[X] Accept her offer. Whether or not you can trust what she says, she's left you a lot of room. If you can reduce the number of potential combatants, and perhaps even avoid a fight entirely, you will.
If she's a drooling vegetable suffering from multiple organ failure, the odds are that she's a clone.
To be fair, if you told the Lystheni can create genetically viable clones of salarians, given full access to the DNA and tissue samples of the original person, I'd believe you.
For that matter, they could presumably just induce twinning of a salarian embryo and keep one of the embryos frozen for a few years, then 'thaw out' the frozen embryo as, in effect, a clone. I don't know why they'd do it, but I can believe they could.
Considering that cloning wasn't even a viable thing in canon time in ME, I doubt the Lystheni managed it this early.
I dunno. I mean, creating a
fully adult clone of Shepard took a few years.
What if this is more like, oh, a clone created by the techniques we're talking about for cloning nowadays? Without any weird stuff like accelerated growth or sharing memories and ideas, just straight-up bioscience? It's quite plausible the Lystheni can do that, and still be a far cry from the kind of absurdly advanced bioscience that must have gone into Cerberus's projects to resurrect/clone Shepard in the distant future.
Note how she still knew everything, despite apparently absolute power being held by two people.
And how a psychotically paranoid absolute leader tolerates a rival acquiring power in the first place.
All she's
revealed she knows is:
1)
In broad outline that the Lystheni research stations are horrorshows, which would hardly be anything other than common knowledge if the majority of all Lystheni have been exposed to exotic radiations as a consequence of their existence. Fuck,
we know that.
2) That the Lystheni have a closed society. Again,
we know that.
3) That salarian loyalties are strongly related to sororal and maternal bonds. The whole galaxy knows that, and any salarian would know that.
4) The identity of the Lystheni admiral, and how to capture him. Impressive, but not that impressive.
It is
possible that, say, she's the real Dalatrass, who sent out a brainwashed or fanatical agent to us
pretending to be the real Dalatrass. On the other hand, if that were true, she'd have to be self-aware and rational enough to recognize just how horrible we would think her actions were. Even if the salarian woman we met was not the Dalatrass, we have no reason to think the real Dalatrass is that sane or smart.
And, again, we can much more easily figure all this out and ascertain if the alleged sister of the alleged Dalatrass needs a bullet through the noggin
after we land vast hordes of marines on the Lystheni planet and lock down all their technology and d
Thank you for taking the trouble to update for us.
And have fun in fair Italy!
EDIT
As for the update:
Jesus Fucking Christ. Is the dalatrass insane?
Do you really have to ask?
Every single aspect of the Lystheni we've seen so far have had treachery hidden inside. Why would this be different?
We can inspect for treachery
after we secure the surrender of the planet.
Remember, we literally have more soldiers (and computer geeks) than the Lystheni have
people. While drowning them in sheer numbers of bodies (and IT people) and locking down their networked communications may be difficult, it's an option for us. We can know everything the Lystheni are doing, if we can just get boots on the ground in sufficient numbers, while not losing too many people to armed Lystheni resistance, even if it's only chicken-with-head-cut-off flailing resistance.
If we decide we need to have the alleged Dalatrass's alleged sister taken out and shot, we can do that.
Later.
I'm not liking the sound of these 'artifacts' the Lystheni have uncovered, I say we nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Edit: Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Lystheni are indoctrinated.
If the alleged sister of the alleged Dalatrass is indoctrinated, she's doing WAY too good a job of acting normal. If she is free and other Lystheni are indoctrinated, this will soon become fairly clear-ish. We should probably avoid doing anything rash or taking any of the SO4 artifacts for ourselves until we know more, but I don't think we should k
Among other things, if the Lystheni have become indoctrinated, this may be the only chance we have to start learning about and preparing against the Reaper threat 2000 years in advance of their OTL arrival in our galaxy. That is... an extraordinarily valuable thing to have. And we lose it if we glass the Lystheni colony.
The Lystheni have all been in contact with probable Reaper tech to some extent for extended periods of time. They need to go ASAP.
There are like a zillion other possible explanations for all that has happened. In-character we have no reason to assume that the Lystheni need killing. The Lystheni we've grabbed so far show signs, not of indoctrination, but of
radiation sickness. Not the same thing at all.
We do not have anywhere near the level of evidence that the Lystheni are indoctrinated, that we'd need to justify exterminating them.
