A/N: Quarian history is always going to be a mess, but I've done what I could.

TWCD should be updating Sunday, October 8th! This will tide you over until then, hopefully.

The Cerberus Files: Outcast Races

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Beloved,

While I am saddened our small vacation together due to the collapse of Cerberus is now over, I am pleased to report none of my own projects seem to have been affected. There was a good reason why I kept my own little messes quite separate from yours, aside from distrust of Williams and the late unlamented Rachel.

I do recall pointing out some time ago that a relli does not cease to be poisonous simply because one has put it into a terrarium. And that simply having the antidote to its bite does not mean one should let themselves be bitten. The events of the past month – especially what it seems Matriarch Benezia was actually attempting to pull off – should be a sharp reminder to you that excess in any fashion is unhealthy.

I, myself, remain in some state of shock. Benezia was… instrumental in me becoming involved in the Temple of Athame, and was both a mentor professionally and a sponsor of my own business and archaeological interests. The idea that she, of all the people I know, would actually think enslavement or worse under the Reapers was better than fighting… does not match the person I remember.

Then again, Benezia was always a hypocrite. The Triune was little more than the sneering dismissal of any intelligent being to find a meaningful path in life not determined by Benezia's whim, and to call it 'patronizing' (or perhaps, 'matronizing') is an understatement at best. I remain astounded Aethyta did not simply murder her – I can tell you that while Aethyta's appetites have created more than one bastard purebred, you'll never hear a single rumor of her being unfaithful to Benezia, while the reverse is not true.

And now I am engaging in asari gossip. Forgive me, the past month has been a whirlwind of events I am still attempting to sort through.

According to the good Doctor Minsta, we have never actually bothered to do a field assessment of any kind on the quarians. Up until this point, I suspect this was due to pragmatic necessity – a ragged band of what he calls 'gypsy thieves and flea market engineers' was probably not a high Cerberus priority. Despite the size of their Migrant Fleet, much of it was simply useless in any line of battle due to the age and decayed capacities of the ships in question.

As we have now seen, however, their so-called Heavy and Scout Fleets were fully capable of engaging even superior geth ships. While the quarians have taken staggering casualties – seventy thousand dead, two hundred thousand badly wounded, and fifteen thousand left medically incapacitated – alongside severe ship losses of over five hundred vessels, they remain a power.

A power which, I might add, is hardly likely to view the asari, turians, or salarians in a kindly light, given how the Citadel treated them for the past few centuries.

Now that they have a seat on the Citadel Council alongside humanity, Minsta seems to think they can be manipulated for gain. I submit that attempting to do so without a deeper understanding of the quarians is doomed to failure, although I agree with the basic premise that he has. The quarians, unlike the salarians or my own people, have no convincing reason to compete with rather than cooperate with humanity, and the worlds they need are often useless to humans.

Thus, while I have been waiting for you to contact me, I've amused myself by pulling together some of the needed information for a full Cerberus File, which I understand should have been planned alongside the batarian and krogan pieces. Myself and Agents Brooks and Rasa have located a facility on Caleston, which should serve for our investigation of the quarians.

Quarian history is fascinating. No matter what lies or smears the Thirty may spread about me, I was one of the premier historians and archaeologists of my people, and my interest in such things has not waned so much as been set to one side. It amuses me to be able to indulge my curiosity in such a report.

Since I have not lived among the quarians as I did with the salarians I fear much of this report is likely to be somewhat speculative. I've interviewed several quarians, both fleet and outcast, and one elderly outcast in particular provided some information that seems to clash with the 'official' history.

Cerberus Thought of the Day: Wisdom is in knowing when to avoid what seems like opportunity.

Historical Overview : Known Prehistory

Quarian history is a curious field of study, as there are simply no possible methods of performing conventional archaeological findings given the fact their homeworld is crawling with billions of geth. While some information was, of course, gathered while the quarians interacted with the greater Citadel society in the years before the Geth Rebellion, the fact remains that Rannoch was strictly regulated in allowing any alien beings to visit it. Indeed, it was only my own studies that gave me the opportunity to see the world in-person, and even then I was certainly kept far away from archeological digs for religious and cultural reasons.

That being said, the quarians are a curiously backward looking and ancestor-obsessed people, and in their flight from the homeworld, took time to make sure they had a clear picture of their biological ancestry and origins. And what we do know of their prehistory is curious.

In particular, a Doctor Venla'Caan vas Shental was able to provide me with scans of prehistorical evolutionary ancestors of the quarians and much of their known biological origins, the results of which were… intriguing.

Quarians are very closely related to turians, although not as tightly as humans and asari are related. If you removed the metallic plating from a turian, what you would have would very closely resemble a quarian. Based on the information from the genetics, it's very possible quarians were perhaps an offshoot of whatever 'original' baseline creature was used by some later alien to create the turian people.

This is, of course, speculative, beloved. Doctor Caan was careful to note that her research was… controversial, to say the least. While the fact that the Message exists is no doubt why the Lords of Sol were so accepting of the concept of asari as cousins, the turian and quarian mindsets are not so similar. Fleet and Flotilla notwithstanding, there is more conflict than consorting done between the two.

And I digress once more.

What little we do know about quarian prehistorical times is sadly limited by not only the lack of archaeological access, but quarian superstition. (For such a technically minded people, their beliefs are nearly krogan in simpleminded silliness.) What we do know paints a picture of a race that evolved to survive a somewhat harsh world.

Idiots have described the world of Rannoch as 'arid.' Having walked upon its shores and cooled my feet in its streams centuries ago, that is only accurate if one ignores the oceans and seas that cover a large portion of the world. The ancient quarians were, even before recorded history, clever engineers. Quarian historians suggest that while quarians only mastered fire half a million years ago, they'd built crude boats and canoes as long back as two million years ago.

Prehistoric quarian settlements were done by large, clan-based formations of loosely related families. There was, much like the asari, sharp differences in the clans that eked out an existence in the inland plains and mountains and those who sailed the seas, but the nature of such has been sadly and tritely summarized by quarian historians as merely cultural posturing.

Recorded History : the Athorak Empire and the Rhaan Confederation

Seventy-two hundred years ago, a band of quarians with a talent for organization and raiding terrorized the coasts near the center of Rathah, the central continent. Bold, daring, and, if the legends are accurate, innovative, these pirate nomads smashed the nascent agricultural civilizations along the coasts to burning ruins.

At some point, a warrior of the coastal tribes, Athorak Zora, united a large number of warriors from other tribes and even some from inland to meet the invaders, themselves led by a chieftain-queen known as Urasi Rhaan. (Quarians have some level of sexual dimorphism, like most races, but unlike almost all others, have no history of any functional differences in leadership between male and female.)

Zora and Rhaan clashed a dozen times in pitched desperate battles before Rhaan was defeated and captured, her fleets scattered and most of her tribe of outcasts and criminals executed. Before she could be brought to justice, however, she somehow escaped (and there are legends about said escape that I will come back to, later, in the cultural notes).

Athorak used this as an excuse to further organize the tribes, and in ten years they formed a crude but effective nation-state. Writing and tally-keeping had been around before this point, it seems, but was done on wooden slates in animal blood, and were not kept. Athorak was the first to have important information (such as the 'official' history of the Empire) instead inscribed on stone slates and stelae, some of which the quarians still have on display in their liveships.

In the span of perhaps a decade, Athorak and his tribe-nation absorbed a dozen other tribes, using the escaped Urasi Rhaan as a casus belli each time. Eventually Rhaan fell in with the surly and insular mountain tribes of the western continent, marrying herself to some chieftain-king there who refused the demands of now Emperor Zora to hand over the 'criminal.'

The mountain clans, threatened by the expanse of the tribes under Athorak, banded together in a loose confederation. This in turn prompted Athorak to further unify the quarians under his leadership, and in year one of the quarian calendar, he raised the standards of what would become the Athorak Empire.

Much of the history of the Empire is legends, fables, and stories, filled with conflicts against the evil and debased Rhaan Confederation. Ultimately, the two continued to expand and absorb other tribes.

Five centuries after the death of Athorak, the Empire covered almost the entire central continent. Meanwhile, the Rhaan Confederation, much more loosely organized, only held half the land of the Empire – but its ships owned the seas. The two continued to battle and fight over meaningless issues until other problems overtook them.

Recorded History : the Dark Times

The quarian historians were reluctant at best to explain why the Empire fell. Quarian exiles, on the other hand, were more than happy to share the story.

The virtues of the Athorak Empire were ones any turian would recognize – loyalty to the Empire, self-sacrifice, honorable combat, and pride. The Rhaan Confederation, on the other hand, valued cunning, intellect, flexibility, and bravery. (Amusingly, modern quarians intermix the two.)

With quarians mastering iron, and later steel, weapons and armor as the two nation-states clashed, the primary differences between the two grew more pronounced. At some point, the Rhaan Confederation underwent some kind of civil war, with the Rhaan family being exiled and, ironically, having to surrender to the Athorak Empire.

Legends say the clan who took over the Rhaan Confederation was one of evil magicians. I'd normally give this sort of thing a pass, but it's clear from the fragmentary descriptions that some kind of cache of alien technology was on the planet, as the 'firelances' and 'rays of darkness' described in the legends seem to be some kind of primitive energy firearms.

Quarian archaeological studies have found traces of alien ruins, a culture that was probably destroyed by Reapers, on Rannoch. Most of these sites showed signs that primitive quarians had discovered them in early history. While much of what was there was unusable until their Golden Era, it seems clear that a few hand weapons were probably brought into play.

Whatever the reason, the results were not good. An assassin from the newly renamed Dawn Confederation assassinated the Athorak Emperor and slew dozens more in a nighttime attack on the capital. In response, the Empire invaded the Confederation, going from a war of skirmishes to outright invasion.

And in many cases, atrocity. Both sides indiscriminately killed civilians, it seems, and it took over a century for the Athorak to finish off the Confederation. Hundreds of thousands of quarians were killed over this nonsense. Entire cultures and ethnic groups were brutally wiped out, and the Athorak Empire shattered.

Broken into squabbling nation-states, the quarians descended into a time of bloody warfare and genocidal retribution for almost three hundred years. The 'magicians' were finally killed in this internecine mess after long years of fighting and the 'firelances' either lost or destroyed.

With the Empire destroyed, the remaining groups of power slowly warred more conventionally over another century before peace was established.

Recorded History : Bright Era

The peace of what would become the Quarian Communality was set in place by the end of the warring period, with the five largest nations coming together to deal with issues threatening the entire race. Cities were smoking ruins, millions of quarians were homeless, and what primitive infrastructure they had was shattered.

The three strongest nations allied with two of the weaker but more technologically advanced nation-states to form the Communality, a loose supranational organization much like humanity's United Nations or the salarian Sparak agreements. The nations banded together their armies and forced peace onto the world, then combined their labor and intellect to repair the damage.

It took a long time for the divisions of quarian society to heal, particularly racism (a curious affection, and the only other race aside from humans to discriminate on skin color and facial features). Quarian society was extremely fluid during these years, but for the most part, the effort was on recovery.

A few human historians (such as the good Doctor Minsta) have attempted to draw parallels between the Bright Era and the European Renaissance. That would be in error, as the events and driving forces behind it were more akin to the rebuilding of Europe after World War II or the recovery period after World War III and the Days of Iron.

There was no flowering of art, architecture, music, or travel – indeed, there was a decay of these things, a retrenchment into 'older' and 'better,' more conservative themes and times. Rather than increased freedom of movement there was an arterial hardening of all aspects of the quarian people and nation-states.

Indeed, the pace of technical innovations also slowed down. The main changes in the Bright Era was a repudiation of war as an acceptable tool of government, and yet a rejection of 'civilian' rule as being capable of preventing war. It was this time that led to the formation of what was then called the 'Command' and, in the modern era, the 'Admiralty.'

The five nations slowly absorbed the other smaller nation-states of their world until they stood alone upon the stage of global politics. It wasn't until this was completed that efforts turned from rebuilding and social renovation to creativity, and even then, it was creativity harnessed to purpose.

Recorded History : Industrial Era

In most species – salarian, asari, turian, elcor – the rise of industrial technology and the widespread use of machines in farming was a reaction to calamity and need. The salarian was struggling to survive the Collapse. The asari were driven to it by the War of Queens. The elcor were dealing with an ice age.

Again, humans and quarians are alike in that your movement into industrial eras was more of serendipity and ease of life. The quarian nations, now at peace, established stability and economy scaled to the point where the invention of various labor-saving devices was merely the result of an expanding people.

Quarian industrial focus was on farming and construction, and devised all manner of extremely clever devices – reciprocal circular internal combustion engines, wirelessly transmitted electrical power over long distances, and the like. There was less of a focus on communications – radio eluded them for centuries – and more on sheer creativity.

The rise of industry also divided the quarian people more along socioeconomic lines, which sadly began lining up with racial divides. While the majority of quarians were 'silvers' – thin plating atop the head, silvery skin coloration, longer jaws, narrower eyes – the ones who created the most wealth and innovations were 'blues' – a darker skin coloration and wider eyes, a more arched cast to the features and thicker plating in places as well as longer claws.

The blues ended up dominating the nations, despite being a minority, especially the lines of the so-called Greater and Lesser Families. Blue-silver crossbreeds, known disparagingly as 'seafoams,' ended up forming a middle class that separated the two.

Religion also underwent several shocks during this time, with ancestor worship ending up being the most common, combined with a philosophy that at times seems somewhat like siari, and at times somewhat like zen. The mantra of this belief system seems to be 'accept what is real, reach for what could be, fear what could go wrong,' which strikes me as a touch… pragmatic for a religious belief.

Trust the quarians to make sure even their religion is utilitarian.

Recorded History : Majestic Era

The (comparative) unity of the quarian nations ended up slowly improving their world even as technology became rapidly more advanced. Their first robotics attempts and use of automation increased standards of living for everyone, and with that, there was finally a flowering and expansion of the quarian culture in the realms of dance, music, literature, and creativity.

Given what happened later, it is no surprise that some quarian historians call this the high point of their species' history. Amusingly, very little hard information is known about it, and what is available has the ever-present smell of carefully crafted propaganda.

The bulk of what we know about the era is literally drowned in the cultural aspects – most modern quarian culture seems to always be based around some aspect of this era.

On paper, this golden age was peaceful, yet the military's size was increased by a factor of ten from reports and histories still available. Quarians experimented with various land and sea military concepts, chemical weapons, and nuclear devices – hardly the kinds of things a unified, peaceful group of nations would need to work on.

Ultimately, aside from the fascinating cultural and artistic outpouring of this era, I cannot draw any real conclusions as to what or why there was so much of a focus on military matters. I can say that, based on fragmented evidence, it is clear that the quarian leadership of the time became increasingly isolated from the 'common people,' and it was at this time that vast gulfs in prosperity first arose among the usually communal cultures of the day.

Recent History : Space Era and Citadel Interactions

Given quarian ingenuity and curiosity, once they developed heavy industrial capacities, it did not take them long to begin to explore space. This started roughly nine centuries ago, but the first three hundred years of the quarian space era were marked by slower-than-light capability and increasingly weird experiments in attempts to create a working FTL drive.

The quarians had a prototype device that functioned much like a one-time use Sinsai drive (I believe the human term is 'Alcubierre drive'). Without eezo, contractions of space-time fabrics in this fashion appear to have been quite dangerous – the origin of the geth was a network of simple machine remotes to pilot these one-shot craft into nearby stars.

One of these ships alighted in a system seven light-years from Tikkun, where the remains of an ancient starship were found. It is critical to note that this spaceship wreck was, by all reports, not a Prothean wreck, nor was it Inusannon. Quarians remain remarkably close-mouthed about it, but exiles have gone on record stating the vessel was in excess of a million years old.

Quarians expended a staggering amount of effort, lives, and capital in reaching the wreck and examining it, and came to learn of eezo and mass effect FTL from the wreckage. It is also believed the distinct quarian electroplasma weapons and some of the computer architecture quarians used in later geth models came from this wreck, as well as several alloy composites unique to quarian ships.

The quarians were not, it must be stressed, an expansive species. Being within the Perseus Veil had hidden the reality of the greater galaxy to them, as the Veil is not only opaque to light, but saturated with the stellar remnants of several novae, making X-ray spectrography difficult. It wasn't until the quarians achieved FTL that they realized they were part of a larger galaxy, a revelation that had unsettling effects on the quarian psyche.

The three centuries of one-shot explorations and waiting years for survey responses via radio meant they had believed themselves alone in some small broken off cluster. While they could see other galaxies beyond the up-spin curve of the stellar arm they were in, they did not apply this to their own situation.

Thus, with FTL in their grasp, the quarians were very slow and cautious in exploration. The paucity of dextro-compatible planets in the Veil only amplified their lack of expansion – five hundred years ago, they only had five colony worlds after a century of exploration.

The initial quarian contact with an outside species was, amusingly enough, the hanar. The hanar told the quarian explorers in no uncertain terms to depart their space and not trespass, and apparently pointed them in the direction of the Citadel.

Quarian historical records state there was a great deal of confusion and chaos in the aftermath of finding other alien beings – riots and rebellions. A large portion of the quarian people were convinced alien beings would be untrustworthy, and the cool reception and utterly alien nature of the bag-like, eyeless, faceless hanar only exacerbated this.

Thus, rather than the civilian government, it was the quarian naval military command that took the lead in further exploration, establishing a series of forward bases outside the Veil and routing all traffic through carefully concealed paths. They mined all known relay approaches to their space and made sure they could fall back if further contact was violent, then proceeded down-spin.

Quarian military forces encountered both asari and turian forces on patrol near the edge of the Veil where it skirted Aria's territory and made first contact. Initial contact was wary, as even in those days the quarian fleet was very large, if nowhere near as advanced as the asari and turian ships.

It took almost two years for quarian diplomats to establish a presence on the Citadel, slowed both by internal governmental bickering between the quarian nations and the Council's usual bureaucratic ineptitude. Quarians were nervous in those days – I remember the first quarian I met was almost clawing holes in her pants from her unease.

In the century that followed, the quarians cautiously engaged with Citadel society as a whole. They quickly mastered Citadel tech and began modifying and improving it, bringing about a large leap forward in technology in many areas, from cybernetics and electronics to certain VI aspects. Quarians were the primary drivers behind graybox, whitebox, and the now-illegal redbox technologies, as well as many other cybernetic systems.

Keep in mind, in those days, quarians wore no suits. They always had the suits in space, as they feared decompression due to their open ship deck plans, but did not wear them outside of that – nose filters or filmy face masks were the most that was needed back then, although a few quarians had stronger reactions and simply did not leave Rannoch.

The quarians did not mesh well with Citadel races. They clashed constantly with the salarians, becoming infuriated at STG penetrations of their space. They deployed some form of nanonic plague on Rannoch that was harmless to most life, but lethal to salarians (as they did not allow salarians of any kind on Rannoch, and I was one of a very few asari to even set foot there) and returned the bodies of one hundred seventeen salarians to the Salarian Councilor, threatening war if they attempted such things again.

They also clashed with the turians and the Council overall in terms of fleet size and their alarming use of redbox AIs, which they refused to outlaw. When the turians suggested throwing them off the Citadel, the quarians responded with unconcern while mocking him for ignoring the fact the batarians practiced slavery.

Ultimately, Council dislike of the quarians soured the quarian leadership on real integration, and led to certain hardliners taking power with disastrous consequences.

Recent History : the Geth Rebellion, the Refusal, and the Diaspora

The worst of these was the full-out development of the geth platform system. The geth were designed as manual workers in theory – in fact, many exiles (and some acquired quarian information from ruins within the Veil) indicate the geth were fully designed to be militarized. This is emphasized by the fact that while other military innovations of the geth such as Armatures and hoppers only came after the geth interactions with Nazara, even early geth designs had the Prime, Hunter, and Colossus body types, which cannot be put to any non-military use whatsoever.

Information recovered by Spectre Shepard during her operations after the Benezia Incident indicate that the quarian military may have been responsible for the eventual geth uprising, but few hard details can be determined at this remove. We know the geth were produced in the hundreds of millions, including ships, ground units, and aerospace assets.

We know the geth were fully integrated into the military and had programming to use military weapons.

We know the geth were probably used by the quarian leaders to further stratify quarian society into the rich and poor, and that geth were seen as a threat to the working poor.

What we don't really know, despite quarian protestations of innocence, is what set the geth rebellion off and if it was intentional.

I remember the day we heard about the mess – I had just achieved my first ranking as a priestess and was in the Chapel of the Moon with (back then) Stellarch Thana Vathan, when the transmissions came in.

The 'Rebellion' did not last long. People often castigate the Citadel for doing nothing to help the quarians, but the reality of the situation was much different. The Veil was right next to Aria's territory and things were already going bad there. This was also in the middle of both the Little Rebellions in Turian Space and the aftermath of the Second Krogan Rebellion – the Citadel's fleets were scattered and the people tired of war.

The quarian military initially said they had things under control. They lost that control in a matter of days – in less than a week the geth had taken Rannoch, Haestrom, Tanlnarn, Himetes, and were bombarding the last main colony world of Kresh.

The Council was still debating what to do when the quarian fleet fled from the final battles in Quarian Space, loaded with millions upon millions of refugees. The initial response from the quarian Admiralty was a request to be granted colonization rights to a dextro-compatible world and to figure out how to deal with the geth, and requests for aid and assistance.

The latter was granted (mostly due to Uressa T'Shora), but the request for a world was shot down in a three-nothing vote. The Council stated in hard language that redbox AI experiments and illegal use of things like the geth were clearly an 'internal quarian issue,' since the quarians had ignored Citadel laws on it, and as a result, the Council had their embassy removed. All quarians were rounded up on the Citadel and forced to leave, those without transport loaded into a mass bulk hauler cynically gifted to the quarians by the STG.

The quarian people drifted aimlessly in their fleet near the edges of the Veil for months, until their main warships were either destroyed or simply outclassed by geth. Council observers encountered geth ships three times, and all three times the geth transmitted simple messages.

"Geth do not wish conflict with organics. Do not enter the Perseus Veil and geth will remain within it."

The Council made avoidance of the Veil a law, ignored the plight of the quarian people, and cleansed their hands of the entire affair.

Recent History : the Wandering Era

Left without a home or even a working forward base, the quarians struggled to survive. Over the decades that turned into centuries, the race changed. They relied on their suits for survival, cut off from the symbiotic micro-life on Rannoch that regulated their immune systems, and began scavenging ships and doing point mining, He-3 skimming, and anything else that could help the fleet.

It was a century later they started with traditions such as Pilgrimages and Last Walks, as well as dispossessing all quarians of personal property for communal ownership. By the time the First Contact War blew up, the entirety of the quarian people had shrunk from well over thirty million to just over seventeen, with fertility rates dropping every year.

Almost all of the quarians' efforts were bent towards the refit and restoration of their warfleets, with the stated goal of retaking Rannoch. Conventional military analysis gave them almost no chance to do so without heavy Citadel support, and the casualties expected would have exceeded tens of millions dead.

Quarian admirals eventually split their fleets fully – a Civilian Fleet, to raise children and food with, and to place those unsuited to military conquest. This fleet focused on mining, engineering, repairs, and doing whatever they could to make ends meet.

The Scout Fleet did long-range scouting and relay mapping missions – mostly for the Council, sometimes for private corporations. They would do mineral surveys, scout pirate locations, or perform high-risk package deliveries, for a price.

All of this was sunk into the rebuilding of the Heavy Fleet, which was where the smartest and most capable quarians were moved to once they completed a Pilgrimage. As their numbers dwindled, fewer and fewer quarians left the Fleet at all. Indeed, if not for a few souls such as Uressa T'Shora, they would have been in even more dire straits.

And if not for their actions at the end of the Benezia Incident, it is very likely the quarians would have slowly and quietly gone extinct at some point. Instead, they won the admiration of many sapients by fighting their rebellious creations and saving the Citadel (alongside humanity, of course).

Recent History : Since the Battle of the Citadel

Quarians are now firmly established again on the Citadel, most of them inhabiting the highly damaged Zakera Ward and assisting in rebuilding. They have one colony planet, Zarroch, which is currently home to almost forty percent of the fleet quarians, and the majority of the most worn-out ships of the Civilian Fleet have been recycled or turned into shelters for these quarians.

The quarian economy is still a jumbled mess, but volus investors are very keen to work with the quarians, and they are one of the few races invited to do business in Human Space. (As an aside, the quarians are exquisitely careful not to offend humanity, and even racist provocateurs such as the Eldfells of Earth have commented favorably on their work ethic.)

The quarian people as a whole appear to be, even years later, in a minor state of shock. Most have given up on the ideal of retaking Rannoch from the geth, as the fighting against the geth has left the turian, quarian, and human fleets in relative tatters with nothing to show but three planets the fleets were forced to glass.

Haestrom was cleared of geth, but geth mining activity ruined much of the ecology, and the strange issues with the sun killed off all remaining life and made the place basically uninhabitable.

Final Notes

Quarian history is more defined by what we do not know than what we do know, Jack. It is full of holes that there are no good ways to fill in. Sadly, quarian culture is little more than broken bits of half-remembered things and descriptions of better times in faded trideo replays and old books.

The quarian people are survivalists, but not by nature – merely by elimination. The weak have all perished, as have the kindly and the foolish and the trusting, leaving only those who endure at all costs. This is both good and bad in many ways, as the Admiralty simply cannot, in my opinion, be trusted. They are as compromised as your High Lords by the very same mandate: extinction is not an option.

Living beings with their back against the wall will do anything to survive, and that – combined with their history – makes them something of a threat. Keep this in mind when you examine Dr. Minsta's suggestion of utilizing the quarians. They may make good allies… but they are always going to be suspicious and pragmatic towards outsiders.