Jump 176: Mass Effect

Jump 176: Mass Effect

Location: Illium
Age: 28
Identity: Human, Drop-In, Engineer
Drawbacks: [+300] Reaper's Eye

[400/1300]  Exemplar
[800/1300]  Apostate
[1300/1300] Tongue Of A Shepard
[Free]      Loadout

The day that the Alliance disappeared from the galactic stage was a day that humanity discovered the Citadel Council's true colors.

There were any number of reasons this could happen, but their diplomatic mission had been recalled on the eve of the deployment of the first human spectre. He was still deployed - red tape waits for no one, after all - but the mission went south, the spectre training him was killed, and with the diplomatic mission recalled they dismissed the potential recruit. The Hanar spectre was not as successful as any had hoped, but had the experience to track down and end Saren before much else could happen. What happened to the "Geth dreadnought" was, from there, a mystery.

The Council thought little more of it other than sending another spectre to try to chase down the alleged rogue spectre that the failed one had reported, and who had reacted so poorly when confronted. The Normandy, on the other hand, didn't make it through the encounter unscathed, and so was considered a failure. Rather than mothballed or repaired, it was given to the human diplomatic mission as a derelict.

And so Jane Shepard and Admiral Hackett found themselves as freelance agents with a damaged ship, a motley crew including the few survivors of the Geth attack on Eden Prime and a handful of assorted aliens, and Shepard's bank account having a suspiciously larger number of zeroes than it did when she'd walked into the Council chambers. With an abundance of time on her hands, she chose to pursue a number of leads to try to figure out what everything came together about - and what happened to humanity.

The mass relays leading into Sol had stopped working, and the other human worlds seemed abruptly abandoned; the Council claimed that after the attack on Eden Prime humanity must have been spooked and withdrew to their system, where some unspecified disaster cut off contact. Those stating the timeline didn't line up were called conspiracy theorists and dismissed.

Thanks to a Quarian that Shepard had met, she had a lead on where to get the Normandy repaired - the Nomad Fleet were experts on making ships last after all, and Tali'Zorah bringing back a ship with bleeding edge technologies was a boon, even if the systems could only be studied rather than outright taken out.

More recruits were found, more data was gathered, and in time the truth was found on both matters. Reapers. An attack by the supposed dreadnought on the Citadel was thwarted by a fleet of all the Citadel races - Shepard had been able to find data indicating what was going to happen thanks to the schism in the Geth collective - and with the addition of what few human ships were still present in Citadel space, it fled after having taken damage. Without the aid of a relay, it laid in a course that seemed to be pointed directly at Sol.

The rag-tag human fleet was unassisted by any others, but pushed their ships to the limit. When they could not use relays any longer, they went the slower path from Arcturus, stopping in a handful of systems to discharge the energy buildup before continuing toward Sol, hoping to intercept the Reaper.

They did not expect for Sol to seemingly disappear when their distance had closed to half a light year, and understandably this led to a great deal of panic in the fleet, but the plan remained the same - try to transmit to the assorted stations as soon as they got into the system, discharge the drives at Neptune, and go from there. After all, they knew where Neptune should be, and it was on their path of approach.

To their collective surprise, they found that Neptune was indeed intact, even if they didn't see anything from the inner system and all stations seemed to have disappeared. It was only as they approached Saturn that they discovered that they also could not see beyond the inner system - it was too dark to discern what it was, but something was present. Something massive.

Undaunted, the fleet continued on. What had they to lose? They had come this far. And unexpectedly, screaming past came the Reaper, straight toward the object. The fleet followed in hot pursuit, only for the Reaper to come to a stop shrt of the surface of the object, a massive structure. A dyson sphere.

They could only see that it was studded with towers laid out in a hexagonal grid when the peaks of those towers lit up with a sickly green, crackling energy slicing out across the void and into the reaper - slicing through its hull, the pieces disintegrating into glowing gold cinders.

The Normandy and the human fleet being contacted was quite unexpected, as was their invitation to enter the shell as a massive panel opened not too far from them. Years later, a refit Normandy emerged once more as a part of a fleet of advanced ships, and Shepard travelled the mass relay network throughout the galaxy uncovering Prothean artifacts (and in one case a live Prothean) and trying to prepare worlds for the return of the Reapers... along with one other task: finding the reapers' makers and extracting them. The Leviathans were caught by surprise by their locations being seemingly divined, and their psionic abilities being utterly ineffective.

In the end, the damage the Reapers did to most of the galaxy was not as much as had been feared, but only because of humanity's parting gift to them - an effective defense, and one that could even uncover and reverse indoctrination. The vast majority of the Reaper fleet tried to strike Sol, as that was the source of the resistance.

The Reapers as a fleet, attacking as one, were no more effective than Nazara; they found out to their detriment that the defenses of Sol stretched to beyond the mass relay at the edge of the system, and they were atomized.

Once it was all over, humanity retreated back to its homeworld. Later expeditions would report that there was no truth to the rumor of the dyson shell - just an unoccupied system, without any planets in the system save the moonless gas giants.