A/N: Next up is the OCC Spoilers I know you've all been waiting for...but first, jellies of note!


The Cerberus Files: Separatist Races

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OMG! Minsta let me write another one. Happiness!

It really sucks that Helnet won't let me send graphics, big man.

So. Hanar big shots. Wow, this is gonna be a short section if you want hanar inside the Ascendancy, since they change all. The. Freaking. Time.

Soooo...we won't do that. In honor of lil' Tiffany popping her racist-nutjob cherry and joining the Dog, I present :

Hanar bombed on weed of the Citadel, and that guy from Fornax who puts up all the hot drell and schemexy turian photos. Please please please make sure you copy Doc M on this.

On a more serious note … hanar inside the Ascendancy are very difficult to identify, since they change the Chorii every ten years and no one hanar ever speaks up. That's not to say they are interchangeable – the High Chorii of the past seven years is pretty laid back, the ones before had a hard-on for intruders and was almost hostile, and the ones before THAT were super-chummy with Aria.

But without any way of identifying these jellies, matching images to actions is tricky. I've semi-cheated by aggregating a few at the end of this report by discussing teh current Highest Chorii. Chorus. Whatever.

The ones that are famous in space outside of the Ascendancy all start out sounding nice or silly… and then turn completely mindfuck scary, and those titles of theirs take on nightmarish ironic overtones. Seriously, fuck what Trellani says, we need to kill these creepypasta gasbags ASAP.

Cerberus Thought of the Day: Success is commemorated. Failure merely remembered.


Delanyder the Indulgent

The most well known and famous of the Ninety-Four, and the perceived 'leader' of the Citadel group, Delan runs a big emporium and engineering services store in Kithoi. They sell mostly standard tech 'tweaked' for underwater operation, upgrade weapons with scary-efficient frictionless rail systems, and provide 'insight' into some Prothean tech – even doing so for the Council on occasion.

Wow. That almost sounded professional, didn't it?

Delan himself is supposedly called the Indulgent because he like to get drunk and sing poetry while wandering in the Presidium. He once serenaded a quarian couple on Pilgrimage, then gave them a half million credits and told them to go far from the 'station wrapped in the clouds of future tears and deaths , painted in the ironic corpses of a thousand cycles of victims."

Whatever that means.

Finding really hard info on Delan is more difficult than it sounds. Over the years he's been a fixture, appearing on various shows, always willing to do interviews and all that jazz. But going over it all you don't get much hard information on Delan himself, except that he's a lot cagier than he lets on.

One thing that does stand out is he's not a very good businessman, often selling his services well below what people would happily pay, and sometimes even below cost. Now, this HAS prevented anyone else from doing the kinds of things his group does, but it is a net money loser. Rasa taught me a long time ago if you're doing shit that is losing money you must be making a profit in something besides money.

So what's his angle?

Going over the stuff he's said also reveals that he's made a number of creepy-ass references that, until Nazara showed up, made zero sense. Shit like "one must always be aware that the assumption of origins of the nature of the Enkindlers is only assumption" and "the Citadel is a flower of death, not of life, fueled by and built on those who died ignorant of its true purpose."

That worries me. It worries me because he might have known what the Citadel was going to be planned for before Nazara even showed up, which in turn makes me ask "how" and "who told him?"

Note I don't ask : "why didn't he just come out and say it plain?" First, hanar don't say anything plain. Second, be honest : if a jelly told us the Citadel was a trap and big AI death robots from beyond the galactic rim were going to show up and kill us, everyone would have thought he was making another weird drunken joke.

A few other things don't add up.

Delan's group of 'engineers' are certainly very handy with weapons tech of all kinds – they were the ones who broke down exactly how the sine-wave speed alteration shit the geth used on their rifles worked, and rumor has it the Palavanus sent them some stuff from their new Thanix cannon to ask questions. Except the Palavanus don't consult with any-fucking-body according to Pel. Ever. For anything at all. So, WTF?

On top of that is the dude himself. Delan was attacked twice by assailants, and in both cases he killed them very nearly instantly – broken neck for a turian, injected neurotoxins and putrefactive agents for the other attacker, a pissed off asari. Now, according to what I know, most hanar don't train in personal combat skills unless they are military...and they stay military for life.

So is Delan ex-military? He knows a LOT about engineering, and very little about selling. He talks a lot of poetry and religious stuff and sort of passes himself off as a priest...but he never actually has CALLED himself a priest.

According to the valkhana, priests don't use weapons or kill. Huh. Makes me wonder why an military hanar is passing himself off as a drunken idjit.

Personality? Delan's a damned blank. He acts silly and airheaded and then calmly explains the best mods to take down SIU armor at range with for any weapon you can name. He gets drunk and wanders about … yet these wanderings take him all over the place, and who knows what kind of eavesdropping tech he has? He claims he's not very good at being an engineer since he's a 'simple thinker', but some of the more innovative stuff his people came up with – using purely Citadel tech – baffled the best salarian engineers for months before they figured it out.

The whole Indulgent nickname thing puzzles me too. One of the STG reports Minsta skimmed over had some stuff in their about injected toxins and the like not working because of the hyper-efficient filtration systems. Which makes me ask: if they can filter out most poisons and simple drugs...how is he supposedly drunk?


Farmas the Denied

The Fornax pimp-lord himself!

Compared to most hanar, Farmas is slightly larger, and he's hacked off the ends of his leading tentacles to replace them with sex tools. (That sounds really nasty, BTW. I really hope he sprung for an autosterilize routine.) He's witty, a bit less drifty when he talks, and all of his poetry tends to the gushy and sexually explicit.

Farmas is the 'leader' of the hanar at the Vabo's biggest colony, and the personal hanger on of Ielisia Vabo, the daughter of the Matriarch, who is completely besotted with the jelly – like, she has panic attacks when he's not around. I've heard of being sprung, but damn, girl. Get a grip.

Farmas spends a lot of his time drilling the shit out of Ielisia, but is hardly loyal to her. By his own boasting admission, Farmas has tagged over two thousand asari, a hundred turian ladies, some quarian females, and six human females (including, of course, our lovely party girl Aish Ashland. Girl gets around more than Chambers does!)

Farmas is about as straightforward as hanar get, claiming he's in it for parties, wild sex, crazy adventures and having a blast. He's also making a killing in selling and producing Fornax, which has gone from a simple extranet kink site to a full blown corporation, with local 'intermix clubs', full service 'social interaction events', glossy haptic magazines, nine movies, a news program, a lingerie line, condoms, turian fertility drugs, sex-toys for every race (including vorcha?) and their own brand of quarian nerve-stim implants.

Goddamn, boy.

Farmas tweaked his own speech processor to literally speak like a slimy porn star in turian porn flicks, and is supposedly called the Denied because he keeps trying to get in bed with Uressa T'Shora and she keeps (laughingly) shooting him down. All of his cash goes into the communal Vabo hanar fund, and is basically blown on drugs, liquor, sex parties, expensive lodgings, and the like. He's got a six million credit expense account with Nova Pharmacetutal on developing stronger and crazier hallucinogenic and psychotropic drugs.

(Aside: Farmas downed a fucking liter of turian horchess straight out of the bottle and chased it with two bottles of krogan ryncol and said it 'tickled'. I'm calling bullshiat on Delan's drunkenness.)

Farmas has been loudly expressing he sees the Citadel Races as "walking ghosts" and that he's here to have fun and memorialize us before we're all gone – and that we'll be gone sooner rather than later. The asari, who at this point probably can't even walk straight or think after being fucked silly for the past century, claim the hanar mean that people die and need memorialization, through siari or whatever the hell that stuff is. But to me? With the recent shit we learned about Reapers, that is COMPLETELY creepy as all fuck and has more to do with he thinks we're all gonna get wiped. Does he expect to survive? Maybe the Enkindlers are actually Reapers? It would explain their fuck-all technology.

Anyway, digging dirt on this guy is just as hard as finding shit on Delan is. We know he spends half his day banging asari and putting together porn vids, and then the other half in his private tower on Vabo lands, which are a teensy bit impossible to infiltrate given the hordes of House Vabo guardians and the two freaking war priestesses that hang out there.

But we can follow his money. While he chunks everything he makes into the communal account, the interest from said account is, oddly enough, being invested through some shady and discreet links with, of all fucking people...Barla Von Financial. The same bank the Citadel Hanar use, and who is a clear Broker front.

Here's the real kicker. About a year back, just after the bullshit with Shepard getting offed blew up, is when this investment started – before then, the interest was just left in the regular account. So why the change?

Hard to say.

Farmas wants really hard to sound like a party dude. But again, the fact his personal bodyguards are six Remembrance Dancers who claim to have 'retired' doesn't paint that picture very well, now does it? Also, Fornax Corporation, for a fucking porn site, has cyberdefenses even the STG hasn't cracked yet. Vigil said he'd take a look and came back saying he was sure he could break through but not before being detected and possibly attacked – there are live AI's, as in multiple, many, hooked up to the Fornax datanet.

I recommend quietly tipping C-SEC Computer Criminal Investigation off to this factoid and seeing what rolls out.


Ithorex the Unready

Hands down, the all-time 'what the fuck' winner of the Hanar awards is this guy. Ithorex (he likes to be called Rex) hangs out on the Citadel in Kithoi and styles himself a 'problem solver' and 'simple artesian'.

The problems the guys 'solves' are usually ones involving people who need to die. Rex himself does not ever leave his little shop, and when someone turns up dead inevitably has an iron-clad alibi witnessed by C-SEC officers in person.

Yet if you want someone dead, this is the guy you go to. He runs a small knicknack shop in the Lower Kithoi, where he carves and sells little figurines of coral shapes. They're actually pretty good. If you go in and request one in black coral, he'll ask for an image you want to use.

Give him the picture of a target and in exactly ten days the person will be dead.

For some images, he'll look at them, and hand them back, saying he doesn't have the skills for such a commission. But most time he takes the job, and sends the customer a carved coral figurine ten days later of the now dead person.

C-SEC has been dying to arrest this guy for sixty years and they can't get ANYTHING to stick. The kills are complete creepy-pasta. People have shown up dead inside locked, secured rooms, on spaceships on the far side of the galaxy, in the middle of camps of mercenaries hired to protect them, and so on. One guy hired the Broker to protect him, and was dead ten days later with an entire fucking level ten liquidation team massacred around him.

One guy was on a ship deep in Aria's space and literally timed his FTL trip to be at the end of the ten days, since he'd been tipped off. The ship had a random FTL failure mid-flight and came apart right at the ten day point.

No one hears anything or sees anything. No evidence. The wounds in every one of these cases (except a very few, like the FTL failure) are some kind of mono-edged blade or possibly mono-molecular impact whip. No fragments of armor, DNA, skin, cells, anything has ever been found. No money trail of him paying anyone to do these hits.

Rex says he's just a shy artist, and his name of the Unready comes from him failing to complete an important commission on time. What a load of bullshit.

Digging deeper into this person's background is beyond me or Rasa, you need to send serious hard asses like Ezno or the Odd Couple for this level of hax bullshit. I mean, I like danger and all, and I'm sure I could talk my way out of it...except if I can't, I don't wanna be a shitty coral carving, you know?


Lansisas the Silent

Hanar are just fucking trolling us, I swear.

Lanisas the Silent is a hanar preacher on the Citadel who constantly rails at passersby in Kithoi to find the light of the Enkindlers and turn away from false states of existence. C-SEC arrests this guy at least once a week, the hanar bail him out, and he's back at it.

He's almost never actually silent.

Unlike the previous three, he's not creepy in and of himself. But some of what comes out of his mouth is terrifying.

A sample:

Six months before Eden Prime: "The Enkindlers will send a sign, a darkness that will blot out the easy living in the shallows. And you will ignore it,and tell yourselves all is well, when this darkness fades. But darkness does not die, and when the tide is upon you, say not that this one did not warn you of your dangers."

Or this:

Two weeks after Benezia died: "This one says that the tides that sweep in good news only bring you sorrow. The words upon the wall are stark and clear; yet fools see the discarded brush used to write them and made glad sayings, thinking the danger is passed. If you cannot see the danger in your own faces, by your own hands and the hands of your sons and daughters, how then can you see that in plain sight that you have ignored forever?"

Or maybe this:

A week after Shepard's death "The wails of the lost are no comfort to those who know the reasons behind these things. This one would warn you again, but ears will not hear and tongues will still wag after the memory of the pain is gone. You have already lost the only one who could have heeded the warning: now you smear the very memory with focused forgetfulness."

We've been taking a lot of what this guy says and trying to piece it together, and my best guess?

Assuming I'm going through what he's saying accurately, the Reapers know we blew up Nazara, but we aren't important enough – yet – for the hammer to fall. But someone is already preparing that hammer and we ourselves will bring it down on our heads if we are not careful. The Enkindlers are working to save us, but salvation requires blood and pain, and submission, and if we turn away when the sacrifice is presented, we'll all die.

I don't know how to link this to anything we can currently evaluate, big man. But it worries me a lot.


Moriggi the Peaceful

Ahahaha no.

Wow, these hanar are really blatant with the mockery in their nicknames.

Moriggi (like to be called "Gi") is the so-called 'weapons expert' at Delan's Emporium, and the only hanar we've seen with heavy external cybernetics. Three of his tentacles are mechanical in nature, two of them with built in omni-shields of some kind, and a sort of framework with armor covers most of his right side, along with mounting hardware of some kind.

Moriggi claims he believes in pacifism for all beings. Based on the skills he shows at the C-SEC practice range open to the public, I doubt that. The guy can make headshots on targets at 120 yards with four pistols firing at four targets, and is every bit as good as Delan at providing tactical advice when choosing weapon or armor mods from the Emporium.

Aside from Delan and Farmas the Pimp Lord, Moriggi is the most often seen hanar on the extranet, and is usually in contact with a lot of mercenary groups, weapons manufactures, and the like. Tracing this network of contacts has proven exhausting and of very little actual use – Moriggi seems to source components they sell on the Citadel from lots of places, and then recombine them into new forms.

Every weapon he sells is custom built from the ground up, and flawless. And everything comes with a lifetime guarantee and freaking life insurance – they'll pay your surviving kin if one his weapons fails in a fight that ends up with you dead.

No one has ever collected on this shit … huh. Maybe I need to replace my shotgun.

One thing stands out about this one is his public statements on pacifism. At first listen it sounds pretty much like what it says on the tin : he thinks violence is bad and should be avoided. But if you start to really dissect what he's saying, between the lines there's another message:

You people suck at war and you should really not piss off the Hanar Ascendancy anymore, or the next Refusal War will be the Last Refusal War.

Moriggi hangs out, when he's not at the Emporium, in the chambers of the Citadel Council, in the lower section open to the public. His only known hobby is coming up with various genetic splices of fish from Kahje, which he doesn't sell but gives away as gifts to customers. Supposedly they're really good.


Iochais the Simple

Iochais is the most 'enlightened' philosopher-priest of the Ninety-four, and is deferred to by most of the exiled hanar almost as much as they defer to Delan or Farmas. He rarely speaks in public, tends to hang around the Kithoi ward uppers in his own little tower, and on first glance is unimportant.

Wrong. Wrong!

From what I can figure out, Iochais is 'senior' to Delan and Farmas, and is an actual priest who we can confirm was once on the Highest Chorus. In fact, his distinct appearance – several cross hatched scars on his flank from some form of sea-life on Kahje – match up with the speaker of the Highest during the First Refusal War.

That would make him very, very old indeed.

It took a good amount of digging and the like, but Vigil was able to identify some really sneaky and super-well encrypted comm channels between Farmas and Iochais, and Rasa and I observed him speaking several times to Delan just before Delan was to go on some extranet show. Iochais himself has a trio of 'retired' Remembrance Dancers – and some truly ugly automated security systems near and in his tower abode.

Iochais has never given interviews or appeared on the extranet, and his only interaction is a series of written philosophy-poems and some hanar 'artwork'. Asking hanar about them inevitably ends with them saying something like 'this one is not worthy to comment on the enlightened nature of Iochais the Simple."

Reading his philosophy will break your head open.

The most … disturbing one, called 'Reflections on the Nature of Is', is actually illegal in Citadel space, because people reading it have a nasty tendency to commit suicide. The snippet I managed to find online was bad enough:

The futile nature of emotion and intellect

is to realize these are not higher thoughts

They are not emergent, measured aspects of intellect

They are chemical impulses, animal instincts

Sentience is a lie, sapience a wave of the manipulator

One might as well call fire alive

One might as well call chlorine reactions reflexes

How can anything have meaning when a machine

Can imitate everything you call 'life'?

The troubling thing about this maybe ex-High Chorus jelly is this: we've been told the Ninety-four originally left hanar space due to philosophical differences. The hanar who've come here don't appear to be doing much to demonstrate exactly what these differences are.

So...when you ask about the differences, you rarely get a straight answer. Delan and Farmas's philosophies appear to clash. An Elcor Lifemaster once asked Iochais his own view, and got this for an answer:

If one has a field of beautiful flowers

gleaming in high-bright radiance (note: hanar word for UV radiance)

blown gently by unseen breezes,

Shaped delicately, scattered in innocent fields unaware

even as the tidal waves approach to wipe all clean

is it better to commit them to memory from a distance, to remember their radiance in the sun

or to save them from the flood, to preserve the seed of what they are to replant, to see the sun again

when the waves have gone down for a time.

The wise will say that the waves will return, again and again

To save them is the stubborn idiocy of belief in choice, in hope

To memorize them is to give them eternity, immune to the death of the physical

The fool will say they have their own value

That memory fades, and to deny them a chance to grow once more in the sun is sad

But life is its own reward, it has no purpose but joy

The Enlightened will say the point of the flowers is not to live, or die

To be memorialized, or to be saved and replanted anew

but to remind one that but for the grace of the Enkindlers

You would be just another flower, unaware.

We watch, not to remember, not to bring salvation, but in humble gratitude.


On the Highest Chorus of today:

The current bunch of priest-guys is more laid back than previous Chorii. The very few communications the races of the Citadel have had with them have been brief and to the point.

The destruction of Nazara had them demand we turn over the wreckage as 'Prothean artifacts'. When the Council claimed the wreck was not Prothean, the hanar sent back a rather cryptic message:

'Tampering with what one does not understand only opens more doors one is unprepared to deal with."

Since then, they've mostly been mum about the incident, although it's worth noting Delan's group has been called on several times for feedback and analysis and they all acted like this was hilarity.

Weirdness.

On other aspects, the Chorus is talking with the Batarian Emperor a lot, and with Aria. Getting spies inside the Black Palace is not ever going to be possible, big man. But we have a few insights into what they talked to Aria about – the protocol for faking up asari we tested out still works pretty good.

Supposedly, the Ascendancy is concerned that Aria is hostile towards the Collectors, and seemed to indicate that Aria should leave well enough alone, or that it might threaten trade. Aria's answer was pretty angry, and the hanar haven't brought it up since, but have been doing a larger portion of trade with the Batarians and turian separatist groups since the communication.


Final Notes:

We got a lot of strange moving pieces that don't add up to make sense. Might be time to take a few risks and get us more people...it's just us few operators, and we're about exhausted.

That's all I've got. Minsta said he'll be back at Moonbeam by this weekend to start on the drell stuff, which should be a bit easier to work – probably want some more military insight into that, since the drell are pretty nasty in a fight that doesn't involve planets with water vapor in the atmosphere.

I included a big attachment to this – complete edition of the 2181 Fornax Spread on Asari. Make sure Doc M gets it!

Arrivederci!