A/N: the next chapter of Of Sheep and Battlechicken has been ready for a while, but I'm waiting on feedback from my beta reader. There will probably be several more chapters of the Asari section (military, government, fleet structure, and important personalities) before a break to work on OSABC, then I'll alternate between the two.

Every single race is going to get the same treatment as the Asari, so this is going to be a BIG document. After I finish each race I'll do corrections and updates, so keep the reviews and ideas coming - if there's an idea you'd like to see explored, let me know.

The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space

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DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

To the Three:

I'm finished with my more detailed examination of the actual components of asari culture. I'm extremely confused why this interests you, but I've done as you asked. I can only hope the sacrifice of Dr. Uraj is worth it.

Cerberus Thought for the Day: There is no such thing as an innocent in this dark galaxy. The innocents of humanity was lost the day we met the first Turian. The alien was never innocent.

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ICARCUS-TWO-THREE-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED

Doctor Minsta ,

It should please you to know that the Night-Wind cell responsible for the tragic death of Dr. Uraj has been located and dealt with. You'd think that given the asari history with asteroids they'd be more careful with their colony worlds in a system with two asteroid belts. All we had to do was nudge several large nickle-iron stony asteroids into the proper trajectory and disable the tracking systems for the colony , and Panji is no more.

The Shadow Hand is pleased with your work, as am I. The Illusive Man is also highly interested in asari culture for his own reasons, most of which have to do with his attempts to infilrate their economy. We would prefer an unfettered examination of the society, as distasteful as it is, rather than focused insights.

The Iron General

Cerberus Thought for the Day: Pity the misguided who follows the alien, but only once they are dead. The living traitors need only your bullet to serve Humanity best.

Asari Culture: Art

Asari art is a variegated thing, most of it what human artists would deem sublime, focusing on tenets and images of unity, exploration, the vastness of nature and the spirit, and pensive reflection. Asari statuary is always highly stylized, even iconized, with little to no realism, and asari paintings are biotic reactive, designed to be viewed with asari senses of electrical sensitivity and through the lens, in some cases of partners linked or bonded with the viewer.

Asari practice very little decorative arts , and eschew needless or gratituous ostentation or ornamentation. They prefer clean, curved lines, yonic or arched shapes, and curves that evoke the shape of an asari body. The colors white, blue, and to a lesser degree, yellow are very important to them, while reds and browns are disliked. Asari associate blue with life, oceans and biotics, white with cleanliness and an open mind, yellow with energy and freedom, and black with sexual release and intimacy. A pale green is the color of death, as the asari blood deoxidizes rapidly and the subcutaneous fluids that promote biotics give the skin that tinge. Purple is emphasizes stubbornness and determination, red speed and motion, and brown safety (associated, most likely with the vast brown stone walls that encircled the Thirty Cities).

The asari dislike haptic art and, while they do enjoy movies, prefer dance and a sort of biotic acrobatic mix of opera, religious service, and drama called the maress. They have a great attachment to themse of history, the valor of a single asari to save others, and of course, the triumph of cleverness and manipulation over brute force.

Artists are rarely individuals, almost all asari art is made by two, three or even more asari. A singular artist is seen as shallow, the more hands in the art, the more complex and worthy it tends to be.

Asari Culture: Music

Asari music is often muted and flatly polytonal to human ears, and is presaged on the concept of a theme that invokes certain memories. Rather than original works, many asari songs and musical works are cobbled together from a series of about a thousand songs and chants that date back into antiquity called the Atherion. Music links choruses or chords from songs in the Atherion into varying arrangements, each one thick with interpretations based on the musical components.

A good example of this is the asari song "Irirsai T'Va Kassa", often conflated as the closest thing to an anthem the Asari have. It is an interesting construction. The pieces of the song are from movements that imply supremacy, guile, the darkness of fear, the glory of the Matriarchs, the sensual delights of a group of lovers who all have taken one another, and the comfort of unity in allies. It is linked by various original pieces of tonal music, but these have no meaning aside from moving from one segment to another.

After exposure to turian and especially batarian music (whose complexity continues to amaze , the brutes have the souls of a Bach), some edgy asari composers have attempted to link pieces of alien music together in the same fashion, sometimes mixing in with the Atherion, others even drafting original pieces. This musical style, known as northess (the mixture) is seen as either a testament to the unifying beauty of asari music or jumbled garbage.

Asari entertainers are often group based, but in recent years, several solo musicians have arisen, although these remain more popular with aliens than asari. Asari musical stars are even more controversial, immature and tawdry than human ones, if that can be possible.

Asari Culture: Entertainment

Asari have a wide variety of team sports and games, most of them incorporating biotics. Swimming , biotic acrobatics, and biotic assisted gymnastics are popular, as is race hunting and clan-compettive sports. One game, tarass, is very nearly soccer with biotics and a dash of polo, using a biotic implement to score goals.

Asari popular culture has given rise to many shows , movies, and extranet venues. Gambling and games of chance are popular, as are puzzles and events that pit two asari against each other in tests of wits and daring. Asari eschew physical violence in all their entertainment, and there is not a single asari activity that doesn't incorporate some form of team play or at least have the option of it.

Asari adore parties based around communal tale-telling, casual sex and linking, and a sense of community and friendship. Often including feasts and drinking, dancing, and possibly even maniacal orgies, these parties are often thrown at the drop of a hat, but rarely if ever for serious events. Births and marriages are celebrated by more serious, somber and less carnal activities.

Refreshingly, asari children are more likely to engage in rough-and-tumble play and honest, simple games of individual achievement rather than stultifying unity than their parents , although most asari work hard to curb these tendencies at a young age.

Asari Culture: Tourism and Events

Part of the asari soul is in travel and mingling with other clans, so it is no surprise that asari tourism is a heavy part of their culture. Most asari make pilgrimages to holy sites, historical markers, and of course, the grand capital of Serrice, at least once in their life, but vacations to exotic, beautiful locales with a new lover is something of a regular occurrence with asari. Tourism is aided by the widespread belief that every new bonding should involve something memorable , to aid in keeping those memories available when one links with a new partner.

Aside from that, asari holidays and the like are sprinkled throughout the year liberally, almost twice as many as on the human calender, and the asari are devoted in breaking off from business or other serious pastimes to celebrate and explore. Asari are reverent about travel, and indeed some of their old religions saw travel and exploration as holy. As such, asari are usually quite mobile in their lives, willing to uproot and move to new cities or even new planets unless their network of companions and linked lovers is too large to support such.

Asari Culture: Religion and Siari

Very little is known about the old asari Athamian religion – even under truly horrific torture, the few asari priestesses of Athame we have captured and interrogated would only smile maddeningly and tell us it was not for the likes of us. We know bits and pieces about the rituals and the locations of a handful of temples, but every single holy site is locked down with military encryption, heavy defenses, patrols of multiple Justicars, and backed up with packs of Night-wind operatives or even Spectres. All of them are also rigged to blow with thermonuclear devices and are shielded with more than two feet of sensor-disruptive material. We know SOMETHING is going on, but the amount of resources to determine what is simply beyond us.

For all of that attention, however, only a few million asari still venerate the old gods. Most now embrace siari, which is a mix of religion, philosophy, and cult of personality. Siari is based around the concept that all is one – all asari are one, all things in the universe are one, all ends spring from the same beginning. It is a faith that implies that regardless of outcome or impetus, all actions are caused by a single primal cause and end with a single primal effect.

The mystery of siari is that each worshiper must find that cause and effect for themselves. Asari define it as the ability to let go of the needs of the self to embrace the other that is akin to you, but siari has attracted alien practitioners who come to very different results. Turians find siari to suggest that turians must be one with the ancestors to find their way. Salerians identify it as a sort of unified theory of everything. Humans who go in for this kind of metaphysical garbage imply that siari gives them the insight to see that humanity is strongest when it is threatened from without and that we must unify our urges towards a better form of humanity.

A key part of siari is communal mediation and linking with a matriarch, so it's no suprise that these people have garbage in their heads that makes them susceptible to further manipulation by the asari. There is no moral framework in siari – it claims morality is an attempt to bind others to a single point of view, but all points of view are important – nor does it champion anything aside from the asinine concept that individuality and uniqueness are bad somehow.

Even stupid turian ancestor worship is more truthful and honest than that. Asari have created a religion that justifies anything if it leads to unity, defines unity as oneness, and oneness as everything. From this completely psychotic stance, asari feel that any action they take, as long as they intend it to further the unity of all, is permissible.

It should be no surprise that siari also incorporates a great deal of meaningless mystical claptrap: that the entire universe is a conscious being, and that every life within it is an aspect of the greater whole, akin to a cell in a body. Siari claims that death is a merging of one's spiritual energy back into the greater universal consciousness , and that what one brings together during life adds to this greater energy, which drives all things.

Asari Culture: City-states

While asari have no overarching government (see the government section) , they are divided into varying colonies and , upon Thessia, city states. Each one of these acts as a completely autonomous and sovereign entity, although all bow to the needs and desires of the Asari Republic.

The city-states each have minor variations in cultural influences. Some are more or less focused on warfare, science, the arts, etc. When an asari must think in local terms, beyond the constraints of race but above clan or family, the best they can often do is on a colony or city-state level. There simply is no larger frame of reference – an asari who becomes an SA citizen defines loyalty as first to all of humans, then to the SA, and maybe then possibly to the city they live in. National concepts with widely varying languages, backgrounds and traits are utterly baffling and confusing to asari.

The City-states are quietly passive-aggressive towards one another, as are the colonies. They cooperate fully on the things that require interactions, but beyond that are standoffish, each defining it's own purposes as being the most paramount importance in improving asari society. Even this seeming individuality is a sham, though, as the Thirty are careful in balancing the power and influence each grouping has on asari culture as a whole. It is as if the Senate could somehow make one nation focus on the glory of making cars and another on the value of producing HE3 fuel, with little else mattering. This compartmentalization of cultures means the asari have many, many specialists for any task, but generalists are very rare.

Asari Culture: Language

The asari language became unified nearly ten thousand years ago, and is a complex mix of verbal communications, subtle pheremonal emissions, and electrical discharges that the asari can sense. Almost a good fourth of the language is tied up in the concepts and sensations from linking or bonding, and such is a vital part of asari communication.

The asari language structure is primarily noun-verb paired, with subjects leading a sentence and descriptors and verbs acting on it, based on where they are placed in a sentence. People and other nouns are often paired with what describes that persons relationships, or that thing's ownership, and events are often tied to motivations.

For example, "Mary walked to the store to buy a cake" would be rendered something like "Mary, who is paired with John, desired a cake to eat for sweetness, and thus journeyed there, alone."

"The car has a malfunction of the engine" would be rendered as "The conveyance of mine, which I value for speed and comfort, is not acting in the manner that it should, for it is flawed in the engine."

The result is a strangely formal , eloquent and long-winded language, which is often foreshortened by emotional and mental commentary mixed in.

Asari writing uses an alphabet mixed with very old pictoral 'image-thoughts'. These pictorals are akin to hieroglyphics, and are only used sparingly, mostly in the context of religious or sexual concepts. The written version was originally written in a series of curved lines , circles, and half circles, with location of the glyph noting pronunciation.

Asari Culture: Facial Markings

At one time in the past, each clan had it's own facial markings, which were applied with long-lasting paints of white, blue, purple, green or black from certain inks in fish bladders and bodies. As clans disintegrated, a great many markings ceased to have any relevance, but were carried down by descendants anyway.

In the modern era, most facial markings indicate a certain way of thinking, sexual preference, occupation, or mindset. A series of white lines and black dots that line the crests indicates someone who is focused on mental pursuits , with a sideline in warfare. There are thousands upon thousands of variations, and some are purely artistic.

A more common and recent facial marking is the mimicking of human eyebrows, started by Matriarch Benezia T'Soni some twenty-five years ago when she acted as the ambassador to Earth. Millions of other asari have taken up this craze, which basically indicates that the asari finds humans attractive and prefers human values to certain asari ones. Asari with these markings have begun to mimic human expressions such as raised eyebrows or the lowering of eyebrows during a frown.

Asari Culture: Linking and Joining

As I have stated many times, the asari view sexual contact as utterly banal, of no more import than a human inviting a neighbor in for a cup of coffee could be seen. Akin to this is the paramount importance of joining mind-to-mind in such sexual encounters, which enhances the memory transfer and web of connections between various asari.

Linking, the more casual version, is done during almost every sexual encounter, and is best described as a light joining of nervous systems. The asari feels her partner's pleasure, surface emotions, and physical sensations, and vice versa. This obviously makes sexual encounters with asari more pleasurable and intense than with any other race. It is addictive. I can't stress this strongly enough – Cerberus operatives and agents who link , however lightly, with an asari, are not going to forget the experience and will want to do so again. This must be avoided at all costs.

Linking can and does often lead to the second level of closeness, joining. Joining links deeper emotions, surface thoughts, and often the very nature of what it means to be a person, with that of the asari. Joining, at the very least, is required for an asari to become pregnant, and there appear to be varying strengths of such joins. Most of them also involve some level of memory transfer, bits and pieces that are emotionally important to a partner, sometimes involuntarily shared.

The cultural importance of these two activities is both casual and not-casual. Asari see no harm or real danger in linking and joining, and find it the best way to both explore potential partners for a bond, or fully enjoy themselves in sex, delighting in the companion's deepest emotional states. The linking is not a religious thing, nor is it particularly seen as life-altering for asari.

For many of their lovers or partners, however, who are alien, it is often overwhelming. Consider your spouse. You have lived with her for ten years, had two children. You have made love, had years at each other sides, knows how she likes her breakfast, and understand her very well, you think.

Then you link with an asari. There is no wondering if she's really enjoying sex, or if she cares for you or does not. There's no question that the party you went to she liked, or if she's cheating on you, or if she feels bored in the relationship. Every act of lovemaking is overwhelming, every gentle romantic evening is intense and you know more about her body than you do your own.

This is the danger, the allure, and the sickness that the asari bring. Once sampled, it cannot be forgotten, or ignored. Once fathomed, one cannot pretend any other sexual encounter is as sweet, or as intense, or as rewarding. We have tested this over and over, and the stupid joke about once you go blue you never go back is a hard, ugly truism.

Are there instances where one has linked, or even joined with asari, and left that relationship for other partners? Of course. Many such linkings or even joinings occur with exotic dancers , prostitutes, or merely free-spirited maidens unwilling or unable to pursue long term relationships. Certainly after some kind of traumatic event or hardship, especially if such is brought about by the link-partner, one could pull away from such allure. But the vast majority of such liaisons end with the partner snared for the rest of their lives.

Asari consider this the beauty of siari. I consider it mind-rape and Stockholm Syndrome.

Asari Culture: Bonding

While asari take linking and joining very casually, the act of bonding is taking with the utmost seriousness and even hesitance. Asari are, by their nature, beings that do not value one-on-one relationships over that of community, but many times two asari or an asari and an alien fit so well together that separation is not really an option. When asari feel that not having a given lover in their life diminishes them, they move to become one person.

For that is what bonding entails – the linkage of neural systems on such a total level that when it's done you have two people that are basically utterly and totally known to each other. Every thought and memory, every hope and dream and fear. Every physical impulse, ugly thought, and even subconscious drives or issues. These are all laid bare.

Asari bonding is , for all intents and purposes, permanent. While asari may go through hundreds, even thousands of lovers in their lifetimes, very few seem to take more than one or two bondmates in that time, and they focus on them to the exception of all else.

Asari bond with other asari only after having children (usually), more towards the end of their lives, while bonds with aliens usually occur at the start of the matron stages, for the purposes of producing offspring. The bond fundamentally alters the brain patterns of a human – scans show definate wave functions that are distinctly asari in shape and form. Bondmates often claim to be able to communicate telepathically (or rather, we suspect, through the bio-electric field of the asari, acting as a channel between the two now that their nervous systems are so fully aligned.)

A bonded asari who loses her bond-mate through separation is often embittered, taking up risky relationships to hope to recapture such closeness or burying themselves in sex to avoid emotional ties. An asari who loses her bondmate to death, on the other hand, is often shattered, with over half of such widows quietly withdrawing from society for a hundred years or more before recovering. Only the strongest willed asari would undergo such a harrowing twice. Every single known asari who has had three bondmates die has killed themselves, the pain is simply too much.

If linking and joining are fundamentally dishonest, due to the asari ability to control such and the overwhelming effect it has on aliens who undergo it, then perhaps bonding is the most honest thing the asari can do. It is the only real individual act that the asari have culturally, tying themselves to a single other person. Some asari have experimented with triple or quadruple bonds, but these usually fail, as very few people are strong enough to have such a multitude in their head their entire lives.

Bonding ceremonies are dignified and strangely touching. Far from the carnal , frivoulous and empty "all is one" siari garbage that occludes most other events such as childbirth, bonding ceremonies are intensely romantic and almost always private, between a handful of close friends and the bonded. The various clans and the Thirty have different methods of tying such bonds together. The Thirty use intricately braided cords to handfast the couple, the colors and patterns of the cords based on the family linage, hopes for the bond, and ancient fertility symbols. The cords are left to tie the two lovers together for a full day, and each must compensate for the loss of one hand by drawing on the bond to aid the other. The cord is severed at the end of the day, with it refashioned into a bracelet set into precious metals, or , on occasion, an armband, which is never to be removed even for a moment except in a handful of situations (like getting into a magnetic imager, etc).

Clans each have distinctive ribbons that are braided into a bracelet, one for each partner, which are exchanged, then ritually burned in a midnight ceremony under the moons of Thessia (or in a pinch, beneath any night sky). There are clan-specific dances, and the pair is given new facial markings, and finally the Clan Matriarchs will gift them with hammered silver bracelets of unity. Plain and unmarked, these serve the same function (and have the same limits on removal) as those of the Thirty.

The clanless have a simple, dignified ritual, where bondmates exchange slender bands of synthetic crystal, colored based on various themes. The crystal modifies it's coloration during a ritual bonding, shifting hues based on the deepest desires of the pair – blue for fidelity and a hope for children, white for unity in love, red for energy and long life, black for desire. The percentage of each bracelet's coloration is decided by each bond-mate's innermost thoughts, and are a public notice of why each has chosen the other. A mostly black bracelet is seen as a poor match, while a mostly red bracelet has overtones of more friendship than lust. A mostly white bracelet is seen as romantic and somewhat naïve, and a mostly blue bracelet as sweet and family oriented. Most successful bondmates have about equal proportions.

Bondings can and do fail over time. Divorce is an ugly thing, as each bondmate must go through a ritual debonding, forcing out memories and severing connections. This is only really possible with an asari bonded to another asari, alien mates are stuck with the link and the emotions it causes. Many divorces end with suicides. Broken bonds are seen as bad luck and a curse, and asari act quite superstitiously to such. Several once powerful matriarchs had their personal cults or even entire Houses laid low by the stigma of such an act – Matriarch Sorei abandoning her bondmate caused the Steelshape clan to expel all her bloodline, and almost a full third of House T'Soni angrily renounced their House and left when the century long bond of Matriarchs Benezia and Aethyta was sundered.

Asari Culture: Death Rites

Asari live a long time, but are neither invincible nor immortal. Death, for asari, is not feared, as many believe they return to the universe upon death, surrounded by the light of those who have gone before and dissolving into some sort of metaphysical eternal mind.

As such , asari death rites , while solemn, are neither the wild, angry fetes of the krogan, nor the dirgeladen sobfests that our own human funerals devolve into. If asari die on a planet, they are carefully lathered in preservative oils and laid in state under the sky for three days. Preservatives and mass effect fields keep away insects, predators, and bacterial decay. After this period, the deceased is ritually bid farewell to, and is immolated, with the family performing a shallow , non-sexual link to share memories and happy thoughts of the departed. There has been more than one occasion, when a bond-mate has died, that the widowed survivor throws herself on such a pyre, and never is this prevented or stopped. (Savages. You'd think a race of natural mind-rapers could invest in some mental health support for grieving widows.)

If the asari does not die on a planet, but dies in space, on a ship, or upon the Citadel, the body is immediately and forthwith ejected whole and unburnt into space, on a course for the nearby star, which will consume the body. Again, if more than one asari is present, linking and the sharing of memories occurs. If all the mourners are aliens, any asari present will attempt to give a recounting of the deceased's life.

All such funerals are coupled with a song , usually sung by a maiden, called a Remembrance. The Remembrance is one of the most ancient rituals the asari have, and one of the most mysterious, as it dates , according to myth, directly from the time of Athame.

The Remembrance is sung thrice, as the body lays in state or is being shot into the sun. It sings of how the asari lived, of the lovers she found and the things she explored, of the fears she conquered and the chances she took. It sings of any children she had, of her bondmates, and her accomplishments as the asari see them.

The final stanzas are the interesting part, and I apologize for the quality of translation, but the language of the Remembrance is the very oldest spoken form of asari, stubbornly not updated to the more modern grammar.

Remember, as Athame remembers Thessia

Remember, as guardians of truth hidden behind a face of stone

Remember, as protectors of a truth too Dark to be seen

Of shores unseen, forests unwalked, mountains unknown

There is a Darkness that lives beyond the Last Star

There is a Rain of Black Leaves that will fall once more

Remember, when Mighty [Cytha?] does pulse thrice times

That in death, the Darkness can be breached to it's core

The asari are not given to allegory, nor are they fans of subtle hints buried in cryptic wordings. The reference to Cytha is particularly troubling – if we are interpreting it correctly, Cytha is a neutron-star struck by a micro-black hole some twenty million years ago. The blow destabilized Cytha's usually rapid rotation, resulting in a spin-cycle that would spray x-rays across the ecliptic of Thessia's skies every fifty thousand to fifty two thousand years.

But when the stanza was written, by any measure, Cytha was in it's invisible phase, it's poles aimed no where near Thessia's view. And Thessian scientists didn't discover Cytha was a neutron star rather than a regular star until less than a thousand years ago. And yet, somehow this canto references this event.

It's worth noting that Cytha began to pulse roughly nine hundred years ago, visible to the naked eye on Thessia. We don't know what "the Last Star" is, unless the author of this maddening verse is speaking of the space between galaxies. Nor do we know or have any reference to a 'rain of black leaves'. The primary theory is that perhaps at one time Cytha was somehow synched up with the rogue planet that threatened to send asteroids crashing into Thessia, but then one must figure out how the writer knew that a rogue planet would cross the star's path and be captured in the first place!

We will continue to research this, as something bothers me about it, as if it's at the edge of thought and I can't quite place what I'm trying to say.