4.2
Consciousness came slowly, haltingly, arriving in bursts and flashes rather than a continuous stream.
He felt... cold. A bone-deep chill suffusing him. It was passing, but still, he shivered, struggling to open his eyes.
It was, thankfully, not very bright. Even so, his eyes struggled to remain open, because he was cold and tired.
Why was it so cold?
Ah, yes, the stasis pod. He'd managed to-
He was awake.
Javik's eyes snapped open, and he lurched upwards, nearly vaulting out of his stasis pod. His strength had not entirely returned to him, nor his balance, so instead of leaving the stasis pod quickly, he only ended up rolling over its side, falling to the ground in a lump. The sensation was a dull throb through his armour, but he used it center himself.
Something touched his shoulder-
"A few minutes!"
"No. The bunker is falling."
"There are pods online."
"Their sacrifice will be honoured in the coming empire."
"Preparing neutron bombardment. Get to your life pod, now."
"Neutron bombardment underway."
"The bunker is secure, Commander Javik."
"What is left of it. A few hundred people... How am I to rebuild an empire from that?"
- and he sees-
Too much. Information, surging through the nervous system, the brain, parts of left out and not there, and parts of it too present.
Then he begins to understand. These are words, that is language, those are thoughts.
Suddenly, it resolves, and...
Javik is standing upright.
Hundreds of trillions look back at him.
"Ah." They say. "A loop coupled with an overload. We can correct for this."
- and then it stops. The hand remains firmly at his shoulder. Despite this, despite the contact, he feels nothing through it. He reads nothing from it. It's strange, distinctly wrong, to touch something and not know it, but for the moment, he finds himself grateful for that.
"Sorry about that." The being speaks in only slightly accented Prathiik, helping him to his feet, steadying him when he wavers. "I wasn't expecting that feedback."
"How many others?" He asks. How long had it been? Had they been found quick enough, or...
"Well, that's the thing." The being smiles. "More than there should be."
Javik's eyes narrow, and he looks at the being.
It's pale, is his first impression. About as tall as him, but it strikes a significantly less imposing form; two eyes to his four, a coat to his armour, and significantly less muscle.
Now, finally getting a good look at it, he recognizes it. The shape is slightly different from what he remembers, but even so...
One of the primitives. The ones only two jumps away from this system. He searches, for a moment, for the word they use for themselves. "Human."
"That I am." The Human let go of his shoulder.
"What did you mean, Human?"
"For something that was attacked and bombarded, this place sure seems undamaged, don't you think?"
Javik paused.
And now that the Human mentioned it... Things were certainly far more intact that they should have been. Neutron bombardment was not a gentle process. The Reaper attack, too, had been destructive.
Javik looked at the walls. They all but gleamed, as if they had only just been fabricated. There were no cracks to be seen, no damage that time should have eventually accrued.
It had to have been a long time, too. The Humans had gone from barely-sapient to interstellar, something that would have taken tens of thousands of years, being generous.
He looked at the pod, and stopped. The pod was how he remembered it. What wasn't was what was around it; a crystalline mass that vaguely resembled a tree, with 'roots' attached to his pod and the 'leaves' canopying it almost... protectively?
He must have been more disorientated than he thought, if he'd missed that.
"What?" He asked. "What is this?"
"That is responsible for this bunker's good condition." How could a crystal tree be responsible for the complete lack of damage to this place? "But we are beginning to think that it had another purpose."
Javik turned, half-glaring. "Explain."
The Human tipped his head before looking at the door. "Perhaps you should come see for yourself. The control room is over here, yes?"
It was, but the Human didn't wait for an answer, immediately walking off.
Javik growled, before following. Humans, it seemed, had grown up into something vague and irritating.
It was a short trip. The Human was only just in front of him, moving with calm, smooth grace. It seemed more like he glided over the ground, for all the impact he had.
The door to control room opened at his presence. The Human moved inside, and then to side, making way for him. The console was inactive, which meant that Victory was too.
Which made sense, because if Victory had been online, then he would have contacted Javik immediately the moment he'd awoken.
A problem easily fixed.
Javik laid his hand on the terminal. Green light flared, Victory called and coming. The checks were brief. The Human watched on curiously, but not saying anything.
Seconds later, Victory's avatar shimmered into being. The green hologram was the same as usual, perhaps slightly more crisp, but it was still obvious that this was not something of flesh and blood.
The Human seemed interested, studying Victory closely before turning back to Victory's terminal. Javik ignored him.
"Commander Javik." Victory stated, briefly blinking. "You are well."
"I am awake." Javik nodded. "I need a report."
"Certainly. Scanning." Victory's avatar shivered, for a moment, before returning. "Scanning indicates 99.8% structural integrity. All but one system is online; the outer sensor array still reports destroyed. All subsystems online. Energy reserves at maximum. Fuel reserves at maximum. Material reserves at maximum. According to reports, it has been 50,235 years since the last full activation."
Fifty thousand years. That... that was a lot of time. Setting side the bunker's mysterious repair, for the moment, Javik asked the question that need to be asked.
"And the pods? How many do I have left?" He breathed in, closing his eyes, preparing himself. How many had he lost to the passage of time.
"999,999 life support pods reporting active, with living occupants. One pod reporting inactive, with an occupant released."
...
Javik's eyes opened. "What?"
4.3
"Scan again!" Javik demanded. "That is impossible!"
"Scan reports the same." Victory responds. "Life scanners report one million and one lifeforms inside the facility. All systems reporting no errors."
"Impossible." Javik repeats, in a much darker tone.
"He speaks the truth." The Human interjects, lightly. "But perhaps you should confirm that for yourself?"
Javik was already halfway out of the door by the time the Human had finished the sentence.
The closest set of pods was down a hallway. It's a short trip, Victory's hologram already waiting for him as he barges inside. The pod is active. Javik wastes no time in walking over, brushing his hand over its surface-
Alive.
- before moving on to the next-
Alive.
- and the next.
They're alive. All of them.
The Human is standing beside the door, and Javik doesn't spare him a single glance before moving right past, heading to a deeper part of the facility.
One of the lower parts, to be more exact. The door opens as he comes closer, revealing a large, wide room. In it, there are pods.
Lots of pods. Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand of them, laid carefully in neat rows and columns.
Javik moved forwards.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Every one he touched, no matter how far he went... Alive.
Javik only stopped when he reached the other end of the room.
All of them... Alive.
The Human's footsteps echoed lowly across the room. He came to a stop a respectable distance away from Javik. Victory's avatar formed on his other side.
"How?" He asks. "They were dead- Victory, they were dead, yes?"
"Reaper attack killed three hundred thousand. Neutron purge killed all but a few hundred." Victory confirms. "I do not understand how they are currently alive."
Dead, and yet, here they were.
"Victory, was it?" The Human faced Victory's avatar. "I have a question I'd like to ask."
Victory looked to Javik. Javik, after a moment, nodded.
"Ask." Victory stated.
"Do you know when that crystal tree in Javik's room appeared?"
Victory stilled briefly. "A recording is available."
"Display it." Javik commanded.
Victory's avatar vanished, replaced with a holographic screen. A view from one of the many cameras in the complex, showing Javik's stasis pod.
Except it wasn't just Javik's stasis pod. There was something else there, a being with a glowing blue form, hovering slightly off the ground, just in front of the pod. It was a strange being, oddly alluring in a distinctly alien way.
"The Dreamer." The Human said, a hint of reverence in his tone. "Just as we thought."
The glowing blue being, the Dreamer, held a hand out. A mote of light appeared above it, before the mote bloomed into a mass of irregular crystals, floating peacefully. The Dreamer's arm extended, fingers splaying, and the mass floated over the pod, setting down just behind it.
The mass grew. Irregular crystal gave way to a smooth trunk, which extended upwards, unfolding into branches and then into leaves. The base of it formed roots, moving to Javik's pod and connecting with it. It pulsed, lightly, before settling.
The Dreamer vanished between one frame and the next, gone without even a hint of where it had come from and where it had went.
The Human nodded, smiling. "I'm going to guess that, after this tree was created, the pods started reactivating?"
The Human knew something. That much was obvious to Javik
"Yes." Victory confirmed. "Over the course of the next two hundred and fifty years, every pod would reactivate and claim a living occupant. The last pod reactivated sixty years ago."
"Only three hundred and ten years?" The Human asked aloud, though it didn't seem like he was actually asking them. "Hmm... That's not too long ago..."
He fell silent, appearing contemplative.
Javik, for the moment, ignored him. "What else did that being do before creating the tree?"
"There are no records of that." Victory apologized. "By the time of its arrival, all energy was being allocated to critical systems, of which internal monitors were judged not to be. Energy and fuel supplies rose after it appeared, and all systems were subsequently reactivated."
"The Dreamer itself was undoubtedly responsible for that." The Human noted. "Restoring the power and fuel, then leaving that tree to keep it all going..."
"What was that being?" Javik asked, finally. "You're familiar with it, Human."
"That was the Dreamer." The Human smiled. "Our... benefactor, I suppose. We, Humanity, owe it much. All that we are today is because of the Dreamer." The Human considered Javik for a moment. "I don't doubt that even the resurrection of your fellow Protheans was due to it."
Javik's mouth opened, then closed. He had wanted to say that such a thing was impossible, but he was currently standing in an area where two hundred and fifty thousand dead Protheans miraculously weren't.
So instead of saying it's impossible, he simply asks a question. "How is that possible?"
"No idea." The Human said, smiling brightly as he does.
Javik stared at him.
"We already knew that the Dreamer had a complicated relationship with death, but this?" The Human leans in, excited. "Reviving people dead for fifty thousand years? This is new to us. For all the god-like feats that the Dreamer has shown, we never knew that something like this was possible. How the Dreamer did it is as much a mystery to us as it is to you."
The Human was insane. It must have been.
The way its grin widened only cemented that.
Then, the Human leaned back, suddenly as calm and collected as it had been only seconds beforehand. The change was so immediate that it was almost unnerving.
But Javik had fought a war against a superior enemy all his life, and had seen things that would have broken lesser beings. This was minor, in comparison.
"And of course, the Dreamer is also an enemy to the Harvesters." The Human paused a moment. "Well, we call them Harvesters. You know them as Reapers."
4.4
"You know of the- of course you do." That was good. "Then you've been building preparation for them?"
"Naturally." The Human said. "The Harvesters are omnicidal space cuttlefish, of course we are."
Javik had no idea what a cuttlefish was, but he ignored it. "Good." He turned around, beginning to make his way back towards the entrance. "My kind are few number, but it shouldn't take too long to get your technology up to our standards. Every moment we have precious, and it shouldn't be wasted-"
"Javik." The Human interrupted him. "That is unnecessary."
Oh. Arrogance. The Humans knew, but had no idea of the Reaper's true power. Undoubtedly, they thought that whatever primitive technology they had now would let them survive.
Javik turn around. "You have no true idea what awaits you-"
"We know exactly what awaits us." The Human's voice was firm. "What you fail to understand is that we are two entirely different civilizations. What works for us will not work for you. Our preparations are ours, while yours will be yours. We will assist you, of course, but we are not Prothean."
"My kind fought the Reapers for centuries, Human." Javik stated, becoming slightly annoyed. Only slightly, however, because this sort of obstinance was to be expected from younger species. "Perhaps bow to the wisdom of experience."
"You have no idea what we can do, Javik." The Human stated. "You have no experience with us. You are ignorant, which is only a problem when your arrogance makes you assume that we are anything even approaching what you think us to be."
A sharp tongue. Good. Spirit, Javik had use for. "Go on, then." Javik called the Human's bluff. "Tell me why your primitive civilization is somehow different from ours. Tell me how your technology doesn't need to be upgraded to our standard. Tell me what you think your kind is going to do to fight the Reapers."
The Human raised an eyebrow. His hand came up, and with a magnanimous gesture, space split open behind him.
Javik blinked.
A circular pane hung in the air, its edges glowing a soft blue. Inside of that blue glow, however, there was a picture of grass, a rolling plain edged with mountains. The scenery of the planet's surface.
The grass rustled. A soft breeze ran into him, around him, despite the fact that they were kilometers underground.
"Why tell you when I can show you?" The Human asked, now seeming slightly amused. "Come, come. Take a walk with me." They turned, and stepped through the portal.
Javik approached slowly, cautiously. The breeze was still present, still real. Javik could smell it, taste it, distinctly different from the air of the facility.
He reached the portal. The Human waited on the other side. Javik leaned to the side, looking past the portal. On the opposite side was the wall of the room, though there was still space to move behind it.
Javik stuck his hand through. There was no immediate difference, no threshold to the portal, just a passage between two areas, like an open door.
Javik stepped through.
Plains. Mountains. Forest. The light of the morning star. The air; brushing over his skin, cooling his carapace, a sensation he hadn't felt in...
Well, for him, it hadn't been too long ago. In reality, nearly fifty thousand years.
Javik turned around, and saw the inside of the bunker. Victory's avatar now stood directly on the opposite side, glowing green and looking outwards at Javik. He leaned to the side, and saw a deep valley with flowing water, flourishing with life, and absent of any dust or ash.
Javik's gaze drifted to the edge of the portal.
He reached to his side, pulling out a combat knife. The blade is dull-coloured, non-reflective, its monomolecular edge having been, more than once, the only thing that had kept him from certain death.
He puts it at the side of the portal, and then gently moves it inwards.
When he pulls back, the top half is missing.
Javik pokes where it used to be, feeling the metal in hand. The cut is perfect, though it is warm to the touch.
Finally, Javik speaks.
"What."
The Human had the audacity to laugh. "Suffice to say, we're not the mud-slinging primitives that you remember." He held a hand out, into the air.
In complete defiance of conservation of matter, crystals promptly bloomed into existence, a harmonic tone accompanying them. The crystals expanded, forming a long tube of irregular shapes, before promptly exploding.
Crystalline dust blew away in the wind, but there was something else that had taken the crystal's place. Javik recognized the sleek, silver shape immediately.
A simple, and ubiquitous, data cache.
"This is a... mildly abridged documentary of our history." The Human said. The cache floated above his hand for a moment, before drifting towards Javik.
He caught it, more out of reflex than desire. An impression of the information inside was immediately made known to him.
There was a lot.
"What?" Javik asked.
"I will leave it to your perusal." The Human tipped his head. "After all, you're going to be quite busy in the near future. A million of your people to awaken, a civilization to rebuild... We will return later, after you've gotten your feet under you. Good luck."
Without another word, the Human vanished with a flash of pale-blue light.
For a few moments, Javik stood there.
Then he felt a force yank at him, pulling him backwards. He hadn't been prepared for it, so he went straight through the portal at his back.
With a flare of his biotic power, Javik stabilized himself, slowing his movement and landing on his feet.
The portal, in front of him, began to shrink, the outside edges becoming smaller and less bright as they did. Just before it closed, a small piece of metal flew through, the tip of the knife he'd used to test the portal.
There was only one response, really.
"What?!"
4.5
"You know... I don't want to say it, but I'm honestly kind of disappointed."
"Yeah. I knew what you mean. The Protheans, a species we had always imagined as enlightened... were actually a bunch of imperialistic jackasses."
The moment that Victory had activated, they knew they would not be able to contain their curiosity. It had been rude, a flagrant violation of privacy, and they would freely admit that.
Nevertheless-
Victory had been interesting. A mind in the machine, existing only as long as it was active, without even a hint of it prior.
So they took a peek.
Victory was... limited. It had been designed that way, they knew. They took an imprint of a personality of a living Prothean, bound it to a limited neural net, and created... That.
A mind, very good in doing what it was programmed to do, with a limited ability to learn skills, to adapt, becoming faster and more efficient over time.
A mind, utterly incapable of doing anything outside of its programming. It was not an artificial intelligence that was shackled, no.
'Shackled' implied that the ability existed but was denied. Victory had nothing, was nothing, outside of its expected tasks. A crippled thing never to grow.
That they could sense its mind was as intriguing as it was concerning. It had a mind, for one. Something as base as that had a mind.
They had created things with their own minds. The Anima. Small things, weak things, but just as ageless and just as deathless as they themselves. In time, they grew, became stronger, became more.
They had not created machine intelligences with their own minds. It had been one of the jumps that they'd just... never made. One part of that was in the existence of Animas effectively rendering such a creation pointless, but even so...
Certainly, expert systems had become incredibly complex over the last four hundred years, could be made to seem so lifelike that they might appear to be true intelligences, but the complete lack of a mind behind it made the deception obvious.
Victory was less complex than some of those systems they'd created. But those systems lacked minds, and Victory distinctly didn't.
So, why was Victory different?
Of all the things that had changed after the coming of the Dreamer, curiosity had not been one of them.
So they looked a little deeper. Victory had been interesting, lightning quick and entirely incapable of noticing them poking around.
What they found was... data. Naturally.
Some of it was encrypted, which they left alone because that, they felt, would be too big an invasion of privacy, but the rest? Unencrypted, publically available upon request?
Well... They'd just been so curious to know more about the Protheans.
It hadn't taken too long for them to find the parts of it that related to history. That had caught the attention of many of them easily, because even after all this time, they still didn't know much more than scattered pieces, here and there.
The bunker had been built with the intention of letting the Prothean Empire survive the Harvesters, and rebuild in a later age, after the Harvesters passed back into the darkness. What was a civilization with no history?
Nothing, naturally. And so, the history had been stored, clear cut in detail.
For the Protheans, it was a long history of them rising from a single planet into an interstellar empire, uniting the other races of the galaxy against a synthetic menace, the ever-cursed Metacons, against whom the Protheans were nearly outmatched, only to inevitably run into the Reapers, an even worse race of synthetics that truly did outmatch the Protheans.
For Humanity, it was a long history of the Protheans rising from a single planet into an interstellar empire, conquering every other civilization in the galaxy, grinding their cultures into nothing, assimilating their peoples into the imperialistic empire, all in the name of unity against a group of maddened machines, only for their unity to backfire dramatically when the Harvesters came by, turned the Conduits off, collapsed the centralized empire into anarchy, and then swept them up over the course of three centuries.
Or, in other words, being a bunch of imperialistic jackasses.
They had to wonder, really, just how necessary it actually was. The historical database claimed that the Metacons had pushed the Protheans to the brink when they started conquering other organic civilizations, but what, exactly, did 'pushed to the brink' mean if they still had the resources and manpower to conquer and assimilate other civilizations on such a scale?
On such a scale, it would have been no small effort. Certainly, much larger than the Protheans should have been able to spare.
It was a kind of oddity that made them think that, perhaps, there might have been some historical revisionism going on.
Hard to do, with a species that could share memory at touch, but the Protheans had survived for over eighteen thousand years prior to the Harvesters ruining everything. Even for them, eighteen thousand years was a long time.
Long enough for details to... slip.
"What should we do about it?"
"I don't particularly fancy a repeat of Prothean imperialism. They can't hurt us, but there are other species out there in the galaxy who are actually mortal."
"Yes. Imperialism at this stage would be counterproductive."
"I would like to believe that the Protheans are intelligent enough to realize this. They'll get further, and stand a better chance against the Harvesters, by not being imperialistic jackasses."
"Frankly, the best way for them to play it would be to present themselves as the old, wise species, who were destroyed save for a small colony, and are now attempting to avert the destruction of the current young species. Play up the low population, trade the high technology for generous deals in resources, build a fleet as much as possible, and then fight the Harvesters when the time comes."
"That assumes a mindset close to Human on the part of the younger species."
"True. Predicting the mindset of alien species without any data whatsoever will be... difficult, at best. For all we know, every species out in the galaxy at the moment could be robots, hiveminded bugs, energy beings, or whatever."
"I mean, if you want to be technical, we count as-"
"I know what we count as. The point I was making is that we don't know what everybody else counts as."
"Fair enough."
"We'll wait a bit before we talk to Javik again. Let him learn and all. If the Protheans prove sensible enough to realize that what they did before won't work now, it's fine. If they don't... Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
4.6
The pod made a hiss, and the Prothean inside jerked wildly as they woke up.
Javik wasted no time in grasping her hand, letting their nervous systems mesh and meld. Her panic gave way under his calm, breathing stabilizing, body relaxing into something slightly less tense.
All that he had awoken thus far had been like this. Javik himself hadn't been that far off.
"I remember dying." She said, after a moment. The memory flashed through his head.
Silver red creatures charged them. Her squad had killed ten times their number already, but there was no end to them.
"Fighting." Javik said. "You gave your life for all others, Seval."
Seval nodded.
It was an honorable sacrifice.
Lancing particle beams scythed her squad down, one after the other. Not through accuracy, but through sheer volume of fire, wearing down their shields before finally striking that final blow.
Seval's hand came up to her chest, over her heart. "I was shot. Through here."
There was no wound there. The armour that covered the other Prothean's body was without flaw.
All too quickly, she was alone. Particle bolts and beams tripped away her cover with alarming ease. Seval grabbed a grenade, leapt out from behind her cover just as it crumbled.
She prepared to throw it, but just before she could, another bolt hit her in the chest, puncturing right through her shields.
She fell to the ground, the grenade, armed, landing next to her. Blood was pooling, shock taking hold-
But Seval knew that she couldn't just stop, not now, not here. She was as good as dead, but the others weren't, not yet.
And so, with her last breath...
Seval summoned her Biotics, and flung the grenade at the swarm.
Javik reached out, grabbing her shoulder with his other hand, and pulled her upwards. "Take this a second chance, then. Ground yourself in the here and the now."
Seval nodded, though still somewhat shaken.
He'd not blame her for that.
He'd read through the Humans' history.
It sounded absurd. It was filled to the brim with what wouldn't have been out of place in some fictitious novel. The claims it made were ridiculous, and the implications that came with them were equally absurd.
Under normal circumstances, he'd have had the data cache be recycled, as it was clearly not being used properly. If he'd been in a particularly bad mood, he might have used it as an improvised projectile in a mass accelerator, or maybe a bludgeon, with which he would beat the fool who dared try to pass this flagrant violation of common sense and basic physics off as real.
Under normal circumstances.
As it was?
Javik was standing in a bunker where the dead had come back to life. He had seen a pale, fleshy being open a portal with naught but a gesture. He had seen that same being create the very data cache he had been holding, from nothing, and then just teleport away not ten seconds later.
In the face of all that, he found himself remarkably more willing to accept things that sounded, on the surface, like insanity. He'd still confirm as much of it as he could, of course; he wasn't fool enough to offer blind trust.
Until he could confirm all of it, however?
He'd be forced to act as if it was true. He needed to, to plan his response, what he himself and the Protheans under his command would do when they were involved.
What he had already was... basic. Bare. He didn't much like what he had, but... well, he didn't have much of a choice.
The original plan, the one the Bunker had been built in mind for, had been a relatively short stasis, awakening soon after the Reapers left. They would have emerged, rebuilt as much as they could, then expand dramatically and leverage every possible resource against the Reapers. Uplift the primitives, expand the empire, build a fleet, prepare many more contingencies in case the effort was interrupted by the Reapers, and then strike as early as possible as often as possible, doing as much damage as possible.
That... wouldn't work. Not now.
They didn't have the time for it. They'd overslept; tens of thousand of years to potentially prepare turning into merely slightly more than a century- if the Human's data could be trusted. Javik had no reason to trust it, but he also had no reason to think it was wrong, and, worse, assuming it wasn't true when it might be true would be more dangerous than the other way around.
The Protheans numbered exactly one million. A century was not enough time to grow into any number that would actually hold effect on the Reapers. It was certainly not enough time to unite the other species in the galaxy- at least, not through military force. If they acted as if they had more time, and didn't?
They'd be crushed under the weight of unfeeling metal.
The Prothean Empire he had gone to sleep dreaming of had vanished into so much as smoke.
The assumption of it was built on the notion of Prothean superiority; whether that be superior technology, superior numbers, superior industry, or superior military. They currently had none of that.
With the assumptions broken, so too were the plans of rebuilding the empire.
Which meant... a change of plans.
All of a sudden, it wasn't about quantity. A hundred years wouldn't bring anything even approaching the kind of quantity that was required to fight the Reapers. Now, it was about quality, the goal being to maximise effect for minimum resources. It would be the only way they'd stay relevant in the coming conflict, and therefore, the only way to fight back against the Reapers.
There were other options, too. Planning more contingencies, making sure each one was better equipped and better prepared, and not vulnerable to oversleep.
But, before all that could come to be? The Protheans needed prepare. And the best way to get things prepared?
Well...
"How much help is your civilization willing to give?" Javik asked.
The Human smiled. "How much do you want?"
When there are exploitable resources, use them.
Let it never be said that Javik was a fool.
4.7
January 16, 2074/2449
Psi-Net Connection Established.
PSIDENT: Marcus Simon De'mire (#1)
Status: Alpha-Green.
Alert: Priority Article (Classification Alpha-Alpha-Delta)
"Display."
Displaying.
Article: Significant FTL Improvements:
Now that we're free of our hundred and ten astronomical unit wide bubble, we finally have the space to start really putting our FTL designs to the test.
Findings are [Here, alongside the math, experience, and all the gritty details, but in short:
We improved our FTL designs. Significantly.
We noticed that the Mass Effect has the ability to distort the fabric of space, but until the Dreamer's temporal field collapsed, we've lacked the space to actually test it. We managed to build an FTL drive that distorts space in two ways; shrinking it in front of the drive and expanding it behind it.
Yes, we built a Warp Drive.
Yes, it's faster than normal FTL.
It does have its own problems, though.
Pros: It's fast. On the order of five to eight times faster than regular Mass Effect FTL.
Cons: Unlike regular FTL, you can't really change course while still in FTL. Minor adjustments, yes, but anything major requires slowing down, reorienting, then speeding up again, unless you want to have turning curves several dozen light years wide.
Thankfully, it's possible to have one drive that does both mods, so you can make a relatively simple modification to existing FTL drives and get the best of both worlds. Normal FTL for interplanetary travel, Warp for interstellar.
Examples of the new drives are now available.
TL; DR: We Star Trek now.
Michael raised an eyebrow. "Neat."
January 21, 2074/2449
"We don't need a space elevator." Javik sighed. "That's why we have shuttles."
"You mean the shuttles that are tiny and completely incapable of carrying any real amount of materials?" The Human asked.
"They are effective." Javik's eyes narrowed. "Unlike the eyesores that are the space elevators your species seems obsessed with."
"What's bad about them, Javik?" The Human leaned back. "The current generation of elevators could carry a dreadnaught into orbit. Tell me again how they're ineffective."
"The amount of resources that goes into a single one of those could be used to build an entire fleet of shuttles. Why would anybody want to use such a gigantic waste of resources?"
"Right, because resources are a concern to a species that can go to any of the surrounding five thousand star systems in two minutes." The Human fired back. "Resources won't be the concern, Javik, throughput will be."
"Which loops back around to shuttles." Javik stressed. "Shuttles can go anywhere in a system. Shuttles are not gigantic targets waiting to be severed and wreck a line of destruction around a planet. Shuttles work."
"But space elevators would work better. And it would look much cooler."
Javik sighed.
January 22, 2074/2449
Javik stared with narrowed eyes as a column of irregular crystals continued to grow upwards into the sky.
"Show-offs." He scoffed.
January 25, 2074/2449
Javik did not smile as the first of the industrial fabricators came online. A pleased expression crossed his face, but nobody would go so far as to claim it was a smile.
There would be more, eventually. But first, there would be refineries, an armada of mining drones, and a small fleet of freighters.
"You've got this whole worked out, haven't you?" The Human asked, though it wasn't really a question.
"We've had eighteen thousand years to refine our technique." Javik stated. "Some of us are not a bunch of amateurs subsisting on magic powers."
The Human grinned. "Yeah, and some of us don't need handouts."
January 30, 2074/2449
"You know what's going to happen if we stick around for long enough, right?" The Human asked.
It was a rare moment when the two of them weren't trading shots with each other.
"We're at a crossroads, here." The Human continued after a moment. "If we keep staying around, keep releasing psychic energy... then psionics will start appearing among the Protheans."
"And?"
"Are you sure you've considered the prospect, Javik?" The Human asked, seeming honestly, legitimately concerned. "The advent of psionics changed Humanity forever."
"Get to the point."
"You have a choice, Javik." The Human stated. "On whether or not you want this process to start."
Javik sighed, before standing up. "Why, Human, would I not want to take that choice? I've seen what your kind can do. Why would I want my kind to be denied that?"
"You Protheans will not immediately know how to do what we can, Javik." The Human noted. "But more than that? What comes out of the crucible of psionics is not the same as what went in. We used to be a divided species, did you know that?"
"I read your history." Javik said, voice blunt.
"Then you understand, don't you?" The Human responded in turn. "What we are now is not what we used to be. We used to be divided, by nations, by culture, by things so vapid and meaningless as skin colour. We used to fight, we used to war, violently tearing everybody else down so that we might pull ourselves up."
The Human held a hand out. "Not anymore. Now, at any given point in time, our entire species can be working and acting as one." He straightened, looking back at Javik, the glow in his eyes low, but markedly more visible than it usually was. "What will come may not be something you want it to be."
"But it would be stronger." Javik noted. "And for that alone, the cosmic imperative demands it."
"This isn't evolution, Javik." The Human said. "It has more in common with augmentation."
"Do I look like I care?"
The Human shrugged. "Well, whatever. Don't say we didn't warn you. You don't get to complain if things don't go as you want."
February 6, 2074/2449
Psi-Net Connection Established.
PSIDENT: Marcus Simon De'mire (#1)
Status: Alpha-Green.
Alert: Priority Notice (Classification Alpha-Alpha-Beta)
"Display."
Displaying.
"Incoming First Contact event expected. System 4478-151-5527 has an active Conduit. Whoever activated it is probably not too far away."
4.8
"Want to be part of a First Contact?"
Javik let out a long, slow, resigned sigh.
Before the end of the Reaper conflict, the average Prothean Dreadnought had been 1.4 kilometers long, with a crew of anywhere between six to thirteen thousand, usually with troop contingents that numbered in the tens of thousands.
The heavily modified Dreadnought that Javik had taken had a crew of twenty, and the only reason that number was larger than five was because this was a diplomatic mission instead of a violent one.
This ship had been a testbed for the new design philosophy; minimum manpower involved for maximum effect. As a result, the entire ship was automated to the extreme, self-maintaining, self-repairing, and controlled mostly by a personality imprint.
Javik expected it to be out of date in three months. This testbed of technologies hadn't made much modifications to the superstructure of the Dreadnought itself. It still looked like it was meant to be crewed, with the spaces for the crew. Many had been filled by technology, but it was easy to see that it hadn't been originally designed with it in mind.
It was nevertheless a silver spike of angry death. Smaller Mass Accelerator arrays combined with laser and plasma weapons would quickly obliterate whatever decided to get close, but staying at longer ranges meant dealing with the ship's main gun and its supply of Warp ammo, which had the remarkable tendency to punch right through the barriers of even of a Reaper Capital Ship, and the equally desirable ability to rip them in half with even a moderately well-placed shot.
Some might have considered it overkill to bring such a vessel on what was ostensibly a diplomatic mission. Javik considered it prudence; space was vast, filled with dangerous and scary things, and the only reason the Humans got away with approaching it with such optimistic recklessness was because they were immortal and would probably rate among those scary things if they weren't so annoyingly friendly.
The Human vessel was an indication of that; the core of it three times the length of his Dreadnought, many more times the volume, and not so much a ship as a space habitat with delusions of being a ship. The extensions attached to the core were significantly less voluminous, but they did extend quite significantly, making it seem larger than it was.
Despite its size and myriad of defensive options, the most dangerous thing about it was the twenty million that called it home.
It had already been here for eight hours.
"You know we're being watched, don't you?" Javik asked, arms crossed against his chest. "You'd have to be a fool to not keep an eye on a Conduit."
"Of course we know." The Human smiled. "We were counting on it. There's eighteen different sets of sensors in this system."
Javik turned to the Human. "Eighteen?"
The Human waved his hand, a projection of the system appearing in front of them.
It was a somewhat distorted projection, with the planets up-scaled and the star down-scaled, but that was entirely normal when one was trying to show everything of importance in a system.
Eighteen red dots shortly appeared on it.
"Six for the Conduit, and four for each of the major planets in this system." The Human noted. The projection faded, leaving only the red dots, which became larger, expanding to show what appeared, at first glance, to be asteroids.
But then a wireframe appeared, and showed the machinery hidden inside.
Efficient, Javik supposed. These would be passive sensors at best, but they would work quite well in keeping whoever created them informed.
A thought occurred to him. "Is that why you haven't littered your Star Rails all over this system?"
"Naturally. Wouldn't want to spook whoever is watching, after all. We know nothing about them, at this stage. Who could say how they react?"
"Conceding the initiative." Javik noted.
"We're not here to make enemies, Javik." The Human said in response. "It was us who trespassed, after all. Let them have the initiative."
"If they shoot at us, I am not going to hold back."
"I don't expect you to."
It had taken a little over five hours for something to happen. Javik would have had his ship processing asteroids during this time, if not for the fact that, aside from the Conduit, the system seemed to be utterly bland and dry. Certainly, there was the typical elements that could be found in every system, but there was a distinct lack of Element Zero, nor a convenient Gas Giant to acquire fuels from.
There had been a planet here, except, at some point in the past, it was evident that it had been bombed into lifeless oblivion; bearing the signature scars of asteroid drops and antimatter cleansing. It hadn't even been that long ago, either, only two thousand or so years.
It went a long way towards explaining why there was, despite the Conduit, no actual presence in this system. It also explained why the Conduit was there in the first place, despite the lack of anything else of value.
That world had probably once been a Garden World.
All it was now was a mildly toxic ball of dust.
Five hours, ten minutes, fifty three seconds.
And, finally, the Human announced that they had visitors.
"They're here." He waved his hand, that projection appearing again. This time, the image was of a Conduit, three ships in formation having just appeared from it.
His own sensors confirmed it moments later, the probes relaying their data straight to his ship. Six light minutes away, three ships floated forwards in formation.
All three were different, but approximately the same size. That in itself was concerning; such disparate designs spoke of a lack of true unity.
One was made of hard angles, with two 'wings' extending from each side, appearing oddly like something that should be in atmosphere rather than space.
The second was sharp edges and points, narrow but long, presenting a minimised profile for maximised effect. Javik couldn't say about the efficiency of it, but it was certainly more sensible than the other two.
The third was where any logic broke down. Smooth curves, an odd shape, and a massive hole going right through the longest part of the ship, in complete defiance of common sense and effective design.
Javik grimaced.
This cycle is off to a bad start.
4.9
The ships were intriguing. The angular one, the spiked one, the smooth one. All three were relatively small ships; six hundred, five hundred, and seven hundred meters, respectively. The variance of the design was uplifting; Javik had described a galaxy under a monolithic culture. This utter difference was good, hinting that there were different cultures with different viewpoints.
Many of them felt that the hole going through the center of the third ship was an odd choice, but the engineers had been quick to point out that it was, in fact, a Dark Matter funnel, providing an effective, if power-hungry and somewhat limited, method of propulsion.
There was an emotional cloud surrounding those ships. They felt anticipation, eagerness, excitement, awe, mixing alongside an appropriate amount of caution, and just a touch of fear.
There was no anger, no desire to attack. This was good, they decided. Marcus tells Javik the former. Javik's own cloud of annoyed resignment doesn't fade, but a notion of some other emotion peeks through.
Minutes pass. The new ships have sent radio messages, beginning a maneuver that takes them closer, though not directly towards, their and Javik's ships.
They retrieve the messages before they arrive. There are several different types, only a few actually understandable. Some are simple, repeating, and it doesn't take them very long to figure out that it describes basic mathematical concepts. The first steps towards gaining mutual understanding.
There are several that are more complex, and all but a few of them are completely incomprehensible.
Those ones are familiar, but distorted. Those transmissions follow Prothean encoding. The size of each varies; one is likely nothing but text, while another likely follows into a visual image, with a third seemingly containing audio content
Marcus relays this.
It is close, but not the same. It takes thirty seconds to properly reconstruct the simplest of the messages, to successfully translate the encoding. It is text, a data string. The message is a simple greeting.
It is also a butchering of Prathiik. The words, individually, make sense. The sentence, translated as is, is more along the lines of 'you Hello, welcome we you to stellar.'
Javik's teeth grind together when he sees it.
The next most complex one takes a minute, and the one after that two. Patterns begin to make themselves apparent. They pass the data through the network.
Psy-crystal had, long ago, proved to be an effective computronium. The combined mass of psy-crystal immediately available to them is far larger than it needs to be.
Brute force combines with careful skill easily. By the time that the alien's light echo reaches their ship, they're starting to get a handle on how the encoding is meant to be done. When the radio waves reach fifteen seconds later, they're mildly certain that, if they tried to communicate through radio, the aliens would be able to piece together at least ten percent of it.
First Contact would have been vastly more difficult if they, or the Protheans, were not what they were.
Javik's ship sends a message back, shortly. A moment later, theirs' follows.
Javik's, however, is singular, a message in proper Prathiik, which, considering their displayed mastery of the language, was probably going to be just this side of incomprehensible.
Their own transmissions are more varied. They send one greeting in Prathiik, which is significantly simpler than Javik's own. They send another in their own language, which is what they suspect the aliens' variety includes.
Their others are more simple, holding in the same vein as the alien's own attempts to establish a baseline, a method of transmitting meaning. It is markedly, delightfully, out of date. The novelty of it is intriguing.
It won't, and can't, last forever. It will last until either Javik gets annoyed enough about the inefficiency of it to arrange a meeting and simply pull the language to get it over with, or until they successfully communicate that they have the ability to learn the language and can get the aliens to agree, or until the situation gets to the point that they can longer afford to extend the courtesy.
Until then...
They tug at their ship, pulling it away from where it was. The acceleration is gentle, and places it on a vector that takes it closer to the alien's own, but doesn't quite intercept it.
Six minutes is far too long for a communication delay.
It had all started over half a day ago. Old probes, leftover from the Rachni Wars, had detected new signals. After nearly eighteen hundred years of inactivity, it was almost a surprise that the probes still functioned at all, especially when one considered the fact that most Salarian equipment wouldn't last even a tenth as long.
It had taken an hour before anybody realized that the probes were reporting. It had taken another before the situation had been investigated appropriately.
Ten minutes into the investigation, and the situation had been escalated directly to the attention of the great Dalatrasses, the highest points in the Salarian Union. Two and a half hours after that, the Turian Hierarchy and the Asari Republics were informed so that all three might plan a unified response.
A ship of unknown design, its size surpassing even the Destiny Ascension, had appeared in former Rachni territory.
Its mere existence strongly hinted at another large, alien polity, likely possessing advanced technology. The three largest governments of the Citadel Species, therefore, had quickly decided that it would be best to go ahead and investigate, with the possibility, and indeed, probability, of opening contact.
Three hours into the preparations, another ship had shown up, larger than a dreadnought, but still smaller than the first, and also clearly of another distinct design aesthetic, hinting at two separate polities.
Five hours later, here they were. Three ships full of some of the finest minds in Citadel Space, all of them with long experienced crews, and ready to make history.
It had been a bit too rushed, for her liking. A great deal many Matriarchs had wanted to wait, but...
Well, Salarians. Short lifespans made for little patience, and when they were a driving force, things would have to go quickly.
The initial phases had gone well, despite; they arrived on target, the transmissions were sent, and they started a course that would take them closer, but not directly towards the other ships.
Six minutes was how long it took for their light and signals to reach.
Four was how long it took the other's to reach back.
As the deck of her ship burst into noise, Matriarch Benezia smiled.
All going well, so far.
4.10
"The second ship, the smaller one, only sent a single transmission. Its a text message that the translators recognize as Prothean."
Benezia smiled. "So they have encountered ruins."
Attely nodded excitedly, before her expression cooled and she spoke again. "Unfortunately, the translator wasn't able to parse it correctly. Their understanding of the Prothean's language appears to have grown differently than ours. The syntax is wrong, and some of the words are unrecognizable even from our database. We understood maybe one word in ten."
"Not enough for reliable communication, then." Benezia noted. "And the other ship?"
"Same syntax issues, but the message was significantly less complex." Attely reported. "It appears to be a greeting. The syntax makes it difficult to parse, but the translator VI reports a 93.4% certainty of it."
"Do you think we could communicate the concept of meld language transference with what we currently have?" Benezia asked next.
Attely slowly shook her head, frowning. "I... wouldn't think it would be reliable enough, Matriarch. While a simple concept, communicating it through broken syntax and a relatively limited array of words would be difficult, and a misinterpretation might be... problematic."
"We'll need to wait until we can communicate better, then." Benezia noted.
Attely nodded.
"It's binary. Simple, yet efficient."
"I see, they organize it like with continuous binary numbers, each one double the previous one. 11111111 would be 255, while 01 would be 2. 111111111 is 511, with 011111111 as 510. Ten ones would be 1023, with eleven ones as 2047. All integers, but no fractions."
"We've observed three different distinct signals, thus far. Signal A is 0, signal B is 1, and Signal C appears to designate the end of a binary string."
"A new signal. It appears to represent breaks in a string, but not the end of the string itself. The result contains three separate strings contained in a single superstring. Metadata."
"I think it is intended to be arranged in a grid, with the horizontal and vertical values being the first and second parts of the string."
"We are now at the point of pictures. Pure black and white pictures, but pictures nonetheless."
"We can also make the observation that the other species understands visuals in a manner roughly similar to us."
"The alien ship has launched drones. They arranging in a grid pattern, ten by ten."
"The drones just lit up. All of them show white light."
"We received a transmission, simultaneously. Grid pattern arrangement of strings matches the drones."
"We received a new transmission, drones changed to match it."
"Ah. They're confirming the results of their attempts and transferring meaning."
"We received a different superstring, this time. Four parts in it, horizontal coordinate, vertical coordinate, active, and an eight piece long string of binary. Drones are changing in response."
"The alien ship is releasing more drones, the grid size is changing to sixteen by sixteen."
"All drones are active, but the light has changed for each of them. Drone 1 has the superstring of 1,1,1,255. The light it is releasing is the same light as before. The next drone is 2,1,1,254, and is slightly darker. Pattern continues to the last drone, which is showing very low levels of light."
"Shades of gray. Just like that, the amount of information that can be communicated has been dramatically increased."
"Drones are retreating back into the ship. We are receiving a new transmission. Grid size is one thousand by one thousand. It... appears to be an image of their ship, from an isometric viewpoint."
Benezia smiled. "How difficult would it be to send a similar picture of our ship to them?"
Attely checked her console. "The Salit is roughly in position. Should I forward the request?"
Benezia nodded.
It took a few seconds to get it all together. Some quick cropping, and some conversion, but it was handled just fine by the VI.
Off the message went.
Thirteen seconds later, the communications officer reported that there were two transmissions, sent simultaneously.
The first was another image, five thousand by one thousand. The top part of it it was a match to the image they sent before, their ship rendered in grayscale, but the lower portions...
Benezia leaned forwards, all of her attention suddenly captured.
The lower portion showed beings that might have been mistaken for Asari.
There were two of them, shown from two different angles. From the front and from the side. Both were remarkably similar, but of the two...
The second definitely had more in common. The structure of the face, the body... Nearly all of it was the same, except for the top of the head.
Where there would have been a crest of tendrils for an Asari, this being appeared to have some sort of fur. There was, furthermore, a pair of structures on the side of the head, though she didn't know their purpose.
The only thing missing was the colour, but that was to be expected of grayscale.
At the bottom of it all was a Prothean word, which the VI helpfully translated as 'Us'.
"What?" She asked, alongside fully half of the ship.
Which wasn't a surprising. Seeing the image of something so close to their species coming from an alien ship- With an appearance like that, how alien are they really? - that would surprise anybody.
The image shifted, moving to the left as another transmission arrived. Another image, again in parts. The top part was an image of the other alien ship, the smaller. The bottom portion, however, show something dramatically different from the previous.
Again, two beings, again, from two angles. these ones, however, were significantly different.
They shared the same basic structure, yes; a head, two arms, two legs. Their hands, however, had only three fingers, with their feet having only two widely spaced 'toes'. They were significantly bulkier, with larger muscles.
The head truly cemented it; the top of it was plated and wide, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of a Krogan, though significantly flatter. Four eyes, like a Batarian, but instead of being right above and below each other, these beings had their eyes arranged upwards and to the side, with two attached pupils in each eye.
They, too, had a word at the very bottom. The VI was quick to translate that, too.
'Prothean'.
4.11
"What?" She asked.
The revelation of the first aliens' appearance had been shocking, but using that name for the second?
"I think-" Attely began, after a few moments. "- that what they think the word means is different to what we think. We know the word means 'Prothean', but they might think it means 'Alien', or something equivalent. So, they use it, not knowing any better, because it offers an easy distinction between themselves and the others."
"That makes sense." Benezia leaned back, sighing.
The Protheans had vanished fifty thousand years ago. The oddity of using their species name as a designator aside, it was simply ridiculous to think that these might be actual Protheans.
Especially when their image didn't even match any of the images or statues recovered from Prothean archaeological sites.
Just ignorance.
"Can we send similar images back?" She asked, getting back on track. They now knew what the aliens looked like, even if they had nothing further, not even names.
Making sure the aliens knew what they looked like followed naturally.
"We would be limited to grayscale, but yes." Her communications officer responded.
"Do so. Start with ours, then the Salarians, then the Turians." Benezia commanded.
The bridge surged back into motion.
As the three transmissions arrived, there was only a single thing that ran through Javik's mind.
"Those fly-eating lizards made it into space?" His voice was incredulous.
The Human shot him an odd glance.
Nearly three full minutes after their transmission arrived, the aliens sent one back.
It wasn't a particularly big transmission, three one thousand by one thousand images sent in sequence.
All three were in a somewhat more stylized format than all previous images.
In the first, both aliens were standing together, with pointed bubbles near their mouths. The first alien had zig-zagging lines in its bubble, while the second had a set of swirls.
The bubbles obvious represented some kind of speech, with the differing lines in each showing that both did not speak the same. A curious thing to send, but it was made more clear by the next two images in the sequence.
The second had the second alien with its arm extended, hand on the first alien's shoulder. The speech bubbles weren't there.
The third, however, had them back. It was nearly an exact copy, the only difference being the second alien's speech bubble.
Instead of swirls, zig-zagging lines had replaced it.
"If I'm not mistaken... They're trying to say that the second aliens can learn languages through touch?" Attely suggested. "Similar to us, through Melding?"
That was a statement that would mean a lot of things to the Asari as a people. Melding had long been a trait unique to the Asari, after all. It was a pillar of the Asari, with even the most popular religion revolving around it.
That another species might be able to do something similar would be... incredible. The implications, philosophically, socially, and otherwise, would all be incredible.
But that was a thought for later, for something other than First Contact. Right here, right now, the most important thing to do was to establish true communication, to go beyond just pictures.
Everything else would follow from there.
They had sent back a similar picture, of an Asari with a Salarian, using melding to learn the language.
This, it seemed, had been the correct choice. Only minutes afterward, the aliens had sent another set of images, showing two different sequences of events. One had shown what would appear to be a shuttle leaving their vessel and flying to the Asari ship. The other had been the same in reverse, with the shuttle coming from their ship and going to the alien's.
The point seemed fairly clear. The aliens wanted to meet. Considering the previous images, this made sense; establishing true communication was obviously a priority.
It took fifteen minutes to solidify that. More than a few words exchanged in Prothean, keeping to simple sentences to minimize the chance of misunderstanding. Several more images to further elaborate the goal.
The meeting was set to take place on her ship.
In the absence of neutral ground, there were only five choices, and those were all five of the ships in the system. When one considered the situation, that went down to three; the Asari, for whom a meld would acquire the language, the first aliens' ship, which had been the primary in this scenario, and the second aliens' ship, for exactly the same reason as the Asari.
The aliens had ceded the initiative to them, in this case. Perhaps because they thought this was the Citadel's territory, or perhaps for some other reason, but whatever the case, the meeting would occur on her ship.
It had taken a little over three minutes for the shuttles to arrive. Benezia, alongside the Turian and Salarian diplomats, had chosen to receive them in an open hangar, large and wide enough to accompany any shuttle at least three times over.
The alien's shuttle had fit just fine.
It was an odd looking thing, wide and flat, smooth white with touches of blue and reflective silver. Odd, but in the same way, quite pretty.
It landed with grace, touching down gently and soundlessly. A barely visible seam in shuttle opened, and a ramp descended.
Three aliens made their way down. Two were of the first species, one male and one female. Both moved with odd synchronicity, their steps matched perfectly, both of their heads looking around, in opposite directions. Odd, again, but they seemed... intrigued by their surroundings.
It was folly to judge, of course, considering that this was the very first time she'd ever laid eyes on them and she was, by no means, an expert on their body language, but even so...
It was hard not to shake that impression.
The third alien was of the second species.
They seemed... vaguely irritated. Benezia wasn't quite sure what made it seem like that, but it truly felt like the being had a cloud of annoyance surrounding... him?
Whether or not she was seeing something that wasn't there, he was obviously and dramatically different from the other two.
The two Asari-like aliens wore soft clothes, flowing but tailored fabrics that appeared neat and stylish.
The other wore armour, coloured a dark shade of red. It seemed an odd mix of practical and ornate, and it definitely lent him an intimidating presence. His eyes darted around the room, taking everything in, before settling on Benezia and her fellows.
The two aliens stopped, but the third didn't.
He stopped only a few steps away from her. He was broad, taller than Benezia herself.
"An-asatai." He said, lips... twisting, in way that she wasn't sure what meant.
A moment later, he let out a breath, before holding his hand out, all of his eyes focusing on her.
Benezia easily recognized her cue. She reached out, slowly. "Embrace etern-"
Their hands touched.