living at the edge of the established wetlands, living on insects and carrion, while mammals starved from the destruction of the vegetation they depended upon.

It is interesting, and even a touch humbling, to realize by what simple chance there may have never been salarians. And perhaps I am merely fanciful to wonder what would have taken their place if not for that surge in the sea. But the salarians thrived, and as the oceans slowly receded, they needed higher rates of locomotion. Thus, by about half a million years ago, salarians reached a fairly upright stance, and shifted from insect eaters to full time scavengers and carrion feeders as their mass grew.

There is a great deal of archeological evidence (most of it curated neatly away in salarian museums) that some precursor race prior to Protheans tampered with salarian development at some point, but that effort did not yield the expect results and the project was abandoned. It is sad to consider what loss of function must have been entailed, but the fossil record shows salarian brain size increased four-fold by 300,000 years ago, while the jaw structure was significantly altered from that of a scavenger to an omnivore.

The reasons for this were fairly simple – a purely carnivorous creature of that size would have swiftly grown to become an alpha predator. Given the fragile ecosystems of Sur'Kesh, this would have almost certainly lead to explosive growth followed by starvation and mass die offs. Additionally, if the ancients were attempting to breed sentient beings, then records indicate that omnivores are the most likely candidates. With the dubious exception of the vorcha, no sentient race has ever been recorded that is not either herbivorous or omnivorous. (The reasons are complex and this is not a study on evolutionary sociobiology.)

The new meat-light diet of the ancient salarians meant that they slowly lost mass and bulk over the next geological periods, eventually ending up as rather clever fishers, eating wild fruits and some light hunting of small, fat-rich animals such as river lizards and mannosk (an animal much like oxen but adapted to river life).

Ancient salarians organized themselves into rough hunting packs, usually several hundred males protecting a few dozen females. Even then, the ratio of male to female was skewed, and much of today's salarian society probably traced back to savage, unthinking battles between competing packs of hunters.

These ancient salarians, even then, must have been devastatingly swift. The fossil record is inexact, since so much of the salarian skeletal mass is cartilage, but there were several such bodies found preserved in swamp tar that showed the same limber carriage, elegant limbs, and unique hook-horned heads as modern salarians.

First Salarian Sentience

Salarians began experimenting with basic tool use around two-hundred thousand years ago, mostly sticks and the like, but the oldest 'complete' set of stone flake-style implements dates to less than ninety thousand years ago. (Please note that humans experimented with the Oldevai tools nearly two million years ago – human technological speed only reached impressive paces after the rise of writing.) They mastered fire nearly seventy thousand years ago, and simple packs slowly began to form hunter-gatherer associations.

These ancient tools were not universal – some tribes had lesser implements – but they spread rapidly, and with the control of fire began moving from living in forest clearings to making their own. The salarian nest was several heaped layers of stones and mud, forming crude ziggurats – a shape of building they prefer even to this day. There may be some innate psychological safety in such shapes, or perhaps racial memories. (Ms. Lawson suggests kidnapping a few and performing psychological batteries. If you chose to indulge in such casual barbarity instead of looking for records of deep asari melds with salarians, then please, take them from the Terminus Systems. I have no wish to deal with STG thugs ruining my morning tea.)

By sixty thousand years ago, salarian hunter packs had ranged far across the core, penetrating into the Yin-Slath Jungles and the Coreai Swamps. They'd mastered slings and spears, as well as heavy bows made with the flexible horns and gut from the heavy mannosks. At some point, following the mannosk herds lead to them beginning to experiment with domestication, and finally primitive agriculture with the mannosk acting as motive power.

The first primitive permanent encampments sprang up around this time, along with increasingly complicated tool uses. The early salarians were inspiringly clever in their innovations. Their stone age tools were elegant, clever, using double-serrated edges and flexible wood, cunningly carved into sliding tubes, to perform their hunts with. Even as savages, the salarians would settle for nothing but the best technology.

First Salarian Cultures

Sadly, given the fascinating nature of prehistoric salarians, contemporary historians pay little attention to them. The jungle and wet nature of Sur'Kesh also works against truly ancient archeological research, as any non-stone artifacts rotted away long ago. Most hard information the salarians have, or care to share, is from the first flowering of salarian culture, some nine thousand years ago.

The earliest rise of such cultures seems to be at the meeting of two huge rivers, below a great bluff of stone that thrust up like a large hand from the waters. This was called the Reach of Sur'Kesh, and even today is the holiest site on the planet. Towering almost four hundred feet into the air and honeycombed with natural, rolling caverns and tunnels carved by ancient vulcanism, the Reach was a fortress created by the hand of nature.

The Reach, in those days, was built around with river crossings, campsites and primitive, wood-paved roads, lacquered with certain resins and mineral salts from the river outflow. Even then, the salarians prized organization and understood the need for paths of travel. The early tribal cultures even had primitive toll systems, bartering fish and salt for furs and meats from those moving inland from the river delta.

These early cultures were mostly hunting and gathering bands, who met at the Reach to practice primitive religious ceremonies. Eventually, this became a series of pilgrimages, a mix of social gathering, religious gathering, and bartering. These early salarians developed a written and spoken language, ancient Kurki, which is the root tongue for all salarian languages.

The river valley was where agriculture was first practiced year round, and eventually some salarians began settling down permanently, carving homes out of the rock cliffs. Sadly, most of the goods this culture produced are no longer extant, but the salarians recorded much art and history on these walls, and in vast cliff carvings around the base of the cliff.

The cultures (known as the Dawn-age Collectives) were four or possibly five large tribal structures, that eventually came to see the Reach as neutral ground, but battled incessantly among themselves for hunting, females and land. The culture that ended up settling around the Reach were brokers and traders, raising crops and fishing and trading tools, grains and the like to the far ranging hunter-gatherer tribes.

The Severing

This amazingly stable culture managed to survive for almost 500 years. Wars were confined to the tribes, never brought within the confines of the Reach, and with this stability, the Reach began to grow wealthy. Acting as the center of trade and power, it's open air markets and temples marked the beginning of real civilization. Written histories and art, carved fish-scale displays and fine weapons were all available here.

However, each tribe began to covet the increasing wealth and power of the Reach, while the Reach itself began training primitive militia. As the Reach salarians began to work metals such as bronze, they kept these superior weapons for themselves. The Reach leadership, a collection of religious tribal leaders who also acted as kings, formed a united council and concentrated power in the hands of a few influential families, mostly those with fleets of fishing boats or large croplands.

Political tensions reached a head around 8500 years ago, when the out-land tribes decided they were going to claim the Reach for themselves, once and for all. Tired of being forced to live a subsistence lifestyle, yet unwilling to form cooperative groups with the skills and determination to create their own towns, these tribes were more opportunistic militant bands than rich tribal cultures. Cruel and rapacious, they bartered their females as if they were fish, and became violent and arrogant, embracing a combat based, honor-based culture of weakness being seen as a perfectly valid reason to kill.

Some of this immoral – or perhaps, anti-moral – stance is still seen in many salarians. Historically, salarians have never openly declared war, seeing it as a stupid surrender of advantage.

The ancient tribes were too specialized – some depended on hunting, others on fishing, others on trapping or logging – to succeed in a group endeavor without the skilled coordination of the Reach culture, but they convinced themselves they could just take it over through military conquest.

The resulting war was a catastrophe. Fire, corpses and massive amounts of fighting destroyed the tribes, ruining the crops and pillaging much of the outlying settlements around the Reach. The Reach forces, armed with bronze scale and swords, could hold their own in battle, but the Reach was very heavily outnumbered by seven to one. Worse, most of the Reach inhabitants were soft compared to the hard, wild tribesmen. Finally, with the ugly reality that the Reach was pinned by rivers, they could be laid siege to by the outlanders, who could hunt to supply themselves even as the Reach starved.

The shaman-kings of the Reach decided the best way to win was not through force of arms, but rather through subterfuge. Using valuable gifts and emissaries sent under the cover of darkness, they promised each of the three largest tribes that the Reach would surrender to them if they were able to stop their fellow tribes from ransacking the city and killing it's people. They suggest that, indeed, the lesser, weaker tribes were a threat to the stronger three tribes, and that a single winner would embrace a new era of control and power for the tribes.

This enough probably would have reduced the enemy to manageable numbers, as the three decided that the only way to ensure they would be on top would be to obliterate their rivals. But the salarian mind is more devious than mine or yours.

Seventeen other salarians volunteered to carry false messages through the night. They knew they would be captured and killed. The messages they carried were purportedly to the three large tribes, stating the Reach would ally with the larger (and more organized) tribes if they in turn fell upon and destroyed the smaller tribes.

As might be expected, the ruse worked brilliantly. The smaller clans attempted to swarm the larger tribes, who were already fighting for the right to rule. Battles erupted all along the battle and siege lines, as driven by greed and fear, they turned on one another.

The result was a savage free for all, turning in a slaughter of most of the tribal armies, and ending with a cold-blooded massacre of the many of the survivors by the Reach. The tribes, shattered, fell back to their hunting grounds, but the Reach leadership decided to take a drastic effort to secure their livelihood, and continued to attack.

Many of the tribes who didn't take part in the attack, seeing the bared might before them, retreated to the southern mountains, choosing to live off the land. The tribes that fought, on the other hand, managed to regroup near the coast, swearing revenge on the Reach.

As a result, over the next couple of centuries, the Reach identified and kidnapped as many females from the hostile, out-land tribes as they could, using assassins to kill off powerful tribal leaders, and reduced the tribes to shadows of themselves. The Reach civilization, absorbing the remains, centralized their government around the four shaman-kings of the Reach and unified salarians, expanding outward from that point. What remained of the tribes fled far from the Reach, eventually building boats and fleeing over the sea to the islands of Irruka.

Salarian Iron Ages

The Reach empire (the ancient name for it was literally Ulkana, or "Reach Empire) grew rapidly in the 800 years that followed, slowly advancing through iron ages. I use the term 'iron ages' as familiar to you, although the salarians would term it the Age of Intrigues.

However, it can't be argued that this is when the salarians began using iron, and the control of forging iron by the shaman-kings of the Reach meant that, even as tribes began rising on the outskirts of the empire, they were suborned and conquered by the Reach.

Expanding their road network, the Reach Empire eventually controlled almost three fourths of the central continent, ignoring those primitives who chose to well in the rough mountains, building cities as they went. Salarian life expectancy at this point was barely twenty five years, so an accounting of the achievements of individuals was meaningless.

The Reach Empire grew so rapidly that they soon outstripped their ability to grow food. With females gathered in a central location and children kept safe from rampant warfare, the salarian population grew very fast, and sanitation and logistics began to affect the Empire. The fisheries were depleted, the soil began to fail, and even the hunting grew sparse.

The empire tried several methods to counter this, but most ended up in failure as there was no real understanding of the underlying systems and problems with the Empire. The balance of power shifted precipitously between those still with fertile lands and those without, and as the situation worsened so did internal infighting.

The mountain tribes, removed from the center forests,were less effected by this, as their diet depended more on coastal fishing and hunting in the mountains. Additionally, their much smaller population was more diffused among the mountains and did not overstress the environment as much. They kept their distance from the Reach Empire and tried to just endure day by day, building a culture with a hard-core edge of grim survivalist thinking and utterly immoral pragmatism.

Across the sea, the old tribal remnants had forged themselves into a very different sort of culture, one dominated by females instead of males, due to the scarcity of females that had managed to evade the Reach's kidnappers to flee across the ocean. The islands had their own natural resources, including vast fields of edible seaweed and almost inexhaustible fish stocks, as well as the animals on the islands. Secure from any attack from the mainland, they were able to build in peace, but the ignominious defeat they had suffered at the hands of the Reach Empire in the old days still burned brightly, and their culture, while female dominated, still was full of male honor systems and vengeance killings. Thus, even as the Reach began to fall apart, these seagoing cultures added to the problem, raiding the coastline and even plundering the coastal cities.

The Collapse

At some point about 7500 to 7200 years ago, the Reach's ability to feed it's people was destroyed by a series of events happening contemporaneously. First, there was a large drought, which made the rivers fall, killed most of the crops, and ruined what hunting was left in the area. Second, the island tribes conducted a vicious series of raids, focusing not on military targets but on food storage facilities. Having learned from their earlier defeat, now it was these island outcasts who were the ones using spies and saboteurs.

But most devastatingly, the population had simply outstripped the technology of the time to feed. Humans, I believe, had a social scientist named Malthus who once predicted the same fate for your kind, but your ability to grow food and thus attain food security was always ahead of your growth rate. Not so for the Reach. With depleted soil and droughts, with much of the Empire scattered over an enormous area and no real way to preserve food for transport to other parts of the Empire, the Reach came apart. Starvation killed millions of salarians, the dead overwhelming the living.

The next 1500 years were a dark-ages for the mainland salarians. The island tribes stole what they could and withdrew, but much history, art, and beauty was lost in these dark times. Goddess only knows how the salarians survived this time, but eventually a hard core of them did. It had an effect on their culture and their outlook, I believe, one that many who seek to understand salarians fail to grasp. Most think of them as sneaks, as spies, as mere manipulators. But above that, salarians are survivors, driven by a need to defy chance and fate by their intellect and creativity.

Salarians were shaped by this period of want, confusion and loss. Even today, they refer to the Collapse as the blackest of times, a curse used only when something is truly dire. "By the Collapse" is to refer to the utter failure of foresight and planning, the surrender to chaos and anarchy.

Over time, what survivors there were began to slowly band together. Living in small communities lead by a small group of females, these bands slowly began clawing their way back to civilization. It was hard, as they had to use their minds to try to find ways rejuvenate the area, and they had neither any guaranteed food supplies nor the ability to repel raids from the coast.

And yet, between a mix of harvesting river mud and using manure they were able to grow small plots of various grains and plants for consumption. But there was no large gatherings of people on the mainland, and the islands, being much poorer places to grow things on, deliberately limited their population. It seemed for a long time that eventually the last of the Reach cultures would die out, and civilization would be nothing but rude primitives subsisting on the fringes.

The Rise of the Daltriana

Salarians might have toiled in mediocrity for ever if not for the rise of the single most influential salarian in history. As I said, salarians in the ancient days died early, and tracking individuals is hardly productive, but one stands out.

About six thousand years ago, one of the females of the Tribe Salar decided she wanted to be the chief of the tribe. Her name was Shego, and her tribe was nothing special, being one of the broken remains of the original tribal cultures driven into the mountains by the Old Reach Empire. But Shego was brilliant, even for a salarian, and was able to maneuver herself into a place of power in small steps. First, she dominated her tribe, using the power of being the only mature, egg-laying female and leaving military matters to the males while she dominated everything else.

Next, she daringly implied a neighboring tribe was stronger, teasing and dispatching one of her daughters to a third clan implying they could work together to bring down their allies. Her timing in the message was deliberately off, and the other clan attacked their target first, blunting their response to the attack of the Salar. In the aftermath, she absorbed the other two tribes, but did something startling. Instead of a council of elders and shamans, she made a tribal council of elder females.

Calling herself the Daltriana ("she who knows"), Shego began commanding in earnest. The old histories don't state why males, usually aggressive and unruly, listened, but they did. It's a pity Shego was born a salarian, she would have made a brilliant member of the Thirty.

Her stratagems of subterfuge (triple crosses, the use of young females to proud tribal males to gain their allegiance, poisoned river water used to incite enemy forces to drink wine her forces had drugged hours before) were unmatched. With nothing more than guile, iron will, and the ability to out-think and out-plan her opponents, in the 24 years of her reign, the northern tribes had swelled into a massive band of unified warriors under the command of the dalatrasses, the mothers of the lines.

Here it is necessary to illustrate one of the hinge points of salarian history. This event is where the salarians began, fully, to eschew concepts of honor and violence for espionage. They'd used it before, but it was Shego who would let no word be given of an attack until it fell upon the enemy. It was the Daltriana who would form the Silent Step, the first known secret agents of the salarians, masters at disguise and language.

Shego encouraged research, and was interested in plants and herbs. Restless and brilliant, when not incapacitated by egg-laying she was tireless in finding ways to expand the reach and power of her followers. Shego protected those who found new methods to farm, to trap fish, to harness primitive wind powered millstones to provide finer wheat. It was Shego who reached out to the island tribes to trade with, bringing strange fish and spices back to the mainland along risky sea-bound and coastal trading routes.

Shego died at the age of 58, a staggeringly old age for any salarian, much less back in a day before antibiotics or proper sanitation. She left behind nineteen daughters, each of which took the title of dalatrass, and the Northern Tribes began the march to the south. They pushed back the old Reach survivors far enough to establish crop lands, even taking the northernmost cities of the old Reach Empire before settling into place and seeking power by dint of trade.

Ergohai, Maithan, and Soluthus

The three groups of salarians – Reach Empire survivors, struggling to rebuild; outcast tribals on the Ikkune islands, expanding their sea empire; and finally, the daughters of Shego, seeking to return to civilization – defined the true historical era of the salarians. They formed three empires, each engaging in subterfuge, spying, trade, limited war, even full out invasions in some cases.

Ergohai, the 'new' Reach Empire, was the most advanced and cosmopolitan of the three, building in the remains of the old Reach. Careful about food stocks and obsessed with technological advancement, Ergohai was less numerous than the other two, but had well-defended walled cities that were hard to attack. Still lead by shaman-kings, Ergohai ended up being, once again, a center-point for trade between the three empires, but was a morass of espionage as well.

Maithan was the ocean-going culture of tribals that fled the Reach early on. Like the followers of Shego, they had a female-dominated society, and they were the most warlike and violent of the empires. They saw Shego's people as cousins and would trade with them freely, but most hated the Reach and warred with them incessantly, using raids and terrorism to contain their growth.

Thus, it was Soluthus, the new group of tribes forged into a nation by the hand of Shego and her daughters, (ah, how very familiar to me, and probably utterly strange to you) that held the balance of power. Soluthus wanted Maithan to grow, to farm, make tools, and be able to provide a neutral meeting area, while the mountains the ancient tribes fled to, while not allowing them to grow much food, provided a new boon – rich deposits of iron and gold.

The ocean empire of Maithan were the only ones capable of producing fish, as well as link the wide-flung cities of Ikkune. Additionally, the threat of attack from the Ergohai kept Maithan from threatening Soluthus.

This elegantly balanced dance endures up to this day, although there is no hostility between the nations now. The Ergohai remain the explorers of society, manning the salarian fleets and are the first to want to colonize, to explore, to pull away. The Maithan remain cosmopolitan, sophisticated and scientific, always pushing development and further organization. But it is the Soluthus, those children of the Salar Tribe, the descendants of Shego, that embody the manipulation and balance of the race.

Shego's influence led to the dalatrasses becoming the center of salarian politics. As the empires grew, the tribes slowly lost their individual flavor and customs, melting into the national mindsets that enveloped them.

Salarian Dawn of Discovery

The cessation of most open war between the nations led to the need for increasing levels of innovation, as the salarian birth rate was extremely high. The nations were forced to work together to create new methods of agriculture, aquaculture, and to advance the life sciences to a large degree. 4500 years ago, they began to set aside national conflicts, even cooperate, in the name of science and learning.

Called the Dawn of Discovery by the salarians, this age was where they played a continual gamble with the lives of the race against their own wits. Vast academies, called 'uloi', were set aside, funded by salarian governments and businesses. Salarians devoted their whole lives to incremental and fundamental shifts in their understanding of the world, themselves, and all within it.

They rapidly pioneered technology that let them explore the seafloor, creating huge farms of kelp and seaweed, while they engineered a huge bay 80 miles long and 200 miles wide to act as a single gigantic fish farm. They grasped electricity and embraced hydrodynamic power quickly, being one of the few races that did not despoil the natural beauty of their world. Industry was always cutting edge, yet no salarian would be happy with anything but the highest efficiency.

It also lead to rapid advances in war-fighting – they achieved the use of advanced weapons and even biological warfare worryingly fast. And they used such at the drop of a hat, when they needed to, when negotiations failed. And yet, despite these petty skirmishes, peace continued to build, until even these minor fights faded.

The increasing cooperation between the nations as they fought to master their world lead to ever higher amounts of espionage, as the nations competed to ensure they were not overtaken by the achievements of the others. At the same time, it also lead to increasing ties between the nations of a friendly nature, as learning and discovery brought out something incredible in the salarian spirit. Eventually, this lead to one of the wonders of the galaxy.

I have seen many great monuments by all manner of aliens. The incredible Sha Titans of the Dust Age turians, the endless citadel-mounts of the Bangshuk batarian dynasty, the almost impossibly huge Great Wall of China on your earth – all of these raise the flaps of ones skin, to make one feel small, tiny and perhaps even a bit scared. The unity of the asari has always been mighty and our core strength, but I for one have never allowed myself to forget that other races can demonstrate equally strong unity at certain times.

But never have I felt so humbled as when I gazed upon the Sparak, the ancient city of scholars on Sur'Kesh. Girdled by walls a hundred feet high, it was vast circle almost sixteen miles across, filled to the brim with narrow streets and towering concrete ziggurat-towers. Here, millions of salarians were born, lived, learned, discovered, and died for their race. They had no wish or hope to leave, they were slaves in a way, sacrificing their entire lives, and their children's lives and how many generations we may never know, to science. To ensure the Collapse would never come again.

Their mantra, carved in the ancient text of the earliest salarians, was simple: knowledge is possibility, ignorance is death. They strove to bring together the finest minds of the entire planet, to bring together the best of what it meant to be salarian, to find the answers to what lead to war, to the Collapse, and to stop it from recurring.

They sought as well to not just define 'survival through knowledge', but unity through understanding. They wanted to be so valuable, in effect, that no salarian would have to kill another again. To drive entropy and chaos into rout, to bring order to anarchy.

In a thousand short years the Sparak drove development, pushing salarian technology from swords to laser weapons. They grasped techniques other races could not develop without computers and robots, such as precision surgery and genetic manipulation. They bred themselves to be leaner, to be smarter, to be ever faster and more capable of sensory input, until they were little more than flesh made lightning and brilliance given physical form.

Do not dismiss the salarian, pretty Rachel, simply because they seem frail at first glance. You have seen what their soldiers can do. They are not tough, but they never miss. They are not strong, but they can out-think, outrun, and out-dodge you or me by a factor of six. They plan for every possibility, and then for that which is impossible, and then plans beyond that. They think faster, capable of maintaining upwards of five separate lines of thought at once. They react faster, their outrageously over-tuned nervous systems allowing them feats of agility unmatched by any other race, even the drell, and their very physiology lends them flexibility that is equally unmatched.

The Sparak's might brought about an immense change in the world of the salarians. Challenged by the knowledge and influence of the scholars, the priest-kings of Maithan slowly lost their grip on their own people, and eventually a council of dalatrasses took up much of the workings of government from them. Once the last of the aggressive males was no longer deciding political policy, the way was clear for the Salarian Union to be born.

3100 years ago, the nations of Ergohai, Maithan, and Soluthus signed a treaty of mutual cooperation, creating a framework of government that would lead the entire planet into the future. It divided Sur'Kesh into 'tiers of influence', led by dalatrasses, that met to determine a group of three who would speak for all salarians.

War ended utterly and completely, and even internal espionage, although still rampant, at least became less lethal. The uloi were made holy ground, never to be attacked or to be shelter for or against military forces, dedicated solely to the advancement of the race. Many of the most powerful espionage agencies fragmented, becoming mercenaries, working for salarian corporations or private interests.

But the most skilled of the spies unified themselves into a group known as the League of One, dedicated to ensuring the salarian people did not destroy themselves or that any one nation dominate the others. The League prevented and stopped wars, leaked information between nations that defused tensions, and took out aggressive leaders or those stirring hatreds.

The League had the "Six Rules of Approach", which are often quoted by salarians even today, as a kind of defining charter of what the League embodied. The rules were simple, but I include them in this history as the best way of defining exactly what salarians are.

The first rule: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. Salarian history shows this concept repeatedly, the betrayals of the earliest Reach Empire against it's tribal foes shows it.

The second rule: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy, for then they have no idea of your true power. The switch from military force to espionage and assassination was cited as key example of this rule.

The third rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. The salarians became masters at attritional, asymmetric psychological warfare. Knowing assassins were there to take you out if you went against the wishes of the dalatrasses was more nerve-wracking than actually being attacked.

The fourth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. The salarians believe that every attack the enemy can't answer to with an immediate response must come from sources that don't allow such responses in the first place. Salarians reject solutions that leave the target no choice but to fight, rather trying to sow chaos and uncertainty for as long as possible. An attack that is too successful leaves the target no constructive alternative but direct combat.

The fifth rule: Exhaustion, be it political, economic, or social, is the most potent weapon. The salarians never want to fight foes at full strength, rather preferring them already fatigued and weakened by the time the first heavy blows fall.

The sixth rule: A tactic that requires too much time becomes a risk. Salarians believe the faster and quicker actions are undertaken, the more successful they will be because they offer less reaction time.

These rules are simple, but they shape how the salarians approach the universe, and offer insights into the next portion of their history.

Salarian Information and Space Age

The unity found by the drawing together of nations and cultures lead to further advancements. Always looking for better ways to do things, the brilliant and multitasking salarian mind didn't need augmentation the way other races did, but eventually, they also created computer technology, and from there, realized the potential of such things. Some three thousand years ago, the salarians began their love affair with the computer.

Salarians began to computerize and automate everything they worked on, driving the creation of VI's early on and AI's not much after that. However, these early AI's were very unstable and ended up in stage I rampancy very quickly, leading to the Salarians destroying them and banning further research. Given the salarian attitude towards knowledge, for them to ban a line of research was extremely out of character for them. I find myself wondering if there was more to the AI conflict that is in the histories, but it is difficult to be sure of anything given salarian propensity to alter their own views of their past and to eliminate facts that might challenge the rule of the dalatrasses.

What is known is the salarians began explorations of space some three thousand years ago – well over three hundred years before we asari were able to begin such. Early salarian ships were powered using gigawatt ion drives and multi-stage fusion drives, achieving very high fractions of lightspeed. The mysterious relay at the edge of the Sur'Kesh system drove the salarians mad, but they had no way to activate it at first.

It took the salarians about eighty years of sublight travel before they stumbled onto a system with both Prothean ruins and eezo. In fact, the salarians found the wreckage of an old Prothean shipyard, blasted to pieces in some ancient war but still chock-full of various artifacts and, most importantly, the Prothean VI known as Verment. Badly damaged and suffering a loss of data regarding what happened to the Protheans, it was able to catapult salarian science and understanding of mass effect physics forward a hundred fold.

The second wave of salarian exploration was utterly titanic, nearly a full nine percent of the race flung outwards in exploration and colonization ships, scrambling to locate eezo and build up a knowledge of the universe. An early foray into a nearby system resulted in the salarian vessels coming under attack from an automated defense system from a long-dead alien race, and the salarians began to arm their vessels and work on warships.

Salarian exploration teams used scout ships with huge fuel reserves and powerful FTL engines – indeed, the FTL drives of the salarians were more primitive than those of my own people when we met, but had three times our range. Salarian scouts discovered many planets, and often were hesitant to open new mass relays without knowing what was on the other side. Rather, they would use FTL to explore a wide range of space, opening a new relay only when existing stars they could reach were all cataloged.

Salarian scouts thus managed to observe volus, elcor, and even humans in this manner. There is fragmentary evidence that salarian wide-arc scouts entered Sol around 550 AD, and there are multiple human, volus and elcor skeletons on display at the Salarian Museum of Exploration that date from far before your race was known to others. There is very good evidence that the salarians monitored humanity and the volus for hundreds of years, taking captives and monitoring developments. The salarians deny this , of course... but they deny everything.

What the salarians might have planned to do with such knowledge is moot, as they discovered the Citadel and the asari soon after.

Salarian Discovery of Citadel

Less than a century after my own people found the open flower of the Citadel, the salarian scout teams arrived. At first, there was a standoff – both my people and the salarians nervous and ready to fight. But neither of our races was overly aggressive, and within a few weeks we began to understand each others languages and the salarians sent dalatrasses to speak with the matriarchs on the Citadel.

Our discovery that the salarians had two sexual aspects lead to great amounts of confusion in the language, as we were trying to grasp a concept not seen on Thessia. We had, of course, found evidence of such things on other worlds, but most asari paid no mind to that just as most humans 'know' there is asexual reproduction but see that in terms of one-celled organisms dividing, not sentient beings.

It became apparent that the asari had only a few trump cards. We were already in control of the Citadel, and we had powerful jump drives, faster FTL drives, and more powerful weapons, as well as our biotics. But the salarians had more advanced technology in literally every other avenue, from shields to sensors. The Council of Matriarchs must have run the numbers and applied their wisdom to finding a peaceful coexistence, as I am not sure asari would have won such an early fight.

That being said, the formation of the Citadel Council was more of a collusion between the Circle of Dalatrasses and the Council of Matriarchs both deciding such a thing would help them retain power rather than any meeting of the minds. The Council formation was the first and last time the salarian dalatrasses left Sur'Kesh en masse. The High Dalatrass, Shiron Ergohai, met with High Matriarch Lidya T'Armal in closed quarters in what is now the Citadel Tower but was back then called the Needle.

What words, I wonder, were spoken, between these creatures, one ancient, one barely twenty five years old? Ah, but to have been there, to have seen the dance of words and subtle threats and even more subtle offers. The asari left no record of what happened, but Shiron had a journal of her experiences, and implies she linked in a non-sexual manner with the matriarch, and in her words, "Our goals and that of the blue aliens were not so different. We are both mothers, both fearful of the dark between the stars, both burdened with the leadership of our people into a future we have no information on."

The salarians, as a gesture of trust, offered a display of the intelligence their signals and scanning operators had been able to gather on the asari remotely. The asari were horrified to realize than in two short years, salarians had been able to hack through asari systems on the Citadel to access records on Thessia itself. They realized they were facing a race that, if push came to shove, could do a great deal of damage to them.

The salarians, for their part, were equally worried and concerned about the asari ability to link and meld, which was a very high violation of the only privacy most salarians had, which was their thoughts. It lead to uncomfortable situations among the two races, and the League of One, distrustful of the asari, began investigating them further.

Unfortunately, these investigations lead to the discovery of certain asari contingency plans in case of war with the salarians. Alarmed, and with a cultural misunderstanding of how asari looked at war, the League decided the asari needed to be neutralized. The League, formed in the days where the survival of the race was the highest stake possible, did not attempt to find ways to neutralize the plans the asari had, or to prepare for war. They decided the asari themselves were the issue, and drew up plans for the literal destruction of the entire asari race. The creation of the pulse inhibitor, and salarian money and investment in the salarian biotics program, stem from this initiative.

The League prepared to initiate their masterstroke, finally informing the Dalatrasses of what they had learned. The Dalatrasses, who had drawn up the same kind of plans to destroy the asari in case they proved to be warlike, disagreed with the need to destroy the asari. Thus far, all was peaceful.

The League attempted to do so anyway and the Dalatrasses responded by assembling a group of skilled assassins and other espionage assets. Dalatrass Shiron gave them their duty – "I have for you a special task" – and the STG was born.

The STG and the League engaged in fighting and assassinations for years, before the League was crushed utterly. (Well, almost utterly. It's the belief of some that the so-called League of Zero are cybernetic AI reconstructions of the League of One.) The salarians cleverly used this infighting as a way to convince their asari allies of their sincerity. My people were of course, with our ideas of unity, deeply moved by the fact that the salarians would kill their own people on behalf of maintaining peace with aliens, and as such, the newly formed Council was a group of equals, rather than one or the other dominating.

Salarians and the Expansion

The Salarian Union expanded rapidly after the discovery of the Citadel, opening mass relays more frequently since the asari had indicated they'd found nothing dangerous so far. Salarian colonies sprang up like weeds, scattered far and wide, and the more challenging the task of terraforming the more willing the salarians were to take up the challenge.

Unhappy salarians of all clans and nations found new lives on these colonies, free of most of the political chaos of the home world. At the same time, salarian companies began doing booming business with the asari, and expanded their markets to the colonies of both races.

As the asari and salarians explored, they stumbled across new races. The salarians, already aware of the volus, ensured a peaceful reception when that race managed to breach their home system, and the volus were followed by the batarians, elcor, and hanar. These races were young and the salarians and asari technological level was centuries beyond theirs. As such, these races were not raised to the Council, and were manipulated and controlled as much as possible. Humanity, at the very edge of their FTP range , was ignored.

The union of salarian espionage and asari manipulation was very simply unbeatable. Until the emergence of quarians, no race discovered by the salarians or asari had anywhere near the technological strength of the first two races. The quarians were more advanced in some areas than even the salarians, but their small population and focus on internal affairs sidelined them from the start.

Salarian corporations expanded rapidly, proving adept at combining technology from multiple races into new and improved technologies no one had thought of. The use of heatsink emissions to power hand-held weapons electrical requirements, the development of nano-articulated suturing wire, the development and deployment of the FTL comm drone – these were all salarian inventions.

Several frightening precursors to the Rachni war occurred just before their release – rebelling mercenary groups, corporations that were co-opted by asari spies, the increasing financial ability of the volus – all of these were threats to the Salarian Union.

Uplift, Disaster, and Recent History

Having had several brushes with forces too strong for them to easily handle, the salarians wanted to create a race of loyal soldiers who would do the heavy fighting for them. It was in this vein that they started relationships with the krogan, slowly uplifting them towards a recovery from their nuclear dark age.

Sadly, it was also the salarians who discovered the rachni, in their continual exploration of mass relays. History from this point is, of course, known to everyone – the widening tide, the overwhelming assault. The krogan, hurriedly uplifted fully, thrown into battle, suffering staggering losses. The discovery of the turians, the Krogan Rebellions... having lived through the tail end of some of it, I find myself unwilling to rehash what is already well known. You know it all anyway, and my perceptions of it would no doubt clash with yours.

The emergence of your people caught everyone by surprise, but in hindsight, I remember clearly that the salarians had eerily accurate translators for multiple human languages mere weeks after first contact, and that they were able to provide top-notch medical services for a race that no one else knew existed when the Citadel Relief Team landed on Shanxi. Proof positive, I'd say, that your stories of "gray aliens" with large eyes and slender bodies were actually far-flung salarian scouts.

In a way, that reality – that salarians look for each advantage – is key to grasping their history. Taking away from recent history any insight into the salarian mindset is difficult, because increasingly the salarian government has ensured that most aliens do not see or know much about salarians. They strive to make themselves somewhat aloof, intellectual, even friendly in a cool fashion, when in reality they are calculating monsters.

Amusing. I find myself echoing the sort of bland, hateful admonishments towards those different than me that I derided Dr. Minsta for. Yet I do so for very different reasons. Asari are not perfect, nor are humans, turians, volus, krogan, or any other race. But the salarians have shaped themselves into a cold species, a species of spies, analysts, assassins, and mad scientists. You have never heard salarian music, or seen salarian art – they keep it for themselves. Salarians present one face to the galaxy and another to their close kin, and they follow the whims of dalatrasses more concerned with the survival of their clutch than the cost to others.

I can see handsome Richard's brows drawing together in perplexed fury even now. What difference is my dislike of salarians and accusing them of being selfish, deceiving monsters is there from Dr. Minsta's distaste for the social dance of siari and reeichu, and the fact that we asari see ourselves as better?

I could answer, why else would an asari be in your ranks if she was not herself also a bigot? I could answer, why else would you tolerate the alien in your ranks unless you knew she was even more hateful than you? The difference is so subtle, in that I can hate and despise and still admire and understand and even praise.

But I will not answer in that fashion, but rather more bluntly. The asari may be threatening, but we could not bring ourselves, when the time came, to bring down the ax. We hesitated at genocide for the Rachni. We agonized at the use of the genophage for the krogan. We cringed at the loss of the quarians and cried for fallen, torn Rannoch. We wept at the dead of Shanxi. We see ourselves as better...yet we feel empathy and we wish that we could make all as one.

We are threatening to you because we could change what is to be a human, not because we plan to kill you.

The salarian? He sees you as either an opportunity to make a profit, to learn from, to use, or as a danger. That is not to say there are not friendly salarians...or salarians not so devoted to the race. But they are rare, and all too often, mavericks in their culture. Rarely are they chosen to breed...

Ah, but that's physiology. I have rambled long enough, let us now regard the twisted morass that is the salarian mind.
Chapter 16: Chapter 16 - Salarian Psychology

A/N: I've updated the Biotic Encyclopedia, OSABC, and this doc all in one day. The biggest holdups are beta reading and copy editing. I'll try to get another update or two done before Sunday.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Dearest Jack, clever Richard, and lovely Rachel,

I must admit that your response to my historical document was vastly entertaining – who knew I could reduce elegant Richard to apoplectic spluttering? Did you really buy the salarian "oh we are all just absent-minded scientists, research research research" line?

How can you hope to dominate the galaxy when you are as naïve as a quarian on Pilgrimage?

I tease, but I am serious as well. You are correct, your analysis of the threat presented by the salarians was grossly off-base. I will not miss Agent Dasan, as his arrogant dismissal of the salarians as "tiny sneak thieves" was, of course, criminally stupid. If there is value in having a flower of Thessia in the garden of Terra, it is in the fact that I do not blind myself with preconceived notions. To handicap myself in such a way makes me vulnerable, not superior.

Ah, but life is embraced in the discovery of personal flaws. Flowers only grow through pavement when it cracks, after all. In that light, I am happy to give you what I can about the mindset of the salarians.

Do not underestimate them.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Be strong in your ignorance of the alien. Curiosity, after all, did not help the cat in the end.

Salarian Priorities

I have spent several hours discussing the works of Maslow with Ms. Lawson. It is a fascinating work, and an insight into how fragmented and chaotic the human mind must be, that you must frame even your ability to exist in layers of urges and priorities.

The 'hierarchy of needs' posited by Dr. Minsta for the asari left me in gasping laughter. If there is an advantage to working with your group, it is to be found in the sheer entertainment value of watching a being who isn't even as old as most of my clothing attempt to fathom the mysteries of my entire race.

But perhaps there is wisdom in this approach, and it has the aura of the familiar to humans, so I will embrace it. As such, applying this ladder of needs to the salarians produces some interesting results.

Maslow foolishly ascribes motives such as "food" and "shelter" to a motivating needs structure. Even fire, which is not alive, pursues nourishment – that is not a motive. It is survival. Let us set aside these asinine entry points and focus on how a salarian defines self-esteem.

At it's most basic, humans define self-esteem, I think, through personal achievements and family. That is, the ties that bind most closely are to your immediate blood-kin, and measures of success are always predicated on your own goals and wants. A human who is a virgin will value sexual activity higher than popularity, but will not shun popularity if it leads to sexual activity. These 'goals' are all linked together, feeding one another and the concept of self.

The core concept of 'self' for a human (or, I must admit, an asari) will always be tied to their own perceptions. One can alter the framework these perceptions are made from,, but a human will not willfully delude themselves as to the nature of a thing once they are familiar with it. In this light, humanity's need to secure 'personal security' before they go after achievements or self-actualization is understandable. Human biological drives are those of a race who has never faced the reality of extinction.

Humans define freedom not as openness to concepts, but in the ability to determine one's own path. This is alien to many cultures, who rely on those above to do so. How can a maiden with a mere century of life know more about what to pursue in life than her matriarch who has lived ten times her span?

Salarians... well, salarians are more linear. A salarian's mind works on many levels simultaneously, but towards one goal or status. They are almost inverted from humanity. A salarian pursuits individual achievements and recognition first. Above personal safety, above family, above sexuality. Their highest calling is the achievement of actual worth, that allows them to define their value to society.

A salarian who is a brilliant scientist is valuable to his clan. A farmer who brings in massive amounts of money is also valuable. If the clan values advancement more than profit, however, the farmer is not valuable.

Salarians only reward success, and rather than build up supporting resource to lead to achievement and success, demand success and achievement to be allowed to build up supporting resources. Males can't even think about offspring, or owning a home, or alternatives like starting a family with an asari, until they feel their achievement provide evidence of their skills and prowess.

In other words, self-actualization provides self-esteem, which leads to family and security. In humans, family requires security, which requires self-esteem leading to achievement.

This reversal of importance is why salarians come off as humble and effacing to you people. A human who decided to become a billionaire before he had the confidence to feel good about himself or date a girl would be seen as … what is the word? A weirdo?

To salarians, rewards without proof of excellence is corrupting. A worker who is rewarded merely for showing up to work is insanity. Humans working jobs below their level of competence to pay for their child's education is lunacy.

More importantly, salarian perceptions of success are not based on a concept of self. In their mind, the self-assessment is the most worthless of things! Only when others acknowledge the achievement does the salarian take pride in it.

Salarians as individuals

On an individual basis, most salarians are psychologically simple. They have a long term goal they aspire to, which is usually either the chance to produce offspring or the chance to make their name important. This goal is a distant thing that they expect to consume their life. In pursuit of the goal, almost nothing else matters. As long as the goal is achievable, the salarian has a focus to their life that they cannot be shaken from.

Leading to that goal are a series of checkpoints, in their mind, of where they need to be in terms of achievements and acceptance. Salarians don't have 'self-esteem' – they merely determine if a thing can be done or not. They don't go after 'dreams' – they only pursue goals that are both plausible and reachable without heroic efforts.

The individual salarian does not think about 'his race' or 'his species', unlike asari. They have no universal feeling of brotherly or sisterly love. What they do have is an iron-lined determination to get to their planned goal, and a focus on planning the best way to achieve it.

Rewards come when the goal is achieved, and are rarely the goal itself. One doesn't want to have kids to engage in sex, but because being chosen to breed is a sign one is a valuable member of society. They seek importance not even to validate themselves, but to prove to others that such validation is needed, for they have aided the group.

It is hard to understand the difference this makes when reduced to clinical terms, so let me put it more plainly: a salarian doesn't sublimate their personal desires for the good of the group, as an asari might. Their personal desires are literally to be of service for the good of the group. It is not unity of thought and purpose, but rather the inability to perceive success as anything but this self-sacrifice. A salarian who is not chosen to breed doesn't resent the ones being called, rather, they simply accept their value is not worth that investment.

This makes salarians almost immune to depression and other mental maladies caused by lack of achievement. The salarian's goal or focus gives them a tangible and unalterable deterrent to disappointment and setback, as the goal will almost always require effort to achieve and as long as any progress is made, the salarian is pleased.

It also means salarians, very simply, do not "give up". They may shelve a goal for a period of time, but they neither forget it nor abandon it in the long term.

Salarians as clan families

Salarians do not have nuclear families. They have clan families based on a linage of females. Each clan has one and only one dalatrass. The dalatrass is a female (usually a daughter) hat carries out the will of the daltriana of the clan. The daltriana is the salarian female who is pregnant and lays eggs, increasing the family size.

A daltriana's only concern is preparing her daughter to take her place. She passes on wisdom and insight, and in time the daltriana dies. The dalatrass ascends. Males compete for her favor and the right to breed, either with her or with a daltriana of another clan in a swap.

The 'family' has some aspects similar to yours – a feeling of brotherly affection for siblings, a last name, etc. But it is also very different. There are no salarian 'father's that get to acknowledge their child as the eggs are usually fertilized by several different males to ensure diversity. The very nature of salarian childbirth ensures the 'father' is only around at the whim of the dalatrasses and daltriana.

A clan that is very successful may have multiple egg-laying females, who in private refer to each other as "sister". Due to the complex breeding relationships and the homogeneity of salarian RNA, inbreeding is not a factor but remains taboo, only used when the clutch is in danger of failure.

Salarian Males
Males are bombastic, full of themselves, and usually icy calm even under provocation. They are more aggressive than the female, and define themselves by dint of their achievement and prowess. Given to a flair for the dramatic and a curious lack of critical self-examination, the salarian male will usually focus on a given endeavor to the exclusion of all else.

Male salarians are particularly prone to hubris, as they are often blind to the effect of their actions or focus, preferring to see what humans call the 'big picture' and what salarians refer to as the wide view. A salarian mercenary does not stop to think of the lives he has ruined, because his focus is first on his value to his mercenary band and second on his personal combat prowess and how he must grow that.

Males, being so much more common than females, tend to defer to the female when it comes to clan family relationships and long-term decision making. This is due to the fact that the salarian male is impulsive and will often engage in decision making without following through on all possible outcomes, confidently secure that their actions, made in the intent of advancing the interests of the group, are justified.

Males can be sentimental, a flaw females do not have, and often form honor-based attachments to other males (alien or not). This kind of bonding serves a purpose, as it's often with a more powerful male, who will act to aid in defense of the salarian in question (and thus, aid the group), but it can lead to a more friendly set of actions as well, when the result outweighs the cost.

Males still have a streak of the old valor-honor based braggadocio somewhere in their heart of hearts. They will be flashy and witty when it strikes them, and their taste for the dramatic or creative lends them more interest in alien interests and people that females have.

Salarian Females

By contrast, the rare salarian females can be summed up as stubborn, insular, and dismissive of anything that doesn't benefit them personally. Females spend half their lives learning to lead, and half their lives incapacitated by egg-laying. Denied much opportunity for travel, exploration or to determine the path of their own lives, they instead retreat within duty to the family and close their minds to many alternatives.

The salarian survival instinct means that a salarian female's focus will always be the security and success of her offspring and mates, and nothing else. Dealing with the dalatrasses of Sur'Kesh is always a nightmare because every deal and negotiation must be framed in a light that lets the dalatrass find exclusive benefit for her and hers. There is no word, nor even a clear understanding of the concept, of charity or altruism in salarian culture or language.

To a female, her outlook depends on if she is a breeder or not. (The term sounds demeaning, but it's a literally straight translation from the salarian, "daltris" – to breed"). Young females are constantly being evaluated for their mental agility, charm, foresight, and physical endurance. Given their scarcity, the fact that they lead sheltered lives far away from the bustle of modern society should be a shock to no one. Only the most rare dalatrasses, such as the High Dalatrass, ever leave the world and participate in politics to any degree off of Sur'Kesh or their colonies. As a result, most young females are somewhat depressed, often shy and nervous, and constantly wondering if they offer any value to the clan.

Once a female turns 15, she is old enough to become one of the clan breeders. Usually, this involves being impregnated and laying her first clutch of eggs. These will become her "gift" to the clan, if the individuals born of this clutch show promise she will be placed in the lines of breeding. This is the goal of any younger salarian female, and they will resort to whatever it takes to achieve it.

Once they are breeding regularly, their minds fixate solely on the preservation of their clutch and clan, and ensuring advantage that leads to more opportunities for the same. Salarian females become more inflexible as they age, seeing themselves as the sole arbiters of life and acting as measuring sticks for salarian males. Being surrounded your whole life by people who literally live to impress you and serve you makes most females very unfit to judge the intent and purpose of those who are alien.

Finally, a key aspect of the female mindset is the understanding that as long as the clutch survives, the race survives. Salarian females will sacrifice almost everything in daring gambles for the ability to secure an advantage if they can be sure they will survive the outcome, regardless of the risk or damage. Unlike humans, who prefer that risk balances reward, salarians will engage in acts that on the surface seem too risky to chance, with the understanding that in a few short years any losses can be made up with a new generation of salarian offspring.

Emotional Shifts

Salarian emotions are powerful and mercurial. They sweep through a salarian and then move on quickly. The salarian mind, processing multiple lines of thought at once, doesn't slow down enough to allow long-term reflection.

Salarians can be angry, sad, or morose, or they can be happy and excited. Many salarians try to keep a tight rein on their emotions, as once they get carried away by them they can often go to extremes that normally they would not engage in.

Linking with them is fraught with danger, as the salarian mind is ever-shifting in how it views and interprets the cascades of data their nerves give them. I believe it is this overwhelming sensory input that drives them to move beyond emotions rapidly.

That being said, salarians are certainly not emotionless. While they move through emotional states quickly, 'quickly' can be a relative term. A salarian who loses a good friend will be sad for several days rather than weeks, one who loses an lover might take months to recover rather than years. Likewise, emotional flashpoints are also reached much quicker – salarians have, as a rule, hair-trigger tempers.

The salarian's mercurial emotional state also provides them with defenses against mental illnesses and the like. Salarians can be paranoid, but that is the only known real mental illness they suffer, and many of them view such paranoia as a survival instinct.

Salarian Ethics and Morality

Oh, Ms. Lawson's dry wit is at times a bit sharply razored for my taste, but she does have a certain faculty with words. Her view of salarian ethics was expressed to me as "the idea that if it's possible to achieve an act, however reprehensible, then it's possible to find a way to cover up doing it" struck me as apt.

Salarians do not have a word for 'ethics', and they have several words for morality. To them, morals are a measure of things that are good or bad. Murder, theft, treason, etc are bad. Working together, cooperation, respect, etc are good. The difference, in salarian minds, is that good and bad are merely properties, not absolutes.

A murder that saves ten lives is not 'bad' in salarian eyes. Theft of a product that wasn't properly protected is merely prudence. The viewing of morality as a property of an action, not something inherent in the action, reduces most salarian activities to merely balancing benefits versus costs. Salarians have no concept of the human idea of "sin" and see morality more as a method of determining if a given course of action's drawbacks outweigh it's costs.

The exposure of salarians to alien cultures, particularly the guilt-ridden and ancestor-worshiping turians, did not introduce any hesitance in salarians to go to any lengths possible to achieve their goals, but did introduce a concept called 'mithra'. Mithra is the closest thing salarians have to an ethical framework, and it's premise is abominable – as long as an act cannot be traced back to the originator, evil is non-existent. It is the logical follow through to a concept that only accountability imparts guilt, and that only the observer can judge actions.

Salarians will perform any act, no matter it's brutality, and as long as they aren't caught doing it, they do not see it as a crime. On the flip side, salarians who commit illegal or unethical acts and are apprehended or otherwise identified are seen as failures and surrendered for punishment or executed.

The crime is not in the act, but in allowing the act to be seen. I cannot say that this mindset is particularly understandable to me, or in fact to any other alien species. Even batarians understand that murder is morally wrong, and they do it because they see other races as lesser beings, not because they feel murder is acceptable. Salarians, on the other hand, will happily murder even each other on an individual basis if it strengthens the clan family and have no qualms about any form of act if they can cover it up.

This is, sadly, my main reason for not really having a problem with Cerberus – the most disgusting and vile actions your group has taken would not stir the sands of the beach compared to the monstrosities the salarians engage in. Living vivisections, experiments on children, twice enabling genocide and the creation of the Disimulat nano-plague weapons are just few of the things that can be laid at their feet. Salarians operating within Eclipse have turned that group from the mere darkness of Jona Sedris's anger to drug-running slavers, murderers, and arsonists, and the premier mercenary groups of salarian origin like Foresight and Unlimited have taken some of the most criminal contracts in history. Only salarians would make money from capturing poor people and using them to create organ farms.

Not all salarians embody this form of ethics. Some of the more eccentric salarians have taken up religious or philosophical stances that impart a different level or focus in ethical behavior. Additionally, most salarians in the medical care industry have in recent years taken up your human mantra of "first, do no harm" when it comes to the practice of medicine and biomedical research. However, these salarians are an extreme minority, and even they will often times be a part of research or operations that seem deeply unethical or immoral to most other races.

Salarian sexuality, romance, and love

The conventional wisdom is that salarians do not have a sex drive, which is completely untrue. However, the salarian sex drive is utterly unlike that of most other species, and is entirely driven by the female, not the male.

Female salarians regularly go into heat, during which time they emit very strong pheromones that attract and arouse male salarians. In ancient times, females in heat were literally unable to control themselves. Since the biological makeup of salarian sexuality requires the female to be fertilized multiple times, this resulted in females being passed around fairly often and raids being staged to steal them.

In the modern area, females are secluded from males once they go into heat, and only those males who have been approved to breed (based on a host of factors, such as intellect, achievements, and the like) are allowed into their quarters. Once properly aroused by the pheromone discharges, salarians are actually quite sexually aggressive. The females have the stronger sex drives, often engaging in sexual activity with between six to ten males in a given breeding session for a clutch. Given each heat usually requires the fertilization of between nine and twelve clutches, a female may end up going through over a hundred male partners. Given that the ratio of females to males is nearly 1 to 100, and that not all females are allowed to breed or are breeding, even this high ratio does not ensure all males get a chance to participate, especially since some females take the same male more than once.

These sexual relationship are not in anyway romantic, they are pleasurable and also a mark and reward for the male, but tender emotional states do not come into play.

Salarians rarely have a form of the nuclear family, in what is called a yindo, or a breeding circle. This is basically the salarian version of marriage, practiced by what mainstream salarian culture views as deviants. These relationships are usually between lesser salarian males who have no chance of breeding with a clan female and the females denied the opportunity to breed by the dalatrasses. In these close-knit yindos, there is a great deal of bonding, and even gentle affection. Being incapacitated by the heats she has to undergo, the female depends almost entirely on the males for both care and income, while the males, constantly bombarded by pheromones, end up devoted to the female to truly incredible degrees. Yindos are far more common on worlds where salarians are immigrants, and especially on the so-called Black Fringe colonies, along the border with what used to be Rachni space. A yindo is limited, eventually the offspring allow it to turn into a small clan, and after a few generations of breeding they become indistinguishable from a normal breeding line.

A very few salarians (usually males, and eccentric males at that, but rarely a female denied breeding rights) will end up with alien partners, usually asari. Salarians are usually attracted by intellectual capacity, physical agility and the ability to keep up with their thinking. While they are truly not very good lovers in a purely physical sense, they are very devoted to their partner, and often surprisingly sweet. I would like to think, somewhere along the way, even the mazes of a salarian mind can find romance.

That is not to say that salarians don't understand or feel love! They love their children, almost fiercely, defending them with a savagery that shocks those unused to seeing anything like strong emotion from salarians. They are not the best parents – often demanding and serious, and rarely taking the time to truly interest themselves in the interests of their children – but they can be surprisingly inventive when it comes to a birthday party or other method to cheer them up.

Nor can I say with any certainty that salarians don't love their extended clan families. I have seen salarians endure torture that would break a krogan and still not sell out even the financial interests of their families. Even the most sadistic, eccentric and criminal salarian would rather die in agony than betray their family.

Salarian and aliens

Most salarians view aliens as different, and as a source of danger. There is no such thing as a salarian letting down their guard. Asari and salarians have been allies for thousands of years and I suspect the salarians still don't fully trust us.

Salarian viewpoints on asari are varied. As Dr. Minsta pointed out in an earlier document, asari and salarians are both unlike and alike. Our viewpoints on the interpretation of the universe is very different, but our focus on methods other than force is similar. Generally speaking, the salarians tend to feel asari are the closest matched to themselves in terms of intellect and overall potential.

Salarians dislike, and have always disliked, quarians. Not just because quarian technology nearly matched their own, but because salarians improve things in slow increments and the quarians were geniuses capable of creating breakthrough technologies overnight. Salarians also dislike how the quarians experiments lead to the geth, which reminds them of their own AI failures.

Salarians have a curious relationship with krogan. The two races do not get along – most salarians feel krogan are ignorant, savage brutes, a tool with no real use left it. And the krogan see most salarians as murderers and blame them genophage on them. On the other hand, many salarians also feel vaguely sad over the ends the krogan have come to. More than once I have seen a salarian staring at the Krogan Monument on the Citadel, and walk away regretfully.

The drell, volus, and hanar don't make much of an impression on salarians from what little I know. They simply interact too little, and too infrequently.

The salarians view the batarians and the humans in much the same light, oddly – as military oriented brutes. As insulting as that comparison probably is, from the salarian point of view such a thing should be taken as a complement. The salarians see humans and batarians as the most dangerous elements in modern galactic society, and as a result take your kind more seriously.
Chapter 17: Chapter 17 - Salarian Physiology

A/N: Tired now, so I'll probably not produce anything for a few days.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Beloved Jack, fierce Richard, and cunning Rachel,

If there is one aspect where Dr. Minsta is probably better served than myself in writing this research, it would be in the aspect of biology. I am not a medical doctor, and my understanding of salarians is strictly limited to what I've absorbed from reading several digests and extranet studies on salarian biology.

That being said, much of the information here was gathered by Ms. Lawson. She really is very flexible in terms of learning – I was not aware most humans had such formidable intellectual capacities. If she is anything like your average young human , then your fear of being overtaken by aliens can probably be set aside, as she would compare favorably to , well, a salarian!

I'm sure that will irritate you as well. In a few more days, we'll go onwards from Mannovai to Sur'Kesh, and we'll see how well Ms. Lawson handles the awesome size of the Reach.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: One must be ruthless to assure a given outcome. Mercy has never led to anything but vulnerability.

Salarian basic physiology

As stated in the history section, salarians are omnivorous creatures most closely related to earth salamanders. They are roughly humanoid, with a wide range of builds and heights, but most fall between 5 and a half to 6 feet tall, and are usually slender, weighing no more than a hundred pounds.

That is not absolute – I once had a run in with a truly-frightening minion of the Shadow Broker, a body-building salarian that stood well over seven feet tall and was built like a krogan – but very few salarians are heavily muscled.

The salarian skeleton is almost entirely made of cartilaginous materials, stiffened at the hips, shoulders, upper arm and lower leg with 'floating bones' that bind to the skeletal material by tendons. The cartilaginous material is highly regenerative, but the rest of the salarian body is not. They are extremely flexible, all of the joints being either double jointed or complete ball joints, and the bones have considerable flexibility when put under pressure. The salarian skull is also reinforced with some bone, as well as shock absorbing muscles and damping fluids. The spine is also bone, and shallow ribs encase the vital organs, although the chest is bowed inwards.

The salarian stands on two digitigrade legs, with enough spinal flexion to allow 240 degrees of walking motion. The legs hook back at the knee, the feet ending in a curiously clublike foot with three digits tipped with long claws. The arch of the foot is very high, with only the toes and the shank of the heel making actual ground contact, giving salarians both a light step and an almost mincing gait. The entire ankle and knee joint assemblies are merely radioulnar articulated joints, a pack of lumpy balls of cartilage linked together with many tendons and ligaments, much like the human wrist. This means salarians can make a number of flexible, unusual motions that other races cannot.

The salarian skin is very thin and semi-translucent, ranging in tones from pale white and cream down to dark black. The skin is very heavily lined with capillaries, and is rather fragile. Below the skin, the muscles are highly striated bundles of paired groups, roped together with bands of nerves that allow salarians astonishingly fine muscle control.

Salarian blood is green, and is the most remarkable part of their physiology. The blood is hemocyanatic and uses copper rather than iron to bind oxygen. This is about 15% as effective as iron (or bauxite) and leads to salarians not being able to support heavy muscle masses in most cases. However, there are also symbiotic organisms in the blood that bind to carbon dioxide and some blood toxins and produce additional oxygen directly into the bloodstream. As a result, even with the copper binding of oxygen, a salarian is often better oxygenated than other races when fully rested.

Salarians who do a great deal of physical labor tend to produce more dense concentrations of blood cells to carry oxygen, allowing them greater muscle mass in return. However, the stress this puts on the body appears to shorten the lifespan. Salarian muscle tissue is very quick-contraction in nature, allowing the salarian to take advantage of their reflexes, but it is not very strong, and without a firm skeletal structure, even strong salarians have the body strength of an below average human.

The salarian brain is perhaps the most developed of any Citadel species. It is heavily folded, even more than asari brains, and surprisingly compact, as it has no older evolutionary throwbacks taking up space in the slender skull. The brain stem actually travels down half the spine, and smaller nodules of brain material surround the base of the skull. These nodules work with the main brain mass to allow salarians to process multiple lines of thought at one time. Salarian neural complexity is extremely complex, with multiphase protein sheaths encasing most neuron cells and gilial cells. These sheaths allow each cell to store and recreate multiple synapse pairs on the fly – as a result, salarians not only posses photographic memories but can even model higher order mathematics (geometry, trigonometry and most calculus) in their heads with no difficulty.

Salarians do not nurse their young, and as such, have no mammary glands nor nipples.

The salarian metabolism is much faster than other races, with the salarian version of ATP having nineteen times the efficiency of ATP mitochondria in humans and asari. Salarians also have a glandular system with a wide array of adrenal and renal functions, capable of flooding the body with a potent array of enzymes, adrenaline, and endorphins. This allows salarians to reach truly amazing levels of speed and fluidity in a short amount of time.

The salarian nervous system is extremely complicated, with a well developed nervous system and neural coordination bundles (like a human cerebellum) , packed with climbing fibers and a fluid-balance system that ensures salarians rarely if ever lose their balance.

The salarian immune system is linked with a lymph-like series of veins that wind in and out of the salarian bloodstream, connecting with a liver-like organ and a triple pair of filtering organs that serve a similar function to kidneys. The blood of salarians is filtered for toxins at all times, moving through the system at key points, making most salarians very resistant to disease and toxins.

The salarian heart is , like an asari's heart, three chambered. But salarians have two of them , one in the upper chest and one in the lower torso. The salarian lung is singular, a large sac that lines the entire back and sides of the chest, and is comprised of air-trapping pockets and mucous membranes.

The salarian digestive system is simple, a muscle-constricting and acid filled stomach, leading to a tube that absorbs minerals and exiting through the cloaca.

Salarian senses

Salarian senses are hypersensitive, and significantly better than other races. Salarian eyesight is far superior to human or even turian eyesight, allowing them to perceive not only full color but UV and infrared radiation. Salarians can also see most powerful electromagnetic fields with the naked eyes.

The salarian horns are actually ears, hollow structures filled with sound-conducting fluids and lined with directionally oriented sensor hairs. Salarians can pick up and track multiple sounds and fix their exact bearing and distance from as much as a half mile.

Salarian smell is predator level, and salarians can track a being by scent in even low concentrations, and the nasal passages have concentrations of olfactory sensory cells in concentrations that rival that of genetically bred bloodhounds. Likewise, their sense of taste is well developed.

They lack the arahal, or the asari ability to feel electrical energy on the winds, but they have other senses the asari or humans do not. They can track and feel minute vibrations , on the air or under ground, and they seem to have a natural sense for direction.

On the whole, salarian senses combined with their very fine motor control mean they can do feats other races simply cannot. How much of this is natural and how much of it was initiated by breeding experiments of the clan families is unknown.

On the balance, however, and given the research we've been able to do into salarian evolution, I can say that the salarians are almost certainly modifying themselves in such ways. The utter control the dalatrasses have over most breeding insures that if they wish to make themselves into a given state, they have the technology and ability to do so. Salarians are constantly pushing for trans-mortal changes, and I believe they have a long range breeding program that will eventually result in salarian super soldiers.

Salarian reactions and agility

Salarians have very fast reflexes, and almost unrealistic levels of agility and dexterity, owing to their final muscle control. As a result, salarians are not only blindingly fast, but are capable of feats of mobility that would leave lesser races gasping to keep up.

A salarian's nerve system is overlaid with neural coordination bundles packed with climbing fibers. These are reflex-stimulus structures – you humans have a bundle in your cerebellum that aids in balance and coordination. The salarian body is literally stuffed with them, and they act involuntarily but with voluntary overrides.

In effect, salarian reflexes are nearly perfect. Most can make a mockery of attempting to attack them in close quarters – connecting would do some real damage, but only the very fastest combatants can have a chance of doing so. Their hand eye coordination is so astounding that it must be seen to be believed, as salarians can make shots with pistols that would challenge a turian sniper, and salarian snipers are so deadly that even krogan hesitate when targeted by them.

As if this were not enough, however, the salarian senses are tied directly into this system of reflexes. Sounds, motions, and even air pressure are enough to trigger reflexive avoidance and maneuver. I've seen salarians laughing as they dodge the enraged swings of a priestess's biotic sword, watched them outmaneuver drell assassins while mockingly offering tips before one-hit killing them, and outrun light armored vehicles.

Salarians make for astounding pilots , drivers, and ranged combatants, and their reaction times are only enhanced by the complexity of the salarian brain.

Salarian Weaknesses

The salarian body is clearly engineered as a high response, high speed and high agility platform. I am sorry but I can't think of it as a body so much as a damned abomination. While other races have played with transasari (or, I suppose in your case, transhuman) concepts, only the salarians would actually proceed down this path.

Thankfully, nature's spirit does not allow herself to be profaned in such a galling manner without the proper recompense.

Salarians are not strong, nor do they handle physical damage very well. While they can flood their bodies with endorphins and natural painkillers when hurt, and adrenaline to boost their strength, even the toughest salarian can't take more than one or two serious wounds before collapsing. The high metabolic rate and naturally high blood pressure salarians have works against them when they are hurt, and their ability to produce adrenaline in life-or-death situations can be exhausted in pitched battles.

Salarians are almost immune to most poisons and toxins, and many diseases, but they have high vulnerability to some forms of alkaline substances that disrupt their body chemistry. Additionally, salarians don't handle sedatives well, as the salarian body ends up having mismatched rhythms and can go into systemic shock.

Salarian organ systems have no redundancy – perhaps, if they were engineered, this is the salarian parsimonious desire for clean efficiency. The result, of course, is that salarians who are hurt are usually incapacitated. A human shot in the arm or leg is hurt but can still fight. A krogan will regenerate it in seconds, turians have plating to deflect it and asari can usually compensate with biotics. Salarians, on the other hand, are usually down for the count. Even a strong punch can knock one out.

The flexible nature of the salarian frame lets them withstand explosions better than others, but becomes a liability in any contest of strength, and a lethal drawback when exposed to heavy biotic physics attacks like slam. Salarians cannot handle G forces very well and make poor fighter pilots, despite their excellent hand-eye coordination.

Salarian reproduction

I'm sure Dr. Minsta would have appreciated the chance to prate about salarian "infidelity", but the salarian reproductive method is actually quite boring to me.

As I stated in the psychology section, salarian females go into heat around age fifteen, and undergo additional heats every two months until they are in their very late 30's, at which age they finally lose their fertility. During the heat, they exude mating pheromones to attract male salarians.

The male's sexual organs are fairly standard, an erectile sheath leading from the equivalent of testicles. Salarian males keep these tucked within the body until sexual activity is likely, unlike human and krogan males. The female sexual organ is part of the cloaca, which is also used to evacuate solid and liquid wastes from the body. Quite primitive, and I'm frankly astonished the salarians haven't engineered something more … elegant. Or at least, less messy.

Each female has various egg clutches within her body. The ovaries are much larger than in other races, fist sized, and will produce eggs regularly until around 37 or 38 years of age. Each ovary (and there are six) produces about 20 eggs. Each egg must be fertilized separately, and once an egg is fertilized by a male, enzymes lock the cellular surfaces of all other eggs to that male's sperm. As a result, a female usually requires at least four to six breeding sessions with multiple males to fertilize the entire clutch.

Eggs grow rapidly into metastasis within a day of breeding, doubling in size every four hours, and are "laid" in clumps on the third day, again (ugh) through the cloaca. The eggs are encased in a slimy sac of nutrients and protective enzymes – highly poisonous to everything on Sur'Kesh, and probably not very tasty to anything else either. The eggs absorb the nutrients, drying out and soldifying in two days, and take another five months to grow to full size, erupting into salarian newts.

Salarian life cycle

A newt is an apt name, as upon hatching, the legs are fused together in one mass, and the eyes do not work. Over the first six months of life, the legs separate, the eyes develop fully and open, and neural activity starts up around the first week. Even with modern technology and great care, something like 40% of the eggs laid do not develop to full term, and must be destroyed.

A salarian male child takes about 12 years to grow to physical maturity, a female takes about 15. However, salarians develop much faster mentally. By the time they are nine months old they can usually walk, talk, and read, and by three years old are capable of understanding basic math, spatial relationships, and logic.

At around maturity, salarians undergo a growth spurt. For males, the penis develops, and for females, the ovaries activate, and she goes into her first heat.

Males do not have any other noticeable physical changes until they are around 40 years old, at which time the body simply begins to break down. Some salarians have lived past this stage – the more fit and healthy a salarian is, the more likely they are to live longer – but few males live much past 50. Females go barren at around 37 or 38, moving into the realm of politics fully, and usually begin breaking down at about 45.

Salarian life span

Just in my own life, I've seen the average age of salarians who die go from the late 30's to the late 40's. This doesn't sound very impressive, until you compare relative lifespans. Humans went from a life expectancy of about 70 to around 150, which is more than double – however, if you adjust for poverty, for colony life, and the like, almost a full third of humanity dies before 70 even today. Only the rich, powerful, and successful reach 150, with most middle class humans having about 90 pain-free years of living before another 15 or 20 years of decrepitude.

Salarians only increased their lifespan by 25%, but this is true of almost all salarians, regardless of economic status or location. Furthermore, they don't experience any real slowdown or effects of aging until a few months before death.

On the surface, the salarian life span is quite limited, and any improvement seems like it's a good thing. However, there is a dark side to this. What I am about to tell you is – well, was – a state secret of the Asari Republics. About thirty five years ago, the Council of Matriarchs gained intelligence suggesting salarians were experimenting on asari captives. I was part of the Royal Strike Force engaged to go after the suspected laboratory, and what we saw there was absolutely sickening. The salarians had captured asari – mostly Eclipse members, a few red sand addicts, and at least one outcast – and had been engaged in research into asari regeneration and our ability to cap our DNA with telomerase. This substance is what determines how many times a cell can divide before it wears out, for lack of a better word. Salarian cells , like asari cells, reproduce rapidly. But in salarians, their enormous metabolic rate ends up killing cells off almost as fast as they reproduce, and they burn through them in a few short decades.

It looks like the salarians have been working on extending the salarian lifespan. Not by leaps and bounds, but sustainably and slowly, and in a way that wouldn't attract too much attention. We asari destroyed the labs, but we were unable to tie the researchers back to the actual Salarian Union, and the STG turned up nothing in their own investigation.

Salarians and disease

The interlinked salarian immune system, combined with the constant blood filtering, means that salarians have a very strong resistance to most diseases. The two that continue to affect them the most are the Soft Rot and the Collapse Plague.

Soft Rot is a skin disorder, caused by parasitic organisms infest the skin , forming colonies of acidic mold between the skin and the muscle. Painful and disfiguring, Soft Rot ends up eating away at muscle mass and producing enough toxins to kill a salarian in short order. It can be combated with powerful antibiotics and broad-based antiseptic purges using injections under the skin, but it grows very rapidly and can kill in a handful of days.

The Collapse Plague is not actually a plague, but a fungal prion that is inhaled through the lungs. These misfolded proteins enter the salarian bloodstream and cause blood cells to debond with the copper in the blood. The result is large amounts of copper in the feces and urine, and the loss of the blood's ability to carry oxygen. It leaves a salarian disoriented from organ shutdown (due to copper poisoning) and lack of oxygen, and swiftly leads to brain damage and death.

There is no known cure or vaccine for the Collapse Plague, which first erupted during the Collapse. It is believed to be caused by decaying egg piles or salarian corpses , which is one reason salarians are so picky about funeral rituals.

Salarians and modifications

Given salarian fragility, it should come as no surprise that cybernetics are very big with salarians. Most salarian soldiers , at the very least, go for implanted kinetic sheathing, armor plating, sometimes a complete arm replacement with gyro-balancers if they are snipers.

Salarians will sometimes sacrifice one eye for a cybereye, especially ones that can see in spectrums salarians cannot, or that includes cameras or other useful hardware. Salarians often invest heavily in biomedical systems, including medigel injectors and nanorepair paste, as well as complete nanosurgeon systems to stem internal blood loss.

Salarian senses are good enough they rarely need augmentation, but some salarians have swapped out most of their natural muscles, one group at a time, with artificial myomer, giving them much greater strength than normal salarians.

Salarians, as a rule, dislike bio-augmentation that relies on actual biological components. I'm not sure why, but it's worth noting that there aren't even any salarian companies doing work on this front.

Salarian body disorders

Aside from sickness, salarians sometimes have a nervous system disorder called "Shego's Fire". Shego had this affliction herself in later life, giving it a touch of holy reverence, but it is completely debilitating.

The disorder is caused by a slow breakdown of neural lining, followed by neural degeneration across the entire brain and nervous system. In the early stages, the effects are minor – tremors, the occasional missing memory. But when it hits the late stages, the mind begins to go. Eventually, psychosis and paranoid ravings set in, along with gruesome savagery and bouts of wild, uncontrollable anger and fear.

There is no good treatment for this disease, other than hoping the salarian dies before it runs it's course.
Chapter 18: Chapter 18 - Salarian Culture Structure

A/N: One reason this has taken so long – aside from my hiatus and work – is that piecing together a coherent salarian culture is not easy.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Smiling Jack, grumpy Richard, and long-suffering Rachel,

Your last response to my updates on salarian physiology was … colorful. I was not fully aware of the wide range of curses and invectives known to humankind, and some of them, if I understand human anatomy well enough, do not appear to be possible. I did warn you that your understanding of the salarian people was flawed, due to your own biases.

These biases are likely to also cripple your ability to grasp salarian culture. As I said when I first started my report, salarian culture is heavily influenced by ancient traditions and religion, but is also influenced by math, logic, and the ever-shifting perspective which is a watchword among the salarian mindset. Cerberus tries to operate by utilizing the cultural failings of other races – the turian tendency to follow procedure and dependance on tradition and organization, or batarian arrogance and lack of anger management. You cannot rely on such easy handles on salarian culture.

Their culture is not like 'human culture', defined more by piddling differences, language variants, and socioeconomic brackets. Nor is it akin to the unified culture of asari, where language and nuance has been leveled through the years and the only thing that remains are the traditions and influences from long ago. Salarian culture is a polyglot assemblage of many moving parts, all of them more calculated to confuse and obfuscate the truth from observers.

The chilling part, of course, is that the observers it tries to cloak itself from are other salarians.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: There is no such thing as surrender in the lexicon of the brave. To return with your shield is victory, but to return on it is loyalty.

Salarian Cultural Basics – the Family (on a large level)

Dr. Minsta made an excellent summation of human culture in his asari report, winnowing the basics down to "location, language, ethnic groups and customs". Such trite summaries of entire peoples, tossing off eons of history with short, frail words of little hard meaning, cannot be used to describe something as semi-rigid as 'salarian culture'.

At its very core, the salarian culture is built around four pillars – religion, family, intellect, and access. These probably seem very alien and nonsensical to you as ascribations of culture, yet that is exactly how best to describe the salarian daily life.

Salarian societal structure is dominated by family first, of course. By family, I do not mean a traditional nuclear family as humans have, or even the extended family that asari have. Salarian 'families' as you would know them are called clans. Most clans are small, with less than a hundred members, and as they get bigger they fission off younger daughters to start new ones. But clan relationships remain fixed.

Every salarian clan traces linage through the dalatrasses, with most of the more powerful families able to claim as relatives one of the founding dalatrasses from the Shego Era. An unbroken linage six millennia long not very impressive to krogan or asari – but it is much, much longer than any other race has been able to keep a single ruling set of families in power. The Windsors are but a thousand years old, the House of Manswell can be traced back, I believe, to the Hohenzollern dynasties, but again, that is but fifteen hundred years ago.

The salarian stability in ruling families speaks to the chilling strength and endurance of salarian family structures. While there are certainly 'nations' involved, most nationalism faded long ago for salarians, and it was always more about the families backing the nations than the ideal of nation-states themselves that attracted the salarian mind.

When we speak of 'families', then, we are talking of the highest, oldest clans in existence, which have split off thousands of times to form the clans of today. These families are like archetypes of salarian culture, thought, and outlook, and a clan will trace back their own heritage (and way of looking at life) to one of these families.

The four most powerful families are Shuel, Manno, Ergii, and Daaso, with the off-world families of Yaan and Solus not far behind. Culturally speaking, literally every salarian alive is related, as least distantly, to one of these six families. And the families, although powerful in salarian government, science, and law, are more than merely institutions of power – each one has a fundamental way of looking at the universe that is completely different from the rest.

Without going into unnecessary detail, since I have my doubts about Richard's level of interest, or patience, it is important to know how the families differ. The "old blood" – Manno and Ergii – are those salarians mostly from the old Reach cultures and the brood of Shego herself. They prize logic and cool thinking, reacting to situations after analysis, the physical sides of the arts, and the application of minimal force for maximum effort. The old blood is hardly ever seen out of the core salarians systems, even the poor among them disliking alien influence. Stiltedly polite and yet cautious to even speak, the best example humans would be familiar with is the former salarian Citadel Council, Ythan. This segment of their culture is religiously devout to the old ways, believes in science, progress, and gradual improvement, and isn't so much anti-alien as aloof. They form the core of the political structure of the homeworld, the backbone of the artistic and creative classes, and have strong representation in certain diplomatic ventures.

The "new blood" – Shuel and Daaso – were the remains of families shattered by the wars and the Collapse, rebuilding in a more militant, more prepared frame. Rejecting the cool logic of the old blood, the new blood is superstitious, suspicious, self-sustaining, and above all else mercurial. They believe to not change is to stagnate, to leave one's self open to assault. Very few of these families are heavily into the Wheel Religion, most have moved into other religious venues. Scarred even today by the memories of the Collapse, these hyperactive sorts are the movers and shakers of salarian society. Common off-world, they are known to be shifty, unpredictable, and stubborn in many ways. Never abrupt but always sharp-toned, many of the new blood seem perpetually annoyed, angry, or dismissive. These types form the core of the STG and many of the clans descended from these two are merchants (although not anyone from the families themselves).

Finally, the "outer ways" – the Yaan and Solus families – are the most reckless and dangerous of the various arch-families. Dismissive of risks, daring, hyper-theoretical and dismissing ethics as a creation of flawed minds, these two cutthroat groups are what usually is projected into alien view when they think of salarians. Twitchy and fast-talking, many of them refuse to utilize proper speech patterns for linguistic best-fits in a chopped, almost staccato stream of thoughts, ideas, musings, or worries. Dismissive of manners and often seen as either rude or air-headed, the two families were the first to see the value of alien beings and how to capitalize on that fact. The new blood also forms the bulk, such as it is, of the salarian military.

I realize that the tendency to shoehorn intelligent beings into boxy categories is a tendency I have recommended you abstain from pursuing – but in this case, perhaps, it has some merit. Despite the other ever-rapid changes in salarian society, the family allegiance remains the one constant touchstone.

I will discuss names and their importance a bit later, but knowing a salarians core allegiance is the best way of figuring out how he (or rarely, she) thinks. In all my years, I have seen salarians do many random, unexpected things. I have seen vast shifts in their outlook and perceptions, and the focus of their efforts. But a Daaso-clan salarian is always going to be a religious fanatic with a leery streak a mile wide and a tendency to assume the worst, while a Solus is going to be a frenetic, word-stammering freak with six thousand ideas and brutal military skills.

The family structure is arcane, at best. Below the six top families are literally dozens and dozens of thim-than, literally 'breeders of skill'. These intermediate families have histories of producing large, stable egg clutches, and often act as intermediaries between the high families and those below them. Then there are the thim-shaair, the 'breeders of purpose', which I'll touch on later, but appear to be genetically modified breeding clans to produce soldiers or thinkers.

The high families don't get involved in intergalactic politics OR business – which probably seems odd. They all have vast levels of wealth, but almost all of it is in the form of real estate, stocks, and bonds in the government. No member of the high families would sully their hands with mere 'work', unless it was in the sciences. Instead, these families (through the mediation of the thim-than) engage in reproductive trades with the thal-thanish, the large mercantile families who run salarian corporations, or the thal-skithar, the very large breeding families that form the salarian craft guilds.

All of these trades and interactions are governed by religion, which brings me neatly to my next point.

Salarian Cultural Basics – Wheel Rites

Unsurprisingly, the mostly logical salarian mind rejects out of hand any form of religious concepts that you humans would understand as such. They do not, in any way, shape or form, believe in 'gods' or in supreme, unknowable intelligences. They also categorically reject most of the metaphysical elements that are so key to siari.

Salarians believe in a concept they call the Wheel. I have thought long on this and the best human concepts that fit the idea are the Christian Book of Ecclesiastes and certain atheistic interpretations of samsara.

The Wheel, as I understand it, is the binding concept that all life is created to in turn create more life, that all things that can occur have an explanation, a time, and a place of execution, and that free will is an illusion imposed on living beings by the flow of time. There is nothing 'new' – all things exist at all points in time – life is merely a process of experiencing a gradual revelation of this knowledge. To explore and discover 'new things' is merely accelerating the process, and by doing so introduces the possibility of perceiving events outside of the flow of time.

All of this, of course, is both somewhat para-physical and very highly philosophical. The masters of the Wheel in salarian society are both mystics and rigid logicians. They have put forward what seem to be outrageous claims, and yet historically speaking, have managed to back them up.

To wit, the Wheel says that since all things already have come to pass, manipulating our perceptions is the equivalent to being able to see the future. Wheel mystics have demonstrated the terrifying ability – repeatedly – to model future behavior with only the tiniest bits of pertinent data as long as they can ascribe certain fixed values to what they see. Wheel mystics predicted the Collapse, meeting the asari, and the importance of the krogan to galactic survival. They don't know what they see or what the exact importance is, but they can find what they call 'points of perspective' and from these mental points, engage in some kind of hyper-advanced hunches.

The Wheel is a sort of visualization of these beliefs. Salarians think that everything that happens now has probably occurred before, and will again. Life begets life, struggle in turn leads to improvement, instincts and emotions lead to conflict and death, driving innovation and planning to triumph. Individuals in the Wheel are like bit-streams in the data network of the Galaxy – impossible to predict individually, but capable of being modeled in the abstract in large numbers. The Wheel, then, suggests that all life is ultimately the same – we are all born, we all bear offspring, we all love and hate, we all desire a better future for our children, we all fear the dark, and eventually, we all die.

And because the Wheel lays out that all things are already existing, that nothing is really 'new', and that the future can be modeled if one can find enough points of perspective and accelerate one's ability to perceive, that the future is in essence, like reading a book. To the characters in a book, things happen as they happen, but the reader can flip to the end of the book and find out how the story ends.

The Wheel mystics claim to be able to do this.

I know that this probably sounds patiently ridiculous, but it has been confirmed, at least to salarians, which explains much of their overall mindset. To a human, free will is everything – your God having martyred himself to give you the chance to, as it were, decide on whether to turn away from sin or not. Asari religion rejects sin and links all things together but offers no answers as to the why of existence. Salarian wheel rites offer a cold, blank explanation of what is coming, where 'why' becomes 'because it is so' with no variants.

This is why salarians dispense with morals and ethics. An act that is to happen is inevitable in their eyes. Whether it is 'right' or 'wrong' is completely pointless to think about, as it will happen, thus a salarian might as well take advantage of it. At the same time, they believe random perceptions of an event, and deeper understandings, should allow them to perceive and forecast what is coming in the future, and thus embrace that aspect of life as well.

I don't know very many humans (or asari) who can take up such a bizarre way of looking at the universe. It is not something that is easily explained, except by the cool distance of time and seeing their mystics able to perform with a high level of accuracy.

Wheel rites are heavily ceremonial, with a 'morning service' every morning that lasts about a half hour, usually given over to personal meditation and introspection, to analyze what has been seen and to draw conclusions from it. Mystics are not priests, they do not lead congregations and rarely, if ever, interact with most other salarians. Instead, they have followers and apostles, who take their words and thoughts and spread them through society as they see fit.

A follower of a mystic who foresees great calamity may end up warning people...or building several businesses to take advantage of the hardships likely to come with such calamity.

Other than rites of communion with the mystics, most salarians practice Wheel rites individually in private. This mostly consists of meditation, focused analysis of a days events, and memory exercises to extract and focus on what the subconscious mind has picked up on. Salarians can draw staggeringly accurate inferences from such activities, and it also appears to provide them a level of emotional and psychological stability during traumatic events.

It also explains why salarians are so capable of dealing with loss, death, and other unpleasant influences – the Wheel maintains these things were always going to happen anyway, and to the logical salarian mind, acceptance is better than railing away at unalterable fate.

It often confuses outsiders that salarians say, on the one hand, that everything is fixed and has already occurred, and on the other hand, that knowing what comes allows them to prepare. A Wheel mystic once explained it to me as such: a solar storm is coming, and nothing can stop it. But it takes fifteen light minutes for the storm to reach the planet you are on. You can't stop the storm, and you can't save everyone it will kill – but you can get those you can reach and get to listen into cover. You can't change the larger outlines of what will happen, but you can shift the small, individual aspects of it.

I fear, in this context, that salarian foresight and planning has lead them to see events coming that they are preparing for in ways that fill me with trepidation. The breeding experiments and pushes for trans-mortal abilities imply whatever is coming may be very, very bad.

Aside from this, Wheel rites and beliefs play a huge role in how salarian clans deal with each other and with events. The Wheel lays down a rigid set of 'customs' in dealing with certain aspects of how salarians interact with the world around them. A mystic, for example, has no possessions, does not involve himself in business, and would die of shame before using his abilities for profit. Most businesses, however, will consult a mystic before embarking on a new product line or investment, to see if there is anything beyond the business side to be aware of.

Wheel rites also form the core of why salarians are so erratic – by deliberately moving off of the script that life has laid out for them, they attempt to generate points of perspective to see what is coming. This leads salarians to gamble outrageously at times with investments, in politics, and in espionage.

Their view on finding perspective illuminates their fascination with spying and intelligence gathering, as they see it as yet another point of perspective to utilize. Indeed, to them, such is hardly an aggressive or unwanted act at all – no one wants their secrets revealed, but if it leads to an insight that allows greater predictions and security, the salarians don't see it as a violation in the same way that other alien races do.

Salarian Cultural Basics – Names

As I touched on earlier, salarian families are a good method to determine the biases and outlook of salarians from clans related to them. This is why it is crucial to evaluate the core family when dealing with such. The arch-families are often incorporated into district or city names.

For example, all salarian names can be broken down into the short form (Personal agonomen and clan name) or the longer, more elaborate form. The long form starts with the name of the planet of birth, national allegiance OR high-clan allegiance, city of birth, district of their clan's affiliation (which may or may not be on the planet or in the city they were born in!), their own clan's name and their agonomen.

A salarian from the homeworld might thus be named Sur'Kesh Ergohai Thanish Shuelan Gimos Thran. Born on Sur'kesh in the city of Thanish with ties to clan Shuel, but affiliated to the nation of Ergohai (Thanish is a city in Maithan, while the Shuel clan is strongest in the nation of Soluthus) indicating that he may have drifted from his original allegiances. His short name would be simply Thran Gimos.

Name analysis is an art, not a science. One must ascertain the message invoked by differences in place of birth and current allegiance, and the clan – family relationships as well.

Salarian Social Structure

Attempting to codify the polymorphic mess that is salarian society is akin to cataloging the movements of a pack of vorcha that are on fire. There is a structure there, but it is riddled with hops from the lowest to the highest, with loops that call upon Wheel Mystics, and with cultural baggage that hasn't been shed in thousands of years.

That being said, the rough layout is as follows. The Six Families are atop the salarian structure, although none of them 'rule'. Their dalatrasses, instead, meet regularly to put forth names for the position of High Dalatrass (in peacetime) and Daltriana (in wartime).

The High Dalatrass is roughly equivalent to the turian Primarch or the human President in terms of political power on a military-political level, but only the Daltriana can command the military. The High Dalatrass is usually picked from one of about twenty clans that are direct descendents and subordinates of the High Families. Known as the Leading Clans, these clans specialize in politics and alien relations. The High Dalatrass heads the salarian civilian government.

Below the Leading Clans are the War Clans, another set of about twenty clans that provide the bulk of salarian military officers. The Daltriana, the old title of Shego, is given to a member chosen from these clans to lead the military in wartime. It is significant to note that salarians do not see a point in having civilian control of the military – in peacetime, the military answers directly to whatever leading clan is in charge of a region of space, and in wartime they answer to the Daltriana, but they never answer to the government. A curious separation of powers, designed to prevent any tyranny from occurring.

Collectively, the High Families, the Leading Clans, and the War Clans are known as the Conclave. These are the nobles of salarian society. Below them are the Service Guilds, the Craft Guilds, the Home Clans, the Offworld Clans, the Free Clans, and at the bottom, the Lythari.

About 2% of salarians are in the Conclave. 35% are in the Service Guilds, 25% in the Craft Guilds, and 20% in the Home Clans. 15% are in the Offworld Clans, and the final three percent are in the Free Clans. The Lythari, outcasts, are so rare as to be a non-entity – while there are several hundred thousand of them, there aren't even enough to form a full percentage point compared to salarian population in toto.

The Service Guilds are clans involved primarily in industrial labors. These are the big business, the corporations, and the bulk of salarians are in clans that answer to the guilds. There are a number of guilds within the Service Guild (mining, pharmacology, etc) but they all meet every five years to elect fifty representatives to serve in the salarian version of a parliament. Aside from this, salarians in the service guilds are what you would term 'upper middle class'. They have stable jobs guaranteed almost from hatching, and interact mostly with each other. The Service Guilds are all about clan profits and clan power, not really 'salarians' as a gestalt ideal.

Their bitter enemies are the Craft Guilds – salarian specialists. Once merely members of the Free Clans, the Craft Guilds arose out of feelings that the Free Clans were being manipulated for the betterment of the Service Guilds and not salarian society as a whole. Each one of the four craft guilds specializes in a task – doctors, lawyers, shipbuilders, and zero-g miners. These four tasks were critical at all parts of post-spaceflight salarian culture, and they remain so today. Many of the clans in the Craft Guilds are very rich, but many are very poor. They operate a few corporate entities, but for the most part the Craft Guilds are almost asari in their outlook – they work for the betterment of all salarians, whether on the homeworld or off it. The guilds assemble once every five years to put forth candidates to the parliament, as well as selecting a Chief Operations Officer to lead the Guilds as a whole.

The Home Clans and the Offworld Clans are groupings of individual clans descended from the Service Guilds, and most are involved in non-specialist enterprises. Office workers, technicians, repair personnel, cooks – just normal people. The lower middle class, if you will. They vote on a bloc of representatives put forth in toto by the Clan leaders.

The Free Clans are a broken remnant of earlier histories, when clans answered directly to the High Dalatrass and the Six Families. Over time, the Home and Offworld Clans drifted away from them, and the Craft Guilds took most of their clans with them, leaving the remains to linger at the bottom of society. They are make-work salarians, operating the restaurants, chain stores, remote HE3 fueling stations and the jobs no one else wants. Clans too poor or small to get good breeding contracts, outcasts, and rebels all end up in the Free Clans. There are a great many yindos among the Free Clans, especially in the more distant colonies, and they are becoming more prevalent as time goes on since most clans want nothing to do in terms of breeding contracts with Free Clan members.

Salarian Social Structure – the Lythari

Salarians rejected by their clans, utterly alone, are called the Lythari. These are rebels against everything it is to be a salarian, who have turned their back on their own families to strike out on their own. Lythari are outcasts in every sense of the word – few, if any upright salarians would deal with such on any level. Most of the Lythari can be found in the Terminus systems, and occasionally entire Lythari yindos can be found there.

A few lythari serve as advisers or scientists for disreputable krogan or batarian groups. The largest organization of Lythari, the Broken Wheel, can be found operating in krogan territory, as these are lythari who voluntarily and forcefully fled from salarian space and jurisdiction as rejection of the use of the genophage, which they found repulsive. Even centuries later, their descendants would rather wander brokenly than submit to a government that would condone such acts. The Lythari, then, would be a natural vector for any infiltration of salarian society you might wish to pursue, but their effective ability to actually enter salarian society is likely to be low – they are very moral by nature, which is why they are outcast.
Chapter 19: Chapter 19 - Salarian Culture, Details

A/N: Enjoy.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Charming Jack, exasperated Richard, and curious Rachel,

I sometimes think the best part of writing these reports for you is the spluttering, rage-filled responses of Richard to what is unveiled. Certainly the idea that salarians can see the future was not conducive to his level of calm. . . I suppose I should have foreseen that?

Ah, poor choice of words.

I do hope the following observations regarding the rest of salarian culture are not so .. upsetting. Humans are not meant to be that color, I fear.

All jokes aside, much of the polymorphic nature of salarian culture is in the smaller aspects of how it is expressed, which I hope I can make clear and easy to comprehend. This report is somewhat slapdash – I fear that Agent Lawson is attracting a touch too much attention from the STG, despite keeping an outstandingly low cover. Once I transmit, we'll depart for the outer-rim Black Reach colonies, to pursue a few old contacts of mine in preparation for a report on the military and governmental functions of the Salarian Union. Carrying such out here would be suicidal, and I for one have no wish to fight through a pack of STG forces, or worse.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Hate is never enough for the alien – love is never enough for mankind.

Language and cant

Salarians speak one main language, Sur'kai, which is a totally spoken language – it has no written form at all. Sur'kai is a verb-linking verb-noun-modifier language, which results in many salarians speaking in what other intelligent beings would consider incomplete sentences. As an example, a human would say "John got in his aircar and drove to the store". The salarian would only say "Aircar at store, John arrives".

Salarians who spend long amounts of time among aliens, particularly salespeople and political figures, often take up a form of speaking more identifiable to aliens, but when stressed or alarmed will slip back into the staccato rhythms of Sur'kai.

The written form of language is not unified in the slightest. Historically, the various clans and then nations were always seeking to steal from one another, and thus the language cants were born. Although they have dwindled in number over the years, at least thirty are still in wide usage. Cants are encrypted written codes that link up with a central repository of Sur'kai words, linked by pictorial graphs or phonetic sounds.

The fact that there is no unified written language means that almost all salarian computer systems are heavily graphical and audio driven. This makes information gathering a hassle, and the most commonly used cant, that of the scientists, is widely translated into other languages for easier understanding. There are cants that are offshoots of these, used by individual clans, and the STG has both an intel-cant and a battle-cant.

Salarians also communicate through a code of subdermal vibrations known as 'quivertalk'. Quivertalk is taught in childhood and used when speech is risky, or (amusingly) during sexual heats when it is hard for salarians to think clearly. STG units have their own version of quivertalk, but how they utilize it is still a mystery to me.

After all, one cannot simply ask them.

Clan Customs

I have spoken of the larger families and guilds, but the regular salarian clan is also important. The average clan has anywhere from fifty to three hundred members, organized around a single dalatrass and her council of daughters. The dalatrass and the daughter's council make all the financial, breeding, and economic decisions for the entire clan.

Most clans are broken into three rough striations. The top of the structure is the female members, who are subdivided themselves. The Dalatrass does not breed, her daughters do, and thus dalatrasses are the only female figure most salarians (much less outland aliens) ever see. The rest of the females are cloistered away, at the very least until they are too old to breed or go into heats, and most stay with the younger females after that, passing on knowledge.

Below the females are the 'elderboys', the older salarians who are in the favor of the dalatrass and inline for breeding rights. One must prove their worth to the clan to enter their ranks, and many of them are successful at whatever they've applied themselves to, and are now more focused on ensuring their legacy of success is passed on to their clan members.

At the bottom are the 'children', young salarians and those not favored for breeding. The bulk of the clan falls into this category.

It's worth noting that clan structure sounds immutable, but is not. While setting the females away from males is de rigor due to the effects of the heats, the methods clans use to determine breeding worthiness vary wildly, and some clans graduate their members more finely – breeder males good enough for trading but not for breeding inside the clan, members to trade to other clans, etc. Even females are often divided into 'worthy to breed' and unworthy status.

Most clans have small holidays, hatch-day ceremonies, and a very large number of parties – for such a serious people, salarians will celebrate at the fall of a drop of rain if allowed. Clans usually follow the dictates and customs of their parent clans, in terms of colors adopted in dress, or even styles, but are more individualistic when it comes to musical tastes or cooking.

Breeding, Bidding, and Contracting

Understanding salarian breeding and bidding contracts is key to grasping exactly how strange these people are.

Salarian dalatrasses work hard at identifying valuable traits in their own breeding lines, and trying to marry those traits up with other useful traits in other breeding lines. The more highly placed a clan is, the more time it has to breed changes, developing a stable of desirable mates both male and female. Some breeding is done within the clan, if the genetics are right and there is no chance of inbreeding. But most breeding ends up being done between clans.

Salarians attach financial values to the right to breed for a certain number of eggs, or to fertilize a certain amount of eggs from specific males. The exchanges can be in data, in cash, lands, companies, stock, clan members, starships or even allegiance and nationality changes.

Some breeding clans are so successful they are traded on the salarian stock markets. Generally speaking, however, there are broad categories of breeding contracts. The thim-than are professionals who do nothing but breed salarians. They have dozens of females and hundreds of males with wide ranges of intellects, physical traits, and mental abilities, and they make offers to salarians of other clans to join them and be on offer. Calling them prostitutes would be very wrong, as they don't sell the breeding act so much as the outcome of such. They post 'contracts', which are in essence a mix of breeding advertisement and insurance policy. For example, if a contract is taken by a lesser clan to breed four females with certain skin tones and vocal ranges, with intelligence in a certain range, the thim-than would deliver that.

The other big section of breeding clans are the thal-skithar, the Craft Guilds answer to being locked out of the breeding contracts from above. The thal-skithar are almost certainly very close to prostitutes, as they are not even really clans so much as groups of breeders left to breed. Males and females in thal-skithar compounds are freely mixed, turning into very little more than ongoing orgies and massive amounts of egg-laying. These eggs are harvested and sold in batches with genetic and informational tags on the input breeders to smaller clans to act as booster stock.

If this all seems rather cold and impersonal, well, it is. To me, it is somewhat appalling, that the futures of young salarian children are so many chips in a bidding contract. To salarians, it is natural – the family is the totality of everyone in the clan. Parents are not important, at least biologically speaking. Raising children seems to be a communal affair.

Cultural Shifts and Allegiance Changes

With the ruthlessness of their breeding programs, it should be no surprise that the very loyalty and allegiance of clans is also for sale. Most clans are tied to their parent clan, and from their to the district clan, and the national 'overclan' – be that a colony world or a nation on the homeworld.

However, these links are not permanent, and salarian society has entire newspapers and magazines devoted to nothing else but the shift of one clan to another as they jockey for access and position. Clan loyalty is determined solely by the dalatrasses, and staying in a given clan structure requires certain levels of compensation and mutual interest. When these fade, the clan moves on to some other clan structure.

There are 'clan swaps' where two clans merge into each others larger clan family, and 'shifts' where a large and fundamental clan moves to a different nation or colony allegiance and their daughter colonies must decide whether to stay or follow.

All of this is tracked by computers, by news services, and by gossip. Corporations attached to certain clans make new business agreements or cancel fixed rate services based on the ever-shifting patterns of clan alliances and breeding contracts. The sheer amount of data involved is measured in exabytes and is only manageable by custom-written, focused VI's.

If you pay enough attention to the larger outlines of these flows, however, you can sense patterns and movements of the salarian race as a whole. For example, in the past four years, most allegiances have been broken up with the Offworld Clans from the Service Guilds, and in their place have been offers from both the Free Clans and the Craft Guilds, indicating a furtherance of interests in offworlder salarians from the homeworld families.

Access and Intelligence

Aside from religion and family relationships, access and intelligence are the other two factors of salarian culture. By 'access', I mean clan access to breeding females, and within clan structures, a clan's ability to trade for other breeding rights.

A male is measured, as I stated in the psychology section, by their ability to be useful for the clan, to prove they are worthy of being included in the breeding calculations that the dalatrasses perform. As such, there are wide arrays of services, planning, even training programs designed to develop salarians, as well as books, music, and art relating to the search for such closure. At the same time, salarian males who have bred often emit a certain level of smug achievement and begin to turn their minds to something that will aid the clan in the long term, since their personal immortality is assured, and many of the most staggering achievements in salarian history come from such males.

Intelligence is the other factor, and by that I do mean spying and gathering information. It is embedded in every level of salarian culture, from the games their children play to ordering a meal at a restaurant. Salarians see information that comes without cost or effort as somehow of less value, and the government is riddled with interlocking loops that require one department to spy on another. Astonishingly, this crazed-sounding ideal has produced a government with almost no waste, zero graft, and very little corruption at any level.

Guilds and Culture

Aside from the rigidly defined ranks of the Craft Guilds, there are thousands of guilds in salarian culture. Most are assembled from three to eight closely related clans, and they tend to operate in broad bands of work. Most salarian corporations are in-fact the public face of a guild (or in some cases, several guilds, each of which hold seats on the board of directors).

Most guilds pick a particular aspect of a particular field of study, and judge their members quality and worthiness to breed on that. For example, there is a guild that does decrypting translations of video games for conversion to salarian markets, a guild that works with nothing but chilled fish products from offworld sources, a guild that focuses on producing surgeons with specializations in muscle repair and muscle grafts, and so on and so forth.

A guild must register with the planetary authority – the Reach Guildhall on Sur'kesh itself, otherwise the offices of the planet's Senior Dalatrass. A guild must define its specialty very finely, because once registered and accredited, it is illegal for anyone – alien or salarian – to practice that work form without explicit permission from the guild.

The Craft Guilds, of course, often overlap these specialists, but they are exempt from such (which is why there is such friction between the Craft and Service Guild segments of the population). However, in general, if you want a service, you go to the service guilds – if you want to hire workers in large numbers, you go to the Craft Guilds.

Each guild popularizes certain dress styles, colors, foods, music, and even building styles. Most guilds are loosely extended families, since the clans comprising them are related, and in some cases inter-guild breeding contracts are conducted in loose, laid back manners.

The oldest of the guilds is the Honored Scrivener Guilds of Translation of the Asari Language, which dates back to the meeting between my people and the Salarians, and is the only group of people who can translate the asari language into written cant or spoken Sur'kai. They have revenues of thirty or so million credits a year, and are often called 'h-pens' in salarian cant slang. This is just an example of the sort of variety of guilds that exist.

Arts and Music

Salarian art is a taste, a mindset, and a method of perhaps reinterpreting the word 'art'. Human art is designed to evoke an emotional response based on visual appreciation, while asari art relies on overtones and relationships to other works to produce a mental reaction. The hard lines of turian art create physical reactions and responses based on turian hunting reflexes triggered by following said lines, and what little sense can be made of batarian art seems to exemplify that, to borrow a crude parlance from Ms. Lawson, that their dicks are bigger than everyone else.

Salarian art is designed to deceive the eye and fool the emotions. It evokes conflicting emotional responses in salarians, often faster than they can themselves process, producing a sort of gestalt of blended reactions. It is a mix of visual and sensory queues – often painting, sculpture and performance art lose their boundaries.

Salarian art is never static, it is produced and performed. A salarian painter will master every brushstroke of his work, and paint it again and again before audiences. The very act of creation, of the art being made, it itself a key piece of the art.

To watch such artists at work is humbling, their movements passionate and yet perfect, so fast the eye becomes dizzy trying to follow. Music is a big part of these presentations as well, crafted to not only the aural ranges but certain levels of vibration that only salarians can hear. There are arts of scent and smell, arrangements of haptic images in chaotic bands that frame and highlight the center art, and a sense of watching something evolve. It is majestic and fascinating...and, of course, deceptive.

In every such artwork, another is hidden. It becomes a game (or part of the piece, I find myself uncertain) to find the hidden work within the greater whole. The greatest masters of salarian art have never had their hidden works found in their art, even hundreds of years later. Entire generations of salarian students master the works of Eyia Thursus, a painter who died seven hundred years ago, trying to find the hidden meaning and message in his work 'Place of Two Lines'.

Such devotion to the arts is humbling. Their appreciation of alien works is more … intriguing. Salarians have a school of thought that suggests alien art and music is a key to understanding cultural and even intellectual values of the species. Salarian economic specialists will study human movie releases and shifts in popular culture – not to advertise, or even gain a feel for market stability or customer satisfaction, but to decide if the human gestalt is ready for new concepts or if they wish older trends and familiar patterns. Military forces also study alien art.

The apparent silliness of this analysis becomes less amusing when one recalls that salarians pride themselves on understanding every facet of an enemy before the first strike, even that which the enemy does not himself know. I once spoke with a salarian general who told me what he took from asari art is that unity in our species is our true weakness, that an attack that worked against our natural desire to follow our matriarchs and rely on one another would be devastating.

I cannot disagree with his analysis, and I worry that even if I could not see how such a strategy would work, he had already come up with one.

Within the Clan

Day to day salarian life is hectic and fast paced, as can be expected from a short lived and frenetic race. They spend the majority of their time in work, study or other productive arts, and they tend to play as hard as they work.

Your average salarian citizen works twelve to fourteen hours every day. He rarely takes time off, only for major medical or family emergencies, and will often work longer hours if needed. Salarians do not have nuclear families or dedicated mates in most cases, so such long hours are not an imbalance for him.

The males will often spend their time after work in competitive, intellectual contests or in celebratory events. Games and tests of reflex, wit, and quick thinking are the most popular, while more physical contests (with the exception of a few high-speed, high reactions sports) are not common.

Video games and other electronic entertainment is a very common form of enjoyment, but salarians are surprisingly down to earth and enjoy nature as well. They are still powerful swimmers and love to engage in water sports almost as much as asari do.

Salarians discovering the human affection for high-speed racing, especially ground vehicle racing, became instant addicts, and the GASCAR circuit is nearly as popular on Sur'kesh as it is on Earth. The sheer reflexes, nerve, and speed of thought required to handle mass accelerated vehicles going six hundred kilometers an hour draws huge crowds.

Salarian daily life for the more successful members of a clan, or the females, is more sedate. They rarely leave their compounds, and are given more to reading and intense examination of the extranet. They partake in a great deal of haptic programming, from lurid turian soap operas to intellectual philosophy from hanar priests.

Philosophy

Deriving a coherent set of philosophical viewpoints from the morass of salarian culture is akin to finding muons by flailing about with a cup. There are so many wildly disparate views and nuanced schools of thought that investigating such would take more time that is available.

However, two basic schools of what might pass as salarian legalistic philosophy are very widespread and relevant to this work. The first is the Rule of Insight, a legendary view supposedly originating with Shego herself. Shorn of the fancy language and Wheel mysticism involved, it states that success or failure in any task is decided by if the end results reveals your true intentions, not by the final outcome. A salarian operation to steal valuable research data that succeeds but can be traced back to the perpetrators is an obvious failure...unless the perpetrators make it look as if they were frame and had no need of the data in the first place. They prize not only obtaining secrets, but either ensuring that they are never found out – or that if they are found out, the why is never truly known.

The larger ramifications of this way of thinking troubles me to no end. It makes me question exactly how much of what we know of salarians is merely yet another smokescreen, another onion layer between us and the core of the truth. I dislike evoking my voice in a way to make me sound like Dr. Minsta, but his revulsion at deception mirrors my feelings toward the salarian mindset. Something very dark and twisted has shifted this entire culture to a place where even the understanding of why an action was taken is more important than the action itself.

No sane being embraces that sort of thinking willingly.

The other school of thought is, on the surface, more benign. Often dubbed the Salarian Paradox, it goes as follows:

Knowledge gained is now a target for others, knowledge not gained a missed opportunity. Gaining advantage over others makes you a threat, but lacking advantage over others makes you vulnerable. Seek thus to turn your targets into opportunities and your vulnerabilities into threats, and you become unknowable.

The skewed logic of the above statement is perhaps the strongest message of the salarian mindset I can give you without a link to let you see the mazes of their minds for yourself. Human philosophy questions the nature of truth and reality. Turians seek an understanding of what honor and survival require. Asari ask how things interact with one another. Even the krogan have a certain symmetry and beauty in their harsh desert poetry and talk of a struggle against existence itself.

But the salarians reduce life to a cipher, a series of equations to be solved, of measures to be balanced. It is the soul of a watch, gears turning in the endless pursuit of empty exactitude. I often wonder if the wildness of their arts and music is a rebellion against such emptiness...or merely another smokescreen over it.

Entertainment and Tourism

Despite the natural beauty of Sur'kesh, the Salarian Union is not a promoter of tourism. Salarians are, however, often widely traveled themselves.

There are of course the usual amenities – salarians like hosting trade conferences, scientific gatherings, and the like. But trideo and haptic entertainment, while consumed in large amounts, is rarely sourced in salarian space, or even financed by them. The cities of Sur'kesh, for all their ancient beauty and majestic size, are too quiet at times. As if everyone watches, seeking, searching, or hiding.

Tourism in salarian space as a whole is a little better,but most of it remains confined to the more loosely regulated Black Rim colonies. Salarians touring other worlds are avid amateur photographers and vloggers, producing reams of memorable events from their stays in alien space. How much of this is real entertainment and how much is the subtle act of gathering information on alien worlds? I do not know.

Events and Holiday

Attempting to make any kind of sense of a salarian calendar is a waste of time, not because of it's complexity, but because it is often easier to find a day by looking for the holidays and celebrations associated with it.

A few important days do stand out, however. The most important of these is the Fall of Shego, the first week of the salarian new year, a time of the giving of small gifts laden with advice and when new contracts are negotiated. The Fall of Shego is a time when dancers fill the streets, haptic signs and masks of paper and thin wood decorate the face, and males compete in feats of reflexes and acrobatics as they did in ages past, hoping to impress a watching dalatrass enough to be brought into a clan.

Another holiday, Wheelflow, is mostly religious in origin. It is a day of meditation and reflection, to push harder at chosen goals and at the same time to look over one's shoulder and see how far they've come. Bereft of the wild dancing and other activities (drunkenness, aggressive male posturing, etc) that marks the Fall of Shego, Wheelflow is a more relaxed, laid back holiday.

Death Rites

The horror that is the Collapse Rot, and the fact that it might source from salarian corpses, explains why their funerary rites are so simple. Salarians that die are rapidly encased in omnigel, and after an extremely brief ceremony, incinerated. I'm afraid there isn't much more to it that that, and most salarians seem dismissive of the bodies of the dead, believing that in death they have already moved on beyond the interaction of our reality.
Chapter 20: Chapter 20 : Salarian Government

A/N: The salarian government has always struck me as requiring a great deal of byzantine complexity, but I was not sure how to model it. I hope the below makes sense, as I had to rewrite it several times and it's so try most of Trellani's voice is missing.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Dearest Jack, clever Richard, and lovely Rachel,

We are in transit to the Black Rim colonies, to meet with my last few contacts, and while I am on this boring vessel, it is a good time to cover the salarian government, that most byzantine of topics.

I have done my best to provide a good overview of what the government is like, although I fear that I have only scratched the surface. The strange mix of hyper-aggressive guilds, ancient noble rulers, and the interplay of relationships between the Ministries of the government is enough to make an elcor weep of boredom, but once past the surface the tangle becomes one of, unsurprisingly, yet more layers of misdirection.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: When the alien becomes familiar, the alien becomes dangerous. Distrust is both your watchword and your salvation.

Salarian Government Structures:

At it's most basic, the salarian government is three polymorphic bodies of power operating in three different arenas of influence. As with every other part of salarian society, there are very ancient political structures mixed in with more modern concepts, and without the photographic memory all salarians posses, keeping it all straight would be a hopeless task.

From what I grasp of your own government, it is organized around strict hierarchical lines, formed around a central group of powerful institutions and delegating lesser responsibilities to less powerful organs of the government. The salarians are entirely different. Each piece of the government has it's own tasking, over which it is supreme. These governmental departments negotiate with one another to arrive at the required tasks.

The Court of the High Circle

The highest form of government in the Salarian union is known as the Court of the High Circle. This is comprised of the Sur'kesh High Dalatrass, the dalatrasses of the Six Families, the High Lord of the Reach Research Compound, the highest ranking savant of the Wheel Religion, and the STG Master.

Officially, the Court of the High Circle exists to 'advise' the Salarian Union. This is blatant fantasy, the Court is the most potent concentration of power and secrets in the entire salarian race. That being said, it is true that they do not issue laws, do not make public appearances, and are rarely seen acting openly.

From my understanding, the Court provides the vision and guidance for where the Salarian Union should be headed – in broad strokes. The actual government does all the detail work, passing laws, raising taxes, conducting diplomacy. There is very little communication between the Union proper and the Council. A single guild is responsible for all public communication between the Court and the general population, and most of them have been cybernetically altered to prevent them from being compromised by torture. And the rest of the government must go through the Ministry of the Union to communicate with them.

That being said, each one of the Six Families has rough oversight over one of the Ministries (see below), and usually over some aspect of salarian society or industry. In that aspect they do communicate frequently, but often through long chains of intermediaries.

It is easier to have a meeting with the Council of Matriarchs than it is to even send a message to the Court.

Government : Salarian Union

The Union itself is a model of clean efficiency. The government on Sur'kesh is based out of Reach, and meets in the old fortress of the ancient salarian lords, now upgraded to modern architecture on the inside. There is a three person committee formed from each of the nations of Sur'kesh that acts as an executive branch. This committee votes yay or nay on laws and bills proposed by the Seating, the gathering of delegates from across the Salarian Union.

The Seating is never a fixed number. Colonies and member worlds send a number of delegates based on a confusing number of factors, including prosperity, the amount of holdings on the world, and political influence of the leaders of the world and of the Seating. The Seating is divided into three groups. The Lower Seating is comprised of the representatives of planetary populations, and proposes laws that affect the salarian people. The Middle Seating is comprised of representatives from the Guilds and Clans, and work on legislature that affects the Guilds and Clans, as well as trade relations. The Upper Seating is composed of representatives from the various holdings on the worlds, and votes on taxes, spending, and military matters.

There is no court or legal framework – all such questions of law are handled at the holding level by the noble or dalatrass in question, and at the highest level by the Court of the High Circle informally. Salarian law is extremely flexible, but they borrowed the word for 'lawyer' from we asari, as the idea of a being who exists only to work on the law did not occur to them until later. There are now various Guilds that do nothing but act as lawyers, each guild specializing in a different kind of law,but these cases take place in foreign settings.

Below the Seating and the Committee, there are six broad ministries that allow the Union to function. Five of them are headed by a male, but the sixth (the Ministry of Union) is headed by a female who summarizes the activity of the various ministries and provides reporting to the Committee.

Below the ministries, literally all government is handled through the holdings.

Government : Venoths, Tanoths, Jenoths, and Seroths

Salarian society retains its feudal flavor once you descend from the heights of galactic governance. While Sur'kesh has nations, these nations are basically place-names at this point in history. Much like the Union itself, they impose a thin shell of organization over a morass of what are called Holdings.

A holding is the amount of land and property commanded and owned by a single Family. Holdings start out as Seroths, which are small, and proceed up to Venoths, which can be entire colonial groups.

A Holding is composed of four elements – the Family who holds the property, the lesser and associated Families who have lesser Holdings within or around it, the Families who reside on it, and the actual, physical properties. Since your AIS uses historical terms from Earth's own feudal period to describe these, I shall as well.

The smallest level of Holding is the Seroth, or the march. It is typically either a small town and the surrounding lands, or a small station (mining, HE3, etc) that is self-contained. It can also be a subdivision of a larger Holding, with rights granted to a lesser Family to aid in administering the area. The Seroth is ruled by what you would call a marquis, who is typically the family dalatrass of the largest Family in the area. Seroths are nearly ubiquitous throughout salarian space. You can think of them as the equivalent of your administrative districts in the colonies, or counties on your Earth. Seroths maintain local taxes, local police forces, local utilities, and basically act to handle all the small-segment needs of a population. They also provide the smallest discrete bloc of salarian political power. A Seroth is important...but not highly important.

Between five and fifteen Seroths form a Jenoth, or county. These are often smaller colonies, very large space stations, or political subgroups in a nation. The Seroths within a Jenoth's sphere of influence do not answer directly to the Jenoth, but often meet informally to coordinate events. Power generation, medical care, large-scale transportation networks, and industrial regulations are the focus of the Jenoth's leadership. Jenoths are ruled by what you would call a count, who has a court of advisers.

Several (between three and six, but never more than seven) Jenoths form a Tanoth, or a barony. Tanoths are almost always entire large colonies, or in some cases the entire solar system including all lesser colonies. On Sur'kesh, each nation is comprised of three Tanoths. Tanoths are so large scale that they manage private militias and each one has an STG adviser. They manage equally large-scale elements of government, such as disaster response, tax collection, education, commercial regulation, and provide what legal framework exists in a region. Jenoths within a Tanoth meet quarterly in a grand council with the Tanoth's dalatrasses, and the ruler of the Jenoth

The highest level of organization, the Venoth, bears special mention. There are only six Venoths, and each one is ruled (unsurprisingly) by the Six Families. The first two, Manno and Ergii, focus all their efforts on Sur'kesh itself. Manno tends towards financial regulations and banking, while Ergii spends more time works more on fostering the arts, culture, and smoothing communications between the elements on Sur'kesh. While I am sure they are involved in more than that, details on both families are incredibly difficult to obtain.

I do know (from an old friend of mine) that Manno's estates are within the Reach itself, and that they own most of the territory around it. Ergii is so utterly paranoid that I am not sure they have a central place of organization at all, instead the family tends to live (or hide) inside fortified bolt-holes built into the museums and cultural centers they sponsor.

Shuel and Daaso, while also based on Sur'kesh, incorporate the surrounding 'core' colonies in their Venoth. They also are in control of maintenance of the planetary defense networks, for planning further colonial expansion, and providing coordination of the space – lanes in the system proper.

Shuel also manages the mercantile markets and provides regulations for merchants and trading. They operate from a heavily fortified ziggurat-complex dug into the mountains just south of the Reach, accessible only by a severely fortified skylane – there is no ground route to reach the complex. They also operate three 'merchant relations' guilds, and are the central registrar for most merchant guilds and corporations to interact with. Shuel government officials are the most visible on Sur'kesh, and the current High Dalatrass, Linron, is a member of the Family.

Daaso is the STG's informal sponsors and provides them with additional political muscle. It has, in the past century or two, become increasingly difficult to separate the facilities and personnel of Daaso from that of the STG. Daaso's family complex, a sprawling estate covering over three thousand square kilometers, directly abuts the STG Core Tower and the STG Proving Grounds. Something like sixty-five percent of the STG is either of the Family, in an associated family, or has links to the Family through breeding contracts. Daaso's time, when not spent on the STG, is usually spent on the industrial machine that feeds them equipment and strike vessels.

The last two Families are, in my view, the most interesting in terms of governance. Between the two of them, Yaan and Solus are responsible for the rest of the salarian colony worlds, and the salarian population on the Citadel. Yaan operates from the Citadel directly, owning most of Tayseri Ward, as well as the Bright Rim colonies spreading from the Citadel to the 'Citadel half' of Union space. Yaan tends to take the leading hand in interactions with other alien races – not surprising, as they are the only one of the Six truly interested in other aliens in any aspect beyond viewing them as threats.

Solus owns the Black Rim colonies, a collection of eccentric worlds and broken clans, bits and pieces of the Free Clans, scientific guilds doing strange or dangerous research, and militant STG training facilities. Of all the Six Families, Solus has the lightest grip on governance, it's Tanoths operating only with the very lightest of oversight. Solus is almost entirely focused on the salarian military, and on the military forces of other alien races. Of the Salarian Union's six shipyards, five of them are owned by Solus and in their space.

Government : STG Command

I do hope, dearest Richard, that you are not expecting some treasure trove of secrets regarding the STG from this jaunt of mine. Attempting to infiltrate and investigate the Special Tasks Group is beyond suicidal, verging on comical.

That being said, one often finds the hunt need not be completed with the spear if the bow will suffice.

It took me some time to find a … pliable … member of the STG. Every member of the group wishes to excel, and while that makes them intensely competitive and resistant to bribery or corruption, it also makes them vulnerable to information offered. In this case, I gave them all the operational details on the Cerberus cell that was set up to act as a honey pot on Tallia II, and in return got a great deal of disorganized insight into the STG itself.

No one, not even the STG, is sure of the identity of the STG Master. He is the top operator of the organization, the interface between it and the government (and by extension, the Court of the High Circle.) He (or she?) wears a climate controlled, scan-proof suit with a total face mask at all times, speaks with a cybernetically altered mechanical voice, has all limbs replaced with very high grade cyberware, and does not have a name. Rumors suggest the next Master is picked when the current one takes office, and is mind-wiped and reprogrammed to be the perfect operative. Other, darker rumors whisper of genetic alteration and experimentation, or cloning.

All we do know is that the STG Master assigns tasks to the Group as a whole. And if the information I have is correct, the Master decides what tasks the Group will or will not perform. The STG does not answer to the Circle, or even to the Citadel in this regard. They consider themselves apolitical, and their only priority is the preservation of the Salarian Union.

I have never heard of an intelligence service that does not answer to anyone, and it is very possible this is just tides against the shore. After all, the influence of the Daaso Family in STG is enormous, and cannot be discounted that they are the secret masters. Then again, these are salarians – the entire structure and the Master may all be lies and some other party controls the Group's actions.

This is why salarians induce headaches.

What little can be taken from what I gathered is this: the STG is broken down into operational cells, each of which reports to a cell leader. A cell is between three and five teams of ten members each. The cells coordinate through the cell leaders, who report to division leaders, who report to the Master.

Each alien race is assigned a division. So is the Citadel, the Geth, the Mass Relays, and so are many criminal groups. You will be honored (or upset) to know that there are three entire divisions assigned to Humanity – one for the SA itself, one for the SA fleet, and one for the Corporate Court. Oh, and Cerberus rates an entire cell.

I did find out one piece of information you will probably wish to act on. There are two cells devoted to attempting to breach the security around your 'Black Zone'.

Government : The Ministries

As I mentioned earlier, there are six ministries that administrate the rest of the governmental functions. These are the Ministry of the Union (executive oversight), the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Ministry of Guilds, and the Ministry of the Interior.

The Ministry of the Union is fairly small, perhaps a few dozen highly placed information managers and a few dalatrasses, who coordinate the information and requests from the other ministries and interface with the Court of the High Circle. Dominated by the Manno Family, the Ministry's basic job is to process all communications to and from the Court, and to pass along instructions as needed.

The Ministry of Defense is in charge of the non-STG portion of the military, and is the largest of the Ministries. Every military force has a Ministry adviser, and all of the ordering, disbursement, logistics and non-combat duties are managed by the Ministry. Unsurprisingly, the leadership of this Ministry is mostly composed of hard-core Solus military types, half of them former soldiers themselves. What passes for strategic command coordinates it's efforts through the Ministry. The bulk of the personnel are War Clans members, mostly from Sur'kesh.

The Ministry of Science is the official government research body, and is in charge of all universities, education, training camps, and of course, research facilities. It works very closely with the Reach Research Compound at the Sparak, and is in charge of all of the various uloi academies on both the homeworld and the colonies. The Ministry sets out research goals, provides and organizes grants, procures and distributes research equipment, sets the testing standards for both standard education and the entry requirements for the uloi, and acts to back-up and safeguard salarian knowledge. Overseen by the Ergii, the Ministry is also loosely in charge of fostering salarian art and culture.

The Ministry of Intelligence is not related to the STG, but instead to the government and military intelligence forces. Amusingly, this is the ministry that deals the most with diplomatic events, and thus the old adage that every salarian diplomat is a spy is very accurate. While intelligence is usually a Daaso thing, it is the Yaan – with their fixation on aliens – that run the Ministry of Intelligence. The tasks of the Ministry are not only in training spy-diplomats, but in psychological analysis, coordinating efforts with the STG, collecting economic and demographic data inside and outside of the Union, and providing counter-intelligence operatives for the public sector.

The Ministry of Guilds, operating out of the Reach Guildhall, oversees the process of incorporating, shifting, altering and registering guilds and guild interests. It also provides a central location for guilds and corporations to work with one another, provides some economic controls and regulation of banks, and the like. The ministry is run by the Shuel family, which is a natural fit given their focus on mercantile interests and business.

The Ministry of the Interior is the strangest of the ministries. On paper, it is in charge of regulating interactions between the holdings, overseeing public works, managing currency and public safety, and land management. In practice, the ministry, loosely overseen by the Daaso when they can bother, is the largest gathering of salarians in the government not directly connected with the Six Families. Much of the ministry is run by members of the Home Clans, with strong leavenings of the Service Guilds also involved.

Government Services: Police and Disaster Response

All salarian worlds have their own police forces, usually mustered by the ruling Jenoth or Tanoth. The quality of said services varies widely, based on the expense paid for them and the goals of the rulers of the area, but almost all of them are roughly on par with C-SEC Special Response units.

The typical city will boast a police force of at least five hundred, usually with a single STG adviser and a few personnel from the Ministry of the Interior acting as supervisors. Special police forces are set up in industrial areas and other areas of interest, called the Union Sentinels, which are a mix of police and intelligence units.

The salarians, much like you humans, also have a class of political police, although at least they are more subtle than Commissars. They operate out of the larger cities, mostly in against gang and/or terrorist activity, and are equipped and trained by the military. These special police are called Dhalash (the Guard of Service) and take orders directly from the Ministry of the Union, oddly enough. The distinction is interesting, especially when they have authority to act directly from the one Ministry directly connected to the Court of the High Circle.

The emergency services of the salarian government is organized on a guild level, with public sponsorship by various towns, cities, and stations. Most cities will have between three and five such volunteer response services. There is a better equipped, more professional force, assigned to deal with haz-mat fires or other serious accidents, which is maintained and trained by the Ministry of the Interior.

Government Services: Public Information Bureau

Another mark of the strange nature of the salarian government can be found in the Public Information Bureau. This strange group of guilds is directly commissioned by the government to provide visitors (usually traveling businessmen or diplomats, but on occasion soldiers cross-training with the salarian military, and the rare tourist) with information and guidance.

These are well-adjusted, calmly speaking salarians with a deep familiarity with aliens. Well spoken, demurely dressed, and exquisitely polite, they are found in every star-port and fueling station, every hotel and public building, and maintain offices and facilities on every single planet salarians control.

They are also – hardly a shock – spies and infiltrators. Designed to place people at ease and to figure out what a person is on Sur'kesh or other salarian worlds to do, they are primarily an early tripwire to allow more professional assessments by the STG of any possible infiltration attempts. They are almost always armed, usually with a slim pistol and some form of close-in melee weapon – typically omniblades, but knives and even mono-filament whips have been seen.

The Bureau employs mostly poorer salarians, rather than recruit from the well-to-do, and thus they are seen as somewhat dispensable. They are, however, very useful for traveling through salarian space, as they genuinely try to help those travelers who are just traveling.

Government Services: The Reach Research Compound and the Sparak

The last component of the government is perhaps the most dangerous.

Until about five hundred years ago, the Sparak – the huge citadel of salarian learning and science – was notably apolitical. Part of this was due to the fact that the uloi academies were places where violence was forbidden, and part of it was that scientists felt politics got in the way of pure science.

That ended when the government put billions of credits worth of cash into renovating and upgrading the Sparak, building a 140-story tower on it's northern edge. An entirely new guild was set up to administer the research inside, and it was dubbed the Reach Research compound.

The guild that runs it is called, ominously enough, the Hand That Seeks. (I wonder sometimes if melodrama is a sort of infection that strikes at random. All they need to do at this point is paint the tower black with red haptic graphics and a sign saying "evil research within".) The Hand gets it's funding and orders directly from the Six Families, that much is known.

What isn't known – and may never be known until too late – is what is being researched within the tower. Only guild members can get in – the salarians have the entire tower hermetically sealed, and the only entrance is through some form of airlock. According to rumors, the guild members have been vaccinated against some form of bionetic plague that circulates within the tower, one that kills in less than eighteen hours. I have not been able tot determine if this is true or not, but the guard around the tower is extremely heavy, and it's structure incorporates six GTS batteries and multiple GARDIAN laser arrays.

The rumors about the research going on inside are even wilder. I believe that the RRC is the salarian answer to the SA's 'Black Zone' and the turian Darkline Territory. Without some way to get inside – and I can think of none – the only truth in the matter is the salarians do not like to throw money away for nothing. Whatever is inside is very important to the Six Families.

The RRC sponsors thousands of scholarships, not just for salarians but for all races, in the fields of biology, cybernetics, genetics, math, and physics. These scholarships are fought over fiercely because they allow one to study full time at the Sparak, which is a high honor. The winners must conduct various lines of research for the RRC to repay such largesse, but the research being undertaken that I have been able to confirm makes little sense.

Much of the research is into a series of archeological digs being conducted by the RRC on a world known as Makana. Among other oddities – the salarians are shipping vorcha in large numbers to the planet. Salarians are buying up lots of UV irradiation panels. Salarians are researching statical discharge systems, and so on and so forth, unknowable streams of information that seem to lead to no clear purpose.

Much like the rest of their government, it remains a mystery to me.
Chapter 21: Chapter 21 : Salarian Military

A/N: There is a nod to X-COM in the design of the Shieldbreaker battlesuits, but only a nod. The salarian military is not numerous, so it must by nature hit harder than other militaries.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Beloved Jack, brilliant Richard, and deadly Rachel,

The Black Rim colonies are so much more interesting – and less hazardous – than the dense, stifling jungles of Sur'kesh or the boring plains of Mannovai. Miss Lawson is finally coming along in the areas of infiltration and seduction, although she takes a distressingly businesslike stance in regards to the latter.

You people seriously need to have more fun. I fail to understand the point of being some sort of dangerous rebel group if you must do so by hiding in barren, infested hellholes plotting instead of getting out and enjoying yourself. But I digress, and Miss Lawson is giving me her "I despise aliens" look...

The salarian military is, both on paper and in practice, no match for the asari. Truthfully, in terms of numbers it isn't even a match for the Systems Alliance military. That does not mean it is harmless. It is extremely dangerous, in a way that the average salarian thug or mercenary is not.

Take a moment to remember what I said of salarian focus, then consider that for salarians in the military, excellence is the only way to prove their worth to their families. Every single salarian soldier is a perfectionist, driven by biological imperative to be as ruthless and precise as possible. They have even less mercy than krogan or batarians and are, when properly motivated, almost impossible to break.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Service in the furtherance of humanity is it's own immortality. Fear not death, only betrayal.

Salarian Military Generalities and Mindset

The salarian military is, much like the asari military, an afterthought. I am sure this amuses or infuriates you, seeing how powerful the asari military is, but I assure you that it is true. Just because a military is required in a dangerous galaxy does not mean it is wanted, or that pursuit of a career in the military is glamorous. Humanity idolizes violence – the salarians and asari do not.

In particular, the salarian mindset towards violence and war can be summed up in the same way a professional exterminator goes after pests. They rarely like their jobs, so they go about it in an a calm, efficient way than ensures they do not have to repeat the task.

Salarian military action cannot be disentangled from salarian intelligence services. The very word they use for war is roughly translated to mean armed conflict after spying, and the very idea of 'declared' war is utterly alien to them. Combat is only brought about after the target has been identified, scouted for weakness, scanned for alternative approaches, and indirect sabotage has already been performed.

Given that salarians have powerful reflexes, incredibly high reaction times, and can outperform most other races on all physical levels except sheer strength and durability, it should come as no surprise that their military emphasis is in three main areas. Precision targeting, forward recon, and defense against attack.

The number of the military forces is smaller than the armies and navies of other races. Part of this is due to the fact that the only people who usually enter the military are the War Clans, the Solus Family, and a few eccentric types from the Black Rim colonies. Additionally, most salarians do not have the mindset for combat – they are too easy to break and run when startled or frightened. Only hardened salarians grown in environments to prepare them can even handle the stress of combat.

Additionally, the military is not a glamorous position, as I have alluded to. While it is important, even necessary, salarians prefer someone else to get dirty with the fighting while they stand back and snipe or provide intelligence information. Dying messily does not appeal to them any longer, unlike in their tribal period. In this, perhaps, the meddling of the dalatrasses to suppress male aggression has worked too well.

Well, except for the Solus, who would pick a fight with a yahg and then study it for evolutionary data after taunting it and killing it with some appalling weapon, like a sword made of grenades or other such nonsense.

Salarian Military Doctrine – Ground

The salarian ground forces are typified by four traits – extremely tough defenses,accurate weapons, rapid medical support, and heavy use of combined arms tactics.

All salarian military units are designed for one and only one task. While this makes them inflexible in chaotic battle situations, it gives them an edge when they are being used as designed. It makes the salarians very strong on offense and weak on defense – but that is the purpose of the Shieldbreakers (see military forces below).

Unlike the measured approach of the asari echelon, which has no weakness, or even the combination of symmetric heavy and asymmetric light assaults of humanity, the salarian military fights offensively yet reactively. Remember that they plan every attack out after intense scouting and intelligence gathering, and will craft responses as far down as platoon levels before actually attacking.

Salarians specialize in the destruction of symmetric forces, using their so-called antisymmetric stances. These are similar in practice to your own SA's op tempos, but unlike those these preset conditions are trained into every soldier rather than announced by commanders.

It is eerie to see entire salarian units nearly automatically react to flanking or other situations in unison, like some distributed intelligence guided them to do so. It is why salarians are so dangerous in small groups where such tactics can turn an ambush into a wild shooting melee – the kind of fight salarians can easily win.

Salarian ground forces are extremely mobile, eschewing fixed defenses. They are worthless in a straight "stand-up" defensive fight, as they cannot absorb damage well and their morale tends to collapse when not on the offense. Conversely, in rapid reaction strike assaults or sabotage, they are unmatched in both elan and efficiency.

Salarian Military Doctrine – Space

Salarians dislike space combat almost as much as they dislike ground combat. The salarian mindset grasps at efficiency and simplicity of form, and the chaos of a battle beyond the opening salvos is appallingly distasteful for them as it cannot be planned and modeled. At least ground battles have to conform to physical terrain, gravity, supply lines and line of sight – space, being three dimensional and with limitless maneuver room, is really only bound by heat endurance, range, and damage control.

In a move that should surprise none of you, salarians focus heavily on those three elements in their space combat strategy. Deciding that if they can't have their calm battle, that the battle should thus descend into a complete mess, salarian planning thus reduces each battle to positioning the enemy in a place from which they can be shot to pieces. Thus, they control the range, they mitigate damage, and they ensure that if anyone has to withdraw due to heat failure it is not them.

Salarian technology, with the exception of armor, torpedoes and mass drives, is well advanced beyond other races. They use x-ray lasers in their GARDIAN systems, which are linked into a pseudo-neural net of reactive VI's, optoelectronic sensors, and cybernetic links to salarian gunners, allowing them to weather missiles better than other races.

Salarian focus on heat endurance is legendary. Rather than the droplet / dump heat sink method employed by most races, salarian heat sinks are multiphase ceramic liquids that go through energy phase shifts when properly energized. This consumes a great deal of heat energy, and excess heat is vented through the array of radial vents cleverly hidden in the 'wings' of salarian ships. They also maintain droplet heat sinks as a backup, as well as some kind of liquid nitrogen dispersal system for emergency cooling. Salarians have not replicated your IES stealth system yet, but are looking into other methods, including visual cloaking devices that operate using chameleon skins adjusted by VI.

The salarian fixation on range and speed is also well-known, as salarians have the fastest ships. While the asari mass effect core is superior, the salarian conventional FTL drive is far beyond any other race's design, allowing it to perform at two to three light years beyond that of other drives. In-system thrusters are also superior, including multipoint vectored thrust systems that use liquid polyalloys to shape their thrust in precise manners or even vent in multiple directions. This gives salarian ships not just powerful evasive abilities, but the speed to control range in battle.

The salarians hate symmetrical space formations as much as they do ground formations, and their answer to the space version can be likened to a straight out brawl, performed by acrobats against spastic quadriplegics. In this case, the cripples are the alien vessels, outperformed in all ways by the slender salarian warships around them. To watch them in space combat is to see a slow, lethal dance, not one entirely alien to anyone who has hunted down game.

In lighter battle, the salarians pair up multiple assault frigates with their fierce corvettes in hunting packs, with scout elements leading the way. Once the target is sighted, the scouts lock up targeting and scanning fields while the corvettes and assault frigates dive in. As the battle is joined, and elements of the enemy are contending with those lighter units, heavier units begin sniping from the sidelines.

Inevitably the enemy will have to break open their battle formations to deal with these sniper cruisers, at which point the frigate/corvette combos in their midst will tear out the guts of the fleet, while the assault cruisers pound down the ships seeking to stop the long range fire. When the fleet has been tenderized and broken up enough, only then will the dreadnaughts show up, crushing any last resistance.

In those rare situations where salarians face dreadnaughts themselves, the pattern is much the same, except that initial charge of corvettes and frigates now includes dreadnaughts and assault cruisers, and the scouts and snipers now spray untold masses of disruptor torpedoes and mines.

Salarian Military Doctrine – Ship Design

Salarian ships are, to my eye, quite beautiful. Sculpted in long, elegant lines that come to a broad crown in the front and spreading to wings in the rear, they are designed for quick strikes and direct assaults, not heavy battle – and yet weather such heavy battle quite well when the time comes for it.

They are spartan on the inside, with simple but comfortable spaces for the crew. Damage control equipment and medical treatment facilities are built into every single space and often replicated two or three times, and there is heavy use of VI automation and mechs to cut down on the salarians required to crew the ships. They are not built for boarding actions and rely solely on security stations to stop boarding parties.

Salarians build their ships to withstand very long patrols, a frigate having the endurance of a heavy cruiser. They do not carry much in the way of food-stocks aside from nutritious pastes and vitamin supplements, although port stops often end up in them buying additional food for variety.

Every salarian ship, much like the SA, has at least a science lab with mainframes, sensors, spectroscopes and the like for physics and chemical analysis. They also feature intelligence labs, with compilations of intelligence related to their mission and secure data communications with the STG.

Salarian Military Organization : Antisymmetric Stances

The salarians despise symmetric warfare, for reasons both psychological (they hate inflexibility) and practical (salarians in a line of battle are soon dead salarians). Their greatest heroes are those who misled and tricked their enemies into positions where they could be obliterated with little risk, or those who stopped wars before they began with intelligence and sabotage.

Nearly every salarian military leader will remind his troops of this, in one form or another, before going into battle. This is not merely to inspire their troops, but to remind them that to fight as other races do is to die.

To counter the blocky ranks of turians or krogans, or the echelon of the asari, the salarians invented stances that their soldiers drill in almost constantly. The stances are part reflex, part meditative, part reactionary based on intelligence. They are designed first to enhance salarian survivability, second to disrupt enemy formations, and last to ensure that if salarians have to die fighting, they will not die alone.

There are dozens of these stances – a few include shifting sniper units to higher ground while assault units rush forward with suppressive fire when heavy infantry are sighted, and then for snipers to take out unit leaders and the front lines to fling grenades and cover smoke grenades for retreat. What is interesting about the stances is that salarians are trained to engage them upon certain conditions becoming true, without orders from above.

This allows salarian officers to focus solely on how to defeat the enemy instead of reacting to the changing battlefield. It is also extremely effective and most stances are designed to disrupt formation tactics.

When I was a mere maiden, I enlisted in the Republic Guard, and was engaged in war games with a salarian unit from Sur'kesh that used these stances. When our echelon attempted to pin them down, so that the hunters could flank them, they reacted in unison. Snipers began targeting our very front ranks, making us stumble over our sisters and flinch back from the fire, while their front line kept throwing grenades off to our flanks. Eventually we bunched up, and that's when their front split open and Shieldbreakers charged us directly, using flamethrowers and heavy machine guns.

At the same time their biotics threw their heaviest attacks at the huntress units trying to flank. The rear of the echelon was thus divided – they could either protect us, and the huntress units would be decimated, or protect the huntress units, and then Shieldbreakers would crash through us and enter their own ranks. They tried splitting their efforts – which failed when the snipers suddenly shifted focus to taking out the war priestess, demoralizing us all.

It was a masterful, frightening performance. True, many of the salarians 'died' – sixty percent of the force. But their attack broke ours, and allowed the loss of a war priestess, most of our huntress units, and shattered our front lines. In a real battle, we would have broken and ran, I think.

Do not underestimate the salarians simply because their soldiers cannot handle damage well, as they will happily fling their lives away if it means victory.

Salarian Military Ranks

Salarians have a very old rank structure that hails back to their tribal periods, which they have not updated out of nostalgia, and due to the fact that it is very flexible.

Salarians in the military hail from the War Clans, primarily, although some others (particularly the Solus Family) make up large portions of the military as well. Soldiers – both officer and enlisted – start out as a single rank, that of Aspirant. The eldest male of family Solus down to the poor scion of a family from some Black Rim colony are ranked equally until they experience at least one real battle. This is called the Blooding, and is usually practiced against pirate forces. No salarian can hold any military position – command or not – without going through the Blooding. Salarians who panic or break during this event are disbarred from further service.

At that point, those who will become officers are sent off to officer training facilities, to train for three years, while enlisted begin service immediately.

Enlisted ranks start at Dragoon, which is a basic recruit. From there, there are Senior Dragoon, Spearman, and Senior Spearmen, as junior enlisted. These are roughly equivalent to your privates and corporals.

Those with the knack for leadership are made into non-commissioned officers, the Shieldbearers, which are akin to your sergeants. Others are promoted into the ranks of shield or storm dragoons if they show the proper aptitude.

Officers ranks translate roughly to Lieutenant, Commander, Captain, Submajor, Major, and General.

Severely wounded salarians, as well as volunteers, form the corps of the Shieldbreakers.

Salarian Military Units : Ground Forces

Dragoons: The basic military force are the Dragoons, in the same way that the basic force of the SA is the Marines. Dragoons are classed as light infantry, and serve from between two and ten years. Conscripted based on arcane formulas from each War Clan, different units have different names, but most are organized based on their relationship to one of the Six Families. They are trained as attrition and suppressive troops.

Shield Dragoons : The salarian version of garrison soldiers (which I have told you they are bad at), Shield Dragoon units are rare. They are given the very heaviest of armor, and nearly 35% of the force is medical personnel. Almost all of the front-line fighters are heavily cybernetically modified or have myomer muscle replacements.

Storm Dragoons: These are Family military units, raised from their own numbers and supplied by the Family itself. Without a doubt the best equipped soldiers in the Union, but their mostly ceremonial and anti-infiltration duties leave them with questionable battle skills. They are solely intended for indirect combat, despite their equipment, and are not trained for main-line battle.

Seekers: Much as we asari rely on our priestesses to lead us into battle, there are the occasional groups of Wheel Mystics who take up violence. These 'seekers' are organized around one to three such mystics, protected by a rag-tag militia of followers and mercenaries. On paper, this should be a laughable threat. In practice, the Wheel Mystics guiding them are terrifyingly accurate at predicting battles and ambushes, and they carry a mysterious aura in their presence I can only describe as unnerving. Unlike most salarians, they fight in complete and utter silence, the Mystics calmly pointing out targets of note and watching as snipers decimate them.

Transcendentals: Biotic units not attached to the STG are sometimes organized into mixed-arms small units to provide biotic support to the military.

The Shieldbreaker Corps: When one talks about professional military forces, the two premier forces that immediately spring to mind are the Turian Final Line and the Salarian Shieldbreakers. The grudging salarian answer to the need for super-heavy infantry, Shieldbreakers are heavy conversion cyborgs – arms and legs removed, chest and head reinforced, and slammed into battle suits through cyberlinks. Their sacrifice of their bodies is honored by all salarians, and the Shieldbreakers are perhaps the only truly apolitical force in the entire race. They fight extremely hard, and are renowned for breaking through the toughest defensive lines.

Salarian Military Classes:

Dragoon: the basic dragoon is a straight infantry soldier. Equipped with heavy armor, they carry a bandolier of several grenade types as well as two weapons – typically a marksman rifle and a shotgun. The marksman rifle (see below) is a cross between sniper and assault rifle, performing both tasks tolerably well.

Dragoon Sniper: With the exception of replacing the marksman rifle with a sniper rifle, and undergoing additional sniper training, these are functionally identical to basic dragoons.

Shieldbearer: A more senior soldier, the armor is upgraded to very heavy, with three or more shielding units, as well as onboard medical assistance. They prefer closer-ranged weapons, such as dual heavy pistols and combat shotguns,which their reflexes allow them to fire with devastating speed and accuracy. Their armor includes a minor array of info-war tools, including a combat drone, and a built in grenade launcher.

Officer: Officers wear lighter armor but very heavy shields, and usually carry a sniper rifle and a submachine gun for close in work. They have large info-war suites on their omni-tools, and can deploy multiple turrets, drones, and the like. Most have at least one mech slaved to their omni, sometimes more.

Shield Dragoon: The armor of the shield dragoon rivals the thickness of krogan armor, and is layered with honeycombed damage traps, backstopped by omni-gel armor paks that stiffen on impact. The shields are equally heavy, and the shield dragoon carries a light hydraulic harness to allow him to wield light machine guns and plasma throwers. Supported with additional plates of 'tech' armor and wearing an omni-shield on the right arm, these heavy infantry units live up to their name.

Seeker Acolyte: Usually wearing only clothing or a ballistic vest, these wandering soldiers do have shield units. They carry civilian rifles, mostly, but will use a dizzying array of melee weapons as well, taking advantage of their speed and agility to close in and gut an enemy. This is very … un-salarian to say the least, and most 'normal' salarians see these types as dangerous fanatics.

Shieldbreaker: The Shieldbreaker battlesuit is a self-contained machine, with multiple armor layers, mnemetic poly-alloy repair capability, projected hard-shields over vulnerable points, with two separate shield generators. The right arm is a multifunction weapon incorporating a grenade launcher, flamethrower, and six-barrel light mass accelerator. It also can generate an omni-shield to block incoming fire. The left arm is a three-fingered hand, allowing it to grasp it's BRKR particle railgun. The back of the unit contains four breakaway turret drones, a comm relay, and tactical detonation charges that can be placed for demolitions work. The legs end in sharp, curving monomolecular blades for kicking aside and killing infantry, while the shoulders are surmounted by a light GTS missile array. This is a terrifying war machine, very rarely fielded unless something vital is threatened. In power, only the asari Royal Paladin battlesuit can match it – in a fight, it's a toss up who would win, and the winner will certainly be in poor condition. It will destroy JOTUN mechs and provide a very difficult fight for a turian SkyTalon battlesuit pilot.

STG War Specialist: Very rarely, soldiers will enter the STG, usually coming back out to advise military forces. On rare occasions, however, the STG will train and task cell members with military duties, which requires additional training. Functionally identical in equipment with a Shield Dragoon, War Specialists also have nasty info-war capabilities and light cloaking tech.

Assault Adept: Biotics are rarely fielded among the salarian forces, but these biotic specialists are like living artillery units. They can only perform one or two attacks before requiring days of recovery, but the abilities they can bring to bear are often spectacular – multiple singularities, which I have only seen the High Solarch able to perform, or even several flares in a row. These biotics are usually guarded by STG forces and only called out when absolutely required.

Salarian Support Units:

Salarians field a wide array of armored air cars, gravbikes, and armored vehicles. Humans love wheeled vehicles, turians are still stuck on treads, asari favor hover vehicles. The cutting edge salarians only use anti-grav floater vehicles powered by mass effect fields, much like air-cars without flight capabilities. A few of the more common include.

Eyesight Light Assault Vehicle: the salarian APC relies more on shielding than armor. The top is open except for heavy defensive fields of tech armor, between which armored cupolas with turrets seat six defensive gunners. An armored pod acts as the cockpit, with no windows – all views are computer generated from small cameras. It can carry up to ten soldiers, plus the six gunners.

Inquisitor Light Grav Tank : A mass-effect supported tank, this vehicle moves very quickly, spraying fire from three linked 10 cm mass cannons on the front of the turret. Holding only a driver and gunner, the tank can hit speeds upwards of three hundred kilometers an hour, and it's guns are pinpoint accurate.

Grand Shield Main Battle Tank: The largest MBT in Citadel space, this is almost twice the length of the SA's HAMRHEAD, and are even larger than asari Storm platforms. Fifty seven feet long, half that wide, they are mobile GTS batteries combined with thick armor around dual 210 mm railguns firing magnetically stabilized flecks of antimatter. The sides of the tank are open-topped fighting turrets, each boasting a light machine gun, and the sides of the vehicle each have a six-pack GARDIAN laser array. The Grand Shield tank has been updated for centuries, ever since it crushed krogan forces during the Rebellions, but there are very few left now.

Salarian Warship Classes:

Salarians prefer fast, light ships to lumbering behemoths, and value the ability to mitigate damage and control range over sheer firepower. They tend to disdain dreadnaughts – they have never built up to their allowed limit, to the best of my knowledge. They prize midsize ships, somewhere between cruisers and frigates, known as corvettes to your kind.

I was able to gain very, very detailed information on the armaments of these ships from a disaffected Solus working in one of the Black Rim shipyards, who thought I was looking to buy light ships for 'pirate hunting'. Given the certitude of the dockworker, who was bitter because his family had deemed his contributions worthless after rewarding another for nearly identical contributions, his information must be taken with a grain of salt. Miss Lawson is in the process of confirming the information...which I might point out, with no smugness, is more detailed than that provided by Dr. Minsta.

Ah, but I must not challenge human superiority, after all...so on to the ships.

Frigates: The standard salarian frigate is half the size of the SA version, and very lightly armed. Carrying two external missile packs and a center-line mass accelerator, the ship is extremely fast and nimble, although the shields are light and the armor completely substandard. They do have four GARDIAN defense arrays, making them very good at stopping missiles. These are primarily used strictly for patrol, anti-pirate and other light combat duties, and it is in no way a ship of the line. They are named after base elements.

Recon Frigate: Three times the length of the stock frigate, the recon frigate is loaded with comms equipment, sensor drones, advanced scanning packages, long-range laser designator groups, and dozens of remote scanning drones. Lightly armored and shielded, with little more than a pair of mass cannons and a single bay of missiles, these frigates are used for scouting enemy positions and gathering forward intelligence. The STG uses many of them, but they are key players in any salarian naval assault force. They are named after rivers on Sur'kesh.

Assault Frigate: A 'proper' frigate, with heavier armor and much better shielding than it's smaller cousins, the assault frigate is literally armed to the teeth. Packing four disruptor torpedo tubes, two mass cannons on swivel turrets in the wings and two more larger ones center-line, and backing it up with six GARDIAN defense array strips, this frigate outguns the destroyers of every other race. As usual with salarian over-engineering, these ships are just as expensive as they are cutting edge. They are named after famous salarian warriors from ancient history.

Destroyer: Compared to the nightmare that is the salarian assault frigate, the destroyer seems out of place. While it has armor and shields slightly stronger than that of the assault frigate, the weapons load is actually lighter. The difference is that each destroyer hosts a pack of six automated fighters, flown by VI and cybernetic links to pilots on board, and that it carries a host of defensive weapons, including mines, jamming drones, and heat-flash bombs to confuse thermal imaging sensors. Destroyers boast powerful ECM suites and very strong cyberwarfare capabilities, and are used in that manner, not in open battle where avoidable. They are named for constellations in the Sur'kesh skies.

Corvette: The corvette is one of the most feared ship designs in the galaxy, the epitome of salarian engineering genius and their refusal to accept anything but the bleeding edge in technology. The hull is composed of multiple layers of semi-rigid polyalloys, floating on a supporting layer of reactive omni-gel and heavy shock absorbing, head dissipating plates. Under this is a layer of mass effect repulsors keeping the floating hull a foot away from the inner, heavily reinforced hull. The shields are actually a double set, the back half fitted within the front half by way of shaped shield emitters and hard fields. The weapons load is also formidable: triple rapid-fire missile packs in each wing, alongside two heavy mass cannons. The center-line gun is what is normally carried on heavy cruisers, and is supported by multiple GARDIAN arrays. There are also detachable missile drones on the exterior of the craft, adding additional firepower. The corvette boasts ECM and cyberwarfare capabilities, strong sensor and scanning suites, and even carries a minifacturing lab aboard. The ship is also fast and nimble, capable of high-power evasive maneuvers using double mass effect cores for greater ability at high-speed movements. The Union Naval Forces consist primarily of packs of these ships, which are paired with assault frigates. They are named for ancient salarian melee weapons.

STG Corvette: Nearly a carbon copy of the stock corvette, with the minfacturing lab and center-line guns removed to make room for a troop bay and two Eyesight APC's. Capable of carrying sixteen soldiers each, the APCs are what the STG use for ground assaults. The corvette also carries smaller missile loads to allow for a heavier sensor/scanner package and more cyberwarfare labs. Each one carries a numeric designation and that is all – they do not have formal 'names' nor a permanent crew.

Saturation Cruiser: A specialist ship deployed only in larger fights against heavy units, saturation cruisers are bulky ships, thick with armor and GARDIAN batteries. They are festooned with torpedo and missile tubes (the salarians actually contracted volus engineers for the designs, then improved them) and the ship is visibly segmented to aid in damage control. The only role of the ship is to launch dozens of missiles, torpedoes, drones, and jamming devices into combat, to turn it into a complete chaotic mess. Watching these ships vomit forth salvo after salvo of missiles in the dozens is nerve-wracking enough, watching fifteen send up clouds of death that rival what a volus dreadnaught could throw is terrifying. They are named after cities on Sur'kesh.

Assault Cruiser: The much bigger, uglier brother of his brute of a little prodigy, the assault cruiser was built along the same lines as the assault frigate, writ large. Salarians buy a decent amount of Silaris armor from the Asari Republic each year to armor these ships, and the shielding systems they have could shame some dreadnaughts of lesser navies. Despite their size and bulk they retain speed on par with most light cruisers, and agility surpassing most light cruisers, despite being a heavy cruiser type. The armament is heavy – two large-bore mass accelerators on each wing, two more under the belly, and five of them center-line to the ship. This is backed up with a devastating little innovation : long armored racks of missile launchers, that can retract into the ship after ripple launching and be reloaded. Rather than be limited to the number of tubes and large launch bays, these 'flash racks' allow them to saturate an area with missiles rapidly. The lower belly of the ship opens up to display twenty small VI piloted fighters and over fifty gun and missile drones, aiding in the ships firepower. Powerful sensors and decent (if a bit weak by salarian standards) ECM suite complete the package. The ships charge in alongside dreadnaughts, covering their weak spots, but can also be used in heavier combat patrols solo or with corvettes. These are named after famous battles in history (most of them ancient).

Gun Cruiser: The weakest salarian ships, these are basically space sniping platforms. With a low-observable hull, massive heat dissipation systems, strong jamming and ECM units, and lots of GARDIAN lasers, the ship boasts a pair of cut-down dreadnaught main guns that it is literally built around. The ship stays at extreme long-range, planting shots at will and relying on its stockier sister ships to keep enemies off of it. Often paired with a recon frigate as a spotter, much like a conventional sniper, some gun cruisers also have an escort of corvettes to keep them safe. In a fight out of long-range they are nearly helpless. They are named after famous salarian snipers.

Dreadnaught: The salarian dreadnaught is a model of sleek power and cutting edge technology. Rumors have long persisted that the real reason salarians have never built up to the limit is that they have a secret 'super-dreadnaught' ship that takes up their remaining seven slots.

Given the power of the dreadnaughts they do field, we should all pray this is false. The salarian dreadnaught is built around four center-line guns well over 300cm in diameter, hurling slugs of 300kg or more. These massive guns are only designed for blasting other dreadnaughts and possibly heavy cruisers, and are useless for smaller fare. Instead, the ship is blistered by twenty armored turrets, each one consisting of two GARDIAN arrays, a pop-up missile rack with fifteen missiles, three heavy mass accelerators, and a pair of disruptor torpedoes. These turrets cover the front, back, sides, top, and bottom, four to a facing.

Additionally, shields are generated in four 'bands' along the dreadnaught – front, middle, rear, and back. Dropping one shield segment does nothing to the others. How the salarians achieved this is still a secret, as multiple shield generators usually have harmonics issues and can only be performed in pairs. The hull is armored with layers of the same materials as the assault frigate, on top of a good two inches of Silaris armor. The crew is augmented by thousands of repair drones and security mechs, as well as VI-driven repair systems. They are named after dalatrasses of some fame, and the flagship is named Shego's Wrath.

These monsters are very nearly unkillable. I have seen only one in combat, and that was centuries ago, when a dreadnaught was ambushed by daringly stupid pirates trying to capture it. The ships were incredible back then, able of taking an entire spray of disruptor torpedoes, barreling through the enemy as if they were flyfish before a pratha shark. The ship, I recall, was damaged and burning, but still firing away, crushing it's pirate foes.

Salarian Military Equipment:

The salarians have a love affair with the grenade that borders on the indecent. As humans prefer ballistic uses of mass accelerators, turians energized bits of matter, and asari plasma, salarians like firing grenades. They have grenade pistols, grenade rifles, grenade shotguns, and a dizzying array of thrown grenades.

Grenades enable them to magnify the force with which their units hit, and break up defensive formations. And in any contest in open ground between a supremely agile salarian and a lumbering alien, the salarian will win. Do not rely on cover or fortifications when fighting their soldiers on the ground.

Aoegr Light Pistol: The Aoegr is the standard military sidearm – a heavy mass accelerator pistol, with a small under-barrel grenade launcher capable of throwing flash grenades or light EMP bursts to drop shields. The EMP burst, in particular, is very dangerous.

Scorpion Blast Pistol: The stock STG pistol, this weapon fires explosive grenades that can detonate on contact or bounce around corners and over cover. The blasts are not that strong, given the small size of the weapon, but they are damaging and disorienting. Most are used to drive enemies into the sights of STG snipers.

Rapier Laser Shotgun: An ugly weapon the salarians flat-out stole from the sometimes clever volus, the laser shotgun is more akin to a minigun, with six flash-burst laser barrels that cycle every six-tenths of a second. The result is a spray of laser fire in the UV band, invisible to the naked eye but searingly damaging. This is an assassination weapon – it makes no noise, leaves no residue, cannot be seen, and is very compact. STG uses them for just that purpose, but also as a holdout weapon – catching a face full of UV laser is a good way to lose your head. Literally.

Venom Shotgun: Another insane weapon from the STG. This grenade … shotgun (ridiculous!) fires either strong explosive blasts or a spray of delayed-detonation proximity grenades. Used to give STG units space and clearance when retreating, the weapon also wreaks untold havoc on tightly packed, lightly armored troops.

Like your SA marines. Be warned.

Serration Marksman Assault Rifle: Eventually, salarians realized that grenades could not solve everything. They built a finely tuned marksman rifle, known as the Serration. The SMAR straddles the line between assault rifle and sniper rifle, including a built-in swing down bipod, laser targeting, armor sensors, and extended clips. It can be shifted from fully automatic to single shot with one switch and can load two different kinds of ammo blocks, one armor piercing, the other high explosive. And there is, of course, an under-barrel grenade launcher.

Cobra Blast Rifle: The Cobra is a heavy assault weapon, that fires bursts of high explosive grenades in a single package. The bomblet 'splashes' these grenades everywhere, and they explode in a globular shape or a spray shape, depending on the settings of the rifle. Used mostly by Shield Dragoons, they are very ugly to run into for light infantry.

Manur Sniper Rifle: One of the finest non-turian sniper rifles, this elegant weapon is simple to break down and reliable in all situations. Using barrel-aligned laser sights and hydraulic shock adjustment, the Manur nearly aims itself, with the aid of a VI recon drone that links to the weapon. The drone is tiny and nearly transparent, and contains both a laser rangefinder and armor sensors to find weak points. The ammo is a narrow bolt of semi-liquid metal, accelerated much like a mass slug, that on impact hardens explosively, sending needles of razor sharp metal in a cone through the target. This tears armor into strips that are driven into the victim, and unarmored targets are just liquified.

Burst Resonance Kinetic Railgun: The BRKR railgun is two pieces. The first component is a burst resonance particle generator, which uses a mass effect field to compact particles from the air into an excited, energetic state. When completed, this 'ball' is flash wrapped in a narrow magnetic film of metal and hurled by the railgun out at a target at supersonic speeds. Upon impact, the metal film shreds and the particle ball destabilizes into a massive explosion of plasma and hard radiation. This is a monstrous weapon that Citadel authorities have tried and failed to outlaw for the hundred and fifty years since it was deployed.

It was designed to take out other battle suits, armored vehicles, and gunships – it's effects on armored infantry are gruesome, and against unarmored units disgusting. If you must have an image, have a human shot out of a dreadnaughts' main gun against a moon.

The weapon is slow to fire and takes time to prepare a shot. It is also loud – not as loud as the Adept Rail Cannon used by asari Royal Paladins, but loud enough to attract a lot of attention. As I said, a fight between a Shieldbreaker and a Royal Paladin would be very, very ugly.

Snapflak Grenade: This grenade uses a distributed EMP burst to take down armor, along with heated fragments of metal to tear through armor.

Flashpak Grenade: A super-flash bang, using subsonics to confuse and confound the inner ear of humans, asari, and batarians.

Gamma Grenade: A tiny version of the BRKR particle round, with lesser plasma effects but spattering hard radiation contaminate over a wide area. Used for area denial or to waste enemy medical supplies, the radiation burns it creates usually also end up affecting the thrower.
Chapter 22: Chapter 22 : Salarian Figures of Note

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Beloved Jack, brave Rachel, and … well, screaming, angry Richard.

I take it from the rather impressive response to my last missive that Cerberus projections of the salarian military were somewhat understated. I have warned you repeatedly about confirmation bias, and I am glad that at least Rachel sees the importance of hard facts instead of propaganda in determining the threat the salarians present.

The salarians delight in being underestimated. I see no reason to oblige them.

The laid-back nature of the Black Rim colonies does not mean they are not dangerous. I am fairly certain STG units are tailing us. Miranda remains calm, but the endurance of that state of mind will not last forever. I believe that, after I finish up some last bits of talking and research, a short jaunt to the Citadel to meet up with one of your protective details is in order.

Events in the galaxy are becoming disturbing. The assault on Eden Prime was bad enough, but the most recent stories are linking Cerberus to Saren's forces. Saren's removal from the ranks of the Spectres has sent shockwaves through the media, and naming of a human Spectre has focused too much attention on your kind for Miranda to not stand out. I am sending her on ahead to the Citadel. I will obtain the information on last part of my report on my own and then follow.

As an aside, your 'thoughts of the day' are becoming increasingly disturbing. Is there no way to perhaps send messages that are more positive?

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Purge the asari witch. Immolate the batarian heretic. Suffer not the turian murderer to live.

Modes of Address:

Unlike my own people, the salarians do not truly bother with titles. Males are rarely, if ever, referred as anything but the polite turian borrow-word of 'cera', which is roughly equivalent to "good man" or "sir" in your language. Females, aside from dalatrasses, are called sisters among their own kind, and are addressed as 'young mother' by males.

The nobility are not much pickier about their mode of address. For most social situations, dalatrass is the title that will serve best.

Where possible (and such information is hard to find) I have included the full name of the salarian in question, with the exception of the Dalatrasses, whose full names are on public record and which reveal nothing of their true personality in any event.

High Dalatrass Linron Shuel, Dalatrass of the Shuel: the highest figure in salarian governance, the High Dalatrass is a bitter figure that is fighting for her political life against more adept foes and shifting family alliances. Linron is, to put it delicately, difficult, and to put it bluntly, bitchy. She was never chosen formally to breed, instead ascending to the position of family dalatrass through a series of accidents that claimed the life of her mother and elder sister. As such, while she is accorded the respect of the title, there a subtle undercurrent of disrespect for her.

While a cunning political operator, her ascension to the position of High Dalatrass had less to do with her own abilities and more to do with the ugly fight between Family Ergii and Family Manno, and quiet possibly the manipulations of Dalatrass Ergii. Linron is the first High Dalatrass in over a thousand years to not hail from the 'old blood', and her rule has not been smooth. Many on Sur'Kesh of the older families do not respect her, while the Yaan and Solus ignore her almost entirely, which only makes her more upset.

She has extensive (but not truly impressive) wealth, numerous (but not truly impressive) political connections, and sufficient (although, again, hardly impressive) sway with the business sector of salarian life. Like most Shuel, she is obsessed with guilds and the economy, and the bulk of her time is spent on mediating between the Service and Craft Guilds. As a leader of the Union, she is rather ineffective. She understands nothing of the military, little of foreign policy, and is sadly arrogant and self-centered.

Her potential political power is further neutered by her scramble to support her position, which has left the fortunes of her family somewhat in decline. Her main saving grace is her strong relationship with Councilor Valern, which at least gives her some influence in larger events – not that she uses it much, but it allows her to trade for other favors.

Venoth Yian Ergii, Dalatrass of the Ergii Family: A very dangerous salarian, Yian is one of the most paranoid beings in the known galaxy. She travels with a private bodyguard of no less than six Shieldbreakers and two asari commandos at all times, usually stiffened by a full regiment of Family Guards. Her normal residence is a private dreadnaught, which is docked inside the protective defenses of one of Sur'Kesh's moons and the gaze of the Home Fleet. She will not eat any food she has not prepared herself, wears full body armor with air filtration at all times, has a complete hospital setup on her dreadnaught, and hasn't been seen in public in the past six years.

For all of that, she is one of the most dreadfully sharp political players I have seen in my entire life, fully capable of steering events to her satisfaction with almost elegant casualness. Her ability to read people is legendary – rumors claims she studied with Wheel Mystics in her youth, although that cannot be confirmed. Her cunning has lead the Ergii to vast wealth and control of almost all research and development in the Union itself. Her plans have continually derailed the fortunes of the Manno Family to the point of madness, and she is widely believed to be the true power behind Linron's rise to the position of High Dalatrass.

Her objectives are murky, but if she is continuing the plans of her predecessors, her main goal is very simply to ensure the safety of her Family first, and the dominance of Ergii over every aspect of education, research, and science. Her influence over the Sparak, if not the RRC, is dominating, and even your Commissariat could learn from her ability to twist propaganda to her own ends. An entire generation of salarians has grown up in an educational system dominated by Ergii teachers and Ergii haptic programming, and the families alliances have grown sixfold since that started, a trend that will only accelerate with time.

Venoth Sersai Manno, Dalatrass of the Manno Family : There is something in the task of, I supposed, being reduced to a brood mare for half one's life that makes most dalatrasses irritable and of poor humor. Sersai is no exception. Much like Linron, only the truly charitable could call her anything but abrasive. She is arrogant, dismissive of aliens, overly sensitive to criticism, and above all else, intolerant of dissent. Unlike Linron, her abrasive nature is backed up with a cool mind and an ability to turn on the charm when she absolutely has to.

The Manno fortunes have waned in the past decade, since a spat in a breeding contract between Family Manno and Family Ergii turned nasty. It resulted in a feud that has since devolved into a cold war, one fought with intelligence and economic sniping. This was not helped by a splinter of the males of the Family breaking away to join the Eclipse mercenary band (See Jaroth, below), smearing the Family name with sordid crimes.

Despite this, Manno's focus on banking and their control over what information reaches the Court of the High Circle ensures that the family is not down for the count yet. Sersai has been in recent months seen in the company of the always-dangerous Muvai Solus, and the two families have recently begun a series of new colony expansions being called the "Silver Rim" by families moving there. I am not yet sure why she is moving Manno away from it's traditional focus on Sur'kesh issues, but it has certainly stirred up a great deal of gossip. It also has the potential, if successful, of rejuvenating the Manno ranks with fresh blood and new markets and income to bolster their forces with.

Sersai is also notable for her like of turian technology and military concepts, going so far as to hire two turian mercenary bands to augment her Family forces. She has an excellent relationship with the Primarch and is often a guest on Palaven.

Venoth Muvai Solus, Dalatrass of the Solus Family: I cannot stress this strongly enough, Jack. For the love of the Goddess, don't underestimate this female. She hates Cerberus in ways I cannot enumerate, and if she ever locates our forces she will fully attempt to slaughter the entire organization. Your poorly thought out murder of two of her sons has made her our most powerful enemy.

Muvai Solus is a salarian so reckless and dangerous that even other Solus family members are terrified of her, and this comes from a Family whose motto basically translates to "You can only die once". Muvai was one of the very, very few females who spent time in the salarian military, going so far as to prod her sisters into bearing eggs while she tried (but failed) to actually enter the STG. Rebuffed at this goal, her attention turned to the design of military vessels. The most recent assault frigate design is hers, and so are the VI-backed drones that now reinforce many a salarian warship.

Finally taking control of her family after the terrorist group Remembrance killed her mother, sisters and most of her brothers, she endured a full year of egg-laying for the sake of tradition before ceasing to take up the role of dalatrass. She has browbeaten the Ministry of Defense to her every whim and has no problems with literally shouting down even salarian admirals on how to run the Navy.

Murvai personally lead the STG and military strike that destroyed Remembrance, and her sons are no less fearsome, the group including two Spectres, an assassin who took out several of the Shadow Broker's intel operatives, and a biotic form master. She only has two surviving brothers, both of which are just as dangerous as her: General Sasin Solus, senior commander of the salarian military, and Professor Mordin Solus, an STG doctor and scientist rumored to be involved with genophage research. Her connections are also impressive, as she is on good terms with many military leaders of various races and is seen by many as the best fit for Daltriana should war arise in the near future.

Muvai is staggeringly, insanely wealthy, in a fashion that boggles the mind. Her families gamble on the Black Rim colonies paid off in spades, and she has more money than the entirety of the Ashlands and Windsors of Earth combined. Even the most conservative estimates of her wealth come in at twenty to twenty two billion credits, not even counting her investments!

Her Family's fixation on the military has lead to them basically establishing a private fleet roughly the size of a squadron, with a dreadnaught known as the Curiosity as the flagship. This is backstopped by a private army that rivals the entire defense force of the drell.

Muvai has been repeatedly involved (in both a business and sexual sense) with Matriarch Thessial, the eccentric leader of the asari Steelshape Clans. The wild parties the two have thrown are … quite extensive and entertaining, if you go in for hallucinogenic drugs and maidens barely old enough to call themselves such. Their military and scientific collaborations are even more frightening, as the two of them have a very wide range of shared investments, from weapons factories on Korlus to backing R&D firms on Ilium. Muvai herself recent purchased Armax Arms for over eleven billion credits, an act that sent shockwaves through the military community. Already Armax's lineups are changing from blunt assault to more elegant and refined stock.

Muvai is not reclining figure presented by most dalatrasses. I have met her only once, but she was slim, very fit, and fiercely intelligent. For all of that, she is probably the most morally bankrupt creature I know of, and will stop at nothing to ensure her family is ascendant. Rumors state she has begun to cast her eye on the position of High Dalatrass, and if true then Linron's days in the role (and her life, most likely) are numbered.

Venoth Chara Yaan, Dalatrass of the Yaan Family: Thankfully, Chara is unlike most dalatrasses, and is neither insane nor grumpy. A sensible, elegant figure often seen on the Citadel at social parties and fundraisers, she is an intimate of the entire Citadel Council as well as many business figures on the Citadel.

Refined and educated, Chara only loosely dabbles in Family affairs, her staggering twenty six daughters doing most of the work for her. Yaan spends the bulk of her time engaged in political maneuvering with the Council of Matriarchs, the Patriarchy, and your own SA Parliament, and is the primary mouthpiece of the Salarian Union's viewpoint. She is not the Union ambassador, but since the salarian holding that role and the current councilor are both related to her, she might as well be.

Chara seemingly has no goals aside from ensuring the Salarians can call on their allies if need be, often smoothing over difficulties caused by cultural disconnects and the acts of other Families. I've met her several times, and she always struck me as very hard to read. Not false, precisely, but I had the impression that whatever she was doing that moment was but an afterthought, and her true attention was … elsewhere.

As a rule, when you are entertaining the most powerful asari in the galaxy (I was there with the Solarch and six of the Thirty), I find it hard to imagine what could be more important than the conversation at hand.

Rumors state that she is beginning to suffer the onset phase of Shego's Fire, and there already fierce jockeying within the family to determine who will be the next Dalatrass. That will undoubtedly neutralize the Family's long-term goals for the next year or two.

Venoth H'tho Di Daaso, Dalatrass of the Daaso Family: Of all the Six, H'tho is the strangest. Her name indicates she is a full-fledged Mystic, and she spends the majority of her time engaged in meditation, seeking the path from which her Family should walk. Her predictions have ensured that, while Daaso has not made any staggering jumps in prosperity, they have avoided any of the setbacks the other Families have.

A quiet salarian female who dresses in plain white robes, she puts me in mind of meditating Justicars when it comes to her focus. The disturbing thing about her, of course, is that she is in frequent communications with the STG, the STG Master, and other figures involved in it. Some have termed her 'the Spider' and seem to feel her predictive abilities are being used mostly on behalf of the STG, but to what ends I cannot say.

It is very hard to get a read on what activities she's really up to, as she uses the STG as her intermediaries with regularity, and her estates are literally surrounded by STG facilities and defenses. Her followers as a mystic number in the millions, and she has often made subtle proclamations stating the need for galactic society to unite and prepare for future troubles.

Professor Sur'Kesh Maando Mori Than-sil Vurn Mannosan Rurda Manno, High Lord of the RRC: The Professor is the leading figure at the Reach Research Compound, and the ostensible leader of the guild that controls it, the Hand That Seeks. He has not been seen in public in almost a decade, and his name mostly pops up in research papers into certain obscure mathematical texts and studies into high-energy molecular manipulation.

Rurda Manno has little contact with the rest of his Family, who are more involved with finances and banking than hard science. While rumors always fly around in salarian society, there are strangely few involving him.

The only one I could pin down is that he meets regularly with several STG cells, who are somehow involved in the research on the planet Makana. I was unable to obtain more information (given the fact that the RRC is better fortified than the Citadel Council Chambers) so you may wish to dispatch forces to investigate Makana yourself.

I am aware this is rather scarce, but I do not have the resources to find out more at this time.

"Vani", Wheel Mystic : The Wheel Religion is not an organized church, and thus it cannot have a 'head'. Each mystic sees the Wheel in a different light, from a different perspective. However, when it comes to those who tend to speak for the Mystics, Vani is the salarian of choice. He is the highest ranking savant of the religion, and is allowed to advise the Court of the High Circle itself.

No one knows this salarians real name. He has the faded tattoo of an STG operative visible on his shoulder, but that tells us little, since the STG hardly lets others investigate their ranks. He lives in simple seclusion in a small but well appointed townhouse not far from the Reach, and is usually only seen in public when he is headed to advice the Court.

His speeches and writings mostly touch on the Wheel's influence in salarian life, but he has also written a series of monograms on the difference between peace and stagnation, and on the need for vigilance. Like Di Daaso, he has also called for greater galactic unity, going so far as to tour briefly with Matriarch Uressa T'Shora in doing so.

Oddly enough , Vani is in the constant company of a female turian known only as "Blue". She seems to act as a mix of bodyguard, servant, and secretary, and only speaks when he instructs her to do so. Vani's entourage of followers is notable not for it's size – which, despite his high rank, only numbers in the low thousands – but for the fact that almost half of his followers are themselves Wheel Mystics.

Perhaps most the most confusing aspect of his character and history is his background: Vani is one of the extremely rare salarian biotics. That is anomalous because he is at least thirty eight, and almost all of the salarian biotics I have ever heard of died around thirty. I have only heard of him demonstrating his talent once, during a botched assassination attempt, but his power was impressive.

Spectre Sur'Kesh Yaansi Vuel Solthan Kaan Sitthoon Jondam Bau, Spectre, STG: With Saren's delisting as a Spectre, Jondaum Bau is the senior-most of the Citadel Agents of the Office of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. A clever intelligence specialist with a skill in data hacking and skip-tracing, Bau is hardly the match for the public image of Spectres, dangerous gunslingers operating above the law, spouting pithy catchphrases. He is a figure better suited in a data center, and often aids other Spectres in finding their targets or amassing information.

That is not to say he isn't dangerous. Jondam Bau can locate almost anyone, and given enough time is famous for setting up truly chilling ambushes and traps. He rose to high rank in the STG before being tapped as a Spectre, and is still often called upon by the Court of the High Circle to advise them on matters military, intelligence or Citadel related.

Bau maintains tight relationships with almost the entirety of the Spectres, often acting as a coordinator when multiple Spectres deploy into the field. He is an accomplished pilot, and has trained with asari commandos and the Turian Blackwatch extensively, meaning he is not going to be a pushover in a fight. He is a master sniper, according to most reports, and collects exotic sniper rifles as something of a hobby.

His inclusion in this report is mostly due to his ongoing interest in Cerberus, which he has stated is the most dangerous organization in the galaxy. No doubt that will please your egos, but remember that he is very good at locating those who don't wish to be found.

It may be time for him to have an accident, one involving Pel, no?

Edat Kurass, the Shifter : Probably the most powerful salarian crime lord in space, the Shifter is a smuggler and hacker unmatched in salarian society. In his youth, Edat was heavily involved in the Eclipse gang, and broke away from that group in the aftermath of an ugly small war on the fringe of the Terminus. He ended up being double-crossed by his colleagues and saved by a group of quarians on Pilgrimage, whose ranks included the father of the future High Admiral, Rael'Zorah.

He took what he could salvage of his operation and set up shop on the Citadel, and in a decade had gone from a two-bit thug to a dark figure with links to Aria T'Loak, P., and the Shadow Broker. It is an open secret that he is one of the most highly placed members of Aria's 'Alliance of the Fallen', an intergalactic crime ring, but C-Sec cannot seem to pin anything on him.

A well-dressed, erudite figure, Edat is often involved in sponsoring or backing other criminal activities while keeping his own hands relatively clean. His criminal syndicate has been linked to eezo and red sand smuggling, weapons smuggling, slavery, restricted technologies, and illegal cyberware modifications, just to name a few, but his own person is never directly tied to any of these actions, operating through a bewildering array of intermediaries and allied gangs.

He also maintains his friendship and connection with the quarian Admiralty, and often acts a sort of protector to quarians on Pilgrimage on the Citadel. He is positively ancient for a salarian, fifty seven years old, and is rumored to use a mix of cybernetics and experimental drugs to stay alive at this point. He hasn't been seen in public in the past few months, leading to rumors that at long last he is finally dying.

Rannadril Ghan Swa Fulsoom Karaten Narr Eadi Bel Anolais , CEO and Director, Noveria Development Corporation: With any luck,you will never have to speak with this icy figure, who is one of the richest and most ruthless businessmen in the ranks of the salarian race. A former member of the STG who parlayed his connections and knowledge of military weapons systems into a business, Anolais is in charge of the Noverian Development Corporation, and also the Noverian Court of Corporations. His personal wealth is estimated, conservatively, in the low billions, putting him in the rarefied ranks of names like Jonah Ashland, Thana T'Armal, and Klanor Palavanus.

His company, Apex Electronics and Defense, is a major player in the starship sensor, ECM, and GARDIAN defense markets, and his investments range from a thirty percent stake in Haliat Armory to half-ownership of Baria Frontiers. Like many wealthy salarians, he dabbles in research and development as well, in this case working on superluminal weapon systems using charged particles and mass cannons.

Noveria is basically run by him as a thinly disguised, business friendly, low-tax haven for every sort of reprehensible and reckless research or industrial activity. The fact that he has, in the past few years, built up his defense forces from a handful of mercs and police boats to a well trained military force boasting a unified command structure has not gone unnoticed, but his death-grip on a good fifteen percent of the galactic economy means that, for now, no one plans to challenge his acts.

His connections with the rest of salarian society are irregular. His family is a small seroth group from the Black Rim colonies with minor ties to the Solus family, but his second in command and closest friend is the second-son of Dalatrass Manno. He is an old enemy of Councilor Valern, but is good friends with Councilor Tevos, balancing his influence on the Council.

Anolais will stop at nothing to make the NDC the most powerful corporate group in the galaxy, and often works with the Corporate Court of Ilium and Vol to counter other groups trying to claw their way to dominance. Between the three courts, they control a good forty percent of the galactic GDP.

Citadel Counselor Mannovai Urvesh Takan Nain Dulsoon Shueltar Erdat Valern: Valern is a strange being, a gentle philosopher and a brutal STG soldier turned influential politico. The elderson of a minor jenoth closely tied to the Shuel family, his Family is currently in alliances of some form or another with the Solus, Manno, and Yaan families, making them something of a mediator, a task he often performs on the Council.

Less aggressive and emotional than Sparatus, and more clinical and realistic than Tevos, Valern often acts as the cynical spy to the turian's angry warrior persona and Tevos's insincere motherly persona. He is focused first on the stability of galactic governance and second on ensuring the Salarian Union's close ties to the asari are not threatened by anything or anyone. He is a curiously close friend of the High Dalatrass, and often acts to shore up her position with his own allies and influence. The reason for this (aside from friendship and family allegiance) is unknown, but rumors swirl that she may have blackmail material on him.

Guileful, reflective, and free thinking, Valern is often the swing vote on issues that divide turians and asari, mostly of a military or economic nature. It comes as no surprise that he often sides with Tevos in such debates, but he will on occasion take the turian's side, although I suspect it is more to maintain a balance of power rather than true agreement or consensus.

He was quite the fearsome operative in his STG days, codenamed 'Ghost' for his ability to vanish from sight and take out his enemies with well placed sniper fire. He left the STG after the massacre of his unit in a botched raid on turian separatists, and after a few years in the Ministry of Intelligence was nominated for the role of Citadel Council after the death of the former holder. Since his ascension he has worked hard at expanding salarian access to markets in the Terminus, making ties with human research corporations, and suggesting cooperative military practices with other Citadel powers.

I admit the … constant theme of unity and cooperation coming from more than one powerful salarian figure in the past three years has my nerves on edge, as salarians as a rule are usually not driven by a need for such, unlike asari. I cannot help but wonder at the impetus or eventual goal of such a push. Perhaps they merely wish to lull others into lowering their guard to allow for salarian intelligence to penetrate more deeply into their ranks, but I do not think so – Valern, at the least, seems sincere, even offering salarian assistance to improve the military of the volus, hanar and drell.

Rumors state he consults frequently with a Wheel Mystic aboard the Citadel, leaving the meetings disquieted and going off to practice sniping at the C-Sec ranges.

Sur'Kesh Maando Mani Than-sil Suil Jaroth Manno, Eclipse Co-Founder: Anyone who sleeps with Jona Sederis is certifiable. Anyone who thinks she has lots of good ideas and works with her on a regular basis without having their head blown off is, on the other hand, both crazy and impressive.

Jaroth left Family Manno with a segment of disaffected younger sons to chase fortune and fame in the Terminus systems, after a violent disagreement with the Dalatrass over breeding rights. While most salarians would never break from their Family over such things, whatever set off the conflict was bad enough that shots were fired and Jaroth angrily declared himself lythari. Such an important Family suffering a public break placed a great deal of scrutiny and shame on Family Maano, and Jaroth's work with Jona Sederis has not improved that.

Sederis was always crazy, but Jaroth's cold blooded evil has only pushed the unstable woman deeper into madness. Nothing, it seems, is below him, including every form of drug smuggling, slavery and shipping fake or tainted eezo to far flung colonies. He has executed his own people out of pique or anger and is a habitual abuser of red sand.

Dangerous and with a hair-trigger temper, his relationship with Jona Sederis is rather puzzling, as asari very rarely take salarian lovers (Thessial and her lunacy notwithstanding. She's baked her brains with enough hallex to stupefy a krogan, after all.) The two distrust everyone but each other, and more than once Sederis has escaped capture or death only by daring rescues at the hand of Jaroth.

He operates out of Omega these days, far beyond the casual reach of Manno assassins or STG units seeking to bring him to justice. Aria seems to find him amusing, and tolerates his presence as long as he pays her tribute and respect.

"Tazzik", name unknown: I have included this person not because of his noteworthy impact on salarian culture, but because of his danger to Cerberus and, well, to anyone or anything he comes across.

Tazzik is the left hand of the Shadow Broker, much as Tetrimus is the right. He is, quite possibly, the most brutal figure in the Broker's employ. Tazzik stands six feet eight inches tall, towering by a good feet over any other salarian I have ever heard of, and his form is along the lines of a bodybuilder. He is believed to have heavy cybernetic enhancement, and uses a multitude of gruesome weapons to execute his kills with. At the very least, he can lift a turian with one hand and snap his neck with no difficulty, and there is video of him engaging in heavy martial arts with a drell and winning easily.

He has butchered hundreds of targets, including asari matriarchs, heavily defended crime lords, salarian lythari outcasts, a batarian general, and a hanar priest. He rarely uses the same methods twice, being a master of infiltration, sniping, direct assault, poisons, explosives, sabotage and even hand-to-hand combat, which almost no salarian is ever seen doing much of. His only touchstone is the unrelenting messy brutality of his kills, which are calculated to sow terror and disgust in any onlooker.

There seems to be no real pattern as to whether Tetrimus or Tazzik is dispatched by the Broker to clean up problems, but both are equally deadly. Tetrimus seems to favor less flashy tactics, while Tazzik will burn a man alive in front of his own family, then shoot them all dead to leave a message.

Tazzik and I crossed paths during my flight from asari space, when the Matriarchy decided to have the Shadow Broker snuff out my life. He was able to shake off my strongest throws, ignored direct kinetic attacks that would have snapped any other salarian in half, and when I closed to try to take him out with my warp-sword, engaged me for several minutes with a reinforced omniblade. I was unable to overpower him and he very nearly killed me.

I do not consider myself 'powerful', but Dr. Minsta and Agent Lawson can inform you that I am certainly not weak, and I can hold off the attention of multiple Night-wind operatives by myself. Against Tazzik I felt like a maiden going up against the hunt mistress. He could withstand blows that would have left a krogan gasping for air, and simply did not tire. I was only able to escape with aid from some of my former followers, who he murdered to the last.

He reminds me much of Pel, except Pel is mostly quiet and soft-spoken and Tazzik is brutal, cold, and mocking. Eliminating him would certainly cripple the Broker's capacity for countering our operations and perhaps send him a message, but I doubt that anything short of a full combat team would prevail.
Chapter 23: Chapter 23 : Pel's Notes : Salarians

A/N: If you aren't familiar with Pel, he's a Cerberus wet-work type that appears in the books. If you are familiar with him, you will of course note that he does not match up with the depiction in the books. Pel was boring in those books.

The Dog is a colloquialism used by Cerberus forces to refer to Cerberus. 'Gray' and 'LGM' are slang terms for salarians.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Pel here, bossman.

I got no idea what goes on in that head of yours, y'know? You put together crazy plans that have nine thousand moving bits and sixty ways to go wrong and, bam, shit works. Guess that's why you get the big bucks and bang the models while I sift through the shit and put big holes in people's heads.

Most times, your shit works. That lunatic job on Viridian? Worked, to my great shock. Going after the ever-fucking Pope? Wow. Still can't believe we pulled that off. Taking down an asari matriarch in her own estates? Crazy, but doable. So I don't usually complain about your whack-ass schemes.

Still, gotta admit...this last stunt? I don't need more gray hair, bossman. Taking down an entire STG cell was Not Fucking Fun. We lost nineteen men, and I don't think Daniels, Fitzpatrick or Norae are gonna make it through the night.

Johns and Muchalihe are in one piece, but they're so shot up that moving them is going to be problematic. I'll put 'em down before I split, I doubt this lily-livered prick of a doctor you got for the interrogation would bother to do it clean. Probably want to 'experiment' a little first. Sick bastard.

We really need to kick these Shadow Cell fuckers out of the Dog, bossman. When someone like me starts having, what's the word, uh, ethical concerns? You have problems.

Anyway.

We snagged two of the STG fuckers alive, and a random selection of other Grays. Bastards are right squrimy to pin down, and I don't give two shits what your blue says, they fight like a ball of razor wire when you back 'em into a corner. The interrogation was messy – what in fuck's name bleeds green – but told us a lot we don't know.

What we found was …

Huh. My omni-tool's editor recommends I use the word 'enlightening'. Ain't nothing light about the shit we dug out of the Grays, bossman. You probably want a drink for this. Scratch that. You definitely want a drink for this shit. I didn't copy the cyberfreak or the Iron Nutjob because, a) I don't trust 'em as far as I can throw a krogan and b) so I can insult them in my report.

Maybe I'll send you a cleaned up copy with right proper English and all that after I've had a good drink or twelve. Maybe not. You pay me to shoot shit, not write reports.

I'd have let the doc write up the report, but he's too goddamn busy testing his whack-ass theories about the Grays' nerves or some shit to do more than drop off his findings. Sides, I never get to make these fancy ass reports. Might as well enjoy myself before you send me off to kidnap the goddamned Primarch or something else likely to get me killed.

I'll try to get through this quick, so I can shower this green shit off my armor. It's like pulping an avocado.

Cerberus Thought of the Day : A coward hesitates, a hero acts. A man chooses, a slave obeys. A human fights, an alien betrays.

Salarians are hard as nails

Trellly says salarians aren't hard. Trelly, bossman, is either so badass that they aren't hard to her, or she's full of shit.

So we got us two hardcore STG and five civvies. First thing I get straight off the bat is all but one of 'em are talking shit. I don't mean trying to play tough, either. They are seriously hardcore not spilling their guts and daring us to torture them.

I've seen some hard characters, bossman. Turian types who'd laugh at you as you pulled their guts out. Krogan who wouldn't break even if you set them on fire. Hard-ass asari bitches who acted like they were watching Fleet and Flotilla while you peeled 'em like an apple.

But even those types scream like little girls when you put the zatharopine into 'em. I ain't never seen no one shrug off sixteen grams of pain amplification drugs and laugh when we start gouging out eyes. The fourth civvie – some kinda banking type – looked soft as ice cream. We had to break every damn bone in his body and peel off half his skin and muscle to even get the bastard to scream.

Minsta thinks they can cut their pain … what's the word? Receptors? Pain nerves off. They got no sense of self-preservation, bossman. None. You can forget any idea you got about extracting much hard intel from most of them using torture. The civvies would rather die than sell out their family, and the STG guys gave us fucking suggestions.

Salarians are bent as fuck

When torture did jack shit all, we shifted to truth drugs. One of the civvies popped his clogs at that point, bubbling up green shit outta his mouth, and Minsta had to adjust the dosage and something about the acidity.

Scientists. The bastard probably did that on purpose to scare 'em.

Took about twice the amount that would have a human singing like a canary, but eventually they opened up. The civvies gave us some basic info – mostly incomprehensible babble about family shindigs and who was gonna get to breed. Boring. Got some other stuff, talk about that later on.

The two STG types though, spilled a lot of info. Most of it made me wanna lose my lunch. They'd give that crazy Rasa bitch nightmares.

The STG will go off and cack anybody the big-shot Six Family types feel is a threat to the Union, at the drop of a hat. Makes our Commissars look like Mr. Rogers, I tell ya. And this isn't a rare thing either, they do it regular-like. Wiped out whole families, from what I hear. All that bullshit Trelly is singing about the salarians working together – ain't seeing it. You mess up with the Six Families, they put you in the ground.

They told us about some of the experiments the STG monitors for the dalatrasses, too. They got some kind of big breeding world out on the Traverse Rim. Thousands of Grays with tons of genetic work, doing nothing but popping eggs and fucking, 24/7. Tens of millions of eggs. They experiment on 'em, work the DNA, breed up a new generation.

About half the STG is these custom-bred assholes. STG uses hypnosis and drugs to give 'em a fake background, fake family life. Disposables, they're called. Explains how the bastards have the manpower to be everywhere at once.

They also got projects working on their lifespan. Your asari broad is dead on when she talks about 'em kidnapping asari and cuttin' on 'em to figure out how they live so long. They're still doing it, just kidnapping them from batarian slave camps or out on the Traverse now. Ain't much that can make me get all upset anymore, but melting people down for life extension drugs is pretty damned cold.

People give the Dog a bad name, but you don't see us doing no shit like that. Hypocritical bastards.

Salarians are working on something called the Alteration Framework

One of these civvies was some kinda scientist fuck from the Reach Research place Trelly keeps babbling on about. (Thanks for letting me read those reports by the way, bossman. She's a bit posh at times but she's funny as hell.)

Her info on them having some kinda disease to keep people out is accurate. Crazy Grays. Only fucking aliens would infect their own people with a lethal disease to stop spies. He started showing effects pretty quick, too. Yet another reason I'm glad we do this sort of shit in full environmental armor.

The big deal they're working on there, and in a bunch of other places, is something crazy called the Alteration Framework. You know that big talking plant on Feros, the one ExoGeni is working? The Grays got one on Makana. Good luck getting to it, the entire system sounds like a fucking deathtrap. They're doing work in other places too – some on Mannovai. Some on Noveria. Some on Ilium.

Anyway, this plant, whachacallit, Thorian, is givin' the Grays tips on how to make themselves smarter. It's not an easy thing, buncha weird surgery and some kind of cyberware that uses organic compounds. Minsta has the tech babble around it. Long story short, this stuff allows them to understand a new form of math. From what we could understand from the civvie, the math is letting them improve their FTL and mass drives. It lets them shape the mass field as they are moving, which is complete bullshit. I ain't got no PHD but even I know that's like turning a pop fly into a line drive after you hit the fucking ball.

The changes, whatever they are, have to be done after the salarian is born, and a bunch of them die as a result of all the surgeries and gene mods and whatnot. That's another reason why they got that sick ass breeding farm out in the Traverse, they're going through about five or six hundred a week. A week, bossman.

I'll never insult Doc Walker and his crazy ass experiments again. I mean, the very worst shit we've done is the project on poison, and that only killed off about a thousand aliens. These assholes have been at this for five years! That's what...

...damn omni doesn't have a calculator. Cheap piece of shit. Pen and paper says about a hundred and fifty thousand dead Grays. These people are fucked up, bossman. Very.

Salarians are breeding up super soldiers

The doc managed to get another one of the civvies to talk. That one worked for their defense ministry, which doesn't actually run the military, go figure. It just provides logistics and support.

Anyway, the Gray told us he knew about another breeding project, this one run by the Solus. They're doing improvements on reactions and the ability for the Grays to handle cyberware. Been at it for years, and when they figure out a way to make 'em faster or stronger, they sell the information off on the breeding market. That's the real reason why the Solus are so rich, according to him.

I don't have a problem with biowork. It's meddling with God's work, but I figure if He didn't want us doing it we wouldn't be able to. But the LGM's have taken it a lot farther than that. They've started breeding some salarians to be born designed for cyberware. Expanded nerves and shit bred to work better with cyber. Poor bastards are born without arms and legs, and from day one they're gonna end up slotted in a Shieldbreaker suit. Right out of the bat.

From what the civvie told us, this shit has gone on for a while, but they're taking it out a whole new door now. Some of that new turian hyper-printing stuff, the 3D printers they run through superluminal travel to speed up the effects? They're using that to run hundreds of generations of changes through the ringer at once.

According to this guy, average salarian soldier that uses these gene mods will be able to run at thirty miles an hour and dodge subsonic rounds based on reflexes alone in a few years. That ain't natural. Plus, they're trying to cook up some kind of regeneration in their soldiers, too. As if we needed more goddamned wannabe krogan.

Salarian military is not unified

The same civvie told us that their military is spending most of it's time fighting each other. Not literally, but over the direction it should be going in.

Half of 'em, from the War Clans, want bigger ships, more ships, more guns. Sounds like any other navy if you ask me. If I have to listen to Florez go on and on bout how Cerberus needs a dreadnaught (and just how the fuck would we hide that?) I'll slap the bitch myself. Hardly surprising the Grays think the same way.

But the other half is fixed - mostly Solus types, but also a few STG - on pushing the tech limit on their ships. They want damage control five times greater than what they have now, and most of it based on honeycombing rather than preventing hull breaches. They want mag-shields, which is kinda stupid. They want fire control systems that use superluminal sensors, faster speed, and to replace ALL of the computer elements in their command and control systems with optoelectronic or even biological computer systems.

The civvie says it's due to some kind of info they got from the Wheel Mystics. No details, but I got together with General Petrovsky about what it means.

He says the only reason you'd load a ship with magshields rather than kinetics is if you were expecting a physical attack. Big railgun impacts, maybe. By big I mean hundreds or thousands of kilos of material. Mass accelerator slugs are not big enough to be affected. The damage control stuff would only make sense if you expected heavy explosive impacts on your ships, or weapons that could go right through armor. The fire control would only be useful if you shifted your primary weapons to big torpedo salvos. The only thing he could figure out about the computer stuff is they were worried about cyberwarfare, but shit, who is gonna out-hack salarians? Geth?

Mm. Maybe it's geth they're worried about, you think?

Anyway, bottom line is the two camps are in each others shit, and it's turning nasty. The army is staying out of it so far, and STG is starting to take the side of the ones going for bigger guns and ships, so we don't know how it will end up. Might be worth sending in a cell for a look-see, as long as I am not in the lineup.

Salarian Guilds are fighting each other

One of the civvies worked with the guilds. Gotta admit, the stuff he described was pretty screwy. The guilds are having a big tiff because there's only so much business available, and the Service Guilds don't want to keep giving knobjobs to the bigshots just to get their slice of the pie.

The Craft Guilds, on the other hand, are willing to take a loss to drive their competition out of business. It's gotten physical a few times. Bombings and such. A lot of it gets laid on gangs or petty criminals, but it's actually the Guilds going at each other with intent to kill.

Normally I wouldn't give a flip about if Bobby's Hot Dog stand is in a price war with Tony's Burgers, ya know? But the weird part is that the STG is involved in this little fracas. The civvie thinks they're stirring shit up on purpose, trying to flush out some kind of industrial spies or some such.

My first question, bossman, is who in the blue hell spies on the goddamned Grays without getting caught and turned into a modern art exhibit?

My second question, after listening to him babble some more, is who the fuck would spy on the guilds doing work on colony ships and life-support equipment, or on salarian clothing manufacturers? And what makes that important enough not only for people to kill over, but for the STG to be involved?

Nothing adds up. And as my old gunny in the Corps used to say, shit that don't add up equals trouble.

Salarians are fighting the Shadow Broker

The two STG types required even more serum than the civvies, and once we got past the easy stuff, they knew less than I expected. There's a lot of 'need to know' goin' on in the STG, and most of 'em don't need to know.

One thing that stood out is that the only reason our plan worked is that they were expecting the Broker to jump them, not us. (More on them expecting anything at all later on. Creepy shit.) STG has been in some kind of little dust-up with the Broker for about six months now, something to do with their breeding projects and his trying to find out what is going down at Makana.

Broker had the same idea we did, seems. Few weeks back two entire STG cells disappeared entirely. Found the ship stripped on Korlus, found the bodies a week later on fucking Omega of all places.

The Broker is not our biggest fan, I know, but if what Trelly and these pukes are both telling us is right, maybe we'd better bury that hatchet and do something about the Grays right quick, bossman. I know the Shadow Hand has some kind of ax to grind with him...but that dude hates everybody, including kittens and Princess Amanda Windsor. As I said before, bossman, getting the Shadow Cell and Mr. Roboto out of Cerberus before he gets us attacked by everyone from the Consort to Blasto the Spectre can't happen fast enough.

I don't have much more on why the STG is fighting the Broker. Neither of the two we captured had specifics on the situation, but they both knew the orders to kill on sight any Broker agents came down from the very top, the STG Master. They seemed to see that as very unusual, almost scary. From what they said orders didn't come from on high like that very often, much less for all the STG to be rounded up and given briefings on Cerberus and the order given in person.

One last juicy tidbit. The second STG puke also claimed that up until about sixty years ago, the Broker had been a salarian, and was taking orders from the Dalatrasses. Then something happened and all communications were cut. That's the first proof we've ever had that the Broker is a single dude and not a committee of goddamned asari or hanar or fucking undead Protheans.

Salarians really, really don't like the Dog

Trelly wasn't lying when she said that Solus bitch had a hardon for us, bossman. The STG said her estimates of what they had coming at us were way off, though. It's not a cell. It's not a division. It's FIVE fucking divisions, over three hundred STG agents, plus six salarian Spectres and a super-secret division of the Union military.

If what I got told was correct, they don't know much about how we're organized. They think our primary backers are big-name rich people like the Windsors or the Chu. They do know Cord-Hislop is involved, but only on a outside basis – all those applications you keep getting for salarian programmers are STG, every last one of 'em.

What was surprising is they knew the identity of several of our agents and some of our researchers. They knew about crazy-ass Kai Leng, they knew about Doc Walker, they knew about Agent Rasa. They knew about Saracino and they had some images, blurry, of the Shadow Hand. They knew who I was, too.

Worst of all? They got their hands on some of the docs that got away at Project Zeus. They know about Subject Zero. One of our docs is in their hands, working on their biotic projects. Fucking traitor. He's out on Mannovai, if you want him rubbed out. Send Kai Leng. Maybe the stupid bastard will get killed.

STG have kill on sight orders for all of us. That kinda limits our ability to move around in STG space, so it's a good thing we didn't send Minsta in with a Centurion team. They didn't seem to know Trellani was Cerberus, but they still want to capture her for the Asari Bitchocracy, so that's no good either.

Salarian Mystics are fucking strange

Since you wanted more info, we asked all of the captives about the mystics. We didn't get a lot of answers that made sense. What we got sounded like someone watched too much fucking Minority Report while high on weed.

Mystics, if what the Grays said is legit, really can see the future. At least some of it. The fight we had was so nasty because the STG unit knew someone was going to jump them. I can't tell you how creepy that is. They even know when we'd be coming. They didn't know it would be Cerberus, but that doesn't matter much. If you can predict when shit is going to hit the fan, that gives you a pretty heavy advantage.

Mystics are definitely involved in the STG. There's a religious vibe to the whole Wheel stuff, but there's also a real weird sort of … I dunno. The civvies acted like the Wheel dudes were acting stranger and weirder than usual. A bunch of them had committed suicide recently, and some had gone crazy. More and more of them were preaching that dark times were coming, and the STG was listening.

The mystics are the ones behind pushing for the Dalatrasses to make nice with everybody, and urging the other races to start singing kumbaya. They're also behind the push for the navy to invest in those weird changes to their ship layouts and technology. They're not saying why, exactly, but it don't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when people who've seen the future are cacking themselves and screaming that everyone needs to stand together, bad shit is on the way.

One of the STG types said he'd talked to a mystic, who told him that a 'darkness' was coming, one that would end up destroying most of galactic life. That it wouldn't be something you could fight, that a single person – a human, bossman – would end up determining if shit went to hell or we made it out alive. The STG has been going crazy trying to figure out who it could be.

Bossman, right now, their leading suspect is you. Don't let it go to your head.

That's all I've got. We're gonna ditch the corpses into a cargo container and ship 'em to Beltras, then split the vicinity before anyone comes looking. If you want, we can swing by and pick up Lawson. Having her fine ass aboard on the trip back to Minuteman would at least give me something to look at besides Minsta's depressing face.

I'll send two of my less shot-up guys to make sure your blue is gonna be alright. The STG didn't have orders to look for her, so if she's got a tail it's not a full cell, at least.

You know my TTG code if you need a skull ventilated, bossman. If not, I'll be station-side in four days. Have my money ready, please, as after this bullshit assignment I am going to get drunk and hire a dozen call girls to try to forget the shit I just saw.
Chapter 24: Chapter 24 : Salarian Miscellany, Shift

A/N: As with the asari, the very nature of the Cerberus Files means some things are not touched on, while others are looked at in the filter of what is important to Cerberus. Any out of character notes will appear here. Just as with the asari, I've tried very hard to make the salarians more than cardboard cutouts. Just as asari are more than ass-shaking sex fantasies, salarians are more than for-the-evulz researcher types.

Albeit, not by much. :D

This concludes the salarian section, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever written. The Turians should be much, much easier by comparison, although the military section is going to be very, very long.

Salarian Social Interactions

Salarians stress efficiency and direct speech in their interactions with one another. Introductions are done quickly, conversations proceed rapidly, and logic usually trumps emotionalism.

Salarians love to argue and debate, but only when they can do so based on facts, not opinions. Shades of gray and the like bore them rapidly, as does 'small talk'. They dislike formalism in any fashion, and prefer organic free flowing talk.

The salarian love of order and the salarian dislike of symmetry results in a curious dichotomy in most interactions. Usually one party is 'senior' and the other is 'junior', even in a casual talk. The senior is expected to lead the conversation in terms of topic, and the junior to question and probe the senior's intentions.

Salarians love to try to interpret and predict the actions of others, especially other salarians, often playing a sort of verbal fencing game called thorus, or 'seek-thought'. Thorus is accomplished through subtle hints in otherwise straightforward statements.

Dalatrasses

The dalatrass is a position of power, regardless of social level. Even the poorest family mother of a small clan recently evolved from a yindo is given a great deal of respect from all salarians. The pressures and near constant political maneuvering required to lead a clan of any size is a challenge, one that males are more than happy not to have to deal with.

Due to both their upbringing and as a side effect of dealing with years of breeding heats, dalatrasses develop iron-like mental control and the ability to focus on what is truly important. Unfortunately, this ends up making them abrasive or domineering at best. They are incapable on some levels of truly seeing the importance of events beyond their own family's best interests.

A dalatrass relies heavily on both her brothers and sisters for advice and assistance, but her word is law and final when it comes to family affairs. The only time this is not true is when the dalatrass's actions would jeopardize a breeding cycle to such a degree that further cycles might not have enough impact to resolve the damage. In such cases she can be challenged by any fertile female in the clan for her role, a challenge decided in ancient fashion by male champions who fight with mêlée weapons.

Most dalatrasses are not physical, some becoming almost bloated with fat as they age. Many spend the bulk of their time resting when the events of the day are completed, sleeping more than twice as long as the average salarian.

Salarian Nobility

Salarian noble families are hard to compare to human, asari or turian nobility. They are nobles by dint of their blood relationship to the Six and to Shego, but also due to their prosperity and ability to adapt to changes. They are however, not treated significantly differently by society, and tend to see their nobility as more of an extended job title and burden than a reason for entitlement.

That being said, noble families share one trait with other noble types, and that is a more extensive level of inbreeding. The dalatrasses of these families must manage such carefully, to avoid recessive or unwatned traits, and also to avoid homogenization of their breeding stock and traits. A noble family that becomes too specialized can no longer command high breeding fees, which are a major source of income.

The Six Families and Salarian Society

By contrast, the members of the Six Families are seen by the average salarian as being to be avoided at all cost. They are, to the last, cunning, brutal, and merciless, and most salarians see them as both superior and dangerous.

The Six rarely interact with normal or even noble society, living in a mostly self-contained world. Only the newer blood leaves home in any numbers to mingle with others, and even then they are standoffish, coolly calculating figures.

A few salarians, like Mordin Solus, are more approachable, but that is more due to their rejection of salarian culture than anything else.

Aliens are not seen as below the Six, but are also not given much attention aside from threat analysis and a sneering sort of pity. The Six find most alien races all too easy to predict, manipulate and outmaneuver, with the exception of the asari matriarchy and elements of the Hanar Priesthood. They are particularly amused and derogatory towards turians and batarians, which they see as blood-thirsty animals ruled by emotion and tradition rather than logic.

The Six have an outsized impact on all aspects of the direction of salarian society, but they never touch anything directly, preferring to work through subtle influences, intermediaries, and popular culture. For a member of the Six to directly take a hand in day-to-day operations is almost unheard of, with the exception of the Solus dalatrass.

Breeding Priorities and Views

Salarians do not see eggs or even newts as 'people', but as resources. They have a cavalier view on life at the early stages that is partly due to the high mortality rates of eggs and hatchlings, and partly due to their lack of any meaningful ethical framework.

That being said, salarians are more likely to treat 'natural' eggs with a bit more respect than mass bred eggs from breeding projects. They focus their breeding tendencies on intelligence first, followed by reactions, health, and learning ability.

They see the reproductive systems of other races as terribly inefficient, although the ability of asari to directly control DNA output fascinates them and has been a source of more than one dark research project. The ability to directly tinker with the building blocks of life, rather than relying on retroviral therapy and nanotechnology, is the holy grail of salarian bio-science.

Salarian Foods and Drinks

Salarians still subsist primarily on fish, kelp, grains, and a type of legume. They eat meat sparingly, as their digestive systems are no longer capable of extracting the maximum nutritional value from it, and many poorer salarians subsist on vitamin fortified pastes and small amounts of self-caught fish.

Salarians employ a staggering array of spices, mostly from custom-bred kelp or coral farms, to liven up their foods. The most common food is sersan, a fish casserole with kelp wrappings on a bed of cooked grains. Another common food is bruel rolls, kelp-wrapped shredded squid-analogue with bean paste mixed in.

Salarians do not eat fruits, but make a selection of sweet wines and cordials from such, including several that are popular in turian markets. They delight in asari fish and seafood products, and are rapidly becoming addicted to human coffee and drell sarzhe, both strong stimulants.

Salarians often like odd food items as well. Batarian b'grha, a type of hot pepper, is popular as a snack. So is the human candy known as Pocky.

Salarians have an attraction towards krogan narcotic leaves, mostly smoked in slender cigars. They find human nicotine 'too strong' but a few salarians indulge anyway, mostly poorer classes.

Salarian Romance and Sexuality

Despite popular rumor, salarians are capable of expressing their sexuality, although this is rare. Salarian breeding instincts are mostly triggered by certain biochemicals produced by females during their heats.

What is not commonly known is that air filtration systems in salarian families can and do fail, exposing some males to such pheromones without an outlet for breeding. These salarians, frustrated by urges they have no outlets for, often end up experimenting with asari. The asari ability to share physical pleasures with their partners is often a sensation that is overwhelming for the highly tuned salarian nervous system, resulting in salarians indulging in such on a regular basis.

Salarian yindos are also a source of casual sexuality, with both males and females being driven to repeated sex by pheromones. These fade with time, as tolerances build up, but the duality of such relationships often result in relationships that are more dually balanced than the traditional dalatrass-breeder-elderboy structure of formal families.

Salarians are not by any means 'romantic' in terms of the human ideal of flirtation, but they are most definitely attracted to feats of prowess and daring, and many a lonely and uncertain female has dreams of some dashing STG type being her first partner. Salarians (both male and female) are avid consumers of pornography and lurid turian romantic dramas, a fact that surprises most people.

The primitive nature of salarian sex organs is often off-putting to non-asari sexual partners, making such pairings extremely rare. That being said, salarians can perform sex acts with humans, turians, and drell females with no issues aside from sanitary concerns with salarian females.

Salarian Literature

Given that Sur'kai is not a written language, most salarian literature is written in cant. Some cants are for fictional works, and others for nonfiction. The most popular genre in salarian literature is, unsurprisingly, speculative hard science fiction. The second is historical dramatic fiction, usually of the pre-Shego era.

The older root language, Kurki, did have a written form, and is used in much the same fashion as Latin is on Earth, in Wheel ceremonies and in scientific nomenclature. A few novelists have experimented in Kurki, as it has a wide array of concepts that neither Sur'kai nor cant embraces.

Many novels are interpretive visual works instead of traditional written interfaces, utilizing Sur'kai and an array of voice actors and limited haptic video to tell the tale. These often blur a line between traditional visual entertainment, art, and literature.

The only truly unique salarian genre is tu'thorsai, or "dancing-thought". It is a combination of mystery, logical puzzle, and choose-your-own-adventure novel, mixed with diluted Wheel mysticism. Often centering around events in salarian history, these encourage imaginary alternative history interpretations of events designed to invoke critical analysis of why things happened as they did, and if the people of that time took the best actions. Tu'thorsai is almost impenetrable for non-salarians to read – one asari described it as trying to understand six hundred years of history from nine words and a single question.

Transsalarian Issues

The salarian fascination with improving their bodies has led to some very unpleasant side effects. The first and most dire of these is that egg and newt mortality is increasing, from 35% to 40% in recent decades, and climbing at a tenth of a percent each year. Most of this is due to the complexity of the changes in salarian DNA reaching levels that spawn uncontrolled cancers, but some of it is due to the slow incorporation of asari DNA strands, which has lengthened lifespans but also destabilized the corrective mechanism of salarian reproduction.

Cancers and the like are on the upswing as well, among children and adults. The strong salarian immune system can suppress many of these for some time, but eventually the salarian equivalents to leukemia and lymphoma overwhelm even that defense. This strikes disproportionally at the poorer segments of salarian society, who don't have access to the medicines and viral therapy to fight such cancers.

The salarian improvement of reflexes and sensory abilities has cost them in more ways than one as well. They are far, far more vulnerable to the aspects of indoctrination, having very little ability to resist such. They also have poor reactions to some weapons that attack sense perceptions, such as flash-bangs and sonic grenades. The over-tuned nerves also can result in nervous salarians opening fire on seeming threats that are not actually a threat.

Salarian experimentation with developing their neural tissue to be able to understand hyper-dimensional physics is fraught with danger. Unlike the stronger minds of the Protheans and Inusannon, the salarians simply do not have enough mental stability to truly grasp the universe in such a fashion. Most of the loss from the project has come from salarians understanding the mind-breaking impossibilities involved and going quietly insane. Worse still, those who survive the process have even less moral concerns or empathy for life than regular salarians, and the power offered by the ability to tweak the laws of physics will lead them down paths better left unexplored. At least one salarian has already tried to play with superluminal manipulation and only succeeded in tearing himself and the entire research facility apart by inadvertently turning them all into dark matter.

Mystics

The ability of the mystic to see the future is partially based on the complexity of the salarian mind. Unconsciously, they can model multiple outcomes at once, in the rough manner of psycho-historical predictive analysis. The far-reaching salarian senses and a subconscious mind that can analyze the smallest details and extrapolate logical results aids in this.

But the true source of the mystics ability is a subtle adaptation programmed into them by the aliens who manipulated salarian development long ago. Much like the Protheans, the salarians who possess certain recessive traits can somehow see echoes of other possible time lines. They cannot visualize these ghostly images, but their minds put together the flashes they do receive and incorporate them into manifested visions.

The mystics have begun to see the coming Reaper invasion, which has driven many of the more perceptive to suicide or insanity, as the visions are even less clear than the mess of images from the Prothean Beacon. Those who have endured have tried to warn others that something bad is coming, but they have neither a time-line or a sense of scale of how bad is. At least a few alternative visions have revealed the Darkness to the mystics, resulting in those mystics completely losing their minds at the horror of what they beheld.

Salarians and Alien Races

Generally speaking, salarians see themselves as more evolved than other species, but not necessarily 'better'. They are dismissive of anything requiring more force than brains, and admire alien cultures that encompass any aspect of salarian thoughts.

Asari are seen as a natural counterpoint to their own kind, but many salarians find them tiresome and too fixated on social games and sexuality to be friends with. Asari are clever but not brilliant in the hard sciences, and their focus on social rather than informational manipulation is seen as useful but not elegant. On the other hand, salarians value the asari for being trustworthy, and their shared submission to females make them more familiar than other species. Asari and salarians will often share friendships that persist with one asari and a long series of salarian descendants, a trend they see as somehow comforting. Above all else, the salarians and asari both see themselves as two races against the galaxy, and only the asari have earned what passes for trust in salarian popular culture.

Salarians find turian focus on honor and tradition understandable but pointless. The old honor-based culture of salarian males still has a few echoes in modern society, enough to allow the salarians to comprehend the turian, but not enough to tolerate turian inflexibility or love of following orders without question. Turian reliability is seen as gullibility, and turian moral frameworks as hilariously hypocritical. The dismissive sexism turians show towards females is also off-putting. Salarians and turians work well together on an individual basis, but often clash on many fronts – turians are staid, salarians reactive; turians value directness, salarians love manipulation, so forth. This gives some of their interactions a duality that is often mocked in movies.

Batarians are seen as domineering and brutal thugs, but the hints of a deeper and richer culture under the Fist of Khar'shan are fascinating to some salarians. The artistic ability of batarian musicians and sculptors does draw the admiration of salarian artists, and the batarian's ruthless nature when it comes to research is refreshing to most salarians. Unfortunately, batarian views on females and their revolting sexual and moral framework is off-putting even to salarians, and their near worship of raw power is seen as childish. Very few batarians are close friends with salarians, and very few salarians want to be close friends with batarians.

The quarians irritate the salarians, because the two races are so similar. Like salarians, the quarians are naturally brilliant and innovative, and willing to risk anything in the furtherance of science. Like the salarians, they had a brutal brush with death at the hands of their own creations, and are survivors in the most ultimate expression. Most tellingly, the quarian form, especially the legs, is the closest to that of the salarians. The salarians dislike these comparisons because the quarians rely more on intuition than hard logic for their innovations, and the quarians stunning engineering prowess outstrips even the salarian ability. Many salarians privately wonder if the salarians had created the geth could they have survived the aftermath, and find themselves unsure of the answer, giving them a rare sense of inferiority. Given that the two races almost never interact, the rare meetings between the two usually devolve into angry bickering.

Salarians hae a complex relationship and view on the krogan. On the very surface, salarians are dismissive and scornful, calling the krogans stupid brutes who were the perfect tools. But salarian historical documents speak tellingly of the rich wisdom and insightful thoughts of the old krogan shamans and warleaders before the Rebellions, and how the krogan were making good progress at civilizing themselves until the rachni destroyed much of their elder culture and almost all of their calmer leaders. Salarians did not want to use the genophage, and resent deeply that they are blamed for the weapon when it was turians who launched it without permission. Salarians wish, secretly, that they could do the Uplift all over again, this time being more careful and cautious with how they treated the krogan. Of course, they would never admit this, and the more generations pass from the time of the rebellions the more scorn salarians feel towards the krogan.

Salarians see the volus as both dangerous and useful. They have, along with the asari, begun manipulating the little aliens to pull away from the turians, which would further cripple the Hierarchy and make them utterly dependent on salarian and asari financial aid. The volus' ability with money is a source of jealousy for some salarians, but their military developments, small scale as they are, lead the salarians to think they may be useful for more than business. Volus fear and greed are easy handles for salarians to manipulate, and the lack of any real intelligence organs in the Vol Protectorate makes penetration very easy. Volus are so submissive in most stances that salarians have no problems with them on a personal level.

For salarians,the hanar are confusing and irritating. The hanar focus on their Enkindler religion, their irritating humility, their rejection of science in the preference of faith, and their incessant moralism all rub salarians the wrong way. Their own far more successful uplift of the drell brings out jelous envy, while their more than capable intelligence services , bolstered by their drell servants, has thwarted STG attempts to determine what the Hanar have hidden away in their temples for centuries. The salarians have blocked hanar access to several critical galactic markets and poisoned the asari opinion on the aliens, but the hanar seem amused by such, as if that was expected and unimportant, a stance that only makes salarians more angry and unsure of themselves. Most of all, hanar disruption of research into Prothean ruins is seen as absolutely intolerable. The hanar's drifty, relaxed nature means few salarians will even converse with the floating aliens, much less pursue friendships.

The salarians dislike the drell for different reasons. The drell memory, superior to even salarians, is seen with an eye to perhaps obtaining the same, but the drell focus on mystical religious figures of supernatural origin makes the salarians sneer. Drell intelligence and espionage capability is a near match for the STG, a source of irritation, and the drell are capable of the same kind of focused analysis and planning as the salarians, making long term manipulation difficult. The salarians are researching Kepral's Syndrome as a possible lever to pry drell and hanar apart, but this is made difficult by the fatalistic outlook of many drell, who seem content to die in coughing heaps rather than seek an ally who's homeworld won't kill them.

Salarians find the elcor, with their slow, careful thoughts and almost fanatically pre-planning, more agreeable, if tiresomely ponderous to react. The salarian love of speed and reaction are obviously not big in elcor culture, and elcor scientists are more practical than experimental types, always grating on salarian views. The elcor disdain for espionage (their language does not even have words for spying or betrayal) is astonishing, and the elcor's focus on merely seeking contentment rather than some fixed goal of grand importance as laziness. That being said, elcor are so easy going that even salarians find them friendly and easy to talk to.

Salarians see the vorcha as someone's experiment with planarian worms gone wrong and think that a good orbital bombardment or two would clean up the entire mess, one of the few times where the salarian answer to a question doesn't involve manipulation. Vorcha are too stupid and violent to even understand salarian intentions, too violent to be useful in operations, and live even less time than salarians, giving them a rare insight into how longer lived races view them. The vorcha only respect raw might, something salarians find distasteful at best, and seeing as the term 'vorcha scientist' is usually a joke involving someone mixing chemicals they should not have, salarians have a dim view on the race as a whole.

Finally, salarians see humans as extremely dangerous. They find many figures in human history, particularly Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Ardiente, to be almost salarian in outlook. Humans have shown ruthlessness, drive, energy and flexibility, all salarian values. But human moral and ethical frameworks are maddening to salarian values, and the sexual focus of humans is almost as bad as the asari's. Humanity's tendency towards suspicion and their own powerful intelligence organs draw some level approval from salarians, but they value force and power too much for any true partnerships to form in most cases.

Up Next: the Turians, and the Transitional Story Piece

Pel leaned back in the long couch, smiling his thanks at the Illusive Man for the cigarette as he lit it, exhaling with a sigh of pleasure. The form-fitting Cerberus armor he wore highlighted his barrel chest, chiseled abs and powerful arms, and he noted with an internal smirk that both Lawson and Cannin had been eying him up since he'd arrived.

Look all you like, ladies. But I wouldn't touch either of you skanks with a ten foot pole.

Dr. Minsta sat on the far end of the couch, muttering to himself as he went over something on his info-pad. The man's normally neat appearance was a bit ramshackle, the frenetic doctor more absorbed than usual in his work.

The Illusive Man ignited his own cigarette, and sent a stream of smoke into the air. His pale white suit was offset by a dark black shirt with diamond cufflinks, and the white slacks met a pair of silver-tipped pale white boots. As usual, Rachel Florez stood at the doorway, leaning against it casually, her own armor gleaming dimly as she examined her fingernails.

Richard Williams stood, towering over everyone, his cold features motionless as he glanced about. The dark black suit he wore only emphasized his gigantic, superhuman frame, and Pel idly wondered how much of the man was man and how much was machine. Half? Seventy five percent? More?

Gotta be some kind of nutjob to go past fifty percent. Who wants to live with no dick and needing to bathe in WD-40 for the rest of your life?

With a quiet click, the door across the briefing room opened, revealing the form of Matriarch Trellani. She wore a long black dress with a gray and orange shawl over it – Cerberus colors, along with tiny Cerberus pin on her collar.

She's got guts if she wore that shit in salarian space. Then again, she's an alien who joined the Dog. Bitch has balls of iron for that alone.

She gazed around the room a moment, her face set in a gentle smile. Pel couldn't help but compare her figure to that of Lawson, and found it funny at the look on the human agent's face, one that was all jealousy. Trellani ignored her, and bowed her head to the Illusive Man, whose expression never flickered.

"Matriarch Trellani. I trust your trip ended safely?"

She gave a shallow movement, the asari version of a shrug, the motions slightly wrong in Pel's eyes. "I am unharmed, if that is what you are asking. More inept assassins from the Matriarchy, nothing I was unable to handle."

He nodded, tapping his ashes into the ashtray set in the arm of the chair. "Excellent. No doubt you've all seen the trideo reports about the events on Therum. Shepard was able to rescue Liara T'Soni from geth forces, and my primary question is : why?"

Trellani shrugged. "Liara is … well, a figure of no import. A shy little wretch, pureblood trash born to two matriarchs who thought a love child would heal a breach a thousand years old. She's been fumbling about for decades now, digging after the Protheans."

Richard Williams raised an eyebrow. "That is of concern, given what Saren's objectives are supposed to include. The question is, how important is she? We could obtain her from Shepard's ship with ease."

The Illusive Man shook his head. "I'd prefer not to derail Shepard just yet. Until we are sure of Saren's motives, an ace in the hole is of considerable value. And if we plan to recruit Shepard, attacking her for the asari girl seems counterproductive."

Pel tuned out the discussion, not even sure why he'd been summoned. They argued and talked about it for a good ten minutes before finally deciding to do nothing at all. In Pel's eyes, the answer was simple. Saren was a turian, you played along with his crazy ass until he lead you to how he managed to control the geth. Then you sold him out to Shepard. Bam. Humanity gets respect, the Dog gets control of the geth, and a turian gets his head blown off.

Of course, no one asked him. He was on the verge of actually dozing off when the voice of Trellani drew him back into focus.

"And the little research project you have going? I see both Mr. Pel and Dr. Minsta are here, so I presume you called me in regards to that?"

It was Florez who spoke, her mouth twisting into that smirk that always made her face go from icy to kinda hot looking. "Indeed, Matriarch. Your impressive results in salarian space have overcome my doubts about the usefulness of a grand tour of the aliens we contend with. Our next target is the Turian Hierarchy."

Trellani smiled. "A good goal, but I am not very familiar with the turians. I have made a few trips into turian space, but nothing like my centuries of dealings with the salarians. A pity we don't have a turian specialist in the ranks of Cerberus."

Pel felt his stomach sink, even as the Illusive Man gave a smile and puffed on his cigarette.

"As it happens, we do. Before he decided to work with Cerberus, Agent Pel was a Systems Alliance Marine working closely with Janus on Project Handshake, the SA effort to heal the breach caused by the First Contact War. He spent eight years in the Hierarchy, and has contacts throughout it's space. I believe he even speaks several turian dialects."

Pel grimaced. "With all due respect, bossman, that was a decade ago. Most of my knowledge is way out of date, most of my contacts have moved on, and I don't know shit about the kinda stuff that goes into these reports."

The Illusive Man tilted his head. "Pel, I am aware you are not a trained psycho-historian like Dr. Minsta, nor a .. renaissance lady like our fair Matriarch here." Trellani gave a trill of laughter, while Minsta scowled and adjusted his glasses. "But you have three things that make your particular skill set vital."

He lifted his cigarette. "First, you know the area better than any other Cerberus operative. Minsta spent time in asari space with his work with the University of Serrice, and the Matriarch spent many years living in salarian territory. You are the natural fit for an excursion into the turian territories."

"Second, you are a very dangerous man. I don't need to send an entire Centurion unit with you, attracting unwanted attention and leaving a trail a mile wide. You're known, trusted by the turians, and capable of holding your own. With the … chaos occurring in the galaxy now, we are trying to keep as many resources close to home as we can."

He smiled. "Finally, Pel, you are wasted as a clean up man for fixing Kai Leng or Richard's little fuckups." The hulking form of the Shadow Hand shifted as he grimaced, but the Illusive Man continued. "For this assignment I plan to pair you with the Matriarch, to see if her charm and your own ability to … persuade others … will lead to insights as critical as your work with the salarians did."

Pel sighed. "You're in charge, bossman. But I can't promise the blue won't get cacked if the Blackwatch sniffs us out."

Trellani gave him an amused look. "I assure you, I am not a defenseless maiden." She tapped a long elegant fingernail on the form of her warp-sword, belted at her side. "Besides, turians are hidebound creatures of habit, and who would expect an asari to be working for Cerberus?"

Pel shrugged. She was wrong about the turians – spikes had a stick up the ass, but they were neither gullible nor easily fooled, with their ability to pick up on human lies by hearing and smell alone. But this wasn't the place to argue with her.

"I need a day or two to get in contact with some people. Captain Theo Pellam has been dead in the SA records for ten years, resurrecting myself will need a little hacking and some greased palms."

The Illusive Man nodded. "Send me the bills, Pel. Rachel, can you put together appropriate transport?"

The Iron General tapped her chin thoughtfully. "That depends on the requirements for the mission. Do you have a preference, Pel?"

The heavyset man blinked, and took a puff of his own cigarette, thinking. "Light transport. NO guns, the turians tend to overlook unarmed ships but anything with even a peashooter gets a look-see. Make it comfy – staying in turian hotels is a pain because the stupid spikes can't figure out how to make a toilet for human OR asari asses. Make sure I have at least two shuttles, and a selection of transponders."

She nodded. "No ship armaments...will you need personal equipment?"

Pel snorted. "I'll take a few of my boys, independents with no connection to the Dog. I can put together some weapons and armor that don't scream 'Cerberus is here' on my own. The whole trip should take at least a couple of weeks if we do it right, so just make sure the transport has a kitchen. If I can, I would prefer to avoid Palaven, goddamn place is a radioactive shithole, but if we can't we'll need some kit for that."

Florez nodded a second time. "I'll get some exposure suits and anti-rad drugs for you, just in case."

She left the room, off to get things moving, and Pel glanced over to Doctor Minsta."If I need to send some spikes your way for T&I, can you handle it from Minuteman, or do you need to come along?"

The doctor sniffed. "I would prefer to handle such actions in a secure location. Field interrogation is messy and, after the salarian mess, I shudder to think how hard turian blood is to get out of the field armor."

Pel stood. "Alright, then, bossman. I'll be ready to go ASAP, I'll OT you when I got my people in position. Until then, I'm off to finish my drinking." He put out his smoke and left the room, and Trellani glanced over at Harper, waiting until the door shut before speaking.

"Are you sure this is wise? He is hardly subtle, unlike Agents Lawson and Cannin."

The Illusive Man stubbed out his cigarette. "He is a very reliable agent, and more intelligent and subtle than he lets on at first glance. He has a number of rough edges, but they will only cut the enemy. Is there anything you can think of that will be required for this trip that he didn't mention?"

Trellani sighed. "Any turian dictionaries and historical documents we can lay hands on, and an up-to-date translation suite that can handle both text and graphical information." She folded her arms, giving him a cool glance. "And a few days to recover from my last trip would be appreciated."

He looked up. "You have two days. Time, sadly, is of the essence. Your trip may find information on Saren we need to make some critical decisions regarding sharing certain .. information with him."
Chapter 25: Chapter 25 : Pel, Turian Introduction

A/N: I was going to have Pel do the historical part, but it wasn't gelling correctly, so I had to scrap it and start over. Instead, Pel gives a small overview of his view of the Turians, or spikes as the slang goes.

Additionally, if interested, I've updated chapters two and three with new information about the Galaxy and the Citadel Council since the human history has moved to TCF: Humanity now.

It will be January before the turian history is ready, and longer for the physiology. Sorry, but Bioware sucks at designing aliens that are medically or historically plausable, and I have LOTS of fixes to make and holes to fill. (You have a culture where everyone is willing to help everyone else but also fights among itself? WTF? Fixing that is fun.)

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Pel again, bossman.

First of all, thanks for nothing. Sticking me out here on this wild-ass goose chase into the Hierarchy is likely to end in tears if the turians tumble to what we're doing. Greys and squids prolly take information gatherin' as kind of a game, as long as you don't make off with anything important. Turians see it as an insult. Then again, they see lots of shit as an insult.

Damn, I don't wanna be here again. I hate turian space. Goddamned inspections every time you so much as change course.

Trelly is off buried in the library at the University of Magna, one of the nicer turian colonies. She's boning up on turian history, I guess, to write up the first part of the report you want. Which is cool and all, but I kinda worry she's gonna focus on the wrong shit.

So, she told me to give you a ground view, so to speak, of what you're looking at when you take a gander at the spikes. I'll be happy to oblige, as long as I ain't gotta speak in High Geekese or whatever the tone Minsta uses.

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MINDSET

Sorry, I don't have a fancy word for it. Calling it psychology is bullshit, since anyone who says they understand how a turian thinks is a lying asshat.

Turians are the most alien, fucked up bastards I've met. Greys are weird, fuckin' evil and crazier than telling a bar full of krogans you just killed one of their kids, but we can get them, sorta. Asari are crazy blue sex-addicted lying bisexual witches who can fuck you or kill you with their mind, but they make a badass drink and aren't that weird.

Turians? Boss, turians would rather die than admit they were wrong about something most times. A turian will happily, and I do mean happily, kill himself if he's fucked up his honor. I don't mean Japanese style fuckup, I mean insulting the wrong person or failing to figure out a subordinate isn't ready for a job.

Best I figure, turians believe they are judged for the afterlife by how upright their intentions and actions are when they live. They see their society – not the people, the GOVERNMENT – as the Big Thing, and everything they do has to rotate around that. If the government says go die, you die. If they say colonize this radioactive, germ-infested shithole, you colonize. Problems come when turians disagree on who should be calling the shots. The turians have a Primarch for each little section of their space, and the Unification Wars didn't really unify shit, so a lot of colonies don't feel the High Primarch is the rightful ruler.

It's a mess. Trelly can tell you about it.

Turians don't have morals in the same way we do. The act has no meaning, it's the reason you did it that is sinful or not. If you have to kill fifty people to save fifty-one , hell, you're a hero in their eyes. But if you don't kill fifty to save fifty-one, they look at you as if you killed those fifty-one people yourself.

Turians don't put up with lying, cheating, or theft. I ain't never, in all my life, heard of a turian cheating on his wife. Not once. You never see them arrested for theft, or graft, or corruption. They aren't wired that way. You can't fucking bribe them, even the poorest of them would try to claw you to death for insulting him that way.

The fuckers are completely fearless, too, when it comes to fighting and dying. They never, ever, break. I've had to put down turian KIDS who after we whacked their parents picked up their weapons and kept fighting. The only turians who ever broke was that group we hit with mind-control drugs, and even half of them killed themselves rather than retreat.

All of this is tied up in that thing about 'dying how you live' and being one with ancestors and shit. I don't get half of it, but I can understand the basic point: a turian can't be turned, corrupted, or made into a traitor. If they're doing something, they're convinced it's the best way to proceed, and nothing is gonna change their mind without damn good reasons.

As a thought, boss? This is why that Saren fuck scares the shit out of me. I don't give a shit what everyone else says, a guy like that turning his back on his own people is freaking unnatural. Whatever he thinks he's doing, he's convinced that it's either that or death. Watch him close.

CULTURE

Turian culture is like fucking ants. What's the word...ah. Yeah. Collectivist.

A spike will put everyone else above his own needs. I don't mean than in a petty way either, boss. Go to any turian city and there's a building called a charity. Down and out spikes go there and literally get adopted by a turian family, given a job, and gotten back on their feet. They don't HAVE homeless people.

They don't charge their own kind for medical services. A turian who can't make ends meet to pay for his apartment will be sent to another place with lower rent, one who has problems feeding his family will have his neighbors gang up and stuff his kitchen with food until he can make it on his own again. They won't back-stab one another in jobs, are brutally honest, and will always go out on a limb for a complete stranger as long as they're turian.

Their work ethic is fucking psychotic, as hundreds of thousands of them die a year from literally working themselves to death! I'm not shitting you, they miss the signs they're in bad health and keep working until they croak or fall out. And this shit is seen as a sign of maturity!

I ain't much for artsy fartsy shit, and neither are they. I do like that about the spikes. Their art is all scary shit designed to remind you that they will stomp a mudhole in your ass if you push them. Their music is boring military marches, their food is nothing you want to eat, and they make the best brandy in the goddamned galaxy. Armagnac can go straight to hell compared to turian kaless.

Other stuff? Turians take their religion super serious, worshiping their ancestors and nature spirits or some shit. I never paid much attention to that, but they always babble on about it if you ask 'em. They don't have many holidays – they see that shit as a reason to fuck off, and they hate fucking off.

They pump out kids at a crazy rate because the women are hornier than the men, which is just backasswards.

Turian counseling is beating the shit out of each other in open-air arenas, then getting drunk as fuck and banging the shit out of some chicks. I really can't find anything wrong with that.

Spikes don't really find the other races very impressive, boss. They think the asari are okay but don't like their sneaky nature, and the salarians are too dishonorable for them to get along with. They'd like to set the goddamned batarians on fire (can't disagree) and they ain't big fans of the lizards or gasbags. They see krogan as stupid ugly brutes who should have died a long time ago, and they are not big fans of humans.

MILITARY

The entire race is basically an army. Their hospitals are part of the medical branch, their public works are run by the army corps of engineering, their schools are run by their military recruiters. The roads are built by the transportation divisions, the fucking transportation services are military. Even the goddamned parks are run by the military!

Every single spike is in the military or has served in it. ALL of them, boss. Every civilian has at least eight years service in, and most of them more than that. Even the outcasts put their kids in merc bands while they grow up. It's fucking creepy.

Their navy is big but shitty, if you ask me. Way too many dreadnaughts and big ships, not remotely enough escorts. They have a big-gun fixation equal to Florez's. The navy is sloppy when it comes to logistic shit too, although they have good tactics. The fleet is split up and sent all over creation to defend half the damned galaxy, and it's not so hot in big engagements.

The army is gigantic. It's bigger than the asari, salarian and human ground forces combined, and that's just active duty. Their infantry is big on info-war shit, drones, snipers, and attrition warfare, with lots of flexibility and small-unit command. The smallest unit can call for airstrikes and orbital support, and the generals try to let their lower-rankers get the job done without micromanaging.

Biotics are rare, and treated like shit. Spikes don't see biotics as honorable combat and tend to use them for dishonorable tasks – infiltration, assassination, that sort of thing.

They have a fighter corps, although their fighters are dogshit compared to our flyboys. No carriers, instead they use them from bases and ground strips.

They have auxiliaries, mostly the volus, although the VDF is taking more and more of that duty on itself. Most volus aux units are, surprise, missile carriers, light armored missile units, and fucking GTS barrage batteries that spit out more torpedoes than a fucking dreadnaught. Goddamn volus.

ECONOMY

The turian economy is crappy. So much of their infrastructure is government based and tax supported that the tax rates are even higher than the SA's, and merchants end up having to pay high import and export duties and all that shit. There's no smuggling (smugglers get shot) and no black market, so people pay higher prices for everything.

Turians don't get business the same way that a human does, or a volus. They rely on the volus for most of their economic muscle, but that's beginning to not work out as the volus are tired of being used.

The biggest problem, of course, is they have to pay for that big-ass army and navy, which eats up like 40% of their fucking GDP a year. Not that they'd ever cut that back, the asari and salarians have put them in a corner with loans and the only way they can pay them off is volunteering their fleets to serve the Citadel. Turians are too honorable and straightforward to care, because honor demands they go along with it.

Nimrods.

HONOR

Honor is everything, that and accountability. You make a decision, you own it. You stake out a position, you defend it.

A turian who won't back up his words is garbage. The spikes aren't hypocrites, at least – they will stand behind their fuckups and stubbornly state it was the only way to go. Their mindset is pretty inflexible on some things.

There are spikes who hate their spouses, who beat the shit out of each other every day, that would rather die than break up. There are spikes who hate their jobs and won't quit because the company needs them in that position, even if they could get a job making twice as much elsewhere.

An entire turian regiment killed itself because they followed orders that had been hacked to identify the wrong target and ended up killing a group of asari on some kinda pilgrimage. Every one of them, even the fucking cooks and medics. Their families said they were proud they took 'the right stand for the right reasons.'

Honor is their life, bossman. The whole FCW blew up because, really, they thought we tricked them at first contact and because we didn't just surrender when they blew up Shanxi.

CITIZENSHIP

They have tiers of citizenship,but not like the SA. More like military ranks. You do a good job, you get promoted. Get promoted high enough and you can start up a Family, turian nobility. Get promoted past that and you can run the entire shebang.

Fuck voting, they pick the best persons to do the job, period. There's no such animal as turian politics in the lower levels of society, which is very strange to deal with. Spikes follow orders, all the way up the chain.

The highest level of citizenship is being a Primarch. That's where the politics starts.

COLONIES

The Hierarchy is broken up into clusters. Each cluster has certain backgrounds, laws, beliefs, blah blah blah. Each one has it's own Primarch.

Every decade or so the Primarchs all get together on Palaven and end up deciding who runs the Hierarchy, which turns into a big mess. Some clusters hate each other – turian unity only goes so far, I guess. The spikes usually have outbreaks of colonial violence or even full-out rebellions after a new one gets chosen.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, bossman. Trelly will have her usual shit on history, physical stuff, how they think, what kinda forks they use, and who is fucking who when she gets her parts done. I'll be doing the military stuff and talking about how they relate to other species.

Keep one last thing in mind. The spikes are smarter than they let on. Don't think for a minute that their fixation on honor and duty to the race blinds them. They didn't survive hundreds of years of salarian and asari fuckery by being stupid. They're honorable in their own way, which is NOT human. They'll blow up civilians by the million to get at a handful of soldiers or react to a riot with gunships and grenades because it's the most efficient method.

I know our view of them is mostly old FCW shit mixed with how they all have a stick up their ass, and God knows I ain't a fan of aliens, but they're cleaner to deal with than the blues or the greys. I have to go with Minsta's gut on this, no matter what Trelly says – the asari are out to fuck us, literally and figuratively. The salarians are bent as fuck and crazy. Turians are scary, weird and hard to understand, but they don't lie, and they don't ever go back on their word. They also aren't trying to make us like them or fuck up everything we do.

I'm off to have a drink. I got half a squad watching Trelly. I won't let your piece of ass get shot up if I can help it, so cut back on the 'ensure her safety' bullshit, bossman. Sides, we're safe enough for now. It's when we go to Palaven we need eyes open.
Chapter 26: Chapter 26 : Turian History

A/N: To my own vast surprise, this is FINALLY done.

The amount of work I had to do in order to produce a coherent history that resulted in the turian species and yet followed the GRIMBRIGHT EVILDARK rules of the PremiseVerse was exhausting. This thing is just short of 10,000 words, but I have written over forty thousand. It has been scrapped SEVEN times, each one a little better.

I know a lot of people were waiting for updates to this and have worried it was dead, and that is not the case, I assure you. But as I build my expanded world, I refuse to simply throw shit together Bioware style and say "Just because it's completely inconsistent doesn't mean it won't work." As I have said elsewhere, a collectivist military culture that fights constantly among itself doesn't make any goddamned sense, so I had to find a way to make it fit.

There are elements of Roman, Balinese, Thai, and Swahili historical bits and pieces in here. Kudos if you can identify the fifth influence.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Patient Jack, less-than-patient Richard, and amused Rachel,

I do regret the amount of time it has taken to gather the information to give you a coherent report, but the unrest in turian space due to Saren's activities is making things more difficult than expected. Pel's familiarity with the turians has proven to be of great use, and so far, no one has given us much trouble in terms of suspicion.

That is not to say gathering turian historical information has been easy. Not only have the turians proven to be at best, indifferent historians, but it appears that much of their publically available history is the worst sort of psychomanipulative military propoganda that would shame a Commissar. Not only is it utterly inaccurate, but it is slanted so heavily that it's primary use is to determine what didn't happen at any given point in history.

I have done my best to put together an accurate briefing, although as you will see in my forwarding statements, it is slightly different than you are expecting. Turians are complex creatures, and looking at them from human perspectives will limit your comprehension.

I can feel Richard gritting his teeth from here, but since they are artificial, I suppose no harm is done.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Complacency with the alien is similar to inattention with high explosives. Sooner or later, such things will get you killed.

A few words regarding turian history

Turian history is not something I have given much study or attention to, and I regret that now, having been exposed to it. It is a surprisingly rich tapestry, but not one of valor and honor as I had assumed. The early turians were shockingly ruthless and their leaders very talented at acts of manipulation and trickery unheard of in modern turians.

The shift in the mindset of the turian has much to do, I feel,with the chaos and misery caused by such manipulations (and with the manipulations themselves, although I touch on that later.) I am not certain if the rulers themselves set aside such or if their subjects simply stopped putting up with it, but shifts of such a fundamental nature are usually presaged by events in history. The salarians, for example, moved from their war-like and honor-based culture to their current mindset only after the horrors of the Collapse.

While there are such dark ages in turian history, the changes in society didn't occur until long after such. It is a mysterious point of thought that I will have to investigate later, but I would be cautious. Pel's dire warnings that turians are not as honor-bound and blind to manipulation as people believe would seem to be correct. It is very clear that at certain points in history turian education, culture and historical records were warped to change society – and the reasons for that are clear. What is less clear is why exactly the turians responsible for these changes would know how to do so in the first place.

Understanding turian history is, I suspect, key in grasping the nuances of the turian people. This may sound like a trite and even specious statement – obviously, a culture and viewpoint shorn of it's history will be hard to understand. But in this I mean it in a different fashion. Humanity is the product of it's long history, and yet what makes humanity interesting is that it's individuals often defy expectations based on that history.

Turians, on the other hand, can be modeled with very good accuracy in a way that would seem to make manipulating them very easy. The nuances of why such manipulations work – especially given that they were changed to behave in this fashion – are what bother me. Either turians as a species don't care about what aliens think of them or do, or they are unable to do so.

I doubt you can grasp why that is significant, given human history. Humans, no matter the culture and no matter the era, prize the concept of being either in control of their own destiny or destined for greatness. There is nothing humanity is incapable of because the very nature of humanity could be summed up as free will. For turians, they have been … evolved … into a culture that sneers upon free will in favor of service, and disdains reaction in favor of preparation. But to be unable to even see that there are alternatives – on a psychological level, on a mental level, on a biological level – that speaks to something very wrong with the turian people.

I have never really interacted with turians, as for long years my duties in the Priesthood kept me confined to Thessia, and my early years were spent in salarian space. Thus, while I have of course interacted with turians, I never did focus my attentions on them in the same fashion I have salarians.

Turian history is drowned in interspecies violence, even more than human or batarian history. The development of the turians appears devoid of the .. tinkering experienced by both my own people and the salarians, and as a result there is a great deal of instinctual evolutionary baggage that in turn has affected the development of the race into sentient beings. That isn't to say the turians were of a natural origin – I do not believe they were. But they were not crafted to what they are today.

Which is a relief, in it's own way. Anything that would want to craft a species such as the turians would be insane at best, and malevolent at face value.

Origins and Evolution of the Turian Species

This section, I fear, will be longer than usual. I would not normally preface a discussion of history with such, but my approach to turian history will be more … asari in flavor than usual. I attempted to meet the expected requirements of what you wanted in my coverage of salarians and am still not precisely pleased with the result.

No wave is the same, regardless of how many times it may crash upon the shore.

I am not, as I have said before, a trained medical doctor or archaohistorian. At best my training in the Temple of Athame forced me to become a critical thinker, a purveyor of the long view of history – and that by asari standards. So my viewpoints on the history of the turians will perforce be different than whatever your own people have put together thus far.

I commented once that Minsta's views on asari sexuality were flawed. He fails to understand why the asari became as they did, even while having all the facts in hand. Rather than attempt to understand how history shapes culture, how history shapes perspective, and how history reveals a species intent, he recites a dry lists of dates, facts, and acts.

Looking at the history of the turians in such a light will mislead you, as it has mislead others and up to now, I will admit, myself. I am convinced turian history is deeply rooted in their evolutionary origins, and I have attempted to provide a history that does not bother so much with the dates of battles and specific events so much as trends. Knowing that the Clans of the Vuthar Plains gathered together in PC 3320 to sign documents ensuring the right of females to travel freely is no more important in the long run understanding of the race than the signing of the Magna Carta by humans. It is not the act that defines, it is the results behind it that matter.

To achieve this, some of what I have pulled together has been accomplished with the assistance of Dr. Minsta via commlink. Some of it came from a contact I still maintain in salarian circles, who has a few STG friends and is unaware of my … allegiances. Other pieces are my own conjecture. The entire work is not exactly history so much as sociohistorical presentation. Which leads me to the evolutionary origins of turians.

They are not, I fear, as simple as either you or I were lead to believe. While turian history after the New Imperatorium was easy to obtain, history before that was spotty. Prehistorical events and evolutionary history are flag-words for turian Deathwatch teams, I have learned. The Turian Hierarchy requires military oversight and licensing to investigate any archeological sites. Aliens are completely forbidden from access to any clan history libraries or digs of greater than twenty thousand years in age. Finally, and most tellingly, turian military education does not include ANY grounding or study of the evolution of the turian species.

There is a reason why.

There is a great deal of archeological confusion about the rise of the turians as a race. Most of this comes from that fact that Palaven looks suspiciously terraformed. There are hints in soil and rock samples dating back some sixty million years that the world was fundamentally altered by some powerful technology, shifting it to a dextro-compatible state. Additionally, there is evidence by the rate of growth spines on petrified takai trees in the oldest parts of the Vutharian tundra forest that suggest the world was not always in it's current orbit, but further out.

Fragmentary evidence of worked metals and impact craters dating back to the same sixty million year time frame hints this may have once been a colony of some long-forgotten empire, but no firm conclusions can be drawn, as the areas in question were the targets of severe nuclear strikes during the imperialistic era of turian history and are too radioactive to inspect closely. However, it is clear that none of the life of Palaven was ever sourced there.

Three things stand out to indicate this. First, from what I have read and been told by Pel and many others, Palaven is fiercely radioactive. Uranium and other heavy elements make up almost 11% of the crust by volume. This is not a naturally occurring instance, and it surely would have sterilized all life on the planet otherwise. Added to that the distance to the sun, and the world is also bombarded with strong UV radiation. No life as we know it could have developed under such a combination of things.

Second, there is no evolutionary fossil record. None, period. An assemblage of 54 plant types in six phyla and 112 animals in nine simply appeared some sixty million years ago. This grouping of species is far too small to be the result of natural evolution, especially given the high radiation. Each and every one of these species has an ecological niche, finely tuned survival adaptations to the environment, and a curious lack of evolutionary dead-ends (like the asari mensis gland, or the human appendix).

Finally, there are several dextro-compatible worlds that have various forms of life very similar to those found on Palaven, except there is an evolutionary record in the fossils of that world to prove they came from there. Palaven was force populated by custom designed creatures to survive the environment...and then allowed to run wild, evolutionarily speaking.

While sixty million years does not seem like a long span in evolutionary terms, Palaven's horrific levels of radiation and the sheer harshness of survival drove the placed species to evolve much faster than normal. Turians were not the only sentient race to develop on Palaven, but were clearly the only survivors.

Turians appear to have evolved from aerial carrion-salvaging predators, opportunistic pack hunters with a build to allow ground travel when dealing with the fierce 'god-storm' storm cells that sometimes cover most of the planet for weeks. Lightly built, the proto-turians sacrificed both muscle mass and size in favor of developing metallic plating like many other lifeforms on Palaven to shield against both the ground radiation and solar emissions. With their light frames and keen eyesight, they would prey on weakened herbivores when possible, eating carrion in the wake of the savage vakars when they could not.

Some nineteen million years ago, the alpha predator on Palaven, the sentients identified by turians as the Luvan, were obliterated by the aftermath of a cometary impact. Temperatures plummeted and the cloud-layer obscured the sun. Several other species went extinct, including nine herbivores. The Luvan ate massive amounts of several of these extinct species and was over-bred, and collapsed without a chance to develop much more than extremely primitive tools.

At the same time turian intellect had been on the rise, and there is a clear sign that proto-turians were used as hunt animals by the Luvan. Like a mix of the human bloodhound and hunting hawk, these domesticated turians were left masterless as their owner's small civilization crumbled in the face of starvation. Opportunistic and familiar with carrion salvaging, turians emerged from the ice age in something of a population boom.

Slow evolution from that point, including increased storms and a more meat heavy diet with the absence of stronger predators, both curtailed turian flight and bulked up their ground mass. By eleven million years ago, most flight characteristics were vestigial, and six million years ago something akin to the modern turian first walked on the plains of Palaven.

The new turians were still pack hunters, using powerful spring-and-leap tactics, sharp raking claws, and strongly built upper bodies in their assault. Springing to a target in a single lightning fast move, they would torque their claws in powerful arcs and backhands, shredding arteries, ripping off plating, and hamstringing legs, before leaping back and letting the prey bleed out.

Turians began experimenting with fire some four million years ago, but adapted very slowly to tool usage. Partly due to their powerful physiques and partly due to their numbers, they were able to beat back competition from another sentient race that had developed on the planet, the Yuvan. The Yuvan, semi-aerial creatures akin to early turians, had developed primitive stone tools and weapons, but were outnumbered. Evolution also resulted in thinner plating due to heat issues, and they were simply no match for turians in combat, and were hunted to extinction in a scant half million years.

Many turian tribes appear to have adapted the tools of the Yuvan, which sparked more ideas. Almost sixty five thousand years ago, turians finally began working with primitive irrigation and tribal groups larger than a hunting band, forming primitive languages for the first time.

Prehistoric Era: the Age of Dust

In the turian history, the days prior to the formation of the Palavanus Imperatorium was known as the age of Dust. The name was due to another harsh climactic shift, as evaporation finally eliminated much of the extra water caused by the comet strike so many years ago, returning areas that had become grasslands and marshlands to the desert they were before. Huge dust-storms arose, further curtailing communication between tribal groups.

The early turians were split into four races, based on plating and skin color. Dark-skinned and light plated Palavu, dark-skinned and dark-plated Tyvu, light-skinned and light-plated Orvu, and the rare dark-skinned and bright-white plating of the Davu. The Tyvu, with their colors matching much of Palaven's environment, were hunters and seekers, xenophobic and hostile to everyone. They wandered constantly, ignoring agriculture in favor of hunting and raiding. The Orvu and Palavu were mostly traditional warrior-hunter clans, dabbling in irrigation and building primitive tent cities, battling each other and driving off Tyvu raids. The Palavu inhabited the areas most settled by the long-forgotten Yuvan and had the best developed tools and what passed for scientific minds back then.

Sadly, the Davu were little better than slaves, abused and often driven off their lands. Much smaller than the other turians and with fewer numbers, many tribes were raided for their females and for slaves, leaving the Davu with bitter hatreds of other turians.

The Age of Dust lasted almost thirty thousand years. The Palavu grew and grew in numbers and power, driving the Orvu completely out of their territory and over the sea to the southern, less hospitable continent. They then turned their power against the Tyvu, shredding their warbands and driving away the herds the Tyvu depended on for sustenance. Unwisely, the Tyvu were driven to attack the Palavu, and were crushed in several short battles that still litter the Northern Salt Desert. There were so many dead that even thirty five thousand years later, the bones litter the salt flats in the hundreds of thousands.

It is a reminder that the turians hate like no other species.

The remainder of the Davu were mostly scattered at this time, becoming slaves and servants, and eventually this became a caste for them. The few remaining Tyvu that were left fled south and interacted with the equally seething Orvu, resulting in a great deal of racial mixing that eliminated the Tyvu as a distinct racial group.

The Palavu began the first cities during this time, each city the center of a vast group of tribes. Lead by a Spirit Augur, the cities were organized around ceremonial priest-kings and seer-priests, each one sponsored by a group of warrior leaders who influenced many tribes. The stronger warrior from each one of the groups was called the Primarch, and the Primarchs met every summer solstice to listen to the wisdom of the Augers and Pryer-of-Sight, the seer priests. The cities interacted cautiously, trading early materials such as timber, stone and meats, while building up large tracts of farmland and ranch land to feed their populations.

The near-savages to the south, however, mostly Orvu, had no such luxury. Faced with a continent full of the more dangerous predators on the planet, limited water, bad farmlands, and solar exposure much stronger than in the north, the Orvu realized they either stood as one or fell separately. They banded together and formed communes, each one networked with it's neighbors, sharing food, hunting information, herbal medicines and the like. The few Tyvu refugees they had absorbed were valuable as well in both establishing hunting patterns and training the Orvu in their skills.

The Orvu battled for survival, eventually drawing on the sea as their ally and becoming adept seafarers. Not shorn of their hatred for the Palavu, they relentlessly harried the former from the sea, preventing the formation of any form of navy by the Palavu and even sacking several coastal cities with sickening violence.

The Palavu were not responsive to this, because the Spirit Augers and seer-priests expended much of their time building the so-called Sha Titans. Each titan was built by a group of cities working in concert, made of huge 120-ton blocks of finely hewn granite. Spiral-shaped at the base, they slowly gave way to the figures of vast turian like figures holding aloft huge bowls filled with burning brimstone. Cunningly designed reservoirs, rooms, and stockpiles allowed the priests to keep the fires burning.

Turian historians (and others) argue endlessly over the purpose of the Titans. The endeavor shattered the economy and unity of the Palavu, much like the Pyramids of Egypt and the titans of Easter Island destroyed those cultures. Many smaller tribes, bankrupted and forced into substance, struck out on their own, and their disrespect to the Primarch caused tribal war. When these wars spilled over into the civilian space, instead of bypassing them as asari (or humans) would have, the battles burned through the towns. Turians savaged the fields and herds, hoping to cripple and starve their enemies, and then realized only too late they themselves were doomed as well.

With the unity shattered, it was the strength of one group of clans that had not been involved in the Sha Titans that rose to prominence. Bringing about the first primitive writing system and early math, the Palavanus clan of the Palavu waited until the rest of the nation was in tatters before unleashing their own military, focusing on securing farmland, herds, females, and lumber sites. They executed strong leaders and priests where they found them and sowed dead animal carcasses in water supplies to spread disease, falling back when done and letting starvation and misery fight for them.

Thirty four thousand six hundred and eleven years ago, the tribal leaders and remaining Primarchs of the north fell to their knees and surrendered to Ulvu Palavanus He slew the high Priest-Augur in sight of everyone, carving his crown from the turian's skull according to legends, before ascending to his throne.

Pre-Industrial Era : the Age of Steel

The Palavanus Imperatorium was, in a word, efficient misrule, mixed with chaos. The Palavanus clan dominated, but they were clever enough to let other strong families become powerful in their limited environments, and to 'share the wealth' when it came to land ownership and the like.

The Imperatorium was founded on the Principles of Arms, as set down by Imperator Ulvu the First. It defined the rights of the clans, the Primarchs, the clan elders, and so on, but it also laid the rules of what are considered the viewpoint of honor.

The first of these was simple: The strongest arm determines the outcome, regardless if the outcome is just or unjust. The second rule was : The coward who cannot master fear can never control his own life. The fool who throws it away out of bravery without benefit cannot control his own life either. The final rule : power is taken, and respect is earned, but command must be given.

These rules trouble me, but I suspect my viewpoint on such things is different from yours. On the face of it, given the average view of turians being obsessed with honor, the rules clash. But turians, I believe, do not solely see the universe through the lens of honor, but rather pragmatism. They know that might makes right, even if it isn't just. And they know that choosing when and where to fight is primary, above survival instinct or foolhardy bravery and heroics. Finally, they admit that just because you can exercise power over others, does not mean they will follow you.

For the turian rulers to use this as their mindset, I believe honor is more of a restraint on turian reactions than anything else. Turians see honor as a way to limit their pragmatism and brutality, albeit in a strange manner. Turians appear to have not only deliberately bred and trained themselves to suppress flight responses, but built up an entire culture that drowned in honor – not because of the value honor has in and of itself, but because without it the Palavanus probably felt turian society would eventually destroy itself.

I find myself digressing into historical speculation, and not mere fact. My apologies.

The Imperatorium was organized around the Palavanus clan-tribe, with nine subsidiary tribes holding positions of power around it : Talid, Varok, Mantha, Mehrkuri, Arterius, Vakarian, Linsho, Digeris, and perhaps most infamously, Facinus. These clans were all very strong, most of them rivaling the Palavanus in strength and size, but each of them had long histories of violence with each other as well. The first Imperator proved to be a genius as maneuvering them against each other while binding them closer to his own clan through marriages, trade, and investments.

Given the primitive nature of the civilization, such sophisticated social tactics were unexpected. Even today, to call someone as 'sly as Ulvu' is a back-handed complement, suggesting someone is very smooth and clever but is using people for his or her own gains.

It took almost three thousand years to truly unify the northern continent, a task made harder by the free-spirited separatism that wracked the turian spirit. When clans tried to expand beyond a certain distance, inevitably strong-willed individuals tried to stake their own claim to being in charge. Cleverly , the Imperatorium solved this by having distant chiefs answer to closer ones, and those answering to the nine large tribes that answered to the Imperator directly.

It must also be stressed that the Imperatorium was not an empire by the means humans see it. It was at best a vast cooperative effort in resource sharing and barely restrained cold war. Over six hundred battles with more than a hundred thousand casualties were recorded during these long years, so you can only imagine the number of skirmishes, smaller battles, assassinations, and the like happening.

The Palavanus 'ruled' in the loosest of manners, but their influence was undeniable and focal. Rather than the concept of nation, the overwhelming call of kin and clan to turian blood was irresistible. What the Imperatorium tried to do was incorporate that impulse to include as many as possible, to make the instinctual need to defend clan-members reach across traditional limits.

It ultimately failed, but the attempt was, nonetheless, inspired. It faltered in it's success only due to the unity brought by, and confusion in the wake of the fall, of an outside party.

It was during this time that ancestor worship first arose, as well as the Valluvian priesthood. A group of turians that claimed to be able to speak with the dead and pass along their wishes gained great power and influence among the powerful in Turian society, mysterious and grim figures who towered above normal turians and seemed immune to damage. By this time turians had begun experimenting with metal weapons, mostly spears and long slashing axes, neither of which did any damage to the priests, according to legend.

The influence of the Priesthood on the turians was immense, as they became very organized in a scant thousand years, moving from scattered hunter clans with cities mostly used as mass granaries to developing full agricultural and horticultural arenas, metallurgy, chemistry, and math. This abruptly ended about twenty-nine thousand years ago, when a series of volcanic eruptions covered the Temple of the Priests in lava, destroying them all.

The Facinus tribe, with it's holdings undisturbed, attempted to take advantage of the violent upheaval, raising civil war and attempting to destroy the Palavanus and take the Imperatorium for itself. The clans all fell to fighting, while the eruption fallout killed crops, ruined irrigation ditches, and sickened the civilians. Widespread raiding and death lead to disease and famine, while the Orvu began raiding inland for the first time, causing more death and destruction.

The Palavanus dynasty lost it's control over the other clans, and bitter, partisan brutal war raged over the land for a staggering three thousand years, before civilization literally collapsed. The cities were burnt out husks, over 35% of the population was dead, the rest were engaged in mindless warfare, and the damage to the environment was devastating.

The Palavanus clan, rather than cling to power, packed up as many of it's children and females as possible, as well as all the wealth and weapons they could, and in an amazing maneuver, managed to cross the oceans to the territory of the Orvu … where they surrendered, pleading for mercy and to serve the Orvu faithfully if they would grant the Palavanus revenge on their old subjects.

It is worth noting that the turian military conditioning of today was not in place (obviously) in these ages. Turians disliked retreating, but would do so if forced, and the weaker submitting to the stronger was instinctual. For the Orvu, barely civilized outcasts subsisting on raiding and hand-to-mouth survival, for the mightiest of the clans to throw themselves at their feet begging for mercy was too heady to ignore.

The Palavanus swiftly proved their worth – their doctors and philosophers aiding the Orvu in agriculture, teaching them how to shape iron instead of soft copper, providing math and better tools to improve their sea forces. While war raged on the main continent, the Palavanus became the scholarly class of the new Orvu culture, cunningly making themselves the center of power even while subjugating themselves before their 'betters'.

It was another three thousand years in the making, but the Orvu eventually invaded the northern continent, backed by their Palavanus allies. By this time the Orvu were very nearly as sophisticated as the Imperatorium had been at it's height, including segmented metal armor, the first primitive crossbows, and knights mounted on vakars themselves clad in armor. Facing them were the shattered savages of the former Imperatorium, reduced to a pitiable state.

The War of Revenge did not last long, barely a century, before all of the Tribes threw down their weapons and surrendered, brutally beaten. The leading family of the Orvu, the Corthus, then called the clan chiefs of his own clans together for tribal council on how to administer their new conquests.

This clan meeting included not only the chiefs and advisers, but many of the heirs, influential shamen, and the generals of the clan. It was at this meeting that the clan of Palavanus struck. They had waited long years for this chance, and they struck with stunning violence, warriors incapacitating the guards of the meeting with poisons. They swept in and massacred the unarmed elders and leaders in a bloodthirsty froth, and then laid false weapons and clan armors to indicate the violent Facinus clan, the last to surrender, had been behind the murders.

The Orvu were infuriated, but leaderless, and in their confusion turned to the Palavanus, who had always been leaders and guides, teachers. Humbly, with much sorrow, the Palavanus swore to avenge the fallen leaders and lead the Orvu on a hunt. In sixteen days, every single member of the Facinus was brutally murdered and burned, most of them captured alive and burned alive on pits of brimstone and fat. Their charred, smoking plating was then torn from the corpses and used to build a covering for the cairn for the fallen Orvu leaders.

In the wake of the attacks, the Palavanus smoothly slid back into power. The Orvu were their warrior-overseer class, keeping a wary eye over their new conquests, while the youngest of the Orvu nobles were sent back over the sea to 'administer the homeland', along with carefully chosen Palavanus brides and grooms for eligible daughters, of course. In less than a thousand years, the New Imperatorium had risen, and the ancient bone-crown of Ulvu – by now covered in silver leaf and embedded with diamonds and rubies – was set upon the brow of Murth Palavanus

I must admire such gall and manipulation, and it is a sad thing that the Palavanus went to great lengths to stamp out any such abilities or impulses in society. They took control of the wrecked empire, and rebuilt it slowly but firmly, but they were always careful to preach the Virtues of the Ancestors : Honor, Duty, Responsibility, and Honesty.

It wasn't until some ten thousand years ago, after long, long years of rebuilding shattered roads, cities, and adapting to changing environmental conditions, that turian inventors developed the first internal combustion engines.

Industrial Era : the Age of Struggle

The industrial age of Palaven was an exciting time, marked mostly by ever-increasing amounts of rebuilding of the once-proud society. Cities grew, as did transport networks, while primitive turbine driven ships crossed the seas in uncounted numbers. The production of refrigeration finally allowed true food stockpiles, while engine-driven plows and trucks allowed a force-terraforming of large tracts of land using nothing but brute labor.

The ash from the eruption of the volcano that buried the temple became valuable, enriching the soil along with mixes of feces and fresh dirt from the northlands. Thousands of tons of dirt were hauled across the seas to allow the southlands to grow their own food, while giant fish farms were constructed from endless lines of workers toiling away fifteen hours a day.

The slow rebuilding of the land was accompanied by an insidiously clever effort by the the Palavanus clan to rewrite not only history, but society. It was an effort every bit as ambitious as the shifts brought about after the asari Age of Queens, or the trials of Shego to unify the salarians, but the Palavanus were more careful and more focused in what they wanted.

Having already spent centuries both slowly reinforcing their domination over the now-dominant Orvu racial grouping, they began large scale intermixing of tribes, using land grants and spheres of influence to do so. The New Imperatorium was ruled by the Palavanus, but this time their method of distributed rule was more subtle and played to the very heart of turian tribalism.

Ruthlessly intermixing families and settlements, they began subdividing the entire race into what were first called ranks of citizenship. The highest families and the meanest urchins were theoretically on the same level. Service to the state was championed, in the guise of survival of all. The challenges of moving into an industrial age were complicated by the ecological damage inflicted on Palaven as well as the need to integrate all of it's people under one rule.

Pack-oriented and territorial by nature, the education and conditioning of the Palavanus had four broad goals. They began shifting a focus in young turians from valuing battle-based honor to personal responsibility. They shifted ideals of what it meant to be 'turian' from merely clans to all turian peoples, with an emphasis on clan level priorities as a way to ensure only the best and brightest would ever control more than that. They ruthlessly assassinated anyone who attempted to block or usurp their own methods of manipulation, while quietly pushing into power those who fell in line with their ideals. Most importantly, they used history as a weapon, the turian fixation on past actions and ancestors becoming a block to further resistance.

The Palavanus had no real influence over government except in three areas : as the scholarly masters of the Orvu, they ran all the schools and development centers. They started the first universities and controlled the 'proper' form of dialects and language. In every teaching and training they stressed that responsibility for one's own actions was the highest goal. Honor, while important, was secondary to acting in a manner from which one would never regret actions taken. Even honorable acts could have bad consequences, and machismo was replaced with a sullen disrespect for authority without demonstration of competence, usually by highlighting how badly things had gone once the Palavanus had been deposed.

Second, the Palavanus family controlled the pace of advancement. The principles of scientific method and any math higher than basic computation were only taught to the Palavanus themselves or their favored students, none of which came from 'noble' clans. They teased bits of knowledge out like candy to a wide array of lower clans, creating ever-shifting power blocks of quicksand-like stability, which kept the noble clans so occupied in trying to counter and control them they had no time to plot against the Palavanus.

Third, they controlled medical facilities and the public health. As the only real healers of note, they were quick to allow turian ignorance about germs and disease lie fallow, blaming things on spirits and ancestral disapproval. When Palavanus healers thus triumphed over diseases that the healers of other clans and tribes could not handle, they were seen in a light of holiness.

Finally and most tellingly, the Palavanus did nothing to encourage scholarship outside of mere mechanism and technical innovation. Even today, there isn't a single turian medical professor, astrophysicist, or genetics researcher who isn't a Palavanus or from one of their child clans. The turian people are not ignorant savages, but they do not appreciate science that much.

The clan also held tight reins over the economy and mercantile areas during the industrial eras. Land-poor, they leveraged their technology and knowledge into many deals and alliances, but never acted as the 'front-runners' They hoarded cash and acted as bankers and loaners of last resort, slowly accumulating properties but never enough to raise the ire or worry of other clans.

It took the turian people a good five thousand years to slowly move through the industrial revolutions and into what most cultures consider 'post-Industrial'. This is not due to turians being stupid, it is due to the Palavanus slowing progress to completely rewrite turian society. When the industrial era started, based on archeological evidence, there were less than fifty million turians on the planet. Cultures were tribal, based on personal strength and combat prowess. Intellect was seen as secondary to savagery and racial tensions were high. Ancestor worship was more about ways to glorify the clan than a method of living life, and honor usually meant following rules in battle.

At the end of the revolution, the entire Imperatorium was a single, giant army. Clans entered younglings into tournaments to join various military units, and the efficiency of these units determined land control, contracts, even distributions of technology. Slowly culture moved away from personal honor as a yardstick to personal honor as restraint.

The virtues practiced over and over for thousands of years became more than rote repetition. Turians, in many ways, brainwashed themselves. The Palavanus removed the word for 'retreat' from the language, and self-preservation became a watchword of not just cowards, but those who put their lives as more important than others.

I cannot sum up how radically the turian people changed in this time, because the historical records are nothing but a propaganda laden mess and much of this is conjectural, but I feel it is as correct as can be. Inter-clan conflict became inter-clan competition, with driving forces of being the best and proving one's worth to superiors and peers outstripping combat achievements. What humans would call ethics is closer to the turian concept of honor, what you call morals their ancestral religion.

Post-Industrial : the Burning

The post-Industrial age was kicked off almost four thousand years ago, by the invention of atomics as a method for massive terraforming. By this time, the Imperatorium was beginning to fragment, due to population issues and increasing amounts of tension between clans over who controlled what.

Rather than attempt to stay atop the mess, the Palavanus family declared that clan Primarchs would each form Councils to elect national Primarchs, who would in turn select a Primarch to govern all of Palaven. The Imperatorium was allowed to decay as the Palavanus slowly turned over the reins of government to various powerful clans like the Vakarian and Arterius families.

I suspect they were snickering into their sleeves the whole time. By this point the Imperatorium had become little more than the coordination of a massive army, used mostly to occupy and suppress disorder among it's own people. The Palavanus retained control of medical fields, science, and education, and let everything else go to those who thought they would gain control from it.

The new government did not last long – several violent civil wars wracked the span of time prior to spaceflight. After centuries of this sort of squabbling, smaller clans began pressuring larger ones to reign in the violence, since it was affecting their economics and ways of life.

Sectarian violence of this nature led to many 'nations' adopting certain types of war paint, each one unique from the rest. Rather than go to full war, war games were held to determine the outcomes of events, and more and more effort was put forth in taming Palaven's environment and tapping her natural resources than battling one another.

Then quite suddenly, it fell apart. No turian historian agrees on who or what caused it, but strong limited nuclear war erupted twenty nine hundred years ago, killing millions. Some speculate it was terrorists, or even embittered cultists who still clung to the Valluvian legends. Others darkly hint the Palavanus were behind it, as at this time turian historians began peeling back the layers of distortion and began to realize how badly all of turian society had been played.

What mattered is that it nearly destroyed the species, and led to all-out war between the clans that very nearly undid all their hard work at rebuilding. It was only by the greatest efforts of several clans and more importantly the reluctance of smaller clans to sacrifice themselves to support the screaming war demands of larger ones that the entire world didn't go up in flames.

With so much ecological damage done, especially to areas rich in natural resources, and a lack of focus on economics, strong depressions wracked the global economy. Wars quickly depleted populations and lead to mass exodus and collapse of civil authority.

It was during this time that tribal Primarchs finally embraced their role. Working hard to dissuade turians from fighting one another, many clans deliberately merged together, forming alliances of blood and marriage. The earlier militarization of society into a military became terrifyingly complete, as only military discipline could ensure an end to violence. Forced by the sudden and catastrophic shift for survival and rebuilding, in less than fifty years the larger clans agreed to ceasefires and to reign in violence.

The Palavanus, keen-eyed planners to the last, quickly realized the planet's resources were now either too depleted or too radiated to be of any real use in a long term rebuilding. They no longer had thousands of years to massage the pride of the clans and work on long-term projects, while slowly managing populations.

The Palavanus first finally began teaching the true methods of science to others not in the clan during this time, focusing mostly on engineering and agriculture. Massive cadres of young turians were drilled in camps twenty hours a day on rigid military protocol and riot suppression. Outbreaks of violence, rather than being encouraged as honor displays, were savagely suppressed, civilians and warriors alike slain to dissuade further uprisings.

The Primarch system became embedded into society, with military ranks and civilian classes blurring together in the pressure of the rebuilding. Roughly twenty six hundred years ago, the fifteen strongest Primarchs – some representing one clan, others hundreds – met in Tyrudo Castle to create a single, unified plan to bring together the turian people.

Briefed by Palavanus advisers and scientists, who projected complete societal collapse and resource exhaustion within five hundred years, the Primarchs crafted a very hasty but stable blueprint for rulership. They called it the Hierarchy, a group of fifteen Primarchs who voted on a Supreme Primarch and commander in chief. Each of the fifteen would be elected by lower Primarchs, and in turn Primarchs lower than they, all the way down to a single clan level, who would be chosen by super-majority voting or in the case of several ties, ritual unarmed combat.

Breakaway independence groups were brought into line by way of violence so sickening even turian historians shy away from describing it. A full forty percent of the turian population was killed in a century, before the rest fell in line.

The horrors such an act imprinted on the turian soul can never be washed away, I suspect. Your own Days of Iron were a nightmarish trial for your people, but the turians went further than even the most insane ideals of Ardiente. Anyone who disagreed – anyone who refused to bow to the Hierarchy – was killed. Their families were killed, their clansmen were killed. Their lands were seized and redistributed.

It has been almost twenty five hundred years since the Burning occurred, and the turian people have not forgotten.

The only thing accomplished of positive note by this fascist unification was the pursuit of spaceflight, as the Palavanus determined mining the system's asteroid belts or other planets was the only way to support the economy. The spaceflight program was a crash effort by what even humans would call second-rate scientists, but they had the resources and backing of the entire planet, and succeeded in short order.

Colonial and Early FTL era : The Unification Wars

Early turian spacefaring years were boring. Colonies were established and the focus was on raw materials and growth to rebuild Palaven yet again. Lives on these colonies were very hard, and every act of rebellion cruelly stamped out.

Palaven's mass relay was an enigma and a chilling realization for the Turians – they came to understand they were not alone in the universe. It militarized their culture even more, the sheer size and power of it having some subconscious effect on the turian mind to build bigger, stronger and more militant ships. By the time they discovered FTL, some two thousand years ago, they had a fleet nearly as strong in size if not technology as humanity does today.

Their FTL wanderings were done in overwhelming, crushing force. They would not open a relay until they had a complete war fleet prepared, and refused to colonize except with full resources. They came across two other sentient races in their expansion. The first of these, the arcaeas, engaged in combat with them and were literally obliterated. Turian warships crushed their fleets and rained asteroid strikes down on their homeworld until not even algae-analogues survived. They strip mined the planet brutally, deliberately crushing cultural relics and left the world a burning, plundered wreck , a stark warning to others.

They discovered the volus about fifteen hundred years ago, as the volus were making their very first tentative explorations of the relays. The meeting was surprisingly peaceful – in return for sharing the details of how to use the mass relays with the turians, and providing new markets, the volus would be protected by the turian military.

The vast injection of volus economic energy into the flagging turian economy was like lightning. Volus clucked sadly at turian logistics and fiscal policies, correcting millennia of neglect or lack of understanding. They revolutionized turian banking, and brought real fluidity to both import and export markets. They were, of course, making a killing off the naïve turians, but the sad reality was that even ripping the turians off wasn't as bad as letting the turians run their own economy.

A mere fifty years of volus management had raised the standard of living for most turians by more than thirtyfold, and allowed massive amounts of power to come into the hands of smaller clan leaders. The volus, cooperative and intensely driven by competition, began breaking the Hierarchy into markets, and using those markets to compete with one another, driving pricing down and working to expand supply limits.

The volus, sadly, didn't understand turian psychology. As smaller clans gained greater and greater economic independence, their arrogance grew. They were not foolish enough to challenge the supremacy of the Hierarchy, not after the examples already set by true rebels. Yet they did challenge the right of the method by which the Primarch was elected.

The more distant colonies, made of turians who'd never even seen Palaven, grew resentful as the wealth they mined and built flew to rebuild a world they'd never see, leaving their own underdeveloped. Each group of clans fought among themselves economically to achieve some form of dominance, hoping that it would give them enough political clout to elect more Primarchs and have more say in what the focus of the Hierarchy was as a whole.

When the volus began encouraging the clans to not put up with 'ruinous taxes' and demand representation on a colony level, the tides of the abyss broke loose.

Until that point, colony affairs were managed by the clans. Unfortunately, with the advent of more advanced economics, many clans had far flung holdings under their banner they had no real ties to. Facial paint for each colony became intricate and unique, but few had any unity to the clans that were nominally their rulers. In some cases they felt more loyalty to clans on their own world, in others they simply resented being pushed around.

Eventually tempers flared and shooting started. At first, the Hierarchy mobilized it's fleets, but they hesitated. The colonies were not rebelling against the Hierarchy, but were fighting amongst themselves, battling to reduce each others importance and attempt to force those weaker to align with their goals.

The so-called Unification Wars dragged on for decades, the Hierarchy wisely staying above the fray, nationalizing any colonies or groups they became too weak. When it finally burned itself out, the Hierarchy quietly arrested a few people, and simply let the scars fade over time. The result of the wars was the final destruction of the clan as a true political unit. The Hierarchy, to avoid such flare ups in the future, divided the command structure of the military and governance. Everyone had a vote, the power of their vote going towards electing local Primarchs, who in turn elected regionals, and in turn colonial, and in turn cluster, and in turn sector, Primarchs. The sector primarchs, along with a rotating selection of four or five Primarchs from the biggest clans, picked the High Primarch.

With the power of the clans broken, the military took on every increasing roles in turian everyday life and organization. Expanding their fleets to new highs and retrofitting their ships with the best weapons, they were about to engage in a long series of exploration flights when they were found by the salarians.

Modern Era : the Krogan Rebellions and Recent History

It was a serendipitous meeting. The turians were shocked by the understanding that they faced two other races of supreme power, the asari and salarians. From the historical records I've been able to obtain, the turians were of two minds about the situation. Facing two fleets that, combined, outnumbered their own by a fair margin, it was the first time they were not in a dominant position of power. At the same time, after the initial negotiations were over, it was clear that, at least in theory, the turians held all the cards.

For the turian discovery came at the raging height of the Krogan Rebellions. While the asari were able to match the krogan on the ground in battle and rout them in space, the rate of krogan birth and the resilience of krogan infantry meant it would take centuries to suppress the rebellion. As Minsta was correct in pointing out, my people are poor at attrition warfare of direct conflict, and the salarians are even worse. No krogan would ever match an asari warrior, much less a trained commando or war matriarch – but barely a tenth of a percent of asari fit such a description, while nearly eighty percent of krogan were war-capable. Every loss of asari life sapped more and more will to fight from the forces of the asari, and salarians had suffered sickening casualties.

Worse, while salarian intelligence had managed to stymie several krogan advances and throw much of their space program into ruins, the Krogan Empire wasn't united behind their leaders. As the war ground on, however, more and more krogan got involved. STG planning suggested that only a core of clans was truly involved in the rebellions, and that the longer it dragged on, the more likely more clans would join.

Thus, the discovery of the turian people was something of a masterstroke for asari explorers. The turians had an army several times the size of the asari, excellently trained and hardened for violence of the most extreme sort. More resistant to hard environments than asari, the size of their fleet and their warrior ethic made them superior at the sort of attrition warfare the krogan excelled at.

The turians didn't trust the situation. They knew full well they were being asked to go to war against a species even more violent than their own, and diaries and news snippets from the time show the turians were surprisingly unfooled by smooth asari diplomacy. They knew this was manipulation of the highest order. And yet, they were seduced by the incentives thrown at their door. In return for aiding the two races with their war upon the krogan, the turians would be given a voice at the table. They would be the sword of the Citadel. Their fleets would be given priority, their client race given ambassadorial rights, their economy would find new markets. Most importantly, salarian and asari assets would assist in suppressing colonial revolts and unease in the turian territories, insuring the stability of the Hierarchy.

What sealed the deal, however, was the appeal of the asari diplomats to the turian Primarchs. They openly admitted that while strong, defeating the krogan conventionally was beyond them. It was something only the Hierarchy could do. The asari were the diplomats and councilors, the salarians the intelligence arm and inventors. That meant there was a place in the galactic ruling scheme for protectors, for warriors, and guardians. The Krogan were unfit for that, because they lacked honor.

This clever approach won over the Primarchs, not only because it benefited the Hierarchy but because it fitted very well with turian perceptions. Armed with a fleet larger than any other, veterans of the Unification Wars, they were the perfect foil for the Krogan.

The krogan rebellions from that point on were bloody and violent, the krogan destroying colonies in their rage and fury, but the turians were able (with considerable losses) to fight them to a standstill long enough for the genophage to work. They were not impressed by the krogan's bloodthirsty savagery, and pushed for the hardest sanctions against their defeated foe. When the krogan surrendered, the turians took the lead on establishing the CDEM overseeing Tuchanka, and disarming the strongest of the clans.

The aftermath of the rebellions ended up a trying time for the Hierarchy. Their economy was heavily stressed by the Unification Wars, and they had begun to subtly blame the volus for the chaos of that time. At the same time, outbreaks of violence in the aftermath of the rebellions ended up costing more money.

Rather than listen to the volus suggestions of fiscal caution, the Hierarchy spent wildly, expanding their fleet rapidly, building up bases across a wide expanse of space, and rapidly colonizing many new world that no one had bothered with up until now due to their dextro-compatible nature. The stress of the costs of colonization and fleet expansion, combined with lackluster investments in sustainable resources, led to a hard fiscal crunch about three hundred years after the Rebellions.

With so many far-flung colonies, all of which were somewhat restless and requiring turian garrisons, not to mention the military requirements of the Citadel Defense Forces, turian military spending had skyrocketed. Colonization costs, resettlement costs, and the ongoing expense of repairing the damage to Palaven added to this. The weak economy and money tightness increased the level of indebtedness the turians had to the volus, who cleverly sold the debts to the asari in return for technological assistance and diplomatic favors.

It wasn't long before the Hierarchy found itself mired in debt to their Citadel partners, who began building businesses and investment networks inside turian space itself. Inept merchants at the best of times, turian economic prowess had until now been bolstered by their volus clients. But the volus (agitated by asari, as you have already guessed) were feeling slighted by the fact that they did not get a Council seat like the turians did. As a result, volus assistance in mitigating the economic crisis was limited.

The result was that the turian government had to agree to much of what the Citadel Council put upon them without recourse. They had a stupendously powerful navy, but it was not the match of the asari fleet nor as advanced as the salarian fleet. They had a supremely powerful army, that was scattered to the four corners of the galaxy, maintaining peace and preventing both turian and krogan restlessness. They had a large economic market, but this was a dumping ground for sharp asari and salarian business interests.

I do not believe the turians are blind to how this has occurred, and they have taken steps to attempt to rectify it. However, the Palavanus clan remains the only group of turians to display any true political cunning on the level required, and they appear fine with the way things are going. I suspect that they will let things continue until they are untenable for the Hierarchy and use the results to attempt to lever themselves back into power.

I am sure there is more history to be found, but researching it is fraught with danger. As I have said, some portions of history are dangerous to poke too far into because of the manipulations of the Palavanus, and as a rule it appears historical analysis is distrusted, because it is too often used to stir up colonial or tribal unrest. The summary I have presented gives you enough points of reference to glean the key points of how their culture is shaped by history.

Turians are violent, tribal, driven by emotion, and guileless, except for a handful. Yet they have forced themselves into a police state of collectivist focus and strict self-discipline. They disdain diplomacy in favor of the sword, yet their government exists primarily because they grew sick of self-slaughter in the end. Pel's 'gut feeling' about turians being more aware of how they are being manipulated is certainly correct, but the complexity of the issues and the realization that turians literally can't get themselves out of the shallows they have stranded themselves in only makes them more dangerous.

Your Cerberus Manifesto is correct on one point. If the turians are willing to commit near genocide upon humanity merely to bolster their economy, it does not bear thinking on what they will do should matters become so dire that the Hierarchy falls.
Chapter 27: Chapter 27 : Turian Psychology

A/N: Moving right along. :D

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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Beloved Jack, wise Richard, and valiant Rachel,

Turian psychology, as alluded to by Pel, is a touch ... eccentric. It does not help that the turian language has nine hundred words for 'battle' or 'war' and a grand total of two covering psychological issues.

Pel should probably be employed to review my insight into turians psychology, if for no other reason than I find myself wonder what sort of colorful invective he would apply to such a topic.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Terrorist and patriot are points of view. Take action, and ignore what perceptions others have.

Priorities

Once again, I will use the laughable 'Maslow hierarchy of needs' that Minsta seems to place so much faith in. While it is not an exact fit for turian minds, the very derangement of the familiar model will help acclimate you to exactly why turians are different than humans, salarians, or asari.

To recoup : there are five pieces of this 'needs' pyramid. Personal needs, such as food, shelter, and water. Security, in the sense of personal safety and acceptance into a larger community. Self-esteem, usually by way of mates, acceptance into social groups, and recognizance by others. Achievement, usually in the form of employment, material wealth and fame. And finally, actualization, or the creation of lasting legacies – artwork, foundations, or something as simple as raising a family.

The human model is personal needs, security, self-esteem, actualization, and achievement. The salarian is personal needs, achievement, self-esteem, security, and actualization. If I am to shoehorn my own people into this excuse of a diagram, I suppose the asari model would be self-esteem, personal needs, actualization, security, and achievement.

The turian model, I'm afraid, is more skewed. The highest priority, even above personal survival, hunger, or mating urges, is ultimately security. Turians have a very powerful, inbuilt paranoia that is a holdover from their evolutionary origins as scattered carrion-scavengers and opportunistic hunters. They hunted as packs, and the survival of individual members was less important than the survival of the pack.

Minsta (and Pel, who should know better) attribute this to collectivism and shared altruism, but it has exactly nothing to do with that. Turians are so coldly pragmatic that they butchered any part of their population that couldn't submit – there is nothing altruistic in that. Turian survival instincts subordinate individuals to groups because if the group does well then all individuals within it are more likely to survive.

It makes turians more concerned with their day to day security and ability to survive rather than worrying about a place to stay, food to eat, or even a job. Instinctively, they know if that one of them falls in that manner, their pack will pick them back up. What they fear is the danger away from the pack, the danger of the dark night, or the moment before the prey is taken down.

Humans (and I admit, some asari and salarians) will sell each other out over profits or sexual acts or hatreds. Turians will not, because weakening the pack is a threat to their OWN lives. Even if they hate another turian, to act against him in that manner is likely to make his own clanmates (or tribe, or mercenary band, or whathaveyou) question his loyalties.

Above security does come personal needs. They are still a culture driven by a hunting instinct, and it shows in everything they do. Their walk, their weapons, their architecture – everything turian is built around the ability to defend and withstand hostility. Once they feel secure, only then do they set about worrying about increasing their own personal needs.

Oddly enough, achievement comes next. Turians pride themselves on only gaining rank or being rewarded for actual ability. Not potential, not because of influences or parents, not because of a name. Only cold, hard deeds count as something that matters. As the turian phrase goes "one does not have to guess if you are a fool or wise man if they can behold your actions".

The concepts of actualization – of being able to establishing lifelong goals that endure beyond your lifetime – are rare for most turians. Self-esteem is even rarer, in that turians who indulge such acts are only those who are not only very highly placed in the Hierarchy but who can honestly say that their loss or death would be a negative influence to the entire turian nation.

Humans, I believe, are driven by these 'needs', as Maslow describes them, like arrows. Achieving basic survival needs and necessities gives one confidence to move on to feeling secure, driving a sense of entitlement and progress that leads to greater self-esteem, prodding one into going after achievements, which in turn begin to open a human's eyes to things beyond themselves. Asari are the obverse and salarians the inverse of this process – asari are selfish individually but selfless when it comes to the greater good, while salarians are selfless individually but horribly .. misguided beyond their own kind.

Turians break this pattern in that they disdain the individual unless and until he or she aligns with the group. I cannot stress enough that this is in no way shape or form anything like asari unity of siari or salarian family bonds. It is not. Even the most humble, poorest and weakest salarian of a no-account yindo who knows he is of no use to his family would not dream of killing himself to ensure their prosperity. A salarian would drive themselves to find a use for whatever skills they have.

Likewise, no asari, unless criminally insane, would ever countenance destroying a portion of the race to ensure the stability of the others. Keep this in mind – turians do not – perhaps cannot – truly grasp the concept of individuality.

Turians as individuals

Unlike salarians, turians are quite psychological complex on an individual level. They have goals and dreams,likes and dislikes, and laugh and cry as much as any asari (or human) would. There are two big differences in looking at the way the average turian views their world, however.

First, when we speak of individual turian drives, we speak mostly of exactly how well a given turian fits into his or her culture. A turian doesn't give much thought, on a day-to-day basis, of how he is a benefit to his people. He merely works as hard as he can and gives as close to one-hundred percent effort in everything he does.

Turians do not get 'depressed' in the same way that humans or asari do. They can get very melancholy, especially after harsh failures, betrayals, or the loss of loved ones, but they do not simply give up on life because it is painful. The more painful life becomes, the more driven and harder a turian pushes themselves to either find some way to bring things back to the way they should be or to ensure whatever caused their emotional upset is dealt with.

Second, turians absolutely hate to do something again that they should have handled the first time. A turian in a fight will not stop with a mere punch, they see nothing wrong with crippling someone as an object lesson. Likewise, turians engaged in any form of competitive activity hate to lose, unless it becomes clear that they were outmatched in the first place. A key and driving component to almost very turian psychology is this push for excellence, for perfection. They are harder on themselves than any other critic could ever be.

Turian Clan, Tribe, and Colony Psychology

In the wake of the Burning and the scattering of turians across space, the concept of 'clan' has been severely weakened, and 'tribe' almost destroyed. Many turians identify now by colonial cluster – that is, the core colony that is their birthworld, or a colony that oversees their birthworld colony. There are dozens of clusters in the Hierarchy, each with their own distinctive facepaint.

Turians from the homeworld have facial markings tied to the clans and tribes of yesteryear. The Arterius clan prefers subtle black markings, the Digeris clan bold red slashes, the Vakarian cold blue geometric stripes. Subtle variations in these indicate core tribal or fringe tribal placements.

Turian outcasts, and on many occasions Primarchs who do not wish to stir up conflicting colonial hatreds, go without such markings, making them 'barefaced'. Many turians from the colonies dislike barefaced turians, because the message is either they are outcasts or too ashamed of their colony to speak the truth. The only 'popular' turian who widely goes barefaced is Saren, because of his importance in turian society and his wish not to be some focus of dissent just by marking his face.

The myriad and dizzying organization of clan, tribe, cluster, and other organizations isn't psychologically important beyond the fact that turians have instinctual needs to belong to small units that they can identify with and contrast to, both to assure themselves they are in sync with their close relations and to act as a guide and reinforcement for behaviors.

Male Turian Psychology

Turian males tend to either be bombastic and bullying, full of brash pride and sneering superiority, or subtle, introspective types given to sarcasm and hard talk. Violence is a balm for them, as they are even more inept at opening up to others and explaining their feelings and frustrations than human males are.

Male turians see themselves as the 'doers' of society, and females as the 'thinkers'. They are exceedingly proud, willing only to back down from a conflict if they truly feel over-matched or if such arrogance is likely to hurt their clan or friends. They expend a great deal of psychological and emotional capital on pretending to be undamaged by trauma and pain, usually only revealing such when they are unable to cope any longer.

Turian males seem driven to compete with one another, be that over job performance, excellence at a task, mates, or ritual combat. You may see a turian who is not as good as someone else at a task, but you will never find one who is happy about that, or humble about their skills.

The only thing turian males tend to like more than fighting is bragging to turian females (or to be more honest, any kind of female.) I hate to sound so … prejudiced. Although, upon reflection of my current allegiances, I have no idea why I wish to avoid that. Regardless, turian males appear to place vast importance on presentation not only of competence and ability but of exaggerated skill when it comes to interactions with female turians.

Female Turian Psychology

Female turians are somewhat stranger than male turians. The male is certainly larger and stronger than the female, but the female has more lethal claws, a stronger bite, and typically much better reflexes. As such, it was not unusual for females to take scouting and assassination duties in ancient times.

There is almost no sexual dimorphism between males and females on a physical level aside from sex organs and less head plating. Psychologically, however, they are very different. Turian females, to put it bluntly, are unhappy unless they are pregnant. They have a sex drive many times stronger than turian males and most of them are roughly on par with asari maidens in sexual activity when young.

Praises to siari that Minsta isn't here to sneer. There are both biological and psychological imperatives for why turian females are this way, but the primary reason is that pregnancy is a casual thing. Given the clan-family based environments most turians grow up in, mixed with all turian children being raised more by the state and the military schools than their parents, the main thing turian females look for in a mate is the ability to reliably impregnate them. I will cover this in more detail in the physiology section.

Aside from this, turian females are what I believe humans would call 'catty'. They are often snide and dismissive, focused intently on physical attractiveness, physical activity, and hard nosed pragmatism. Once married they tend to be slightly abusive to their mates, often dominating them.

Turian females are more given to very deep thinking than emotional internalization, and indeed are often accused of melodrama and emotional instability. They are seen as figures of strength and mental endurance by males, and there is very little gender discrimination except in the areas of science.

Honor

The definition of turian honor is, I must stress, not a cultural concept.

I believe that the issues most races have with comprehending the turian mindset stems from this simple, if understandable, misconception.

Only humans, turians, and salarians have an honor-concept that I am familiar with, and the salarian honor-concept is anarchic and typically non-applicable any more. Batarians see honor as laughable, volus have no use for it since it lacks profit, drell would laugh themselves silly over it, and the asari are more concerned with why something is done rather than it's justification.

That being said, human honor is cultural, and turian honor is psychological. This is key. Human cultures have many honor concepts, from your Japanese Bushido to what I have been calmly explained to as 'fair play'. There is a surprising lack of consistency between these honor concepts, some of them even diametrically opposed.

Honor for humans is a framework for justification. It is essentially an ethical backdrop with additional social and cultural reward-norms. To use the example that is the most extreme in human history, a samurai of the Bushido honor code would not commit ritual suicide for an infraction of said code because he believed he needed to die – but because the honor code called for him to do so. A more honorable man might do so to protect his family, one of weaker will would do so because to not follow through would shame him to the point that life itself was not a possibility anyway.

But there is not a single human culture where honor codes were absolutes.

Turian honor is psychological in it's basis, in that even across the widely differing cultures of the Palavu and Orvu and Tyvu, the requirements were very nearly identical.

The turian honor code only has three real components. The first is discipline – a turian who cannot control himself is a threat to the tribe. The second is responsibility – a turian who will not take ownership of his actions is forcing others to suffer for his mistakes. The final one is honesty. A turian who lies is placing his benefit above the rights of others.

Turians who violate any of these appear to break some psychological tripwire, much like a human sociopath. I remain unsure if these honor concepts were evolutions of pack-hunting survival instincts or developed early in the formation of sentient thought processes, but the truly curious thing is that they are innate.

That is, a turian who is raised without any influence from turian culture or society, and with no access to turian history or knowledge, will have extremely strong tendencies towards self-discipline, honesty, and responsibility. This is why I make the claim their honor concept is psychological.

This is, I believe, also why the Palavanus are the only clan who engages in acts that bend this honor code. They may be the equivalent of human sociopaths, a genetic flaw passed down on a dominant gene. But it is curious that, in a universe where treachery and vile betrayal often seem to trump goodness, that only one small grouping of turians acts that way, and the rest continue to act with honor even at the cost to themselves.

That is not to say there are not cultural aspects of honor in turian culture – there are many. But the underpinnings of the code are firmly psychological in nature.

Ethics and Morality

Turian ethics and morality are strange only if one demands looking at them through non-turian lenses. Their disregard for civilian life, their brutal use of the most effective strategy regardless of cost, their near-fanatical refusal to retreat, their culture-wide military that brutally suppresses any resistance – these things all sound, on the casual glance upon the tides,horrible.

Yet examined through the turian lens of both history and psychology, it is actually very understandable. Turians pride themselves on economy of effort. Rather than make a substandard effort which must be repeated at a later date, they would rather provide a supreme effort once and be able to move on. As such, their morals and ethics are at a sharp angle to asari and human views, which are more scaled towards the person than the group.

Turians, as I have said before, do not prize individuality. They see nothing good about it except the hand of chaos and confusion, and thus every ethical framework about free will and the sanctity of life simply doesn't mean anything to them. Turians don't believe in the importance of the lives of individuals and they never will, because to the turian it is the group, the hunting pack, that matters.

Turians see alien morals as shockingly weak and forgiving of what would, in a turian, be an unbelievable lapse in judgment and responsibility. When asari Justicars first gave an explanation of why they accorded the crimes of the mother down to the daughter, the turians were quick to grasp that and agree. When salarian STG units were able to take out a cell of batarian terrorists only with heavy turian civilian casualties, they did not expect the survivors to praise their actions.

Dismiss your own expectations of morality when dealing with turians. You cannot and should not try to conflate the two. They are not even comparing, to borrow a human phrase, apples and oranges, but rather apples and a hunk of raw meat. One can be appreciated and eaten as is, the other requires preparation and cooking before it can be consumed.

Turian morals are inflexible and do not allow for 'lapses in judgment'. A turian who gets too inebriated to drive and kills a bystander while driving drunk is executed for premeditated murder with malice, because they chose to go drinking in the first place and had no discipline, nor even enough personal honesty to tell themselves that driving while intoxicated was a bad idea. The turian penal code only has imprisonment terms for rebellion against the Hierarchy, in most other aspects it is at least as stiff as the asari Justicar code – because most crimes are placing the individual above the pack, and turians cannot – on any possible level – ever accept that.

Turian Outcasts

Some turians have problems in fitting into turian culture. They resist sublimating their impulses for honesty to discipline, and have trouble shifting what they see as their responsibility onto the pack. I suspect these outcasts have some influences similar to what makes the Palavanus different from most turians.

The result is what are called outcasts. Turians who refuse to follow the direction of the pack, instead attempting to define their own packs and what is and is not 'responsible actions'. I hesitate to say that most of these turians end up either as hard near-criminal vigilantes or ruthless mercenaries, but that is usually the case.

Unwilling or unable to accept orders from superiors who cannot meet their own criteria, most outcasts drift away from turian society. Many end up working for the various bands of hastatim (turian vigilante groups) that prowl through the edges of turian space, or on separatist colonies that refuse to answer to the Hierarchy.

I'm afraid the cliché of the hardened turian outcast and his lonely, oversexed asari outcast lover has become a common theme in haptic programming over the past four or five hundred years, but there is a certain truth to it. When it comes to defending their new packs, turian outcasts are even more fanatic than regular turians, and no one clings as hard as an asari shorn from siari.

Sexuality, Romance, and Binding

Turians are rather casual when it comes to sexual activity, less so when it comes to romance. Turians will experiment with multiple mates, often quite frequently, before settling down to one that they seem to connect to best.

Until a turian finds a mate that they feel a pull to, they see sex and pregnancy as mere actions. They are less free about it than asari are, to be sure, but they have no sexual taboos and guilt-factors like humans do. Sexual release is seen as healthy and appropriate, especially after combat, and most turian units are mixed-gender to encourage this.

Once two turians begin to feel an emotional bond, however, they stop any and all sexual activity except with one another. They will mate several times before the male bites the female, usually one one of several nervous branch points to one side of the neck, breaking the plating and leaving a distinctive scarring pattern. This is known as the binding, and it is a way for males to mark females. As a result of this bite, the female releases several sets of pheromones that tend to 'lock' the male turian into sexual receptivity only to that female.

Turians can be very violent about many things, but absolutely nothing will infuriate a turian more than a threat to his or her mate. There are many, many stories about turians shrugging off absolutely lethal wounds to literally tear apart threats to their mates.

Turians do not (and there is no history of) have any form of homosexual responses with other turians. Turians who decide to experiment sexually with other races, on the other hand, show a marked disinterest in the stated sex of the other partner. Turians are just as defensive of non-turian mates as they are mates of their own species.

Turian romance is, I find, rather sweet, perhaps the only softness in this hard, frightening race. They will work hard to cheer one another up, encourage each others efforts, and cover any failures or lapses in behavior. Turians do not have a concept of 'widows', and many turians will slowly wither and die of emotional distress if their mate is killed. (This does not happen if the mate is non-turian all the time, many instead go somewhat insane with rage or sorrow).

Turian viewpoints on aliens

The average turian sees all aliens through the lens of 'other'. For the most part, only turian outcasts can move beyond that sort of thinking, but outcasts are hardly an iconoclastic group that I can easily define viewpoints on.

The average turian sees the asari as manipulative warriors. They have always respected our combat power, the strength of our fleet, and our longevity. They are respectful, if wary, and tend toward formality when it comes to interactions. They are better than most races as grasping siari and what true oneness means, even if they feel we are a touch too forgiving. Turians are (perhaps unsurprisingly) fans of the Justicar Order and every few decades a particularly hard-ass turian will come to Thessia to join as a supplicant.

The turians both admire and dislike the salarians. They have vast admiration for salarian ruthlessness when it comes to dealing with a problem, and they admire the deft salarian touch of not coddling those who threaten the species. On the other hand, they feel intelligence gathering and wet work are the weakest responses to a problem, pointing to the fact that asari and salarian reliance on such required them to be saved twice, against the rachni and then the krogan. They also find salarian ethics about as repugnant as I do. While turians have no more regard for the individual than salarians do in some ways, they also know every turian is a part of the pack, and should not be discarded simply for mere advantage.

Turians hate batarians with a passion only humans surpass. Literally every single component of the two races clashes, and batarian arrogance only inflames the turian anger. It is only by very strong efforts by the asari and salarian governments that the turians have no committed genocide upon the batarians, and there is every hint that all it would take is one action that could be traced back to the government of Khar'Shan for the turians to simply invade, regardless of consequences.

Turians are wary around the hanar and their drell allies. They respect the latter a great deal, but are too confused by the former to have many firm opinions. On the other hand, the fact that the drell serve the hanar willingly and without rancor has convinced some turians the hanar are worth at least tolerating.

Turians dislike humanity for reasons I believe Minsta has already covered. Humans are enough like turians that the differences irritate them even more. The turians have not forgotten that humanity made them look sloppy and incompetent, before forcing them to kowtow to the asari. However, human efforts at repairing the breach seriously confused the turians – enough so that at least some turians are willing to concede that, maybe, a less hostile attitude should be used.

Turians and volus get along well on individual levels, but many turians feel superior to their client race, because of the lack of volus military might and combat prowess. Turians have no real contact with the elcor.

Turians have a complicated relationship with quarians, the other dextro-compatible race. They tend to dislike them because of the quarian meddling with AI and rejection of Citadel rules lead to the downfall of the race, and because quarians refuse to submit. On the other hand, quarian ingenuity, their communal unity, and help with finding new colony worlds for the Hierarchy have endeared them to some. The popularity of the turian-quarian soap opera "Fleet and Flotilla" should enlighten you as to the attitudes of far too many adventuresome young turians and quarians.

Turians and krogan do not get along, much like certain chemicals. Both races respect each others ability to fight, and that's where anything mutually good stops. Turians see krogan as pitiful, self-destructive animals, unable to achieve discipline, too stupid to find a sense of responsibility that has lead to the downfall of the race, and most infuriating to turian sensibilities, all too willing to fight dirty. The turians have not forgotten the colonies destroyed by asteroids during the Krogan Rebellions.

Turian Mental Illnesses and Disorders

Turians suffer from conditions similar to Parkinson's disease when they become very old, and a good thirty percent of the population will develop mild functional paranoid by the time they are adults. The prevalence of turian defense shops and the old adage that every turian has two guns is a result of this slight quirk.

CERBERUS RETRANSMIT

CODE DAEDALUS-FOUR-SIX-SIX

Addendum: Pel, this is Trelani's report on the turians. The Illusive Man requires your feedback. Normally I would prefer you to download it from the highspeed link, but according to your flunkies you are busy with call girls. I'd appreciate it if in the future you limited your absences - and general incompetence - to when you are not in the service of Cerberus.

- The Shadow Hand

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MARS-ZERO-FIVE-EIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

LIMIT TRANSMISSION: ILLUSIVE MAN

Pel here. Transmission came through clean.

I'd copy Oddjob and General Queen Bitch, but I don't feel like listening to their shitfaced crying. I'm telling you, Boss, one day that cyberfreak is going to get mouthy with me one too many times and I'm going to feed him a goddamned spiked EMP discharge.

Speaking of EMP spikes, heard about Kai Leng and his little Black Knight routine with that asari spectre. Serves his retarded ass right. Send pictures, I gotta see this shit.

Anyway. Reading now.

Huh. Trelly, gotta admit, is a hell of a lady. Well, lady squid. Whatever.

Breaking down the spikes like that... I'd say she's spot on about most of that stuff. I ain't much for reading a pile of High Geekese,but most of this seems straightforward.

Read the history shit too - shocking, they're goddamned hardasses and always have been. Still, these slimy Palavenus types worry me, bossman - sure is a lot of smoke,mirrors and bullshit with all of these aliens, and none of them are what they claim to be.

Back to the psych, I'd add one thing.

Combat.

In a fight, spikes don't give up. I don't just mean they don't retreat. I mean there's no way they decide they're going to lose. Even when it's down to five or six of them, they won't charge in blind to throw their lives away, they're planning until the last second to see if there's a way to beat you, even if they don't survive.

People confuse "won't retreat" with "throw their lives away", which is bullshit. Krogan do that crap, not turians. A turian coming at you to kill you is going to keep at it until you kill him or beat him down so bad he can't tell him self there's a way to win. That is the ONLY way to make 'em back down.

All in all, not bad. Ahem. I got five or six dead spikes lined up for ya, my teams out in the Traverse popped some turian mercs. I don't see any reason to draw attention to us here. Minsta can carve the fuckers up and shoot Trelly the biological data so she can write up your next report.

Ugh, dammit, now we have to head to a shithole.

Cerberus Message of the Day: -error alert- user disabled
Chapter 28: Chapter 28 : Turian Physiology

A/N: More than one person has commented that Pel's remarks work best if you imagine them with Zaeed's voice, and I encourage you to do so. Pel has much of the same sort of accent, albeit deeper.

This is an experimental chapter for me – it may or may not work well. I had a very scientific sounding paper for the turian physiology drawn up, but I couldn't make it work with Trellani's voice at all, and finally resorted to this. If you dislike it let me know.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

Due to a scheduling conflict and certain delays out of our control, Matriarch Trellani was delayed on her own mission, resulting in the need for someone to perform a write-up of my initial medical examination of the turian captives forwarded to Minuteman. Normally I would have written it up myself, however on extended review, I decided to have Pel make an attempt at the report.

I made this decision for two reasons. One, it will lead to a better usage of what comes of my findings. While I'm sure my detailed insights into asari biology were appreciated, it struck me somewhat later on that I probably did not consider combat related or interrogation related aspects. Pel, despite that outrageous accent and less-than-stellar educational background, is cunning and will pick up on certain things I would miss that might be useful in Cerberus's fight against the alien creatures.

Second, and equally important, is that I will grudgingly admit you were correct about the man's intellectual capacities. Pel is frighteningly intelligent, merely uneducated and with manners that would offend a krogan. More than once he's given me suggestions or asked questions not out of place from a graduate level student. I think that allowing him to , as he insultingly puts it, translate what I find into more common parlance may create additional insights I may otherwise miss.

As Pel himself extrapolates, I have taken the liberty of editing his final file before transmission. I have not touched any of his … words, but I have interjected comments for clarity or restatement where I felt such was needed.

-Minsta

Cerberus Thought of the Day: Ethics is a human concept, and can only apply to fellow humans. Ethics with an alien being is simple: us, or them.

Against my better goddamned judgment, somehow I get stuck with putting together a section on turian bodies. I'd go over the clusterfuck that lead to this, but I'm sorta enjoying imagining the look on the Shadow Hand's face when he has to listen to my dumb ass ramble on about how turian dicks work and whatnot.

Rather than put y'all through me fumbling through my omnitool to figure out how to pronounce 'thesical torsion process' and finally understanding that's High Geekese for 'shoulder', I'mma just put in my thoughts on the line item shit Minsta figured out by cutting up some spikes in T&I.

Trelly is all caught up in some kind of discussion with one of the slimy Palavanus fuckers and sent a code indicating she was fine but unable to disengage.

Minsta will probably edit the fucking file once I send it off, so if there's any kind of snide comments on what I'm getting out of this, I ain't responsible for them.

Addendum – Minsta: Yes, yes. Laugh all you wish.

Overview of basic physiology

First off, that word physiology pisses me off, so we're not using it any goddamned more. Turians are big bastards, the shortest stands a little over six feet, and I've seen spikes that top eight feet tall, but most are six and half to seven feet. Broad through the shoulders and chest. The boys tend to have wider shoulders, the lady turians have wider hips and skinnier builds.

Addendum – Minsta: A depressingly inexact description. Turians are bipeds of a cold-blooded extraction. They share many features with both Terran avians and dinosaurs, specifically hollow bones, saccule respiration, serial chromatic scaling vision with possible low-light sensitivity, etc. They are articulate in all joints at a fixed two hundred and fifty five degrees, except the hips and shoulders which are completely condyloid.

No asses, and no tits. Goddamned depressing. At least with blues or even bucketheads you got something to look at.

Unless you live in a cave everyone knows turians are dextro. Way Minsta explained it to me, living things – strippers, taxi drivers, aliens, hell, even parts of ol' Richard – are made up of proteins. Normal people have 'right handed' and turians and quarians have 'left handed' proteins. We're all told that levo can't eat dextro food and vice versa.

Minsta says that's all shit. The problem isn't the proteins being weird, its that their shape fucks up enzymes in the other type's body. You eat a turian hamburger and your body incorporates the proteins, which makes the enzymes and sugars or whatever come out all fucked up and THAT causes the toxic shock, vomiting blood, blah blah blah.

Addendum – Minsta: Astoundingly, he managed to mostly understand my point. Common science tells us that there can be no real harm in merely dextro amino acid groups – even some things on earth share such. Dextro proteins can be found in cell walls of many plants, and most sugars on earth are actually dextro in conformation. Even some nervous cells have dextro configured proteins, mostly alkaline off-shift channels for deionzation of nervepaths.

The dextro amino acids of both turian and quarian extraction, therefore, are fully capable of being consumed and used by humans. The problem comes in that some – not all, but some – of these amino acids use long-bond chains that inhibit certain peptide reactions. Enzyme misreads and malformed prions are also likely. Such prions and refolded protein chains can be extremely dangerous to humans – the old 'mad cow' disease that affected the 20thand 21stcenturies is a good example. Those, ironically, were caused by dextro contamination of feed food sources from neural matter.

To sum up, some turian food and bio-matter will likely cause allergic reactions and has a chance to cause something more serious. A more serious issue is that turian body chemistry is much more acidic than human, with a baseline of 5.2. That is why chemical burns and the like can happen from turian blood exposure.

Bottom line, the spikes are low-level toxic, and you can be blinded if they spit in your eyes. Hurts like a bitch, too.

Addendum – Minsta: Ahem. See above.

Anyway, back to bodies and shit. Turians are covered in plating (more about that later) and walk on two legs that are more or less like giant goddamned springs. The spur things they have sticking out the back of their legs are anchor points for bigass muscles, and the bones actually slide inside one another, allowing them to run like crazy and to jump twelve to fifteen feet with one leap. I've seen it, scariest shit you'll ever see, five hundred pounds of claws and teeth leaping on you.

They have claws, about six to seven inches long, made up of compressed bone and iron from their bodies. Do not underestimate these fucking things, even unaugmented they can rip your throat out with a single flick. And most turians like plating them with metal or inlays of omni-blades or Jesus fuck knows what else. I saw a turian disembowel a batarian once with one slash.

From behind.

Starting to understand why Minsta drinks so goddamned much. Anyway, turian muscle is 'long-strand' , which is a fancy name for muscles like the ones in your calves. It bunches and unbunches real quick and has lots of impact power, but doesn't give the turians a lot of stamina. Minsta told me humans evolved to run their prey down through exhaustion. Turians didn't, they leap out and claw shit to death, so they have lots of raw power but not lots of endurance.

Addendum – Minsta: A simplification of what I said, sadly. Turian muscles pack enormous hitting and striking capability not just because of strand composition but ATP distribution. Turian muscles have mitochondria more … aggressive than human versions, which break down sugars and provide large bursts of energy very rapidly. The muscle cells are literally saturated with them, as well as a form of rapidly discharging fat-storage cell that breaks down into high energy lipids under heavy stress. A turian therefore can power through exertions that would exhaust energy in a human rapidly.

Moreover, turian muscles regenerate and rebuild themselves at an equally faster rate, enabling them to recover quicker from exertion and build muscle mass and power far faster than a human.

They have fucking fangs, like a bad vampire movie. Lots of them, in a jaw that can crack a human femur with one bite. Those little mandible things on the side are leftover from when turians also had a venomous bite. Glad that they lost THAT shit. When they get edgy or upset, they flicker a lot, because back when they could bite you that was how they pumped venom into the mandibles.

Goddamned lovely.

Turians have three hearts, all shitty two-chamber pieces of crap that work like fish hearts, and instead of a set of lungs have big sacs all down their ribs that take in and filter what they breathe. Makes 'em resistant to gas, airborne infections, and shit like that. Air is constantly going into this sac, but only part of it dumps oxygen into the body, so they can have a backup of air all the time.

Addendum – Minsta: Ugh. He only got half of that it seems. Much like Terran birds, a turian inhales through narrow passages which lead through a large sac-like arrangement in the torso. This sac is full of filtering fibers and clamps shut on exhalations, storing air. The breathing of the turian inflates the smaller lung sacs lining this larger air sac, pressing fresh air into the lungs and stale air out a series of expulsion holes.

The beauty of this method is that turians have a limited supply of fresh air at all times, and can hold their breath for an astonishing six to eight minutes as a result. I would recommend against gaseous agents in any assaults, as they are unlikely to be fully effective.

Nerves are 'fairly standard', according to Minsta, although they have more than we do.

Turians have a bunch of weird organs that do some of what our human organs do, but in different ways. Turian blood is blue because it uses cobalt (a blue metal, I guess) to carry oxygen around. They have a liver-thing, three or four kidney-things, and all that jazz. The backup organs means that most torso shots are a fucking waste of time.

I can just imagine you three rolling your eyes at 'kidney-thing', but I don't care. I mean, seriously, Bossman, do you give a shit what their liver is called? Didn't think so.

Addendum – Minsta: The turian liver is actually of some interest to me. It is highly efficient and utilizes a serial enzymatic cleansing pattern that can filter most harmful substances in short order. It not only filters blood but also the lymph-analogue the turian immune system uses, and it builds up reservoirs of harmful materials as a sort of guide. When a hostile element (a poison, for example) is introduced into the turian bloodstream and hits the liver-analogue, the liver can actually utilize tailored enzymes to break it down faster once it has done so at least once before. We should aim to see if this adaptation can be copied bio-mechanically for our own use.

They have a thing like a gizzard – ya know, like a chicken. Minsta says it's because their teeth are for ripping and tearing meat up, not for eating plants or grinding. The crazy fuckers will swallow small rocks with their meals to aid in digestion. The spikes have two stomachs, one for plant matter and the other for meats. Here's a tip – a good shot just to the left of center in their torso will hit the meat-stomach, and acid from that will usually disable them.

Addendum – Minsta: A suggestion that did not occur to me.

Turian blood vessels are more like human veins, according to Minsta. He...ah, god, let me just quote the fucker, I can't even translate this shit. "Vessels are surrounded by vasoconstrictor muscular nodes at major joint formations. This, along with cup-like muscular valves, assists in prevents hypovalemic shock from blood lividity..."

After pulling up that shit on SirtaNet, basically their blood vessels have lots of little muscles to help their hearts pump blood and keep it from pooling, and they can pinch off broken blood vessels. This is why even after taking shots and wounds that would bleed out and kill a human, turians can survive.

Addendum – Minsta: I shudder to think what uses Pel is putting a database of medical and anatomical knowledge to, but he is (basically) correct. Based on my examination of the turian corpses, key points to hit would be the head, hips, and the areas of the stomach he pointed out.

Other than that, turians are stronger than humans and batarians, and about half as strong as a krogan. They have to eat more than humans do, but they don't need anywhere near as much water. Turian strength is greatest in slashing motions with the arms – those big ass shoulders are mostly muscles to power a clawing backhand – and in the legs, so don't let the fuckers kick you.

Turians are really good climbers and natural pilots, but bad swimmers.

Addendum – Minsta: I shouldn't be surprised he stops here. There is some minor but possibly useful information he left out.

The turian bone structure, as I mentioned earlier, is mostly hollow. The bones themselves contain a soft-tissue lining of erectile tissues that stiffen if a bone breaks to hold it in roughly the correct shape, allowing them to heal from simple fractures and soft breaks very easily, but making more serious bone injuries a potentially dangerous hazard.

Turian blood is very slightly acidic and also acts as a debonding agent for several kinds of adhesive.

Without getting caught up in medical minutiae , it's worth noting that turian immune response is multi-tiered, with several competing immune systems providing a layered defense. Most biowarfare is contraindicated for short term reactions, and they make extremely good test subjects for broad-spectrum viral testing.

Turians can operate on significantly less sleep than humans, and can induce sleep in less than twenty seconds. Their brain matter and nervous system also allow them to fight off fatigue effects from lack of sleep for up to a full week, and they are very difficult to knock unconscious.

Turian Senses

Short version: Turians were predators as they evolved, and they've got some incredible senses. Not as good as salarians, but close.

They have really, really good vision – Minsta said they have more cones and rods in their eyes than eagles do, and they can see at a hundred feet what a human can at twenty. The nerves from the turian eye to their brain are more complex than ours. That means they can actually react to more of what they see – even peripheral vision. Each eye is independent or they can be locked together, so a turian can focus on one thing, or have one eye focus on something and use the other to keep looking around. This does mess up depth perception, though, at least Minsta is pretty sure it does.

Be glad you don't have to translate this shit into English, the bastard is using the most complicate words he can find. He actually described color as 'a non-monochromatic reflective artifact of ambient visible light'. I may choke him out when we get back to Minuteman.

Addendum – Minsta: Cretin.

Anyway, turian eyes are covered by a membrane they can open and shut to keep out dust and the like, and a second eyelid that blocks bright lights (like that crazy ass star over Palaven. Who in FUCK inhabits a world with a B class super-giant?) The eyes have all these other weird things, but the bottom line is they see real good, better than humans, and they can keep track of shit like crazy.

Addendum – Minsta: The man has a talent for reducing medical terminology into street babble, I will give him that much. A few things he glossed over – turian eyesight is adjustably telescopic, with a maximum magnification of 3X, achieved by several clear 'lenses' that can slide behind the primary lens in the eye. They may or may not have augmented cone structures in the eye to allow ultra-low-light vision, and I am unsure if they see in the infrared spectrum or not.

Turian have hearing that is incredible. They can hear a heartbeat and tell if you're lying or not from that, and they can do so reliably. More than that, they have four ears. Well, not ears, but ear holes. They can use this to pin down where sounds come from.

Their taste is about the same as ours, and they have a weak sense of smell.

Turians can also see patterns and shapes in low light better than we can. Thankfully, they don't have any thing weird like shark-senses in asari or goddamned UV vision. On the other hand, they really don't need it.

Addendum – Minsta: Actually incorrect, I'm almost certain that, just like Terran avians, they can see some UV reflections. They cannot, however, see using only UV lighting like salarians or drell can.

Turian Plating

Turians are not entirely covered in plating, but a lot of their body is. The plating is like a cross between bone and the stuff that fingernails are made out of. When they are growing up, they eat lots of stuff with iron in it, and this travels to their skin. The plating is grown out of a mix of bone, what Minsta calls a keratin analogue, and bits of iron and other metals from their foods.

Addendum – Minsta: For the uninformed, keratin is the material your fingernails are made out of.

The purpose of the plating is to bounce soft rads and UV radiation. Alpha radiation, the weak stuff, is stopped by clothing and what not, but is the most dangerous. Get this shit, turian skin is thinner than human skin, and so the plating blocks that. It also blocks beta and some gamma radiation.

Under the plating is a bunch of blood vessels and sacks of gel. This gel stuff is mixed with something like graphite and helps block more radiation (as well as cushion shocks, like punches and kicks). It also glubs up when exposed to air, helping to reduce bleeding from punctures and slashing wounds.

Plating is hooked on to the skin and muscles by boney spars that you can see here and there, except on their face, where it hooks right to the skull. The plating gets hot, and the channels and blood vessels vent the heat upwards, to the head. The fringe thing on turians are like big radiating vanes that let it bleed off, contracting in cold and expanding in heat. Females have smaller fringes because they are smaller in size and also because turian eggs need more body heat than the males do for incubation.

Huh, this is kinda interesting to read. Minsta's running out of fancy ass words.

Addendum – Minsta: I simply see no point in damaging the elocution of the document any further if any time I use technical language it's glossed over. However, while there are several other interesting things about turian plating, none of them have any … practical application.

Turian Reproduction

Turians breed like cockroaches. Just putting that out there. We'll never be able to outnumber the spikes, they pop babies all the fucking time.

The naughty bits are pretty much like ours, actually. Turian nuts are tucked away inside the body behind plates of bone (lucky bastards) and their dicks retract deep into the body when not in use. (They don't use 'em to piss, apparently.) They pop a fairly normal boner just like everybody else does, but it's only when they want to – voluntary control. Stays up as long as they want, too. Fucking spikes, hate them more now.

Addendum – Minsta: I regret letting Pel write this now...if the fool starts using pornographic references...

The chicks … ah, god. Turian females like being knocked up. For human women, it's a pain, for turians, it's pleasurable. A turian female has six or eight eggs inside them at any time, ready to go. Only one can be impregnated at a time, but usually they end up banging four or five times just to get one eggs ready to go.

Addendum – Minsta: sigh The eggs use a rather unique form of protein surface lock to require multiple breeding sessions, borrowing multiple strands of modified XY/XY pairs from each sperm match to filter out potential hazardous mutations. This has the interesting effect of ensuring that male-dominant genetic disorders rarely pass down more than one generation – possible adaptation to higher radiation rates on Palaven, no doubt.

Once it's, uh, hot, it takes about three or four weeks to grow and develop before the turian female lays it. During this time, the hormones of the females even out, but being pregnant is like some kinda turn on for them, the turians actually have a word for it, something like 'glow of life' or some shit. You can't really tell a preggers turian bitch from one who isn't, they don't show or anything. At least not to human eyes, turians can smell a difference or something. The egg laying itself is also some kind of turn on for them – I didn't ask for details and for once, I'm so very goddamned glad Minsta has a stick up his ass and didn't try to find out more.

Addendum – Minsta: It appears to trigger certain involuntary orgiastic responses. I'm not interested in the sick fetishes of aliens. Pel and I are, for once, of like mind.

Details? Jesus fuck, go find a turian porn movie. Parts of those have birthing sequences. Shit you not. All aliens are fucking freaks.

Getting sidetracked – the egg. After it's layed, the turians put it in a hatchery – climate controls, sonic isolation, nutrient baths, whole nine yards. From there it hatches about two weeks later, and a tiny as shit turian baby is born. The level of development is about on par with a premie human baby – lots of them don't make it. Turians don't have maternity wards – the egg laying is, as I said, in pornos, so it's not debilitating to the chicks – they do have egg wards and wards for the babies. Pretty high-tech stuff.

I'll warn you right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing will piss off turians faster than blowing up their child wards. Blowing up hospitals with adults, meh, two points. Cacking small children, frowned upon but nothing nasty. But killing turian babies or blowing up eggs is going to get you fucked up quick, fast, and in a hurry. Once saw a krogan skull on display in a baby ward and asked about it. Krogan from the Ganar Clan wanted to kidnap and sell eggs to the batarians to start a breeding farm. The turians skinned the krogan alive, and then waited for him to regenerate and did it again and again until he went crazy from the pain and starved to death from the regen.

Then they burned his body and mounted his skull and encourage their kids to throw spitballs at it.

I know you guys like sending messages, but that's an envelope that will blow up in our faces. The Dog don't need to be fucking with kids anyway, if you ask me.

Back to the science. Ha, I always wanted to say that.

Addendum – Minsta: Jesus wept.

Except during the three or four weeks the egg is actually growing, turian female hormones are telling them to get laid. I've actually heard the males complaining about it (hate the fuckers so much right now). That means turians females who end up with non-turian mates are pretty much non-stop horny.

As far as the mechanics go, like I said, watch some porn movies if you have a goddamned interest. There's only so far I'm willing to go for Cerberus, and that does not extend to detailed examination of alien bird-lizard poontang, sorry.

Addendum – Minsta: Compared to asari filth, it's actually fairly tame. The turian phallus is not much different than human or batarian versions, and the turian vaginal analogue is slightly larger to account for egglaying, but that's about it. Turians have a more robust nervous and erogenous zone placement than humans, which lack pain nerves (probably due to issues with pinches from plating and talon cuts.)

Turian Life Cycle

Turians start off as babies, duh. They have, in their own language, four stages of life. As a hatchling they are weak , only about the size of a human baby and even less coordinated. Parents chew up food for the baby and vomit it back up into a disgusting mess the kids lap up. A hatchling basically sits around all day, eating, shitting, and learning to crawl and talk. This takes about seven years, give or take a couple for really stupid spikes.

Addendum – Minsta: Turian learning rates during childbirth are markedly inferior to humans, which is hardly surprising for people who took tens of thousands of years to get from sticks to sticks with rocks at the end.

Once they're old enough to walk and start growing in teeth so they can feed themselves, they are considered 'half-adults'. That's their term, I guess we'd call them teenagers, but turian teens are nothing like human teens. They focus heavily on school and learning to fight, while growing their plating and shooting up. By the time a turian is twenty, they stand nearly full size and weigh almost as much as a full grown turian. Another big difference is that turian teens don't have a sex drive or even urges.

That kicks in when they hit full grown adult – for males, the deciding factor is when they can pull a boner, for females, when they start making eggs and wanting to shag everything in sight. At this point, they formally enter the military and all that jazz and get their first citizenship rank.

When a turian gets really old, their sex drive finally shuts off. Females stop making eggs and males can't get it up any more. They call this 'Fading', and it basically is the turian slowly falling the fuck apart. Plating gets thinner and thinner until it doesn't stop radiation anymore. In the past, that was a death sentence , but with modern clothing and colonies, it isn't so bad. Still, once a turian goes into the Fading, their time is about up.

Turian Lifespan

Spikes live about a hundred thirty to a hundred and fifty years. They hit full adulthood about twenty five, and the Fading usually strikes about a hundred and twenty and up. Up until the Fading they are pretty active, the only difference between a young buck and an old man is the old man will be a bit slower and less endurance.

Males tend to live longer than females – the constant production of eggs is harder on the body of spike girls, I guess.

Addendum – Minsta: I am astonished he managed to figure that out on his own, but he is correct.

Turian Modifications

Spikes love cyberware and bio-modification.

Most turians have their kids fitted with cybernetic rangefinders and internal clock-compass sets when they hit their 'half-adult' stage. Losing a limb in battle and getting a cybernetic replacement is seen as a badge of honor, while getting your goddamned limbs hacked off to get replacements so you can be a better fighter is a sign of sacrifice.

Lunatics.

The biggest and most common cyber they get are gyroscope implants for wrists and vision-spotter enhancements for snipers and sharpshooters. Lost of them get mods for their claws, like I mentioned earlier. All kinds of crazy shit – omni-implants or full on omni-blade edges, polyalloy coatings, bonded metallic cores – one fucker I knew back in my Alliance days had monofilament tips and kinetic impact gearing shoved in his hand.

There's nothing quite like seeing a turian slash completely the fuck through a steel door and filet the stupid bastard behind it.

Muscle enhancers, especially in the legs, are also common, as is armor plating. Subdermal plating is pretty easy to fit on a turian, they can just shove it beneath their regular plating or bolt it directly to it.

Turian Diseases and Bodily Disorders

Given that their homeworld is an irradiated shithole orbiting a giant ball of nuclear fire that puts out enough UV and hard rads to sterilize every surface it hits, the bacteria and shit like that on Palaven have to be pretty ugly shit. Thankfully, they don't do much to non-dextro life – they rely on enzymes and those protein patterns to infect, and none of the dextro shit fits the levo stuff. Even if they did manage to get inside, like some turian viruses can, they end up blowing themselves up trying to convert cells, according to Minsta. You'll get a day of high fever and some sore muscles from being exposed to turian diseases, but that's about it.

The spikes have about as many sicknesses and illnesses that we do, but only a couple really stand out. There's some kind of plating rot that ends up with their plating decaying, if it gets bad poisons and toxic shit gets in their blood and they start decaying like goddamned zombies. Gross as shit, most times it's lethal so they just put a bullet in the spike's head and keep stepping.

They've got a disease that acts a lot like the flu. Turians don't sneeze, but they do cough and spit up a lot, and that's how it spreads. Other than that, I think they have a few other things like muscle disorders.

The biggest thing the spikes deal with is cancer. Shockingly, living on a planet made of uranium is going to give you some really nasty problems. Cancer (mostly of the skin and heart) is the leading cause of death that isn't violent among turians. They've gotten it under control mostly in the colonies (the big drivers of cancer there is genetics, according to Minsta.). On Palaven...not so much.

Addendum – Minsta: There is, as you might imagine, a great deal of technical specificity left out of the report, but all in all this will suffice as a primer. The turian is a superior close-quarters fighter and has excellent adaptations for long-distance combat as well, but they are mediocre at mid-range fights. Their speed, strength and senses give them a strong edge over human combatants, and they have sharper reaction curves even when undersupplied or exhausted.

That being said, they have weaknesses that have not been compensated for. They are not very well equipped to take damage – once bleeding and plating breaks reach a certain level, their inferior heart design will drop their blood pressure. While their vascular system counteracts this to some degree, blood loss from multiple wounds will kill them, and the blood pressure loss weakens their accuracy and strength considerably.

They have very poor ability to handle heavy physics shocks due to the hollow bone structure and lack of a truly segmented spine – theirs is fused in sections along the reinforced back plating. While quick and agile in CQC, they are not good brawlers or wrestlers, and once those nasty talons are taken out of play, less than impressive against a truly skilled unarmed combatant.

While their various sexual curiosities may seem pointless, the fact that the females are often distracted by breeding urges means they are typically less alert than the males, which can be used against them. Likewise, turian biological protectiveness of their children can be used to stage distractions, even if you accept Pel's statement that actually harming turian children would be counter productive.

Their resistance to poisons and diseases is somewhat limiting us in our rapid reduction efforts, as we have no fast method to disable large amounts of turians with one deployment, but there is some promising research concerning sonics. Visual-assault weapons will also work wonders, given their enhanced vision.

I will finish my dissections of the turian corpses I was forwarded and present my findings in an attachment in a few solar days, but for now I think Pel has managed to convey the gist of my findings well enough, if only by covering them with enough invectives to shame a sailor.
Chapter 29: Chapter 29 : Turian Culture, Structure

A/N: Oh, culture was a real barrel of laughs to write. Interested in feedback on this, as I'm not sure it all holds together.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Insightful Jack, focused Richard, and elegant Rachel,

Pel's insights into the physiology of the turian was a delightful distraction. I was sadly occupied discussing cultural views with a Palavanus social scientist and philosopher and could not simply leave such an august figure on shore notice.

Turian culture is hard to typify or summarize. It is complex, yet hardly changing - multifaceted, but reflecting only the same images in minor variation and intensity. Rather than attempt to shoehorn these concepts into a more human framework, I have attempted to merely ... observe and draw insight from this interplay.

Hopefully it will be useful.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Aliens fear humanity, and any open hand they extend in our direction is merely distraction from the knife they have in the other hand.

Turian Cultural Basics – Clans vs. Families

I will admit to a certain level of bias when it comes to my views on the turian variance in their cultural constructs. My fellow asari congregate along the lines imposed by bonds – small groups merging with larger ones, city-states acting as the largest cells in a whole-racial organism. Salarian and human groupings are based on biology and the requirements of reproduction. Even the complex rules and rites of krogan inter-reactions and clans follow certain rules, like the winds drive the tides.

Turian clans and families baffle me.

From what I have been able to discover, a 'clan' has changed it's meaning a great deal over the many years of turian history. What would traditionally be called a 'clan' in ancient times was an actual grouping of hunting turians, usually closely related by blood. Clans would be split into a number of somewhat homogenous tribes, engaging in raids or arranged swaps to prevent inbreeding. Eventually these clans began binding themselves more tightly to a core identity.

At some point in the chaos that was the Burning, when smaller clans refused to aid larger ones, the meaning underwent some level of disharmony, and remains so to this day.

In modern parlance, a clan is a formal grouping of like-minded individuals, who embody and exemplify the ancient honor concepts of certain famous clan leaders. For example, a member of the Vasin clan would base his or her personal honor metrics and expectations from a Primarch on how Primarch Vasin acted some six thousand years ago. Clans are rarely measured in blood relationships – although they certainly have some incidental breeding occurring.

Clans are the closest thing one can come to finding political parties in turian culture, on reflection. They strive to emulate the positive aspects of ancient, powerful figures and by doing so, both pay them homage and ensure their teachings and views are not lost in the modern era. Most (but not all) Clans are lead by a Primarch, or at least a Circle of Autarchs, but some instead have a council of chieftains that only selects one of their kind to stand as Primarch during the Primarchial Selections.

A Family, on the other hand, is more akin to the ancient clans – related individuals who are banded together under a single Chieftain. Rarely are they entirely unified around concepts or teachings, rather sticking together out family bonds. Families are comprised of between ten and several thousand loosely related family groups who all utilize the same last name and can trace a blood relationship back to the Family founder. Most Families are the well known of turian society – Arterius, Vakarian, Talid, Mekhuri, and so forth.

There are similarities and differences between a Family and the asari Thirty, grace be unto their houses, or the human Noble Families. For one, they are not hierarchical structures – all Family members assemble once a decade to confer Family leadership on the member with the highest rank in the meritocracy of the Hierarchy, but as Family leader the turian in question does little but act as an Autarch. Second, they do not consider themselves 'noble', exactly. To look down on other turians would be bizarre to the turian mindset, but they also do not see themselves as special. Rather, they hold themselves to very high and rigid standards of duty, honor, and sacrifice, to set a proud example for the turian people. Finally and most tellingly, the Families do not hold any special place in government.

Barely fifteen percent of the Primarchs or Autarchs of the Hierarchy Chamber of Will hail from a Family, and no Family member has ascended to the ranks of the High Primacy in centuries.

Both Clans and Families are basic building blocks of the turian cultural menage. An area or colony with more Families than Clans tends to be more loyal, more traditionalist , more willing to accept hardship and political dissent from the High Primarch. Clan-dominated areas are more rebellious when times are bad, yet blindly loyal when they approve of the actions of the High Primarch.

With over five hundred thousand Clans and two hundred thousand Families, keeping track of this morass would drive even a salarian into the sea. Luckily, both the Clans and the Hierarchy publish 'talon-mark listings' of Clans and Families, along with facial markings, colors, and mottoes.

Turian Cultural Basics – Facial Marks, Color Meanings, and Dicta

As you surely know, turians identify their allegiance to whatever subculture – Clan, Family, Cluster, Colony – they partake in by way of facial markings. These markings are either paint applied weekly or etched paint patterns forced into the structure of the plating on their faces.

As mentioned in the psychology section, only a few Primarchs and highly political types choose to forgo these markings, along with outcasts. The marks announce one's allegiance and in many cases, beliefs to the world – to walk without one is seen as a mark of someone ashamed or hiding their true selves. Given the turian focus on responsibility and accountability, such is rarely viewed in a positive light.

There are important differences in painted marks and etched ones. Painted marks are obviously not permanent, but require reapplication on a fairly constant basis to remain fresh. A turian who paints his facial marks is seen as still determining his place in the world, and as such most painted marks appear on younger turians, those who have yet to settled into a firm understanding of themselves. Painted marks on older turians are usually a sign that at some point they underwent a core shift in how they thought or affiliated themselves – which is rare.

Most Clan facial markings are done with heavy organic paint that has a tendency to shine in direct light. Family markings, on the other hand, are deeply etched and often are matte in texture. Marks can incorporate turian script, or the ancient glyphs associated with the Valluvian priests.

As an aside, has humanity never experimented with facial markings? I find it curious that asari, turians, krogan and drell place so much value on them when humans and salarians do not.

There are meanings attached to the colors, as well. Black is for valor, while green is the color of Palaven's oceans, often used to represent restlessness or travel. Purple is the mark of sacrifice, while white marks indicate duty. Blue is a color most often identified with loyalty and dependability, while yellow indicates passion. Orange indicates intellectual pursuit. Gray is ferocity.

Red is rarely used. It indicates betrayal at the hands of another. A turian who has a feud or grievance with another clan or family will mimic that group's marks highlighted in red. Pure red marks are only worn by very bitter outcasts who feel betrayed by the entire Hierarchy, such as the exiled General Vuthur or the Broker's assassin-aide, Tetrimus Rakora.

The more intense or brighter a color, the more the value is emotionally held, the darker implies it is a matter of practicality. Bright blue means loyalty by emotional ties of friendship, while dark blue would mean loyalty based on mutual need or past experience.

Colors can be combined. The core color is the basic value, while the outline augments it. A turian with marks of blue outlined in white declares himself loyal to his unit or place of service, the reverse would indicate he owes a duty to whatever or whoever he is assigned to or affiliated with. The two are not conflated. To the above example, a turian bodyguard for a Primarch with blue marks outlined in white is saying "My duty is to protect this person, but I am also personally loyal to his goals." The reverse is saying instead "My loyalty and beliefs are with this person. It is because of that loyalty that I am willing to die for him."

When you have multiple colors and layers, top layers indicate the most important values.

Placement matters. Marks on the cheeks below the eye indicate a primary focus, while shapes along the jaw indicate secondary focus. Marks on the top and middle of the head indicate a primarily philosophical stance, marks on the fringe a stance based on experience, and marks in the middle of the face indicate long-held beliefs.

Shapes also play a role. Straight lines indicate a devotion to ideals. Blocky geometric shapes indicate an attachment to logic, reason, and fact. Circles and ovals indicate flexibility in thought and action. Whorls and curved lines indicate devotion to traditions. If the majority of marks are vertical, they state the turian is devoted to ascending the meritocracy based on his talent, while horizontal marks indicate a preference to their duty and ascending based on feats of valor.

The facial marks of the Palavanus Family, for example, are heavy thick ovals of bright yellow trimmed in dark green on each cheek, and a single narrow stripe of black turian script that bisects the face, spelling out the words 'Will is the weapon'. This is translated as 'a hard focus on intelligence and intellectual pursuits, with a sense of restlessness. They ascend the meritocracy through valor and the belief in their own willpower.'

The Vakarian Family, on the other hand, relies only on dark blue marks, curving lines under the cheeks dropping to straight lines on the mandibles. Their message is more blunt 'Loyalty to the ideals and traditions of the people.'

The complex mess of swirls,lines, and shapes on the face of Turian Councilor Sparatus is all done in hard, bright white, indicating 'Flexibility, Belief, Thoughts, and Emotions all in Duty to the State.'

Most colonies, Families and Clans also have a short phrase or saying known as their Dictum. These are often, to non-turians, very difficult to associate or grasp, bordering on the status of non-sequitur. For example, the Dicta of the Disfan Clan is literally 'Honor is blood'. Other dicta are quite long and on occasion demonstrate the very dry turian wit. The dicta of the Arterius Family, for example, is 'The Spirits are on the side with the heaviest battalions.'

Being able to interpret and grasp the meaning behind facial markings and colors is critical in the turian mindset of communication. As summed up by one of their philosophical types, 'True turians can speak with a glance, when warriors see the soul upon the gaze.'

Turian Cultural Basics – Colonies vs. Clusters, and Palaven

Atop the morass of already confusing interactions between clans and families, there is also the reality of the political structure of the Turian Hierarchy.

I have spent some time attempting to find a logical thread or at least a theme to this madness, but it is as untamed and random as grains of sand upon the crashing surf of a storm surge. What little I have managed to figure out, I present below, but with a caution:

As with the salarian, do not associate human values with these concepts. I use the words of humanity to describe them, but the filter is warped, like old leaded glass through which sunlight shines through only dimly. These are at best echos of whatever sparks in the turian soul, the strange conflict of duty and loyalty with violence and rebellion.

The turian seeks to follow orders, but cannot bring himself to support those he knows as unworthy. He strives for order, conformity, and balance, but he finds those in the rough embrace of war, not peace as asari or humans would. They pick their leaders based on the overriding sense of what those around them see as proper.

This has resulted in a culture which is in perfectly harmonious lockstep – with those closest to it. A dozen different variations on the same theme, but where any deviation is seen as cause for chastisement and correction.

The homeworld, Palaven, is divided into five rough districts – the crudest and most direct translations would be Gloried North, Lost South, Broken West, Burned East, and Spire. The North was the hold-fast of the older, stronger Tyvu Clans that once dominated the land. The Lost South was the area where the ancient Orvu fled, over the sea. The Broken West would be the shattered plains and ruins of the ancient First Palavanus Imperatorium, while the Burned East the center of the Second. The Spire is where Palaven City stands today.

These five locales each processed and looked at the world in slightly different ways, and this continued beyond to the spread of the Hierarchy to the stars. In many ways, the layout of what became the Clusters could be tied in a way to the ancient holdings of clan and tribe upon Palaven itself.

In short, various clans combined power and influence (under the guiding hand of the Hierarchy) to encourage settlement in the colonies, which combined to form clusters. I will not belabor the actual structure here – that is a concept best left to the government piece. From a cultural standpoint, however, the clusters and colonies are vital to grasping the turian mindset.

They see everything as built from smaller to larger. Honor itself is built on the wisdom to see one's own mistakes, the responsibility to admit to them, and the bravery to either improve one's weakness or remove your life from the tribe so it can be stronger. Likewise, the cultural differences between the tribes on Palaven have mutated into strikingly dysfunctional relationships in space.

Naturally, the older areas of Palaven spawned more developed, richer cultures. The clusters that were developed from such focus more on traditional views, on Families, on hard work and the value of turian unity and will. I hesitate to call them less militant, but they are certainly less aggressive. These clusters are the ones closest to Palaven, and are the least exposed to alien influences. The did not suffer the wounds of the Unification War, or the Troubles. And yet these are the most open to alien influence, the most willing to interact and learn.

The outer clusters are that in name only, mostly administrative districts given to groups and clumps of colonies. These are newer, rougher worlds – some badly terraformed, others simply rough and tumble to live upon. Border worlds, exposed to violence, pirates, aliens and hardship, their weaker connection to the core of turians society means an oddly muted sense of culture. Music and art are more rare, the people more insular, more stubborn. There is a large amount of Clan activity, with few Families. There is a sense of energy, but it is restless and bitter. Aliens feel unwelcome.

I see you with puzzled eyes, lovely Jack. You fail to see why this is 'cultural'. What one must take away from this is that the Hierarchy's very culture is split along physical, sharp lines – not of just history, but of prominence, exposure. Humans, when exposed to new cultures, assimilate them, as do asari. Turians, shaken from their core, become more xenophobic and unlikely to adapt.

I sense again the ghostly hand of the Palavanus in this. I find it altogether too convenient that the vulnerable, poorer border areas react with suspicion and increased militancy to outsiders, rejecting their influence, while the calmer, more carefully watched interior feels more free to mingle. That is , by all my reckoning, the opposite of what we should see.

Turian Cultural Basics – Ancestor Worship and the Spirits

The core of turian religion is based not on gods, but on a pantheistic believe in 'spirits'.

The spirits are, if I grasp the concepts correctly, not supernatural beings, but rather beings that are beyond the ability of mortals to grasp or see. A turian mathematician once described them as 'beings of infinite possibility in dimensional spaces we cannot perceive.' This is an extremely curious and bizarre belief, with no clear historical pointers as to how it evolved, save fragments from the Valluvian Temple that suggest it started with them. Given the assorted strangeness that seems part and parcel of that Temple's practices, one has to wonder what exactly gave them the idea of spirits in the first place.

There are 'good' spirits, that intercede in mortal affairs for the betterment of the individual turian, and 'evil' spirits that cause strive and difficulty, to test the moral fiber and toughness of the people as a whole. The motivation of the spirits varies based on which one of several 'spirit-houses' one ascribes to. The Pava House says spirits act out of love, both the good and evil serving to make the turian people better collectively. The Nehga House says that the good spirits are acting out of benevolence, and the evil spirits are basically acting to weaken the turians, to remind them all they must stand together or they will die. Finally, and frankly the most disturbing, is the Vetnah House, which says the good spirits and evil spirits are merely fragmented representations of greater beings, and their actions little more than random noise in the chaos.

At some point, the belief that a properly lead life, full of honor, valor, discipline and skill, and ended by selfless sacrifice, would enable turians to join the spirits, arose and became part of the religious mix. This has become more prevalent in modern times, with a large piece of the turian sense of duty focusing on ensuring one's final sacrifice is worthy and not forced.

Turian shrines are overseen by half-mystic half-philosopher types known as spirit hunters. These are, aside from actual outcasts, the only turians who take no roles or part in the meritocracy or the military. Few in number, they support themselves through hunting or small jobs for other turians, pausing to pray and seek guidance from the spirits three times a day. The shrines themselves are beautiful, clean shelves of black marble cut into areas of nature and lined with tiny carvings of turian dead associated with the shrine who have joined the ranks of the spirits.

Turians will pray to the ancestors before making major decisions, when expecting children, when preparing for battle, and when troubled by tragedy or dishonor. The various Houses act in this manner only in the fashion in which they dispense the 'advice' given by the spirits. The gentle Paya house tends to focus on happier events – bondings, births, ascent up the meritocracy. The neutral and philosophical Nehga house focuses on events of choice – hard decisions, lifestyle changes. And the nihilistic and anarchic Vetnah House is consulted on dire times – deaths, military preparation, and when sorrow overtakes reason.

Off of Palaven, the shrines are rarely open to non-turians, and most are actually cleverly hidden away from casual view in the back of turian-specific businesses such as fringe-tailor shops, plating-barbers, and the like. Only one shrine, the Blade Edge Shrine of Valor Unbroken in the House of Vetnah, is open to aliens. Humans are welcome, as the shrine was dedicated after turian survivors of the clash between the First Turian Fleet and your Solguard were deeply impressed by their valor. This shrine is on the Citadel in the turian Park of Honor – it is a fascinating display, one I would think even dear Richard would grudgingly approve of.

Upon reflection, perhaps not, given the message of the day.

Turian Social Queues and Movements

Turians have a number of physical stances that are used to display certain values, reactions or beliefs. This is rather unusual, as while it is hardly strange for races to display emotions in this fashion, no others display, for example, honorable regret.

The most common stance taken is feet apart, with the right fist over the primary heart and the head slightly bowed, mandibles loose. Aliens often mistake this for a turian honor salute. But the primary turian hand is the left hand, and an honor salute has the feet together, the head elevated. This stance is instead used to display submissive support with an undertone of disapproval.

Turians make eye contact to display agreement, and avert it when they disagree. The display of teeth is similar to humans, usually an indication of pleasure, but to tighten the mandibles without displaying them is to suggest you are preparing to bite – aggression, obviously.

Turians who feel an action is dishonorable will often square their shoulders and turn their heads to the right, while actions taken that are less than valorous but required will leave them slumped, heads bowed.

Turian compassion and honoring the submissive is done by crossing both hands over the chest, gripping the 'collar' of the turian shoulder framework tightly. A turian should not bow, unless to aliens – a turian dipping forward at the waist is offering his spine and neck to be assaulted, a sign of abject failure and a plea to be executed.

A turian who has been honored will often place one hand over his shoulder, either his left (to indicate his belief that he was worthy) or his right (to indicate his gratitude but worry that he is not ready).

I could catalog more, but I believe you should grasp the concept now. Turian impetus to communicate these feelings and responses is very deeply embedded. Such actions can change the flow of otherwise staid and on the surface boring talks into very complex directions, and in many cases there are possibly other, more subtle hints of behavior that I am missing due to their unique turian nature.

The Meritocracy and Citizenship Tiers

This is covered in more detail in the government, but I wish to touch on the cultural aspects of the meritocracy.

Turians are immensely proud of their achievements, and many small rituals and markings tend to adorn them as they ascend the ranks. Most of the take the form of honor sashes – small rolls of cloth, draped around the neck in the hollow of the chest and shoulders, marked with not only achievement but the chop-signatures of those who recommended his or her ascension. A turian with a long, heavy honor sash filled with prominent names speaks of one who is very competent, and often sought for advice.

One's rank in the Meritocracy can be equated, I suppose, to human citizenship tiers in how the holders of such interact with others. As with your own people, the highest along the path of the meritocracy often have little to no contact with those near the bottom, and tend to hold them in something of a mix of distaste, faint pity, and disregard. The difference being that a turian of the highest orders of merit would still take a low-merit turian into his house and feed him if he were homeless and hungry.

I need not elaborate on what a Class V citizen would likely do to a Class I beggar on his properties.

There are many subtle gradations in tone and deference between turians of widely differing ranks in the tiers of citizenship. The highest tier below Autarch, that of Praetor, is often treated with more deference than a wealthy turian, or a member of a powerful Family, or even a chieftain. A Praetor must literally achieve the highest ranks possible of the meritocracy without resorting to politics or taking a position as a chieftain or Autarch – Pel suggests the closest fit in human military society would be a senior warrant officer.

Praetors have a surprisingly complex gradation system. The most famous, the Praetor Supremalis, I believe Pel will discuss in more detail later on. But there are lesser ranks as well. For non-combat positions where a scientist, doctor, or other typically low-meritocracy type has engaged in an act of supreme bravery, sacrifice and/or risk of death, there is a position known as Praetor Emeritus. While this does not convey the full rights and fear a 'real' Praetor has, Praetor Emeritus are quite possibly even more respected by the average turian for their bravery when they did not even have the training to match such.

The Palavanus (as always) defy this scheme, and rarely move towards being Praetors. Those who do follow the process are considered somewhat... eccentric, at best. They are titled as Praetor Exactal, and from what I gather the trials required to move to full Praetor are even more demanding and likely to be lethal than what Praetors do, which is already an alpha-male ritual of excessive savagery.

Social Structure, Names, and Status

The best word to describe the social structure of the turians would be 'complicated'. It is almost an easier task to state what it is not.

At the very simplest, social structure is based on the intersection between the status of the individual, and the standing of the groups the individual is associated with, adjusted by one's standing in the meritocracy as opposed to their potential. Wealth, physical attractiveness, and even race are not much influence in modern times.

For the broad purposes of categorization, since I know you wish my observations to contain data of use to Cerberus and not merely my delighted interest in learning about the culture of another, turians can be broken into five bands.

The lowest would be the broken – those turians unconnected to any structure in the Hierarchy save that of the citizenship tiering, and who have little chance due to the nature of their lives to ascend it. Merchants of a non-military nature, lower-wealth citizens working in the fields of the arts, music, farming, history, and pretty much anyone that doesn't play an active role in the military machine or operates beyond it falls into this group. Consider this your lower-class.

The broken rarely if ever join Clans, almost never organize into Families, and tend to take on informal last names set off by the usage of separators. For example, a merchant specializing in alien art would consider himself in the ranks of the broken, and would refer to himself only by a first name and perhaps his world of birth, such as Cavsis of Palaven, or Fennis of Tyroth.

Directly above the broken would be the fringe, those citizens whose daily lives rotate around the support of the military without actual service. Scientists, most merchants who deal in weapons, armor, or the like, civilians working normal jobs, and high-wealth types involved in non-military events. This group tends to identify by cluster and their local Autarchs, and is usually absorbed in merely climbing the ranks of the meritocracy and living fairly calm lives. These people will use their cluster identifier instead of a last name, for example: a junior scientist might call himself Mintus M'Thalas, where the M prefix is the turian contraction for cluster.

Above that would be the claws, which are the junior military ranks and lifer military types, as well as scientists working directly with the military and moderate wealth types in mainline industries and jobs. Many are involved in Clans or Families, and focus on the leadership of chieftains or their Primarch. Consider this your 'middle-class', I suppose. Most of these will be the Family name or the Clan name, such as Vonnel Digeris.

The highest tier of the meritocracy, known as the fangs, is occupied mostly by military officers, military suppliers, life-long veterans, always is in a Clan or Family. Usually a mix of low and moderate wealth types, a few higher-wealth figures will also be included, so strip away the human equalization of money to prominence when you consider this the 'upper class'. Names are the same as with the claws, although usually with an honorific of 'cera' for males and 'cina' for females, such as Cera Saren Arterius.

Finally, the Autarchs and Primarchs occupy the highest level of status, the eyes, in turian parlance. They are addressed as 'Primarch' or 'Autarch' usually only by their first name. A few powerful political types, such as the Citadel Councilor and ambassador, would be included. At this level of power and influence, the meritocracy is an afterthought, but most remain proud of their place atop it and seek to aid others in climbing it's ranks.
Chapter 30: Chapter 30 : Turian Culture, Expression

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Beloved Jack, elegant Rachel, and fearsome Richard

My research into the cultural concepts of the turians is now completed. Given the unity between the turian government and it's military, those two sections will have to be combined. Pel will be doing the bulk of that work, a topic I must admit I look forward to both for it's informative value as well as his mastery of invective.

Turian culture is rich, but most of it is akin to the merha sauces we asari use on our seafood - we can taste it and appreciate it, humans cannot taste even the slightest hint of it. Turian culture is inwards facing, reflective, not arrogative or presentative. It relies on a very turian way of looking at things, and many aspects come off as overly violent, grim, or barbaric to outsiders.

I hope my explanations can clarify some of what you see - and do not see - regarding the turians.

Cerberus Message of the Day : Worry not about morals and decency, when it is long past the hour for such things. You cannot afford to be decent when the headsman's ax is already falling.

Turian Culture: Art and Architecture

When most think of turian art, the only things that can immediately be brought to mind are the Sha Titans.

This is an unfortunate and rather sad commentary on the bigotry of all aliens when it comes to recognizing what is art. The Sha Titans, however, are not seen by turians as art, but as a direct representation of something they claim to have encountered.

Turians did not conceive of the visual arts as paintings, carvings or sculptures – in fact, they did not even have a word for such ideas until they encountered the volus, and to this day do not practice anything like statuary. Despite their predominant sense being vision, they see art as the presentation of the objects of everyday use, not specially set aside and otherwise useless things, and to many senses, including touch, not just the eyes.

Thus, in some ways everything is art to turians. This is why their buildings are so cleanly functional and yet always striking in form and angle, why their facial markings are so exact and exotic, why every set of turian armor is a striking admixture of the organic lines of their bodies and the hard, mathematical angles of their structures. It is why their floor coverings use such striking colors and they have so many wildly differing models of clothing.

Turian furniture and interior items, such as rugs and draperies, are richly decorated with geometric or organic shapes that are subtle and difficult for non-turians to even see. Likewise, turian weapons, tools, and even vehicles are molded into eye-pleasing forms and often utilize rectilinear shapes or tiny carvings of turian script that evoke the dicta or views of the crafter. Turians believe the most sublime art is that which is a blend of utility, subtlety, and making one appreciate a message or view from the shape or texture of an object alone.

Turians see art as literally, that which enhances the appreciation of the mundane. They boldly use color and augmented shapes and textures on everything they make and use. There is very, very little non-functional turian artwork, and most of that is exploration of bizarre non-Euclidean shapes in representation of the world of the ancestral spirits. Many of these strange objects are somewhat ominous or even frightening to look at for long, as no other race has the proper visual angles for the resulting intersection of shape and form to make sense.

Turians have a large appreciation for textures, especially contrasts in feel. This is why their clothing and buildings have such bizarre (to aliens) juxtapositions of materials used in their construction. Certain textures appear to convey different emotional responses – hard and smooth materials feel efficient, organic and natural textures relaxed, machined or rigid ornamentation is for diligence, etc.

Turians utilize repeated decorative foci – the curve of wings and claws, the sharp acute angle, triangles, oblongs, and irregular trapezoids. Circular shapes are rare in buildings, clothing designs or surface textures, and almost all turian rooms and buildings evoke echoes of ancient nesting concepts – shallow oblong bowls with hard overhangs, low and irregularly surfaced ceilings, and the like. Turian architecture is some of their most artistic endeavor - the Citadel Tower was redone by turian architects, and it's sweeping , simple lines are the pinnacle of turian subtlety through projection.

Very few turians engage in anything approximating 'conventional' visual art. A handful of somewhat eccentric turian types have take up such arts as painting in the past centuries, but they are seen as superfluous wastes upon the meritocracy and are hard-pressed to find much value perception in their work from their own people.

Turian Culture: Music

Turian music is, to be fair, somewhat simplistic, and almost its entire focus is upon a few key themes – glory to the people, glory to valor and sacrifice, spiritual reflection, and what Pel mockingly but insistently calls 'ass-whipping music'.

Turian music falls into two rough categories – jurchass, or 'movement', relies more on the shifts between notes and chords than melody to define itself, giving it mournful and dirge-like reactions. There is heavy use of percussive beats, and Pel referred to the turian anthem of "Die For the Cause" as 'old pre-Iron death metal meets modern slide-shift electronic in D minor or some shit'.

His eloquence is truly touching, Jack.

Jurchass is mostly used in military related or inspirational pieces, such as battle anthems and the like. It is the most popular kind of music that other races listen to. I find it very amusing that humans think that "Die for the Cause" is 'catchy', given it's rather depressing overtones of being killed for the sheer glory of the Hierarchy and having your name inscribed on a piece of stone, but the male-oriented and frankly phallic-worshiping fixation of turians, batarians and humans on violence has never made much sense to me.

The other type, falchan, or 'spirit cry', is mostly tonal variances on 'hard' choral accompaniment to a heavy, staccato beat. The beat changes periodically, resulting in a curious quality almost like poetic meter as it drifts back and forth, speeding up in shifts as the singing increases in intensity and emotion. This is more religious in nature, and is used in both events of a joyous nature as well as sorrowful ones. Perhaps the most moving and powerful piece of music in this vein is "Sacrifice is Never Without Regrets", often sung when particularly young turians die in the protection of others or for the safety of innocents.

I fear my trials and hatreds have hardened me to things such as pity, but I will not deny that hearing this song on Magna, at the funeral of a turian boy barely fourteen years of age, who died in searing agony to rescue three young females by running through plasma fires, made me weep as if I was a maiden. I doubt you will appreciate the beauty and loss in such a piece, but it shows me that, unlike the salarians, the turian soul is not some empty black place filled with duty, but has sorrows it merely endures.

Turian instruments are rather eclectic, with a lack of anything like horns or strings in favor of a bewildering array of percussive instruments both terrifying and grotesque. At least two musical instruments incorporate turian bone and other elements of the turian body, and several more are similar to the human drum.

Turian Culture: Entertainment and Sports

Turians are a very active, physical people, and it should be of little surprise that they entertain themselves in a primarily physical manner. They are fiercely competitive, if good natured about such, and most sports is adversarial in it's concept, with a primacy in demonstrating strength and durability over cleverness or intellectuality.

Turian sports include the always popular clawball, hideth turram (a mix of human polo and asari venchass), several types of foot races and gymnastics, and competitive martial arts tournaments. Turians are also very fond of combat with ancient melee weapons, particularly what humans would call axes. Other more sedate sports include contests of visual accuracy with hurled objects.

Turians delight in hunting as well, particularly the dangerous alpha predators known as vakars, which may be semi-sentient and are dangerous enough to require modern military arms and armor to survive a pack assault. Turian hunting expeditions range far and wide in search of increasingly outlandish game, and more than one turian has died foolishly attempting to hunt thresher maws.

Even krogan are not brave enough (or suicidally stupid enough) to actually hunt those monstrosities.

Turians are also heavily involved with designing and playing what you would call 'board games', and are fascinated by human chess, which has more complex rules in the turian adaptation. Many turian board games are of a military bent, including recreations of the Krogan Rebellions or even the Relay 314 incident. (For obvious reasons such games are rarely played by other races.)

Turians do not like gambling or any forms of games of chance, unless they have a physical aspect ... with the exception of P. , but that strange figure is hardy an exemplar of turian values.

Turians value dance immensely, and most turians can be surprisingly elegant and energetic in dancing, but their form of interpretive dance, uchanas, is also a form of ritual combat and not recommended for aliens to partake in.

Turian haptic entrainment is mostly limited to musical shows, military movies, educational programming, historical reenactments and the like, with a couple of exceptions. Turians are extremely avid consumers of pornography, although unlike humans and asari they are rather fixated on purely their own race when it comes to such. (I find Minsta's dislike of asari sexuality hilarious in light of the fact that only humans match the asari in the watching and creation of pornography.) As I believe referenced by Pel, a good amount of said material covers egg-laying and other rather unpalatable subjects for aliens to watch, and much of it is rather ... extreme.

It is a rare moment when Minsta, Pel, and I agree on a topic, and further discussion of turian sexual proclivities is over.

Turians are also (very surprisingly) absolutely rabid consumers of romantic dramas, not only including the common Fleet and Flotilla show but even risque asari dramas and human 'soap operas'. They will bicker about the context of these shows endlessly, often becoming quite driven when the pairings of such shows do not match the turian expectations of what should happen. The rather lustful and shamelessly wanton (even from my perspective!) behavior of some female quarians in the show that so turns off other viewers is seen as perfectly normal by turian females, although the reasons are much different.

Turian entertainment is usually collective, and the turians have a wide array of what they call 'all-gathers', a free-to-the-public mix of gymnasium, bar, boxing ring, entertainment theater, and, well, rooms for sexual contact. Stressed turians will come here to fight, watch shows, eat, get drunk, mate, and thus feel better. They are definitely not the sort of place a human would fit in, although you could probably gather a great deal of useful information from inebriated, overstressed turians.

Turians enjoy nature, and love mountain climbing and hiking, although they are not good at swimming as noted by Pel and avoid all forms of water sports.

Turian Culture: Tourism and Events

Turians do not really have a sense of tourism as asari, humans, or salarians do. The idea of leaving your clan and comfortable surroundings to go haring off into some strange alien landscapes and looking at pointless and functionless art is completely bizarre to turians. However, the idea of seeing natural beauty of a kind not familiar to one, such as mountains, or natural formations like the Grand Canyon on Earth or the Shatter on Thessia, is understandable to them, as is going on exotic hunting trips.

As such, there is a minor tourist industry in turian space. Few aliens come to turian space to see the sights, and Palaven in particular is only exceeded by Tuchanka and Irune in it's hostility to alien life.

Most turian tourism is actually religious in nature. When a turian is torn between the course of action he must make or feels himself dishonored by circumstances not of his control or ability to avoid, they will often engage in a pilgrimage of sorts. This is a fasting trip, where a turian disengages from everyone (except a mate) and attempts to reconnect to the ancient values. Such turians will not speak while engaged in this rite, eating only enough to survive and often spending time meditating or thinking alone in spots of natural beauty and away from civilization.

The turians only have two holidays in their calendar. The first is the Day of Ash, where they remember the sacrifices of the race to ensure the survival of the people. Turians carefully paint their faces with thin and complex sigils of black ash in memory of loved ones or friends who died in such a manner, while the Primarchs do the same and venerate the spirits of all those who died during the Burning. This is the only day turians will neither work or fight, as the day is seen as holy – interrupting them during this time is likely to result in being ignored.

The other holiday, Highfall, is when Menae is closest to Palaven every six years, resulting in the magnetic field of the moon clashing with Palaven and creating huge auroras in the sky. The ancient turians believed this was the day ancestors ascended to become spirits if they died in a worthy manner, and it is the only time turians are celebratory and relaxed. It is, according to Pel's somewhat disgusted recollection, an interesting admixture of brawling, open sexuality, drunkenness, and silliness, with a dash of the human emotions at your New Year's ceremonies of unity.

Turian Culture: Ritual Combat

Turians have a fixation on unarmed combat, both as a way to relieve stress and to enjoy the feeling of strength and power flowing through their bodies. However, there are certain situations in which this combat is more serious and often involves serious injury – when it is to solve conflicts between those at different ranks or places on the meritocracy, and as a sort of erotic foreplay between males and females.

These two types of very ritualized combat have strict rules and observed traditions. The first is known as kha'lal, or the challenge. It is usually invoked when a turian subordinate cannot bring herself to follow the orders of a superior who is clearly not qualified for their rank or position. This is not when a turian disagrees with orders, mind you. A turian will follow orders they feel are wrong as long as the superior has their confidence, because the turian feels the superior must know something he doesn't, or that there are no other good options – his is not to question but to obey.

However, an incompetent leader – even if they are making what seems to be the correct choices – cannot command respect or submission in his subordinates. Turians ancient instincts will force them to rebel – this is, writ large, why the otherwise unified race is constantly racked with internal rebellions. The challenge is a formal protest to suggest the leader be removed and replaced.

The battle is fought only using talons and with no armor of any kind. The goals of the combatants are very different. The challenger and subordinate is looking to cripple or kill his superior, while in order to prove his superiority, the senior must disable his subordinate without crippling him , preferably as fast as possible. No martial arts can be used, instead both must fight in the 'old way' – kicks, fangs,claws, and grapples. No one can interfere, and the combat only stops when one turian submits or is too crippled (or dead) to fight on.

A clear win results in a temporary submission from those watching, while a battle that takes too long is seen as a sign of clear weakness. And should the superior actually lose, this is seen as clear incompetence.

The challenge is notably not allowed while in active combat the military, due to the fact that sometimes the orders being given did not originate with the superior, and that classified information might be required for them to make sense. Politics, business, and non-combat military commands are those who go through the challenge most frequently.

The other fight, the hulth, or the wanting, is a sort of mating challenge between two turians that are attracted to each other but vastly separated by the meritocracy. This challenge is usually by males seeking a higher rank female, but the reverse also happens on occasion. Generally speaking, matches across wide divides in the meritocracy are looked down upon, some even casting aspersion on the higher ranked partner. By completing the wanting, the challenger proves that while his valor and acts have not yet matched his or her desired mate, his will and discipline make him a worthy match and that there should be no shame in mating.

Unlike the challenge, the wanting is done in strict privacy – no others except one direct superior to the challenger may observe. Combat is similar to the challenge, with the change that neither is striking to kill or even cripple, but to weaken and subdue. This is where the uchanas is used, the ritual dance-combat of potential lovers. No alien has ever beheld such combat, but a few very rare bootleg haptic videos of such were taken. The resulting fight is both graceful and somehow sad.

The partner being challenged has every reason to fight as hard as possible even if they are desperately attracted to the challenger – if they lose, they cannot ascend further until their mate equals their rank in the meritocracy. It is often seen as somewhat crazed to risk such, as stagnancy in the meritocracy is likely to result in superiors assuming the person has no further potential to ascend.

If the challenger wins, the fight usually turns into somewhat aggressive and repeated sex, until the other partner is (if female) fertilized or (if male) unable to further perform. The two can then be bound. If the challenger loses, however, the winner chastises the challenger's superior for his arrogance and will depart. This results in massive loss of face for both the challenger and his superior.

The most famous of the hulth in recent history was the mating and bonding of General Regilus Vakarian to the challenge of Mitisia of Palaven, a lower ranked female. The general was at the time one of the youngest and highest ranked turians in the Hierarchy, while Mitisia was little more than a sergeant barely beyond the fourth tier of the meritocracy. They were drawn to each other and the combat was reportedly so fierce that to this day Regilus lost an eye to his wife, but ended with her victory and union. Given that this outcome is as if some street waif was able to lay claim to the hand of young Christian Manswell, it caused a great deal of controversy in the Hierarchy at the time.

Turian Culture: Promotion in the Meritocracy

The nature of the meritocracy is stultifying tests, perception and of course the evaluation of superiors and peers. Much of this is government, but one thing is very cultural, and that is the promotion tests.

The Trials, as they are called, vary based on the job the turian holds in society, their relative skill to others, and how much potential they have shown in the past. A highly skilled weapons designer with a past history of excellent military service will have a much sterner trial than a young cook who mustered out after one term of service.

However, the more strict the Trial, the higher one can ascend. There is a turian saying that 'low summits call for less skill than the Veriximus Peaks'. The Veriximus Peaks are the highest on Palaven, no living being has ever managed to reach the peak of Uxam Primus, and thousands have died trying.

Turians who ascend rapidly are often seen as both exemplars of the race and somewhat reckless, but those who ascend slowly are often seen as lazy or hapless. There is a great deal of expectation for turians in prominent Families or affiliated to great Clans to ascend rapidly, while most turians are willing to ascend at the pace best suited to their actual skills.

The Trials are very somber in execution, often with family members or friends showing up to provide moral support and encouragement. A successful Trial is cause for celebration, although this is of a short duration, while failure leads to the family and friends encouraging the turian to work harder and have faith in their own abilities.

Turian Culture: Language

There are two primary dialects of turian, along with a handful of secondary dialects only used by the military. When people think of the turian language, they typically only think of the primary two.

Pavaas, or lowspeak, is used by all turians, and it is a simple, flexible language that mostly deals with day to day concepts, military terms, Clan and Family ideas, and the basics of any sentient race's communication needs. Pavaas is the second most widely spoken language in the galaxy after the simplified Galactic Asari Standard that all races speak.

The second dialect, Vanaas, or highspeak, is a ritualized language supposedly derived from the speech and teachings of the Valluvian Priests. Many of it's concepts are very hard to translate, such as issues related to the ancestor spirits, dimensions of reality, certain obscure geometric and mathematical concepts that make no sense and the like. It is also very formal and archaic, full of anachronisms and lacking in modern technological terms. It is only used in ceremonial and ritual situations.

Three minor dialects , called the little clawspeaks or the little mutters, are mostly used by the military. One is distinct to the hastatim, or turian vigilante culture, notable mostly for the large number of words borrowed from batarian and krogan. Another is mostly used by the Deathwatch and Blackwatch, mostly with combat related concepts. Pel, I believe, is familiar with this dialect. The final language is used only by the Turian Final Line, and is unique in that some of it is purely electronic in nature. Given the shadow-world these zombie-like monsters live in, between death and life, it is no surprise that this language is very strange.

Most turian concepts are very clearly delineated in their language, which has a very large number of descriptive adjectives and relational-ownership verbs. The language is rich in technical terms, in combat and killing words, in words describing math and amusingly enough, in sexual slang. (Although your Spanish and French remain supreme in the amount of sensual – or crude – terms related to sexuality. Perhaps Minsta should write a monologue on why that is.)

Turian Culture: Clans and Families

Turian clans are organized by 'circles'. A member wanting to join a clan must do so by impressing a member with acts of valor, demonstrations of why their mindset is akin to that of the Clan Founder, or other feats that attract attention. Once tested and admitted, they are in the whelpling's circle.

From there, the process is similar to a mini-meritocracy, except one gains rank by making sure their actions and deeds exemplify the core concepts and goals of the Clan. The circles move from whelpling to innocent, devoted, driven, and finally ascendant.

Once ascendant, a member becomes held as a Chieftain. Chieftains are not formal government figures, rather the collective ruling body of a Clan. Chieftains meet in council twice yearly to determine the direction and goals of a Clan and how to best live up to the Clan's central figure and achievements.

Most Clans have this circle of chieftains select a Primarch, or a circle of Autarchs, to formally represent the clan in their relationships with the military and government. Many powerful Clans are tied to specific elements of the turian military establishment – for example, the Jaxis clan is in charge of the turian food service system for feeding the troops, while the Actus Clan is in charge of salvage operations.

Families are, as stated earlier, mostly related by blood. Most Families have one 'primus' line, decended from the founder, and several 'honorus' lines, related less closely. The Family Name can be passed to anyone with a blood relation to the primus line, but should the main line die out or have no male offspring, there may be some reduction in the prestige of the Name for not managing to preserve itself as the honorus lines must take over.

Families take little role in the government, rarely even acting as Autarchs, but many hold high military rank and form the core of the military's veterans. Families, unlike Clans, are always associated strictly with combative military elements, either infantry or naval command. Most are significant because they are well known for their bravery, valor and refusal to despair, making them inspirational leaders.

Turian Culture: Clothing

Turian clothing is one of three styles, depending on the turian's background. Low-ranking turians outside of Clans or Families tend to dress fairly normally. Turians prefer bodysuits, sometimes with a vest around the lung-collar and chest, with long loose sleeves and high, heavy boots. Most turians favor darker colors – blues, blacks, grays – and females tend towards clothing that displays their waist, as a slender but strong waist and arched legs are the primary sexual attractors for turian males. Most civilian clothing is highly patterned with geometric shapes and several fabric types for a variety of textures.

Turians in the Clans (and their biotics) have a preference for long robes and half-hoods that are strips covering their fringe. Layered clothing and heavy fabric are common sights, as well as limited amounts of armor plate near the legs and chest. Most of the fabric used is heavy and rough, along with hide and fur linings and other barbaric accoutrements.

The Families tend towards wearing full armor most of the time, at least for those in military service. Even those who are not will wear up-armored versions of civilian clothing, or cover their armor with Clan-like layered robes. Family colors are often used to decorate such armor, while it's design and shape speaks to the Families relative position – more technological looking suits are clans that follow the dictates of duty, while overly traditional Families use more stylized armor.

Turians will not cover their faces with masks or the like for any reason, and remove helmets whenever they can to display their markings. Only criminals or those forced to work in areas with high chances of decompression or inhaled dangers will wear helmets all the time. Hoods that cover the face or cast it into darkness are also rare, although common among biotics and other types – the turian love of melodrama means many of them find this sort of outfit attractive.

Turian Culture: Mating Rituals and Bonding

I will not risk a diatribe from Minsta (or more recommendations from Pel on which turian pornography to watch) and describe turian mating rituals in any long detail, but there are a few points which I feel you should be aware of as they outline important concepts in the turian mindset.

As stated earlier, turians mate for life when it comes to other turians. When they find a sexual partner of supreme compatibility, the male will bite the female hard enough to penetrate the plating and trigger a set of enzymatic and hormonal responses. This is called the Marking, and is eerily effective in ensuring fidelity between partners, as without the pheromones of the other being present, neither partner can apparently achieve orgasm (or in the case of the male, even sustain an erection).

I will admit to vast confusion on why such loyalty is important, since the stultifying nature of lovemaking with the same partner over and over loses any spice without external influences rather quickly.

[Notation: Private display to IllusiveMan: This is why I do not mind your other dalliances with various human women, Jack. I must admit, I was impressed at you inveigling so many beautiful human women to your side with little more than a few words. Your pleasures may simplistic, but are certainly not boring.]

Turian marriage is surprisingly similar to the asari rites of the Thirty, valor to their names. There is a use of bindings between the hands, certain spoken oaths, and a second bite to from the male to the female in view of all present. This second bite, known as the Intent, is a further triggering of the Marking, and the two are unbound only after it is completed.

Few turians go through with fully handfasting an alien, as there is a rather severe stigma among turians for not acting to uphold the race (read as breed more turians). While there have been examples of turians in love enough with asari to handfast in the past, it is very rare outside of commoner asari and low-rank turians to do so. Turians high in the meritocracy will have their judgement and even loyalty to the Hierarchy called into question for such acts.

Turians and quarians have somewhat similar hormonal/pheromone reactive natures when it comes to mating, but the quarian version is merely aphrodisiac for turians and vice versa, there is no locking in of loyalties. Additionally, the Marking and Intent are likely to cause infection for a quarian female. Most turian/quarian pairs are male turian and female quarian, although the inverse has been noted before as well.

Turians and asari rarely pair unless both are outcasts, and the asari's clingy nature when shorn from siari is usually enough to invoke strong protective instincts in males, keeping them loyal. Surprisingly, though, there are many female turian outcasts who prefer asari lovers, even though the turian female's focus on penetrative sex is hard for an asari to fulfill.

There are only a handful of turians who have mated with humans – humans lack the low level regenerative abilities of asari, making such more than a bit painful. Some human biotics can use their skills to protect themselves, and a certain subset of human sexual deviants who like pain are attracted to turian lovers as well. With both asari and humans, sexual secretions can result in slight chemical burns and thus neutralizing foams and protective sheathings are recommended.

I admit, I threw that last bit of information in there solely to torment Minsta and Pel.

Turian Culture: Death Rites

Turians are surprisingly macabre when it comes to death rituals. Turian biotics will literally plunder the skeletons of other turian biotics, making their talons into knives and their plating into a bizarre and rather horrifying sort of ceremonial sash.

Most turian families will have an ancestral vault, where the skulls of their ancestors are held along with carved representations of the turian made of the deceased's bones. Turian babies who die before reaching maturity are cremated and grieving mothers wear their ashes smeared across their faces, chest and loins for a month of mourning. Many turians have small necklaces or fringe-piercings made of bone from their ancestors, and turian cemeteries are more like storage facilities, where thousands of skeletal remains are cataloged for easy retrieval if someone wants to commission another bone pendant from their great-great-grand sire in celebration of a promotion.

I am not quite sure what to make of it, nor their lack of any real ceremony upon death. Turians see death as merely a transition to another state of existence, and with the exception of children and young turians under the age of twenty (who are seen as unable to have had time to develop a soul strong enough), rarely seen as a cause for despair or great sorrow. A turian who loses their mate is often devastated, but that is more due to the fact that they were very close emotionally and miss them, but not out of grief as asari or humans would understand it.

Turian fixation on the body parts of the dead reaches truly strange levels in the spirit houses, which can have, in the case of the largest ones upon Palaven, the remains of tens of thousands of dead turians incorporated into the walls, floor, furniture, and ceremonial items, along with endless racks of bone-carved spirit totems and the like. Many old battlefields on Palaven are left sealed off and undisturbed, vast fields of bleached bones, skulls and plating left as mute testimony to the self-violent tensions within turian society.
Chapter 31: Chapter 31 : Turian Government

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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MARS-ZERO-FIVE-EIGHT

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Bossman. Rachel. Tin Man.

Should I be worried about the fact that Saren just took out our talking plant on Feros? Because, not to be a dick or anything, but that seems like a pretty serious fucking setback. Your girl Shepard ain't impressing me much, Rachel - story on the news is she got her ass beat hard by Saren.

Anyway, figure out what the fuck you want me to do after we clear out of turian space - and make it fast, the spikes are getting antsy. Saren blowing up most of a Citadel Fleet has them panicking. Trellani messing around out here is going to eventually raise some eyebrows. Plates. Whatever. And I ain't exactly a nobody in turian space either.

News of a dead man showing up in turian space will get the attention of my old teammates if nothing else. Rachel knows there's bad old history between Kai Leng, Anderson, Sanders and I. Let's not let it bubble up, Bossman.

Now, I just spent six fucking hours on this document. I have no fucking idea who decided I should write this up, but I am sort of glad I got to do it, since understanding spike government is like understanding jazz. Any cocksucker can read a book and tell you some fancy ass words to describe it, but that don't tell you what it means.

Trelly suggested just combining this with the military stuff, but that wouldn't make the military part anything easy to reference. Trust me, the government is confusing enough. So, I've done my best to take a stab at puling my knowledge of the turian government together. Which is hard, because the shit is not anything like what we think of as government.

I'd say something here about how the spikes are not what you think they are, but I figure letting you read through the way they manage themselves should drive that much home.

Cerberus Message of the Day : -error alert- user disabled

Turian Military-Government Mess

The turian government and the military are the same goddamned thing. One just manages the other. Do not think of 'government' as 'ruling the people'.

In fact, put any bullshit ideas of government at you know it right out of your head. Forget voting, or at least voting as you know it. Forget nobles, forget parliaments, and for sure forget fucking shit like the Corporate Court. Spikes don't have any of that shit and don't want it. Best way you can look at it is old style tribal government split with a bunch of overlapping but separate military chains of command. Yeah, there's voting, but you have to prove you are worth shit to have a vote, and the average turian never votes directly on the leaders of the race, or even the people who do vote on that.

The spikes government is formally called the Hierarchical Service of the People. On paper and in practice, every single turian from the age of twenty on up is a member of both the government and the military until death. Keep that shit in mind, bossman. All of them. The turian economy has businesses, but almost all of them have links to the military, or are supported by the military, or support the military, and the government is just a framework to make the military more efficient and to make sure the turians do a good job.

The biggest pieces of the government are pretty easy to lay out, the three claws – the army and navy command, the military support command, and the civilian oversight command. The last is basically the meritocracy, if you couldn't scan that on your own. These pieces are what make up not just the government, but … well, shit, pretty much fucking everything about the Hierarchy. It's the economy, the fucking schools, the meritocracy, the guys doing police works, the fuckers who operate the spaceport, the people who deal with the sewage, everything.

Keep it in mind, bossman. The government and the military are wrapped around each other and it's involved in literally everything. The only kind of war spikes get is total war. Their government is built around making sure they can do it.

Government : Wards, Districts, and Colonies, Colonial Clusters, Family Holdings and Clan Holdings and other Bullshit

These are the basic chunks of turian real estate. There were once, I guess, spike nations, but they all got blown the fuck up in the Burning. Also, tell Trelly that asking openly about the Burning is a really stupid idea. They don't like talking about it.

The basic structure of the Hierarchy is fifteen colonial clusters that surround Palaven (and the handful of small chunks of Family and Clan shit that surround Palaven, more on that later). A cluster is formed of anywhere from fifteen to eighty something colony worlds and start-ups. This can also include habitats, mining stations, and the like, but those aren't considered 'colonies'. They are basically treated like districts attached to the nearest colony.

Every colony is broken down into districts (literally, 'divided by claws of bitterness') and wards (literally, 'nests of home and hearth).

A ward is basically a town or city, or small group of settlements. Anywhere from two to six of them make up a District. Most colony worlds have five districts, just like Palaven does. Wards are where most turians focus their attention. They have a feeling for their colonies, for their districts, but the ward is home to them.

Think district as 'state' like in the old US or 'province' in Europe and you get the idea. Bigger focus, bigger shit happening. All of this leads to the colony level. Colonies are grouped into clusters. In theory, the fifteen clusters plus Palaven equal the Hierarchy.

Ta fucking da. No, I'm not listing the fucking clusters. It's a goddamned report, not an atlas.

Of course, the spikes can't be that simple. Big Families and Clans usually own a lot of property, and they come in on the District level in most cases. Smaller families dominate wards, and some of them group together in these things called Congrexes that basically act like a bigger Clan or Family owning a district. More on that shit later.

The way the whole thing is supposed to work is simple. Wards select Autarchs by direct voting, with a simple majority. All the Ward Autarchs in a District select a District Autarch in the same way, simple majority. These guys in turn all gather together with the Families and Clans on that colony to select a Colony Primarch. Again, it's just simple majorities at this stage of the game, nothing super serious. Yet.

Colony Primarchs meet and argue over which one of them is the most valorous, baddest, whatever, and select one of their number to be the Cluster Primarch. Meanwhile, all the Families and Clans in the cluster select a Cluster Autarch, who advises the Cluster Primarch. This is where shit turns nasty and colonies blow the fuck up, because a lot of times colonies won't agree on who should be running the rest of them, and the meetings turn into goddamned brawls. Sometimes the delegates fight it out with axes and singing, other times they have contests, and sometimes, well, it just turns into a fucking brawl.

They usually get drunk as fuck during this mess too, which makes it a great time to not be anywhere near but also great entertainment to watch as totally shitfaced turians try to make a speech. Why can't our government do shit like this?

Every decade or so, the Cluster Primarchs all meet at Palaven. The people of Palaven vote different – given that Palaven is so fucked up ecologically, everyone who could get the fuck away did, and the ones left on the planet are the ones who have the money and influence to buy up housing and shielding to survive. Shockingly, that means most of the population of Palaven is Families and Clans.

So Palaven basically has a huge goddamned mess of Chieftains from each Clan and Autarchs Family leaders meeting in this big ass circle-jerk of a voting process. They go through all the Cluster Primarchs assembled and pick the top three, based on the populations of the Clusters and the relative badassery of the guys in question. Finally, they pick one of their own Primarchs to represent Palaven.

The Primarchs brag about who has the biggest dick, how badass they are, how many krogan they've killed with a single shot, how many chicks they've banged, all that shit. Their Autarchs go around the Palaven Chieftains and Autarchs, trying to sway opinions to their guy and away from the others. Given that no one from Palaven really wants to bow down to some other cocksucker from Palaven, ninety percent of the time the Primarch chosen is from off-world.

Then everyone votes again on who would be the bestest Primarch – all the Cluster Primarchs get a vote, so do the Autarchs, so do the Praetors (more on them later) and then the Palaven Chieftains and Autarchs.

If at least half of the group agrees on one Primarch, he becomes the High Primarch and leads the entire race. If, on the other hand, the vote is split with no one in the lead, the four wannabes square off in ritual combat and literally duke it the fuck out, unarmed and going for submission. The Primarchs are supposed to be careful not to kill each other in this fight, but it has happened a few times in the past.

Whoever is the last one standing gets the office – if no one makes it, they start the entire bullshit over again. The rest are then sorted out by their relative rank in the meritocracy, military rank, and general badassery.

The current guy, Primarch Fedorian, has lost the past three voting rounds, but he's eight and a half fucking feet tall and is a bodybuilder and martial artist. The last time it went to the claws, seven years back, he literally clawed one guy's arm right off and beat the other two down with a single punch to each, hitting one guy so hard his plates splintered and put out the guy's eye.

That means, yeah, he's been beating his way up the leader of his people for the past three fucking decades. Even though most of the Clusters hate the guy, everyone grudgingly admits he's not going anywhere unless you hit him with an orbital bombardment. It doesn't hurt that he is the first Praetor to become a Primarch in the past thousand fucking years.

Primarchs, Autarchs, Chieftains, and Praetors and Assorted Badasses

So, the basic figure in turian government is the Primarch. A Primarch is basically a boss, dominant fuckers who don't take shit off anyone. You have to get pretty damned far up the military (and thus the meritocracy) to become a Primarch – basically the equivalent of a rear admiral or major of marines.

Given the retardedly huge size of the turian military, they have a LOT of fucking guys at that rank, but it's still a position worth respect. As I said before, big Primarchs are selected based on voting from groups of little Primarchs, who are in turn selected by Autarchs.

A Primarch is...fuck. A lot of things. It's hard to explain until you've gotten up in one of their goddamned rallies to make it all fit. It's like the quarterback, mixed with a rock star, mixed with a movie star. And yet it's different. The Primarch is the very definition of the alpha male, the biggest dog in the fight. None of them are like human politicians, stuffy fuckers in a suit with some slick talk. They have to be impressive and inspiring, lead by example and by sheer balls, in order for turians to follow them.

A Colony Primarch is a hard-core baller, no doubt. Turian bitches throw themselves at them, turian businesses love giving them jobs, and turian military units fight harder when their Primarch is around. They aren't much like politicians at that level, more like a mix of local celebrity, loud-mouth activist and street preacher – they don't govern the colony so much as inspire it. A lot of the details are instead handled by the ward and district Autarchs.

A Cluster Primarch, on the other hand, is the very definition of a no-good bastard. Most of them don't wear face-paint so they don't piss off other colonies in their cluster, but that means they don't really represent the colony the way a Colonial does. Cluster Primarchs try to be everything to everyone by doing lots of brave (and fucking stupid) shit, by making lots of boring ass speeches and by listening to the Colonial Primarchs.

They have a hard job, given that they can't connect as well to their subjects, and so they have to do a lot of work in actually trying to make sure they do the best they can to address the issues in their cluster. In recent years, a lot of these guys are just compromise candidates, and these days half of them are reluctant to go to Palaven for the primary selection because Fedorian will beat their asses into paste and they know it.

Autarchs are like mini-Primarchs, but with some differences. For one, the meritocracy requirements to be one is a little lower, as are the military rank requirements, more like a colonel or commander. Second, Autarchs have a different vibe than Primarchs, more administrative and I guess , uh, like Senators and shit. They aren't pencil-neck losers – just less in-your-face badass than a Primarch.

Again, spikes are screwy, and I'm doing my best to pick words that get across the closest humans come to this – human senators don't hold open-air arenas to beat the shit out of political opponents to demonstrate how badass they are. I'd pay good money to see that, come to think of it. It'd be great fun to see one of those corn-fed Eden Prime types choke the shit out of some of those lisping autistic assholes from Mars.

Anyway, Autarchs are also involved in writing laws, coming up with regulations and procedures, and shit like that. They do most of the hard admin work, especially in terms of local governance and peacekeeping at the ward or district level, whereas Primarchs just make decisions and puff up their chest a lot. Most Primarchs who aren't stupid will have at least one Autarch to advise them.

Autarchs can be elected, but the areas under control of some of the big Families have Autarchs picked by the Family in internal selections. Lots of arguments and fights over this shit, as an Autarch from the Families doesn't necessarily meet the meritocracy or military rank chops of a real Autarch, and gets less respect.

Chieftains are the leaders of the Clans, and basically act more like judges than anything else. The turians don't have a judicial system – the local clans Chieftains meet with the cops every week and decide the punishments for anyone breaking the laws. More complex stuff, like business law and anything to do with aliens, is done by a big meeting of all the Chieftains that happens every time a new Primarch is elected. Chieftains work with the local Autarchs in writing laws, as the Clans are big on remembering cultural bullshit and the laws of the past.

For the really complicated legal shit, they hire volus lawyers. Fuck.

Being a Chieftain is pretty heavy – the Chieftain has meritocracy chops right up there with a Primarch, but only requires military rank equal to an Autarch. Chieftains are selected by the Clans by – guess what – more ritualized combat, but also by a special set of Trials called the Trial of Memory, where they have to prove to their peers they are an 'exemplar of the Clan's Founder and his principles' or some shit. Chieftains are usually the most surly, grumpy and hard to deal with spikes you'll run across, some of them have forgotten it's not the goddamned Unification Wars anymore.

The last figure you hear tossed about is that of a Praetor. When it comes down to total badasses among the turians –

No no no, fuck that.

When it comes to total raging badasses in the goddamned galaxy, nothing tops a Praetor.

They get their rank by going completely the fuck through ALL the military ranks to the very highest possible, something like Admiral of the Red or Lord General. Keep in mind that most people clawing up the meritocracy will get promotions that skip a few military ranks here and there – not these guys, they want to earn every rank. Same thing with the meritocracy – they won't take more than one tier at a time.

They get tested into their final meritocracy tier by passing a special Trial called the Trial Supreme that's a double-dose mix of the ALL of the other trials, plus taking down a goddamned vakar unarmed and with no fucking armor.

First, go read about the trials. Imagine doing all of that shit in one day. Then, you fight a vakar.

Since Trelly skimped on the description, I'll give it justice. It's a mutated cross between a giant bear and a severely pissed off lion somebody tried to drown in eezo. More than ten feet long and almost seven feet tall, with plates six inches thick, claws two feet long and harder than iron, and a mouth that can bite a krogan in half. Spits poison up to thirty feet away. Oh, and it's fucking biotic, too. Uses them to increase it's speed. It has a ground running leap that can hit speeds of 110 MPH and over ninety feet.

There's footage of a pack of them tearing apart an armored column, batting a APC around like a cat playing with a oversized ball of yarn before peeling the thing open and eating everyone inside. More footage of three of them going after a turian reinforced patrol and killing half the spikes before they were brought down with lance cannon fire.

When the turians found a thresher maw on a planned colony, their answer was to dump twenty of these things at it, which literally tore it to bits. It's like the mascot of the turian people – it's on their money, lots of curse words, hell, even some families (Halvakar, Vakarian, Vakarenthus) named themselves after it.

Anyone who wants to be a Praetor fights one of these things.

In single combat.

On foot.

With his fucking claws and wearing not a piece of goddamned armor.

The only way to kill one without weapons or armor is … well, nuts. Somehow evade it's spring and leap, and then do one of your own. Dodge it's bites and claws, clamber up behind the thing, slash away at it's tendons through the plating to hamstring it, then cut at it's arteries and hope it bleeds out before it flings you away and tramples you into paste. A single hit will kill any turian trying it. Seen footage of that, instant blue chunky salsa.

Bossman, remember the fucked up failed hit on Admiral Tharaxis that I bitched so much about when I found out? The one where a single turian in plain clothes killed an entire strike team of six Shadow Cell assassins by himself with a kitchen knife while lecturing to his kids on the best way to kill humans, then went right back to cooking breakfast? The one who sent us the fucking skulls of said assassins, painted with his Clan colors, carved into drinking cups with a crate of turian brandy, and a note saying 'send more next time'?

Yeah, that was a Praetor.

No one, not Primarchs, not the Council, not asari matriarchs, not even fucking krogan give Praetors shit. There have been less than a hundred in the past ten thousand years, and everyone of the them ended up being the Founder of a Clan. They are the pinnacle of what it means to be a turian, an iron hard bastard who just refuses to fucking die. Praetors are all 'retired' and don't have to do a fucking thing in turian society, since they've proven they're the best, but they can walk into any level of government and just start barking orders and are instantly obeyed.

Praetors have the right to act like a Cluster Primarch if they like, or an Autarch if they want. They have a vote on who gets to be the High Primarch and the right to challenge the High Primarch at any time they feel like doing so if they think he's a fuckup. Except of course, for now, the High Primarch is also a Praetor.

The three living Praetors at the time (Fedorian, Tharaxis, and Invectus) didn't take part in the First Contact War because it was beneath them. In fact, Fedorian became Primarch because he got pissed at how stupid the Primarch at the time handled it, challenged him, broke all his arms and legs, and then tore his mandibles off.

Bossman, I like to consider myself pretty good. I tagged along on some pretty crazy bullshit, fought in some pretty badass places. Went up against some mean fuckers. Hell, took out an entire STG cell. I don't usually back away from any thing or any one.

But if you ever fucking order me to take on a Praetor, me and the Dog are going our separate ways. That's goddamned suicide.

Government : Ward, District, Colonial and Cluster day to day shit

On the Ward level, most governing is done via a mix of the Ward Autarch and the Ward military commander. They work together to make sure things get done – the Autarch walking around and checking things out, and then referring them to the commander to liaison with the appropriate military forces. Autarchs usually have a group of old retired turians they use as a sounding board, who will go out, get drunk, chase younger turian girls, and then figure out what new roads or schools or waterworks are needed. There's no real 'structure' here, most of the time it's run out of the Autarch's house or the main Ward military facility.

At the district level, it's more of the same, but local businesses usually get involved. Also, sometimes the local military commanders will use whatever the district needs as training evolutions or punishment details – lots of hard physical labor and dirty jobs get handled that way. Districts spent most of their time actually coordinating with other districts, to avoid replicating effort and shit like drawing too many resources from the military at the same time. There might or might not be at least one planning office used, but nine times out of ten the various Ward Autarchs and the District guys just meet at one of the vasthur (the free-for-all hangouts) and thrash out some plans before going to the military and laying it out.

The colonial level planning and governance actually has real offices and staff, mostly military turians involved in engineering and logistics. The colonial Primarch will usually let the Autarchs handle the details while he drums up support or rallies people to help out with planet-wide projects. Also at the colonial level, the colony chieftains will gather up and handle criminal cases, with an appeal to the Colony Primarch the only out from whatever punishment they hand out.

Planning at the Cluster level is a coordinated effort between professional planners in the Hierarchy, suggestions from the Primacy's Circle (actually, the Circle of Coordination within the Primacy Circle) and Cadre Circles, and weekly meetings via holocall between colony Primarchs and Autarchs.

If it seems like I'm skimming over details … I'm not, Bossman. Turians are really laid back in terms of governing. Most of it can be handled by the chain of command, and all the civilians really have to do is point out issues and shit gets done. There is almost no bureaucratic runarounds, and certainly no political bullshit except at the Cluster level. Remember, they tend to look at this as 'we're all in it together' and will work long stupid hours to make sure everything goes smoothly.

It sounds disorganized the way I describe it, but it isn't. The spikes are organized as shit by nature, and they know what needs to get done – the government at lower levels just puts all the lists and decisions together and sends them off at once for efficiency's sake.

Government : The Primacy Circle

Although they never really use them in their buildings or anything, turians sure do like circles. Better translation would be 'nesting-gather-rounds', but that's just stupid sounding.

The Primacy Circle is composed of the High Primarch, the highest rank of active duty generals and admirals, and the fifteen Primarchs of the Clusters. They act as the high military command, and everything in the fucking Hierarchy drips down from there. It isn't so much a Joint Chiefs of Staff type thing as a disaster and coordination type thing.

It is NOTHING like any kind of military command chain you expect to see. It's what Minsta would sniff at and call 'organic', what Trelly would smile at and call 'elegant', and what I spit at and call 'goddamned scary'.

Ever kick an ant hill? You get the idea.

The Primacy Circle has a lot of levels. The lowest are the Circles of Awareness, which is basically a pack of tactical officers and comms specialists, monitoring tons of turian scout ships all the fucking time. These are broken down by cluster and are overseen by military officers answering to the Cluster Primarch. This is how turians prepare for problems. They monitor the fucking colonies, the borders, the trade routes, everything. This also includes monitoring pretty much all communications in and out of the Hierarchy as well as the take from hordes of drones hovering over every Hierarchy world and every remote colony they have. Certain things tend to trigger VI's monitoring the drones and other intelligence to alert an operator, who brings the stuff to a commander, and to the Primarch. In some clusters, there are even little mini-circles that work up towards the bigger Circle of Awareness for that Cluster.

Above this are the Circles of Reaction. Admirals and their planning staffs make these circle up, each one commanding one of the many turian reaction fleets that are just waiting to smash the fuck out of something. When a Circle of Awareness kicks them an alert, they send out a turian force to isolate the issue and then direct all known information upwards. Again, this is on a Cluster Level. Usually there are ground forces, engineering staff, even transports assigned to each one of the Circles for a given cluster.

The Circle of Coordination is the next one up, which is lots of intelligence assets, ties to the Cadre Circle, and packs of turian officers trying to make sense of the piles of data and information coming in. When the Circle of Reaction sends out a force, the Hierarchy coordinates across clusters at this level. They begin moving troops, preparing supplies, getting fuel and ammo ready, sending out engineers to bring vehicles online. Reserve units are kicked off. The clusters all go into a state of readiness and district forces are briefed. This circle operates over the entire Hierarchy, given that it's job is basically to unify all the data and present it to the big boys.

The highest Circle is the Unbroken Circle. The High Primarch and the fifteen big boy cluster Primarchs sit on this Circle, along with the highest ranking generals and admirals. They coordinate large scale fleet and troop movements, and are also the main source of diplomatic … stuff … that happens with other races. Most of the Unbroken Circle's job is coordinating the turian fleet and the portion that serves the Council, and parceling out resources and ships to the colonies. The Circle never all assembles on Palaven, as it's most important task is to ensure there is always a High Primarch. If the current one is killed, they are all ranked in order of ascent, and the next one automatically steps up to take the place of the High Primarch until the next selection. Even if somehow the entire group gets wiped out at once, each has a designated backup to step into place if they all die. The backups are given one part of a code-phrase that the central command VI's use to authenticate them. There is no way to decapitate the Hierarchy.

That's why it's called the Unbroken Circle.

The High Primarch and his staff operates out of the Spire, a gigantic armed fortress thing on Palaven that makes the Citadel Tower look like a fucking treehouse. They basically planted a dreadnaught into the ground and built up a fortress around it – this thing has more guns and GTS batteries than it does fancy offices. It's surrounded by a damned city worth of administration buildings, tax offices, military planning facilities, and the biggest military base and garrison in the galaxy- six million turian soldiers protect this place.

The Primacy Circle isn't really about 'governing' so much as coordinating. There isn't a legislature – the High Primarch's staff reviews various laws from the Clusters and decides if they should apply to everyone or not. There's an entire section set aside for interactions with aliens, but it's more about (again) coordinating shit so that they present an even, calm front to anyone who isn't turian.

The High Primarch also picks out a handful of Chieftains from the biggest Clans and usually a couple of Palavanus types to form the Court of High Law. These guys are the closest to a real judiciary the turians have, reviewing cases from all over the Hierarchy. More importantly, when a turian is formally exiled and stripped of his ranks and standing in the meritocracy, these guys are the ones who look over all the evidence and decide what to do.

Other than that, there's not much to the Primacy Circle. Obviously, you have to be pretty far up the meritocracy to even work for the lowest parts of the Circle, and every turian considers working for the Primacy Circle a big honor.

There's one other piece of the Circle – the Roster of the Chosen. This is a list of the turians selected to serve as Citadel Councilor and Citadel Ambassador. The ambassador is always, without fail, a Palavanus Never changes.

The Roster is mostly made of retired, older Primarchs and the occasional general who can talk real good along with kicking ass. The Councilor is usually the hardest-ass bastard they can find who isn't already a Cluster Primarch or a Praetor. The one they got now, Sparatus? FCW vet, General who was one rank below Praetor, and had twenty years in the fucking Deathwatch.

Voting is done by simple majority on a slate of twenty candidates – one put forward by each Cluster Primarch, two by the Palavanus, and three by the High Primarch. The Primacy Circle votes on who is the best choice, then ranks the rest by a combination of meritocracy rank, military rank, and ability to communicate and interact with aliens. Usually, whoever the Palavanus pick is rejected.

The Councilor is in a funny position. On paper,he is nearly the equal of the High Primarch. In practice, he usually attempts to act much like a cluster Primarch does – pleasing as many as he can while trying to stop the grays and blues from fucking over the spikes any harder than they already are. He tends to 'take suggestions' from the High Primarch and 'follow the instructions' of the entire Circle.

Government : The Cadre Circle

The Cadre Circle is composed of the oversight for the various military functions that are split between military use and public civilian use. These are called Nests, and include Engineering, Transportation, Education, Civil Defense, Civil Security, and Land Management. These work hand in hand with turian businesses to provide essential services to the people while also allowing civilians to help out the military.

I can't find a good example of this thing in human culture, except maybe some shit like Disaster and

Emergency Command. It's more than just joint military-commercial bullshit, it's an entire command structure that organizes civilian efforts to support the military, military efforts to support the civilians, and often is a big part of ward and district governance.

The Cadre Circle is mostly run by non-combat senior officers and retired civilian versions of the same. They are broken down into ward-level, district level, colony level and cluster level sub-circles, each on focusing on the needs of that Nest for that area. Rather than relying on some kind of big fat logistics command center, the Cadre acts as a ... whatchamacallit, clearinghouse.

Heh, that's a good word. Trelly can probably explain it better, it works a lot what Minsta described the Asari Republic as doing, but with less sitting around and more doing shit.

Spikes in big biz can just requisition what they need directly if they're high up enough the meritocracy. A lot of turian business aren't even real companies, but rather distribution chains for smaller actual businesses – they just handle working with the Cadre Circles. Likewise, local military officers are tied into the Cadre when they need local labor or civilian support, which gets pushed out as a contractual request that many different businesses or individuals can chip in and help out with.

It's totally different than the way we do things. Compare.

For us, lets say a town needs a new dam because of flooding from a river. First some bastard had to get flooded out, then complain to his mayor. Then the mayor had to get surveys done by the city, wait for that to clear, do some kind of estimate of costs, run a campaign to raise bonds or however the fuck they pay for it, then bid the shit out to the lowest contractor, who will subcontract it out. Then work starts, maybe, and finally the dam is built months the fuck later.

Turians? They need a dam, they put in a request. An Autarch checks it isn't full of bullshit, they send out the request, bam. Work starts the next fucking day. On top of that, engineers go and build up the riverbanks so the shit doesn't just become a problem for the wards downstream. Costs are just absorbed by the military, mostly. This great for the local economy … but the taxes are a bitch.

Anyway, the Nests are as follows.

Engineering is the turian combat engineering group, which also handles heavy construction. Businesses often provide logistical and supply support – the military may build a new dam, but turian businesses will supply vehicles, cement, extra workers, that kind of thing. On a ward level they help people build their homes, run the hardware and repair stores, offer classes in home fortification. On a colony level they supervise businesses that build larger public works, and usually run the power grid. On a Cluster level, they are also in charge of water supplies, demolitions, and building new cities from scratch. The Engineering nest is also in charge of creating weapons and armor, and setting the standards for such.

Transportation maintains ground-car and mag-lift train lines, builds and operates airbases and spaceports, and regulates shipping. Businesses take up the more mundane aspects, like customs, vehicle production and the like, but there is all kind of back and forth between the civilian and military half, since all vehicles are military ones. The civilian ground-car most turian civilians use is a combat-capable scout car minus the heavy armor and weapons. This allows civilian militia to rapidly up-armor and have large amounts of light combat vehicles. On a ward and district level, they do most of the road building and also operate training pilots and drivers. On a Cluster Level, they coordinate and regulate shipbuilding codes. Transportation works closely with the navy on shipbuilding, and with the infantry in making gunships and armored vehicles.

Education runs the schools, which are really preparation for turian boot-camp and the military. Private civilian schools in some non-military technical applications work closely with them, as do the universities, to ensure unity of teachings and thought. The education department also runs what passes for turian psychiatric help, with some civilian assistance. Mind you, the turian idea of a shrink is a member of the opposite sex who will fight you, fuck you, then go out drinking with you and make you talk until you cry it all out. Education also works with the Cadre Circles on teaching turians the proper methods of determining if someone is ready for promotion, signs of stress that indicate a spike is in over his head, and shit like that.

The Civil Defense branch is mostly turian damage control engineers, firefighters, and some transportation elements. The turians keep mothballed mega-freighters on every colony world with enough capacity to evacuate at least half the population,without exception. The CD group guards and keeps these updated, as well as building local fire units and emergency shelters. They operate the meteorological services to predict weather and work with civilian units to create evac programs and haptic programming on educating the public on what to do in case of emergency. They are also in charge of coordinating the defense militias, which are more for evacuating civilians and stopping pirates than heavy fighting.

Civil Security is basically a thin veneer of military command over the turian Private Military Corporations. The only mercenaries that have contracts with CS is the Turian Division of the Blue Suns, the Turian Division of the merc units Valor Unyielding and Outcasts For the Cause, and oddly enough, Eclipse.

Bossman, I do not even want to think WHY the turians would hire crazy blue skanks under that lunatic bitch Sederis to do anything like police work. More than likely, they hire Eclipse to hunt down and smash rebellious colonial movements.

CS basically runs a two-tiered police system. The first tier, the varastim, are pretty much like human cops – they write speeding tickets, stop druggies, fight gangs, crack down on drug use, etc. C-SEC was modeled off of them, so their tactics are pretty cut and dry. These guys mostly work on the ward and district level, but occasionally do coordinated work inside a Cluster.

The other tier of the police, the creepy 'justice brigades', is what you get when Turians take a look at our Commissars and the asari Justicars and say to themselves 'I gotta get me some of that'. The thasvar are fucking terrifying in a way that actually makes the Black Hats and Red Skirts look fucking humane.

Thasvar are employed when turians commit acts of terrorism against the state, or when more skilled turian criminals – such as outcasts – that are beyond the power or reach of the military police to combat become a threat. They are not standing forces, they are recruited when a target is declared. Each one erases their name, severs contacts with their family, and paints themselves in hard whites and blacks. They use ritualized sets of older armor and special weapons that combine radioactive waste with chemically unstable compounds as ammo.

The thasvar use trained vakar and will hire the worst mercenary scum they can find to hound and track their targets. And then they send a message, by massacring the target and as many close relatives as they can find. They pull his ravaged corpse to pieces and skin him, draping the plating and hide over a rack and feeding everything else to the tame vakars.

They take this … broken skin thing and hang the it by the heels in front of the Spire, the center of government on Palaven, as a warning to others. If the target was a member of a Family, every direct (one separation, so brother, sister, wife, son, father, etc) is executed in the same fashion. If in a Clan, a number of randomly chosen sacrifices is made to suffer the same fate. If an outcast, the turians who threw the offender out of the meritocracy in the first place are congratulated for their good foresight – otherwise, if the criminal was still in the meritocracy, the last person to promote them is also executed and skinned.

Whoever the fuck showed the spikes a copy of the movie Predator should be slapped. Even batarians aren't that fucking hard, Bossman. I'll go ahead and say the Thasvar rarely have to act – as far as I know the last time they got involved in anything was over a century ago. A lot of them are gunning for Saren now, but that isn't much of a shock, now is it?

Finally, Land Management is how the turians handle real estate and property. When a colony is founded, the entire planet is owned by the military. It splits it up into districts first, usually auctioning them off to the highest bidder from Families and Clans. Once no one is interested in buying the rest, it sections the districts into wards and repeats this for smaller clans and families.

Once that is done, it splits the wards into urban areas and wilderness, and grants plots of land to any turian interested. The amount of land you get is dependent on your rank in the meritocracy, not by how rich you are. Turians who volunteer for colony duty get first crack at the land, then it slowly gets parceled out until the colony meets some kind of criteria. After that Land Management will sell land to new settlers or to Families (and rarely Clans) that come along later. This is a major source of colonial revenue.

Land Management also handles (along with engineering) building housing, apartments, and public parks. They manage wildlife and hunting areas, provide nature preserves and all that kind of shit, and are responsible for maintaining the Sha Titans.

Government : The Service Circle

The Service Circle is made up of groups of retired Primarchs and Autarchs, older Clan members, and big-shots of the community. There are Ward, District, and Cluster levels of the Circle, and these are the guys who run and evaluate the trials and promote or demote turians in the meritocracy. Their decisions are mostly final, although some can be reviewed later by the Court of High Law in the cases where they determine someone should be exiled.

The highest of the Service Circles, the Ascendant's Honor Circle, is made up entirely of older retired members of the Praetorian Reach (the highest rank of the meritocracy). Every five years, they pick out the turians that will form the Cluster level Circles. These those Cluster level circles pick out turians for the Colony level, who pick the District Circles, who pick the ward circles. Since each and every one of these circles has a different goddamned name, I'm not listing them all.

Kind of the reverse of Primarchs. Turians are backwards coming and going.

The Service circle isn't military exactly – it's only job is to administer the Trials and decide on whether or not turians are ready for more responsibility. But, on the other hand, given that the meritocracy is what makes or breaks an officer's career, a lot of times they work closely with the military command and even the Ward Primarchs to make sure they are looking at all the variables and shit.

Being chosen to sit on a Service Circle, even at the Ward Level , is pretty big shit. It means your superiors in the meritocracy think you exemplify what it means to be a spike. The flip side of this is that a spike's judgment had better be good – agreeing to promote turians who later fuck up make the Circle look pretty bad, and also ends up making many wonder if other turians promoted by that Circle are worth it.

Government : The Trials and other assorted mindfuckery

To ascend the meritocracy, one has to participate in various trials. There's four parts to this process, and all of them are in their own special way, very fucked up. The basic goal of all of this crap is to make sure turians who go up the meritocracy are doing three things. The other goal of the trials is to keep the turians so tied up in improving or proving themselves that they don't just get lazy and stop working.

Anyway, the goals are simple. First, they check the turians who apply for judgment. They have to have the judgment to know when they are ready to move up, and to be able to realistically asses their own abilities. Several of the most challenging trials are based on this concept.

Second, they are a check that applicants can actually not only do what they say they can, but have proof and other turians who can point to evidence of this. Even the most badass turian won't ascend if he does all his deeds in the darkness, or fails to be enough of the bigger community that he can't get enough people to vouch for him.

Finally, maybe most important to the spikes, that the turian going up for promotion is actually ready for more responsibility, especially over others, and not just good at raw skills. This is more determined during the decision than in the challenge, but some of the trials emphasize this as well.

The parts are the Calling, the Testimony, the Challenge, and the Decision. Three of these parts are the same for every Trial, but the Challenge has different things that are looked at based on the tier one is in or attempting to move to. Lower tiers and less important jobs get easier Trials, the higher you go and the more important you are, the more stern the tests get. At the highest ranks, they pretty much try to mindfuck you into the ground.

The Calling is when a superior turian, usually one higher in the meritocracy, a civilian boss, the local Autarch, or a superior military officer contacts the local Service Circle to recommend a promotion up the meritocracy. For spikes, this is nerve-racking shit. You can't ascend up the meritocracy if you don't regularly suggest other turians for promotion, but if you fuck up in your recommendations, that hurts your chances. The Service Circle will pull the service records and military records of the turian in question and check them for things that would disallow them to ascend.

Assuming they find nothing (and you'd have to be really fucking stupid to recommend a turian who had enough black marks on his file to fail even at the Calling), the turian is summoned to the local Service Circle for the formal ceremonial Testing. This phase, called the Testimony, allows the person trying to get promoted a chance to bring along his parents, his bondmate, and four of his friends, fellow soldiers, or co-workers. The turian candidate lists off his achievements and acts since the last promotion he got, and his witnesses list off the reasons why he is ready for promotion. (Or in some cases, not ready.)

This is open to the public, and anyone who thinks the turian is really ready or really not ready should speak up at this time. Being denied in the Testimony is not uncommon, and spikes don't see it as a bad thing. They can even decline to be promoted if they truly don't think they are ready, which is seen as very mature. Turians who have been promoted before also have to show they are doing their part to evaluate and suggest others for promotion, or they come off as anti-social dicks and are probably shot down.

Assuming the Service Circle likes what they hear, a turian engages in one of eight tests of his values, known as a Trial of Challenge. Each challenge tests a turian's aspects in one of the virtues or elements of either turian culture or turian lifestyle. As Trelly said earlier, a weaker turian gets a weaker Trial, and the more strict the Trial, the more likely they are to get promoted at the end of it – sometimes more than one tier, and sometimes an entire Reach. The Trial selected is up to the Circle, and some Circles are harder to get promoted in than others.

Normally, I wouldn't list these things out. But they're so important to understanding how the turian mind works, I think you should look them over. Plus, a turian who has gone through certain Trials is probably in a lot of confusion, and this can give insight into who our operatives go after.

Plus, you can see for yourself how messed up turian culture is. Trelly downplayed the crazy and the retarded parts, as usual. You gotta remind her that you can't hang in the Dog if you aren't gonna be a hater.

In order from the easiest to the hardest, the trials are:

Merit: the trial of merit is basically just a damned paperwork review, where the service circle looks at what the turian in question has accomplished compared to his co-workers and peers. A turian who makes good solid choices, acts in the proper turian fashion, and works to ensure he is in step with his fellows will easily pass this trial. Rebels and those who repeatedly fuck up must answer questions as to how their actions demonstrate actual merit. A Trial of Merit is pretty common in lower tiers of the meritocracy, and is big with supervisory types in the civilian sector. It's rare the higher one goes except for turians who act in roles that don't let them shine elsewhere.

Service: the trial of service is similar to the trial of Merit, but a turian must actually show his shit off – letting the Circle see skills he has learned. A turian cook must make a meal, a soldier must show how badass marksmanship, a turian medic must show he can heal.. During the Trial, the Service Circle may change up the details, or make the turian do the job with any kind of fucked up limits – wrong tools, no materials, or things like that. Service trials are common for practical types who can show their jobs and how good they are pretty easily, and are easily the most used type of trial.

Emotion: the trial of Emotion is a test of how a spike reacts to ...well, bad shit happening. It is almost the same as a Trial of Service, except that while they're trying to do their thing, one of the Witnesses they brought along gets the shit beaten out of them – or worse. A turian who can ignore this kind of crap, especially to their mate, is seen as a bad motherfucker, while those who can't are punks and thrown the fuck out. This mind-screwy Trial isn't used very often, and sometimes it ends in a turian going apeshit and getting killed. As a result, it's only used nowadays on those spikes who are overseeing dangerous materials or holding positions that would make blackmail a serious threat against them. A witness who is chosen can say "I ain't doing that shit", but this is the same as saying they have fuck-all confidence in whoever they're a witness for and making them fail.

Sacrifice : The most fucked up of the tests, in my opinion. Basically, the criteria here is the turian has to sacrifice something important. Sometimes (for soldiers) they have to get a limb cut off and replaced with cyberware. Businessmen have to give up property or business assets. An Autarch might be required to surrender his position to a rival. A general might be asked to step down from command and retire. If they really want to fuck with a spike, they'll order him to do something really messed up – stab his mate, or give up his kids.

The test is goddamned sick, and not just because of what they make the spikes do. A turian has to decide if the sacrifice asked for is proper, or improper, based on why they are being told to sacrifice. If they agree to it, they have to lose or give up whatever they agreed to, and only then are told if they chose correctly or not. And if they chose incorrectly, well, they fail. If they refuse, they have to explain why, and if they don't explain correctly, they fail. Very few positions require this kind of goddamned testing but it also can punt a spike up an entire raft of tiers, rather than just one, and is used mostly the Deathwatch and the like. It never comes up in lower tiers at all.

Honor : This is a harder if less crazy test, a test of a bunch of old turian chieftains and the like interrogating the applicant on for a given action, what would be the most honorable course of action. It's tricky because the chieftains rarely give the proper answer, and the turian has to pick the most honorable of the choices, which is almost never very clear. Most honor trials last for hours, and are unique in that there is a lot of back and forth arguing, and that the Witnesses can offer advice to the applicant. Honor trials are very common for soldiers and anyone who has to deal with aliens a lot.

Valor: A pretty brutal physical test of how badass a turian is, this one is just straight out combat against a superior chosen by the Circle. It's mostly used to eliminate turians they feel are pretty much unworthy to ascend, as the spikes that get picked to fight the contestant are usually pretty nasty customers. If they really hate the guy, they put him up against a Praetor. However, the test is of valor, not victory – if the spike being tested puts up a hell of a fight and never backs down, they may promote him anyway.

Mind: A hard and rare test, this is usually given to Primarch and Autarchs trying to go further up the Meritocracy. A bunch of decisions and choices they've made are picked apart by the Circle, and the turian has to come up with a rationale of why he made those choices that is consistent among all of them. A tough-and-tumble Primarch who usually resorts to violence and military action rather than tradition and appeals to duty, for example, will have to explain why he does so and what that says about his ability to truly represent the values of the turian people. This is a psychological mindfuck for most turians, since they tend to own all their decisions impulsively and don't waste much time on self reflection or any shit like that.

Duty: The most trying of the tests, and it hasn't been done in quite a while – Fedorian was the last to do so. The trial of duty basically has several high tier turian elders, Praetors and Primarchs all dissect an entire turian's life from the time he entered the military to the present. Every choice and decision is challenged, every sacrifice questioned, and the turian's ideals of honor, valor and service are turned upside down. Witnesses are forced to withdraw and the applicant has to be able to answer every query clearly and with a good understanding. Any hesitation or an answer that all present don't agree with is cause for failure. More than one turian can't take the bombardment of judgment questions and suggestions that he is a disgrace to the race and ends up failing.

Only a few dozen have ever taken it, and only two turians have ever passed, Primarch Fedorian and the outcast Darenthis The consequences of failure of this Test are greater than any of the rest – if the spike is declared to have failed, he is immediately executed. This sort of Trial is only used in a few situations – when a turian has been heavily demoted within the Hierarchy and is attempting to ascend again, when a long-time outcast is trying to rejoin turian society, or when a refusal of a lower Circle's decision has been made.

After the Challenge is completed, the Decision is made. The members of the Circle talk it over and then explain to the turian in question if he passed or failed, and why. Assuming he succeeds, the name-chops of his witnesses get added to his rank sash and the Circle enters his new tier into the Hierarchy's computers.

Failures, on the other hand, are often seen as fucking stupid, arrogant, or just flat out not ready. It tends to shame the witnesses, and more than that, the guy who suggested he was ready will often be challenged by inferiors or face a really hard Trial to make sure that the turian is not also a fuckup.

In case of a failure caused by lack of Witnesses or inability to perform a Trial, it's over. If the turian had witnesses backing him and managed to pass his Trial but the Circle still doesn't think he's ready, though, there are two options. The first and most common is to accept the judgment of the Circle. After all, for most turians, the guys on the Circle are the chosen judges of what it means to be a good or bad turian. Most will attempt to improve themselves and take whatever criticism or failure they made to heart and work to fix those.

On occasion, though, especially after trials of Valor where the contestant loses, they have the chance to question the decision of the Circle. This is basically akin to pissing in a turian's face, and doing so moves the Trials up to the next level of Circles (so from a Ward to a District Circle) and invokes a Trial of Duty.

If a turian actually succeeds at this challenge, his status in the meritocracy shoots way up. He may only advance a single tier, but from then on he will get much easier Trials – he's already done the hardest shit there is to do.

Fedorian himself pulled this shit and won, which is one reason he's such a feared Primarch. The Circle that made the original judgment is all fired and replaced, and most of them demoted in the meritocracy for such an egregious mistake. On the other hand, if the applicant fails, they get executed for their arrogant temerity.

Government : Hierarchy Military Ranks

The rank system is composed of the most bewildering kinds of bullshit you have ever seen. Some ranks are restricted to Families, one line requires you to get demoted before you get promoted again, and a few ranks are only available to turians in disgrace. There's no fucking point in listing out all the ranks. They have seven different kinds of what would call a corporal, based if he's a combatant or non-combatant, in or out of a Family, from the Colonies or Palaven, and other kinds of shit. Half the ranks don't have any clean English translations, either.

First High Claw Leader sounds pretty badass, but it's just a fucking sergeant. A Lesser Black Fang sounds kinda weak, but it's what they call a rear admiral.

There's no difference in the actual rank values between the navy and army in terms of actual authority, except at the very top, even if the names are very different and confusing. The only functional differences is that turians are evaluated in the Common Trainings (their version of boot-camp) what branch of the military would suit them best, and are trained in those things constantly as they rise. Once they hit the top of the chain of military ranks, then and only then do the ranks shift.

Likewise, there are no officer academies really. Every turian is expected to rise from the bottom of the ranks to the very top. The more important clans and families are just expected to do it a lot fucking faster. There are lots of opportunities for skilled soldiers to have special training, go into special programs and even learn whole new skill sets, but these are more based on potential skill than rank.

The reason this is in the government and not the military section is that lots of the ranks require civil service or duties along with military service. Plus, some are tied into the meritocracy.

The ranks can be broken down very roughly into three groups: the Ranks of Duty, the Ranks of Honor, and the Ranks of Valor. Military rank doesn't guarantee promotion up the meritocracy, but without certain levels of military rank you can't go further up the meritocracy at certain points.

Basically, the ranks can be looked at by what their tier is called. The ranks of Duty are just that, the ranks all turians go through in their basic twenty year commitment to the Hierarchy. The Ranks of Honor are what most Clans and Families ascend to, since they feel they owe more service to the Hierarchy. And the Ranks of Valor are only reached by those who have proven themselves both in terms of military skill and bravery, and in the meritocracy.

Think of the ranks of duty as fodder. Talons and Claws are roughly like privates and corporals, while Strike Leaders are like sergeants and chiefs. Keep in mind that anyone beyond a goddamned talon can rain hell down on your head with a single call back to military command for combat backup. Most do the scut work – cleaning, basic patrols,low level operation. Turians graduate from boot-camp at Talon Second, and are expected to move up to Senior Talon within two years. Those who don't meet the requirements will never be able to ascend further up the meritocracy no matter how good they are at their later jobs.

Like everything else about the spikes, their use of numbers is backassward from ours. In our navy, a petty officer third class is below a petty officer first class. Theirs is reversed.

The lower ranks of Honor, dominated by Legates and Tribunes are more professional soldiers, although again, not really proper officers. They are more like warrant officers mixed with certain civic and public responsibilities, which is why the human translations come out with fancy ass Roman titles. The Ranks of Honor are where the bulk of climbing the meritocracy is done by the soldiers, and each one is expected to build and honor the Hierarchy both off and on the battlefield. Promotion through these ranks is a lot slower, and it's where large numbers of lives are entrusted to the turian in question. It's also the first time a turian can get out of the turian military before their twenty year commitment if they can get here fast enough.

The higher ranks of Honor, including Vigilants and Centurions, are similar to a junior officer cadre, with the added ugly bonus that, unlike most human officers, these bastards have a good grasp on combat and will fuck your ass up in a fight. Most of these guys have twenty plus years in the military, and all of them have extensive civil service as well. A lot of turians in recent years have started the trend of identifying Vigilants as 'lieutenant' and Centurion as 'captain', but these can be very misleading – some Centurions command barely more than a few squads, others are literally in charge of millions of turian infantry. The upper ranks are what is generally required for top government services, such as being an Autarch or Chieftain.

The Ranks of Valor are definitely command ranks, at least what we'd think of more like a major, but then again, given the sheer size of the spikes army, maybe not. Each rank earned here can take years to get, and are increasingly harder to earn, as you have to also ascend the meritocracy to get promoted , rather than getting promoted to ascend the meritocracy. You have to get this far in order to be a Primarch.

Most of the ranks are those of the Triarch and Duarch, but the highest ranks, of general and admiral, are known as the Praetorium. Being good enough to enter the ranks of the Praetorium is seen as a signal honor, since they lead the Hierarchy in war.

The ultimate rank, that of Praetor Superior, is for someone who has devoted their entire life in direct service to the Hierarchy military. I told Trelly this was like a warrant officer, but that's because I'm thinking of the weird deference warrants get from the military, like a warrant cussing out an admiral or Senator. I already described what these guys do and are like, so just keep in mind they are higher ranking than our Lord Generals or Admirals of the Red in turian terms.

Government : Hierarchy Meritocracy Reaches

There are twenty seven ranks in the meritocracy. The first two don't really mean shit, because you get one for being goddamned born as a turian and the other for being able to say a fucking oath.

Again, I'm not listing them all out. There's lists on the extranet for that shit, and knowing that the fourteenth tier is of a secondary supplicant tells you jackshit about what it really means. The tiers can be broken down into what they call the Reaches, and that is what I will cover.

Keep in mind, these are translations from the turian to English – I don't give a shit about the names in lowspeak and neither do you, so I'm not listing that shit out. Also keep in mind that most turian civilian operations, civilian support businesses, and the like will require certain positions in the meritocracy. For example, no turian CEO would ever be less than a Supplicant, because you aren't seen as responsible enough to manage large numbers of turians until that point. Rising through the meritocracy proves your skills and rights to manage or participate in various civilian tasks under the military's oversight.

Most of this is just cut and paste shit from the turian constitution. Don't get all excited just because I stop cussin'.

Citizen Reach : the ranks of citizens are mostly formalities. They have no real requirements besides passing the very first Trial and getting past boot-camp Very few turians (or the Broken, as Trelly calls them) fail to move on past the citizen rank. There's five ranks in the Citizen rank, and it gives you the basic rights – travel, legal representation, military service, owning property, voting. There is no series of Trials for the Citizen rank except the Trial of Rectitude, where a turian takes an oath to the service to the Hierarchy and turian people. Advancement is just achieved by hitting certain things – reaching a certain rank in the military, being twenty years old, etc.

Militant Reach: the militants are those who have proudly served at least one twenty year term in the military and have moved on. This allows turians to get involved with and start businesses, work for the civilian government sector, take a last name, challenge superiors, take a mate in formal handfasting, and to supervise Trials for Citizens. It's the first ranks where Trials start, and it is mostly used to make sure turians mature before being handed more responsibility and learn to own their decisions.

Supplicant Reach: the supplicants are those turians who have demonstrated both competence in matters of assisting the Hierarchy and a willingness to grow turian power through service and sacrifice. They allow you to sponsor other turians for promotion, owning land other than that which you live on, employing large numbers of turians, trade licenses, travel outside of the Hierarchy without military visas, and to become an Autarch.

Determinor Reach: This rank is where the serious shit starts. It's one of the ranks where you start needing military rank to go up the meritocracy again. It allows one to join a Clan or marry into an existing Family, to join special forces like the Deathwatch, or to become a Chieftain. It also allows you to be considered for foreign service (ambassadors and such shit) and to operate out of the Hierarchy for long periods of time.

Servitor Reach: the highest most turians get in the meritocracy, the rank of Servitor is someone who has consistently and repeatedly put the Hierarchy and the turian people before their own needs, while at the same time managing to demonstrate repeated good judgment in selecting other turians for promotion and demonstrating no bad judgments. It is the rank at which you can be named a Primarch, or to serve in any of the command circles as an adviser. It's also the rank where turians can call upon military resources for use in their own business operations without getting approval. The trials of this rank are usually pretty fucking brutal.

Ascendant Reach: The highest tiers of the meritocracy. Very few turians have the skill, guts, sheer stupid endurance, and brains to get this far. You have to get to this rank to be a high-ranking admiral or general, as well as to use large-scale military resources like docks and employing the police. It also covers the right to move to Palaven, or to found a Family of your own. The trials of the Ascendant are almost always nasty, with the Trial of Sublimation (aka fighting a goddamned vakar) required to ascend to the rank of Praetor.

Government : Colonial Outliers, Family Holdings , Clan Holdings, and other minor bullshit

Outside of the Clusters, there's a couple of special holding types that don't really participate in governance. The first is the Settlement Areas, where new turian colonies are being setup. Right now there aren't any, but in the past a new Cluster was formed kind of piecemeal, similar to how it's handled on a smaller level by Land Management.

These proto-clusters were managed by a small group of Autarchs and a Primarch elected by the colonists. They don't vote and aren't full citizens, with no circles or any chance at the meritocracy – they are supposed to focus on survival and getting things going. When the cluster is ready for settlement, the bigshot Ascendant's Honor Circle, comes in and does a mass Trial of Service on everyone who helped out and ranks them from Primarch down to First Militant based on how much work they did and how hard they busted their asses during the setup.

There has been a lot of talk about cutting a chunk out of the Attican and making it a new Settlement Area, but the turians aren't quite ready to pull the trigger on that shit, since it would put them right next door to both the majority of Eclipse territory and the main pirate and raiding routes from Omega. That's just asking to be raped at both ends.

The very biggest Clans and Families have a single colony world they call 'home' besides Palaven. These worlds are fairly small colonies in terms of population, and are more like vacation homes than anything else. They don't participate in governance or elections at all, and the Families and Clans pretty much run their own little Service Circles. The downside to that is a Clan-borne or Family-borne, someone who never steps off these planets, is not really treated with the respect someone who's done the real meritocracy would get. Additionally, this fake-ass shit doesn't go higher than the Supplicant Reach, so it's not like the fucks can be anything but local Autarchs anyway.

Before the Unification Wars, almost two thirds of the turian space was controlled by the Clans and a good fifth of the rest by the Families, and the decisions of the meritocracy under Clan control was the equal to that of the Service Circle. The Hierarchy stood back and let them beat the shit out of each other, until today barely a percent of turian worlds are run this way, and only the very biggest Clans and Families can claim a world of their own. It didn't really 'unify' the Clusters or colonies, but it did tear the power out of the hands of the Clans.

Congrexes, or wards and districts dominated by the Clans or Families, aren't quite the same. They follow all the rules and meritocracy of the main colony.

Government : the Palavanus Family/Clan Thing

The Palavanus used to be the biggest cheese of all. The goddamned homeworld is named for them, for fucks sake. The entire concept of the Hierarchy, of all turians being one pack, is something they came up with first. They designed the meritocracy. They BUILT the entire shit you just read. They ruled for … shit, what, ten thousand years? Got deposed and then came back to rule for another ten thousand before they literally got bored?

Turians have never forgotten that the first time the Palavanus were removed from power, the Valluvian Priests fell and the Facinus nearly got everyone killed. Or that the second time they let the rulership of the turian's go, the idiots that came after them ended up bringing about the Burning. A lot of turians are somewhat upset that the Palavanus still aren't running things, and worry that the reason the Hierarchy has been fucked over by the asari and the salarians so hard is because they are busy fiddling with science and shit instead of leading.

Kind of a sullen, grumpy disappointment. The general attitude of turians toward the Palavanus is … uhuh. Omni-tool says I should say 'multi-layered'. More like multi-fucked, I think. I'm sure Trelly has lots of reasons why, but you ask the spike on the street and it's simple – no one understands the fuckers. Most turians know the Palavanus aren't quite right in the head (at least in turian terms, which probably means they're fairly fucking sane. Fucking spikes.) Yet at the same time, they have ultimate faith in them. A Palavanus gives you advice, you do it without question.

The Primarchs and Clans are always nervous about the Palavanus. On the one hand, the fact that they haven't bothered to try to run shit since they created the Hierarchy means that they most likely don't intend to rule again, and their advice and guidance has saved the Hierarchy more than once. So the Primarchs like having them around.

The flip side of that is the Primarchs know the Palavanus only really have to stretch their hand out and display the crown of old Ulvu and the turians will follow. The old stories were full of how bat-shit crazy and hardcore the Palavanus were – they literally did not fear anything at all. While never really chest-beating warriors, when it came down to a throw-down they would dish out way more hurt than their enemies could put back on them. No Primarch could match the level of fucking psycho that the Palavanus could back in the day.

For now, the Palavanus are like an entire different … caste, or culture, or some shit. In a way, they are like old Earth royalty used to be before the fucking Manswells resurrected the shit. Irrelevant in the day-to-day. They don't ever do much besides science shit, medical stuff, chat with aliens, run the spirit houses, and hang out offering advice.

A drunk turian once told me everyone (by everyone, guess he meant the spikes) figured the Palavanus were waiting for something, but no one knew what. That scares the spikes, and whatever scares turians should be something the Dog has a very close look-see at, Bossman.

The turians see the Palavanus as semi-holy (sort of, it's fucking complicated). A lot of Palavanus end up acting as spirit hunters, and they operate more than half of the larger spirit houses in the entire Hierarchy. The Palavanus are also seen as good advisers. Most Clusters have a tiny little tower thing on the capital world called the Reference. One or two older Palavanus types will live in these towers and advise the Primarchs, Autarchs, pretty much anyone.

The bulk of the Family doesn't interact much with the rest of the Hierarchy. In fact, the entire Family doesn't participate in the meritocracy at all, and they all occupy a special rank in the military of 'Adviser to the People'. Most of them are scientists, researchers, doctors, and work with aliens anyway, so this is no big loss to most turians. A lot of them never even enter the military, technically, although they have some kind of rank just so they can interact with some public services when off their world. One or two more adventuresome types have lead various military units on scientific expeditions, but this is very rare.

Most of them live on their little world of Trentus, which is a moon of one of the gas giants in the same star system as Palaven. The ones who don't – like the ones who work in spirit houses, References, and the universities and hospitals (half of the staff there are Palavanus) – all live in heavily defended walled villas set into mountain ranges. They don't associate with or interact with other turians outside of the public venues they serve in.

The long and short of it is that the Palavanus don't fit most of the rules. Palavanus do not vote. They don't own property off of their own world, nor do they run businesses within the Hierarchy (although they run a fuckton outside of it, and pay a tax rate higher than any other turians). They do not educate their own kids in the public military schools, and they don't mingle with other turians. They don't make much money from their jobs, so the Hierarchy pays the entire Family a lump sum every year. For what, who the fuck knows.

Even Trentus doesn't follow the damned rules. Trentus is managed by Palavanus overseer types called Pretarchs, which are like Autarchs but outside the meritocracy. A turian fleet and six entire fucking companies of the Blackwatch guard this place pretty tightly.

The only real power the Palavanus show is rarely used. Every once in a looong fucking while, the Primacy Circle has some real hard shit to deal with, and they issue what's called an Imperatorial Summons. That's a pretty loaded word, since the Imperatorium fell thousands of years ago.

Are the fucking birds on goddamned vacation or something? Are the Primarch's just kinda watching shit for the Palavanus while they fuck around with chemistry and astronomy?

Anyway, when this summons goes out, pretty much the entire Family meets on Trentus for some kind of hush-hush discussion. They can commandeer any ship to get there, and they all put on white robes and take a vow of silence for the trip. When they arrive, they have a big party, and then huddle up inside their main estates on Trentus for ten days. When the time is up, five of them come out and go to Palaven to advise the Primarchs. These five are called the Council of Woe.

I really, really hate turian melodrama.

The Council of Woe ends up looking exactly what the fuck you'd expect with a name like that, like a pack of Saturday morning cartoon villains. They paint their faces, first with turian blood (yuck), then with a layer of dark brown (a color meaning vengeance) and then hard jagged script in the Valluvian Clawspeak, done in purple lined in red (which is, if you read up on face paint, Not A Good Combination). Dressed in scary-ass black robes, and escorted by the Deathwatch from Trentus to Palaven. Turians are supposed to fall silent and look away when they pass. There's all kinds of other creepy bullshit in the legends about these guys – they erase their names, they vanish after the meeting. Whatever. Not important.

What is important is what they bring about. It's usually death.

The council meets with the current roster of Primarchs and the High Primarchs and advises them. Usually after the meeting, at least one Primarch (sometimes more) will be dragged out of the meeting hall, dead from ritual suicide, and the rest never look happy according to the legends.

The very first judgment of the Council of Woe was what lead to the Burning, when they advised the Primarchs to create the Hierarchy and kill any dissenters. Fucking cold, but the spikes couldn't have been shit if they didn't go that far. Without it, fuck...turian history would have been some kind of stupid shit where they had rebellions and revolts every day. It was a smear on the honor of the race, but it kept the spikes alive.

The second time was at the outset of the Unification Wars, when they advised the Hierarchy not to stop the clan violence, which resulted in the power of the Clans being crushed as I talked about earlier. That was some pretty slick thinking, too, if sneaky and dishonorable.

The third time was to decide if the turians should abandon the Citadel forces when the salarians and asari didn't want to use the genophage. That lead to the turians basically stealing it and using it themselves. Given what it did to the krogan, and the lack of honor involved, you can see the trend of shit here.

The Council is clearly made up of evil, hard-ass and sneaky Palavanus fuckers. When the Hierarchy can't figure out what to do, they call these guys. Inevitably after they call the Council, billions die, every fucking time. We need to make sure we are ready for anything the next time they get called up.

Not much else is really known about the bastards. They're funny guys, to aliens – friendly and making jokes, really laid back and interested in all kinds of shit. Smart as fuck, but not all stuck up and shit about it.

I don't trust them as far as I could throw Arcturus Station.
Chapter 32: Chapter 32 : Turian Military

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

A/N: This took ... much longer than expected. Putting together a coherent military wasn't hard, but making it both unique and yet capable of actually doing what we see it doing in ME3 took some work.

As usual, reviews are welcomed.

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MARS-ZERO-FIVE-EIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Bossman, Boss Lady, Boss Mr. Roboto,

Finally, a goddamned report I can write, where I actually know something about what I'm saying.

Before I even start, bossman, there's one thing you should keep in mind. Make sure the SA remembers, too.

The spikes do not do subtle. Can't stress this enough. Whenever you fight them, keep repeating that to yourself. If you see something that looks subtle, or sneaky, fucking retreat immediately.

You fucking run, and you do not look fucking back. It means a goddamned Palavanus is calling the shots, and you are completely fucked, and have been fucked from before you even got onto the battlefield. I'll come back to this later on, but remember it.

Cerberus Message of the Day: -error - filenotfound404 - filecorrupt

Turian Military Generalities and Mindset:

Turian strategy is simple, so is their way of looking at the fight.

Humans are about maneuver warfare, with feints and flanks, use of armor to strike fast and deep, and air support for taking out supply columns. Asari focus on formation, using that whack-ass echelon shit to tear apart enemy commands and panic the enemy into a rout, air support mostly as flankers, and armor as a barricade to enemy attacks on their leadership. Salarians focus on intel and reaction, figuring out all the angles before firing the first shot and reacting to whatever the enemy does, using their armor to counter enemy armor and their air support to tie up enemy heavies that would break their shitty lines. Batarians are all about waves of shitty attrition infantry to wear you down, spraying explosives everywhere, then one clean shot of armor and air to punch through and core your force from the inside out.

Turians, on the other hand, focus on sheer fucking power. Every part of their mindset focuses on putting as much firepower downrange as fast as possible, then moving in hard before the enemy can even recover. Every element of turian military – Skytalon battlesuits, armor use, even space combat – focuses on this style of attack.

Most turian tactics assume three things that are almost always true. First, the spikes outnumber you. Second, they have a clear line of attack. Third, they can bring most of their firepower to bear directly.

If the answers to any two of those questions is 'yes', the spike launch a frontal assault every time. (Remember, they don't do subtle.) It's not that they aren't flexible – I've seen them pull of other shit, flanking if the opportunity is there and things like that.

But rather than fancy-ass tactics, most turian generals and admirals go straight for the kill whenever they can. In a ground fight, they lead with their heaviest units. If they have armor (which they fucking will) it goes in. In space, they lead with dreadnaughts and follow up with more fucking dreadnaughts.

The only time you'll see them deviate from this pattern is when they can't get clear lines of fire and they are are outnumbered. Then they act a bit more cautiously, using heavy weapons and artillery to try to crack an enemy open wide enough, and typically call support forces down to assist. They also won't act quite like this when a spike is commanding Citadel fleets, but even then it's just variations on the same shit they usually have their infantry do on the ground – have the non-turian ships flank and pound the bad guys with heavy guns to hold them in place, while the turians do the heavy lifting.

The other time they deviate from this is when the Palavanus are running shit, in which case you fucking run and pray they haven't already prepared for that too.

Turians focus on three things. Overwhelming firepower. Strict unit discipline. And combinations that don't give an enemy any chance to do anything but sit there and take a fucking pounding until they break and run, or die.

Turian Military Doctrine – Ground

The turian basic ground doctrine is based on just a couple of ideas. First is combined arms. The turians don't build 'infantry units' or 'armor units'. They build units around the job they do. Every turian ground force is about a 40/40/20 split of ground infantry, combat armor, and air support. This mix rarely if ever changes, and it is a nasty fucking thing to work around cuz there are zero fucking weak spots.

Even the smaller units fit this description. The smallest turian unit, the diamond, has three infantry, two heavy infantry, and two light combat grav-bikes sporting launchable VI controlled air-support drones.

Second, asset use. The turians use their lines of infantry and vehicles much differently than we do. As weird as some of the salarian and asari units are, they're still pretty much like ours. Light shitty infantry for the lead. Heavier units for breaking lines, armor doing it's own thing, usually flanking. Artillery for fixed assault. Air support for suppression. Turians break all these rules, as you can probably tell by their combined arms usage. A unit 'type' for lack of a better word, uses it's assets based on what role it plays. There are three basic unit roles: Assault, Defense, and Open.

An 'assault' unit is the ones that go into fixed defense and break them. 'Defense' units are the exact opposite, they defend a given area. 'Open' units are the most flexible, as they are used when fighting in the field, or when clearing urban areas or stations. The breakdown of not only the numbers but the kinds of vehicles, infantry, and air support varies based on these roles. For example, defense units have more of the heavier infantry, slower vehicles, and lighter aircraft, while open units have almost all light infantry and smaller vehicles.

Third, turians use even their soldiers different. All units are broken down by their position in the Four Movements, which are the basis for turian combat. I'll get to that later, but what you should take away from it is that turians don't slot a type of soldier into combat based on what he does so much as the role he fills. Sounds the same, different in action. A human marine is infantry. He holds a line, or he leads an assault. Sometimes he does defense,other times he does offense. A turian soldier will be used in one specific task, like suppression, in one specific instance, like on defense. It makes them better suited to their jobs, but less flexible when taken by surprise – another reason we didn't get waxed during the FCW.

Turian Military Doctrine – Space

Their space tactics are a bit more shitty, if you ask me. And since you are, I'll tell you why.

First off, turians have a big gun fixation like you wouldn't believe. The turian fleet is the biggest in the galaxy after the quarians, but the quarian fleet is 80% civilian ships, some of 'em converted to have guns. Likewise, the asari fleet isn't much smaller than the turian fleet, but more than half the asari fleet is lighter ships. Turians love dreadnaughts, and have more than any other race. Last reckoning had us with the asari at having thirty one (the max), the salarians twenty-four (seven less than the max), the elcor with eight and two building, us with nine and one building, and the volus still working on their first.

The turians at last count had fifty, and are working on the fifty-first and final one under their cap. That's not counting their mega-heavies and shit. 65% of the turian fleet can be classed as heavy cruiser or heavier. This leaves them with some pretty shitty scouting and flanking capabilities.

Secondly, the turians only build warships – more on that later. But just keep in mind, the turian tactics stem from them wanting to put the most fire downrange all the time, which means everything not directly related to that is shit. Maneuvering? Shit. Sensors? Shit. Damage control? Shit. Labs? Get the fuck out of here. Medical and supply capabilities are crap, too.

Third, their logistics are, frankly, so shitty that they can't handle really big engagements. The main reason the FCW turned into a clusterfuck for them is that they didn't properly cover and protect their goddamned supply lines, and they just put shit in big depots for us to raid and blow up. That hasn't changed. In medium battles, they are perfect. In smaller battles, they do well. In big extended wars, they tend to get sloppy.

That stems from the fact that they've had the turian fleet scattered to hell and gone for the past fucking eight hundred years, and their military has literally fucking forgotten how to fight really big naval battles.

In battle, the tactics are simple and brutal – jump in, use light units to do the calculations and ranging, and then open fire with the heavies until everything is shot to pieces. There's not a whole lot more to it than that, unlike all the complexity of their ground combat strategy. There are a few turian admirals who use pieces of the Four Movements, particularly when they command Citadel fleets, using the alien ships as flankers and half-assed inhibitors, while their own cruisers handle the rest, with the dreadnaughts acting as the disembowel force.

Turian Military Doctrine – Ship Design

Turian ships have some very fucked up design names, which I've ignored to come up with the best-fitting human name. When I can't, I at least try to tack on which ship class it should be in. Some of these terms come out kinda old fashioned...but then again, turians would be right at home in naval combat on earth back in the pre-Iron days when it was all sails and shit, so that shouldn't surprise you.

Spike ships have one long center hull, with two wings to either side – these are swept back, not like the wedge-wings on a SA ship, or those wimpy ass curved things on asari. They look like real warships, like ours, not that swoopy graceful salarian shit.

Like I said, they build warships and only warships. Even their merchant ships are mostly cut down cruisers with attached cargo-pods, and their freighters are mostly a pair of cruiser hulls cut in half and slapped to either side of a large cargo-pod system. This means all the support systems on all their ships are for shit. They don't have redundancies for anything.

No backups, no secondary fallback systems, nothing.

On the other hand, because they don't have all of that, their power management levels are superb. Their weapons all hit harder and their shielding is tougher than almost any other ship class equal size in another race's navy.

All turians ships have a gym and a hand-to-hand combat space, a big nest-like bar/lounge area, and living quarters in weird tucked off areas. Spike crews try to keep as close to fifty-fifty split between males and females as possible so everyone can get laid regularly. They actually have regulations requiring the ladies to get banged once a week so they don't space out. I hate the fucking turians.

Most turian ships have a pretty shitty medical bay, mostly just to stabilize injuries, since the only real goddamned doctors they have are all Palavanus and none of them are going to serve on a warship that isn't a dreadnaught.

Weirdly enough, they also all have big kitchens. Turians guys like to cook, the women think it's beneath them. Backasswards idiots. Their bitches are already barefoot and pregnant all the time, why not just go full out and do the cooking too?

Turians go very, very heavy on not just forward but broadside firepower, with one class focused on it. They're a touch light on GARDIAN arrays, and their ECM sucks, but they have pretty tough armor and, as I said, extremely tough shields. Except on lighter ships, turians don't favor missiles much.

One more thing : remember that the turians are big fans of particle packets. Their mass accelerators don't just fling slugs, but blocks of unstable particles, like a compressed particle beam all in one ugly hit. Unlike our shitty half-ass versions, the turian kind will wreck merry hell on shields, and if they penetrate the armor it's rad-burns and fried chicken all around for anyone in the blast radius.

Turian Military Doctrine – Vehicle Design

Turians only have four types of vehicles – hoverbikes, grav platforms, light fighting vehicles, and superheavy monster trucks. They never developed a 'tank' concept, really, but what they have means they don't need one.

Turian design splits between light and heavy. The light shit – bikes, platforms, ground cars – focuses on moving fast and being agile, with lots of firepower and rugged durability. The heavy stuff is mostly focused on armor, terrain handling, and suppression firepower.

Spikes never figured out anything like an APC, but their LFV's hold enough troops to do the same thing, except they can shoot as well as be carried around. Likewise, they have tons of mobile infantry concepts, so vehicles are used more for shock value and speed than transport or heavy assault.

The hover bike is nasty, agile, and heavily armed, and comes in light or heavy flavors. The lighter one is faster than even salarian aircars and GASCAR racers, and the heavy ones pack the firepower of a goddamned FRIGATE into a small frame. Not even exaggerating.

Most of them have an VI controlled weapons drone that spits mini-missiles, so watch out for those.

The grav platforms are basically like big-ass floating surfboards, using mass effect fields and ion propulsion systems. Heavy weapons guys and biotics use them a lot, for better line of sight, floating above the infantry. The front of these things mount vehicle-class kinetic barriers, and they're more agile than they look, making them a pain in the ass to deal with unless you have missiles.

The trucks...Jesus fuck. Big ass heavy blocks of armor, with an open-top back full of turrets and armor plating for spikes to fire, on top of armored tyres eight feet tall. They'll just crush infantry underneath, and I've seen them smash down six foot tall walls. The main weapons are all anti-infantry, multiple rapid fire turrets and plasma flamers, but they can swap the back part out for medium range ground missiles, plasma mortars, even small GTS arrays.

Turian Military Organization : The Talon Stances of the Four Movements

The Four Movements were modeled off of the turian hunting technique, with rough translations of 'pounce', 'bite', 'hamstring', and 'disembowel'. Pretty much every single battle starts with the one of three variations of the Four Movements. Each variation is intended for a different style of fight. The basics of the four movements don't change, only the 'flavor'. The three variants are translated at 'path of speed', 'path of power', and 'path of danger'.

The path of speed is used when closing on distant enemies. It focuses on getting lighter units in first, progressively heavier as the fight goes on. The path of power is when an enemy is dug in, and the requirement is to break their front or defenses, starting off with area-effect and shock units. Finally, the path of danger is when the enemy is stronger or outnumbers the turians, and focuses on more suppressive fire and heavy units. The variants just shift around the balances a bit.

The first phase, pounce, is done by the spikes considered pouncing units. No matter the organization, the goal of pounce is to hit the enemy ranks hard before they can get dug in, or if they are already dug in, to bypass static defenses and wreck shit. The pounce is usually done quickly, and the goals are shock, impact trauma, and confusion.

The reason for this is simple. While the enemy is reeling from the pounce, the next phase, the bite, begins. It's done by units tagged as inhibitors. Their whole job is to pour on firepower, flanking and frontal, to pin the enemy in place. Suppressive rockets, light mortars, the works. Armor gets in on this too, raking down the flanks to keep 'em off their toes and stop any early attempts at a breakout.

By this time the pounce guys have withdrawn under the cover fire of the bite. They regroup while the slash and hammer units head out for the hamstring. Slash units go in hard and fast, concentrating on ripping up the structure and organization of the enemy. Lots of auto-fire, flame units, info-war to overload and cripple weapons systems. Armor used by slash units is mostly intended to blast open holes in the front lines and sew more chaos.

Slash units are replaced by hammer units in defensive situations, similar to slash units but with more of a focus on explosives, area-effect damage, and lingering damage. Armor in a hammer unit runs right the middle to tear the shit out of the center of the enemy while the air support is busy firing suppressive fire at the rear to keep it pinned down.

By this time, the bite units are a little ragged, and they finally disengage. With a huge hole torn in the middle of the enemy, and their flanks bleeding, it's time for the disembowel. The regrouped pounce units form up and do another deep strike, this time towards the rear of the enemy, sometimes blowing the entire rear of the force apart, scattering explosives. While they do this, the thrust units go to work. These are nastiest bastards in the turian army, designed to completely tear apart and crush whatever is left of the enemy.

A force that is hit by the Four Movements is a gutted wreck which can't do much more than flee in all directions.

Turian Military Ground Unit Types

As I mentioned, there are various types of units.

Inhibitors focus on just that, locking enemies in place. They focus on using tech mines, suppressive fire, area-denial grenades, and knockdowns of enemy equipment. They're fast and mobile, moving around the flanks of an enemy to tie them up in skirmish. These guys are usually your lower ranking types. A unit pinned by inhibitors will typically take lighter damage if they stay put, but get cut to pieces trying to advance or retreat – that is the idea, after all. These fuckers are really nasty with tech mines and other mine-based shit.

Slash units are heavier than inhibitors, but with the same focus on speed. They favor more damaging weapons that will cause ongoing problems – flame units, weapons with bleed capabilities, incendiaries, and lots of shotguns and heavy area of effect attacks. Slash units also like to get in and do some CQB, literally living up to their name.

Pounce units are all mobile infantry, either jump assault or worse, Skytalons. These guys are basically like our DACT, with lots of the same tactics and weapons choices. Pounce units are also the only turians you will regularly see fall back, as they are not supposed to get over-extended. Given that spikes like valorous bullshit, it's usually older, wiser types who fill this role, ones who've already proven they are badasses.

Hammer units are like a nastier brother of slash units. Super-heavy infantry, mostly with lots of squad-level machine guns, missiles, hi-ex, and the like. Anything that takes out bunches of the enemy at once, that's hammer units. As I said, hammer is mostly used on defense, to bust up enemy charges once they've been stopped cold, and turn them back, sometimes routing them.

Finally, thrust units are the true shit-wreckers. This is all an assortment of badasses – Final Line fuckers, Blackwatch, Deathwatch and the like. The thrust unit kills entire enemy units, sometimes carving them up so bad they can't even surrender or flee coherently. Having a swarm of these nightmares spring and pounce and tear the heads off your buddies and laugh will break most units with ease. In the FCW, our N7's would take all the other turian bullshit with ease, but get owned by these guys over and over again.

Turian Infantry Classes:

Every type of military class in the Hierarchy corresponds to one of the Four Movements. I'll give the translation, and what kind of unit they are.

Fang Soldier : The fang infantry trooper is the basic infantry type. Fangs wear light Velek or Thermal armor and carry Phaeston rifles and a few grenades. Their job is that of inhibitors – sink into the enemy and hold them in place so you claw the shit out of them. Fangs are usually new and junior types, given a fairly safe job to see how better soldiers get shit done, but also because the job requires a lot of running around and is best left to the youngsters.

Talon Soldier the other half of the basic infantry lineup, talons are 'slash units'. Using Tornado shotguns, frag and incendiary grenades, and lots of hand-to-hand combat, these guys are a step up from the Fangs. Usually wear Phantom armor.

Cataphract : Family elites, these guys are very highly mobile mixes of soldiers, snipers, engineers and tacticians. Wearing Family Ceremonial armor and using Raptor marksman rifles, they're also handy with grenades, plasma and cryo blasts, and tech mines. Flexible enough to be used in pounce or slash tactics, they are often very tough to stop because of their armor. These are also the fuckers you will find piloting almost all the vehicles.

Raptor Guard: Nasty fuckers in jump-capable Silverback armor, these guys use Hydra missile launchers and the Krysae to blow shit up in all directions. They always act as pounce units.

Shadow Guard: Clan based units, these are a mix of solider and combat engineer. They are inhibitors, and prefer to stick to the sidelines, launching drones, turrets, tech mines and shit like that to keep enemies pinned in place. Wearing Monitor armor, they use the Judgment pistols with very good levels of training and can pull off headshots at scary long ranges.

Raven Guard: Clan heavy combat engineers, these guys run in with the slash units, setting off explosions. Wearing Silverback armor and packing Sunfire pistols, these guys are masters of area-effect info-war – plasma clouds, nanite storms, shit like that.

Blackwatch: the Blackwatch is the spike version of the N7 program, formed of teams of badasses, Blackwatch is mostly pretty clean cut, sent on missions a lot like our own Spec Ops, and most of the shit they get up to is classified, although most people in the know can tell you they have the highest success rate of any turian unit in history. Blackwatch guys are often used independently, in five man fire-teams, but their role in a fixed battle is as a thrust unit. They wear Titan Armor, and use the Indra and the Tornado as their weapons, so they're dangerous at any range.

Deathwatch: The Deathwatch is basically turian Cerberus. Their only goal is the preservation and protection of the turian race. They don't give a shit about laws, casualties, or who they piss off. The Deathwatch has lots of ceremonial and semi-religious bullshit attached, and each one is technically severed from their family, much like biotics are. Unlike biotics, being in the Deathwatch is a huge honor, basically saying you are badass enough to be trusted with the fate of the entire race. The Deathwatch is mostly Clan and Family types, and almost all of them wear Family or Clan Ceremonial armor. Their signature weapons are the Sunfire pistol and the Widow sniper rifle, but lots of them pack customized weapons, like Revenants, Serrations, or worse – one gigantic Torkus nutjob had his legs and arm hacked off and replaced with enough cyber to haul around a cut-down BRKR railgun. They are thrust units. Shock.

These guys, like the Dog, could give a shit if they kill aliens. I'd leave your Iron boys at home, Rachel, none of them would match up well against these lunatics.

Support Cabalist: weaker biotics often assist with pinning enemy forces in place, and are classed as inhibitors. The support cabal uses lots of pull, throw, and smash biotics to keep the enemy off balance, and occasionally will use salvos to pin them down more directly. They carry around Judgment pistols, but prefer to use biotics and claw daggers – don't get in close, those things are like tiny fucking warp swords. The armor they were is about as tough as Vedek light armor.

Strike Cabalist: The more powerful (and fucked up) turian biotics, on the other hand, go in for the fucking kill, as either slash or on occasion thrust units. Wearing heavy Titan armor and packing plasma flamethrowers and omni-axes, these guys fling big warps, shockwaves, and other crazy shit around. Their favorite trick is using throw to fling grenades deep into enemy lines, before anyone can react or flee.

SkyTalon Battlesuit : The SKYTALON is a heavy mass-effect powered battlesuit that can fly short distances, like a cross between a DACT and a Thermopylae suit. It has thicker armor and better durability than a Thermopylae, and is fully space-combat capable. It has twin kinetic barriers, and lacks on-board weapons, but it packs a giant omni-axe in one hand, and the SPEAR minigun in the other, so it doesn't really need other weapons. A properly piloted SKYTALON will wreck a Thermopylae, and it can hammer the shit out of a Shieldbreaker or Asari Paladin before going down, the SPEAR does a lot of damage. This is the killiest of the pounce units, and sometimes even gets all up in as a slash unit when the pilot is in a pissy mood.

SKYTALON battle armor suits are some of the very worst fuckers to fight. Maybe not the strongest, but they're fast and they can fly, are articulated and nimble enough to fight on the ground with in melee, and some of them can even generate bullshit like omni-armor facings or omni-gel repair underlays. Back in the days, even Mike Saracino couldn't drop one of these bastards solo.

Do not match ATLAS suits against this, Rachel.

Final Line: When it comes to bad motherfuckers, the Final Line is pretty much it. Everyone has heard of them. Final Line soldiers are spikes too shot up and wounded to live a normal life. Rather than doing the sane thing and just dying, they end up as nearly-full conversion cyborgs, sometimes going as high as 85%, and wear articulated power-armor 'frames' to make them even tougher. They can act in hammer or thrust roles.

Final Line soldiers are usually only deployed in the unthinkable situation when the turians are being overwhelmed and most other races would be retreating. Them showing up means the Hierarchy expects the turians on the battlefield to die. To see Final Line guys striding up, calmly speaking orders and organizing the lines, is an eerie sensation. Turians get very calm and focused around them, because they know shit is about to get real.

The Final Line cyborg is bad news by himself. Out of his powered suit, he's still rocking built-in armor roughly on par with Titan Armor, a built-in set of arm-cannons roughly on par with a shotgun, and an omni-grenade launcher. Also can generate an omni-shield on either arm, and usually carries a PAIR of fucking Sunfire pistols.

When they ARE wearing their battlesuit, well, then shit gets real, like I said. Encased in two tons of what is pretty much just hydraulic-driven four-inch thick slabs of spaceship armor, backed with a power supply and carrying around a Heavy Hyperluminal Particle Accelerator, they brake for nobody. Their kinetic barriers are vehicle grade, and they can lift a krogan with a single hand or punch down a reinforced titanium door.

Their weapon will blow the complete shit out of anything it hits, and the armor is thick enough to bounce any kind of anti-personnel weapons entirely. The suit also has built in missile launchers, plasma throwers, a pair of VI drones, micro-mines, a full info-war suite, onboard omni-repair systems and, of course, omni-claws two feet long.

Final Line soldiers have bitchslapped Shieldbreakers out of their way before, and even stood up to and killed one of those fancy asari battlesuits once, although that wasn't a one on one fight and the asari bitch killed three of them first.

Turian Support Units:

Volus Missile Auxiliary: The wobblies aren't worth shit in any fight not involving food or money, but they do build some nasty fucking vehicles. The volus aux units are, as I said before, missile units. These are converted asari hovertanks, with the asari weapons stripped off, more armor added, and tons of missiles. The unit can be configured as ground saturation, artillery bombardment, anti-air, or GTS.

People laugh at the volus, but damn, these things can put out more fucking hurt than you'd expect. The ground saturation version in particular is nasty, a single aux carrier can throw sixty M/AM tipped missiles up to ten miles away in thirty seconds flat. That will turn an entire goddamned regimental combat unit into atoms, Bossman.

Civilian Auxiliary Support Teams: The turians have a couple of pre-space client races that they have do support duties sometimes - running ammo, hauling back casualties, supplies, that kind of shit. They only pack the C-404 civvy rifle and maybe some flash grenades, but at least one of these races - Jirmbo or something like that - are meaty bastards that look like the shit you fight in Galaxy of Adventure - twelve feet tall, six fucking arms that end in strangler hands, and a mouth in the middle of the body that can eat a krogan whole. I really cannot recommend getting your shit wrecked that hard just to shoot up the ammo runners, especially since I saw one of these big corn-fed bastards eat a goddamned mech.

Turian Warship Classes:

The primary weapons of the turian fleet are accelerated particle-packet (APP) cannons, mass-effect disruptor torpedoes (they don't use matter-antimatter in their torps, but see the fucking motion corvette), and high powered mines. Secondary weapons are both flek and pulse missiles, GARDIAN lasers, and traditional mass accelerator cannons (mostly found on the lighter ships).

E-Boat: The smallest ship is the e-boat, which is like a built-up pinnace with an FTL drive. Stuffed full of ECM gear, it also acts as a mine-layer and scanning platform. Like every other spike ship, this one is heavily armed – three 10 mm mass cannons, plus a rack of missiles. E-boats are pretty common throughout turian space as part of the eye they keep on the colonies and clusters, but are seen as wimpy and most staffed with low-ranking trainees. These things don't get names, just the cluster they work in and a serial number.

Missile Frigate: The missile frigate is the spike's very unhappy answer to all the other missile-shit the volus have introduced to us in the past ten years. Turian frigates are mostly assigned to patrol duties, and the missile frigate is basically an over-sized anti-piracy platform for the spikes, rather than being seen in the line of battle. It has a pretty good missile load, but for-shit armor to make room for it all, ending up with it being a damned flying bomb. This is actually seen as a good thing by the turians, since it encourages the captains to fire off their missiles rapidly and get the fuck out of dodge so 'real ships' can fight. The spikes name them after mountains in the cluster they are built in.

War Frigate: The 'war frigate' was the first human-turian joint engineering effort, and it's pretty new, replacing an older frigate that frankly sucked. Built along more human lines, it's more like a destroyer and built roughly along the same lines in terms of firepower, armor and shielding. It is the flanking and escort unit for most smaller turian fleets, and is the only other turian ship besides e-boats, corvettes and a few dreadnaughts to have ECM and pretty heavy GARDIAN arrays. The war frigate picks off incoming fighter, missile and light frigate attacks, it's weapons a pair of wing APP cannons and a bigger APP gun centerline. Armor is, like a proper human ship, thick enough to stand off ranging shots, and frankly for a frigate (or even a destroyer) it's pretty heavily armed. Sadly, not agile at all. The turians seem to like the design, and the stealth frigate they worked on with us is their way of repayment, I think. God knows the spikes needed a ship like this. Amusingly, they're named after turian ambassadors. Real subtle, spiky.

Torpedo Corvette: Spikes don't like missiles, and they absolutely hate torpedoes, since they ruin their nice dreadnaughts. The 'torpedo corvette' is more backasswards turian shit, a better name would be 'anti-torpedo corvette'. The turians bought the rights to the basic salarian corvette hull, gutted it, and fitted it with engines, piles of ECM, strip after strip of GARDIAN lasers, and a special set of forward arc cannons called splinter guns. Splinter guns basically fire out a 'cloud' of excited ions and particle matter in a long cone shape. This tends to destabilize the detonators on torpedoes, causing premature detonation. Even of it doesn't, it scuffs up and ruins the reflective coating most torps have, making them more vulnerable to GARDIAN laser fire. The Corvette also has four 5mm rapid fire turrets with high-power, high-speed accelerators mounted, which they use to shoot down torpedoes as well as bombers and torpedo fighters. They're named after important pieces of ancient turian armor.

Motion Corvette: The motion corvette is … fucking weird. Built around a trio of dreadnaught engines stuffed into the same hull as the Torpedo Corvette, and given much stronger shields, this thing can outrun almost anything else in space. The boat features fairly light weapons, but heavy armor – and a tank of two hundred fucking pounds of antimatter. The real job of the motion corvette is to blaze past enemy lines and open up this bay which shoots out long metallic lines that move slowly enough to pass enemy shields and connect to the hull. Once four of these are in place, the motion corvette energizes them, making a magnetic funnel, and then dumps this antimatter right into the enemy ship. That is usually enough to vape a hole clean through even dreadnaught armor. Turians aren't above having them ram an enemy directly, sending up the entire mass of AM in one go, making a gigantic fucking bang. These are all named after famous turians who sacrificed themselves.

Escort Cruiser: Pretty much the lighter stock cruiser. It has a slightly stronger shields and and a heavier weapons load than a human line cruiser, and much better speed , but maneuverability and armor sucks.. The escort cruiser often does just that, escorts larger ships as a flanking element. It's pretty boring, really. Named after old Valluvian priests.

Assault Cruiser: Thick armor, and a ton of forward firing APP cannons. Assault cruisers are used to set the flanks of the line when the dreadnaughts charge, picking off the small fry the big boys miss out on. Again, there's not much to this ship, except engines, armor, guns, and more guns. I'm not even sure the fucking things have medical bays or not. Named after various turian melee weapons.

War Cruiser: Twice the length of the Assault Cruiser, more guns, more armor. Notable only for the fact that this is where the spikes also start loading the ships down with heavy broadside firepower as well. The war cruiser is the only turian ship that can carry fighters, even if it's only six of them. Sometimes they act independently as border patrol ships, where the fighters come in handy. Named after stars in the Hierarchy.

Battlecruiser: There are more of these ships than any other kind in the turian fleet. The battlecruiser is EXACTLY fifty tons and thirty feet under the size/weight classification for a dreadnaught, which is just so much bullshit. Basically, they're pocket dreadnaughts, pound for pound twice as powerful as the heaviest asari or salarian cruisers and about on par with our actual dreadnaughts. They have hundreds of these things. Each one has a centerline main gun as strong as our dreadnaught guns, except they fire a forty pound APP slug that would blow a cruiser into sparks and scrap. They're named after famous turian marksmen.

Sloop: The sloop is smaller than the battlecruiser, and lacks forward firing weapons, instead being twice as broad in beam than any other ship. It focuses entirely on broadside firepower, and is used in defensive postures or to storm and assault space stations or ships. The sloop has thick armor and good shields, and of course very decent cargo capacity to haul soldiers. It also packs more GARDIAN lasers than most other ship classes, as well as external mounting hooks for landing craft. Named after cities on Palaven.

Dreadnaught: The turian dreadnaught is a nasty piece of work, bigger than most other navies dreadnaughts. It's mostly a block of armor stuffed full of guns, shield generators, and space for soldiers and vehicles. The ships do have some other features, like full medical bays with Palavanus doctors, and even full info-war and ECM suites and the like. Most dreadnaughts have two center-line guns and lots of turrets down the flanks, with strips of GARDIAN lasers on the wings and a bay full of bombs. They are slow and unwieldy, but they can take a severe pounding. They're named after turian generals and admirals of note.

Battleship: The last two turian dreadnaughts built, and the one they're laying the keel on now, are monstrously huge – way bigger than even our carrier dreadnaughts. These fucking things pack four heavy main guns, and then no less than three barrage-style APP cannons on each wing, on top of a volus-inspired rotary missile launcher rack that can ripple fire forty missiles in a single salvo. Turrets with APP cannons and GARDIAN lasers dot the top, sides, and bottom, while the back of the ship actually docks three war frigates that can deploy as escorts, as well as fifteen claw fighters. The most worrying thing about the Battleship is the triple hull, which has advanced kinetic barriers between the fucking hull layers. This means there are multiple levels of shields that have to be cracked to even damage the things, making torpedoes almost useless. So far, each one has been named for an ancient Praetor.

Turian Fighter Classes:

Turian fighters are nowhere near as good as ours, but they are serving a different role, so maybe I'm being, whatchamacallit, subjective.

Or maybe they just suck ass. They're not real maneuverable, and they have too many guns and not enough armor.

Claw Fighter: The most common fighter type, this looks like, well, a claw with wings on it. Most retarded shit I've ever seen after watching Kai Leng and David Anderson get in a fistfight over a white girl while in a goddamned strip club. Packs a pair of heavy APP cannon, some light shielding and sensors, and some incendiary bombs. It's only real use is ground harassment.

Merhku Fighter-Bomber: The more serious looking ship, this one was developed as a joint effort between humans and turians around the same time as the stealth frigate shit was. This fighter packs a four-pack missile launcher under each wing, a double-barreled APP nose turret, and four GARDIAN laser turrets on the wings – a nasty package. It has better armor, shields, and speed as well.'

Turian Vehicle Classes:

Lincent Hoverbike: the light bike packs a pair of APP rapid-fire cannons in the nose, a four-pack of light missiles, and a single VI drone in the back. Top speed is about 350 mph.

Velorthi Hoverbike: This thing is badass! That fucking Kai got one and won't tell me where, the stupid bastard. I should have shot his ass back when we were both in the SA. Anyway, this thing has twin engines and three kinetic harpoon launchers on either side, along with a fullauto APP gun in the nose. No missiles, but it can drop up to ten small mines that have a haptic cloaking field over them. Nasty things. Slower than the Lincent, only about 200 mph, but it also has a tough-ass kinetic barrier that will bounce most sniper rifle fire. The baddest thing about this bike are the fucking harpoons. Each one is loaded with a fleck of fucking antimatter! These things can drop a GREAT WHITE in one shot. Given the cost of the harpoons, the bikes are pretty rare, but still...

The pair of VI drones in the back is just overkill, honestly.

Aranthus Grav Platform: shitty platform most of the spikes use. Basically a metallic board with a shield generator, a mag-lift engine, and a mounted pair of Phaestons in a turret, this is for suppression fire and tactical support.

Arterius Grav Platform: the heavier and nastier grav platform, this thing is about nine feet long and nearly as wide, boasting much heavier shields and a rack of frag and plasma missiles on the bottom. It has two turrets, one to each side, mounting rotary APP miniguns. These things lay down some serious fucking hurt, and biotics use them a lot, the gunners keeping the biotic safe while he wrecks shit. This thing also has four VI drones that can help out in combat.

Vitha Armored Fighting Vehicle: Basically an armored ground-car with a big trailer on the back that holds spike soldiers, this thing is also lousy with more APP miniguns, kinetic barriers on the sides, and a decent top speed.

Serothis Heavy Command Fighting Vehicle: Take a eezo-core 35k vakar-power engine and stick it in a block of armor with giant ass monster-truck tires. Then hitch four ten meter long armored trailers to it, each also on monster-truck tires, and install frigate-grade shielding on the entire mess. That's the Serothis. Each fighting trailer is capped by a triple-mount lance cannon manned turret and has a pair of APP minigun turrets along the sides, along with firing ports. The first cab is all C4I and comms, the second is a full-out medical treatment setup, and the final two are infantry transports - with rack-slots on the side to allow SKYTALONS to latch on.

This is their command vehicle when doing heavy invasions and ain't no brakes on this rape train. Among other features, this bad boy boasts a two-hundred drone launch rack, two pop-up volus M/AM flek missile launchers, full ECM and the entire armor system is underlain with omni-gel emitters for rapid repair. The axles alone are sixty centimeters, the suspension uses something like six pounds of fucking eezo, and that engine can pull the whole thing along at about a hunnerd and fifty KPH.

You see this coming, you'd best head the other way.

Vakarak Heavy Fighting Vehicle: The war-truck. I already described this monster. Goddamned spikes. Nothing much you can do to something with half a meter of silaris-plated laser steel armor and triple kinetic barriers, alongside two SPEAR minigun turrets and an articulated HYDRA rapid launch system. Oh, and six light GTS turrets incase you start thinking about using gunships or any of that shit.

I'm not sure if I'm more pissed we don't have something this bad-ass, or the fact that it can take direct hits from a GREAT WHITE MBT and hit the thing with its own main gun, which is a monster rail gun firing depleted uranium chevron-sabots thirty mm wide at mach 9.

Yeah, fuck that noise. You ain't blowing up one of these bad boys without orbital fire in most cases, or serious artillery.

Turian Military Equipment: Weapons

Most spike weapons are APP (accelerated particle packet) based. Instead of a bit of metal, they fling a compressed ball of particles that blow up when they hit. This is weaker at getting past shields, but deadly once it does so, and has the ugly tendency to blow off arms and legs. You can't make particle ammo for pistols or sub-machine guns, so most of those still use good old mass rounds.

M-842 Judgment Pistol: A super-heavy, single-shot hand-cannon, the Blood Pack made a shitty knock of this a few years back. It fires explosive, high-impact armor-piercing slugs, one at time. This the stock sidearm of the turians. It has a lot of recoil, and what it hits is not getting the fuck back up anytime soon. Saw one of these blow a hole right through a krogan's skull once, bastard didn't even realize he was dead for a few seconds, stumbling around.

M-903 Sunfire Compression Plasma Pistol: The single most powerful handgun on the market, makes a Carnifex look like a fucking popgun. Creates and compresses plasma blasts and fires them out with a mass accelerator, smashes pretty much whatever it hits. These bastards cost more than a rack of Revenants, but they're worth the cost. I've seen this gun blow holes in Silaris like the shit wasn't even there, and when we went after the Primarch the Sunfire he had is what dropped a charging krogan in heavy armor with a single headshot.

Every member of the Deathwatch gets one once they pass some kinda trial, but some other turians have them too – Final Line guys like 'em, and the Raven Guard. Outside the Hierarchy they are very rare - some big-shit in the STG is the only guy I can think of who has one that actually works, although a few humans have broken ones from the FCW as mementos.

M-667 Tempest SMG: Often used by turian and asari mercs, the Tempest is a nasty piece of work. Hot rate of fire, good range, good penetration, and a pretty scary spread. It also can handle incendiary or hot-shotted explosive ammo. Tends to jam if left on full auto for too long, though. Bit unbalanced for single-handed shooting.

C-404 Civilian Defense Multifunction Rifle : This is a dual-stage weapon. The primary firing system is a stepped-down mass accelerator rifle, a bit shittier than a semi-auto Avenger. It can be compacted into a decent if short ranged shotgun. These weapons aren't really military-class weapons, but the dual-functionality is a severely handy feature. Be aware: every turian gets one of these upon reaching full maturity. So storming colonies, you have a threat at range and up-close.

M-393 Tornado: a really nice shotgun, this thing is double barrelled, and the barrels are slightly angled. With buckshot-pattern APP blasts, it tends to pulp whatever it hits. Not much ammo, and very short range, but it's a good inside shotgun and great for urban work. I use one myself.

M-772 Phaeston: one of the finest, if not the finest, military assault rifles I've ever used. Tight bursts, with both short burst and full auto select, and an extendable barrel with a singleshot mode and more power for turning it into an on-the-fly marksman rifle. Really good heatsink capacity, tearaway mag-rails for clamping on accessories, hydraulic-mount extendable shoulder stock, and three trigger packages in the stock – turian, human/asari, and salarian. Even comes with self-gimbaling auto-leveling features, and a pop-up UV laser sight that's invisible except through the eyepiece (and I guess to drell and salarians). The best part has to be the goddamned omni-bayonet that slides out of the front.

This is a kickass rifle, and we should seriously get some human guys to tinker with it and make a version for the Dog. Leng and I use nothing else. The APP rounds it fires are just gravy, really.

M-439 Vakial Rotary Assault Weapons System: The V-RAW, as it's often called, is some straight up bullshit.

So there's this minigun... thing. Like eight barrels of a Phaeston, but longer. The entire assembly is mounted on a harness-thing that has incorporated eezo lift systems and a hydraulic/myomer bodysuit you wear, as well as a power pack. There's a sort of armor-top-shell thing they drape over this.

The V-RAW fires six hundred APP rounds a minute at stupidly long ranges. Now, I know what Rachel's thinking now. "Pfft, only six hundred rounds a minute? Miniguns usually fire more." You don't need more. A full burst from this thing will saw a fucking MAKO in half if you sit there and let him shoot you up. Let's not even talk about the fact that they can sustain this fire rate for over an hour before they run out of power - and if they are riding on one of those fucked up turian trucks they can hook into the truck's power.

Ain't nothing this side of real armor on a tank is bouncing this kind of firepower. Fortunately, the weapon is kind of rare, very fiddly and prone to jamming and breaking. Thank God for small favors, Bossman, and we need to steal one. You know, for... research and shit.

M-342 Raptor: Speaking of knockoffs, we've already made a version of this weapon, I think. Ours is a light sniper, theirs is a marksman rifle. Semiauto APP rounds, with a pop-up scope and semi-fluidic shock mounting. Prettty low recoil, long range, very accurate. Hits much harder than the Phaeston, but without the full auto. Like I said, it's a designated marksman's rifle, not quite a sniper.

M-990 Krysae Anti-Materiel Rifle: I have said it before, but spikes do not fuck around. Their heavy long-arm, the Krysae, is sick. It uses unstable overloaded APP rounds to create an explosion when it hits, often tossing off hard rads at the impact point. For a sniper this thing is heavy and bulky, mostly due to the advanced range-finding shit in the main body that automatically adjusts the length of the barrel to affect the range of the shot proportional to the firing position or some shit. This thing hits a human in anything under Devastator armor, and they're turning into a fine red mist. Very, very accurate out to almost a mile and a half. Slow rate of fire, but who gives a fuck?

M-90 Indra: The other turian sniper rifle, this one is really nasty. Long and accurate, it has a pair of fire modes. The sniper fire mode spits out twin APP shots, calibrated for accuracy. The other mode turns it into a full-auto assault rifle a touch less accurate and powerful than the Phaeston...but with a sniper rifle's fucking range. Yes, that means the goddamned spikes can lay down full auto APP fire at several thousand fucking yards. This weapon killed more marines in the FCW than anything else combined, and the turians keep it up to date and refit older models from time to time. It is very delicate, however, compared to other turian-designed weapons.

M-459 Heavy Particle Acceleration Lance Cannon: Lance Cannons, the very best there is. When you have to absolutely, positively kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes. This is probably the most widely known and distributed heavy weapon in the galaxy. Lance cannons (no one uses the official name, not even spikes) are upscaled versions of regular APP weapons. And by 'upscaled', I mean instead of flinging a little tiny packet of packed particles this thing throws bolts two inches wide and a meter long.

Lance cannons are not very long range, but they fuck up anything they hit. They fuck up armor. They fuck up barriers and kinetics. They fuck up omni-armor, plated omni-gel, and they can crack Silaris if you work at it. Unlike most heavy weapons, which are either focused on anti-armor, anti-material, or anti-mech, this can do all three. Plus, the shots move fast enough that they can take out shuttles and gunships. Being hit by one is no joke, as that much APP doesn't just blow up - it detonates. You get hit with a full burst of APP rounds, you lose you arm - you get hit in the chest with a lance cannon your arm loses you.

Lance cannons are found all over, both in and out of Council space, and are one of the few things the Hierarchy exports that bring in a big profit. Unlike most heavy weapons lance cannons don't have any DRM shit except the APP colliater, so making your own is possible.

It's also hilarious to hit guys on foot with it - makes them go flying like in old Hollywood flicks. Nothing beats blasting a krogan and watching his eyes go wide as the stupid fuck skids ten meters backwards.

M-550 Hydra: This the turian version of our own ML-77 heavy missile launcher. The Hydra's designers – a bunch of Palavanus freaks – came up with the idea of bypassing the missile launcher's main weakness. Most launchers either go for dropping a single heavy target or for big explosions against a buncha targets. The Hydra has a VI that assesses the designated target and modifies the warhead on launch. It fires a sub-munition multimissile. Against multiple targets, it brackets them, overlapping the explosions split-seconds apart to overwhelm shields. Against a single target, though, it stages the shots in sequence, using three shaped charges The first fucks the target's kinetic barriers before the second destroys its armor, and the third warhead blows the fuck up INSIDE the goddamned target.

Saw a krogan get hit with one of these, limbs everywhere. Goddamned made me lose my lunch.

Heavy Hyperluminal Particle Accelerator : The superheavy weapons carried by Final Line soldiers, these things are sick and deadly. They are big fucking rifles, bigger than BRKR railguns even, almost five feet long. Each one is a crude and primitive mass effect tunnel generator, from what I understand. The Palavanus salvaged the shit from some Inusannon ruin about ten years ago. Anyway, when the gun is fired, it basically makes a small kinda weak mass effect shunt, like a mini-relay.

In vacuum, the weapon is useless. In any form of atmosphere, the air in the beam is flung at about a third of the speed of a mass relay jump. This is waaaay fucking faster than light. The air is literally converted into a blast of plasma, particles, and radiation, all compressed into an ugly flare of blue-shifted light that just completely fucks up almost whatever it hits. The minimum range is four hundred feet – then again, being hit with the mass tunnel itself is also not healthy. A cone of shit from four hundred feet to about seven hundred feet is either destroyed, wrecked, or badly damaged.

Beyond seven hundred feet out to about nine hundred feet, it's like a spray of grenades, and beyond that it's not more than some hard rads.

If, God help you, you are stupid enough to be hit by the fucking mass tunnel, it will probably tear a living being in half, and wreck armor. The things fire very slowly, but are still ugly.

SPEAR (Sub-molecular Particle Enhanced Assault Railgun): This is what happens when you give a goddamned Palavanus unlimited funds and tell him to horrify salarians. The SPEAR is kind of a built-up version of the Krysae, except instead of a mass accelerator they use mag-shells filled with compressed particle explosive rounds inside a railgun. With five barrels and the power supply of a battlesuit, this is a Very Bad Thing to face on any battlefield. Each round is a high-explosive particle blast, flung at four or five times the impact of a normal mass accelerated round, and it fires thirty rounds a second. I've seen, more than once, entire bands of pirates cut to bits by these things.

Omni-axes: Spikes don't do swords. They like axes. Nuff said.

Turian Military Equipment: Armor Systems

There are five weights of turian armor (not counting Final Line bullshit or Skytalon suits). Light armor is mostly for skirmish. Moderate is for regular battle. Heavy is for heavy infantry. Augmented is super heavy infantry. Ceremonial is … well, their idea of ceremony is different than ours.

Velek (Light): light turian armor is mostly formfitting ballistic cloth with a heavy spall liner on the inside, and a thin set of energy-deflecting plates on the exterior. The plates are usually topped with impact resistant leather padding. This is popular with scouts, inhibitors, and young turians. Not designed to stop heavy fire, more incidental stuff and shrapnel. Not environmentally sealed, nor is it space rated. If nothing else, EVERY fucking spike family will have sets of this for every single family member, even the kids.

Thermal (Light): the other kind of light armor, this is a set of nano-weave plastics topped with hard battle ceramics over the chest, cowl, shoulders, and upper legs. Designed to stop heat and rads, it's mostly worn in the more dangerous areas of Palaven. Unlike Velek armor, it can be sealed and it's space-worthy. This stuff bounces light rounds very well, but even a shitty rifle will go right through it.

Phantom (Moderate) : the 'stock' turian armor, this is a ballistic hardsuit about on par with our Onyx. Two layers of energy-absorbing spall liners, hard outer layer of battle ceramic, and an inner set of shock padding. Full environmental controls, six hour air supply, all that jazz. Mostly only the junior guys wear this crap.

Monitor (Moderate) : While no thicker or tougher than the Phantom armor, Monitor armor has more gadgets, their engineering types use it. Some built in sensors and info-war bullshit, and a thin gel layer to block radiation. Haptic lighting to see in low light environments, more on-board air, and a heat-managment system for spacewalks.

Silverback (Heavy): the most common type of armor for the bulk of the infantry, everyone remembers this shit. Silver and black, lots of curves and funny shapes. The surface is laser-polish compressed metals backed with high-impact ceramic, over a gel-padded bodysuit of spall-liners and omnigel that automatically seals suit breaches. Gyros in the wrist, heat management, FLIR and UV sights in the helmet, a full day of O2, and fully environment sealed. This suit WILL bounce light fire from Predators and Avengers that go for center mass. The knee joints are weak, but not a good shot on a turian, as they can work past that shit. Try a hip shot, and if that doesn't work, repeated rounds at the face will eventually get through. Better yet, don't use a fucking shitty ass weapon like an Avenger.

Titan (Augmented) : thick ugly plates, big fat slabs of armor on the chest, and multiple suit layers are what make the Titan a pain in the ass. Used mostly by the turians whose job is to storm positions, this thing was designed to take heavy fire, complete with two synched kinetic barriers and built-in medigel dispensers. It's built off the shell of the Silverback, so it has all the features that suit does.

Clan Ceremonial Armor / Family Ceremonial Armor: When it comes to bad-ass protection, neither the Clans or Families fuck around. This stuff looks all medieval and shit, lots of fancy curves and a surface layer of delicate ceramic, but underneath is a monster of a suit. There are five (or more) layers of anti-impact ceramics and energy-resistant laser steel, smashed in a mass effect forge and super compressed, then packed between more armor under that fancy-ass surface layer.

The entire thing is lined with synthetic muscle, boosting the spike's strength. There's capacitors for shields and shield regeneration, superior energy links for omni-tools, heat sheathing and heat management shit, gyro-kinetic coils for ranged weapons...God knows what else. There's even a fucking VI enhancement most of them use, linked to an eyepieces, that helps them target enemy vulnerable spots or to snipe.

Most big-shit Clans and Families will have at least two or three suits of this shit, one for the leader, one for the heir, and one spare if they can afford it. Most of the Deathwatch wears it as well.

You can fucking forget about one-shotting a Clan or Family puke, even a goddamned gunship doesn't have the firepower to punch through five fucking layers of anti-ballistic hard ceramics.

Special Tactics: the Palavanus

Palavanus rarely go to war. When they do, it becomes suddenly goddamned clear why turians put up with their bullshit.

First off, they are fearless. I mean, actually, literally fucking fearless. Along with whatever else the fuck is wrong with them, they really honestly think they cannot die. This has been tested by turian psychologists. It could be one fucking Palavanus with a pistol against six dreadnaughts and he will be talking shit and yawning.

It's one thing to see bravery, it's another for turians watch a leader fucking walk right into the heaviest goddamned fire and start mocking the enemy, or go up against two vakars at the same time while taunting the things. It does strange shit to the turian morale. It's already up there, but a Palavanus can whip them into a truly terrifying battle frenzy.

Second, even when they get hurt, they just shrug it the fuck off. The turians have a pack of legends about Palavanus doing this shit, and I've seen one take a full fucking burst from a LMG, get thrown to the ground in a splatter of blue, and manage to get back up to talk shit. They aren't any stronger per se than a regular spike, maybe a bit bigger on average, but all of them have hella pain tolerance, and they practice some kind of waking mediation bullshit that allows them to suppress pain and control their breathing. Again, turians watching a Palavanus keep going with nine or ten lethal fucking wounds get even wilder and more determined than usual.

Third, they're a fucking nightmare in hand-to-hand. Claw-to-claw. Whatever. Back in the day, they never gloried in war the way normal turians did, they just went at it with this cold fucking brutality that left anyone jacking around with them deader than dog shit. When it comes to shooting, they're sick fucking snipers, but they prefer to get up close and personal. Combined with them thinking they're immortal and unkillable? Yeah, it's like fighting the turian version of fucking Wolverine. Take my advice and don't do it. Seen krogan loose their ass off trying it, a human has no fucking chance whatsoever.

Finally, they're military geniuses. If the Six Families are all badasses at planning ahead, and the Thirty masters of manipulating shit and twisting people around to their thinking, then the Palavanus are masters at warfare. They come up with shit that no one even sees, using turian military units in ways that don't make no fucking sense, and they completely wreck shit. No one, not in twenty thousand years of recorded history, ever beat a Palavanus on Palaven. And the few times a Palavanus has had command in the modern era, no one has beaten them then.

The Palavanus commanded most of the strikes during the Krogan Rebellions, crushing the krogan lines before personally going out and just murder-fucking the krogan warlords. The only reason the krogan were hanging on towards the end is that they just bred faster than the turians, and even then it was only going to be a matter of time.

There are stories piled on top of stories of how many times Palavanus types have been outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded, and just wrecked shit three hundred and sixty degrees. The last bigshot Palavanus general in the Krogan Wars, General Vetha, was outnumbered twenty-to-fucking-one at the Battle of the Kephic Valley, and routed the entire fucking krogan army, inflicted six hundred thousand casualties and lost less than five hundred of his own spikes.

Just run.

I got to see one in action once, in HANDSHAKE. Worked with one of their more adventuresome types, big corn-fed spike named Vorkus Palavanus. Terrifying guy – he is the only goddamned Palavanus in centuries to bother with the military, and he's carved his way to one rank below that of Praetor. Vorkus was always coming up with weird science shit, and HANDSHAKE sent two detachments on one of his crazy ass expeditions.

The total force was something like maybe thirty of us, and one hundred turians, working on some backwater planet digging up Prothean data, when there's an alert from the cruiser that brought us here, saying it's under heavy fire from pirates. Before it can do shit else, it's blown out of the fucking sky.

The SA destroyer we caught a ride on made tracks, leaving us stranded. Calm as you can please, Vorkus asks us humans to stay out of the way, and he has his men setup explosive traps in the ruins. He also gets his engineers to jury rig some of the missiles from the tank accompanying the group, before splitting his forces.

Batarians come down heavy, probably six hundred of them. Shit looks dire. Vorkus splits the unit into five teams and has them start harassing and sniping the batarians, even as more land. It's fucking hopeless, and I'm ordering my own men to fight well, because we can't fight past a thousand fucking batarians. The snipers hit some batarians, and the stupid fucks wheel around in confusion for a while, before they start to reform.

Then a funny thing happens. He pulls his snipers back, and sends out two squads to directly attack the batarians near their landing zone, while we fall back with the tank. Squads get shot to shit and fall back in good order. The batarians chase them, and the squads keep falling back, drawing the batarians into the traps, which explode.

The batarians that survive are clearly pissed, and we've only killed about fifty of them. But they don't attack, again just milling around, and instead one of their ships comes down. Vorkus has the engineers fire off that missile, and it hits the ship, generates some kind of EMP burst, and crashes it. Vorkus and three squads of turians rush it, managing to get aboard while telling the rest of us to fall back as rapidly as we can.

We do so, which is easy – the batarians on the ground are swarming the cruiser. We get to high ground, and see Vorkus and one of his squads escape, and disappear into the ruins. Then the cruiser's mass core goes up – he sabotaged it and left two squads behind to defend it until it went up. That explosion killed pretty much the entire landing force of batarians.

Vorkus and his guys hid inside a Prothean ruin , which stopped the blast. Calm as you please he and his last squad walk back to us, and he's fucking excited because the cruiser blowing revealed more of the ruin.

Turns out his plan depended on his knowledge of batarians. The snipers shot up the officers, and when the batarians charged, the remaining officers took the lead, and got caught up and killed by the traps. Batarian tactics at that point called for a ground bombardment, and then more officers to get off the command vessel to take over. He had an EMP missile ready to disable the cruiser when it came down to do a bombardment, then used the wreck to bait in the rest of the batarians. With the command vessel and all the high-caste leaders gone, the batarians would panic, and when his sabotage killed them all, they'd want to flee.

Sure enough, with most of the manpower of their fleet gone the fuckers split, and Vorkus wasn't even sweating the shit, busy digging through Prothean bullshit.

Boss, when your ride has been shot out of the sky and you are outnumbered five or six to one, the normal answer is you kiss your ass goodbye and sell your life fucking dearly. Vorkus, at NO FUCKING TIME, was even concerned about the batarians, and more importantly, neither were any of his fucking soldiers.

Do not fuck with them.
Chapter 33: Chapter 33 : Turian Figures of Note

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

A/N: Thank God. The turian section is almost over with, all that remains now is the OOC notes and transition to the next race - the Batarians.

Writing the turians was very hard, since they are very 'alien' in their outlook. While both asari and salarians are certainly quite alien in many ways, their fundamental method of viewing the universe is not that different than certain human cultures throughout history. The turians were not that accommodating.
Work does continue on other projects, it's just slow. I think I'll hold off on putting any kind of timeline around when I think I will have the next piece ready, since I always miss my dates.

As usual, reviews are welcomed, and questions via review or PM encouraged!

Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING

HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Lovely Jack, beautiful Rachel, and dutifully disagreeable Richard.

Our time in turian space has come to an end. Given the disturbances in the fallout of Feros, it is unlikely staying in the area would be conducive to our long-term health. Pel has already met up with me, bringing along Ms. Lawson to assist in coordinating the mass of anecdotes and information we must process.

The process of learning about the turians has certainly been eye-opening, and forces me to consider exactly how much of what the asari assume to be true regarding the turians is merely a smokescreen put forth by the Palavanus. Their anomalous actions and behavior strikes me as deeply ... off. And we have no rationales as to why or how this has happened.

I close our report with an overview of the important turians that I am aware of. I attempted to put together a profile on Tetrimus, the mouth of the Shadow Broker, but the information I collected is so fragmentary and contradictory that I have simply removed it.

Given what I have learned about P., Tetrimus seems like a laughable concern.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: The shadow of coincidence is the stain of collaboration. When in doubt, strike.

Modes of Address:

Turians are not very interested in formal titles. Primarchs, Autarchs, Chieftains and Praetors are referred to as such, while most other turians either go by their first or last name. The polite "cera", or an instance on being addressed by their military rank, is the closest they get to having an actual mode of address.

Likewise, for a turian to address a non-turian by their first name is considered a mark of approval and trust. Turians who usually go by their first name are more open to social discourse than those who rely on their last name.

Primarch Fedorian Kurthal, High Praetor: The huge and regal leader of the turians, Primarch Fedorian is often seen as a brutal and hard nosed figure, more inclined to use his fist than his mouth for diplomacy. This is perhaps an unfair attribution, as Fedorian is very skilled at interaction with aliens and in managing the morass of the turian government.

Fedorian can be summed up by his actions rather than words. He rose through the ranks of the military and meritocracy slowly but surely, eventually marrying a Vakarian female and joining the Kurthal Family as he reached the rank of General. Fedorian became a Praetor in the Troubles, the mini-civil war kicked off in turian space by separatists before the FCW.

When the FCW turned against the turians and they were shamed, and the sitting Primarch proved unable to even defend his own children against the predation of an outcast, Fedorian challenged and defeated him, taking the office for himself and holding onto it ever since. Fedorian has worked hard to attempt to make stable relations with the humans, which he sees as more honorable and trustworthy than salarians or asari, despite the troubled past between your two races.

Fedorian is blunt and given to a soldierly informality, and towers above most other turians, being larger and stronger than even most Palavanus. As High Primarch, his government has been noted for its focus on experimenting with and upgrading the turian fleet and attempting to stabilize the economy on their own rather than rely on the volus.

Fedorian is old friends with both Venari Pallin and Regilus Vakarian, and despite neither being 'officially' ranked as Primarchs, it is well known that if Fedorian steps down he will put one or the others name in the ring for consideration.

For such a powerful figure and a leader of the turians, he is surprisingly humble in his personal wealth, owning a small home near the Spire and a single aircar.

Admiral Tharaxis Davaria, Praetor, Chieftain of Clan Davaria : The second living Praetor, Tharaxis is technically retired, living at home with his children and writing books on military strategy. A coolly efficient tactician and hardened warrior, he also leads and organizes Clan Davaria, named for his own ancestor, yet another Praetor.

Tharaxis is bluntly amused by humans, dislikes salarians, can't stand most asari, and prefers to hunt on Tuchanka. For years he was the high admiral of the turian fleet before settling down in his old age, but even at ninety he is no reclining figure, still active in many aspects of turian society.

Tharaxis' dislike of the asari stems from his younger days, when he had a long-lasting and torrid affair with an asari whose identity has never been confirmed. Apparently she was not loyal, something turians cannot tolerate, and the relationship ended violently by all rumors. There is a single asari at his estates in her late forties who uses his personal facial markings, and this is apparently his daughter by that asari, although since she has been raised from birth by turians, she is more turian in outlook than asari and does not use her biotics at all.

Tharaxis is moderately wealthy, but not outlandishly so.

General Invectus Rathaxan, Praetor: The third living Praetor, General Invectus is still active in the military, in charge of developing the turian military and keeping up with alien forces. He has been the primary backer of the human-turian joint military efforts since the end of the First Contact War, and is the turian most favorable towards humanity who is a major member of the turian government.

Invectus is famous for using perfectly conventional tactics in unconventional ways, and for dabbling in science. He is one of the only turians to be allowed to visit the Palavanus on matters non-essential, and is often called on by Fedorian or the turian government to act as a kind of translator for scientific matters. He is a hobbyist collector of Inusannon technology.

Invectus has been stained with some levels of scandal more than once for his favoritism of human culture and humanity. With his bondmate dead and his children all grown up, Invectus has been linked repeatedly to relationships with human females, something most turians find slightly off putting. Invectus has also traveled to Earth to race personally in GASCAR and to hunt in the radioactive wastes of the Middle East.

Exactly what led to Invectus' appreciation of humanity is unknown, but the rumors state that one of his sons fought in the FCW against a noble lord, who spared his life in a duel, thus winning the Praetor's gratitude. Confirmation is still in progress.

Invectus is famous for using a powerful omni-axe, which has been given the hilarious designation of 'Splitting Headache'.

General Adrien Victus, Primarch: Currently the highest ranking Primarch who has never stood for the High Primarchy, Victus is a successful rebel in a culture that usually disdains such.

Victus is known for highly unconventional tactics, a tight bond with his soldiers, a disdain for naval combat, and his personal bravery. He fought in the FCW, and was instrumental in stopping the counter-thrust of the Second Marine at New Edo, managing to reverse what should have been a crushing victory into a stalemate through clever use of pounce units.

Victus was one of many generals taken aback at the sheer fury your Solguard displayed at the Battle of Sol, and has been generally conciliatory towards humans ever since.

His primary importance is that he is the highest ranking active general who is likely to contest Fedorian's office at the next selection. The general is well liked by his soldiers, popular with the turian media, and far more diplomatic and nuanced than most turians.

Executor Venari Pallin, C-SEC: I know Venari personally, a hardened guardian of the Law who sees duty as higher than any other concern. A childhood friend of Fedorian, his rank in the meritocracy is actually very high, enough that he could easily be a Cluster Primarch if he so chose. Instead, he prefers to run Citadel Security, a job he takes to even more grimly since the death of his wife and children in terrorist activity.

Pallin is very by the book, but is willing to look the other way if it gets results. His innovations to C-SEC, such as Special Response and Special Investigations, have increased C-SEC's reactivity to off-station criminal networks that threaten the Citadel, and he is in close contact and cooperation with the major law enforcement organs of all major races, even batarians.

Pallin has long been an outspoken opponent of the SPECTRE programs and dislikes the entire concept as unworkable and dangerous, a stance that in the past has gotten him into rough seas, but in the fallout of the Saren incident, has won him praise for taking a tough stance and sticking to it by many turians.

Despite the fact that he sits in an office all day, Pallin should be considered highly dangerous, as he was the leader of the Deathwatch for twenty years before moving into law enforcement. Pallin is also curiously hostile to humans, not out of any personal dislike but his belief that your species are merely asari cat-paws. He saves actual hatred for the volus, who he sees as traitors to the Hierarchy.

Autarch Joram Talid, leader of Family Talid: Joram's father was the Admiral in charge of the disaster that became the First Contact War. (I have taken Dr. Minsta's advice to avoid the term 'Relay 314 Incident', since that name infuriates humans.) As such, given the fact that a good fourth of the Family died and the admiral committed ritual suicide in shame, it should be no surprise that Joram hates humans and the Systems Alliance.

What is surprising is his methods of opposition. According to rumor, he went to the Palavanus for advice on how to combat humanity, and is taking their advice seriously. He has become a rather successful businessman, pioneering techniques in light mining and other industrial areas humanity is trying to expand into, crippling your markets. His politics can be felt heavily on the Citadel, where he constantly agitates against human interests, and he is suspected to be one of the major supporters of smuggling restricted items to the Batarian Hegemony.

A tall, dignified looking turian, Talid has become very popular in some salarian circles, and many turians on the Citadel look up to him as well. A traditionalist in all other ways, he is a frequent visitor to the Citadel Chambers.

Family Talid has lost much of its former wealth and influence, but still remains a highly populous family, giving Joram no end of supporters and assistants in his quest to derail humanity's operations. I am frankly astonished you people haven't already assassinated him.

Autarch Geldan Mantha, leader of Family Mantha: A grim and ancient turian, Geldan is commonly nicknamed 'the Executioner' for his unbelievable skills with a sniper rifle. He was crippled by (and crippled in turn) your Michael Saracino in the First Contact War, in their sniper duel during the Raid on Dalthos Fortress, and yet is not bitter towards humanity.

Requiring a grav chair to move around, the leader of Family Mantha focuses most of his time and energy on organizing opposition to the policies of Primarch Fedorian. He has often stated if he were younger and could walk he'd happily challenge Fedorian for the post of Primarch, a challenge that Fedorian has no honorable way to answer.

The core of Mantha's disagreement with Fedorian has to do with his calm acceptance of the Volus pulling away from the Hierarchy, which he sees as blatant threat from the salarians and asari. The only thing he agrees on with Fedorian is that making allies with the humans and thereby perhaps splitting the asari/salarian combination is the best path for the Hierarchy to take.

Extremely argumentative and a very well known proponent of the uses of assassination as a justified political tool, Mantha is as close as the turians get to having a master of intelligence services. He works with the Palavanus in this regard on occasion, although remotely.

Autarch Regilus Vakarian, leader of Family Vakarian: A figure of seeming little importance at first glance, Regilus is one of the most influential turians in the entire Hierarchy for many reasons. He was a highly acclaimed general, rising in rank alongside Fedorian and Pallin during the Troubles, and made his name breaking the Third Facinus Rebellion with minimal losses. His tactics were almost Palavanus-like in their elegance, resulting in him being the designer of most turian tactics used today.

His career stalled heavily after his marriage to his wife, who beat him in ceremonial combat for the right to marry and thus put his ascent up the meritocracy on hold. Instead of sitting still, he joined C-SEC along with Pallin, and was instrumental in forming many of its more paramilitary functions, such as Special Response, along with Pallin.

He retired from C-SEC to take up leadership of the Family after the death of his father, trying to rebuild Family Vakarian's depleted ranks through various means, and became the de facto voice of the Families on Palaven during the Patriarchal selections due to his close relationship with Fedorian. Regilus was also a big player in the military reforms after the end of the FCW, and the push to incorporate more missile technology into the turian fleet.

Given Family Vakarian's extremely high cachet among the meritocracy, and the fact that the only reason he isn't a Primarch is due to his wife's halting of his career, many would happily see Regilus replace Fedorian if the latter ever decided to step down. His fiercely traditionalist outlook and focus on turian honor and valor is seen as more proper than the rather laid back attitudes of Fedorian, and he remains skeptical of humans.

The families (and histories) of Regilus, Fedorian and Pallin are tightly intertwined, and there's a great deal of innuendo that the three males all knew each others mates quite intimately before they were bonded. More scurrilous tales suggest that Regilus and Pallin profiteered from their C-SEC positions in the way of weapons smuggling and other unsavory things, which I have problems believing. In any event, the finances of Family Vakarian have been on the decline with several members dying of a rare turian disease, and Regilus' wife suffering such as well.

Regilus's only son, Garrus, is entangled in the hunt for Saren, but I was able to find out very little about him except that, like his father, he is a deadly sniper and in C-SEC.

Autarch Erenis Varok, leader of Family Varok: the biggest of the "Big Four" Families, Erenis Varok is that rarest of creatures, a female Family leader. While turians are not sexist in the way humans are, their culture has definitive roles for males and females, and most females do not ascend to leadership of Families. (Clans, yes, but not families.)

That being said, Erenis is leader and Autarch by her skills and abilities alone. She has single-handedly revived Family Varok from a broken collection of distant relatives into a mighty and united force, boasting generals, admirals, and three Cluster Primarchs. She is only Autarch, yet is poised to ascend to Primarch during the next cycle, and has been seen practicing martial arts and ax combat with Deathwatch instructors, making many think she plans on challenging Fedorian. A female High Primarch would send shockwaves throughout the Hierarchy, and probably not good ones, as many of the more traditional colony clusters would be absolutely livid.

Erenis is a very unconventional turian, who focuses mostly on economics and working with the various military commands to offset revenue losses from volus investors pulling out. She's started something of a trend among turian women to be 'more responsible' with money, to encourage saving and investing. Her businesses, unlike most turian companies, are more than mere transfer points for the military, often investing in foreign markets and bringing the revenue back to invest into the Hierarchy.

While the turians do not count wealth as a primary driver of success, she is indeed very wealthy, probably the richest turian in the Hierarchy. There has been some talk of her being invited into the Citadel Court of Corporations as the first turian member.

Given her age, the fact that she has not bonded to a mate yet is somewhat unusual. She is rather rare in that she has gone ahead and had children (eleven so far) by various turian males, and shows little sign of slowing down. She has been particularly outspoken in her statements suggesting that turian birthrates are too low, which – given that there are now more turians than any other race – seems outright ludicrous.

Autarch Tarren Sparatus, Citadel Councilor: This rather aggressive fellow is a microcosm of everything turian, which is no doubt why he was chosen. Sarcastic, sullen, and argumentative, Sparatus is often the odd man out in Citadel votes, which is a clear source of frustration for him.

Formerly a general and a member of the Deathwatch, Sparatus was never a highly placed associate of those in power, despite his achievements. He was very unhappy with the outcome of the FCW and feels his current position is pointless. Despite this, he is loyal to the Hierarchy and dutiful to beyond the tolerance of other turians, and endures with few complaints.

Sparatus delights in malaproping various human sayings and gestures to infuriate humans, including mangling your various sayings and using the 'air quotes' gesture to impugn anything he has his doubts about. Ms. Lawson has called this 'trolling', a term I do not quite understand, but if the idea is that his acts are deliberate, this is certainly true.

Sparatus is well known for his appreciation of music other than turian, about the only non-conformist thing about him, and is given to listening to batarian force-opera and human death metal.

Warden Kuril of Meshar, Blue Suns commander: The most famous of the turian outcasts, Kuril turned his back on the meritocracy and the Hierarchy over fifty years ago, when the batarian raids on his colony claimed his wife and children and the official response was simple to protest to the Council. Kuril has an intolerance for slavers and crime that makes Justicars and Commissars look kindly, and he is in charge of a massive deep space high security prison where he incarcerates the worst criminals in the galaxy in return for fees.

Kuril was once highly placed in the meritocracy, even in line for a role as Autarch. His violent separation from the Hierarchy still causes whispers four decades later, as does his brutal treatment towards criminals (or worse, slavers) who are unlucky enough to be in his grasp.

Kuril was famously supportive of your Commander Shepard in her RRU days, often sending along Blue Suns pickup ships to gather up any pirates or slavers smart enough to surrender to Shepard before a fight. He has gone on record as saying if there were more Butchers and Justicars in the galaxy, there'd be no need for such hard acts as committed by the Deathwatch and other groups – such as Cerberus.

Kuril is a truly terrifying opponent in battle, having been a member of the Deathwatch for many years. He is perhaps the only known turian who has turned down the offer of reconciliation with the Hierarchy, who offered him the Trials to rejoin the turian people after his Blue Suns unit tracked down and captured a pair of Facinus separatists.

Kuril is famously barefaced, refusing to use his old colony markings. Since the loss of his wife, he has been in relationships with his asari lieutenant for the past thirty years, although they have no offspring – then again, a prison station is hardly the place to raise a family.

Imperial Prince Regent and High Pretarch Thanix Palavanus, leader of Family Palavanus: The leader of the Palavanus and the theoretical heir to the office of Imperator, Thanix is both a celebrated warrior and a skilled and famous scientist.

A physicist and weapons designer by nature, Thanix has lead turian fleet and weapons developments for over fifty years, building or designing many elements of the turian war machine. Much of the development of the most recent addition to the turian arsenal, the SKYTALON suit and the SPEAR minigun, are his work, as are increasing levels of turian sophistication in optronics technology.

Thanix boasts an intelligence level unmatched by even salarians, literally off the scale of the Rienar Intelligence Measure – in your terms, well above 250 IQ. He is so intellectual and intelligent that he has a cadre of other Palavanus that have to translate most of what he said into language that normal beings can understand.

Thanix rarely bothers to 'lead' the Family, with each member pretty much doing whatever takes their fancy. His current fixation has turned from weapons towards Inusannon technology, particularly research into the biotic-reactive ruins of Gryt-III. Thanix, according to what I have been able to discover, thinks the basalt plain and the eezo-carved sigils there are containing something, and has been exhaustively researching it for the past three years.

The last time he interacted with the public was at the cessation of the First Contact War, when he declined to summon the Palavanus for a Council of Woe. Given Pel's insight into what usually happens when such a convocation occurs, it is very likely that if he had agreed, humanity may not have survived. He has gone on record as saying humans are not a threat, but could be used as one, whatever that means.

Among the many quirks of the Imperial Prince is that he dabbles in the wheel religion of the salarians along with his own ancestor worship. More recently, rumors state he has been splitting his time between his research and time in the ancestral shrine.

P. , He Who Is Not: By far the strangest and most baffling of the many turian outcasts, the enigmatic figure known only as P. may be the most dangerous being in the entire galaxy. While at this point he hasn't acted against humanity or the Systems Alliance, who knows when that will change?

I will admit to admiring him simply because he has gleefully murdered and plundered members of the Thirty, supposedly by seducing them. The irony of those manipulative fools being played by a turian is too delicious to ignore.

Almost nothing is known of his origins. He simply seemed to appear almost sixty years ago, and very few have met him face to face. Those who have say he wears all-black face-paint with a single pink glyph on his forehead. Pink is a very rarely used color in turian culture, because turians have difficulty seeing it. The color, when used, is a mix of concepts of both rejection or non-conformance and misdirection. For black to cover the entire face, combined with the pink glyph, would seem to indicate a rejection or a misdirection of valor, a very curious concept indeed. The glyph itself is the more ominous thing, as it has shapes that invoke certain asari glyphs found in the Temple of Athame.

P. is an information broker, a crime lord, a terrifying assassin, a master thief, and above all else a showman. While he rarely appears in person, his broadcasts and snippets of his perspectives are found all over the extranet. His voice interrupts news broadcasts to share 'the P's Truth', an attempt to expose the sordid acts of various governments, and more than one black ops program has met grisly ends at the hands of P. and his army of operatives. He grandly announces whatever acts he's pulled off across the extranet, often including mocking footage of the reactions of governments.

What becomes terrifying about this is that often times these videos are in what would be seen as secure locations, such as the private offices of high government officials, or (amusingly) the bedroom trysts of asari matriarchs. He has even gone so far as to do what no other outside group has done, and record the reaction of the Council of Matriarchs, somehow, from within the Temple of Athame!

P. has no stated motives or goals aside from sheer chaos – one minute he may hack money from the asari to pay for disaster relief for humans, the next he may be slamming an asteroid into an turian colony and then stealing money from the relief efforts set up to help it to send to the quarians. If there is any pattern to his acts, it is that his harmful acts are limited to hitting the asari, salarians and turians, while his helpful acts focus on the other races. He is also a foe of large corporations, and delights in taunting (and killing) intelligence agents of any race.

P. runs (or is behind) many businesses, most of which are part of a grand organizational network that focuses on supplying turian outcasts and separatists, building up crime rings, and operating several turian outcast mercenary organizations. The level of his connections is mired in shadows, there's literally no telling how many mercenaries, pirates, and private security organizations actually answer to some front company run by him. Given the level of wealth and influence he has, he is certainly capable of being a threat to any galactic power, possibly even the Citadel Council itself – even the Shadow Broker and Aria do not antagonize him.

P. is well known for truly outrageous feats of hacking and theft, including siphoning over a billion credits from the coffers of the Citadel Tax Offices and making off with a cutting-edge experimental salarian heavy cruiser in the midst of testing. But his networks are often used for darker acts as well, assassinations and bombings. Six Matriarchs of the Thirty, three lesser Primarchs, and more than one member of the Six Families has fallen by his hand. Only one patchy recording of him in actual combat exists, some fifty years ago, with him laughing in uproarious mockery as he battled Mithrax Arterius, a Praetor and one of the most dangerous SPECTRE's in history, before overpowering him and escaping.

No one ever confirmed to meet him in combat has survived except Mithrax, and the video clearly shows that the Praetor was losing. Pel has already told us of the fierce power held by these turian heroes, and Mithrax was a SPECTRE atop that. In interviews held after, Mithrax was insistent that P. was literally toying with him. Whatever P. is, I cannot advise attempting to attack him.

His criminal status is literally beyond any other sentient alive, as he is wanted in Citadel, turian, salarian, asari and Noverian courts, with no less than two hundred million credits in bounties on his head and six hundred and eleven death sentences. The turian government refuses to call him P. , instead titling him as "He who is not", and have ritually struck the very idea of his existence from every roll of valor.

There were once many justice brigades devoted to bringing him down, but nineteen years ago over 90% of them were murdered in their sleep, and the rest woke up to find a cheery pink ribbon tied around the necks of their mates and children. Since then even the turians have not found the bravery to actually go after him.

The so-called 'Hand of P' is an equally confusing turian known as Rolan Quarn, a masterful impersonator and thief extraordinaire. Rolan Quarn appears on videos distributed to the extranet extolling his master's virtues and warning of nefarious 'Citadel Plots'. Turians who claim to have known Quarn say the turian on the videos certainly has his voice and mannerisms, but that isn't his face. Then again, the turian appearing on each such video has subtle plating and eye socket differences in every single video, so Quarn may have cybernetics underlying his facial plating allowing him to alter his features on the fly.

P. also maintains a literal harem of asari outcasts, numbering in the dozens, and boasts well over fifty daughters. The very curious thing about these daughters is most of them appear to be closer to ninety than sixty, which might mean P. is older than he appears – or that he was active before he came to fame as P. The role of the "Daughterhood of Chaos" seems to be penetrating asari, turian, and salarian culture to scout and identify targets.

The rumored hideout of P. is a system deep in the core-edge of the Traverse, inside a black hole cluster and with an uncharted relay the only way in or out. Neither the SPECTRE agents or STG units sent after him have ever found a trace of his whereabouts, and several units that have gone looking for him have simply vanished, including a team of nine SPECTREs – one a war priestess of Athame – and a dozen heavily trained Final Line Soldiers. Again, the Citadel gave up on this effort years ago.

Likewise, rumors of his origins are wild and unsubstantiated. Many claim he must be a Palavanus, but the few people who have seen him claim he lacks their fringe structure or stature. Many of these theories are so much garbage, but I have heard one theory from both STG contacts and from the lips of Matriarchs of the Thirty when I was still a Priestess. They both claim that P. is not actually an entirely new phenomena, that a figure similar to P. was active early in the First Krogan Rebellion after the Turians entered the war, as well as the Second Krogan Rebellion.

It took me a while to find evidence of this, as someone has been very diligent in cleaning the extranet as well as offline libraries, but I was able to find a fragmentary STG report about the salarian interaction with Ganar Okeer being interrupted by a figure that seems very similar to P., which they drove off only with heavy losses.

Is not Okeer one of the associates of Saren? Perhaps reaching out to ask him what he knows would be more productive than speculating in ignorance. Whatever P. is, for him to be that old is clearly impossible, unless he is using some form of cryonic suspension and only appearing in person when the time is right.
Chapter 34: Chapter 34 : Turian Miscellany, Shift

A/N: As with the asari and the salarians, the very nature of the Cerberus Files means some things are not touched on, while others are looked at in the filter of what is important to Cerberus. While the turians were looked at in a more neutral light than the asari or salarians, some things were not touched on because Cerberus wasn't interested ... others because they did not know.

Any out of character notes will appear here. Just as with the other races, I've tried very hard to make the turians more than cardboard cutouts. Just as asari are more than ass-shaking sex fantasies, and salarians more than for-the-evulz researcher types, turians should be more than 'me-good-soldier-me-follow-orders' zombies who never run and always use airquotes.

This concludes the turian section, which was longer and harder than the salarians and serves me right for bitching about them.

UPDATES: Turian Kaless is now 315 proof.

Turian Social Interactions

Turians see themselves, at least in the modern era, as all struggling together. Their concept of unification is alien to us, because their concern is actually that of all turians as a collective. Killing individual turians for the good of the race as a whole is seen as right, not unethical or hypocritical.

Turians are loyal to even turian strangers, as long as they are not outcasts. They will call each other brother and sister, or elder turians father or mother. They tend, even when arguing vehemently with each other, to care about the other in the argument. Pallin does not argue with Garrus merely out of devotion to law, but because he worries about Garrus ruining his future and doing something that he will regret. Garrus argues not only out of frustration but admiration for Pallin, seeking to show him that he's right and win his superior's own approval.

Turian conversations are often informal when between turians of similar rank or meritocracy placement, or among old friends, but become more formal (and militaristic) the further apart two turians are on the scale. High rank turians do NOT look down on lesser rank turians, they are simply more formal with them and provide guidance.

Turian fighting (and the whole fight-mate-drunk thing) is not seen in a prejudicial light. A turian does not fight or spar with those he dislikes, as the desire to pounce and kill is too strong - a turian who turns down a match is basically telling the other turian he would like to kill him. Likewise, turians become offended if non-turians refuse offers of a spar, as they see it as the alien thinking they don't have the control to not hurt them.

Turian Emotion and Communication

Turians often suppress displayed emotion, but it is there – turians feel with an intensity that burns, and their sorrows, joys, loves, and hatreds run deeper than most other races. A turian who swears vengeance will never stop, one who declares his love will not go back on it unless betrayed.

The sub-tonal element of turian speech often conveys secondary emotional overtones, ones the turians have been careful not to introduce into translation software. As a result of bonding with asari, the general concept is known, but very few non-turians can interpret such sounds for what they are.

Turian females emit pheromones that have a tendency to stiffen turian male morale and bravery, which is yet another reason the military has the two sexes highly intermixed.

Turians often have problems expression their very strong emotional states, often suppressing them in favor of a calm, stoic front that is anything but accurate. When they do anger, it bursts free - Sparatus' reaction to Saren's betrayal is a good example of turian anger. For this reason turians prefer to receive bad news in private, so that they don't project a violent appearance.

Turian speech tends towards directness - double-talk and euphemisms are only used by the Palavanus in most cases. A turian values straight talk as a sign of trust, and will not shy away from criticism (positive or negative) if he feels it's deserved. The flip side of this is that most turians very free with their blunt opinions of those they feel are below them in rank or merit, while silent to those higher than them.

Outcasts

The Palavanus did what they could to obliterate individualism from the turian mindset, but no such operation can be fully successful. Inevitably, some turians simply will not be able to fit into the highly organized and stultifying turian culture. And equally inevitably, they will either flee of their own volition, or be forced out for not conforming.

Outcasts are not separatists. A separatist wants the Hierarchy destroyed and the old clan based rule restored. An outcast is just a turian who can't fit in to the greater turian society. Some outcasts still hang on inside the Hierarchy, rarely advancing up the meritocracy, doing the best they can to make sense of it all. Others become morose and depressed, leaving everything they know for a chance at making a new life.

The tendency for turian outcasts to take up with asari is not, as some have suggested, deviance. Turians are by evolution pack-based creatures, and need others around them for psychological reasons. While many outcasts band together to find such, those who are loners will go mad without some kind of support,and the bond an asari forms with a turian can provide them with the balance they need.

Outcasts are in a hard spot when it comes to dealing with regular turians. Cast out of the pack, the outcast – even if he or she didn't fit in while she was part of the Hierarchy – is given to jealousy , hate, and fear. The non-outcast turian tends to feel a mix of disgusted pity and wariness around outcasts.

Many outcasts are more oddly more friendly than Hierarchy turians, as they cannot afford to make enemies by being surly and rude. Most of them tend to be far less traditionalist as well, although most will have one or two things they cling to and will not back away from.

When enough turian outcasts band together, they have a tendency to want to make one of their own the leader. The emergence of P. in recent years has sublimated this tendency – many outcasts see P. as the ultimate turian, standing firm against anything and everything in his path, and will follow his wishes in much the same way turians defer to Primarchs.

Turian Society

The day to day bits of turian society are both like and unlike that of other races. Businesses are not driven by profit so much as performance – as if every business was a non-profit organization. Even those that do outside business have a tendency for fair pricing and more focus on employee issues than making profits.

Likewise, turian entertainment is not so much propaganda as merely focusing on the things turians find important. If there is a glorification of the Hierarchy in such, it is because that is actually what turians find comforting and appealing.

Most turians live their lives in a manner not drastically different than humans, asari, or salarians, but with a focus on preparedness and more civil defense drills. Turians do not argue with one another over material things or basics – a turian in need is one every turian will try to help.

Turian Foods and Drinks

Turians are masterful, devoted cooks, who have a wide range of native foods and ones adopted from other dextro-compatible planets. Almost all turian cooks are male – female turians, especially when in heat, have difficulties with taste and smell that make cooking difficult. Many turian foods are pastes and jellies, spread upon a kind of bread made from legumes called ironwafer.

The primary turian foods are ground meat pastes baked or fried into wraps, a beanlike substance often turned into a mush with bits of meat, and steaks and other meat-based products. Vegetables and other plant material is eaten sparingly, often pre-ground up to avoid overuse of the gullet, and more for flavor and texture than nutrition.

Secondary turian dishes often incorporate fish and types of sea-life, shrimp analogues, and the like. Turian secondary dishes are served after the main meal, and are flavored to bring out aftertastes and as a snacking type of feasting leading up to drinking.

Turian brandy is unique in the sugars it is made from are actually bichiral, meaning it can be safely consumed with no ill effects by everything except elcor. The turians have over three hundred varieties of brandies, cordials, and fruit-extract punches with alcohol content starting at 25% and going up from there. The strongest and rarest turian brandy actually drinkable, kaless, has a proof of roughly 145, and will kill quarians, salarians, batarians, and most humans from shock alone. Turian horosk is literally pure spirits and will send even turians into a coma if consumed in more than tiny amounts.

Turian spices hail from a wide variety of sources, including plant and animal extracts, mineral compounds, and secondary processed extracts from dead turians. The latter is mostly restricted to funeral services.

Turian Romance and Sexuality

Turians understand romance and are surprisingly good at it, seeing the hunt and chase as highly enjoyable in any sort of encounter. Again, they are not human, and have no concepts of sin as related to sex, so it is highly casual. Romance is taken much more seriously, as turians may be casual with sex but bonding is very important.

While there is certainly an element of physical comparability, turian romance is based more around the concept of two turians to excite and support the other. Turians (for many reasons) have a tendency towards depression and mental instability, and their lifemates fight this better than any other remedy.

Most turian romance is a mixture of melodramatic moments and what most people would call sappy emotionalism. Turians, for all their hard-edged instincts, are much softer and more caring around their mates (and children, for that matter).

Given the extremely strong impetus for females to produce offspring, it should come as no surprise that turian sexuality is somewhat rampant. There is a great deal of social pressure on turians to mate and produce offspring, even above evolutionary urges. Unlike asari, to whom pleasure is merely passing and often seen as unimportant, or humans, who tend to be able to rein in their own impulses, most turians are functional sex addicts.

They have extremely poor methods of stress relief or managing emotional issues, and the fight-sex-drink routine only purges stresses for a short amount of time. This has had the effect of cheapening turian sexuality to the point where bonding rates are starting to fall – it is simply more common for females to mate with as many males as possible to stay continually pregnant, and more common for males to take advantage of such.

The downside to this is that bonding produces biochemical changes that lead to better egg-laying conditions. Turian children from unbonded women develop more slowly and have five times the mortality rate of children from bonded women.

Sadly, the pressure on the turian military – losses from batarian incursions, losses from separatist infighting, and ongoing losses from turians literally working themselves to death – had only increased the pressure for more turian offspring to be born. The Palavanus have not seen this trend yet, and when they do they are unlikely to do anything to correct it.

Turian Literature and Entertainment

Given the turian love of melodrama and themes of vengeance, the most popular genre of turian literature is the therxal, or the Redemption Hunt of Revenge. It is a story where a popular and valorous hero is unfairly outcast by corrupted, cowardly enemies, and must struggle against odds and enemies to face his foe in a life-or-death fight, usually contrived in nature. Garrus's off the wall comment to Telanya about not fighting Saren over a live volcano on a rope bridge is a snippet from one of these works.

Turians like salarian crime drama, finding the twists and turns exciting, and are (even if they try to hide it) enormous fans of human war films, especially ones set prior to spaceflight. Turians have been the highest consumer of human WWII movies among aliens. Turians also like noir films and have a strange attraction towards the Maltese Falcon.

Turians tend to dislike softer asari works, but do like asari music, along with some batarian musical arrangements. Very few turians experiment much with alien music, but a lot of turian music has the same sorts of sounds and overtones as human death metal, and it's becoming popular in some turian circles.

The turian love of melodrama is a well known fact among the galactic races, and it often seems as if much of turian society is constructed to extract the maximum value of such from everyday actions. Turian weapons, for example, have no need of heavy, loud and intimidating cocking noises, pump actions, or bayonets, but all have these features. This love of melodrama is found in all their works, and a turian who does not indulge in it is seen as strange and boring.

Relationships between the Turian Commoners, Clans, and Families

The Clans are the collection of turians who have no blood link to the old nobility of Palaven, who prize action louder than words. The closest thing you can get to in human society would be medieval reenactments, except these people do this 24/7.

The Clans are open to anyone high enough up in the meritocracy, and they tend to be full of turians subtly dissatisfied with popular life, longing for battle, valor and glory. They aren't seen as throwbacks, but nor are they seen as proper leaders. The clans lost a great deal of prestige in the Unification War, as well as almost all of their lands, ships and power, and the Primarchs are not going to let them ever restore it.

The Families, on the other hand, are very much throwbacks. Most turians see them not quite as nobility, more like we would see the rich and famous. Families push their members very hard to be ideals of the turian people and the turian concept of duty and sacrifice, as opposed to the focus of glory and honor and valor of the Clans. The Families are seen as more level-headed, more mature and definitely more suited to leadership in most cases.

Families and Clans alike deal everyday with regular turians, and there isn't much of a divide between them. Clans will tend to be slightly snobbish around non-military turians (such as those engaged in maintenance of wilderness areas or medics), while Families tend towards cold formalism with turians perceived as lacking in duty (such as entertainers and artists).

The Palavanus

The Palavanus are an enigma to most alien races, one that they have worked very hard to maintain. The Palavanus are indeed very different than all other turians, and their strange nature is entirely due to the origin of the turians.

As explained in the history, Palaven was indeed engineered. An ancient alien race, uncovering the truth about the Reaper Cycles and realizing their numbers would not be enough to survive, decided to build perfect soldiers and influence them through Reaper-related technology – the Arca Devices. These were created using the secondary Reaper implants this ancient race had managed to salvage during their own long fight against the Reapers. The Arca Devices would create a weak-order indoctrination effect, stimulating the creation of husk-like creatures to dominate and lead. Subtle tweaks to the nature of the indoctrination coding, however, would make such creatures immune to actual Reaper indoctrination, or at least highly resistant.

The Arca Devices were not well understood, even by their creators. This was not helped when the Reapers invaded while the aliens were still in the process of getting everything ready. Testing revealed they had a wide range of side effects, and the final produced creatures were horrific looking and likely to invoke terror. Still, with their war going very poorly, the ancient race poured everything into their effort. Their goal was to create a race to avenge their deaths, to be the perfect foil for Reaper abilities and technology.

They took the best possible lifeforms that they found like themselves - dextro in nature - and threw them on a special world designed for rapid evolution of a pure hunter-killer. In order to cover the entire planet of Palaven, three such devices would be needed. Unfortunately, one of the devices was shot down by Reapers on Eden Prime, and the other one was damaged. The undamaged one ended up in the Valluvian Temple, creating the Valluvian Priesthood. Unfortunately, the Priesthood itself was not the product the aliens wanted, being too fixated on ritual to move beyond that, and the volcanism of the planet ended up destroying it in any event.

The damaged Arca Device,however, managed to do it's job correctly. It ended up in the clan territory of the Palavanus and was undiscovered until they found it.

The Palavanus Arca Device acts very differently from the main one. The damage to it was very severe, and it attempted to repair itself as best as it could, but the level of success it achieved was low. Instead of converting the turians physically into complete husk-super-soldiers, it instead modified the Palavanus, giving them low levels of regeneration and completely nullifying most pain and fear responses.

It altered their minds as well, giving them something the Palavanus call the Oversense. Just as The Illusive Man can instinctively understand alien languages, technology and see certain things that others can't, the Palavanus have a semi-subtelepathic connection to other turians and can innately understand many technologies. The sub-telepathy makes them natural leaders of turians, who cannot help but feel stronger and more powerful when a Palavanus leads them.

The alterations of the device have resulted in all Palavanus born near it (which in the modern era is all of them, as the device is in the center of their egg chambers) coming out mentally altered as well as physically. The device boosts their toughness to completely unnatural levels, heightens their intellect, and gives them a keen and cunning instinct of how to manipulate turians. They are highly resistant not only to indoctrination but even Thorian domination – the Thorian on Eingana could not completely control Vorkus Palavanus even after the latter died. It gives them a coldly manipulative and cunningly treacherous outlook that would not fare poorly in salarian or asari circles. It somehow blinds their acts from the perception of the salarian Wheel Priests, and it even attracts the spirits (see below).

Most importantly, it has made them something very close to sociopaths. Palavanus do not, and perhaps cannot, place value on anything except an urge to follow the ancient commands of the Device and build a perfect warrior race. Every action they took has been to change and mold the turian people into the perfect warriors the aliens who crafted Palaven were trying to achieve.

They have stepped back because their perfect soldiers are faltering, and they do not yet know how to fix the issue. There is simply too much stress and militarism and emotion in the turian lifestyle, and not enough softer things to balance it all out. The Palavanus understand this but can't figure out how to bring it about, and are taking a hands-off approach to see if the turian people can figure it out.

When it comes to Reaper exposure, the Palavanus will instinctively hate and fear them. The Palavanus have not been fully briefed on everything that happened during ME1, but the moment they are brought the wreckage of the Reaper main gun, the Palavanus will know they must fight whatever this is. It will be why in ME2 it is (hilariously) the turians and Sparatus who continue to bring up the Reapers as an immediate threat when the other races believe it to be hundreds of years in the future before the Reapers will show up.

Turian religious practices – the spirits

As one can probably intuit from their religious section, the turian 'spirits' are nothing even remotely to do with an actual afterlife. They are fragmented energy beings from a higher dimensional state, shattered and destroyed by the Reapers in a far-past cycle, and attracted to the Arca Device of the Palavanus.

Turian prayers and pleas are somehow understood by this fragment of the race, which cannot always directly affect the lower dimensions in a reliable manner. They do what they can to aid the turians, always working towards methods to encourage them to advance far enough to be able to perceive them.

The Palavanus can see the spirits very clearly – and communicate with them, albeit in a fractured language that barely conveys any easily understood meaning. The Palavanus have used the spirits to understand some technology they can't quite grasp. The Palavanus have managed to figure out the spirits are trying to warn them about something dangerous, although more details are hard to work out aside from the fact that it is an extra-galactic invasion.

The spirits have been able to show the Palavanus 'things to see' – namely, ruined bits of technology they can adapt to fight the Reapers with. At the same time, they don't truly understand 'mere' three dimensional beings, and some of the things they are showing the Palavanus are very dangerous – like the ruins of Gryt-III.

As an aside, yes, the spirits did indeed deflect those bullets in the doctor's office.

The Transitional Piece...

Jack Harper sighed as he viewed the two men standing before him, before lighting his Compineros cigarette with a moue of disgust.

"Gentlemen, you are both graduates of the best programs and training humanity has to offer. You are lethal assassins, deadly soldiers with more than thirty years of experience and background. And yet you are responsible for nearly wrecking the Minuteman Shuttlebay. Can either of you explain exactly how this came to be?"

The figures in front of the Illusive Man were as different as night and day.

The one on the left was slender and tightly muscled, short and wiry. His Asian features were coldly composed, his eyes occluded behind his low-light cybernetic mask, leaving only white staring spaces in their place, framed by messy black hair that fell to his shoulder. His slim-line Cerberus armor was decorated with complex Chinese imagery, curing dragons and tigers, shaded in pale gray on the glossy black surface of his armor, and half hidden under his ballistic long-coat. A monomolecular blade sat in a battered sheath across his back, with a long bandoleer of omniknife hilts, grenades, throwing knives and darts crossing his chest.

The man next to him towered over him by a good foot, thick with powerful muscle. Strong arms and a barrel chest came to a fairly narrow waist atop pillar like legs, the entire form sheathed in heavy plates of black armor trimmed in gold. Two huge shotguns cut down into pistols slumped in wide holsters from a slantwise belt, and the man's African features were fierce - shaved head, a strong jaw, cold black eyes narrowed in amused anger, and gleaming white teeth bared in a sudden smile.

Kai Leng and Theo Pellam spoke at the same moment, each gesturing at the other. "He's a goddamned moron."

Jack closed his eyes, telling himself that if he just exhaled and inhaled enough, he would either wake up from this ridiculous nightmare, or the two in front of him would suddenly mature to act their age. When he found to his immense disappointment that this was not the case, he poured himself a very liberal three fingers of scotch and drank heavily before speaking.

"Kai, Pel. Cerberus is not an organization given to levity. And while I certainly appreciate your jobs are stressful and liable to cause some need for the expression of... polite disagreement ... the answer should not involve taking out nineteen soldiers, five JOTUN mechs, and requiring a GUNSHIP to make you to stop brawling."

He tapped ashes from his cigarette. "Luckily, since you are free of your assignment to turian space, Pel, and you are done cleaning up on Eden Prime, Kai, I have the perfect task for you."

He tapped a padd on his desk. "Pel, you have already assisted Dr. Minsta and Matriarch Trellani on putting together reports on the alien threats we face in this galaxy, so you can fill Kai in on the goals later. My next target of interest is the Batarian Hegemony. Given the fact that asari would be ... extremely vulnerable in batarian space, and that sending any female into that region is non-optimal, I've decided the only assets that I can afford to send who can take care of themselves are you two."

He puffed his cigarette again. "I was almost feeling regretful for doing so, until you two smashed my pinnace."

Kai Leng sighed, while Pel folded his arms. "Look, bossman, I know the Dog has a stick up it's ass. So shit got a little out of hand. If Rachel's bitch-ass Iron flunkies hadn't pulled weapons on us it would have just been a little blowing off steam."

Kai Leng made a disgusted hand motion. "If that's the best Iron can produce you might as well just hire a pack of vorcha. No training. No emotional hardening. You kill one of them and the rest act shocked."

Pel grimaced. "You're not supposed to kill our own guys, slant-eyed idiot."

Kai glared back. "They're Iron, not 'our own guys'. We did not ask for these amateurs to be grafted onto us like leeches, and besides, a single punch should not kill a normal human." He fingered a knife. "Call me slant-eye again."

Pel opened his mouth but the Illusive Man tapped his desk sharply. "Children, I believe I was talking about dispatching you to batarian space...and the fact that you smashed my pinnace. I am waiting for you to either accept said order, or magically provide me with a new, nineteen million credit pinnace."

The two nightmare assassins gave nearly identical sighs, and Kai was the first to speak. "Fine, Mr. Harper. We'll go to batarian space and torture some information out of the squints. Do we have any support or resources?"

The Illusive Man glanced over at the form of Trellani, who had been silent up to this point. She sat comfortably off to one side of the room, and quirked her lips, her intricate facial paint taking on a sinister look in the dim lighting. "The ship we used in turian space is still available, and most of the translation resources, study software and telecom equipment is intact. The pinnace would have been a better choice, but..."

Her smirk grew, and Jack sighed again.

Pel rubbed his chin. "We'd have to go in as slavers. We can probably buy back some of our own people if you drop us a dime or two for that, then blow up some shit on our way out to cover our tracks. Not that I'm scared of the punk-ass state army, but the SIU ain't nothing to fuck with." His expression brightened. "We can probably 'liberate' some fine ass women on our way, now that I think about it."

Kai Leng shot Pel a look of pure loathing, then rolled his shoulders. "Mr. Harper, I rest my case in regards to Pel being a moron. When do we depart?"

Jack put out his cigarette. "You have a day to gather what you need. Events are coming to a head here, and I plan to relocate with Trellani back to the Denver Arcology, well away from the HQ. Our relationship with Admiral Kahoku is becoming strained as more evidence of our interaction with Saren comes out, and when the SA realizes it is not me but it's own two watchdogs who have gone rogue, there is no telling what the reaction will be."

He rubbed his head. "I will be trying to determine what our level of danger is. Minsta is already occupied here at Minuteman with the breakdown of what we intercepted from the Normandy in terms of footage from Feros, which is why he won't be coming along. Assuming nothing changes, once you finish with the Batarians, meet up with us at the Cord-Hislop HQ."

Kai nodded. "And if something does change?"

Jack almost ignored the idea, but paused. "If things go very downhill...I will enact Benedict. Your job if that happens is to ensure the safety of as many of 'our people' as you can - at the very least, Oleg, Hope, Miranda, Trellani, Henry Lawson, and if needed our little mole in the Broker Network. Our first fallback will be Horizon. In the event I am killed, Miranda Lawson will lead the organization, and if she is killed, then Henry and Oleg will figure out what to do from there."

Pel nodded. "What 'bout Iron and Shadow?"

Jack smiled. "In the case of Benedict? I said 'our people'. I believe you have long advocated a housecleaning of Cerberus, Mr. Pellham."

Pel and Kai both gave icy, grim smiles at that, and Pel inclined his head. "That's why I like you, bossman. In that case, we're off to pick up some enslaved honeys and write about guns and shit. Kai can do the rest."

Kai only shook his head. "Jesus wept."

Batarians, Quarians and Krogans will be covered in the next Cerberus Files