Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

Did we at least get the Prothean artefacts?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[X] Refuse her offer. You are not acceding to restrictions on your actions when going into your army's first ground invasion. She can surrender in person to the soldiers who find her, just like everybody else.

She does not have any real authority, and after dealing with Dalatrass, Mira have no reason to trust anything that comes from Lystheni. Too many betryals, too much bad will. To much risk of it backfiring and causing yet more problems in future.

Lystheni, as far as we could see proved themselves to be backstabbing, amoral maniacs. No way of knowing how much it was Dalatrass, and how much her people.

Not accepting will not change too much. Let's wipe the political slate clean.

DiceOfStupidity said:

[X] Refuse her offer. You are not acceding to restrictions on your actions when going into your army's first ground invasion. She can surrender in person to the soldiers who find her, just like everybody else.

She does not have any real authority, and after dealing with Dalatrass, Mira have no reason to trust anything that comes from Lystheni. Too many betryals, too much bad will. To much risk of it backfiring and causing yet more problems in future.

Lystheni, as far as we could see proved themselves to be backstabbing, amoral maniacs. No way of knowing how much it was Dalatrass, and how much her people.

Not accepting will not change too much. Let's wipe the political slate clean.

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Well...
You see, accepting her surrender allows us to do less work, for:
a) Less combatants to be neutralized
b) Less information to be recovered from offices shot to hell
c) Easier time reestablishing order

We find out we don't like her after occupying all the Lystheni colonies? We take everything she gives and turn her into a martyr for our cause.

[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.

Simon_Jester said:

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.

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Oh certainly; that bit's the easy part. That's just a twin.
We do it commercially today, for too rich people who want duplicates of their dead pets; Barbara Streisand did so for her dead dogs.
50k for those with the money.

Growing adult clones that match the phenotypic age of their gene donors, and with the memory/knowledgebase to impersonate them?
Different matter.

Simon_Jester said:

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.

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I would flatout argue that it's impossible; the dalatrass displayed too much autonomy in dealmaking to be a body double.
That would both go against everything we know of the lystheni government's controlfreak tendencies, and would involve letting someone with no diplomatic expertise making binding negotiations for your nation.

Even an ambassador would communicate with their home government, and they're trained for negotiation. A body double? Not a chance.

Simon_Jester said:

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.

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Note that this is what we know about salarian biology:

The salarians are amphibian haplo-diploid egg-layers; unfertilized eggs produce males and fertilized eggs produce females. Once a year, a salarian female will lay a clutch of dozens of eggs. Social rules prevent all but a fraction from being fertilized. As a result, 90% of the species is male.
Salarians have photographic memories and rarely forget a fact. They also possess a form of psychological "imprinting", tending to defer to those they knew in their youth. Salarian hatching is a solemn ritual in which the clan matriarch, known as the Dalatrass, isolates herself with the eggs. The young salarians psychologically imprint on her and tend to defer to her wishes. During the hatching of daughters, the Dalatrasses of the mother and father's clans are present at the imprinting. This ensures the offspring have equal loyalty to both, ensuring the desired dynastic and political unity.

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So there are probably a fair number of females among the lystheni.
I just assume the current dalatrass is there for a large proportion of births, which gives her undue influence on the newborn and the young.
And I won't be surprised if she preferentially expends the progeny of other females on risky tasks.

Simon_Jester said:

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

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Everything you said.
Except that I wouldn't go as far as capital punishment; both for ethical reasons and pragmatic ones. For one thing, horrible as it is, they don't seem to have broken any lystheni laws. And who knows what the state of international law is.

Probably less bother to simply move them off-planet to Virmire and stick them in prison for the rest of their natural lifespan.
They'll die sooner than the batarian PM we overthrew, and he's been in prison for 17 years so far.

And our primary leverage being what kind of incarceration you get, with a choice of facilities from a concrete hole in the ground under a mountain, to house arrest in an island villa with an ankle bracelet.
Depending on how cooperative you are.

Simon_Jester said:

Do you really have to ask?

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Yup. I thought we were dealing with a mixture of naivete, ambition and ignorance. Not Mengele shit.
Not that the Soviets and the US don't both have a history of illegal, unethical human experimentation.
Still heinous, especially on the kind of scale that seems to be in play here.

uju32 said:

Still heinous, especially on the kind of scale that seems to be in play here.

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Sigh...I just hope they didn't delete too much of it to spite us.

And no this is not me being a ********

In my view the only thing worse than letting these kind of experiments happen in the first place is destroying the results, it means all the pain those people went through goes completely to waste.

I just hope we can get enough doctors down there to mitigate the side effects of whatever else they did.

And get those ****ing artefacts.

[X] Accept her offer.

[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.

Doomed Wombat said:

Sigh...I just hope they didn't delete too much of it to spite us.

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Like has been pointed out, getting an ally on the inside who might have access to the rumors will help immensely.
As well as the data backups that undoubtedly exist somewhere.
And be able to point us at who we have to interrogate.

Especially important if we want to scupper any contingency plans the dalatrass had cooking; I'm beginning to worry about what the fuck she thought she was doing.

Doomed Wombat said:

I just hope we can get enough doctors down there to mitigate the side effects of whatever else they did.

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We'll see I guess.
It's gonna get expensive as shit.

Doomed Wombat said:

And get those ****ing artefacts.

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The artifacts took five to ten years to move.
They didn't abscond with them in hours.

[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.

// Getting her on board might save us the hassle of occupation. So not interested in space!middleeast.

uju32 said:

Like has been pointed out, getting an ally on the inside who might have access to the rumors will help immensely.
As well as the data backups that undoubtedly exist somewhere.
And be able to point us at who we have to interrogate.

Especially important if we want to scupper any contingency plans the dalatrass had cooking; I'm beginning to worry about what the fuck she thought she was doing.
We'll see I guess.
It's gonna get expensive as shit.

The artifacts took five to ten years to move.
They didn't abscond with them in hours.

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Well I'm voting accept no worries on that front.

Also my bet is zombies, but I wouldn't say no to Kingsmen style madness inducement.

Isn't it always? Though if it heads off problems, helps us get their loyalty and lets us be moral in the process then I say why not

Really? Huh. Always assumed they'd be quite small...mmm I always assumed it be small stuff and it took so long for them to find em cause they were big ruins...though what on earth requires being bombarded with nuclear energies to activate I dunno.

Doomed Wombat said:

Really? Huh. Always assumed they'd be quite small...mmm I always assumed it be small stuff and it took so long for them to find em cause they were big ruins...though what on earth requires being bombarded with nuclear energies to activate I dunno.

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Becoming an ascended energy being. The ancestor of the current dalatrass had a vision, and the artifacts clearly show1​ that something like that must be possible.
1​Take your favorite brand of 'proofing' techniques encountered in real life.

[X] Refuse her offer. You are not acceding to restrictions on your actions when going into your army's first ground invasion. She can surrender in person to the soldiers who find her, just like everybody else.

Doomed Wombat said:

In my view the only thing worse than letting these kind of experiments happen in the first place is destroying the results, it means all the pain those people went through goes completely to waste.

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IRL, it has been found that the same people willing to do mass unethical experiments are also completely unsuited to do science. The results are basically worthless, as the goal of the experiments is not to find out the truth, but to confirm the strong ideology that motivates and justifies the experiments.

[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.

Doesn't matter real or fake. If real, we got an intel source to squeeze. If fake, we save work smashing only half the planet and smash the other half later. If anything its a smaller gamble than accepting the parley.

[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.

I say this because we know Jack about them and she has intel we need and more importantly it doesn't involve rocking the area she is in which will result in civilian casualties

[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.

We've proved our point so to speak. Crushed their navy.

But, they're on their final chance. Pull any more shit and it's over. Orbital bombardment for everybody.