"Just because I'm telling this story, doesn't mean everyone's alive at the end. Yeah...it's that kind of story." As the Reapers begin their cycle of extinction, three heroes are chosen. This is the story of one of them: Olivia Marcellus, as she joins Commander Mark Shepard in the race against time to save the galaxy. ME1. AU. Xover with Mass Effect: White Wolf. Shepard/OC/Garrus

Mass Effect: Rise of The Oracle

Prologue

The Journey Begins…

Just because I'm telling you this story…doesn't mean anyone's alive or I'm even myself at the end of it. This could all just be some parallel universe where I'm Saren's psychotic and indoctrinated zombie queen, assuming my 'rightful' place at his side, and aiding him with the complete and total annihilation of the individual species one planet at a time, just as he, the Reapers, and Sovereign, intended.

Well this isn't that universe, thank the spirits. In this 'verse I'm alive, I'm not indoctrinated, and free of that galactic maniac.

Why am I doing this now of all times, you ask?

Better late than never, I suppose. However, the real reason is to set the record straight because handed down stories can become muddled as time passes.

But take a note: this isn't just my story I'm telling; it's the story of three individuals, chosen by fate, to lead the galaxy into halting an endless cycle of galactic extinction. It's a soap operatic tale of sharp edged love triangles, personal self-discovery, deep-rooted hatred, siblinghood, self-sacrifice, temperance, denial, betrayal, death, destruction, and most importantly; it's a story about how you can't change the galactic irony that is your fate, no matter how hard you try.

Speaking of fate, Marcus Aurelius once said to "accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together. But do so with all your heart."

Before all this went down, I hated the idea of fate because I didn't like the idea that I wasn't in control of my own destiny. So I did stupid things to challenge it. Like self-sacrifice to save the men I love for example. I thought trading my life for theirs would right everything that was broken in my life; that it would inevitably restore the peaceful balance of the universe and ultimately give fate two erect middle fingers.

But as time progressed I came to accept fate and love the two men whose fates intertwined with mine.

Oh right, the story.

Most stories and tales have clearly defined heroes and villains: the perfect composition of good versus evil, culminating their grueling journeys in an epic apocalyptic battle over who wins the souls of the land. The result is usually the destruction of the opposed and the hero's happy ending with him or her being crowed a legend in the history books.

Well however pleasant that would have been had the whole ordeal went down that way; this isn't that kind of story.

Shit, this isn't a Drew Karpyshyn novel. This is gritty authenticity, not a children's lullaby. There is no 'happily ever after', no 'good ending' vs. 'bad ending', no red, blue, or green beams of light that miraculously saves us from annihilation and destroying everything in the process of salvation, and definitely no clear-cut division between what's established to be good or evil.

Just the pure ugly truth thrown across the table where the lines of friend and foe are blurred, and you are forced to think past black and white and transition into the technicolor canvas which is reality. To question what is good and evil, exactly.

My particular journey…is the story of a group of antithetic people; brought together by extenuating circumstances and how we all were searching for our own answers to our own fucked up situations as the odds kept stacking against us. This is a journey of how we shed blood, sweat, and tears together and how we came to accomplish things that we never thought possible, even in our own imaginations. Of why Councilor Wrex called us the' travelling freak show' and how that freak show became more than just that. How we all became heroes under the lead of a charismatic man.

Wait. I realized I've gotten way ahead of myself.

For the record, the name I gave myself to evade my past is Olivia, after the Countess of Twelfth Night who was petty, self-involved, and who loved to cause the occasional melodrama.

But before I go into too much detail on myself, I need to bring you up to speed with a little history lesson.

When the First Contact War broke out in 2157 and eventually found its way to the human colony world of Shanxi, it was bloody and brutal. Turians might've had strength, discipline, and upgraded technology on their side; but they didn't expect humans to use groundside guerilla tactics and warfare against them. Both sides were rapidly suffering major losses: humans in space and turians planetside. The war got so bloody and so widespread throughout Council space in the six month period it lasted that the Citadel Council intervened to negotiate a peace. Councilor Sparatus also knew the turians were losing and to save face for the entire turian race, he facilitated the negotiation summit between leaders.

The result of the summit became the Treaty of Shanxi.

Let me see.

Oh, here it is.

It is declared in the treaty that 1. Both races must honor a sanctioned cease-fire and actively seek to live together in peace and harmony. 2. Both races must work on Council selected bipartisan projects amicably. And the doozy: 3. Those who decided to adopt orphaned children that resulted because of the war are protected under this treaty and the children in question shall be allowed full citizenship upon formal adoption, the specific adoption procedures based on their respective governmental laws, traditions, etc, and their citizenship shall be recognized by all council governments.

As much as Primarch Fedorian and Prime Minister Kennedy ground the enamel off their teeth in anger for being painted into a political corner (and for damn good reasons), both political leaders came together and signed it, forging the shaky alliance between both factions.

As time progressed, the battle wounds started to heal as the children had grown into adults, but there was still plenty of room to improve. I mean, after all was said and done, many turians still resented humans and vice versa.

I guess some things will never change.

But however fucked up it was politically for the Council to do to both races, something profound came of it. Little old me; then an infant, was plucked from wreckage by an affable turian general who was offering groundside medical support to humans and turians alike, wherever he could to atone for his species' mistakes. He wasn't xenophobic or traditionalist like the rest and boasted having a good friend in the Systems Alliance Navy.

He said because of my smile (which apparently took days for him to coax out of me), he and his mate took it upon themselves to endure the brutal and formal ascio rites, or adoption rites, by turian societal standards and add another child to their biological brood of two.

Or at least that was the story I'd been told.

But I'll get to that later.

Much later.

Rising out of the treaty, there resulted a group of individuals that were generally considered to be 'demisangs', or more degradingly known as 'half-breeds', which being one held the same stigma of being barefaced to the turians and turian to the humans. Despite whatever the treaty actually stated, we could never truly become a productive member of either society or even remotely trusted. So most of us fell off the grid and became mercs-for-hire or space pirates. Like I did.

All right. Enough of the history lesson and my origins, you're here for the real meat and potatoes. You're here for what I've promised you.

I know that every story has a beginning, a foundation, a point of origin. So, I'll start at the most logical point I can think of. The point where it all began:

Eden Prime.

The story begins like this: In 2183 the SSV Normandy SR1, a state-of-the-art warship that was a bipartisan project between governments to put a little band-aid over the human-turian problem (with the Council's financial blessing of course), was slated to engage on its ill-fated maiden voyage.

As it turned out, it was more than just a simple shakedown run. The warship was to engage in a mission of a classified nature to retrieve a newly unearthed Prothean beacon: one of the rarest Prothean artifacts in existence. Once retrieved, it was to be delivered to the Council for the proper study.

You would think this would be a simple retrieval mission, but is anything ever just that fucking simple?

Chosen to lead the doomed mission was Captain David Edward Anderson, one of the Alliance's most decorated Special Forces operatives and the first soldier to graduate with the level of N7 from the Special Operations program at the Interplanetary Combatives Academy in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. In addition to Anderson, a Council Spectre by the name of Nihlus Kryik was aboard to evaluate the Executive Officer's performance during the retrieval mission for possible Spectre candidacy; a man no other than the Butcher of Torfan and Anderson's second protégé, Commander Mark Shepard.

Anderson's first Protégé you ask? I'll talk about him later, when he becomes relevant.

The pristine warship had just cleared the relay when they received a distress signal from Eden Prime, one of the first human colonies established outside of the Sol System the moment humans broke into the galactic race through the Charon Relay. To add insult to injury, the barefaced turian who was the Council's most decorated Spectre and Sparatus's personal blood hound, Saren Arterius, had gone rogue and attacked the colony with his army of Geth: synthetic creatures who hadn't been seen outside the veil in two centuries, which raised all kinds of red flags.

The reason behind Saren's attack began during a raid on Camala with Anderson, when the turian got a hold of an Alliance doctor's files which mentioned an artifact of tremendous power. The doctor's journal entries intrigued Saren so much that he fell off the radar in search of the artifact. And without hard evidence from Anderson on the turian's indiscretions during the operation, the Council wasn't going to chase after the doctor's 'artifact' or Saren.

Free from restrictions and the ever watchful eye of the Council at that point, Saren began openly studying the research he stole and became fascinated by the description of Sovereign, the artifact really being an enormous sentient starship. Once Saren found Sovereign, Sovereign explained what the Reapers were and that the sentient machines were created for one purpose: a fifty thousand year cycle of organic extermination.

Saren believed his whole life, even his career as a Spectre, had been a prelude to the discovery and he planned to use Sovereign and his army of sentient machines waiting in dark space to exact his revenge upon humanity for the death of his brother, Desolas, in the FCW by a mercenary named Jack Harper. The turian subsequently went on a campaign to aid Sovereign in the hunt for the conduit, the conduit being a way for the Reapers to come through to our galaxy and wreak their havoc.

On this mission, Sovereign led Saren to Eden Prime, where the rogue Spectre attacked the colony and effectively shattered the treaty, single-handedly declaring war against humans. In addition to the carnage, he killed Nihlus with a shot to the back for his files on a certain space pirate, who was harboring an encyclopedia of ancient secrets, in an attempt to put together clues to the location of the conduit.

Here's where the train derails. As Saren decimated an entire colony, got a hold of the Prothean beacon's message, and fled the colony on Sovereign, Mark, who'd been on the turian degenerate's heels since he'd set foot on Eden Prime, rushes in and 'accidentally' comes into contact with the same beacon himself; the same distress signal transferred into his mind.

But he couldn't discern a lick of it, just as Saren couldn't.

So the race against time began.

Now back on the Citadel with Mark in tow, Anderson, knowing something sinister was brewing since Saren and his army had destroyed a human colony and killed his own protégé and best friend, decided to go to the human ambassador, Donnell Udina, and demand that Saren be disbarred from the Spectres for his act of treason. Again, since no hard evidence was provided and Anderson was once again involved in Saren's affairs, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

The trio was defeated but it was in that moment Mark came up with a brilliant plan. He knew Nihlus had been on the Normandy to observe him for possible Spectre candidacy, so Anderson and Mark conspired to get the commander inducted. Mark knew that if he could find hard evidence that Saren had gone rogue, then the Council would absolutely have to disbar Saren, no questions asked. And because of their policies about sending a Spectre to catch another, they would induct Mark to set out on the hunt.

Being the pro-humanist he was, Udina agreed to aid him and Mark got moving with a vicious purpose, scouring the Citadel for anyone who might have had any information on Saren.

The first lead he tracked down was Detective Garrus Vakarian, the one turian nephew Executor Pallin despised and assigned the case into Saren in hopes that he'd either get killed or disappear. Garrus didn't have anything solid because Spectre files are classified and tightly sealed, so that lead to freeing an imprisoned krogan named Urdnot Wrex, a bounty hunter hired by the Shadow Broker to kill Fist, one of Saren's lackeys. Wrex didn't have anything solid either.

But the last lead, a quarian named Tali'Zorah vas Neema who was currently headed to meet the Shadow Broker with the information, did. Mark saved her from an ambush of Fist's thugs, presented the recording to the Council she had salvaged from a geth platform on her pilgrimage, and offered them all a spot on the Normandy as he was crowned the first human Spectre.

As for my involvement, it started just a little before Mark got to the Citadel. Around the time he was chasing the turian around Eden Prime, I had been contacted by the General and was told that he'd received a final recording from Nihlus, the man my mother tasked with protecting my new identity. Apparently it had taken him a few minutes to die and he got the word out that since his files were going to transfer to Saren upon death, the bastard would know exactly where I was and how to get to me.

Because he was my father and loved his youngest daughter dearly, he ordered me to go to Palaven where he was stationed to seek asylum on a planet where he could protect me.

It was a great plan, save for the fact that I didn't want to go. I hated Palaven, no loathed it,and I'm sure its inhabitants loathed me in return. So I flat out refused and stayed behind, following a gut feeling. As a precautionary measure, I left my small apartment to find a salarian genius named Morlan, from whom I was planning on procuring a false ID from if I needed to resort to getting off the Citadel. En route I was attacked by Fist's thugs and as I was 'questioning' one of them, I found out that Saren had sent them after me through Fist, who'd betrayed the Shadow Broker.

That was my wake up call to get the hell out of dodge because I wasn't going to be stuck in the middle of the underground political wars. And after a series of unfortunate events and crossing paths with Tali and Garrus, I found myself finally following the General's orders.

What I didn't know what that I was soon going to find out that I was playing right into fate's hands.

Captain Olivia Marcellus; an ample figured pirate dressed in a clichéd pirate's apparatus with a long white streaked raven plait and silver-colored luminescent eyes, skillfully navigated the twelve-foot high chain-linked labyrinth of service corridors with a naturally graceful ease. It wasn't until she rounded a sharp corner did her knee-high black boots finally skid to a grinding halt, making her quickly regain her balance with a gloved hand gripping a nearby post. Upon closer inspection through narrowed slits, she concluded that the area was one of the many shipping and cargo areas for the docks above. She then calmly scanned the area for an emergency exit door for a hasty escape.

As for the 'blueberry brigade' – the comical moniker she'd affectionately bestowed on the black and blue armored idiots of C-Sec's Enforcement Division long ago – they were probably lost in the maze and far enough behind her that she could afford a few brief moments to think past the adrenaline and frustration to calculate her next move. Her sister hadn't granted the nickname of 'lulamanirae' for nothing and the escape artist was notorious for getting out of any situation like a tiny mouse in a maze, hence the nickname.

But Olivia reminded herself that it was merely C-Sec on the hunt and not Fist's thugs like before. C-Sec had pistols and protocols. Thugs had shotguns and no fucking sense whatsoever. These facts alone made this much easier for her and she immediately begun to quell her racing heart and heaving breaths.

However, the sheer size and scope of the area made Olivia growl in annoyance. She knew that if she couldn't find that emergency exit to the upper docking bays, which it didn't look like the odds were in her favor at the moment, then her last resort would be to hide in one of the many crates and bide her time until C-Sec was scurried off in another direction. Although hiding seemed almost as impossible because there was an Everest-like mountain of the multi-colored shipping containers of all sizes; some strewn on the floor, others stacked floor to ceiling. None of which she could immediately tell if they were filled to the brim, or empty.

Spirits be damned.

Olivia felt like a caged rat instead of a crafty mouse and it wasn't until that moment that she realized she'd been stupid for following her gut instinct, which also confounded her because her gut never failed. She probably should have followed the General's orders and hopped the next shuttle out to Palaven the moment he gave the order, forgoing the disastrous-to-humans and radioactive effects of its atmo and leaving her petty issues against the agonizingly warm planet, the General, and his new wife, far behind her. She probably should have thought about what staying behind really meant and how fast Saren could track her in a place he'd known like the back of his three-taloned hand.

Now she'd have to wait until the next day to catch the next shuttle out, which she didn't know if Fist had more boneheads to throw her way for target practice. Before the pirate could become giddy with the possibilities of popping some more heads, the General's voice resonated from somewhere deep within her skull, mocking her.

Do as I say…and that's an order, soldier!

Olivia drew in a deep breath through her flared nostrils. She might have been pissed with herself for her choice, but the larger part of it was aimed at the ignorant turian detective who probably sent the blueberry brigade after her, which resulted in the delay and the chase that led her here. She considered the consequences of allowing the slow-paced T-Rexes of Enforcement to arrest her so she could give that blue tattooed, self-absorbed prick a large piece of her mind.

But Olivia wasn't one for good luck, or even semi-great karma. She knew the sense of humor fate had and she knew she would probably be caught by the Spectre that, as of five hours ago, deeply yearned for what she possessed. If information was a commodity, then she held the whole stock market and he wanted to crash it…no…decimate it. She could just see the morbid joviality on his avian barefaced features and flared mandibles, as he watched her warm blood cooling beneath her and pried the locket from her cold dead fingers as she stared lifeless and wide eyed in rigor.

Olivia knew it was only her paranoia that created the horrible image. But the locket was exigent and if the information encoded within slipped her fingers and fell into the wrong hands, like a rogue Spectre, it would spell disaster. It could start a war of galactic proportions and honestly, she really didn't want the blood of billions of people on her hands. She had enough emotional baggage she carried around and didn't need a nail in the coffin.

Olivia reflexively rolled the smooth piece of silver between her fingers. To someone of the unknowing eye, the ornate laser-etched locket seemed like a simple piece of sentimental jewelry that hung loosely from her neck from a thin twisted rope made of Palavenian silver. When opened, a holo would appear her turian family. Contrasting the peaceful image, the hollow inside housed a small shard of unfamiliar technology that held a concordance of documents of classified nature, stemming back to the origins of the Relay 314 incident.

It would have been smart to voluntarily relinquish the information to the Council, or the rightful authorities. Shit, a good little citizen would have, in fear of the harsh consequences. But she was a space pirate, a degenerate, and every other negative epithet she'd heard over the course of her mature life. Would they have listened to her when she told them that she happened to 'fall' on the sensitive information and the information was her mother's? Wait…would they have allowed her to escape punishment once she complied? Probably not. The Council, Councilor Sparatus in particular, would have had her arrested, convicted, and thrown in jail until the day she took her last breath.

Fear of imprisonment or execution was the main reason she'd kept it and suffered the unpleasant consequences of its retention.

Aside from being hunted by the most notorious and most infamous Spectre in existence for information only she knew; a mutiny had been staged against her by her first mate. Olivia's ship, the sophisticated and heavily armed Diamond Rose, the ship she'd shed her fair share of blood to obtain, had probably been turned into scrap metal. And her crew – the ragtag group of antithetic people she placed in the same vein as family – had been scattered or worse…butchered in the most macabre way possible.

Olivia swallowed the large lump of bile that had risen in her throat.

If her mother hadn't given her the locket in the first place, none of this would have ever happened. As for being sentimental, she was on the opposing side of the spectrum and debated using the rare metal in the fabrication of her ballistic ammo rounds. However, she'd been there when her mother took her last agonizing breaths, so she held it as close to her heart as utterly possible. It also quelled the stomach rumblings of leaving her more halcyon days behind and she sometimes found herself popping the clasp like a lost child, staring longingly at the turians who rescued her from the devastation of Shanxi.

Yet another bullet on the list of reasons the non-sentimentalist kept it. Uncovering of the locket's scandalous contents, however, set the current events into motion like an atomic clock.

It started with something as simple as a ruby drop. Olivia had just finished a sparring match with Urdnot Krull, the muscle of the Rose, simply for shits, giggles, and exercise. She'd been so busy with ship politics between crew members that she had forgotten to patch the wound when she engaged in that rare ritual of opening the locket in the dead of a space-night. Because of the blood that was still slowly oozing, a drop of her essence landed on the sacchariferous image and incited a surprising response; the locket illuminated a bright blue and began a data transfer directly into her skull, uploading virtually endless digital dirt that she later realized was extremely classified from her mother's career in Blackwatch.

Dirt that people were killed for to obtain. Dirt that would compel governments to send operative for extraction and assassination. Dirt that she realized made her the most powerful and dangerous woman in the galaxy, even more so than the Shadow Broker him/herself.

When the painful process finished, the overwhelming surge of raw information short-circuited the electrical impulses her brain, plaguing her with multiple seizures and placed her in a fully aware, but physically paralyzing catatonic state. Then to add insult to injury, she watched wide-eyed and helplessly as her xenophobic bastard of a brother, Marcus Marcellus, took the Rose by force for his own petty purposes and dumped her on Altakiril to die a gruesome death of either starvation or suffocation.

Subsequently and still a myth in the underground community, she'd prevailed and found her way to the Citadel.

As the old anger of her mutiny rose within her again, she caught something in the corner of her eye. Lonely and set apart from the others was a matte black shopping container that was large enough for its purpose, almost calling out to her it was so prominent. Taking the random chance that this particular box was empty enough to fully submerge herself into, her gloved and hurried hands scurried over the interface for her omni-tool and she effortlessly bypassed the holo-lock's circuitry.

She didn't think to glance at the ship name or insignia that was displayed on the front. Once inside, she severed the miniscule electronics to reactivate the lock and breathed in the air of her temporary sanctuary. Aside from a few small boxes of tungsten rounds that would be a literal thorn in her back, there was more than enough room for comfort. So she stretched out her slender legs and poised herself, still rigid enough to pounce on any C-Sec officers who decided to uncover her whereabouts.

Olivia then laid her head awkwardly on her arm and played the waiting game. Waiting wasn't something she particularly loathed because she saw it as time to clear her head, meditate, and gather her bearings. Philosophy wise, she wasn't a student of any religion, known or unknown. But her mother had been Buddhist and the aging matron soldier took the time to bestow its teachings upon her progeny. Behind his mate's back though, the General drilled them with turian beliefs. Being thrown into the turian military in their adolescent years didn't help either. But as military brainwashing goes, the turian beliefs always took precedence.

As Olivia began to iron out a spontaneously created set of plans to miraculously pass through customs unrecognized, her sleep deprived eyes burned so horribly that she felt a compulsion to gouge them right out of their sockets. It was a brutal sign that it had been ages since she'd experienced a restful night's sleep and thinking about it now, she couldn't remember the last time she'd drowned in that bliss.

Then again, I'll sleep when I'm fucking dead.

Interrupting her calculations and increasingly throbbing headache, the C-Sec pawns finally rounded the corner and she could vaguely hear their muffled search for her whereabouts. Reflexively, she unholstered one of her black matte, opalescent handled, specifically modified for her own use, one of a set of twin Desert Eagle Mark XIXs and one of her daggers, calmly awaiting the opportune moment where she could spring from the top and go out in a blaze of glory like the cowboys of the old Earthen western vids.

The crate shimmied and shook as though she had been made and the adrenaline that began to saturate her bloodstream rose to dangerous levels in sheer anticipation. The moment never came, however, and she could hear the growl of Executor Pallin through their earpieces, calling off the search to investigate Fist's death.

Thank the Spirits and whoever else watches over me.

She released the deep breath she'd been holding and quietly sat the pistol near her head.

For once in her measly existence, she thought her luck had finally turned for the better.

With the adrenaline lowering and fatigue clamping its vice grips around her head, her eyes involuntarily drifted shut and her brain won the war with her body, allowing sleep to take over rapidly. And what felt like the first time in years, she wasn't plagued with nightmares while she slept.

A/N:

lulamanirae – Lula; Little. Manirae; tiny omnivorous raptors no larger than a terran mouse.

Please provide feedback. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Thanks. XOXO