#PLANETS FROM OUTSIDE OUR LOCAL CLUSTER OF GALAXIES

[giediwyomingamericadeathtrap]

GIEDI WYOMING AMERICA DEATHTRAP

DISNEYLAND?

[alderaanwyomingamericadeathtrap]

ALDERAAN WYOMING AMERICA DEATHTRAP

DISNEYLAND?

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Webb finds candidates for first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way

An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to detect the first rich population of brown dwarf candidates outside the Milky Way in the star cluster NGC 602.

Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200 000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602. The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. Together with its associated HII [1] region N90, which contains clouds of ionised atomic hydrogen, this cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.

An international team of astronomers, including Peter Zeidler, Elena Sabbi, Elena Manjavacas and Antonella Nota, used Webb to observe NGC 602 and they detected candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way. “Only with the incredible sensitivity and spatial resolution in the correct wavelength regime is it possible to detect these objects at such great distances,” shared lead author Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency. “This has never been possible before and also will remain impossible from the ground for the foreseeable future.”

Brown dwarfs are the more massive cousins of giant gas planets (typically ranging from roughly 13 to 75 Jupiter masses, and sometimes lower). They are free-floating, meaning that they are not gravitationally bound to a star as exoplanets are. However, some of them share characteristics with exoplanets, like their atmospheric composition and storm patterns. “Until now, we’ve known of about 3000 brown dwarfs, but they all live inside our own galaxy,” added team member Elena Manjavacas of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency.

“This discovery highlights the power of using both Hubble and Webb to study young stellar clusters,” explained team member Antonella Nota, executive director of the International Space Science Institute in Switzerland and the previous Webb Project Scientist for ESA. “Hubble showed that NGC602 harbors very young low mass stars, but only with Webb we can finally see the extent and the significance of the substellar mass formation in this cluster. Hubble and Webb are an amazingly powerful telescope duo!”

“Our results fit very well with the theory that the mass distribution of bodies below the hydrogen burning limit is simply a continuation of the stellar distribution,” shared Zeidler. “It seems they form in the same way, they just don’t accrete enough mass to become a fully fledged star.”

The team’s data include a new image from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) of NGC 602, which highlights the cluster stars, the young stellar objects, and the surrounding gas and dust ridges, as well as the gas and dust itself, while also showing the significant contamination by background galaxies and other stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. These observations were made in April 2023.

“By studying the young metal-poor brown dwarfs newly discovered in NGC602, we are getting closer to unlocking the secrets of how stars and planets formed in the harsh conditions of the early Universe,“ added team member Elena Sabbi of NSF's NOIRLab, the University of Arizona, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

“These are the first substellar objects outside the Milky Way” added Manjavacas. “We need to be ready for new ground-breaking discoveries in these new objects!”

These observations were made as part of the JWST GO programme #2662 (PI: P. Zeidler). The results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Notes

[1] Some of the most beautiful extended objects that we can see are known as HII regions, also called diffuse or emission nebulae. They contain mostly ionised hydrogen and are found throughout the interstellar medium in the Milky Way and in other galaxies.

TOP IMAGE: Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200 000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602, which is featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This image includes data from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument).The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.An international team of astronomers, including Peter Zeidler, Elena Sabbi, and Antonella Nota, used Webb to observe NGC 602 and detected candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way. [Image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.]Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

[mysticstarlightduck]

For the Q&A tag game, you mentioned there are minerals/natural substances available in the environment that characters use to dye their hair. Any other cool bits of lore about alien planet/moon geology and biology you want to share? Does the story mainly stay in that one location, or do the characters visit multiple different planets with different worldbuilding lore for each location?

Thanks for the ask, @diabolical-blue!

And yes!!! On Cethea III there's a naturally occurring mineral that's pretty much everywhere and thus is a free/cheap way for the inhabitants of the moon to dye their hair if they so wish to - that mineral, known as Azurellite, can be easily ground up with water and makes for a pretty potent and long-lasting hair dye. Depending on the hue of the rock the hair can turn a specific shade, ranging from pastel blue to deep purple or indigo blue. While the 3 main protagonists were growing up as street urchins on that moon, Cassie Tithus often dyed her hair bright blue using that specific mineral - which, since it was basically everywhere, was a free dye they didn't have to spend their precious units to buy or prepare (they wouldn't have been able to afford it if it was otherwise).

Onto the other parts of this question!

Cool facts about the geology of the main planets within this series!

The planet of Ivion, which the moon Cethea III orbits, is a large ice giant planet, where there are little changes in weather during its seasons, being basically a massive tundra. The planet was originally inhabited by the Zatrian people, who built their sprawling cities out of pitch-black stone within the underground of the planet, underneath the unforgiving layers of ice and snow. The Junction has long since established a colony on the planet, and has subjugated/colonized many of the Zatrian settlements, and those who do not submit to Junction rule are unfortunately made targets of raiders and slavers alike. This complicated relationship between the settlers and the original inhabitants of the planet is the reason why Deimos Soll, the main duo's adoptive brother, ended up kidnapped from his home by slavers sent by the Junction in the first place.

In the Khosmonian Galaxies, the planet of Thalassen is a gargantuan planet that hosts some of the largest and deepest oceans in any of the known galaxies. It is known for equally gigantic creatures that lurk in its endless depths, literal behemoths that defy logic and strike fear into the hearts of outsiders and even some locals alike. The people of Thalassen are known for being some of the most technological advanced people in either of the galaxy clusters, with their cities being built both within floating mountains above the sprawling oceans and in underwater caves. Lyorna Alyrii, Jack Tithus' eventual love interest, is the daughter of an ancient and important family from Thalassen. The giant planet also has beautiful, equally gigantic, rings that surround its orbit, like a much larger, inhabitable version of our Saturn.

Stryxus, a dwarf planet on the edge of an asteroid ring that lies on the outer rim of the main Khosmonian Galaxy, is covered in lush, sprawling tropical fungal forests, where largely harmless gigantic fungi and mushrooms take the place of regular trees and reach the heights of skyscrapers. The planet is known for being home to some of the most powerful and ruthless crime families in the Khosmonian Galaxies and it is infamous for both its many underground racing rings and its renowned Fighting Pit, where outsiders and those whom the crime families do not approve of often are forced to fight to the death. Stryxus is surrounded by many space stations, all owned by local warlords, crimelords and space pirates, like a gigantic, living satellite.

Close by to Stryxus there's a gas giant surrounded by many moons, one of which is a frozen desert plagued by sleet storms, swarms of ravenous, bloodthirsty creatures that attack in hordes, and where a strange, electromagnetic pulse causes many spaceships to crash and harm communications with the outside. It's a metaphorical "black hole", in the sense that while it is an inhabitable planet it is incredibly tough to get out of, for both humanoids and machinery alike, and thus remains unclaimed by both the Junction, the Khosmonians, and even the warlords. While fleeing from Stryxus and being pursued by a bunch of vengeful space pirates, Kye and Artemis crash on this hellhole of a moon in the space shuttle they'd used to escape and must begrudgingly find a way to get past their differences to survive and find a way to get out of this planet to reunite with the rest of their team, though they soon find they're not the only ones "shipwrecked" on this moon, and that this other person also trapped in here may make things even more perilous for them.

Thypsiell, the planet where Kye was born, has chalk-white trees with blood-red leaves, and large prairies with sprawling, windswept hills. The grass ranges from salmon pink to orange and even light blue in some spots. The Khylet people are a highly meritocratic society with a harsh system of castes - most tribes are also ruled by a matriarchal council. Kye's mother became such a bitter woman because she was shunned by her own mother, her mentor and the elder of the main Khylet council of chieftains, who considered Eldora too unstable and cruel to create a proper legacy - offended at the slight of being "denied her dues" by the mother she adored so much, Eldora set out to collect conquests and become the most dangerous Khylet warlord that ever lived, seeking to one day gain her mother's approval and a seat a the Hearth (their council), unaware that she was only proving her mother right and disrespecting their people's ancient traditions by indulging her warmongering ways.

And onto the final art of this question!

Supernova Initiative does not take place in one singular location and instead takes place in multiple locations as the characters travel the galaxies during their multiple quests in the story - starting at the moon of Cethea III (in Jack, Deimos, and Cassie's backstory), then proceeding to many locations within the Junction systems, secret laboratories where inhuman experiments take place, wartorn planetary systems and various planets in the Khosmonian galaxies as the characters travel to complete the most dangerous heist of their lives and get their freedoms back, and their adventure suddenly takes many, unexpected, turns throughout the book!

Supernova Initiative Taglist (-/+): @ray-writes-n-shit, @sarandipitywrites, @lassiesandiego, @smol-feralgremlin, @kaylinalexanderbooks,

@saturnine-saturneight @diabolical-blue @oh-no-another-idea

@cakeinthevoid, @clairelsonao3, @sleepy-night-child

@thepeculiarbird

@the-golden-comet, @urnumber1star

Let me know if you'd like to be added!

[spacenutspod]

Image: The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike the menagerie of weird and wonderful spiral galaxies with ragged or disrupted spiral arms, grand-design spiral galaxies boast prominent, well-developed spiral arms like the ones showcased in this image. This galactic portrait is a composite image that integrates data from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and the innovative Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), half of which was contributed by Europe.In this image the dark red regions trace the filamentary warm dust permeating the medium of the galaxy. The red regions show the reprocessed light from complex molecules forming on dust grains, while colours of orange and yellow reveal the regions of ionised gas by the recently formed star clusters. Stellar feedback has a dramatic effect on the medium of the galaxy and create complex network of bright knots as well as cavernous black bubbles.M51 – also known as NGC 5194 or the Whirlpool Galaxy – lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbour, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbours one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. The gravitational influence of M51’s smaller companion is thought to be partially responsible for the stately nature of the galaxy’s prominent and distinct spiral arms. If you would like to learn more about this squabbling pair of galactic neighbours, you can explore earlier observations of M51 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope here. This Webb observation of M51 is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers, or FEAST. The FEAST observations were designed to shed light on the interplay between stellar feedback and star formation in environments outside of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Stellar feedback is the term used to describe the outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them, and is a crucial process in determining the rates at which stars form. Understanding stellar feedback is vital to building accurate universal models of star formation.The aim of the FEAST observations is to discover and study stellar nurseries in galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Before Webb became operative, other observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in the Chilean desert and Hubble have given us a glimpse of star formation either at the onset (tracing the dense gas and dust clouds where stars will form) or after the stars have destroyed with their energy their natal gas and dust clouds. Webb is opening a new window into the early stages of star formation and stellar light, as well as the energy reprocessing of gas and dust. Scientists are seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time. They will also be able to measure how long it takes for these stars to pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas (these time scales are different from galaxy to galaxy). By studying these processes, we will better understand how the star formation cycle and metal enrichment are regulated within galaxies as well as what are the time scales for planets and brown dwarfs to form. Once dust and gas is removed from the newly formed stars, there is no material left to form planets.[Image Description: A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s centre, but it is tightly limited to the core. The rings feature colours of deep red and orange and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles.]

[lilflowerpot]

Since medicine is so advanced for the rest of the universe, how would Lotor and the rest of the Galra react to human medical practice? What would they think of surgery? What would they think of organ donors and transplants?

anon(cont.): I JUST SENT THE MEDICINE ASK AND THOUGHT OF ANOTHER ONE, WHAT WOULD THEY THINK OF BLOOD DRIVES?

-

First thing’s first: are you familiar with the Kardashev Scale?

At a base level, the Kardashev Scale (proposed by Nikolai Kardashev in 1964) measures a civilisation's level of technological advancement on the basis of its energy consumption; though Kardashev himself proposed only Types I/II/III, others later proposed Types IV/V/Ω.

A Type I civilisation is able to use the available energy of their home planet. Within this (0.1-1.0) is encompassed anything from hunter-gatherer type civilisations, to civilisations perhaps 250 years beyond us in the present day. Humanity currently ranks at approximately a 0.75, as we've significantly altered our planet to suit our needs by creating large structures, mining mountains, removing rainforests, draining swamps, redirecting rivers, and creating reservoirs. Providing progress continues at its current rate (and we do not make Earth uninhabitable in the process), we will become a fully realised Type I civilisation within the next few centuries.

A Type II civilisation would be able to use the available energy of their star, and planetary system. So what we would expect from societies in this range (1.1-2.0) would be attempts to alter and mine other celestial bodies, establishing outposts, infrastructure, and industries outside of the home planet, progressing to establishing colonies, and terraforming other planets by altering their atmosphere, rotation, or position. Due to an obvious increase in energy consumption, they would likely then attempt to harness the energy of their local star by building a Dyson Swarm: structures orbiting a star to capture and harness its solar energy for redistribution depending on their needs.

A Type III civilisation would be able to use the available energy of their entire galaxy. This would require the harnessing of energy from other stars in other solar systems, and for a Type II civilisation, the distance to said stars might feel like the distance between Earth and Pluto does to us now: technically within reach, but only with immense investments in terms of time, ingenuity, and resources. So civilisations in this range (2.1-3.0) might discover new physics, understand and control dark matter and energy, be able to travel faster than light, or even utilise wormhole technology.

A Type IV civilisation would be able to use the energy of multiple galaxies. A civilisation classed as such (3.1-4.0) would have influence that extends over entire galaxy clusters.

A Type V civilisation would be able to use the energy of entire superclusters. A civilisation classed as such (4.1-5.0) would have influence that extends over structures comprising of thousands of galaxy clusters, and trillions of stars.

A Type Ω civilisation goes beyond anything we can realistically comprehend with our knowledge of the universe as it is today. They would potentially possess the ability to manipulate not only the entire universe, but possible other universes too. It has been proposed that any such civilisation might even be the actual creator of our universe!

Any civilisation of Type III and beyond would likely have an influence so all-encompassing with technology so far beyond our own, that were they anywhere near us the galaxy would flash with their activity in thousands of star systems, and so we would almost certainly be able to detect their artifacts or movements between different parts of their Empire. Even if they existed in the past and have since gone extinct, we would be able to observe the remnant of harvested stars, decaying megastructures, or scars of great interstellar wars.

Focusing all this within the realms of VLD, within canon we saw great diversity in how technologically advanced different planets and their people were: at one end of the spectrum we have the arusians (s01ep01) who, judging by their weaponry and housing, appear to be a relatively primitive society and would only rank at perhaps a 0.4 at most, while at the other we had the alteans, whose technology would see them solidly identified as a Type III (perhaps even Type IV!) civilisation due to their ability to use wormholes to travel across the entire universe, and the fact that their technology from literal millennia ago still holds its own against the galra's present-day advancements. The galra themselves would absolutely have to be considered a Type IV civilisation (somewhere in the 3.2-3.6 range, I think) due to the sheer scale of the Empire, and their ability to harness quintessence energy; even the Komar, barbaric as it is, highlights a level of technology beyond our comprehension wherein they're able to essentially convert entire plants into energy for their own purposes.

((Interestingly though, Voltron and Sincline would both be considered Type Ω advancements due to their ability to transcend the boundaries of our universe and enter into parallel realities (s03ep04 & s08ep12) so this really speaks volumes of the kind of power altean alchemy allowed one to wield... which is precisely why I have a certain Thoughts™ regarding both Oriande and the alteans as a whole, but you'll have to wait until we arrive at that point in LB's narrative for me to say any more on that front.))

But back to your actual question and the reason I'm telling you all of this: due to the range of societies and level of technologies that we witness in canon, and considering the Empire's unrivaled scope, I don't think the galra would necessarily have a strong reaction to human medical practices. Judging by the Kerberos mission, Earth in vld would just about be classified as a Type II civilisation (at a maximum of 1.2) as the Garrison has explicitly demonstrated that their technological capabilities extend to reaching the very outskirts of our solar system (Kerberos), initiating small-scale mining projects, and (if my memory's not failing me) I think that in one of the later series they even made an offhand mention of having established a research colony closer to home (on Mars?). So while we'd certainly seem primitive to the galra, we'd not be the least advanced people they've ever come across either, and at some point in history the galra themselves will have almost certainly used similar methods of surgery, transplants, and transfusions, because it's all part of the learning curve.

[cerberusdailynews]

[BLOOD PACK] The Juggernaut That Stopped

via Kaplin Jossin, Illium News Network Seven years ago, the first shots were fired in an altercation that would escalate to a full-blown civil war within the notorious Blood Pack mercenary group. News items from that first year chronicle mutinies against individual warbands’ officers, eventually developing to feature fighting between Blood Pack formations and ships stationed in the Nemean Abyss and outside it. This was the point where the civil war slipped away from the public’s eyes. Battles moved away from populous ports of call such as Omega and Cartagena. The mercenary group, known for their cavalier attitude to tactical finesse and operational security, learned discretion and concealed their hands. Reports of the combatant factions’ clashes were reported only after the fact, as bystanders found the wreckage and bodies. How did we arrive here? Through meticulous investigative journalism, conducted over many months, from the deepest reaches of the Terminus systems to the Skyllian Verge, Illium News Network is ready to publish its discoveries. The origin of the Blood Pack civil war was a situation not unique in the mercenary group’s history: Khel Raut, an ambitious warchief with popular backing, rose to challenge the chief executive, Ganar Yulaz. Witness statements from former Blood Pack members say that Khel Raut was a key player in Tugorc Brokk’s assassination in 2189. This assassination removed a nearly thousand-year-old veteran, contemporary of Blood Pack founder Ganar Wrang, and warchief to a third of the entire Blood Pack’s manpower. More importantly, Tugorc Brokk was responsible for operations within the Nemean Abyss. In the immediate confusion and chaos of Brokk’s passing, Raut was able to strong-arm Nemean units under his control, setting the stage for the next phase in the war. Reports retrieved from archived MercNet discussions corroborate what local news agencies knew in early 2190: rebellious Blood Pack forces had seized two important staging areas in the Nemean Abyss without any outside help. The outposts at Balorn IV and Rogharth VII became footholds for Khel Raut’s faction, from where his forces harassed other Blood Pack units still loyal to Ganar Yulaz. However, what the public did not know was that Khel Raut disappeared from the awareness of even his closest associates, shortly before the Blood Pack proper made their announcement of abandoning the Nemean Abyss to the breakaway faction. Back in the greater Terminus Systems, the civil war continued against Khel Raut’s stragglers and new breakaways. One of these splinters that have survived to the present day are the Gore Fangs, an all-vorcha outfit. Lorded over by the self-declared ‘warchief’ Tish, they continue to attract more recruits and have seen modest success as guns-for-hire within the Shrike Abyssal and Hourglass Nebula clusters. Yulaz’s Blood Pack has thus far failed to re-incorporate them into his outfit, nor has he succeeded in destroying them. The true mastermind behind the civil war would not announce themself until the dust, and their influence, had settled in the Nemean Abyss. Former Blood Pack troops and ships were now adorned by the enigmatic triangular red maw lined with teeth, the fist removed entirely from their symbol. Krogan and vorcha who had rallied to Khel Raut’s banner now marched to new orders, marshalling strict discipline rivaling the other big two mercenary outfits’ and Terminus states’ militaries’. They taxed and recruited new soldiers from settlements they had seized, and waged war on pirates who trod on their turf. It was from here that the leader of the Maw’s Dominated finally revealed themselves; a yahg from Parnack. To those living under his command, he is simply ‘the Master’ or ‘the Red Maw’, the sovereign of first of its kind polity in the Milky Way galaxy. “When I think back to those days when the Master arrived, it was like seeing a huge storm appear in the horizon and begin blowing your way,” said Tylis Toukoi, an asari shopkeeper who has since escaped the Dominated’s holdings and was subsequently interviewed by INN for the purposes of this article. “We knew a new pirate band had begun to hit settlements systematically. Then our neighbours fell silent, until one night, the red maw-painted shuttles struck our settlement. The fight was brief: we had barely woken up when the loudspeakers ordered everyone out and to the commons. Our administrator and the town’s guards stood there in line, held at gunpoint. The troops were krogan, some other people and the most obedient lines of vorcha I’d ever seen. They announced that their Master had come to claim our homes and lives, and we had the choice to bow to his will or die. “They started with the guards’ lieutenant. Told her to pledge allegiance, but she spat back in their faces. The Master’s troops then shot her and the rest of the guards there. When the administrator’s turn to pledge came, we had figured out that if our leader said no, all of us were going to fall. We pledged ourselves into the red maw’s possession. “A token garrison was flown in the morning to replace the shock troops that had seized us. We buried our dead, cleaned and repaired what we could. In the following days our radio and extranet were restored, and we learned that our town was just one of many recently annexed into the Maw’s Dominated holdings. After that came the taxes. Credits, supplies, people. The Master was waging a war and had to pay for it. Though I loathe to say it, his soldiers were far more disciplined than what we had expected from pirates. Looters were quickly punished once a settlement had surrendered.” It was the heavy tax burden and disruption of markets that eventually drove Toukoi into unemployment and to escape, as the Master’s policies on welfare threatened to deport her to parts unknown. At present, the Maw’s Dominated holds sway on several planets and space stations. Other powers of the region, the Ad’Thoro Pact, High Republic of Orozvhad and New Vonskar Coalition are aware of the development, but have not yet intervened. “We did not expect statesmen to come from the Blood Pack, but the Red Maw has potential to prove us wrong.” Admiral G. E’W. Aen of the Orozvhad navy stated in an interview in 2194 on the matter. Ganar Yulaz continues to command the vastly weakened mercenary outfit. While his reputation has been tarnished, his position at Blood Pack’s head is once again secure. After years of silence, the Blood Pack CEO agreed to comment to Illium News Network on the turmoil he went through. “Khel Raut didn’t see the knife coming for his back. He trusted the yahg too much. Now his head is displayed as a trophy in Red Maw’s court and I’m still in charge. He suffered a fool’s death.”

[spoon-writes]

Ends of the Earth | Chapter 17

Fandom: The Mandalorian

Pairing: Mando x OC

Read on FFN or AO3

Summary: When Sinead's husband is ripped from her, she escapes the Hutt Empire and goes on a quest to find him. Since being a runaway slave in the Outer Rim isn't exactly easy, she makes the Mandalorian an offer he can't refuse, and soon they travel across the galaxy looking for her missing husband.

Chapter index

Chapter 17 - We Need to Talk About Kyen

The Razor Crest touched down on the planet's dusty surface, the ship groaning as it settled on the ground. Din looked out at the deserted landing pads and the sandblasted settlement with a frown. He would have preferred to land somewhere uninhabited and wait for Sinead to finish going through the records, but the ship had been running on fumes, and he didn't want to risk getting stranded in the middle of nowhere.

He looked down at his gloved hand, moving his fingers experimentally. Sometimes an ache would run down his arm, the only evidence that a nexu had tried to rip his arm off.

The sight that met him when he stood and turned nearly made his heart leap out of his chest: the child had found a fusing pen, probably taken it from the toolbox that stood in the corner of the cockpit. A treson cluster had burst behind a panel close to the door, and Din had had to hastily pull the half-melted components out and weld the rest back together as best he could.

"No, you don't." Din pulled the pen from the kid's hands, stifling a small smile when the kid sighed as loudly as his little body was capable of, his face wrinkled into a frown. He left the pen on top of the console and lifted the kid into his arms. "Come on," he mumbled to the child, who tried reaching for the pen.

Sinead sat on her bunk in the hull, scrolling through the datapad with a vacant look in her eyes. She glanced up when he climbed down the ladder.

"We landed?"

"On Mon Scon. Ship's almost out of fuel."

"Okay," she said and returned to her work.

Din stood silently, unsure what to do, unsure what he wanted to do. She hadn't said a word since she started going through the record. Instead, she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, the light from the datapad making her look washed out and ill. His arm prickled, and he almost managed to convince himself that it was residual bacta.

Once outside, it became clear why the landing pad was empty; cold gusts of wind tore across the ground. The sun directly overhead gave no warmth, only pale light that seemed to suck the colors out of everything, and every step threw up a cloud of dust that blew away in the wind.

There was a fuel pump on every landing pad, and Din flipped a switch to start the process. It made a coughing sound and briefly let out a smell of burning plastic before the wind whipped it away. He closed his eyes and counted to 10.

"Guess we have to go find someone."

The child cooed in response.

It took some time before Din got someone willing to help. The locals huddled in their houses or under warped awnings made to catch the worst of the sand. At last, an old and wizened human told Din to grab a toolbox and follow him, and once they got to the fuel pump, it took him a few minutes to clean out the buildup of sand.

The man walked back to the city, bent low to shield himself from the wind which had begun to come in harder and harder. Din leaned against the fuel pump and waited.

The ramp came down, and Sinead appeared in the opening. "You okay out here?"

"The pump didn't work. Should be done soon."

She nodded and disappeared back into the ship, leaving the ramp down, allowing sand to blow through the opening.

Din heaved a sign and was about to close the ship back up when a shadow through the haze caught his eyes; four shadows to be more precise who were moving closer to the ship.

A blaster bolt fizzed over his shoulder and hit the ship dangerously close to the fuel port, where it ricocheted off the metal with a ping. He dropped to the ground and drew his blaster, trying to keep his body between the kid and the attackers.

"Oh Mando!" a familiar voice called out.

Yurru. Shit.

"You're very popular these days!" The human bounty hunter came into view, most of her face hidden behind a mask. He could see his cold eyes glint behind the visor. The three others were strangers. Hired help, maybe. "It was quite the mess you made back on Nevarro. Didn't believe my ears when I heard what you did. You're the last person I expected to break the code."

Standing up, Din started moving away from the ship one careful step a time, keeping his eyes trained on Yurru. She was the only one smart enough to wear a helmet; the other three wore goggles to protect their eyes, but it was clear they were having trouble with sand blasting against their unprotected skin.

Yurru inspected her blaster. "Just this morning, I said to Vorkit, I said 'wouldn't it be nice if the target came to us for a change.' And just like that, you fall into our lap." Her eyes narrowed. "Got nothing to say?"

He was only half-listening while searching the surroundings for any sort of cover that wasn't a highly explosive fuel pump. The kid felt heavy in his arms.

Yurru shrugged. "Doesn't matter anyway. Vorkit!"

"Yeah?" one of her companions said, scratching at his uncovered ear. The lens on his goggles was cracked.

"Check the ship. See if the target's in there."

Din didn't move as Vorkit went to the ramp and squinted into the dark ship. "Hey! Anyone in there?"

Yurru snarled. "Get in there and look."

Vorkit grumbled but still walked up the ramp, holding his blaster rifle at the ready.

"Now," Yurru said with a sigh. "I still haven't decided what to do with you. Dragging you back to Nevarro by the short and curlies will definitely put me among the greats, but there's something very satisfying in letting the traitor end his days in a shallow grave on some insignificant planet."

Din shifted his stance, so he was ready to move out of the way. If it came to it, he would be able to take a couple of blaster bolts, but the kid would not.

A thunderous explosion tore through the air, and the bounty hunters hit the ground. Din turned and saw her.

Sinead stalked down the ramp, her face set in an angry snarl, lit by red light emanating from a whip - the whip - she held in her hand. She swung it in an arc that alighted the air with kyber fire. The beskar didn't behave like metal; it flew through the air with precision and grace, irregular bursts of energy pulsing down the length of chain. The laser melted the sand to glass wherever it touched.

The whip cracked down on one of the bounty hunters who flew back, his chest caving in on itself. He was dead before he hit the ground.

Sinead whirled around and brought the whip down on the last bounty hunter. He crumbled in a wet, smoldering mess. An acrid smell of burning flesh filled the air.

Yurru aimed her blaster at Sinead, but before she had a chance to shoot, Din took her down with a shot to the chest.

Sinead turned in a circle, surveying the carnage around her. The whip burned a black line where it touched the ground.

"Is the kid okay?" She powered down the weapon, the red laser disappearing back into the hilt, leaving behind the beskar core.

"Yeah, I think-" Din looked under the cloak at the child, who started up at him with his big, dark eyes- "I think so."

She poked the bloody mess with the tip of her boot. "Who were they?"

"Bounty hunters." He went to Yurru's body and rifled through her pockets, coming up with a small pouch filled with credits and a tracking fob emitting a steady beep, which he crushed under the heel of his boot. "Let's go."

Sinead scanned the horizon. The wind came in even harder, and the settlement was almost totally obscured by a wall of sand. "Let's."

Sand had piled up on the ship's floor by the time they got back, and Sinead started to sweep it outside while Din placed the kid on the bunk. He turned to face her.

"I thought you said the nau'orar was somewhere safe," he said in a forced calm voice.

"Yes. The safest place is with me."

He scoffed, which finally made her turn, the whip swinging gently with her movement. "What was I supposed to do? Bury it on a random planet? Hide it somewhere and hope no one finds it?"

He gritted his teeth. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Now it was her turn to scoff. "I didn't know you. If you knew, what would've stopped you from taking the damn thing and leaving me for dead?"

She, very annoyingly, had a point. If the roles were reversed, he wouldn't have told her either. Hell, it wasn't until she literally risked her life for the child that he told her the truth about him.

"I could still do that."

"I have a feeling you won't." For a long moment she looked at him, head cocked to the side, and an unreadable look in her eyes. Wordlessly, she offered him the weapon.

It was lighter than he thought. The metal rings clinked as he turned it in his hands, the light catching on the beskar in an almost hypnotic way. Crystals had been fused to the metal, probably what powered the whip. The hilt fit in his hand like it had been made for him, perfect Mandalorian craftsmanship. Another piece of their culture stolen away like everything else. It belonged in the covert.

He thrust it back to Sinead.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Sinead said. "I nearly killed myself the first time I turned it on." She bundled it into a rag and stowed it in the little crevice between the bunk and the wall.

"Where'd you learn how to use it?"

"Got a leather whip to practice with, you know, I figured it was better to lose an eye than my head if something went wrong. And, I don't know ... once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard."

Din tore his eyes away from the whip's hiding spot. "I'm gonna find somewhere else to stay."

"Preferably without any bounty hunters."

"Yeah."

... ... ... ... ...

She almost missed his name.

The words blurred together in a long string of blue light. She had stopped thinking about them as names, as living, breathing sentients who had fought or toiled in the refineries on Loovria. It hurt too much.

It took a second for her brain to comprehend what it was looking at, and then it felt like all oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

K. Beck.

Human.

She nearly fell off the ladder in her haste to get to the cockpit, where Mando sat quietly with the kid on his lap. He startled when she stumbled into the room.

"I found him!" She tapped on the datapad in rapid motion, making the colors warp.

Mando took the datapad and looked, while Sinead threw herself into her seat just to jump up and start pacing.

"Says he was sold to a royal house on Seavo."

"So let's go."

"He was a fighter in the arena.”

A small seed of horrible doubt took root in the pit of her stomach. The image of Kyen in the arena, bloody blade at his side, refused to form in her mind. Combat was the antithesis of him. He was a farmer, not a fighter. "He did what he had to do. We've all done things we regret in the name of survival. You gonna plug in the course?"

Mando gave her back the datapad and started the navicomputer. She could feel him glancing at her as the ship changed course.

"What?"

He fiddled with a row of switches for some time before sitting back into his chair, clearing his throat. "You know, there's ... there's no guarantee that he's still alive."

"I've had years to think about this. The possibility has struck me. I still have to know."

"Fine."

She desperately tried to hold on to the elated feeling from before, not wanting to let Mando drag her down. He was right, of course. Her search could very well end at the foot of a grave. At least she would know what happened to him.

Letting out a deep breath, she leaned back in her chair and waited.

... ... ... ... ...

Seavo, it turned out, was a small and unimportant planet in a small, unimportant system located on the edge of wild space, where travelers were few and far between. It had no tactical significance and had therefore been largely ignored by most of the galaxy-wide conflicts. The surface consisted mostly of icy seas and slivers of rocky land. Mando steered the ship towards the biggest settlement which clung to the side of a cliff like a mollusk, nestled inside a large bay. As they came closer, Sinead could see watercrafts bob in the water.

The Crest landed on the small platform between rusty light freighters that looked like they hadn't been used for a long time. The people of Seavo had little use for space travel.

The smell of saltwater overwhelmed her senses when the ramp came down, and a chill immediately snuck into her bones. Growing up in space and subsequently ending up on a desert planet meant that she hadn't had much exposure to the sea, which was fine by her.

On the opposite side of the bay, overlooking the settlement, stood a dilapidated palace like a great shadow against the overcast sky. Even from a distance, it was clear that it had seen better days.

Sinead tamped down on the growing excitement which had bubbled up as soon as the palace came into view. Kyen might be in there. He wasn't, because when had she ever been that lucky, but until they got an explicit confirmation, she could pretend there was only a crumbling wall between them.

“You ready?” Mando looked at her.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”

“Let’s go find out.”

The path to the palace led down through the settlement, steep and uneven. None of the houses were the same, but somehow, they all followed the same chaotic pattern. Some had grown together or had entirely new floors added on, made from whatever they’d managed to scavenge. Sinead recognized the cockpit of a hammerhead corvette stuck to the side of a building like an outhouse.

"They're very crafty," Sinead said.

“They have to be. There aren’t enough resources to go around.”

"I guess when all you have is endless seas and useless rock, you gotta make do."

Most of the people they passed were human, all of them casting curious or low-key hostile looks at Sinead and Mando.

It became clear that no one had lived in the palace for a long time. Even standing at the bottom of the bay, she could see that parts of the roof had caved in and the windows were black voids in the lichen-covered walls.

A human woman worked by a larger house, prying rusty metal plates off the outer wall and discarding them on the ground. She stopped to push a lock of wiry hair out of her face, and Sinead chose that time to clear her throat. The woman turned with a scowl, and Sinead gave her a winning smile. "Excuse me, I'm looking for someone to tell me about the palace up there."

“Who’s asking?”

“Names Jesha.”

“Why’re you asking?”

She shrugged. “Just wondering why such a beautiful building has been allowed to fall into disrepair.”

The woman gave the palace a dark look. “Psh. What use do we have for beautiful buildings, hm? If you haven’t noticed this ain’t Coruscant. Fancy houses don’t keep your family fed. Good riddance.”

Sinead crossed her arms to ward off the icy wind. “What happened?”

“Lord of the house finally got what was coming to him is all I know. All I care to know.” She looked Sinead up and down, her scowl slipping just a fraction. “Keep on the main road until you hit the docks, you’ll find an old fisherman by the name of Baston, peddling his excuse for redfish. He might be able to tell you more. His youngest is mixed up in all of this. Tell him that Dista sent you.”

Sinead shot her a genuine smile. “Appreciate it."

The woman grimaced. “Yeah, yeah, just let me get back to work." She brandished her crowbar in a vaguely threatening manner and waited until they started down the street.

The sharp smell of fish and brine permeated the air long before the docks came into view. The last buildings fell away, and Sinead got an uninterrupted view of the sea that glittered in the sun, throwing up clouds of freezing mist whenever a great wave broke against the harbor wall. The air was filled with bird squawks and shouts from fishermen. A single fishing trawler was docked and in the process of being unloaded. Straining her eyes, Sinead could see more vessels out on the ocean as small black dots. It all reminded her of the great spaceports she’d spend most of her childhood in, trying not to get in the way of burly workers who didn’t have time to entertain a curious girl.

In one end of the docks, out of the way of most of the traffic, a collection of stalls made from bleached driftwood sold fish lying on beds of ice or hung on racks, dried and salted. The birds were more concentrated here, watching the fish with empty, evil eyes.

They quickly found Baston manning one of the stalls. He was a short man with a thick grey beard, selling fish that were indeed rather sad looking. He grinned when they neared, not at all discouraged by Mando's intimidating presence.

“Hello there! S’not often we get strangers here. What can I get you?”

Sinead was about to answer when the kid made a noise and kicking his little feet, eyes fixated on the row of dried fish behind Baston.

"I guess we'll take a fish for the kid." Sinead gave him a couple of credits, and he plucked a dried fish off the rack and handed it to the child.

“What brings you all the way out here? New faces are a rare treat this close to Wild Space.” Baston’s eyes strayed briefly to the Mandalorian. He was remarkably calm in the face of Mando.

“Dista sent us. She said to ask you what happened up in that big house.” Sinead gestured to the dark palace.

A shadow came over Baston’s face. “Why do you want to know?”

“I …” she bit her lower lip. “I’m looking for someone. Might have been through the palace some time ago.”

Baston nodded to himself. "Happened some cycles ago. Don't know how long in your time, don't have much use of that out here." He was silent for a moment, his lips moving while he gathered his thoughts. "One of the king's men went an' killed him. The king was a bastard, but what followed wasn't much better to tell you the truth."

“He took over?” Sinead asked.

“For a little while. Think he got bored. We’re fishermen, we haven’t much need for governing around here, not really.” Baston seemed like a totally different man once the smile fell from his face. “Never thought I’d be missing the old king, but this man was something else. Don’t think I ever saw such a nasty man in all my life. What a terror. Say, who were you looking for again?”

She took a deep breath. “He might have been a slave in the palace. From Loovria.”

Baston nodded slowly. “Old king had a few of those. Like I said, he was a bastard. What’s the name? I might have known him?”

Sinead’s stomach knotted in fear and nauseating hope.

“Kyen Beck.”

Baston’s face twisted in fury. “You think this is funny?”

“What are you talking about?”

He came out from behind his stall, jabbing a finger at Sinead, who took a step back. Mando shifted the kid to his other arm, ready to draw his blaster.

“How dare you! Coming here, asking me questions like this!! I don’t want that tyrant back, not again.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

He finally seemed to catch on. “You … you really don’t know?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Obviously not.”

“Who do you think killed the king? Beck terrorized us for more than a cycle before pissing off to who knows where!”

At first the words didn’t register. Kyen terrorizing anyone? That couldn’t be true.

“You’re wrong.” Her voice was hollow.

Baston spat on the ground, all signs of the jolly old man gone. “Not something I’m liable to forget.”

“You know where he is now?” Mando said, not relaxing his stance.

“Not here. He stole a ship and took a crew. My guess is he’s out tyrannizing the Outer Rim, the good-for-nothing pirate. Calls himself Red Vekkass last I heard.”

Kyen? A pirate?

“No!” The word exploded out of her mouth, making passerby’s stop and stare. “Kyen would never do that!”

"Apparently, you don't know him as well as you think you do. My idiot son went with him, thinks a life of crime is better than staying here in safety."

“You’re wrong!” Her face was flushed and the sudden anger made her dizzy.

“Sinead-“ Mando began, grabbing her elbow to pull her back.

She wrenched her arm away from him. "Don't touch me!"

The kid made a worried sound, his little face contorted in a frown.

Mando clenched his fist and let it fall to his side. "Move. Now." His voice was dangerously low.

“But-“

“Now.”

Once they were off the dock, Sinead exploded. "Kyen would never do something like that! Not in a million years."

Mando stopped abruptly and put the child down on a barrel and turned to face her with his arms stiffly by his side. "It's been years. You said yourself, we all do things in the name of survival."

Sinead looked like she'd been slapped. She felt like she'd been slapped. "Not like this." Her eyes prickled, and she stared up at the sky. "You don't understand ..."

He remained silent.

"I ..." She took a shuddering breath, forcing the tears not to spill. "I wasn't born a slave. Already told you that ... my parents ran goods across the galaxy. We were ... pirates boarded the ship. They killed everyone ... except for me." She swallowed thickly, feeling at once hollow and drowning in memories she usually kept buried deep in her mind. "That's how I ended up on Srilurr." And I never told anyone except Kyen - and you.

If Mando had been still before, he was now a statue, glinting coldly in the morning air.

"Kyen wouldn’t do that. Not to me."

Mando cleared his throat, flexing his fingers. "I ... I didn't know."

"Nobody did." She breathed deeply, trying to keep herself from falling to pieces; if she were falling anywhere, it wouldn't be in front of Mando and the kid, who was watching silently from the sideline.

"Do you want to go after him?"

And just like that, grief was replaced with red-hot anger that pooled in her stomach and made her eyes twitch. How dare he ask her that? Like she would just give up after all that time and effort!

Small hands touched her calf, and she looked down into big black eyes. Somehow the child had gotten down from his perch and was gripping her around the leg, giving her the most worried look she'd ever seen on such a small face. The anger didn't ebb out, but slowly it receded enough for her to rein it in.

Picking him up, he settled against her chest, where he left a greasy handprint on her jacket. "Let's just get out of here." Her voice shook with barely concealed anger.

Mando nodded and stepped to the side, letting her lead the way back to the ship in silence.

<- Previous chapter - Next chapter ->

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 157

The Revolving Universe

What is velocity, one of the major concepts we learn in physics? What place does it occupy in our lives? Where is mankind in the universe in terms of velocity? Why is it important to understand velocity?

In order to find answers to these questions, let's consider ourselves sitting at home after a long, tiring day. Are we aware that we are moving very fast even at a moment when we seem to be resting? When we travel by bus, we are motionless from the standpoint of a sitting passenger, yet have a velocity compared to an outsider standing on the sidewalk. The trees lining the road seem to be going backwards, but they are fixed to the ground with no speed. Therefore, velocity is relative and we in fact move at different speeds while sitting at home depending on the objects of reference. We have a zero velocity relative to our guests sitting with us on the couch, but have various speeds compared to the center of Earth, the moon, the sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Not only us, but all existence in the universe has a movement, or oscillation. This movement is usually in the form of a revolution for objects of important mass and as a vibration for particles with smaller masses.

The shining celestial bodies of the cosmos rotate around themselves like whirling dervishes. They revolve around other heavenly bodies or around their common center of gravities, such as pilgrims revolving around Ka'ba in Mecca. The gravitational force set in the universe pulls all objects towards each other. This gravitational force indeed pulls all masses together; however, it is counterbalanced by the motion of revolution given to grand heavenly bodies. As a matter of fact, everything is moving: a solar system with its planets, moons, and comets; the Milky Way galaxy, along with billions of stars, nebulas, galaxies, interstellar dust, gas clouds, and other celestial objects… all are moving in a giant rotating motion like a carousel. In this article, you are going to find some of the scientific findings of our revolving planet, the sun, and the universe, and how some verses in the Qur'an sound miraculously relevant to them.

The Earth's motion

First of all, we have a velocity stemming from the Earth's rotation. People living on the equator travel approximately a thousand miles per hour in reference to the center of the globe due to this rotation. While people on the poles never gain any distance over 24 hours, people on the equator travel nearly 23,800 miles! Inside a plane, because we move at the same rate as the plane, we cannot feel its speed. In a similar way, since we move at the same rate as Earth, we cannot feel the globe's movement.

There are many benefits associated with the Earth's rotation. The delineation of day and night, atmospheric jet streams, oceanic currents, and similar events rise from the rotation of Earth around its axis. For instance, it causes the warm water currents of the Gulf Stream to reach England, generating a warm and rainy climate.

There are verses in the Qur'an that point to the globular shape of the Earth and its rotation around its axis and revolution around the sun:

"He has created the heavens and the Earth with truth. He wraps the night around the day, and He wraps the day around the night. And He has made the sun and the moon subservient (to His command), each running its course for a term appointed (by Him). Be aware! He is the All-Glorious with irresistible might, the All-Forgiving." (Az-Zumar 5)

Yet another verse furthers this point:

"It is He Who has created the night and the day and the sun and the moon. Every one (of such celestial bodies) floats in its orbit." (Al-Anbiya 33)

The verb "wrap" is usually used for round objects, and the perpetual arrival of day and night are only possible with a circular planet. The Earth's rotation leads to different days, on the micro level, and different seasons, on the macro level. The Qur'an concisely summarizes all these physical events with the simple phrase, "wrap the night around the day."

The Earth's primary motion is around the sun. We are roughly 93 million miles away from the sun and we make this orbit, which is nearly 584 million miles, every 365 days. According to the center of the sun, our average velocity on this orbit is approximately 66 thousand miles per hour.

In addition, other planets travel around the sun via different orbits and speeds, each moving on a separate plane. For a moment, it is significant to visualize the sun, which is more than a million times larger than Earth, with its planets and other viscera revolving around it via no visible bond between them.

The movement of the sun

As stated earlier, when we travel on a bus, we observe the trees and buildings near the road going backwards even though we are the ones moving. In a similar way, we see the sun as revolving around us, though in fact the Earth is the one moving. In the Qur'an, the chapter of Al-Anbiya, the verse reading, "each running its course," is about the creation of the sun and moon, clearly pointing to their movements. Unfortunately, the verse that reads, "A(nother) clear sign for them; And the sun runs the course appointed for it for a term to its resting-place, for the stability of it(s system)…" (Ya Sin 38) was misunderstood as the sun revolving around the Earth. However, we know today that our sun is one of a couple hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As such, it both rotates around itself and revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and confirms the miraculous declaration of the truth in the verse.

In addition, the sun also has a secondary movement inside the local star cluster towards a certain direction. We can explain this with an example: the atmosphere is in motion along with the Earth. Each particle and particle set that makes up the atmosphere not only moves right and left, but also has a total revolution around the Earth. The sun behaves in a similar way within the star cluster and around the center of the Milky Way.

How are we going to define the velocity of the sun? We can determine the sun's speed by referencing a constant point depending on the average velocity of stars in the section of the galaxy that we inhabit. The sun, according to a local constant point, travels towards the shiny Vega star in the Lyra constellation with an average speed of 43 thousand miles per hour.

Apart from their individual movements, the stars in our galaxy also revolve around the galactic center. The velocity of this movement depends on the star's mass and its distance to the galaxy's center. The sun completes one loop inside the Milky Way galaxy every 225 million years. It has completed a total of 20 tours around the galaxy's center since the Earth's creation. Our Earth, which moves along with the Sun, travels around the galaxy's center at nearly 492 thousand miles per hour.

The motion of the Milky Way galaxy

Our galaxy is one of the billions of galaxies in known space. Galaxies are the biggest known structures. The universe expands and galaxies move away from each other, conforming to the meaning of the verse, "And the heaven, We have constructed it mightily; and it is surely We Who have vast power, and keep expanding it" (Adh-Dhariyat 47). Our galaxy, along with nearby galaxies, is pulled towards the Leo and Virgo constellations. The cause of this attraction is not understood yet.

Since all galaxies are moving, how can we determine the velocity of the Milky Way galaxy? As is known, the entire universe is filled with cosmic radiation as a remnant of the Big Bang. When this radiation is taken as a reference, the Milky Way travels at around 1.3 million miles per hour.

At the moment, when we think we are sitting in place, we are actually moving around the center of the Earth, sun, our local star cluster, the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and also moving away from other galaxies. We have velocity in relation to all of these movements. The revolution of the universe is also a fact verified by the Divine word: "I swear by the heaven ever-revolving" (At-Tariq 11).

[dgcatanisiri]

I said I’d hoped to get this out by the end of the month. FINALLY, the next installment of my series of Hypothetical DLCs. 

Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway. 

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway. And, as I’m not bound by any hardware limitations in terms of crafting ideas, or production cycles dictating when the game’s endpoint is, these can and do go on a great deal longer than the standard lifespan of a game.

A review of the format: There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable, and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

Feedback is welcome! Like an idea? Don’t like an idea? I welcome conversation and interaction on these ideas. Keep it civil, remember that these are just one person’s ideas, we can discuss them. Perhaps you’ll even help inspire a part two for these write ups! Because I do reserve the right to come up with more ideas in the future - these are the ideas that I’ve had to this point, but the whole reason this series exists is because I come up with new ideas for old stories.

With the KOTOR games both dealt with, we move on to the next category of the BioWare franchises, Mass Effect. This one took a while, considering the much more open-ended aspect of choices within the Mass Effect universe. And ME2′s edition is going to take a good long while as well, considering... Well, I’ll explain that when I get there. 

Anyway. Given the way that Mass Effect carries decisions forward, there is an additional category for the ideas within these editions, where there’s a brief summary of the way they will impact future games - granted, most of these are ME2 letters and ME3 war assets, but it’s still worth making a note of.

Also, given the context of ME1′s rather open-ended structure, where there aren’t really any serious plot breaks or boundaries that prevent advancement too soon, aside from Virmire and Ilos not being unlocked until events in the plot, assume that, unless otherwise noted, these DLCs are all available at any point after Shepard is made a Spectre and given command of the Normandy, and, obviously, must be played before Ilos. 

To business!

First Contact

As a Spectre and Alliance officer, Commander Shepard is called in when an Alliance team goes missing after reporting they had made contact with a new alien species. The Normandy is assigned to recover the team and establish peaceful relations if at all possible – yet there is a mystery here, one that the natives are not happy to welcome meddling in...

So, yeah, the basic idea here is simply that, with the whole Reaper thing, we don’t really get to see much of the more basic ideas of space exploration – big plot trounces little ideas. And first contact is as basic a concept for a scifi series as you can get. In my book, that’s the advantage of DLC in this series, to go for the smaller scale stories.

So let’s go into detail. We’re going to need a character to act as the exposition fairy – I vote that, at least in the briefing, this is coming from Pressley, so we can offer him a little more characterization and involvement (let’s honestly consider “Pressley gives a briefing that offers him more characterization, involvement, and general utilization” a thing for all of these, since he really doesn’t get a lot of usage in ME1, which is probably why he’s not really replaced on the Normandy after this game, and take this opportunity to give his character some expansion so that his death can mean a little more when ME2’s prologue goes down). He’s giving the baseline facts about why the Normandy is going in and handling this situation.

Obviously, the First Contact team has gone out of contact, and the Normandy is tasked to discover what has happened to them and make the best of the situation they end up in. I’m not locking this to after recruiting Liara, but I do picture her, Kaidan, and Ashley getting some fair use in any and all of these (a few in particular – we’ll get there when we get there), both because of their role as love interests and because of their general attitudes and thematic roles – Liara’s the wide-eyed idealist (considering her romanticizing of the protheans – any culture that refers to themselves as an “empire” is not going to be a peaceful collection of philosophers and scientists), Ashley’s the reasoned cynic, and Kaidan is something of the balance between them – cautious optimism and ready for if/when things go to shit.

The arrival finds Shepard and company on our new world (location to be decided – given Citadel rules on activating dormant Relays, it’s probably best that this is a planet within an already existing cluster, and we probably ought to put it somewhere within the boundaries of Alliance space, what with them taking lead on this first contact). The locals seem welcoming and friendly, but there’s a clear air of uncertainty – are they a threat, where’s the Alliance contact team, why are they acting like they know something that Shepard and crew don’t?

I know, we’re running the risk of retreading the ground of Feros and the thorian here, but, one, honestly, I like Feros, so I’m okay with revisiting it as a concept at least, two, it’s not like BioWare doesn’t recycle their own plots all the time anyway, even granting that they usually don’t do it within the same game, and three, I see it ending in a different place, so we’re going with this.

Anyway, investigation, suspicion, blah, blah, blah... I swear, the fun would be in the investigation, the building mystery, so I’m skipping over the work for the sake of a summary. The end result is that of course the natives killed the team, but the reason is because this is a group of descendants of a prothean subject race. They’d engaged in a revolt, adapted/stolen a colony ship, and flew off into the black, and done this right around the time of the initial stages of the Reaper invasion of the prothean empire – the protheans had bigger fish to fry (or be fried by, depending on how you use the metaphor), and given how proud the protheans are, I can see them covering this up in the name of saving face, both of which allowed these people to escape the notice of the Reapers – systematic destruction or not, finding one lone ship in the depths of space isn’t “needle in a haystack,” it’s “needle in the midwest.” It’d have been one thing if they’d found a planet to establish themselves on right away, but they dove into the black without a clear destination – also use this to emphasize WHY most Council explorations tend to stick to familiar clusters with an established Mass Relay nearby, that space is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big.

As a detail for this race, I’m gonna include one of my headcanons for the protheans, since, hey, my DLC idea – while the protheans developed their technology around the Mass Relays and such, as the Reapers intended, the tech of their own design, without the influence of external powers, would have more of an organic bent to it, that they were more inclined to “grow” their tech than build it. Like they accepted the Mass Effect as a foundation for their tech, the Citadel as a base, but they weren’t all that happy about it, just never quite getting their own designs really match the designs of “inusannon” technology in effectiveness. So in response, this species turned towards cybernetics (maybe they’re members of the zha’til, to connect them having this knowledge with the tidbits Javik offers in ME3? *shrug* I’ll use them as the name for this species for simplicity’s sake, because that’s less awkward than no name at all, but I’m not married to it being them), to not just give them an edge against the protheans when they came after them, but also to serve as a taunt towards them, a statement of “you fear technology, so we’re going to become the personification of your boogeymen.”

So the survival of these zha’til has been their hidden nature, and they have developed into a pure xenophobic society – no aliens are accepted among them, and, with the appearance of Shepard’s team, they are fully of the belief that there will be those who come after. They can recognize that the appearance of outsiders once means it will happen again. And they will be ready – Shepard’s crew is a boon for them, allowing them access to biologies of not just humans, but asari, turian, krogan, and quarian. They’d prepared for the damage the protheans could do upon finding their retreat, spent fifty thousand years becoming something the protheans would have to fear. Of course, Shepard’s gonna have to ruin it. I can see them trying the ‘we’ll erase the coordinates, put up a warning buoy, ensure no one comes here’ argument, but that’s not flying with these guys, since organic nature tends towards curiosity, and just blanking the system would leave a mystery, one that organics would want to solve, and a warning buoy can malfunction or be ignored – they want total isolation, and, even if the odds are like one in trillions, that’s too high for them, so they’d sooner be the only life in the galaxy.

I’m thinking the solution is in their reliance on their tech, having attained this symbiosis with it that they all are implanted – tech can be hacked, it can malfunction, it can be a vulnerability as much as an asset. Going way back to the start of the involvement of Kaidan, Liara, and Ashley, here’s them all getting to voice their solution, with Ashley going the straightforward route of “they’re a threat, they’ll keep being a threat, they don’t want to change and stop being a threat, I don’t want to commit genocide, but I also want to defend the Alliance, and those options look mutually exclusive right now,” Liara is all “think of what they could offer us, their history is invaluable, they were contemporaries of the protheans, what might they know, and even if we have the ability to wipe out an entire species, that’s an action that can never be undone,” and Kaidan is the middle ground of “the leaders and people we’ve spoken to made a threat, but we can’t call the entire population of this planet genocidal maniacs, surely there must be something we can do to find a reasonable solution.”

It basically comes down to Shepard getting to hack the tech, and then faced with the decision – a) wiping them out by way of effectively setting all their implants to electrify themselves – they’ve shown themselves to be a threat, they have violent intentions towards other life in the galaxy, and nothing indicates that there is any dissent among their population, especially if their implants can allow for like planetary consensus or something, b) shutting down the tech, their greatest threat, as a way to keep most of them alive, but reducing their civilization to like Bronze Age – the Citadel races would certainly be willing to help the zha’til recover, but it’s not like they’d be happy to accept it, or c) use this as the way to force them to come to the table and negotiate in good faith, under the threat of destruction as a result of them using this weapon, give them a chance, with the downside being that they have done nothing to indicate that they deserve this chance, or that the second they develop a workaround, they’ll be back to threatening all alien life.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from the head of a Council-approved research team, investigating the planet, with or without inhabitants.

ME3: Assuming the zha’til survive, a representative is on the Citadel, offering their aid. If they were reduced, they are a significantly smaller War Asset.

Investigations

The Citadel’s Wards house people from across the galaxy, and murder is a common occurrence. When the murder victim is a prominent Alliance politician, however, one whose controversial opinions made him a target for non-humans, the Alliance can only trust one person to investigate on the Citadel – the first human Spectre, Commander Shepard. 

Honestly, the Citadel could absolutely support its own game. Just the pieces we get of it from the trilogy and the Citadel DLC tease a massive station that probably has a population higher than some planets. So there’s A LOT to do here (indeed, looking over my notes for this, I have at least one DLC focused entirely on events on the Citadel in each game, and all of them can utilize entirely new areas, so...). And, really, who doesn’t enjoy an old-fashioned ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery?

Obviously, we have more than just the basic mystery happening here, or else we’d just have a standard sidequest, not a full DLC length story. I feel like this needs to go in depth on corruption within Citadel politics – poke around my blog, you’ll find I’m HIGHLY critical of the Council’s handling of the Saren matter, where they appoint a C-Sec officer with a reputation for not playing by the rules as the only investigator of the Eden Prime incident, give him roughly a day to look in to things, (Shepard’s out about sixteen hours, according to Doctor Chakwas, they arrive at the Citadel, get summoned to the Council, and encounter Garrus, at which point the trial is about to start, with no indication that more than hours at most have passed) and then TELL him that his investigation is over, Saren is allowed access to the files of the man he is accused of killing, an eye witness report of Saren’s murder of Nihlus is completely dismissed, while the data file Tali extracts from a geth, which Anderson says upon hearing that he’s never heard of this happening (to say nothing of the quarians’ status among the Citadel races) is deemed “irrefutable evidence”... There’s A LOT that is at best questionable about how the Council handles things. And that’s just sticking with the first game.

So I’d like to pull back some of the veil on Citadel politics, and use that to explore the human-alien friction. Due to Shepard’s rising profile throughout the series, we kinda lose a lot of the big level details of this, and it’s one of those things I like about the Mass Effect universe circa the first game – humanity ISN’T the big kahuna, they’re the latest arrivals, and the rest of the galaxy thinks they’re a bunch of jerks trying to take what they haven’t earned.

Hence where we start – our victim is an Alliance politician, someone who’s got one of those jobs that makes them friends and enemies of the same people. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of people on the Citadel (and outside the Citadel) who would easily be picked up as suspects – again, we’re going an investigative route, to help show off Shepard as a tactician, to show off their brains as well as their brawn.

This is going to lead us first to explore more of the Citadel Tower, the place where the Council and other assorted political figures meet. Udina probably plays a part in things, considering he IS the ambassador at this point, so he’ll probably be talking to Shepard about matters along the way, something of our regular check-in point (plus good to offer him some more characterization and expand him somewhat).

Obviously, with a murder mystery, we investigate through the location, taking us through the Tower and into its deeper structure, to the point that Shepard ends up in the Tower’s basement (or whatever we call the lowest level). Down here, the discovery is that there’s (what else) a conspiracy. Humanity is moving too fast – they’ve only been here for about thirty years and they already have an embassy, are angling for a spot on the Council, how long until they replace all the races who were here first on the Council, make the Citadel humans only?

I feel like we could also get some retroactive elements of Cerberus’s human supremacy in play here, suggest that our victim was being manipulated by them and used to advance their agenda – not just to foreshadow how Cerberus gains prominence in the next game, but also to show that even well-intentioned people are preyed upon by Cerberus’s actions (hello Paragon Shepard). Cerberus didn’t mind using him for their objectives, even if he’s not some pro-human bigot.

Speaking of, let’s tie in Terra Firma a little more into this – they seemed to have some influence in the first game, then drop off the face of the earth, so yeah, let’s throw them in somehow. Like I see that as part of our concluding decision, where the replacement political figure is one of their people, so they seem like the “obvious suspect” red herring – I think by this point we’ve established with these that one of my priorities is worldbuilding, and, again, Terra Firma dropped off the face of the series when it seemed to have developing prominence in the first game.

Anyway, back to the plot. Obviously, Shepard has to do something about this conspiracy. The problem is, of course, while extreme, they represent a dominant view among the Citadel races. And it’s one that has validity to it, humans are demanding more power than any other race in the Citadel’s history (this cycle, anyway, who knows about the previous ones?), and to these races, they are seen as aggressive in that pursuit.

Here’s the thing, and I’ve gone over this in my critiques of the Council before – humans are aggressive about getting more representation because of a handful of things. Number one, humans are out to advance, we recognize that we learn best from making mistakes, while the Citadel races seem to abide by a code of “none shall advance faster than the slowest.” That no advancement is made until all are “capable” of benefiting from it in certain ways, despite how we have the example of multiple species not even being able to compete on a level playing field with races like the asari, the salarians, or the turians – the volus are a client race of the turians, despite having been a part of the galactic community longer. It’s why we see the relative stagnation – the asari discovered the Citadel two thousand years ago, and yet so much of it is still a mystery.

Number two, humans are aggressive because the Citadel races were aggressive to them first. The First Contact War started because Citadel law is that no one shall activate dormant Mass Relays. Thing is, humanity opened Relay-314 at a time that they’d never even heard of the Citadel and its government. So the turians who opened fire first? They were holding humanity to the standards and rules and laws of a governmental body that they didn’t even know existed until the shooting started.

That the turians enforce this law so rigidly, and that the asari and salarians don’t seem to understand how much the asshole it makes them, is the honest source of a lot of the tension between the races in the game.

Like, I vehemently disagree with the racist attitudes of the Terra Firma asshole we meet, but he’s not wrong in pointing out that if you see a kid playing with a matchbook, you take the matches away, but you don’t shoot them for good measure. The turians started the conflict, and you can tell that the Citadel races never acknowledge their responsibility in this – it’s all “humans are so aggressive” without any understanding of why a species whose introduction to the greater galaxy came at a cost of life and involved acts of violence inflicted on them, literally on the basis of information that by definition, they could not have, just MIGHT hold a grudge.

...So, uh, bringing this back around to the topic at hand... This is where we get to the central conflict. Our Terra Firma assholes who are all “Earth first!” have a valid point that the Council and the Citadel races mistreat humanity, and wrap it up in condescending bullshit, so the fact that they’re looking to take some kind of action to do something about this is understandable, even if they’re doing it wrong. The opposition is the conspiracy folks, the ones who murdered the outspoken human, all in the name of protecting their people from perceived human aggression.

And yes, it really does all come down to something that simple, as both sides are right and both sides are wrong, and now someone has to clean up the mess their hostilities have created. I do want this to really come down to something so simple and, on paper, easy to resolve, because when this kind of thing happens in our world, it’s frequently just as on paper simple, but, because of the emotions involved and the personal grudges accumulated, no one is able to take that step back and try to make amends (not saying that as a value judgement, just a fact – sometimes it is appropriate to address the personal grudges, sometimes you need let them go for the greater good).

There’s an interconnectedness to the Citadel races in the course of the series, and this is one of the ways to showcase that, by displaying that both of these peoples need each other in the course of the continuation of this cycle’s civilizations. So Shepard’s ultimate decision is about making a decision, and the hard work is in making them both recognize and acknowledge that they are both wrong – pulling this off right, meaning Shepard found all the ways to make good in-roads with both factions so they’ll listen when they make a big persuasive speech, we have the legitimate grievances acknowledged and at least on course to be redressed (one of the galactic news reports can, if the Alliance fleet is sacrificed to save the Destiny Ascension, say that the turians are considering reparations – maybe with this option, this happens regardless). Pulling it off wrong, Shepard has to side with one faction or the other, leaving tension and hostility remaining unresolved, impacting future relations.

Post Game Followups: 

ME2: Emails from the sided faction, talking about their political advancement.

ME3: Impact on Citadel politics, affecting the attitude of the populace in the Citadel Defense Force

Old Wounds

Shanxi was the site of the First Contact War. Since then, the human colonists have resisted alien interference and involvement on their world. But things become complicated when a turian effort at reparations ends up as a hostage situation. Naturally, the Alliance has one person they want to send in to help smooth things over – Commander Shepard.

An Ashley focus mission, we’re giving her the spotlight here – consider this something of a proto-loyalty mission, since the game itself didn’t have these. Because Shanxi is a place that means a lot to her and her family, so we’re going to say that she is on this mission. That obviously also limits this to a pre-Virmire position in the plot, because she may not make it off of that planet.

Shanxi is talked about, but it’s never even given a flyby in the games proper, and so we head there. And, especially with the context of the last entry in this list, I feel like there should be some effort to acknowledge that there should be reparations to humanity – like I said there, the turians discovered humans on Shanxi and decided to openly attack them, hold them to laws and rules that they had no way of knowing existed, and then decide that humans are the aggressive ones because of how they respond? Yeah, that’s bullshit.

So we have a situation where a group of turians have this realization and are trying to convince the people of Shanxi of their good intentions. Shanxi is, understandably, reluctant to believe it. Shepard is going in to smooth things over, try and ease the tensions that are inevitably flaring up, and Ashley is, ultimately, conflicted about how to feel about this whole matter – this is Shanxi, Williams are not exactly welcome here. But there is still a feeling of responsibility here all the same, because her family impacted this world and now she’s here to help try to build a bridge. The “hostage situation” of the synopsis will actually take place during the course of events – before that happens, we get a chance to explore Shanxi, learn about the history there.

This seems like a point to bring it up: Ashley’s grandfather surrendering Shanxi, in the name of preventing a massacre, and being branded a traitor for it makes little sense to me. Of course, I get that surrendering looks bad, if you’re only looking at the act, and not the motivation. People were losing their lives, he acted to protect them. The Alliance military being unforgiving assholes is not unbelievable, but the general public going along with it, refusing to have his name cleared, even decades later, is.

So we’re going to have to dig into the reasons for this. People on Shanxi will resent the Williams for the surrender – they wanted to fight to the bitter end, and they passed this along to their kids. The “death before dishonor” crowd think it would have been better to have fought to the last – sent a stronger message to the Citadel about the wrongness of that whole “shoot first, ask questions later, blame the victim for everything” approach. They’re the ones who lead the charge against Williams’ actions, saying he was weak for surrendering to the turians. Meanwhile others are aware that he saved lives.

If anything, this makes things difficult for Ashley. As much as she lives under the specter of her family, she is not quite sure about what life would be like if he’s cleared – even knowing that things would be better, her family not getting shit details and crap assignments, it means getting a new perspective on the future that she never expected and needs to process that.

Core plot is still the hostage situation, one that Shepard ends up being involved in. The hostage takers are a group demanding more for the turians in terms of reparations – they can’t bring back the dead, of course, but the turians aren’t giving enough in their eyes. I don’t know, let’s say that it’s coming across as a perfunctory kind of apology, the “We’re sorry you feel we disrespected you” kind of reaction, which... Yeah, I totally see the turians doing that and the humans calling bullshit.

I mean, yeah, you want more to it than just “we’re angry” and such, because that’s a pretty straightforward mission, but the idea here is as much for exploring Ashley’s character and development over just an outright mission story. This is about her, and we’re going to explore her through this as much as the plot, so the plot can get away with being fairly limited in scope or scale, because this is about the character.

And this means that Ashley needs to have the big moment of resolving the crisis, rather than Shepard. Like, RPG, we’ll say Shepard gets the option to decide who gets that moment, but let’s be real, to culminate her arc in this DLC, it should be her. Bookend the portrayal of her grandfather with her – depending on how Shepard’s interacted with her, with how much digging they did into the history of the place, how they’ve interacted with the people, and it leads to Ashley (or Shepard) being able to talk down the hostage takers, defuse the situation, resolve things peacefully. If they can’t, violence ensues.

Resolution-wise, we’d be looking at the turians being upset and nearly starting conflict all over again because “you humans are too damn aggressive,” “the turians aren’t negotiating in good faith and wish they’d blasted humanity back to the stone age,” blah blah blah. Variation is in how the situation was resolved – peaceful resolution leads to the agreement to try this again later, let hostilities die down a little before trying to fix these long-standing grudges, violent is that the turians walk away, the human diplomats basically going “well, we’ll try this again at some point, hopefully.” And, for Ashley, she’s resolved some of her family’s old ghosts – best case scenario, she’s given Shanxi a different memory of the Williams clan, and can walk away with a tangible note on her record that, regardless of how anyone else might try to creatively reinterpret her record, says that her contribution saved lives.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from diplomatic representative about the advancement of the talks over the previous two years.

ME3: If peacefully resolved, a joint human-turian task force is a war asset.

Ascension

The Ascension Project is a home for human biotics. Rumors reach Captain Anderson that there is a biotic extremist group attempting to subvert the teaching and draw them towards pro-human interests, and he asks Commander Shepard to investigate what could be a threat to the human-Citadel alliance.

We had Ashley’s loyalty mission, here’s Kaidan’s. The advancement of human biotics was a running thread through the background of ME1, but sort of fell by the wayside as the series expanded its scope in successive games, so this is a chance to explore that further. And we’re going to do so in part by building on the mission in game that involves Chairman Burns, the Alliance Parliament member who is taken captive by L2 biotics seeking reparations.

Obviously, we see Grissom Academy, the site of the Ascension Project, in ME3, but hey, for one, I like the idea that (retroactively, anyway) this means that Shepard is returning there in the course of the third game, and for two, it’s entirely reasonable to make the Academy large enough to house areas that we just didn’t see in the course of the mission there. Plus we’re seeing it (at least to start) in less of a state of chaos as exists in ME3.

Again, we’re starting lowkey. The idea here is more infiltration first – if extremists are trying to coopt kids’ education, odds are sending in soldiers is gonna tip them off quick and easy. So instead this is going to be framed as an “Alliance biotic recruitment” kind of thing – “The Alliance wants you!” and all that sort. That’s the cover as Shepard’s team heads in. The name of the game here is stealth, that we’re not here to set off alarms, just to ensure that there’s no attempt at subversion of the Alliance’s goals of peaceful coexistence with the Citadel races.

As a sidenote, both this and the Ashley DLC are basically me engaging in retroactively applied stories to further justify why it is that Kaidan and Ashley get the Spectre wings come ME3 – as it is, that kinda feels more like a bone being thrown to humanity in the name of appeasing them with Earth captured by the Reapers, as well as Udina wanting a loyal bodyguard, as opposed to something that their skill and ability has earned them the position. I want some exploration of the skill that justifies them getting that position.

So, yeah, we see the Ascension Project in its glory, causing a bit of a stir of memories for Kaidan, aware that this is more like what he should have experienced at BAaT. He’s glad that there are biotics who are getting to learn about their abilities in a safe environment that isn’t going to treat them like trash – whether or not that’s the military boot camp way, these are kids who have been, by a quirk of fate and chance, given these incredible powers without their consent, they deserve sympathy and understanding regarding their lives abruptly turned upside down, not demands that they show the same level of skill as people who train through their lives to be weapons.

Another investigation story, as we look in on the various teachers, learning more about what the state of affairs with regards to biotics are – if Mass Effect Andromeda is going to say that Cora felt outcasted and isolated because of her biotics, lets at least make this have a tangible feeling of what the actual culture and society she left behind is dealing with, considering that this is something that I’ve seen EVERYONE side-eying at best with her. At least offer it some grounding in the universe so it’s not just her, in effect, whining that she felt alone when we have characters like Kaidan, who killed someone with his biotics as a teenager, and Jack, who was tortured from infancy in an attempt to build a better biotic.

Anyway. The idea is to see more about what the biotics go through, and to better explain what biotics even are to the uninitiated (re: the audience). Biotics are just an accepted part of the universe in the games as is, but these are still a relatively recent thing for humanity, and we don’t really know how people are handling it.

Honestly, I’m kinda inclined to fully lean into a “biotics = homosexuality” metaphor. Like, personal stuff here, that’s one of the things that really... bothers me about the way Cora is handled in Andromeda, that she has this very queercoded story in terms of her self-acceptance, to the point of at one point, in reference to her biotics, saying “what if someone had told me ‘that’s okay’?” about herself. And that’s a line that defines queer narratives, but it is coming out of this cis-straight person’s mouth. So yeah, I’m gonna fix that how I can, since canonically, Kaidan is a bisexual man, and he gets the focus here, and we’re gonna take advantage of this. I may have issues with how BioWare handles their not-straight characters, but since they’re not actually making this, I’m gonna take full advantage.

Oh, right. Plot. Something, something... We get to the overall plot. Of course, we can sway a few people over – these biotic extremists are looking for belonging and acceptance above all. We see things like Major Kyle’s biotic cult, biotics are looking for something that gives them a place, beyond just the military stuff – what happens to the biotic who is a pacifist, where do they fit in when the only place that really seems to accept biotics is the Alliance military? Yeah, sure, these extremists would be testing the idea of “pacifism,” but it’s still the general concept we’re going with.

Like with the above Ashley story, it comes down to Kaidan getting the option to take the lead on this. You know how in the situation in the base game with Chairman Burns, Kaidan will interject about being an L2, like those extremists? Last time I played through, I kinda felt like he should have been more in the lead on that mission, that it should have been his answer to Garrus and Doctor Saleon, or Wrex and the family armor, something like that. So we’re going to have a similar situation here. Like with Ashley above, his ability to talk down the leader of this group depends on how well the player investigated – find the details, talk to the right people, that sort of detective stuff (because I like there being more to gaining experience in games that just combat).

That’s especially meaningful because this particular pro-human person, the one leading these biotic extremists? He worked at BAaT, was one of the people supposedly tasked with watching the situations with the turian biotics who had been brought on. He knew Kaidan. Kaidan knew him. In some ways, because of what happened with Kaidan, that’s why he was inspired to this – letting aliens teach biotics to these children, dictate those terms, WAS abuse, and, in his mind, humans can’t let their children be so violently abused by aliens again.

Kaidan says he dealt with his past in the game proper. But this is still an echo of it, someone who he once knew, worse, someone who cites what happened to him as reason for what he’s doing. Which is why it’s important for Kaidan that he be the one to resolve this. As ever, it can be resolved with words or violence, yay Paragon/Renegade system. For Kaidan, though, it’s just important to see this through and make sure that he has this dealt with.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from a class of biotics saved.

ME3: Student saved during the Grissom Academy mission is among the students encountered here, their presence gives a boost to the biotic students war asset

Ruins of Preita

An asari colony world has discovered a prothean archive that could rival those on Mars. Due to the concerns of the Reapers, Commander Shepard and crew go to investigate – and find an empty world, the archaeology team missing. Finding the missing team leads into a world lost to the galaxy for over fifty thousand years – and a threat even the protheans locked away!

So, now we have a Liara loyalty mission story. If you’ve paid any serious attention to my blog over the years, you’re probably having a laugh at my expense here – I’m always complaining about an overfocus on Liara, and yet here I am, adding to her content specifically. Hey, I’m at least playing fair and giving her time alongside Ashley and Kaidan. Hell, that’s why I’m doing this. I gave them time in the sun, and it’s fair that I give her the same.

But yes, I want to explore Liara’s character through the lens of her as an archaeologist, which basically gets a little lip service in the games proper, but ultimately means nothing. She is supposed to be an expert on the protheans and an archaeologist of renown, and yet that gets dumped as her actual profession in ME2, so that she can “be a very good information broker,” which... Not to dismiss her in what is meant to be a focus mission for her, but that ends up being told, rather than shown. Let’s let her play to her strengths.

This is a mission about her getting to flex that muscle. She learns about this archive – actually, thinking about it, let’s say that this was a dig that she had the chance to go on instead of the Therum dig, and chose it instead in the name of it being more isolated (more on that later). With the latest report she’s read about it, she thinks it’ll be an assist to Commander Shepard – if nothing else, the fact that Saren was interested in Eden Prime’s prothean beacon means that a new prothean archive might well be a lure for him, and he might well show up, or have Benezia or one of her agents go there in his stead. It could lead them to Saren, is what she’s using as her justification for telling Shepard to go and check this out.

Obviously it won’t, because game mechanics, but it’s a solid enough reason to get us where we’re going, which is an asari planet. Here’s where we get a chance to see Liara in her element AND see this pushback against her theories. It bugs the hell out of me that Liara says that her theory of the cycle of extinction is dismissed by other asari because of her youth – by framing that dismissal of her peers with having to do purely with her age, it says that in the two thousand years since the asari discovered the Citadel, to say nothing of anything that might have been included in the prothean archive in the Temple of Athame, NO ONE ELSE has put forward the idea of the cycles. That Liara is the first to put those pieces together. In more than two thousand years. And, as things turn out, she is 100% correct about there being a constant cycle of civilization and extinction.

My suspension of disbelief breaks at that. That she and she alone has developed this theory – this theory that is absolutely fact – in two thousand years. Bare minimum, I would have said that she was part of a fringe collection of scientists who just don’t have the evidential support to justify this being the mainstream view. But it’s the canon we have to work with, so, fine. But this disagreement when it comes to theories on the extinction of the protheans would be another point of why Liara didn’t go on this excursion, that these other researchers are those who do not share her beliefs, and, as she believes, that would mean they would shun her.

But it’s important that these researchers not just be strawmen – they may have held opposing views to Liara, that doesn’t mean they would dislike her. In point of fact, one of them has to have considered herself a friend to Liara, for reasons I’ll get in to in a bit. But these are going to be people who are all for the most part entirely likeable and reasonable. They just don’t agree with Liara’s stance.

Or at least, the records and logs they’ve left behind make them entirely likable and appear reasonable. Because, of course the research team is missing when Shepard and team arrive – like research teams in these scenarios are ever able to avoid going missing and being presumed dead.

This sparks a conflict with Liara – she’s glad that they’re able to try and find them, maybe even rescue them, but she’s also guilty because she should have been on this expedition, should have been with them. Liara’s got a tendency to put things on her own shoulders (see her reaction after Thessia, assuming you don’t have Javik/don’t take the interrupt to get them to an accord). Hell, ideally, this would be something done after Noveria and her mother’s death to explore that some – I hate how by the time you try to speak with her about it, she’s already pulling that “I choose to remember Benezia as she was” thing, seeming to either be accepting or repressing what happened, when what happened is that, regardless of the why, her mother is dead, and Shepard pulled the trigger.

So yeah, while this is a mission available at any point after doing Therum, in my mind, it’s best to take this after Noveria for the ability for Liara to lash out at Shepard for not being able to rescue her mother, how do they think that they can save these people, one among them a friend of hers, look at that, it’s another situation where Shepard is going to fail to rescue someone who mattered to her!

That is her breaking point, where she can’t bottle this all up anymore. That, for the sake of the mission, for “the greater good,” she’s bottled up her feelings and anger and resentment and fear, and yet, here and now, she can’t help it, she has to address it. She knows it’s unfair to Shepard – she heard about indoctrination, understands that it was something horrible for Benezia, that Benezia accepted no alternative to death, but people she cares about keep getting caught in the line of fire, all in the name of what, exactly? “The greater good”? “The ends justifying the means”? Chance and circumstance?

Hell, include some elements tying her closer to Ashley and Kaidan at this point – it connects the crew together more for when the Virmire decision hits, considering that this game only has banter in the Citadel elevators, which, given fast travel, is heavily skippable, and competes with news reports. There needs to be more development of the character interactions, so let’s do some character interaction here, if nothing else. (And maybe also include a post-Virmire conversation with her about how SHE feels about the loss of Ashley/Kaidan, yes I’m moving out of the scope of this DLC idea, but it’s good for characterization, dammit!)

Investigation happens, records and logs do the ‘ominous mood building’ thing... The end result is that what happened was that this planet once housed a prothean lab. A bio-engineering lab. They were creating something that (stated ambiguously, since Shepard won’t know about the Reapers properly yet at this point in the timeline) was meant to fight the Reapers, be something that could stand against them and protect the protheans. But by the time that it was done, the war was all but over, the protheans having lost. The protheans never got the chance to let it loose, pulling up stakes from the facility before the Reapers hit it. But as time wore away the tech, this thing they created has gotten loose on its own after a few thousand years. This thing is like the rachni on Noveria, having been grown in isolation – there was nothing else on this planet, it was literally the only kind of life around, even before getting to it being engineered as a weapon above all else. It’s too mad to save, must be put down.

Easier said than done, of course. The archaeological team are contained inside of it (I’m thinking held in some kind of crystal-like stasis pods on its back), and is drawing on them for life, sort of in the same way that Malak used the Jedi captives on the Star Forge in KOTOR, where it taps into them and heals itself based on their life force. So the Paragon/Renegade choice in here revolves around how much effort Shepard’s going to put in to saving the captives. Freeing them before they get used as batteries, probably with Liara using her biotics to rescue those who they manage to get loose (meaning she’s unable to act as support in combat because she’s busy focusing her biotics), or just killing them first – with Liara distracted and unable to provide support, that justifies the Renegade stance, because it’s one less source of firepower against the thing as it tries to either kill them or add them to its collection.

That’s important because that aforementioned friend of hers is going to be rescued either way the player chooses – Liara will insist on getting her out alive, even if Shepard foregoes saving the others. Regardless of the player choice, Liara’s friend survives, and, once the creature is dead, she’ll respond to how Shepard chose to resolve the situation, if she’s the sole survivor or if Shepard made an effort to rescue everyone. She’s grateful for her survival either way, but she’s angry about the failure to save the others if they were abandoned.

For Liara, though, the ultimate result is seeing something of the protheans being knocked off their pedestal – regardless of the reason (which, yes, we know to be extinction by Reapers), they abandoned this creature, left it to be consumed by madness. The point here is seeing Liara have a moment where she grows up – she has to acknowledge the protheans she pictured for the last century were flawed (Partially because it bothers me the way she speaks of the protheans with such rose-colored glasses even by ME3, when she says “it’s clear they prized knowledge, growth, and cooperation with the rest of the galaxy,” even before Javik sends that image crashing – a species who form an empire, whose legacy is memorialized as an empire, is not going to be first and foremost wise scholars). She’s realizing that whatever the reasons were for creating this, whatever caused them to leave it behind, they still did this to an innocent being that they were responsible for. It’s something of her “loss of innocence” moment, considering that Benezia’s death currently doesn’t really provide that (though, again, we ARE also addressing that... Details.)

Her friend is also going to get a few moments with Liara, talking about the archaeology team, and commenting about how Liara’s development has gone. This is a moment for Liara, to really help give her a character arc in the game proper – considering that she can be left on Therum until right before Ilos, she kinda doesn’t have much of one as it is. Also, this gives a chance for Liara to exist outside of Shepard’s world, considering how she bubbles herself into it as the trilogy progresses. This is someone who’s only really in Liara’s orbit, not Shepard’s, and it gives her a little more grounding and existence outside of Shepard.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from Liara’s friend, commenting about how she handled Shepard’s death, expressing concern for her losing direction

ME3: The creature’s remains have been examined, providing a War Asset, if the archaeologists were saved, they provide an additional boost, Liara’s friend has a cameo on the Citadel after Thessia

Incursion

An Alliance space station on the fringe of the Terminus system abruptly goes silent. As the Normandy’s stealth systems can get there without letting any invaders know, as well as Commander Shepard’s skill, Captain Anderson sends them to check on the station. The batarians specifically have been known to be in the area, but there remains the possibility that this is something worse...

Okay, out of the loyalty mission structure and direct character work, back to isolated stories in the setting. So, the frontier of space? I say this as a lover of scifi from a young age: It is TERRIFYING. You are on the edge of all that’s known, and any number of things, things you could never conceive of because they are so outside of your frame of reference, could show up and kill you. A flimsy barrier of glass (or transparent aluminum or whatever material they make those big honking windows out of) is all that separates you from a suffocating death.

Yeah, we’re doing a psychological horror story here. I suppose technically AGAIN, considering the stuff around the disappeared archaeologists in the above DLC idea, but that was as much about Liara as the atmosphere. This is pure paranoia and suspicion.

The inspiration I’m going with here is KOTOR 2’s opening on the Peragus mine. Something happened here, and the people are all dead or missing – a handful of corpses, but, yet again, we’ve got logs to find, and they’ll include people who we can’t identify among the dead. Because that gives motivation to stick around and solve things, rather than just blow the place to hell.

The first guess is that there’s a batarian slave raid happening here. There are indications that the Alliance officers here were thinking this at first, that this was some raid in progress – sure, it wasn’t open violence, but maybe they were softening things up, trying to get on board, lower defenses, and then let the slave ships show up and take everyone left. That’s what their last attempt at an outgoing message suggested, it’s what Shepard and company show up expecting.

But that wasn’t the case. The investigation continues through the station, with Shepard searching for signs of anyone still alive. And as they proceed through the station, there’s something that seems to keep just passing out of view. Something else is here with them.

Again, I’m skimping on the exposition here, just because the investigation is the important part, and that’s hard to develop without a layout of the station itself in front of me, and what and how the narrative has to adapt to the environment, but also because this is a very atmospheric style story, where the focus is in the build up, the mystery, the way to get to the big reveal of just what it is that happened here. In a story like this, the tension in this is built with how many times you think you’re going to have an encounter with “the monster” before you actually do.

This particular “monster,” as it turns out, is some kind of energy creature, something that came to the station from the unknown depths of space, drawn by the station’s power core emissions. All indications are that this is simply some space-born lifeform that evolved naturally, and isn’t like some Reaper weapon or anti-Reaper weapon. Just some non-sapient lifeform, drawn in by the power core (maybe it had been specially modified, to further explain why this station and why now), and ending up killing the inhabitants of it.

The thing about this is that I’m going to emphasize here is that I DON’T want this as some kind of creation of the Reapers or their servants OR something that was cooked up to combat them. This thing is entirely independent of anything to do with Reapers. One of the things that I appreciated with ME1 over the later games was the “lived in” nature of the galaxy, where there were a handful of things shown and revealed in the course of the story that just spoke to there being life and civilization wandering through the galaxy for countless millennia. Life is pretty persistent when given the chance, and there’s surely life that exists in the depths of space that is so completely alien to our understanding that we might not even recognize it as such. This creature is one such example of life but not as we know it.

Obviously, there’s a straight up Paragon/Renegade choice of killing or sparing the creature, finding some way to lure it off and away from the station. I’m also inclined for a neutral option of trying to humanely capture it – it’s a creature unlike anything they know, it could show them so many things about the greater universe in the examination – but I’m not sure I feel like there’s enough room in the series for that kind of variation, given the limitations – this IS meant to be DLC, you know? Or at least, hypothetical DLC. Either way, though, the end result is that there is a boss battle, Shepard having to either kill it or weaken it, the station is cleared of the threat and the Alliance gets to have the station back, with talk of it being repurposed into some kind of early warning system regarding threats from outside Alliance/Citadel space (hint hint, nudge nudge).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Emails from the new station commander, referring to the reopening of the station and the fate of the creature

ME3: Station as a war asset, exo-biologists as a war asset, how they examine space-faring life in the galaxy and if they can be adapted in some way to resist the Reapers

Evolution

A mercenary contacts the Normandy, claiming to have information regarding Saren. Following this lead, however, proves to open a separate can of worms, as the mercenary reveals their connections to a cult of people who view synthetics as the next step in organic evolution, and, knowing of Saren’s ties to the geth, seek to stop Shepard – or convert them.

So the idea here is to give more attention to something that seemed to be a running plot thread during ME1 and ME2 – machine cultists. The ExoGeni survey team on Trebin got huskified by an unknown artifact, and in ME2, there’s the mine on Aequitas. Yes, technically that hasn’t happened yet, shush. But we observe this in action in the games proper, and no one ever actually acknowledges it beyond the simple immediate reaction.

So what we have here is a merc, trying to contact Shepard, claiming they have info on Saren. No one really believes it – if Saren’s working with geth, he would have no need for the liability of organic agents. Yet they also can’t really ignore the idea either because Saren is why they’re out here (I really intend to take advantage of the idea that the whole party cast comes back for these with a full on mission briefing/discussion to kick this off – sounds like some fun opportunities for character dynamics with them debating the validity of this claim).

The result of going in takes Shepard and team to a planet where, initial impression, something is OFF about this place. It’s a prefab colony in early colonization, and something about how the people act just doesn’t seem right. They seem to be in an almost trance-like state that no one can snap them out of, a fact that immediately puts everyone on edge.

The merc is here (let’s say he’s a turian), and keeps things frustratingly vague until the arrival of a leader of the colony. The kicker with him being that he appears partially huskified (sorta like the Cerberus goon on Mars that Ashley/Kaidan find). Yet he still seems to be able to act seemingly independently. Of course, someone this obviously not-right has made himself a target, but all the people in the colony, including the merc, are all on his side.

Shepard can try to fight out of this, but they’re overwhelmed – there IS an entire colony of people, and there’s still the possibility of getting them free, Shepard has a responsibility to not shoot civilians (no matter what trigger-happy Renegades might think), and the team at least is willing to take that stand.

The explanation is that this is a group of wanna-call-themselves “next phase of organic evolution,” people who believe that they are the future. That’s what got their attention about Saren and Shepard, knowing about how he is working with the geth (it was an open session of the Council when they got made Spectre, after all). They look to Shepard as a potential threat.

When we encounter Machine Cultists in the game proper, they’re too far gone to really give any explanation. The comics seemed to draw on this – in Mass Effect Evolution, Saren’s brother uncovered one on Palaven, the Illusive Man was involved, Saren had to nuke from orbit the location of this device and his brother with it. We’re kinda going into the same territory with this, but, you know, Shepard gets to save the day.

So the merc shows up, trying to explain, offer the sales pitch (i.e.: the carrot), try to convince Shepard that their leader has the right idea, that this is a true joining of organic and synthetic, and that it will avert the “coming apocalypse” (just in case the whole ‘Reaper artifact’ element wasn’t certain for anyone playing). Then the cult leader shows up to offer the threat (i.e.: the stick), the warning that whatever Shepard expects to do, they will not be able to succeed.

For pacing reasons, I think of this as a pre-Virmire thing, so there’s not a direct awareness on Shepard’s part that just being around a Reaper artifact is a cause for Indoctrination, leading to a period of wondering how this happened and assuming it comes from direct interface – this is as much an explanation for why, if the implication is that the cult leader got to interface with a prothean beacon of some kind (actually Reaper, in the same manner as the vision that Object Rho offers in Arrival), they don’t have Shepard try to interact with this one, that they’re afraid of Shepard becoming like these people.

Anyway, jailbreak sequence! Because we can do better than just running a game of Simon in order to get Shepard out of their cell. Shepard finagles a way out of the cell block and to the colony’s science lab (it’s a frontier world, they need a science lab just to stay aware of all the new things they discover here). Among the things there is the record of what happened here, and specifically the existence of the artifact. Leads to a simple solution – blow up the artifact, and see what that does.

Of course, the artifact is guarded in the heart of the colony’s main site. We meet up with the merc again, who’s seeming a little uncomfortable – the indoctrination hasn’t completely taken root in him, and so there’s some question of maybe he can be reached. Paragon/Renegade here about dealing with him – kill him or spare him. That sparing will come back in a short while

Because now there’s the colony leader – the cult leader, effectively, at this point – to deal with. He’s angry about the damage Shepard has done to everything, ranting about plans to bring the glory of evolution to the galaxy. Yeah, he’s round the bend, the device effectively having melted his mind (okay, yeah, I’m getting flashes of Kenson here, but hey, same tech, so it’s not ripping off, it’s continuity!)

After dealing with him, the plan is to blow the artifact sky high. Here’s where the merc comes back into play – he says he’s too far gone, and wants to be the one to push the button on this thing, die with it. It’s his way of having a good death after this. Another Paragon/Renegade choice about his fate before blowing the thing sky high – the colony, unfortunately can’t be saved, anyone not killed getting there dies when the device is blown.

There’s an after action briefing, too, where, because, again, the idea here is that this is pre-Virmire, the crew really discuss the horrors of what “these Reaper machines” can do, and what if they’re not some geth red herring or something.

Basically, my idea here is that this is adding to the atmosphere and mystique of the Reapers, in a way that, with the game proper focused on the concept of advancing the plot, doesn’t get a chance. This is a more traditional feature of building up the menace, by showing the insidious nature of things, having the Reapers’ subtle side at play – we see references of Indoctrination, but we don’t really get the horrors outside of some talk – sure, there are the salarians who are in the Virmire facility, and Benezia’s talk, but it’s all second hand. This is a case where we see the effects spread across the entire colony, which, given resources in the game, is all of a planet we get to encounter, and Shepard and company are the only ones who aren’t, and that can go to the paranoia, where the people surrounding them all are giving off the vibes of being a threat, but they’re not doing anything. What can I say, I am a sucker for a good atmospheric story.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email about the aftermath of the colony’s destruction, and the research done on the corpses on the effects of Indoctrination

ME3: War asset surrounding Indoctrination research, preliminary anti-Indoctrination tech being introduced around the Catalyst facility, if the merc sacrificed himself, his family offers a boost to turian military morale on the basis of how one of their own resisted (pointedly ignoring Saren)

Relativity

The Mass Relays are the ancient devices that allow faster than light travel throughout the galaxy. The Charon Relay specifically was one that opened the way for humanity to join the races of the Citadel. This only makes a sudden distress call from the Relay all the more urgent, and Admiral Hackett believe that of everyone in the Alliance, Commander Shepard is right for the job.

So the Mass Relays are these massive facilities that are a key point throughout the entire trilogy. Why, exactly, do we never see one up close aside from transition screens? We should totally get to explore one! Like, I realize that it’s never explicitly said if there’s any kind of command station, or if “guarding a Mass Relay” was a ship-based action or if there was actual, physical contact with one, but I’m saying that something of the size of the Relays, even if much of it is a solid object, you maintain SOME sort of command structure within it in order to monitor and examine things. Even if the Reapers have some kind of robotic drones or Keeper analogues running around, doing standard maintenance, I cannot be convinced that there is not SOME areas of the actual Mass Relay that house facilities for organic life to work in. Especially considering the design having the light sources along the hull that we traditionally associate with acting as windows on starships and space stations.

So yeah, this is an adventure taking us into the workings of a Mass Relay proper. The general idea is that there’s a distress call from the Charon Relay, which is something that really worries the Alliance – lose the Charon Relay, humanity loses their connection to the galaxy at large. And the Alliance doesn’t want the Citadel to know about this, at least not right away – if something is impacting how the Relays function, the Council is going to demand getting involved, and the Alliance DEFINITELY doesn’t want to give the non-human races a free pass into humanity’s home system, so they’re calling on Shepard.

Also part of the novelty of this is that I kinda want to have the chance to explore what it’s like for those who are not exploring the stars in this setting – the Mass Relay’s crew is alive and intact and interactable. This isn’t one of the many cases of showing up too late to be able to properly save people (I’m looking mostly at ME2 on this count, even before we add in the above and below of my own creation).

Head of the team on the Relay is an engineer, not a soldier (pulling a name out of hat for them in the name of simplicity in this write up... Let’s go with Sarah Manning, just because my Orphan Black DVDs happen to be right next to me as I’m writing this and it offers as good as a placeholder as any – feel free to picture Tatiana Maslany as this character if you so choose, though, by the rules of this series, in an ideal world, this would have been DLC produced for ME1 in 2007, so this character would probably be at least a decade, probably more, older than she would have been at the time, oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed...). She’s not just concerned about the Council finding out – not that she’s a Terra Firma type, just that she has Earth related pride and considers the Charon Relay humanity’s, and, on a personal level, HERS, given her responsibility for it – but also the lives on board. She wants to protect and preserve as many lives as she can.

The interior of the facility is a mix of reasonably sensical designs, in the areas meant for humanoid habitation, and something far more Eldritch abomination-y when we start moving out of those areas. And, you know, we pretty much HAVE to move out of them as time goes on, since that’s like half of the fun of this concept.

But we start in the more familiar areas, where everything seems normal. Except the people are missing (yes, I know I’m relying on this concept a lot, but it’s good as an in universe mystery and out of universe programming so that the game doesn’t have to account for like a dozen NPCs to fill space). In this instance, the distress signal itself indicates that the Relay’s station commander had ordered their people to a designated safe zone within the Relay’s structure, which is where Shepard will need to head to uncover things. Sarah’s staying in the control area, trying to ensure that nothing else goes wrong.

At some point in the midst of this, I do want the question of if the Relay will be/has to be destroyed to come up, better establish the idea that will come up in Arrival of the destruction of Relay in the game proper.

The exploration takes Shepard into the Eldritch-y areas, which, sadly, because I am a wordsmith and not a picture kind of person, I can really only describe as messing with perception and going all Escher in the design. Basically, the idea is to present the interior and heart of the Relays as being these massively complex and complicated machines that function on a level not really human (or, in the case of the non-human races in the game besides the Reapers, human adjacent). Because, first of all, this is faster than light travel, which means this is this is this franchise’s handwave for how anything happens on multiple planets and is dealt with in (in-universe) real time, and second, Sovereign talked about a level of existence beyond our own and such. This leans into that kind of concept – yeah, sure, we may have the Reapers be shown as effectively fundamentally understandable, but let’s at least justify the hype a little, huh?

The big idea here is that we’re kinda throwing back to the puzzle style of play that you used to see in computer games in like the nineties. That’s why perspective is going to be a part of this. Basically, the engineers on the Relay found something that tripped the security systems, sort of “unhinging” standard reality around them, getting them lost in the various extra layers (dimensions?) that the Relay works in.

I don’t really know if I see any kind of real boss or major decision here, because this is basically about the gimmick over anything else – Mass Effect isn’t a bad place for a gimmicky throwback, right? Maybe... Ah, something’s clicking here for me – the guy responsible for all of this happening in the first place. He was trying to access an archive – he initially thought it was prothean, but he’s been able to realize that this is much older. He wants to get this information, and is the last one we rescue. The issue is that it’s going to be a choice – rescue this guy and lose the archive, or save the archive and he dies. Like, I’m thinking that there’s some kind of rip or maybe a miniature black hole that’s sucking in the both of them and Shepard can only save one. That’s a solid Paragon/Renegade choice, especially since I could see arguments for both.

Anyway, once the crew’s all rescued and the choice made, Manning gets back to Shepard and says that this is about to get slapped with a security clearance so high she’d “probably have to kill [herself] just for remembering [she has] it” (because yes, I want that as an actual quote), and recommends that they get off the Relay before any superior officers show up to rake them over the coals for their involvement – Shepard’s a busy person, doesn’t need to get bogged down in the red tape that’s sure to come.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Manning regarding the Relay’s subsequent stability

ME3: Manning’s team as a war asset/the archive being tapped for Crucible data and information on the Reapers (mutually exclusive – the team will have disbanded after the loss of the one member if the archive was recovered)

Planet of Peace

An attempt at colonizing a planet, with the aid of all Council races, in an effort at fostering galactic peace, sounded great on paper. The diplomats jumped on the opportunity. The reality has been... less than stellar. Considering the first human Spectre a bridge between races, the Council asks Commander Shepard to try and help smooth over relations.

Frankly, while I understand the focus on the threat of the Reapers, honestly, this seems like a legitimate issue that would be an instant demand for the first human Spectre. And, given the tension and hostility between the races (even beyond humanity against everyone else), it seems like a natural fit, in all honesty. Because it does seem like all the canonical colony worlds always start as one species attempting to tame a single world, rather than taking advantage of the unifying effort of the galactic community.

At the forefront of this colony is the retired human ambassador to the Council, Ambassador Goyle (Anderson mentions her when talking about his candidacy for the Spectres and we see her in the first of Alec Ryder’s memories, now we get to make her a character we get to interact with). This was her passion project specifically, thinking that all races had something that they could offer one another and need to come together.

Basically, she’s underscoring what I like to think of as a core concept of the series, being stronger together than separately.

But, of course, there are tensions. I mean, not even just because we wouldn’t have a plot without it. She is concerned that there might be some extremists getting involved – aren’t there always? When things are tense, some idiot’s always going to come along, see the stacks of dynamite, and decide to light a match. She is specifically asking that Shepard come to help resolve some issues, using their symbolism. Her request is fully aware of this being an exercise in flag waving, but it’s an important bit of flag waving – doing this here can make the galactic community a more stable place.

Bringing back in the element of having the cast back for these, I want to include quite a bit of companion content in this one, including something like how Dragon Age 2’s Mark of the Assassin DLC had a short companion quest for everyone. On a planet that’s a melting pot of the various races that make up the Citadel species, there’s going to be something for everyone here somehow. I don’t know what specifically right now – these write ups focus on the main plot, not the sidequests. But these are things that are there.

As for what is happening on the planet, on the small scale, there’s your standard culture clash brushfires, things that seem small and petty, but have accumulated for the people involved because they’re in such close proximity. But there is a strong Terra Firma presence as well, the “Earth for humans!” type, in addition to similar groups among the traditional Citadel races – this is still only a handful of decades past humanity’s entry, and as we’ve discussed before, the arrival of humanity has made things much more chaotic than they were before, and there’s more than a little resentment among the non-human races for humanity’s attitude and approach to things coming across almost as if they’re demanding more, without anyone Citadel side acknowledging that First Contact was a shit show of THEIR making (scroll back up and see Investigations for more on that...)

But the larger scale conflict is a group out to make sure that this planet fails in its mission and goal, drive a wedge between factions. I’m thinking of going the Star Trek VI route on this, that this group is an ironic banding of humans and non-humans, determined to see peace fall apart at the cost of allying with their supposed enemies, and using “look at how easily they turned on their own to stop this!” as a justification for their own hypocrisy.

Going with the Star Trek VI reference, this group is gearing up for an assassination attempt on Ambassador Goyle herself, believing that stopping her will stop the advancement of this idea. Now, Commander Shepard HAS to save her, we’re not doing the question of “can they stop it in time?” but, for all those pro-humanity xenophobic “Cerberus was right all along!” types, the response of Shepard will be to either name the conspirators and why or utilize their designated fall guy.

BUT WAIT! That’s not the end of this one. See, we’re also going to get an aftermath – the results of this will impact how the population react, and there’s a second story mission that requires a plot progression to access.

Returning to this planet (I feel like it would get some ambitious name like “Hope” or something, but I think it’s kinda provincial for the planet to carry a human name, so...), things are even tenser than before. We get to actively see how the fallout is impacting things, with people drawing lines based on the earlier assassination attempt. This is a lot like how the turian weapons merchant on the Citadel in ME2 will respond differently based on how Shepard resolved ME1 – side with one faction in the first part, their supporters approve of you and their opposites are angry with you, and vice versa.

Goyle appreciates Shepard’s return, because she’s seeing the place beginning to collapse. She’s feeling ready to throw in the towel because of how poorly things are going. Still, until the place closes its doors, she’s going to stand up and act like the leader she’s here to be. Shepard saved her life, she’s going to commit it to preserving this colony. But she wants Shepard’s help all the same, because they can leverage that heroism to helping put things here right.

Of course, here’s where we get to the big finale choice – are you going to strengthen this colony or break it? And sure, it seems straightforward on the idea of what’s good and what’s bad, but here’s the thing that the overall narrative develops through investigation – the Alliance and the Citadel need to allocate their resources. Part of the reason that the sanctioned colonies tend to be dominated by one species or another is a matter of need – when you have a primarily human/asari population, you’ll have to import in resources for turians, things like that – even if they’re trying to grow them on their own, they probably need to import like soil for nutrients and such.

And that not only gets costly, that can divert resources that are more greatly in need. In the long term, this could tie up resources that are needed elsewhere. In the short term, if trying to make these disparate races and cultures work together and play nice is taking up this much time and effort, isn’t it possible, isn’t it plausible, that there are better things to be doing with those resources?

So, do we try and heal the divide and potentially tie up resources in what has been an uphill climb from the start, and right before the Reaper War begins (for all you forward thinkers reading this), or do we cut our losses and focus on making these types of cross-species initiatives at a later point in time? That’s the Paragon/Renegade choice here.

The resolution comes and Ambassador Goyle will be either thankful for the effort or resigned that her great initiative isn’t going forward. Regardless of Shepard’s actions, she’s thankful that they at least made an attempt – she isn’t going to see them as failing if they opted to cut the losses, but herself.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter either from Ambassador Goyle, reporting on the colony, or a news service announcement of her having further withdrawn from the public eye after the colony’s failure.

ME3: For Paragon choice, there’s a decrease in dextro-food reserves, given the colony’s need, but an increase in interspecies morale, with efforts to incorporate multi-species crews underway, and vice versa for the Renegade

Daedalus Station

A space station on the fringe of Citadel space sends out a distress call. When the Normandy arrives, however, no one there claims responsibility for it. Yet the station is in a spiral, a path that will, slowly but steadily, lead the station directly into a sun. Commander Shepard attempts to save everyone aboard from the inevitable death, and discover why they seem unfazed at the idea.

Okay, let’s just acknowledge first, yes, I’m aware that the synopsis sounds not just like a rip off of the first mission of Leviathan but also “Incursion” above. I’m aware. Look, the synopsis is a short brief, not the full details, okay? Strictly speaking, it’s more in line with the events of Leviathan, certainly, but I want to at least acknowledge that I’m aware that there are similarities. Okay, they’re there, LET’S MOVE ON.

Anyway. Distress call, brings in the Normandy. Station is obviously in a death spiral. The moment that Shepard and company board the station, everyone is going about their routine. Obviously, something’s a touch screwy about this set up. Another investigation must ensue.

Of course, as we’ve established, details of the investigations are not where my expansions really shine – it’s easy to stretch out a discovery of this sort, with development A leading to clue B and making revelation C... Yadda, yadda. I’m about the what of these things, not the how.

The ultimate thing about this is twofold. Part one is that this is basically going to be an introduction to the concept of Indoctrination – someone discovered a Reaper artifact, and is trying to adapt it to their benefit. Because frankly, the idea that someone wouldn’t try and take Indoctrination for themselves... Yeah, let’s be real here. Someone WOULD.

Obviously, since we’re still in game one and the Reapers are still mostly a mystery at this point in time, there’s the question of what this is. But, hey, it’s still something that should have happened, and this is the time when there’s the most mystery and least immediate “oh shit, this will horribly backfire if we don’t just straight up blow this up now” reactions.

So, our villain. They’re gonna spiral into insanity (thematic mirroring – as the station enters the death spiral, they spiral into madness), so we’re not going to push too much on making them seem sympathetic, in the traditional sense. Honestly, in writing this, I’m kinda getting parallels to your average dangerous incel aspiring mass shooter, so we’re gonna go with that, someone who perceived themselves as more isolated and alone than they were – the investigation will have us find private journals from other crew pre-artifact that mention him, usually in the fashion of ‘he doesn’t talk much, but doesn’t seem that bad’ kind of messages. Meanwhile, his own talk about the others has a more downcast approach, that he knows they’re not interested in hearing about him, etc. etc.

You know, this is the kind of person who, upon getting the ability to manipulate minds is basically doing it in an effort to bolster his own self-esteem, turning people who were once a little sharp with him one time into his whipping boys, and making himself the king of this little hill.

The problem of his plan? The mental degradation. The last of those to fall under his sway sent out the automated distress beacon, and knew that there was a danger in this guy leaving – but they also couldn’t be sure that their efforts would be successful. It’s a case of the distress beacon being a double-edged sword – can their rescuers save them, stop this guy, or will they fall under his sway as well? But there’s no other solution. They set the collision course (and yes, I’m aware that this is happening on a space station, hey, the pilot episode of DS9 showed that the station could travel through maneuvering thrusters and such – the idea is that they wanted to find a way to destroy the station), and then destroyed the controls so it couldn’t be undone, and disabled the alerts so that the station wouldn’t alert anyone, setting it up to make it that the station’s sensors all seem to send the green light to the rest of the station – the false data would hopefully prevent the station crew from noticing.

Yes, of course I want there to be an apocalyptic log, why would I deny that BioWare staple?

Another thing that I want to do here is kinda retroactively at least make it a part of the universe that Shepard is resistant to the efforts of Reaper Indoctrination. The idea I’m going with is that some of the scrambling of Shepard’s brain (which, sidenote, I also want to take some time in this and call out the fact that it’s a PLOT POINT that Shepard’s brain gets messed with repeatedly throughout this game and no one thinks that might actually be a questionable matter – if a key point of this DLC is “dude, you’re messing with people’s minds, that’s rather unambiguously Not A Good Thing To Do,” then it’s an elephant in the room to not bring up that this is what’s happening with Shepard) has made them more resistant to these effects, though that probably means justifying this as having a watered down effect so that the companions are feeling the tug to fall under our villain’s thrall.

That’s basically where I picture the boss battle going, that Shepard has to fight against one of their companions, who has been compelled to be this guy’s defender against them. I’d say both companions, but that might be a little much, in particular on lower difficulties. So I’m going to say that Shepard can knock out one of their companions before they fall under the sway of the big bad’s influence, but the other escapes. I feel like there could be ways to offset the difficulties of this by way of like finding objects that counteract the signal or whatever, but the idea is Shepard versus companion. While it obviously has to end non-lethally, I feel like this is the kind of thing that is morbidly fascinating to see in just about everyone’s book. I’d also figure that it would depend on a handful of variables that make them resist more or less (because the game should reward investigation, right?)

When that’s completed (I figure it ends with Shepard destroying the controller artifact), it’s time to deal with the station about to be caught in the sun – the station’s going to be locked in a death spiral, but the people of the station can now evacuate. Which leaves the person responsible. On the Paragon side, Shepard is not judge, jury, and executioner, this guy should be given a fair trial. On the Renegade side, he’s a dick who took over people’s minds with no remorse on the matter. Whatever decision Shepard goes with, the station’s population will abide by – they probably want him dead anyway, right?

Aftermath does come into play, with a conversation with the companion Shepard fought against, because, especially if they’re a romance, that’s gotta mess with their heads. Also some general discussion of the artifact itself – obviously, while I expect a variation in the event this is played after Virmire, my idea of this is that it happens some time before it, so things like Wrex and Ashley/Kaidan’s deaths (or possible death) are variation options, this is basically something that I feel can influence matters – if Shepard and Wrex have already fought, for example, I feel like that would earn them enough influence come Virmire for Wrex to stand down there, it’s got parallels/foreshadowing... That kind of emotional work.

Also there’s some consideration about that artifact – once a technology exists, putting that genie back in the bottle is nigh impossible, so now it’s known that you can use this tech to control minds, someone’s sure to try and take advantage of this tech somewhere down the line – Shepard and company will discuss what kind of precautions can and should be taken about these kinds of developments in the future (hint hint, Cerberus/Illusive Man, hint hint).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from a station survivor, variation on the matter of how the responsible party was dealt with.

ME3: Efforts have been undertaken to block Indoctrination tech, based on the information that Shepard gathered on the station.

Fleet Crisis

With the concerns of Saren and the geth rising, Admirals Hackett and Anderson want to get a chance to upgrade the defenses at the heart of the Alliance. Arcturus Station, home to the Alliance government, is housing a defense meeting, and Commander Shepard is being recalled to speak at it. The Alliance may be facing another crisis, however...

(Two plot planets completed)

We have very little actual Alliance elements involved in the game, did you ever notice that? Like, there’s Admiral Anderson and Admiral Hackett, and we get the inspection tour thing from Admiral Mikhailovich, but other than that, we really are not given much about the Alliance proper. So the idea here for us to go to Arcturus Station and actually encounter the Alliance government proper. We only ever properly encounter the Citadel Council, not the government that technically, Shepard is under the authority of. The closest we ever come is the (rather useless) Defense Committee at the start of ME3.

So yeah, we’re going to the home of the Alliance proper, and seeing the Fifth Fleet – like my first time playing the game, I had no real concept of the Fifth Fleet until it shows up at the endgame. I kinda would like more foreshadowing, more textual acknowledgement of the fleet that is the reason why we end the game as we do. Like, we get to do a fleet flyby in the process, allowing us to see the size of the fleet and talk about what makes the human fleets different from those of the other races. Although the Citadel races do have their bullshit reasons for distrusting humanity, the fact that humanity has this massive force is a reasonable excuse for the behavior.

I also see this as a very different style DLC. As it is, we got one DLC that was basically a shooting gallery, so here, we’re in the opposite direction, where combat is taking almost a total backseat to dialogue – I mean you have a dialogue system like Mass Effect, where every line gets voiced, you would think that would imply that there’s a lot of faith in the writing, wouldn’t you think? And, the whole beauty of DLC in general usually is the fact that everything’s option – if you’re really all shooty-shooty bang-bang, you don’t HAVE to do this. But the whole series paints Shepard as this inspirational figure, and their oratory skills should be on full display as much as their ability to fire a gun.

I’m also kinda anti-“going to Alliance vessels and the in universe equivalent of the House/Senate halls/White House combined and freely shoot up the place,” just on principle.

Anyway, here we are, visiting the heart of Alliance space. We honestly really should have more of an idea of what humanity has accomplished in the universe. Arcturus Station, the home of Alliance government. This is a big deal for the crew, of course – it’s getting invited to speak at the Senate in Washington DC. For the various non-humans, it’s a big deal as well.

Now, of course, in the heart of Alliance government, the involvement of a bunch of non-humans is going to be considered questionable at best. I won’t go straight to “you can’t use any companions other that Ashley and Kaidan,” but there is going to be more of a sense of observation from the other Alliance officers and officials when the non-humans are in the party.

The first thing to note about this is that Shepard’s position as Spectre has made them a combination of being a political tool for humanity’s better advancement, but (as evidenced by Mikhailovich’s ranting) some are concerned that Shepard may be – intentionally or not – turned into a pure Council flunky and only doing the work that they approve, regardless of acting in humanity’s benefit.

That’s part of the reason Shepard’s even here – their position is getting humanity’s foot in the door with the Spectres, but this is creating a conflict in various corners, wondering about where their allegiance will be if pressed. Admiral Hackett is, of course, speaking in Shepard’s favor, but just because they have the approval of Hackett and Anderson, there’s still concern among the brass.

This is going to start out seeming very low-key – we’re in the heart of Alliance territory, who would be foolish enough to come along and mess with anyone or anything here, right? So a lot of initial tone-setting, discussion and debate – the first half is a debate sequence, with Paragon/Renegade points abound as Shepard discusses with the various Alliance officials what they’re doing as a Spectre. That culminates in Shepard’s oratory really getting to stretch as they approach the seat of governing for the Alliance, and all those earlier discussions start to add up to how their performance is among the bigwigs – if you talked up human dominance in the one-on-ones, then talk peaceful coexistence, for example, you get called on it.

After Shepard’s speech is over, that’s where we start to see the real fractures starting to take place. We’re not quite at ‘military coup’ levels (let’s leave SOME plot elements for the later games, huh?), but there’s clear dissatisfaction, that Shepard’s words have only fanned flames for – regardless of the way their speech went down, there are some among the fleet, admirals and other high ranking officers who were involved in the First Contact War and just don’t like how the Alliance is handling things.

It’s not a coup, but it is, in effect, breaking away from the Alliance to set up an independent nation, separate from both the Alliance and the Citadel. It’s still in its earliest stages, of course, but it’s easy to see how it might well turn hostile to both – it’s got several military figures from the Alliance leaving, meaning a vulnerable gap for the Alliance military, and it’s got lingering hostility for the Citadel races (turians in particular, but let’s also not forget that the asari, the famed diplomats of the Citadel, seem to have never picked up on the fact that the human resentment towards aliens comes from the fact that an alien government came along and tried to impose their rules on an unaligned species as humanity’s introduction to the greater galaxy – they are complicit here).

Shepard’s task becomes trying to prevent this offshoot from happening. These are orders being cut by President Shastri himself (let’s make this major Alliance figure a presence we actually feel in the series, huh?), with Hackett’s blessing – meaning if things devolve into a shoot out (which will be possible), Shepard will not be held liable for the deaths of several Alliance military figures, that the record will show that they were acting in the interests of the Alliance in response to an imminent threat of potential armed conflict, even a human civil war. No one wants it to come to that, but it’s also going to be one of the most likely outcomes in the minds of those involved – even if Shepard weren’t a Spectre, if someone of their rank and stature on the galactic stage gets involved, it’s because diplomacy isn’t working.

So there’s another segment of trying to sway the people involved. Shepard will have the choice of approached armed or unarmed (like I said, I dislike the idea of a shootout, but I feel like Shepard’s in a position both to be legally entitled to wear weapons in this situation AND uncomfortable going in without any weaponry), which will feed into the metric of how well their argument is received. Because it’s a mechanic so good, we’re using it twice! (Okay, really, it’s because “dialogue” is the gimmick of this idea, but shush.)

Anyway, the various ‘points’ accumulate to the ultimate confrontation with the heads of this group planning this splintering. Shepard’s arguments are going to be along the line of (to summarize) “you’ll only weaken the Alliance, that can’t be your goal,” “if you have problems, work within in the systems and listen to both sides of things,” “put this aside or else,” or “I support your efforts, but this isn’t the time.” Yes, I’m going with four paths for this, the dialogue wheel does offer that, and I want Paragon/Renegade options for each of these. Like you basically pick a path at the start and argue from that position. Depending on the “points” accumulated through dialogue (and probably a handful of sidequests) in the lead to this debate), it will come to either a peaceful resolution or Shepard pulling out their gun on a handful of high-ranking Alliance officers, ready and able to pull the trigger.

While shooting them isn’t an ideal solution, it can bring the others back into line. It’s just going to cause resentment within the Alliance itself – threat or no, these were respected figures among the Alliance. Meanwhile, folding them back in is an ideal solution, but it still means the resentment lingers, because Shepard’s only delayed the boiling over, not prevented it. There’s still tension in the Alliance because this was about issues that can’t be solved with a few words, especially when this was about the involvement and actions of the Citadel. Shepard might be a Spectre, but whether or not they’ve affirmed themselves as giving the Alliance its due, they’re now wrapped up in those politics.

The curveball in things is that last one, Shepard suggesting that they should wait on this issue. I think it’s a valid possibility among the various permutations of the decision point, to have Shepard support them, especially given that ME1’s Renegade Shepard could be a pro-human asshole, but, considering that this is DLC, and particularly DLC that, by my self-imposed rule, cannot change the base game’s story (because if I could do that, I might as well be rewriting all the games in this instead of just created additional content, and this is all hypothetical to begin with), we can’t introduce some new faction into the galaxy, especially an optional one. So the idea here is that Shepard is supporting it, but saying that they can’t make this A Thing right now.

There is an aftermath discussion with President Shastri as well, discussing implications for the future. I also figure that the companions should have a lot to offer in both the aftermath and the core interactions – again, I see Ashley and Kaidan as greatly recommended for this story, and the Alliance officers should have a lot to add, including conversations in the midst of the crisis.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Shastri as an update of the tension in the Alliance – it’s also something that should be impacted by the decision of the Council at the end of ME1

ME3: Tensions between Alliance and Council forces are impacted by the outcome – if they were swayed by persuasion to rejoin the Alliance, there’s actually a bump in assets, as well as the Alliance bigwigs being a tactical resource, while there’s a decrease in cooperation if the bad blood was fostered.

The Clean Up

The Battle of the Citadel is over, but even if the geth and Sovereign have been defeated, there is a lot left for Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy to do. Investigating the damage done to the Citadel leads to a possible lead on the Reapers. In the wake of the battle, Commander Shepard and company set out to chase it down...

(Post-Game)

So, as I said in the KOTOR editions, we’re adding a Post-Game to ME1 (since this is all hypothetical to begin with, so we’re going to make that alteration to the mechanics), pretty much solely because I want to do some development of the aftermath of the game, as well as do some retroactive set up for Mass Effect 2. Because I don’t think there was a lot of emotional wrap up to the characters at the time. I will grant that we’ve got an awkward period of time between the games here, but, hey, we’ve got enough wiggle room I think to lead in to the opening of ME2

Basically, we can start in what’s basically the immediate aftermath – Shepard’s now out of their recovery, is looking to get back in the game. But, with the Council either still reacting to the events of the Battle of the Citadel or still needing to be reassembled, there’s really not any particular indication of what to be doing. This is some mood setting, looking at the rebuilding effort, how the Citadel was impacted and seeing the response of people to the attack – some are still shaken, mourning their loved ones lost in the attack, hoping for the lost to be found safe, and all that sort. Others are angry about the attack, and the ultimate approach to it seems to basically be blaming everyone, and Shepard in particular since they’re there, for the failure to protect those on the Citadel – and yes, we absolutely get to call out this bullshit for what it is, because Shepard tried, but the Citadel itself is something of a complacency trap, and even if the politics weren’t a distraction, the fact that the Citadel itself remains aloof is an actual problem

Anderson speaks with Shepard, regarding the geth that are still out there in the Traverse, and the need to deal with them before they put more human colonies in danger. The bigwigs are already trying to downplay the Reapers – Anderson basically tells Shepard that they need to go out, find proof of something that ties back to the Reapers or the Council will likely turn around and make this all about the geth and call it over (uh, yeah, Shepard, about that...).

The lead involved is going to be heading out to the border of geth space, which is also the line of what used to be quarian territory. This is convenient for Tali, who wants to return to the flotilla now that Saren has been dealt with. There’s a trading outpost that will be out there that will give her the opportunity to get a ride back to the Migrant Fleet (because, despite a couple of references, I have never believed that Tali lingered too long on the Normandy – either she has to get her data on the geth back to them, or she has to discover an alternative). Because part of this is also going to be the “characters splitting apart” stuff as set up for ME2. Tali’s going to assist through this branch of the mission, but she will want to come back here before the Normandy returns to Citadel space proper.

The trading outpost is Omega-esque, something of “the poor man’s Omega,” again, setting that up for ME2 (we’re doing a lot of world-building patches here, okay?) The citizens here don’t care about the Alliance and they’re not all that concerned about Spectres, either. This is not a friendly place and will not just accept the appearance of anyone with the supposed authority that Shepard is representing.

This is kind of an introduction to ME2’s merc gangs – ME1 seems to play the systems of the Terminus to have their own government, species not represented among the Citadel races, and just this general atmosphere of the Terminus being more developed than it ends up being when we actually go there (which, yeah, that’s how writing and developing and world-building goes, but we’re here to smooth things over). I’m leaning towards not having the big three on Omega be all that represented here, considering that, lawless border or not, this is not really a place where they care enough to expand their influence. But they should at least be mentioned and referenced as the big dogs of the pack, that the gangs that jockey for power here want to take them on. Probably some poaching of members (through recruitment or snipers) from those gangs that make their numbers never get to where they might pose a threat.

Anyway. What needs to be done here is find out where Saren discovered Sovereign – that’s the idea we’re going with in trying to track down evidence of the Reapers. Sovereign had to be hiding out somewhere, you don’t just stumble across something like that. Considering this is one of the last places you’d expect to be able to find a Spectre, especially a Spectre who is one of the Council’s top operatives, it’s a decent enough starting point for us as the audience – we’ll say that there are records that Saren was out here shortly before the Eden Prime mission and such, explaining why we’re starting here.

Garrus is also going to have a realization about the merc gangs, about the horrible things they’re inflicting on the people who are living here, and being infuriated at the injustice allowed to happen – the effective attitude of the officials here are basically ‘look, unless the merc gangs come after us, we don’t care.’ This is going to dig under his skin (plates... you know what I mean), lead him to why he ultimately breaks with C-Sec, despite Shepard being able to lead him to a better understanding of the rules and regs – he understands the need for them, but sees them being used and abused to allows these injustices to continue, that it becomes a personal mission to see ‘justice’ and ‘law’ be synonymous.

As for the plot, yes, we’re getting there. This does, of course, lead to a shoot-out with a major gang force here, some people who are indoctrinated spies (because, hey, we’re looking for evidence of Reapers). They were left behind as part of Saren’s contingency plans, meant to stop anyone hunting for him – it’s just that the investigation that Shepard went on in the base game didn’t send them here. Even with Saren and Sovereign dead, they’re still here, still indoctrinated – a reminder that this is a permanent thing, a devastating thing, because there’s no way to take the Reaper compulsion away. But this leads to learning about a place that Saren ventured to from here, a place wracked with dangerous phenomenon. The only way to get there is with a crack pilot – which, fortunately, Normandy has.

There’s a brief pause from plot for some further expansion with the others – Wrex has been contemplating the krogan, given what went down on Virmire. His people are dying out, maybe not in the way we traditionally think of it, but still in practice. What is there for the krogan but to be used and abused by the Sarens of the universe, so long as all they care about is getting offworld and fighting and dying, usually being pit against one another as the proxies for stupid, pointless conflicts. It’s not right, and it’s beginning to eat at him.

And then there’s Ashley/Kaidan. Given the events of Virmire, both of them are thinking about the family that was left behind – Ashley’s sisters lost one of their central figures, Kaidan’s family lost their only son. They both are trying to write a letter of condolence to their counterpart’s loved ones (and specifically asking Shepard about the one they should be writing), trying to figure how they can make it better that they were saved at the other’s expense. It’s a complicated matter, and I want to just explore, even retroactively, how these two were friends, were close, potentially (if Shepard shuts down a romance with both of them) starting to come together. Just a bit that not only reestablishes the friendship and emphasizes that the fallen character is not forgotten, plus giving more context to how they’ll say that they and Shepard got through the other’s death together in ME3

This is a point for some romance content, which, I realize I have yet to bring up Liara’s character bit for this – don’t worry, it’s coming. But we do pause for some smoochies.

Anyway. The Normandy arrives in the hazardous area and we get a team meeting – remember how back in the first of these outlines, I brought up wanting to give more for Pressley? I haven’t directly mentioned him much since, but here’s a place to feature him, in the same way that the landing on Ilos does, showing him having a greater involvement in the strategy and such. Team Shepard needs to figure out if there even is a place to investigate within this area. There are sensor ghosts that might be something that they could land on and investigate, though it’s too small for a Mako mission (I may love that tank, but I feel like its final ride being the trip through the Ilos Relay is poetic and I’m not going to mess with that). Joker gets his moment of putting the Normandy through her paces (which is also going to add to the pain of her loss in ME2’s prologue, that she could pull this off, but couldn’t out-fly the Collector ship).

They detect something with a similar energy signature to the prothean beacons on an asteroid large enough to land on, which makes it reasonable for Liara to go with – take the prothean expert to a place that could hold more information on the protheans. She’s nervous because of the confirmation of the Reapers has just made things really real for her – this is facing the same thing that destroyed the protheans, and how can they stand against them, given the protheans’ advanced nature?

Let’s also take a moment and, given the indoctrinated nature of the mercs who attacked back on the outpost, to have some follow-up for Benezia’s death – I may only be speaking for myself, but it has NEVER sat right that Liara’s response to that is to simply go “I choose to remember Benezia as she was,” given that Shepard was, regardless of their reluctance, responsible for the actual bullet that ended her mother’s life. She’s struggling – could the mercs have been saved? Could her mother? Could what they find below offer a way to have saved them, and, if so, would Saren have had it, could he have freed her mother before her death? Did she have to die? Why did her mother have to die? Cue Shepard offering their support for her emotional struggle.

And yes, for Liaramancers, this is where they get their smoochies.

As for what they find... Geth. Plenty of (heretic – though Shepard doesn’t yet know this) geth. They are crawling all over the facility, it’s a firefight all the way to the central database, and, as our big final boss, we deal with a geth augmented with some of Sovereign’s tech, meant to be a Reaper upgrade for the geth. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the geth consensus (heretic or true), and this is effectively the only existing prototype.

The result of this is that they do find an archival interface, the same kind that allowed the communication with Sovereign on Virmire. Unfortunately, it can provide nothing – without Sovereign connected to it, it’s got minimal functionality – something might be recovered, with some time and effort. But the facility is about to move into the areas of this area of space that will fry any systems that get close to it – Sovereign probably had this place selected in the name of being a place where anyone who might stumble upon its hiding place would decide to move on because it’s suicide to remain in the area.

The only choice is to return to the Normandy, without any additional evidence. There are indications of geth vessels having moved out of the area and into other sectors, which could give them something to go on for further investigations. But, with this stage of the mission being a bust, Shepard is going to have the Normandy return to the earlier outpost in the name of allowing all ashore who are going ashore – Tali, Garrus, and Wrex, specifically, but also any other Normandy crew willing to stand down for the time being. Investigating this further is a strictly volunteer mission. This will, of course, lead us to ME2’s prologue...

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Mentions of Shepard’s activities on the outpost while on Omega, a letter from a scientist, passed on by Anderson, about further studies made on indoctrination being done on the sly, considering the lack of approval from the Council.

ME3: Further research has been done on indoctrination, now publicly, and makes for a scientific war asset, the remnants of the merc gang that were indoctrinated have reformed and reassembled as a roving band of resistance fighters against the Reapers.

Miscellaneous 

Bisexual Ashley, Bisexual Kaidan, proper close outs to other romances, romances require proper flirts to start, additional conversations for all characters

Look, no one in space is heterosexual, okay? I don’t make the rule, I just enforce it. Actually, considering the context of these, I DO make the rules, and “no one in space is heterosexual” is one of them, so deal with it. Kaidan is canonically bisexual as of ME3, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be canonically bisexual in ME1. And we’ll throw Ashley in for good measure, because why not? And we definitely – DEFINITELY – need to do something about the romance mechanic that seems to assume “I would like to get to know you better” means “you, me, my cabin, the way to Ilos, yes/yes?” There needs to be explicit markers for closing out a romance WITHOUT locking you out of conversations with the character in question (particularly considering that now, all of this game’s romances can be options in a given playthrough). And yeah, I think there could stand to be a few extra conversations with the characters, that focus on the characters proper – for most of the crew, they basically end up acting as glorified Wikipedia entries on their species, or, in Kaidan’s case, the plight of human biotics. Let’s give them some more personalized material that lets them tell Shepard something about themselves (and offer Shepard something similar, as character development for the both of them).

[ask-jaghatai-khan]

The Vampire of Cairn

// A story set on the forgotten Pariah Planet, Cairn. Entirely inhabited by the soulless human mutants known as “Blanks”, the world was settled before the rise of the Imperium and remains cut off from the rest of the galaxy to this day. But secret intelligence suggests that the world is not as safe as it seems, and that danger might still lurk in a galaxy lost to myth.

—

A fog bank was rolling in, though here in the city it wasn’t so prominent save for on the major streets. What few transports there were, on the roads or in the sky, made themselves sparse rather than deal with the lack of visibility, as people sheltered for a while in the shops and offices to avoid the damp chill. The misty pall seemed to run down the main thoroughfares like a wave. It would pass soon, but for now it hung over the alleys and side-streets, shrouding the tops of buildings and casting the whole world in a dull silver, both the neon signs and midday sun becoming faint and washed-out in the gloom.

Zhi’s destination was an alley downtown, by 26th and Baobeng. His personal transport, a sleek black sedan, navigated itself along the reflective guidelines of the ground-level roads as he went over his notes. He’d not been to this city before – if you could call it a city. It was more of a post-industrial town, now in the final movements towards establishing itself as a cultural center. He didn’t recall what Tianshi was known for and he didn’t much care. The compact little city was not much different from many of these other sparse population centers in the DB Jinkou Provence, but it was the pattern that concerned him. His last lead for his current assignment had been a whole city over, in the more remote Borios. It suggested the mark was not just on the move, but capable of long-distance travel without notice, maybe even without assistance.

There was a ping on the console as the ETA hit two minutes. The Investigator closed his documents and detached his holopad from its charge port, before the government-issue transport skidded around to the alley’s entrance and settled down on its unfolding wheels. There were several other cars there already, some civil service, some civilian, all clustered around the official cordon.

It was lowkey, which was to Zhi’s liking. No flashing lights, no big groups of reporters. One local Sentinel was speaking with a handful of private broadcasters, but all the emergency vehicles were running silent, their personnel milling around inside, maybe processing data. The whole setup made it clear that whatever had happened, it had passed. Zhi’s flat shoes made his approach noticeable as they snapped along the damp pavement, the dark surface of the road reflecting the point lights of the various transport vehicles.

He flashed his badge, but the Sentinel didn’t even try to stop him. He walked with the air of his profession, which was not to be cut in front of. Moving on, the Investigator moved into the alley, cast in long shadows by the spotlights that had been brought in to examine the scene.

There were a couple of sealed dumpsters, a storm drain, and not much more. The adhesive residue marked where posters might have once been put up, but nothing more remained. Compared to the streetfront, where neon signs, greenboxes, and other solar gatherers gave off color and brightness despite the fog, the alley felt quite barren. All grey ferrocrete and weathered service pipes.

The scene of the crime itself was obvious, and rather simple. One body, face down in the damp, looking pretty bloody as well. Dried blood was being rehydrated by the moisture in the air, and was doing nothing for the corpse, giving off a slight smell of iron and onset decay. Two more Sentinels - marked by their dark outerwear, utility harnesses, and subtle insignias – stood about the scene before one took notice of the approaching Investigator.

“Hello.” They said with simple but respectful affectation. Almost questioning, as if Zhi wasn’t supposed to be there.

He extended a hand as he approached, his own dark trench coat matching the local colors rather well.

“Investigator Zhi, Consensus assigned.” Introducing himself, he held up his badge once more. The little metallic chit marked him as under permanent internal security contract to the Consensus Sciences Service.

“Li. I’m with the local Sentinels.” Her precise vocabulary identified her as a woman, and a rather metropolitan one too, for a Sentinel in a northern industrial town. Her hair was styled into a tight pink stripe on her head, and her matching hued eyes suggested cybernetics. Such quirks weren’t common outside the major hives, “We weren’t excepting the Fed.”

“Yes, well we’re just checking all our leads right now and this was brought to my attention.” Zhi clarified. He was far more mundane looking in comparison, as fit a Federal Investigator. Not drawing attention was part of the game.

“And might I ask a little more?” she shot back, still with respect though her body language was unyielding, “This is under our jurisdiction, after all. Is there something bigger we should be worried about?”

Sentinels were local law enforcement, though not in the conventional sense of eras past. They were more like an office between a community watch and a militia. More ad-hoc and concerned with the protection and proper law enforcement of their districts than any higher loyalties. With the right moves they could be amenable, but they were very ground-level and had some of the strongest unions, making outright hostility towards them a bad idea for even Federal agents.

Zhi took off his wide-brimmed hat, making clearer eye contact with Li.

“There’s some suspicion this might be part of a larger series of murders. That’s—”

“You mean the Vampire?” the other Sentinel came up then, no longer content in the background, and with some verve in his voice.

“That’s all I’m at liberty to say.” Zhi’s face went dark.

“Sentinel Chaleb.” Li gestured, “Apologies, though it’s a legitimate question. It’s been around the stations. Could it be that killer?”

“Impossible to say either way until I’ve had a look, eh?” the Investigator tilted his head.

Chaleb. The man must have been from somewhere rural before becoming a Sentinel in Tianshi. His name, inflection, and appearance – paler and with sandy hair – had the twinge of Goth in them. Didn’t much matter, but it was an observation Zhi made.

“Here.” Li stepped aside, gesturing to the body that lay half slumped onto its face in the damp. Zhi got in close for a better look.

Man of about middle age, perhaps seventy-eight, as he seemed in good health. His hair was dark and short-cropped, messy now that the damp had worked through whatever gel it looked like he’d used. He was dressed in simple formalwear, with the open-front black jacket that went down to about his knees, and the black underclothes to match.

“Victim was a Mr. Jia Ming, as our first data responses have come through.” Li informed, “Local. Worked at a distribution firm for signage products, I think. We took his datapad and are seeing about getting permission to access it from next of kin.”

“Injuries?” Zhi asked.

“Broken collarbone and shoulder on the left side—” he could see it, the way the joint folded in on itself in an odd way, “Though the coroner scan didn’t think that was simultaneous with main cause of death. They’re still processing the data.” She didn’t need to point, as it was obvious the man’s throat was cut wide open. It was clean, yet broad, as if done by a swordsman in an action vid. The man’s skin had gone ghost pale in death from how much of his blood had flowed out onto the pavement.

“He was found around 2 a.m. this morning.” Chaleb interjected, “The owner of this sandwich shop was closing up and found him.” He pointed to the wall on their right, against which the dumpsters sat.

“You say the shoulder wasn’t simultaneous with cause of death.” Zhi stood back up, content in verifying the facts.

“No, but it wasn’t from a blow either. The blunt force trauma doesn’t seem to match up from what the scans show. The pattern looked more like—”

“Impact from above?” Zhi shot in. She was good. Maybe trained to be a Sentinel.

“How’d you know?”

“Oh that’s spooky.” Chaleb shook his head, “Absolutely the Vampire. Did you see that one clip online? They were saying they could probably scale sheer walls.”

“Yeah so can I, if you sweet-talk my quartermaster enough.” The Investigator cut him off, “Was there anything else of interest?”

“Possible cam footage. We can’t get it, though.” Li gave him.

“Why not?”

“It’s the security cam from the sandwich shop. The owner’s spooked, maybe drowsy. They didn’t want to give us access.”

“I’ll talk to them.” Zhi assured, gesturing with his hat in a vague direction “away” from the scene, “Do you want to be involved, then?”

Li nodded, signing off to Chaleb that she’d be leaving and that he should guard the area of the corpse. It might be good, if the Sentinel had talked to the storeowner beforehand, to have her there again. With luck, the civilian might be put more at ease by the continuity.

As they got out of earshot of the other Sentinel, rounding the corner of the alley side by side, Li turned towards the Investigator.

“Do you think it’s the Vampire, then?” she asked, though the look on her face told Zhi that she wasn’t keen on using the name, her pink eyes squinting.

“I’m getting sick of hearing that word.” Zhi walked forward another pace, annoyed at the stop, the sign and door of the sandwich shop visible just down the road.

As far as he knew, the nickname had been picked for the style in which the killer worked. Clean kills, along with the untraceable escapes. Still sounded stupid to him, but then most spree-killer nicknames tended to be.

“There’s been a lot of strange things in the news. People have been putting together all kinds of theories.” She continued, trudging beside him, “There were those signals they were talking about from the Jingshe belt that they said were nothing a month later. Then that meteor strike just a few weeks ago near Shuguan, and the murders in Shuguan they stopped reporting on after a week, and now these deaths going from city to city all the way here.”

“So what then, alien serial killer from outer space?” Zhi tried to sound as sarcastic as possible, wishing they could just pick up the damn pace.

“Maybe? There’s precedent. The Men of Iron came from space. We came from space.” She wasn’t wrong.

“Sounds like a fun story.” The Investigator just brushed it off as they reached the shop. The glass sliding door was barred with a shutter but knocking still produced a solid sound.

“I’m just saying, that’s what the theories have been online.” Li finished her piece, face flushing a little as if she’d been embarrassed at getting so caught up in the theory.

“Don’t believe everything you read on the net.” Zhi replied. The Sentinel glanced at his eyes – the man couldn’t have been much older than her based off looks, but his eyes – they seemed to be weighed down, drooping with some deep fatigue the rest of his face resisted.

There was a clanking, a latch-releasing kind of sound, and one of the individual panels that made up the collapsible door screen pulled away to reveal the eyes of a middle-aged individual. A woman, maybe, though as a city-man Zhi never made assumptions by habit.

“You’re back?” they asked.

“I heard you might have recordings that could help us.” The Investigator spoke up, while Li just provided aesthetic support, “Really all I’m interested in. Wouldn’t take a moment of your time, and I won’t cause any trouble.”

“Who are you?” their eyes were brimming with concern.

He flashed his badge, though he doubted they’d recognize it by training, “Federal Investigator. This might be important; you’d be doing us all a big favor.”

They shook their head, “I-I don’t want to get involved with anything. This is all really messed up.”

“Yeah, that tends to be the case.” He nodded, “May I ask your name?”

“Ling.” they gave.

“Your shop?” Zhi asked.

“It’s my shop, yes.” They answered.

“I’m not fully authorized for this, but I could promise you a degree of protection if you agree to help me, Ling.” Zhi tried his luck, “Maybe a vacation ticket as a gift? You can leave town for a little bit, and I imagine even if there is danger it’ll have blown over by then. Does that sound amenable?”

They seemed to mull it over for a bit, before their eyes conveyed a nod, and the latch shut. A few moments later, and the automated rails of the door screen were lifting the metal plates into the ceiling, and they were let inside with the accompanying ring of a bell.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” Ling stammered, “It’s just this kind of stuff never happens out here. Maybe the occasional thief, but nothing like this.” They ushered the two inside.

It was quite a large shop, with a good amount of sitting room. Zhi suspected outdoor seating might not be so popular in this town, what with the fog drifts being predominant for most of the year. It was amazing the greenboxes on the buildings were in good order.

“Here, just follow me. I haven’t checked the footage. Just download it off, if you want. I’d really rather not look at it.” The shopkeep was rather short, old in appearance but with a youthful demeanor and a neat bun hairstyle. Altogether regular and tidy, and very out of place in any kind of trouble.

The duo was led back through the shop, past the kitchen, up a flight of stairs, and through a locked door to the second level. Their destination was one of several doors lining the hallway, like a janitorial closet. Ling gave them access with her datapad. It was a small room, though very neat and with an impressive computer setup, with multiple monitors and a decent unit from what Zhi could surmise.

“Pretty heavy-duty stuff. This all for security?” Li inquired.

“This building is actually bigger than just this shop. There’re some offices upstairs, a few other food places around the back, and uh, some apartments. Very compact. I live here too.” They explained, “It’s just I’m also the building manager, so I deal with ensuring most of the security and utilities.”

It wasn’t so uncommon. Zhi just didn’t know how they had the energy to run an eatery while also being the community in-between for the whole building. He’d be as high-strung if he had to deal with anything more than what his one job already dumped in his lap.

The civilian logged in and gestured to the chair, stepping out of the way of the two officers.

“Just, uh – do what you need to do and then you can just leave it. I’ll give you space.” They smiled, “Oh but uh, just the security cam footage please.”

“Of course.” Li assured.

“Yeah, I’m not looking for a lawsuit, I’ll just be a moment.” Zhi was a bit brusquer.

“Strange one.” Li commented once they were alone, as she leaned over Zhi’s shoulder to watch him at work.

“Overworked. Could’ve been anything, they’d have snapped from the stress. Just unfortunate it had to be a murder.” Perception was something of a trade specialty. Having dealt with all manner of civilians who had actual things to hide, he’d grown accustomed to sussing out the weird from the suspect.

Li watched with some surprise as the Investigator brought up one of his hands. She hadn’t noticed until now, but he wore a drab brown glove on just one hand, having done most of his gesturing with the other until now. He pulled off the covering to expose unfleshed augmetics – a silver and angular surrogate with many odd details about its surface. With a few internal adjustments, as the various components moved on their own, one prong stuck up from his index finger. He inserted the interface probe into the input port of the computer. At once, his operations on the monitor moved ten times faster, as he navigated as quick as thought.

“Cool aug’.” she commented, as one cyborg to another.

“Trade tool.” He said without much passion.

In moments he’d located the cam files and sorted through the different streams from the few sentries around the building to the one that sat at the edge of the rooftop, watching the alley. So much security. If he was a Sentinel he’d maybe be concerned that something unsavory was up in this commune, but it wasn’t his department. Maybe some kind of hedonist club. So long as it was nothing sketchy it wasn’t a problem anyways.

“Alright, and—” he muttered, as he spun back the hours to the night before, looking for the moment at which the body on the pavement would stand itself back up again.

“There!” Li pointed, as if he couldn’t see it. The man had been cutting through the alley, and a whirl of something fast had dropped him like a bag of rocks. Zhi did his best to zoom, but the resolution was lacking in the darkness.

“Someone over him.” He assessed, “Holding him down.” He pointed with his free hand. On top of the form of the victim was a hunched figure. Dark, though its head stood out by a faint glint in the shadows. It was stooped over the man, holding him there as he writhed, doing something. They waited.

There was a sudden flash of movement. The figure’s arm came up holding something in its hand, and the victim’s head jerked back with it. His throat had been slashed. Without pause, the killer stood and rushed with almost inhuman agility over to one of the dumpsters, vaulting off it, then the sheer side of the wall, and they were out of frame.

“What on Cairn?” Li muttered.

“Wait.” Zhi wanted to check something. He rewound the footage, back before the first attack. He played it slow, watching it unfold as the dark figure returned to the kill, and then shot up into the sky.

“Augmetics? How’d they fall like that?” the Sentinel asked.

“You’re killing me. Please.” Zhi shushed her, his gaze trained on the screen. She glanced at him in irritation but noticed something had come into those drooping eyes. They were locked on the monitor like a sniper’s scope.

“Here.” He pointed again. It was at a portion of the roof’s edge just caught by the camera. There was a shadow and – a foot. A black-clad boot, resting just at the very corner of the camera’s periphery.

“What kind of camera—? Ah.” The Investigator check the readouts in the corner of the footage, “Microreceptor. Explains the resolution as much as why our perp didn’t catch the camera.” Partial-3D microreceptor, a kind of microcam preferred for being very small and discreet in part, but also for its unique rendering pattern. You could “rotate” microceptor footage in three dimensions to some degree, making it easier to spot details in normal blind spots.

“The peripheries on these things are usually blurry.” Zhi spoke. Li had some familiarity, but she was more focused on the footage, “But if I uncrop the frame let’s see what we can get.”

He did so, as the whole edge of the recording pulled back to show the actual rendering of the scene. It was circular, the center in full clarity while the edges feathered out in the peripheral vision of the microceptor. Li gasped, while Zhi sat still as a dead man.

It was a humanoid figure perched on the edge of the rooftop, kneeling as if ready to leap. The outline was blurry from the recording technique, but the image was clear enough. Human, or humanoid, with a black skintight suit enveloping its entire body. Faint distortions in the silhouette suggested items strapped to the figure’s frame, though it was hard to tell.

What was clearest was the face. Inhuman, twisted, insidious. It was a mask, as far as Zhi could tell. He hoped it was, at the very least. It was made in the shape of a leering white skull, distended at the cranium into an elongated form that curved back over their shoulders. As if that was not strange enough, one eye was absent, instead being replaced with a much larger augmetic lens, which swept back with its own tube casing parallel to the side of the mask. The distortion gave them just the bare form – the stylized skull, the one odd eye, the freakish head, all set atop the otherwise sleek, lithe body. Zhi restarted the footage and watched the ghoulish shape leap from out of obscurity down into the alley, crushing the unsuspecting man beneath its weight. going about whatever it had subjected him to before the final cut.

Li didn’t say it aloud, but she thought it in her head. The word seemed right, for such a ghastly anomaly. “Vampire.”

Zhi wished he could’ve been happy with finding his mark. Instead his thoughts were flooded with threads, choices. There was going to be untold friction with the CSS, to say nothing of the matter of catching whatever this – thing was. Its skull face just leered with cold, unmoving expression as he rewound the footage again, staring into its empty mask eyes. The body of a human – and the visage, the movements of something else.

The world of Cairn did not yet have an answer for this.

[barbariccia]

X57: Bring Down The Sky

ok, i lied. there’s one last thing for me to get through in mass effect 1 - the BDtS dlc, which i’ve never played through before. it’s relatively short and available for free if you play on pc - included with the base game on origin, and can be downloaded on ea’s website for steam.

who wants some Additional Plot all crammed into one long post?!

in true ME style, you’re thrown directly into the action. once you enter the area this mission takes place on via the galaxy map, you’re shown a familiar looking world... and an asteroid slowly approaching.

and we’re dumped onto the asteroid itself in the mako.

it’s pretty easy to see the objective even if you weren’t paying attention to the distress call.

three giant fusion torches are propelling the asteroid at great speed toward a looming planet that looks rather earth-like, though we’re not in the local cluster at all. this is terra nova of the exodus cluster, one of the first planets colonised by humans after they discovered the mass relays and what lay beyond, and the second “extrasolar colony”, the first being no other than elysium, which we’ve heard about before.

there’re bases around the three tourches, all armed with heavy turrets, easy enough to dispatch of via the mako’s own gun, and once we make it inside the first base, we’re treated with a... rather unusual sight.

these charming fellows are batarians, outlaws and pirates for the most part, and while not seen in the base game, they go on to be the face of space-orcs, in a sense. vicious and seemingly war-hungry, they’re directly responsible for a ruthless shepard’s background, who was stationed on torfan and lived through their assault, the only person of their troop to do so.

we clear them and their varren out easily enough, and disable the first torch at a panel upstairs.

read the subtitles, shepard.

the communication line she’s using goes dead. on our way out...

we meet a man, who shoots and immediately panics when he sees the chest he attacked belongs to a human. eh, i’ve had worse.

this is simon, the chief engineer. he’s worried, of course - we’re heading right toward terra nova, where there are four million people living. not ideal.

well, that’s just fucking dandy, then.

Simon: It would be like millions of fusion bombs striking at once. Millions. The heat of the blast... a thousand kilmoeters away, clothes will ignite. There’ll be global wildfires. Air shock will flatten everything for hundreds of kilometers. Terra Nova will die, Shepard. Not just our colony - the planet. There’ll be a climate shift. Mass extinctions. The ecosystem won’t recover for thousands of years. Millions, maybe.

Shepard: Any chance it’ll land in the oceans?

Simon: That would be even worse! Tsunamis would sweep inland at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Millions of tonnes of water would be vaporized at the point of impact. Global cloud coverage. The plants could all die. And if they go, the whole ecosystem rolls over. I-- I’d have to run the numbers, but take my word for it: it’d be bad.

traditional mol nerd notes, since i was a dinosaur kid: the idea of the asteroid that decimated the dinosaurs (and began one of the 5th largest mass extinction events in eath’s history) was only first proposed in 1980, which is way more recent than i thought it was. the asteroid itself is thought to have landed in the area of chicxulub, mexico, and the collision itself is considered to have released around 100 teratonnes of TNT -equivalent in energy. so big boom. as of 2019, dr sean gulick has done research ⁽¹⁾, ⁽²⁾ on the crater itself and the rock record of the impact, and doctorial student robert depalma (and coauthor professor phillip manning) has excavated the Tanis area of Hell Creek ⁽³⁾ amd published a paper on the findings of deposits in the area ⁽⁴⁾, though the latter has been criticised for being potentially sensationalist, having been published by media outlets before it was accepted at PNAS.

either way, it’s commonly accepted that the impact would have thrown enough dust into the atmosphere to have caused an impact winter for up to a year, which was likely exacerbated by vaporised rocks in the atmosphere that helped to reduce sunlight reaching the surface, and causing acid rain. this in turn likely led to the oceans cooling and becoming more acidic. if wildfires were also on the menu, it would have contributed to a greenhouse effect.

whatever happened, the impact led to about 75% of all species on earth becoming completely extinct, so terra nova’s not looking especially peachy with twice the damage incoming.

tl;dr yeah seems pretty spot on

this comes out when you select the renegade’s “damn aliens” response, which is pretty incredible. even as shepard you have the option to be xenophobic... but batarians really haven’t proven themselves to be much more than as aggressive as krogans, honestly, if not worse, somehow. for a non-ruthless shepard to think this way... yeesh. goes to show just how much the attack on elysium affected the human psyche, even if you’re happy enough to bring aboard most other kinds of aliens aboard your stealth cruiser.

well, let’s get on our merry way. simon tells us that one of the torches is surrounded by proximity mines, which were going to be used as excavation tools once the asteroid was brought to terra nova - where it was en route toward anyway, by design - so we have to be extra careful going over them. yay.

never change, shep.

he also tells us that he had a crew working on the asteroid when the batarians hit. it’s easy enough to find them... or what’s left of them, once the batarians were through with them.

they’re, naturally, spread around the asteroid.

the message is cut off by the sound of an explosion.

and as for the third...

all three are very, very dead. but hey, on the way we at least got to turn on the transmission tower once again.

party on, dudes.

after you turn off the second torch, kate contacts you again.

we get the chance to see what’s going on with kate. there’s a man with her, and a small group of batarians that have them cornered.

spoiler: he doesn’t make it.

no time like the present to go turn that third and final torch off. after we do, there’s a small group of aliens waiting for us.

we have a little chat with our new friend, who tells us that he knows he’s in way over his head. another batarian by the name of balak is running the show, and “what balak wants, balak gets”.

[Renegade choice: Don’t be stupid.]

Shepard: Spoken like a true lackey. You get me out of here and I’ll take care of Balak. Or you can take your chances with me.

Charn: An, uh, interesting proposal. It certainly has benefits over the current situation. (to another batarian) Shut it down. This is Balak’s problem now.

he gives us a keycard, tells us where to find the boss, and scarpers. balak’s elsewhere, in a different facility, also guarded by turrets.

in case you don’t want to look at your map, the red gives it away. why’s it red? who cares!

there’s a hell of a shootout waiting for us in the final facility, but once we’ve cleared the area of what feels like every batarian ever conceived, balak himself deigns to come show his face.

Balak: I’m leaving this asteroid. If you try to stop me, I’ll detonate these charges and your helper and her friends are all going to die.

Shepard: You don’t get to leave, Balak. Not after what you’ve done.

Balak: What I’ve done? This is nothing compared to what’s been done to the batarians. We’ve been forced into exile. Forced to survive on what we can scrounge up. It’s been like that for decades.

Shepard: Why take it out on these people? They didn’t do anything to you or your race.

Balak: Didn’t do anything? Aside from colonizing a world that could have been ours? Aside from using resources that should have been ours? We were left to defend ourselves. But the humans were stronger than us. We knew that. The Council knew that. But it didn’t matter.

Balak: It was you. You and your kind are the only reason we’re in this position.

Shepard: How does killing innocent people make up for that?

Balak: We had no other options. Sometimes you need to get someone’s attention before they’ll listen.

Shepard: Is that was Elysium was? A way to get our attention? Well, you got it. And when we responded you ran like cowards. Now you want to start it all over again.

Balak: You couldn’t possibly understand... Actually, you just don’t want to understand. And I’m done wasting my breath.

the choice is, once again, in your hands. that’s a very interesting dialogue they have before this... and one i can understand both sides of. it’s worth noting that originally the batarians were welcomed into citadel space, but their aggression provoked more than one crisis intergalactically. their exile from the council is recent- they weren’t happy with humans colonising in areas that batarians already considered claimed (this is the skyllian verge and elysium, for those keeping track), and when they were told no by the council, they closed their embassy, severed all relations, and became a rogue state, retreating back to their own systems and becoming known primarily as pirates and slavers within the terminus systems, outside of citadel space. those in the terminus systems are actively rebelling against their own government, too, who prefer to stay in their space.

i don’t want to use the word self-imposed exile, but from the human’s point of view it’s very much a throwing your toys out of the pram because you can’t get what you want act. then again, from the batarian point of view, why should they stick with a council that doesn’t seem to consider them as on equal footing enough to grant them rights to colonise the land as they claim it?

i chose to let balak go, and save the hostages. we’re stopping the asteroid either way, and death for death is... well. not ideal. if we’re throwing away our ideals and doing the whole eye for an eye thing we should have started a long time ago.

worth noting here that the base game offers a sidemission i remember me to colonist shepards, where you meet a survivor of mindoir, a colony that was raided by batarians ~13 years before game’s start, and is the colonist equivalent of the sole survivor mission dead scientists. after the colony was attacked, the surviving girl was taken by slavers, and the sidemission deals with you taking her down from a suicidal response to systems alliance soldiers finding and killing her batarian slavers. provided you talk her down, she resurfaces in a minor way in the next game, with an email thanking you for helping her. i think it’s a damn shame that this sidemission is only available to colonist shepard, because in no way is this an isolated view of the batarians and the things they’ve done and would have been a nice bit of additional flavour text for the rest of the game, considering batarians are only mentioned in passing once or twice (and in basegame only get a concept art picture by their codex entry, even).

(laughs in virmire)

you tell simon about the dead engineers you found, and let the hostages go.

she explains that the man the batarians killed was her brother, who convinced her to join the team in the first place. you get the chance to ask her a couple of questions, mostly about herself, but also...

Kate: I don’t even think they knew. When they first arrived, they were talking about getting us back to their ship. They wanted to sell us as slaved. When Balak showed up, everything changed. It was his idea to redirect the asteroid. Said it was the will of the batarian rebellion, whatever that is.

considering balak and his contingency are the outliers of their society... well, buddy, i hate to say it, but you don’t speak for the rest of your people. sure, tensions are high with humans... but they are with the turians, as well, and the turians didn’t throw a hissy and exile themselves and have their people considered the worst of the worst by even their government for the practises of a few.

eghhh. this is one of those surprisingly complicated situations. this isn’t the first time bioware discusses this concept - dragon age 2 comes to mind, and i’m sure i’ll get around to that as well sometime - but we’re not really given any way of viewing the batarians as anything other than an enemy in BDtS. we do see more batarians in the future, and that’s its own thing. we’ll revisit this later.

Bring Down The Sky, complete in around an hour. not bad for a (now) free dlc mission, but the stuff i’ve done here today won’t carry over to mass effect 2. turns out the last save i had on the normandy was actually just after feros; all my other save states were in the middle of something of on the citadel at the end of the game where there’s no way to get out and do something else. thankfully, not having completed the dlc doesn’t affect anything in the future too much, though i think i won’t be getting some me2 background commentary. not that i’d know what it was, having never done this content before.

ah well. upwards and onwards, crew!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Webb finds candidates for first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way

Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200,000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602. The local environment of this cluster is a close analog of what existed in the early universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionized gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. Together with its associated HII region N90, which contains clouds of ionized atomic hydrogen, this cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighborhood.

An international team of astronomers, including Peter Zeidler, Elena Sabbi, Elena Manjavacas and Antonella Nota, used Webb to observe NGC 602 and they detected candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way. The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

"Only with the incredible sensitivity and spatial resolution in the correct wavelength regime is it possible to detect these objects at such great distances," said lead author Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency.

"This has never been possible before and also will remain impossible from the ground for the foreseeable future."

Brown dwarfs are the more massive cousins of giant gas planets (typically ranging from roughly 13 to 75 Jupiter masses, and sometimes lower). They are free-floating, meaning that they are not gravitationally bound to a star as exoplanets are. However, some of them share characteristics with exoplanets, like their atmospheric composition and storm patterns.

"Until now, we've known of about 3,000 brown dwarfs, but they all live inside our own galaxy," added team member Elena Manjavacas of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency.

"This discovery highlights the power of using both Hubble and Webb to study young stellar clusters," explained team member Antonella Nota, executive director of the International Space Science Institute in Switzerland and the previous Webb Project Scientist for ESA.

"Hubble showed that NGC602 harbors very young low mass stars, but only with Webb we can finally see the extent and the significance of the substellar mass formation in this cluster. Hubble and Webb are an amazingly powerful telescope duo."

Zeidler stated, "Our results fit very well with the theory that the mass distribution of bodies below the hydrogen burning limit is simply a continuation of the stellar distribution. It seems they form in the same way, they just don't accrete enough mass to become a fully fledged star."

The team's data include a new image from Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) of NGC 602, which highlights the cluster stars, the young stellar objects, and the surrounding gas and dust ridges, as well as the gas and dust itself, while also showing the significant contamination by background galaxies and other stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. These observations were made in April 2023.

"By studying the young metal-poor brown dwarfs newly discovered in NGC602, we are getting closer to unlocking the secrets of how stars and planets formed in the harsh conditions of the early universe," added team member Elena Sabbi of NSF's NOIRLab, the University of Arizona, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

"These are the first substellar objects outside the Milky Way," added Manjavacas. "We need to be ready for new ground-breaking discoveries in these new objects."

IMAGE: NGC 602 observed with NIRCam. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

[starwalkapp]

✨ Jupiter Approaches a Globular Cluster ✨⠀ ⠀ Bright Jupiter will grace the sky these days 🌌 Grab your binoculars or telescope and observe the giant planet close to a globular star cluster NGC 6235 🔭⠀ ⠀ One of the brightest objects in the evening sky of this week is Jupiter. On the evenings surrounding Monday, August 26, Jupiter's apparent motion will carry it close past a magnitude 7.2 globular star cluster designated NGC 6235, which is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus. ⠀ ⠀ As the sky begins to darken, look for the giant planet sitting less than a third of the way up the southern sky. Hour by hour, Jupiter will sink lower — then set in the west just before 1 am local time. ⠀ ⠀ Here’s a fun exercise on the next clear night once the sky is nice and dark. Grab your binoculars or telescope at low magnification and look just a fraction of a finger’s width to the left (celestial east) of Jupiter for a dim, fuzzy patch. What you are seeing is a globular star cluster, a mass of thousands of stars arranged by their mutual gravity into a densely packed sphere. This cluster, one of hundreds known to orbit our Milky Way galaxy, is named NGC 6235 (from the New General Catalogue of deep-sky objects). It is located 38,000 light years away from our solar system! When you see it, you are looking into the distant past. The light from those stars began traveling towards us around the time that Neanderthals died out! ⠀ ⠀ Jupiter is moving steadily towards that cluster, and will pass in front of it next Monday. So the later in the week you look, the closer Jupiter will be to the cluster. Both objects will fit within the field of view of a backyard telescope at high power. Jupiter is overwhelmingly bright compared to the cluster. To better see the dim, fuzzy globular cluster, try placing Jupiter just outside your field of view. Remember that most telescopes will flip the view around. So check both to the left and right of the planet.⠀ ⠀ Our comprehensive astronomy guide will help you find the current position of celestial objects in the sky above you.⠀ ⠀ Enjoy stargazing with Star Walk 2 app! ⠀ ⠀ Text Credit: Chris Vaughan via Instagram https://ift.tt/2MJyKa3

[doorsclosingslowly]

Sign up, scene one, first draft

On a secret mission to recruit new members for the Resistance, Finn meets a survivor of a war long gone.

Finn & Maul’s Excellent Adventure | 2.6k | post-TLJ

It’s one-sixty standard days after the end, an early evening with awful humidity and a storm brewing on the horizon. It’s one-sixty-four after the end, or one-sixty-five, or one-sixty-three, depending on the count—Hosnia Prime, Slip, FN-2187—but mostly it’s a hundred and sixty days after. After the death of the hero Luke Skywalker. After the annihilation of most of the Resistance, in the First Order’s assaults on D’Qar and Crait and several other outposts they only heard about—or, more to the point, didn’t—days later. That’s the date that matters right now, the event that’s lead to Finn standing in a narrow alley watching the deserted main street of Rishi’s ninety-third largest city, observing a small picturesque bar, running down the last hour until he meets with a potential new ally. A hundred and sixty days.

Almost half a year after the First Order won. Their ascent from small challenger—all-encompassing from the inside it had felt, but on the first leg of their flight from Crait Finn had read and eavesdropped and chatted to whoever would answer, in order to hear about history from a less biased perspective but mostly to stall the panic galumphing in his head, and for most of last twenty-three years, the Order’d been barely a blip on any radar but General Organa’s—to one of two factions warring for control, to the Order being the only major consolidated power structure in the known galaxy, give or take a few criminal conclaves and a few multi-planet corporate production chains. The one bully left.

It doesn’t have anything like the awesome reach of the Old Republic, one government from Bonadan to Imynosoph as the textbooks said, or even the slow-healing tatters of the New Republic. It doesn’t have that reach yet.

Total domination is inevitable.

Finn had warned Rey and Solo and the small orange pirate woman, a long time ago. ‘They'll slaughter us,’ he’d told them, ‘there is nothing we can do but run,’ and that had been before he’d seen how little the Hero Generals of the Rebellion could do against Kylo Ren. Before he’d watched them slaughtered before his own eyes. Before he’d heard the death-screams of every soul on Hosnia Prime, thousands of parsecs away. It had been back when he’d still thought the Resistance was a resurgent army spoiling to take on the legions of the First Order, and not just two-hundred people mourning their dead. Two hundred. That’s what Kaydel had announced, wild-eyed and shock-sweaty, after three sleepless days of calling and disconnecting and rerouting and encrypting and calling again, every personal frequency she’d remembered or been read from scraps of flimsi another survivor had kept sewed into the lining of their boots. Two hundred. Finn would put them at around six hundred survivors total, factoring in the uncontactable and the ones he wasn’t informed about out of a lingering sense of distrust, but still—it’s basically a rounding error of people. It’s not even a tenth of the number of troopers in FN-legion alone. They’ve lost.

He’d wanted to run, back then, before Hosnia Prime. Almost managed, and really, in retrospect, would it even have made that much of a difference? The Resistance would still have been fucked, give or take an exploded Starkiller. He would still have been frequenting small out-of-the-way bars on planets as-yet below the Order’s radar. He would still have watched every second he could of local holonet newscast, ears pricked for any mention of fights or unexplainable communications breakdowns with nearby planets. He would have still been afraid.

The only difference, really, is that he wouldn’t be out setting up meetings with people in those bars. He wouldn’t be trying to convince them to sign over their lives for a war they will not ever win.

(When Poe had brought up the need for recruitment, four days after the end, Finn had completely supported him, and not solely out of friendship. They’d been huddled in the increasingly rank and grimy main area of the Falcon, talking strategy with General Organa and General Chewbacca and Major Kalonia and a dozen more, Kaydel had just reported their numbers, and it had been obvious. ‘The Order is evil. People need to know that they have a chance, that we will stand by their side, and they will join us,’ Poe had said, and looked at Finn then. Finn had smiled back at him. ‘We’ve just been holed up on our bases, completely disconnected,’ Avga had added. ‘That’s why no-one came when we called for aid. We need to get out there and talk to people.’ Chewbacca had warbled something that apparently translated to, ‘I will talk to Lando.’ In the end, they had all agreed to split up. Another sensible decision: they need to cover ground quickly, they’ll be less conspicuous, and if someone gets caught the Resistance won’t be vaporized in its entirety. This way, at least, it won’t be quick: death from a thousand cuts instead, the pessimistic side of Finn’s brain adds.)

Recruitment is still their only option, if they want so postpone their inevitable failure. Finn just wishes that back then, signing up for the mission, for the Resistance, while running on fumes and terror, he’d considered: just how hard it was going to be. No, not hard. Impossible.

Poe’s calls—bi-weekly at least, a lifeline after they’d had to split up seventy days ago to pursue diverging leads—brim with life, with stories of the people he’s met and sent onwards, and Finn gets it. Talking to Poe, who wouldn’t be kindled with hope and fight? Rey is the last student of the legendary Luke Skywalker, and also, she’s great. She’s Rey. Rose knows the underbelly of the glittering worlds, knows just how to hit the pain-points. Finn hasn’t commed General Organa, since he’s been the one to suggest the isolated cell structure in the first place and he’ll be damned if he’s the one to compromise their operational security now, but surely few will have denied her a hearing. Chewbacca is very persuasive, he’s been told. And so on.

All Finn has to offer is tales of the First Order’s atrocities. Of massacres and orphans and miles of identical benches in front of identical tables with identical meal-kits on them, spaced no more or less than exactly fifty centimetres apart.

He’s been huddled, more than twice now, in a corner with a potential recruit, and then been shown a pocket-chain holo of children wrapping themselves around their parent’s neck. He’s advised, ‘Know where they are at all times. Keep watch. Tell everyone: watch your kids. The Order is efficient, they won’t bother hunting a single family. You’ll be safer if you leave the city, or if you stay… when you hear the noise of the Star Destroyer, grab your children and run. Don’t look back. Or you will never see them again.’ He’s met with fifty people now. He hasn’t recruited a single one.

It’s futile. There’s nothing left to do but try again.

Half an hour left until the current attempt, a meeting with a local journalist who may grant the Resistance’s cause exposure at the very least. Finn doesn’t know what she looks like—which makes him uneasy, sure, but it’s not like he can fault anyone for paranoia when dealing with the Order—but she’d said that she would be easy to find, since there’s never much happening on a mid-week night, especially with the weather.

Looks like she was right: the main street is deserted, still, except for… in front of the bar Finn’s been surveilling, a young nautolan woman is now crouching, clad in a black apron over her smart pantsuit. A tiny nametag’s affixed that Finn can’t read from this distance, but no matter: open bar door, uniformed woman. Probably not the journalist then. She must be staff, out on a smoke break—she’s sucking on a small tube and coughing out yellow mist, and then she stands in it until it dissipates. Even more humidity. Finn’s sweating by proxy. He doesn’t miss much from his old life, but the climate-controlled armor was nice.

She crouches down again, ignorant of Finn’s presence, one hand on her vaporator and the other ruffling the leaves of a cluster of pavement flowers.

When Finn’s eyes return—twenty to meetup now—she’s still there. Early dinner break? Slow day? Slacker with insufficient supervision? Something more sinister? Her eyes turn in the direction of Finn’s alleyway, and he ducks, alarmed, but they pass over it, until she’s staring straight down the wide street. Finn follows her gaze, and oh. She’s watching the sundown.

It’s peeking through a torn hole in the storm clouds, and then it falls below the mountain. As the light slowly dies, the whole street is wreathed, writhing, in hot red and orange, and—Finn almost, almost succeeds in not seeing the fire of Tuanul. Slip’s hand, dead, blood. Rounding up the villagers. The circle. The pleading. The blaster fire. The smell. Fuck, that smell.

The nautolan is gone when Finn looks up again, and there’s no-one else outside: no-one here to notice his quick sightless glance, his flinch, his shudder. No-one to watch him kneeling, face towards an untouched door, eyes shut and heaving up his breakfast, careful not to get any sick on his jacket. Finn decides to be grateful. No-one to judge. No-one will report him to Phasma, not ever again. Ten to meetup.

Might as well go in now and get a good table.

The door gives a pleasant jingle when Finn enters. It’s the only way out, apparently, bar the two massive front windows flanking it, which already narrows the seating options considerably: he might be hidden from outside view in one of the booths tucked in the corner beside the bar, but he would also, if it comes to it, be fucked. There haven’t been any signs of First Order activity in the region, but you can never be too careful.

(‘I know where the nearest escape pods are,’ Finn had declared, hours before the end. ‘’Course you do,’ Rose had replied, and Finn had felt the sting he’d been meant to feel, the scorn. The gaping distance between their lives: FN-2187 had known every escape pod on Starkiller Base and the Finalizer and every other ship he’d ever been on. Closing his eyes, he could still call up every detail. Each had come with its own fantasies attached, of how he’d use it to get away, if only he had a pilot.

Also, it’s just good sense.)

There’s only one other customer inside: a bald old man of a species Finn can’t place, with horns and a patterned face almost like a zabrak, but in stark red and black instead of the customary muted browns. It should be familiar. Finn had taken a module on the biology of all galactic species, back when he’d believed he might one day become an officer like Phasma. ‘All species’: another of the Order’s lies? At any rate, the man is sat at the table to the left of the exit, the one Finn would have picked. A gnarled walking stick is leaning against the table at his left. No tell-tale bulges of a blaster straining his tight black shirt or the loose trousers. He’s alone, head bent, nursing a big glass filled with clear liquid. No indication he’s even heard Finn walk in. A local drunk?

A massive inconvenience, anyway. He might have fine hearing, so Finn can’t have a conspirative meeting just one table down. Next to the door is a bust, then. There’s also the door to the kitchen, right beside the bar, but if the nautolan—nametag ‘Ahn Artega, bartender,’ he was right—if she went out front to smoke, there probably won’t be an exit there. He nods at her and takes a trip to the toilets, but there are no ways outside there, either, not even windows big enough to squeeze through.

It’s enough to ratchet up his paranoia, when he takes a seat at the window-table furthest from the old man. No-one is looking at him—in the reflection in the window, he can see the old man staring at his glass, and the bored bartender stacking a massive pyramid of limes—but someone is watching. A cold sensation running down the durasteel patch in his spine. It’s just nerves, he tells himself: for all Finn’s instincts have always served him well, there’s no-one following him. He’s been having this feeling for over two months now, intermittently, and nothing’s come off it. No-one’s following. He’s been covering his tracks carefully.

It’s a relief, when Ahn Artega comes over with the menu. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“Yeah.” Fifteen past, now. “She told me she might run a little late, though. Can I get a drink first?”

When Artega returns with an Alderaani light beer, she also offers to explain the menu, a muted sympathy in her eyes. She must think Finn’s being stood up. She’s probably right. The journalist seemed like a sensible woman, and tangling with the Order is anything but. “It’s no trouble. Early evenings are always quiet, this place doesn’t start buzzing until ten o’clock. Anyway, this is my grandpa’s place, and I’m sure you’ve never had any food like it in your life! I know for a fact that this is the only Alderaani restaurant within four quadrants, if not on the entire Triellus Trade Route! We have a lot of the original spices too, because great-grandpa set up his kitchen garden here before the Destruction of Alderaan. A lot of the vegetables are extinct now, though. Especially the ones from the south polar region, where our family is from, so we mostly serve Aldera City cooking—an intergalactic hub, you know, so they used a lot of ingredients that weren’t native to Alderaan in the first place—give me a second. Mister, a refill?”

While she takes care of the old man, Finn studies the flimsi menu. There are pictures printed onto it. One of them, he’s seen before: a young girl in white with a crown of braids, flanked by a tall blue-clad man and a woman in a regal blue dress.

“Princess Leia Organa, bless her memory.”

“What?!”

It’s not that Finn has somehow missed news of her death, though, he soon realizes. Ahn explains, “The last Royal of Alderaan. She survived the Destruction, you know? She was a Senator, one of only hundreds of thousands off home when the Empire attacked. A remarkable woman, founder of the New Republic, even Chief of State. She was the New Republic, really. Papa gave me a biography of her, and I read it over and over, I nearly followed her into politics. Good thing I didn’t. The restaurant saved me. Hosnia Prime, gone like that. All those people, all those politicians, and Princess Leia, too.”

Finn could tell her that General Organa lived. He could talk of what she did after politics. Of how she was the first to recognize the new threat, how she built the Resistance. He doesn’t: he doesn’t want her to join up. He doesn’t want her to die. There is so little of Alderaan left, and he wants no part in its destruction. This is a tiny bar in little city on a small planet off the major trade routes, and the First Order might never come here. After the end, it might even be the only safe place left.

Instead, he stays, for mains and desert and drinks, until the restaurant fills up and Ahn is too busy to make small talk anymore. He crosses the journalist off his list of leads. He makes plans for describing the bar’s coordinates to General Organa if he can risk contacting her, of for Poe to pass on. He joins a freighter crew bound for his next futile destination.

He doesn’t notice the old man again for two planets.

[astrogeoguy]

The Old Moon occults Pre-dawn Planets, and Missing Moonlight Enhances the Ice Giants and Orion’s Spectacular Sword!

(Above: Rick Foster of Markham, Ontario captured this single frame image of Orion’s sword on through a Celetron C11 Edge telescope equipped with a Hyperstar Lens and DSLR camera on January 7, 2019. The Great Orion Nebula with its central Trapezium Cluster of stars is in the middle. The blueish Running Man Nebula is at top left and the bright stars at the bottom are dominated by Nair al Saif. This photo spans about 1.5 finger widths - top to bottom.)

Hello, Stargazers!

Here are your Astronomy Skylights for the week of January 27th, 2019 by Chris Vaughan. Feel free to pass this along to your friends and send me your comments, questions, and suggested topics. I repost these emails with photos at http://astrogeoguy.tumblr.com/ where all the old editions are archived. You can also follow me on Twitter as @astrogeoguy! Unless otherwise noted, all times are Eastern Time. Please click this MailChimp link to subscribe to these emails. If you are a teacher or group leader interested joining me on a guided field trip to York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory or the David Dunlap Observatory, visit www.astrogeo.ca.

I can bring my Digital Starlab inflatable planetarium to your school or other daytime or evening event, visit DiscoveryPlanitarium.com and request me. We’ll tour the Universe together!

Public Astro-Events

Every Monday evening, York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory runs an online star party - broadcasting views from four telescopes/cameras, answering viewer questions, and taking requests! Details are here. On Wednesday nights they offer free public viewing through their rooftop telescopes. If it’s cloudy, the astronomers give tours and presentations. Details are here. 

At 7:30 pm on Wednesday, January 30, the RASC Toronto Centre will hold their free monthly Recreational Astronomy Night Meeting at the Ontario Science Centre, and the public are welcome. Talks include The Sky This Month, an update on the David Dunlap Observatory, and news about a possible new planetarium for Toronto. Check here for details. Parking is free. 

On Friday, February 1, starting at 7 pm, U of T’s AstroTour will present their free planetarium show entitled Grand Tour of the Cosmos. Details are here. 

If it’s sunny on Saturday morning, February 2 from 10 am to noon, astronomers from the RASC Toronto Centre will be setting up outside the main doors of the Ontario Science Centre for Solar Observing. Come and see the Sun in detail through special equipment designed to view it safely. This is a free event (details here), but parking and admission fees inside the Science Centre will still apply. Check the RASC Toronto Centre website or their Facebook page for the Go or No-Go notification. 

(Above: Here’s a smartphone picture of the January 20-21, 2019 total lunar eclipse. I took this from my driveway in Thornhill at 12:44 am EST by holding my Galaxy S8 smartphone’s camera over a 40 mm eyepiece mounted in my 12.5″ Obsession Dobsonian telescope. The exposure is 1/10 second.)

The Moon and Planets

On Sunday afternoon (today), the moon reaches its Last Quarter phase, when it rises at midnight and appears half-illuminated – on its western side. For the rest of this week, the moon will be in the pre-dawn sky, leaving the night sky nice and dark for stargazing. The late rising moon will also linger to remain visible in the morning daytime sky, especially on the coming weekend. 

For the second time during January, the old moon will visit Jupiter and Venus. Between about 5 am and dawn in the southeastern sky on Thursday morning, the old crescent moon will land 2.5 finger widths to the upper right of bright Venus and 5.5 finger widths to the lower left of somewhat dimmer Jupiter – making a lovely sight in binoculars and a photo opportunity. To top it off, just after 6 am local time, Saturn will rise to sit two fist diameters to the lower left of the trio. 

That pretty chain of objects strung along the ecliptic should remain visible in the growing twilight until about 7 am local time. Later on Thursday, the moon’s eastward orbital motion will carry it even closer to Venus, allowing observers to find Venus in broad daylight. Folks in eastern Micronesia, Polynesia (except Hawaii), the Galapagos Islands, southern Central America, and northwestern South America will see the moon cross in front of (or occult) Venus in daylight. 

Finally, on Saturday before dawn, the waning crescent moon will pass less than 3 finger widths to the lower left of Saturn. Hours earlier, centered on 19:50 GMT, skywatchers in northern and northeastern Africa, southern and central Europe, Middle East, western Asia, and parts of Southern Russia can see the moon’s orbital motion carry it in front of that planet, too! 

(Above: On Thursday, January 31, 2019, the waning crescent moon will pass between Venus and Jupiter. Two days later, it will pass near Saturn. Parts of the world will see the moon occult both Venus and Saturn this week! The sky is shown at 6:35 am local time.)

Moon or not, those three bright planets will be in the same part of the sky all week. Jupiter will be rising after 4 am local time, Venus about 30 minutes later, and dimmer, yellowish Saturn last – at about 6:15 am local time, in a brightening sky. Saturn and Jupiter will be lowly moving farther from the sun every morning, but Venus will be descending toward the sun. Mercury is passing by the sun this week, and will join the evening sky next week. 

Mars remains an ideal target for stargazers (or planet-gazers) this week. After dusk, the Red Planet will appear as a medium-bright, reddish pinpoint of light halfway up the southwestern sky. It will set at about 11:30 pm local time. Mars is slowly shrinking in size and brightness as we increase our distance from it. 

Mars has been setting at about the same time all winter because it is travelling east in its orbit at about the same rate that the distant stars are migrating west due to Earth’s motion around the sun. As a result, the planet has been steadily traversing the dim water constellations. In December, Mars passed very close to distant Neptune in Aquarius (the Water-Bearer). In mid-February, Mars will pass quite close to Uranus in Pisces (the Fishes). 

(Above: This week, Mars continues to sit in the southwestern evening sky, between the distant, dim planets Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Aquarius. The sky is shown at 7:40 pm local time.)

Speaking of those ice giants, the missing moonlight is a good reason to try and see those two dim and distant planets. Blue-green Uranus is about 1.25 finger widths above, and slightly to the left of the modestly bright star Torcular (or Omega Piscium). This week, Uranus will already be at its highest point, over the southern horizon (the best position for seeing it clearly) after dusk, then set after midnight. Dim, blue Neptune will set shortly after 8:30 pm local time, so look for it as soon as the sky is dark, while it’s higher. Neptune is sitting about three finger widths to the upper left of the modestly-bright star Hydor (Lambda Aquarii). Hydor, and a pair of stars to its east (upper left), form a sideways narrow triangle with Neptune inside of it.  

Orion’s Spectacular Sword

This is a perfect week to grab the binoculars and check out Orion (the Hunter). The distinctive constellation will stand up over the southern horizon at 9 pm local time during late January evenings, and we can enjoy it until late March. 

(Above: The eastern evening sky in late January, early February features many bright winter constellations. The Milky Way’s path through Canis Major and up through Auriga has populated this area of the sky with many deep sky star clusters and nebulas (labelled symbols). The sky is shown for 8 pm local time.)

Orion’s spectacular sword is one of winter’s true astronomical treats. The sword is a few finger widths below Orion’s distinctive three-starred belt. Unaided eyes can generally detect three patches of light in Orion’s sword, but binoculars or a telescope quickly reveal that the middle object is not a star at all, but a bright knot of glowing gas and stars known as The Orion Nebula (or the Great Nebula in Orion or Messier 42, aka M42). 

The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest nebulae in the entire night sky and, at 1,400 light-years from Earth, it is one of the closest star-forming nurseries to us. It’s enormous. Under a very dark sky, the nebula can be traced over an area equivalent to four full moons! 

Buried in the core of the nebula is a tight clump of stars collectively designated Theta Orionis (Orionis is Latin for “of Orion”), but better known as The Trapezium, because the brightest four stars occupy the corners of a trapezoid shape. Even a small telescope should be able to pick out this four-star asterism, but good seeing conditions and a larger aperture telescope will show another two faint stars. The trapezium stars are hot young O- and B-type stars that are emitting intense amounts of ultraviolet radiation. The radiation causes the gas they are embedded in to shine brightly, by both reflecting off gas and dust as blue light and also by energizing Hydrogen gas, which is re-emitted as red light. That is why there is so much purple and pink in colour images of the nebula. 

Within the nebula, astronomers have detected many young (about 100,000 years old) concentrations of collapsing gas called proplyds that should one day form future solar systems. These objects give us a glimpse into how our sun and planets formed. 

Stargazers have long known about the stars in the nebula’s core, but detection of the nebulosity around them required the invention of telescopes in the early 1600’s. In the 1700’s, Charles Messier and Edmund Halley (both famous comet observers) noted the object in their growing catalogues of “fuzzy” objects. In 1880, amateur Henry Draper imaged it through an 11-inch refractor telescope, making it the first deep sky object to be photographed. 

(Above: Orion’s spectacular sword hangs vertically below his famous 3-starred belt.)

In your own small telescope, you should see the bright clump of Trapezium stars surrounded by a ghostly grey shroud, complete with bright veils and dark gaps. More photons would need to be delivered to your eye before colour would be observed, so try photographing it through your telescope or with a camera/telephoto lens on a tripod. Visually, start with low magnification and enjoy the extent of the cloud before zooming in on the tight asterism. Can you see four stars, or more? Just to the upper left of M42, you’ll find M43, a separate lobe of the nebula. It surrounds the unaided-eye star nu Orionis (ν Ori). 

While you’re touring the sword, look just below the nebula for a loose group of stars, 1300 light-years away from Earth, called Nair al Saif “the Bright One of the Sword”. This main star is a hot, bright star expected to explode in a supernova one day. It is surrounded by faint nebulosity, too. Astronomers believe that this star was gravitationally kicked out of the Trapezium cluster about 2.5 million years ago. 

Sweeping down the sword and to the left (east) brings us to the star named Mizan Batil ath Thaalith (aka d Orionis) at the tip of the sword. This magnitude 4.7 star is near the limit for visibility in moonless suburban skies. About two finger widths to its right is another star of similar brightness, named Thabit, "the endurer".

Moving upwards towards Orion’s belt, half a finger’s width (30 arc-minutes, or the moon’s diameter) above the Orion Nebula, you’ll find another clump of stars dominated by c Orionis and 45 Orionis. A larger telescope, or a long-exposure photograph, reveals a bluish patch of nebulosity around them that contains darker lanes forming the shape of a figure, called the Running Man Nebula. This is another case of gas reflecting light from the two stars mentioned. 

Just above the Running Man sits a loose cluster of a few dozen stars best seen in binoculars. Then we jump higher – most of the way towards Alnitak (the eastern-most belt star), to check out a beautiful little grouping of stars collectively called Sigma (σ) Orionis. What makes this a special treat is that, in a small telescope, we find four or five stars crammed together. Check it out with your telescope – trust me, it’s pretty! It’s a bit more than a finger width to the lower right of Alnitak. Let me know what you see!

Keep looking up, and enjoy the sky when you do. I love questions and requests - so, send me some!