The Shadow of Old Transgressions (Homeworld/Mass Effect Crossover Quest)

The Enkindled Spheres

Belan System
Orbital Station Myr

It feels good to have the fleet back together. Iuno, Aurora, Laverna, and Ulysses all present and accounted for just like the old days when you were a Chorus. Of course you have a few new additions now. The Kushan, Kadeshi, Irunese, and now the Keeper Oracle. So it isn't quite the same. But still it's good to have everyone in the fleet network again.

For one thing everyone can discuss the current situation with the Wraiths and the T-Mat. It is not at all usual for T-Mat ships to be moving in the modern age. If they were there would be a obvious lines of catastrophe as planets went dark and ships went missing. Oracle mentions that it seemed to be drawn to the Progenitor derelict, which again is unusual. You have to wonder if the Wraith's emergence triggered some sort of reaction.

You have lots of time to ponder it because the Illuminated Primacy's representatives are taking their own sweet time getting back to you. When your fleet entered the system and transmitted your purpose they welcomed you readily enough and asked you to dock at their sole orbital station, but since then nothing.

You have half a mind to just leave, when you finally receive a communication ping. You open it expecting to see the local hanar representative you talked with before, but are instead surprised to see a bipedal figure. One of their drell servants.

"Greetings, honored Bentusi. I am Yuttel Luot, and I ask that you listen to my tale."

Iuno speaks up for your fleet in her mysterious elder race persona, "We Listen."

"Wise One, the trade convoy that my son serves on has gone missing. It was transporting artifacts of the enkindlers and so the elders argue about whether or not it was divine providence or retribution. But I care not. I ask that you please find my son, and save him if he is still alive."

You receive a data packet containing some coordinates, and you ponder your next step.

[ ] Head off in Search of Pirates
This is what you came here for. You've got a lead, and some one is in danger. No point wasting any more time waiting for the Hanar. Leave a polite message and spin up your hyperdrive modules to go track down some pirates.

[ ] Contact the Primacy Representative
Yuttel is a random drell. You have no idea if he's even telling the truth, and he's definitely not part of the government. Better see what the Hanar themselves have to say about this. That said you've been waiting politely long enough. There are other things in the galaxy that you need to do. Time to be a little bit more insistent about speaking with them.

[ ] Do a Little Hacking
It's not that you necessarily think anything suspicious is going on, but the Drell's coordinates are in a completely different area than the other piracy reports you have from this area. And the Hanar were pleading with Minister Scrimius to send aid, but now that you're here they've clammed up. Something seems fishy here on both sides.

---

[ ] Work on the Fleet
-[ ] Pick a Research Project.
-[ ] Pick a Character to work on the project.
-Current Options: Aurora, Iuno, Laverna, Valerius, Ulysses, Flicker Friends

[ ] Pick a Codex/Interlude
-[ ] Write In
Pick something you'd like to know more about.

---

Quest Note: Bit of a short one. I kind of just want to get back in the writing groove.

Codex: The Categorization of Races​

The Bentusi like to track the history of things and understand them. So of course they have put a lot of effort into understanding the history of the galaxy itself and the races that dwell in it. One of the things they've done to that end is categorize the races of the galaxy both living and dead. Though truly there don't seem to be many dead ones. Living beings have a tendency to hang on by any means possible.

The Bentusi have their own archeologists and those archeologists argue quite frequently about how to categorize other races, but one of the more traditional and widely used methods is by age. This divides the galaxy into the ancient, elder, and young races.

There is only one race that comes to mind when considering the ancients, and that of course is the progenitors. Their massive megastructures litter the galaxy and influence events even in modern times. However they were not the only one. There are scattered ruins that are clearly of a different nature, and even some belief that the Progenitors were a federation of species rather than one single race. But of course the other main ancient race are the T-Mat. They clearly come from the same time period and are unfortunately still very much alive. Your own personal explorations have added a third race to that list. The Void Wraiths are if anything even older than the Progenitors, and seem to operate on a similar scale if their megaliths are any indication. You aren't certain if the crimson flesh qualifies as another ancient race or is some form of out of control bioweapon. Perhaps it is both.

The next category are the elder races. These races are very old. Most of their histories date back approximately ten millenia where something cataclysmic seems to have happened in the galaxy. By its very nature this has made understanding what exactly happened between the death of the progenitors and the rise of the elders difficult. But it is tentatively believed that the elder races were servants of sorts of the progenitors, or at least space faring. The four elder races are the Rachni, the Bentusi, the Vaygr, and the Kadesh. From fragmentary myths and scraps of fragmented data it is believed that each served a different purpose in the Progenitors empire.

The Rachni were workers building the Progenitors megastructures and tending to the maintenance of their worlds. The Bentusi saw to the movement of goods between Progenitor worlds. The Kadesh were engineers filling in the practical details of the Progenitor Architects grand designs. And finally the Vaygr were warriors keeping the others safe. The Cataclysm seems to have been some traumatic event that forced each of them to find a different method of survival. The Rachni retreated to a single cluster of systems. The Bentusi integrated themselves in their ships. The Kadesh shielded themselves with progenitor artifacts. The Vaygr sealed themselves in cold sleep arks. When they finally emerged from their various forms of exile they found a much changed galaxy and their various reactions would shape galactic history for the next few millennia.

The final category is that of the young races. These are races that were primitives at the time of the progenitors or even during the hey day of the elder races. Some of them weren't even sapient. All of these races were deeply affected by the Progenitors simply by discovering their artifacts and reverse engineering scraps of their technology, but the effects go even deeper than that. It is widely believed by Bentusi biologists that the Progenitors actively tampered with the genetics of many or even most of these races.

Some of this tampering is more evident than others. The Hanar are believed to have been a particularly intelligent species of cephalopod during the time of the progenitors, perhaps even sapient, but direct progenitor intervention is believed to have given them their first civilization and enhanced their sapience. Their home world of Kahje is home to the Loom, the largest and most intact Prothean bioengineering station ever discovered. Unfortunately the Hanar's worship of the Enkindlers has lead them to denying any attempts to study it.

The Asari also received Progenitor attention to increase their longevity and expand their peculair method of reproduction to work on other species. It is also believed that the Krogans were tweaked to increase their hardiness, but most Progenitor interference on Tuchanka was in the introduction of thresher maw spores to increase the lethality of the planet even more. Apparently this was done in an experiment to see how much danger sapience could survive. This is take as evidence by most Bentusi archeologists that the Progenitors were not actually very benevolent despite their widely revered status. Or at least that they had a goal in their interference beyond simply uplifting other races.

Salarians appear to have been left mostly untouched though there is a suspiciously large jump in the intelligence of their evolutionary ancestors. Turians also appear to have been left alone, though certain elements of their mythology point to possible Progenitor contact and social engineering. Bentusi archeologists are still divided on what the intended effect of this was.

---

Quest Note: Some of this information may not match perfectly with previous codexes. That's partly because I don't remember everything I wrote, but also partly deliberate. These codexes are in game Bentusi documents Valerius is referring to and they don't always match. Especially about the prehistory stuff.

Belan System
Orbital Station Myr

The Illuminated Primacy does not skimp on their data security. For all their galactic reputation as floating preachers the truth is they are actually one of the most advanced galactic powers when it comes to intelligence operations and wet works. Only the Salarian Intelligence services surpasses their Drell Special Operatives. Even here on one of their secondary colonies the orbital station Myr's systems are protected by military grade encryption and hard links to data centers literally miles underwater.

Pitted against them are five young Bentusi mostly motivated by boredom and an increasingly restless desire to do something. The Myr's secure network never stood a chance. A stealth probe latches onto the station and emits a trill of radio pulses that interface with backdoors unknowningly passed down from progenitor designs. Ancient security protocols activate and a data port opens that Laverna slips through like a shadow. Sub minds honed by millennia of Bentusi research crack the best galactic encryptions and Laverna brushes past the firewall like its made of cobwebs. With the way clear the rest of you enter the network and begin rifling through the government documents looking for something beyond petty bureaucratic rivalries.

Or at least you are, Iuno is reading the histories of those rivalries with rapt attention. Ulysses goes straight to the point and pulls up everything the Primacy has on the recent pirate attacks. Meanwhile Laverna keeps digging looking for a way through the remaining air gaps and hard links to the surface in order to access those underwater data centers. You'd applaud her dedication, but you know she actually just relishes the challenge. Aurora takes a quick look to make sure there aren't any dangerous counter measures Laverna missed and then withdraws to continue working on the fleet's maintenance cycles. However she is soon replaced by some of the Geth instances from Oracle-16 who appear to be evaluating the system for potential colonization. From what you can make out of their communication protocols they're curious about alien hardware, but somewhat disparaging of the lack of server space.

You keep one part of your awareness watching everyone else while the rest of it searches for patterns in the Primacies files. Some rational for why they requested help, but then ignored your arrival. You find a lot of cryptic letters shrouded in elaborate philosophy and religious metaphors. They seem to indicate that there is something in the nearby systems called the Red Current. The Primacy either doesn't want it exposed, doesn't want to find it themselves, or fear it coming for them. It's a little hard to parse their exact motivations, but what does seem clear is that they fear the pirates are in the thrall of the Current.

They wanted the Taiidan fleet to come to deal with the pirates as they trusted that the Taiidans strict military hierarchy and attendance to duty would see them fulfill the mission and leave without investigating further. The arrival of a Bentusi fleet has them in a panic, because Bentusi have a reputation for being fairly nosy when it comes to finding interesting artifacts. You honestly can't tell if they're worried for what will happen to you if you find the Red Current or themselves.

You send the raw logs and your conclusions to the rest of the fleet even as Ulysses transmits his analysis of the pirate fleet and their most likely current location. Everyone mulls it over for a few moments.

"So are we going after this Red Current?" Laverna sounds fairly interested in anything new and unknown.

Ulysses's response is predictable. "We should at least clean out the pirates first. It's what we came here for."

"Don't forget we're still waiting on the Hanar. I want to see what they have to say?" Iuno of course is more interested in the flicker races than anything else.

Aurora projects the collated star chart with three distinct sets of coordinates marked on it. "Have you all noticed that Yuttel's location doesn't match either of these coordinate sets. What's he after exactly?"

You consider the possibilities. You still have time to discuss it, but it does appear that you have several distinct paths to follow from here.

[ ] Head off in Search of Pirates
This is what you came here for. You've got definite coordinates now, and the likely location of the pirate base. Go clean them out.

[ ] Contact the Primacy Representative Again
Call the Hanar again and politely by firmly insisting they talk with you.

[ ] Follow up on the Red Current
It makes you a little uneasy to see anything described as red after your encounter with the wraiths and their viral contamination. It might just be a coincidence, but you should go check it out just to be sure.

[ ] Look for Yuttel's son.
Are there two sets of pirates? What's going on with Yuttel's request here? Does he have information that isn't in the Hanar's systems?

---

Whatever you decide to do there are advantages to just waiting around like this. For one thing it gives you more time to acquaint yourself with your new body. Your old one is currently tucked away in one of Iuno's hangers while you integrate with the massive sentinel cruiser Aurora built in the Kiln cluster.

Unfortunately it is taking you a while to get comfortable in your new skin as it is considerably slower than your old gatekeeper. It does pleasingly remind you of your old archer that you lost near the beginning of all this. However while that was a long range artillery ship this new cruiser is very much designed to charge into the middle of an enemy fleet and duke it out with other capital ships. Something which makes you look forward to your next encounter with a wraith carrier.

Still such future enticements only partially make up for the current lack of speed. You're used to zipping around space to go where you're needed. Now you're only slightly faster than Iuno. Even Aurora can outrun you. It isn't necessarily bad, but you are having to rerun all your tactical simulations and come up with new fleet formations to account for your lack of maneuverability.

You aren't the only one who's still getting used to their body either. Like most Bentusi Ulysses is fairly technically inclined, but his specialty is metallurgy with a focus on armor composition. Laverna took one look at his modifications to the siege cannon he found and forced him to hold still while she directed a swarm of resource drones to pull the whole thing out and reconfigure the power conduits he was using in the interface. Now Ulysses is complaining about the weight of the additional capacitor bank she forced on him, but you can tell he's actually quite eager to test the modified siege cannon.

---

[ ] Work on the Fleet
-[ ] Pick a Research Project.
-[ ] Pick a Character to work on the project.
-Current Options: Aurora, Iuno, Valerius, Ulysses, Flicker Friends

[ ] Pick a Codex/Interlude
-[ ] Write In
Pick something you'd like to know more about.