The year was 2185 CE. The time had passed through his hands like sand. Thousands of revolutions he had made around its star since the day he crash-landed on that blue marble. Earth, as the humans called it, had been kind to him.
Having been entrenched deeply within perhaps the most complete unbroken narrative of humanity ever experienced, a deep and lasting groove in his heart they had worn. He had watched them wrestle with their own mortality and struggle with the questions of how best to live their lives. He had seen their incredible compassion and their utter ruthlessness. He had celebrated with them and had mourned with them. They had flourished on that blue planet, had hit the ground running; the persistence and drive that he had sensed in their humble beginnings had propelled them over tall mountains, under deep seas, then up off the surface of the cradle they called home. The day they announced that humanity had found the data he had left on Mars, he cried in relieved triumph - not only for him but for all of humanity. The information he had left, though now heavily fragmented, propelled their technology hundreds of years into the future. One year later, they discovered the mass relay orbiting Pluto, the last link in the chain that connected humanity with the rest of the galaxy. Finally, after an eon of biding his time, he returned to the stars.
He had always expected that the favourites of the Protheans had prospered in his absence, but he was staggered to find just how much they had grown. Like with the humans, time had exponentially magnified the early traits that had set them apart: the salarians became leaders of intelligence, espionage and invention. The turians became masters of discipline, war and strategy. The asari became foremost influencers, their culture, political prowess and economy shaping all the others they met. There were numerous other species too: drell, elcor, hanar, volus, krogan, batarian, vorcha, all adding uniqueness to the galaxy's melange of cultures.
As planned by the protheans, the asari were the dominant species in this cycle, and he pondered long about the implications. The asari were polar opposite to the protheans in many ways. The protheans had been mighty because they accepted nothing less than complete domination of everything they encountered. The asari, on the other hand, operated with a different ethos: they invited new species of advanced development to join the galactic community, knowing that their ideas and beliefs would inevitably influence their existing culture. The prothean culture was a monolith. The asari culture was pluralistic. The prothean centralization of all galaxy power was the key to their downfall. He hoped the arari's polarity made all the difference.
Metaphorically speaking, the years on Earth had set his watch to human time, and they were, by all accounts, late. He contemplated with dread if his bet on the humans had failed. Humans had arrived on the galactic scene two-thousand six-hundred fifty-seven years behind the asari. To his further horror, the chosen Reaper vanguard, Sovereign, had already arrived and beaten him to the game. Sovereign had awoken far too early by his biased estimations, and he found himself completely unprepared. His plans for galactic readiness depended on years of learning everything there was to know about this cycle's economy, military capability and innovation. He had considerable capital to move pieces in play, but his investments needed time to multiply. Time, it seemed, was already running out.
It was to his absolute surprise and pride, then, that news of a human named Eden Shepard filtered in. She had stumbled upon the secrets that loomed in dark space and defeated Sovereign before the Citadel relay that provided passage to them could be activated, putting a full stop to the invasion before it began. He was stumbling in the dark while the courageousness of the female human had proved to him that he indeed had made the right choice thousands of years prior when he stood atop that broken tower and threw down the blade he had pressed to his own throat. Out of the two primary vanguards of this cycle – Sovereign and himself – the Reaper pawn moved first, but his champion had drawn first blood. The Reaper pieces had yet to be played, and he hoped they would have enough time to prepare the board before their arrival.
As fate would have it, his excitement proved to be short-lived. Just as soon as the Citadel had been defended and Sovereign defeated, her ship was torn apart by an unknown vessel, and she herself had been spaced. The news had been a blow to him, but what happened immediately after sunk him even lower. In tandem, the main governing bodies officially denounced the Reaper as a geth warship and swept the entire incident under the rug, stopping any momentum they may have built. The way forward was unclear, and he was unsure of his next course of action - his partially-formulated plans to assist the Commander in leveraging her status were ripped to tatters, and the situation had turned bleak. Not only did he need to find someone who represented the best of them, but they needed to be politically connected, militarily powerful and have insights into the Reapers. It was a very short list.
While he scoured service records and gathered intel, he pursued the only alternative to directly fighting the Reapers: Leaving the Reaper's board completely and thus, leaving the Milky Way. He wrote a blank cheque for the Andromeda initiative to send twenty thousand Citadel Council citizens on a one-way journey to the unexplored galaxy. He hoped that the Reapers were not also harvesting Andromeda as well.
While he prepared the best he could, a new piece of news arrived that confused him greatly; the human Commander was seen alive. How and why he didn't know. His feeds pinged with her movements through logged docking manifests, and her pace seemed hurried, if not frenzied. Her old crew, one by one, disappeared from sight as they returned to her side aboard a new vessel - a Cerberus-built Normandy SR-2. Reports of human colonies being abducted overlapped with accounts of her movements, to which he could only speculate. It was clear he needed to find her. The only group who knew where she was consistently was Cerberus. Done waiting, he used intel to locate a Cerberus orbital facility in the Horsehead Nebula. Their leader, the Illusive man, was impossible to locate, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and he went all in to get an audience.
He took a human-made personal shuttle and installed a Cerberus IFF tag that he had purchased on the black market salvaged from a downed Cerberus cruiser. It was not cheap. He had a micro-fabricator print out the Cerberus insignia, which he then bolted to the side of the shuttle. He then headed directly to the station, fully suited. The station's automated defence systems, recognizing his IFF signal, didn't shoot him down immediately, but that didn't stop station security from hailing him repeatedly for identification. He docked anyway. When he opened the shuttle doors, Cerberus agents were waiting for him; guns were drawn, ready to neutralize him should any of his fingers stray too close to a weapon.
"I need to speak with your boss."
