A/N: Just a little teaser. Added some stuff to next TWCD chapter for Editing Gang review. Still writing.
The Cerberus Files : Separatist Races
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Sir,
I am pleased that you found the hanar write-up useful. While it is often… stressful to work alongside Agent Brooks in any capacity, I do appreciate both the work she and Rasa did on the hanar military (which was probably incredibly dangerous), as well as giving me time to organize personal family events.
Tiffany's work on the Unseen Cloud seems to be both useful and accurate, although I do take into consideration Trellani's disdain for her attitude. I will not apologize for such, as money and influence and social height do not make up for the cruel barbs of other noble children taunting her about her mother, or the lack thereof in her life.
I would like to see Tiffany more fully integrated into Cerberus. I know the work we do is highly dangerous and that there is every possibility that things may go horribly wrong and she could be executed for grand treason. There is also every possibility, even if she works in the financial and diplomatic sections of Cerberus, of her being killed by STG goons or worse.
That being said, I must point out that despite her incredible talents, high intellect, prodigious learning capacity, and well-rounded physical assets (ah, poor choice of words, there)… ahem, impressive physical abilities, Operative Lawson is not exactly charismatic. I won't argue with you at this time who should lead the project. Instead, I will point out that the entirety of Project Revenant is costing us a literally staggering amount of money and resources, and we need additional sources of such to keep moving forward.
Tiffany has completed her master's degree in intergalactic finance and economics, both at the University of Arcturus and through correspondence with the University of Sur'Kesh (FTL Economics) and the Grande Salon of Vol Prime (Fiduciary Economics). On top of that, she has been managing House Minsta's funds for the past four years and has increased our wealth by almost forty percent in under three years.
With the death of Samuel Derjais in the chaos of Benedict, you have had to run economic operations yourself. I submit that with proper vetting, training, and, of course, a stern injunction against mouthing off to people like Leng, Tiffany would serve excellently as a director of the economic projects we have in the post, such as the deal with the von Graths and with House Drescher.
I, sadly, am both overloaded with increasing responsibilities to my House as my father's faculties slip further, as well as simply too burdened with running the Cerberus Scientific Directorate. My daughter believes, Mr. Harper, in a way some of our operatives have lost due to the trauma and tragedy they have suffered defending humanity, often from itself.
We need new blood. Shepard may or may not work out, but if she does, I somehow doubt she will long tolerate anyone of Cerberus who was around prior to Benedict. Having new faces like Tiffany may ameliorate this if we can show the organization is not merely the hater of the alien.
Forgive me for the long digression, but researching the hanar was incredibly stressful and somewhat frightening.
I now move onto the hanar's pawns, the drell. In a way, Mr. Harper, the drell are less alien than every other species out there, despite their outlandish appearance and freakish biology. Drell concepts include guilt, sin, manifest destiny, noblesse oblige, appreciation of stubbornness, defiance in the face of death, and a straightforward honor code.
Their society is not exactly what I would think is 'good,' but they are refreshingly honest and show a complete lack of hypocrisy in how they deal with others. They are also loyal beyond death – the race as a whole to the hanar, but individuals to those they owe an honor bond with.
Their culture is not overrun with sick fetishistic cults, mind-controlled 'unity,' disgusting experiments on children, cheat-beating barbarity that praises mindless slavish devotion to an honor code made entirely of hypocrisy, or obsessive-compulsive fixations on dominating the entire galaxy. They are a quiet, self-reflective people who focus more on living the lives they have than expending much effort on things they cannot.
It is something of a shock to me that I find myself admiring an alien race, but I do. And perhaps that is good. Perhaps, in the biting rejoinders of our good asari, I am a bigoted terrorist… but I am not blindly bigoted.
An Overview of the Drell
Mindset
The three main driving forces in drell society are service, balance, and reflection.
Service is a constant throughout drell history, even prior to the hanar – a drell feels a need to serve another, in some capacity. Families are almost always dominated by either males serving a female or females serving a male (the gender matters less than one spouse is over several others). Drell businesses focus on mutual service contracts and lengthy, ironclad agreements. Most drell who leave Drell/Hanar Space are mercenaries in nature – be that military, or contractual agreements, or bids for hire. Only the most powerful and highest in drell society are free of this need.
Balance – balance of the life and soul, between work and leisure, between the gods and real life, between life and death – is another central component. The drell believe that being out of balance in anything will always bring discontent and distraction, and that evil and sin are all the results or symptoms of a lack of inner and outer balance. This does render drell morality and legal systems dreadfully tit-for-tat and an eye for an eye, but on the other hand, it seems to have produced staggeringly low instances of mental imbalance, depression, or suicide.
Finally, reflection on the perfect memories all drell have takes up much of their time. Drell often lose themselves in recalling such, and do so in an attempt to draw out new context or meaning from the same memories. Drell memory is terrifyingly precise, to the point a drell can glance at the pages of a book for less than a second a page and then recall the entire thing to read decades later. Drell focus on finding meaning in memory takes on some curious overtones that have led to the rise of arcane monastic orders like the Servants of Life and the Remembrance Dancers.
Culture
Drell culture varies wildly between the drell serving the hanar, the barbarians murdering each other in piles on Rakhana, and the 'free' drell who make their way through Citadel Space. Curiously enough, each group has the same broad strokes – a love of song, dance, and eating, a focus on feats of skill and prowess, a dedication to achieving a stated goal, a fondness for practical jokes, and a complex religious system.
The details, however, are so different that at a glance they seem like completely different subcultures, despite the underlying basis for each. All drell cultures share a single feature, an emphasis on living the life you have and making the most of it – be that in entertainment, the pursuit of wealth, scientific study, or what have you. The idea of a lazy drell is nonexistent and most drell pack every minute of the day not spent in reflection with activity.
Drell music and art are rich and diverse, and drell music is both almost tribally bombastic while possessing surprisingly elegant undertones and depth. Drell cooking and food practices are renowned far and wide, and drell architects are in high demand in Asari Space.
Military
The drell military is a curious force. Consisting of a handful of heavy-cruisers, over a hundred light-cruisers, and some three hundred frigates, destroyers, and combat assault ships, its primary purpose is light interdiction and policing of drell systems along the edge of Hanar Space. This force is backstopped by a slightly larger and much more dangerous group of drell ships utilizing limited hanar technology that is in direct service to the hanar.
The purely drell navy did not exist until the hanar decided they wanted the drell to integrate into Citadel society, and funded its construction so that the drell could make the required contribution to the Combined Citadel Fleets. One such ship was destroyed in the Benezia Incident at Feros, and thirty more were destroyed at the Battle of the Citadel at the end of the Benezia Incident.
I believe I made some mention of a drell army in my introductory section. I have studied this further, and I'm afraid that statement was in complete error.
There is absolutely no drell 'army.' The drell find the entire concept of a standing force of semi-professional killers who don't get to kill very often a mix of hilarious and incomprehensible. Even on Rakhana, the 'warbands' are more like mercenary groups that hire out to the warlords than standing armies.
Overall, drell mercenary forces make up the bulk of military power for the drell. (One might argue that there is little difference to standing mercenary forces serving the government from standing regular military forces doing so, but the drell think otherwise.) These are exquisitely trained, frightfully polite, and utterly amoral and discreet. Drell can (and have) killed other drell in service to aliens, although the hanar do not use them in such a manner.
Economy
Given the infuriating lack of an actual hanar economy, it should come as little surprise that the drell don't give much thought to it either. The hard lessons of Rakhana in terms of pollution, resource depletion, corporate greed, and privation have led the drell serving the hanar to mimic their masters as much as possible.
All drell in direct service to the hanar are paid in volus index bonds, which the hanar purchase directly from the volus to use for such things. The hanar only buy index 'A' and 'AA' bonds, the most valuable and expensive, which are marked to galactic eezo, platinum, exotic goods, and objets d'art. As a result, most Concordance drell are comparatively wealthy. The drell government taxes all of these drell fairly heavily and distributes the remainder not used by the government into a volus-managed pension index fund, which in turn provides a basic living income for all drell.
Rakhana does not have an economy so much as a post-apocalyptic barter system.
Drell outside of the Concordance usually integrate into the economy of their masters, although they make extremely bad merchants and do not have any interest in pursuing such things unless forced to.
Intelligence
Given that hanar are, shall we say, somewhat conspicuous and rarely leave their known locales, drell form the bulk of the intelligence services of both the Hanar Primacy and the Drell Concordance.
Drell are natural spies – perfect eidetic memory, outstanding reflexes and stealth, a known preference for mercenary work which takes them all over the galaxy, and the odd but useful ability to not really draw distaste from any race.
Most of the drell efforts are focused on locating Prothean ruins for the hanar, but they have also been dispatched for other reasons. More serious drell threats include Remembrance Dancers and some of the more obscure and combat-oriented cults of Amonkira, the Lord of Hunters, who act both as ritual vigilantes as well as bounty hunters.
The thrust of drell intelligence forces is almost totally military in nature – they either do not value or, more likely, are not utilized in pursuits such as technological research, economic data, financial trends, and the like. On the other hand, they are deeply involved in very… strange sorts of information gathering, such as searching oceanic worlds, reviewing archaeological digs of primitive species that died out before developing spaceflight, and other oddities. The reasons behind this are unknown, and speculation is ill-advised given how mysterious the hanar are.
Governance and the Hanar
On paper, the Drell Concordance governs and controls the thirty-plus drell colonies that border Hanar Space. They have no relationships (or concerns) about Rakhana beyond regular drops of survival supplies, and do not care about outlander drell.
In practice, despite the hanar's repeated statements that they are free, the Concordance sees itself as a hanar client state at best and, on most days, as servants. The Concordance is a theocratic oligarchy, a top-heavy structure that has religious leaders and important mercenary owners defining the rules, and the rest of the government mostly deployed in strictly public service measures.
This is almost as maddening as the hanar, since the Concordance 'governs' about as much as a modern-day Earth nation – police, fire and disaster relief, public maintenance, medical maintenance, and controlling zoning and the like. There is no taxation aside from the taxes on earnings from the hanar, and the government does not regulate financial or economic matters at all.
The religious side of things is practically more important than the legalistic side – many of the laws and strictures are drawn directly from the drell 'Book of Days.'
Rakhana, Yismas, and Ghellen
As is well-known, the drell race arose on a desert world known as Rakhana. They developed on roughly the same scale as humanity did in terms of technological advancement, although they had seven world-spanning Dark Ages and at least one near mass die-off.
Upon full industrialization, several devastating wars kicked off due to shrinking resources. The planet's ecosystem, never particularly strong, was further ruined by unceasing glaciation, heavy pollutants in the little remaining water, and no less than three violent nuclear exchanges. From a high in population of almost nine billion, less than seventy million drell survived.
The world was on the down spiral to a complete Malthusian collapse before the hanar intervened, 'uplifting' almost forty million drell to serve them. Those who refused this offer became known as the valkhana – 'those who refuse.' The world continued to suffer and centuries later, many valkhana accepted resettlement from the asari and salarians to Yismas.
Drell under the hanar were originally relocated to Kahje, but the humid nature of the world and aggressive spores killed tens of thousands and sickened more. The hanar scouted and terraformed (in a shockingly frightening short span of time) six desert worlds, which it settled the drell onto. The drell in the Concordance have expanded from this humble beginning to some thirty colonies, plus a good dozen resource or mining bases with more than one hundred thousand drell. Ghellen, the first world terraformed, is now their capital.
Those drell who accepted the offer of the Council settled on the dry hellworld of Yismas, which was useless to both asari and salarians. Drell have performed some minor terraforming on the world, but mostly it is an armed mercenary camp – a dark and forbidding planet from which independent drell sell their services to the highest bidder. These non-Concordance drell share the same language and religion as their servile cousins, but do not revere the hanar.
A few million barbaric holdouts still fight and survive on Rakhana itself, even as hanar nanotech cleans up pollutants and regulates temperature. At the current rates, Rakhana will be fully livable again in a century, although almost all useful resources have been exhausted. Rakhana drell language is a patois that is barely translatable, and their tech level intermixes industrial and modern weapons with ancient building and farming techniques. Compared to other drell, Rakhana drell are known for being surly and insular.
Technology
It is hard to pin down where drell technology 'starts' and gifts from their masters 'end.' To be fair, drell do have some things they've invented themselves, particularly in the area of UV sensors and biotic invocations.
The primary drell building materials – a reddish metal and a greenish one – do not correspond to anything we have on the periodic table, and the substances in question are clearly highly advanced plasma-forged nano-constructs, probably produced by the hanar. Drell weapons and armor systems are also hanar in nature, although the drell refit such things for their own body shape.
Drell weapons and naval technology are at least fifteen years beyond current Citadel state-of-the-art, with their Concordance heavy warships recently sporting the hanar Prism Lance technology in limited numbers.
Threat
A hard value to assign, sir.
In theory, they are a more severe threat than hanar, simply given their abilities. In practice, however, they rarely act without both direction from their masters and a signed mercenary contract.
Any assault on Hanar Space must penetrate Drell Space heavily, and invasion is likely to be extremely costly for any Citadel power. With no standing army, you would assume they would be easy picking, but every civilian is trained in how to use, at the very least, personal defense weapons and kinetic shielding.
Hanar civil response units (AKA The Sympathy) distributes hanar SMGs, medical kits, bugout bags, kinetic shields, and omni-tech assets to drell civilians quarterly.
The outsider drell are harmless since they only act upon mercenary contracts, and the drell on Rakhana are savages killing each other at the clip of twenty to thirty thousand people a year.