AN: My Mass Effect lore is the bare minimum so forgive me if I get things wrong lmao

"Many seek to understand our technology. Many will fail to do so. It's better for them that way, lest they get a boon they did not deserve nor have the mental faculties to comprehend it." - Anonymous scientist, Imperial Science Department, Engineering Branch

Nebalus Platform, low Illium orbit, 2185 GST

First Officer Alan Watson was at his post overseeing the workings and goings on of Nebalus Platform, one of the numerous surveillance platforms stationed in orbit to monitor the planet below. It turned out that being a place where almost any Council laws and restrictions were nearly totally relaxed meant that keeping the peace and maintaining order was daunting. The platform wasn't big, especially compared to other stations, but it wasn't small either, being around 550 meters wide and 735 meters tall. Its crew numbered in the hundreds, being a mix of various races, most of which were asari or humans.

Alan sighed, both in relief and tiredness at his post. He was thankful that it had been unusually quiet for the past few cycles, although Illium being the place it is, he didn't expect it to last much longer. Gazing out one of the windows, he saw the dull green and blue surface of the planet and thought about how if one didn't know of the shady dealings occurring on said surface, one would think that it would be an ideal vacation spot. The First Officer chuckled to himself at that, knowing full well that Illium was still a decent tourist hotspot if one could resist indulging in the more... debaucherous activities present. Yet, the First Officer knew all too well that something could flare up at any moment due to a deal gone wrong or something similar.

"Anything to report?" He asked the nearest junior officer.

"Nothing at all, sir," they replied. "It's the fifth cycle in a row, something's up."

Alan sighed, looking around the bridge crew. They were a mix of various races, but the predominant ones were Asari and humans. His position was a cushy one, stable with high pay, and anyone would eagerly jump at the prospect of easy money, but in all actuality, it was mind-numbingly boring, with the only action they had was when a smuggler got a bright idea or when a minor conflict on the surface starts getting out of control.

"Well don't let your guard down, we can't risk anything popping up."

The crew didn't respond, evidently engrossed in their tasks, the hum of the systems and the occasional beep of their monitoring systems serving as their reply. Most of them came from Illium itself, all of them wanting to escape the more chaotic life on the surface, or simply the heat of the planet, while the rest were taken from the Council itself, mostly surplus personnel from the Citadel who had nowhere else to go. People often joked that careers go to die here and from the looks of boredom on the faces of the crew members, it was a somewhat accurate descriptor. Alan refocused his attention toward the planet, its beautiful exterior masking the seedy and shady underbelly that exists if you know where to look.

The shrill warning of a subspace monitoring device brought everyone in the room to full attention.

"Sir!" A human monitoring officer said. "We're picking subspace traces of a... Ship? Object?"

Alan immediately went over to check.

"Is it traversing the Relay?" He asked as his concern slightly decreased.

"N-No sir, it's not using any known form of FTL travel, we... we can't even scan the thing," the same officer replied, tone shaking from anxiety. "No one at the Relay is reporting an incoming ship either."

The beeping became more urgent and rapid, but this time it was the proximity sensor. The officer stationed there checked and nearly fell out of their chair in shock and panic.

"I have the trajectory, sir!" The officer exclaimed. "Its-Its headed right for us!"

As soon as the officer finished uttering those words, a blue flash appeared followed by a massive explosion that rocked the station, causing everyone who wasn't sitting to be thrown to the ground, including Alan, as the lights and screens flickered off and on. He got up just in time to see something that was engulfed in flames head for the planet's surface, specifically the northern pole. As soon as everyone else recovered from the impact and got themselves together, he helped the remaining crew members on board to their chairs.

"Status report, now!" He ordered, taking control of the situation. "And get medical up here to help the injured!" The room was filled with the noise of the crew talking into intercoms and the sound of the consoles working. After a couple of minutes, various medical personnel entered and retrieved any injured present, while the rest of the crew performed various hull integrity checks. More minutes passed in anxious silence before another officer spoke.

"Multiple hull breaches in 15% of the station," they said nervously. "The majority of which are empty storage areas, which is a relief. Our surveillance systems, however, weren't so lucky."

"How bad is the damage?"

"...They're gone, sir. Whatever struck us did so with such intensity that they completely vaporized our surveillance systems. We're lucky that it was only a glancing blow, for if it were merely a millimeter closer, the devastation would be catastrophic."

The First Officer sighed in annoyance. Said surveillance system was the primary reason why their station was here in the first place. Without it, they'd have to rely on the other five stations to cover for them as they waited for the Council to get its ass off its chair long enough to remember to send a repair crew over. In the meantime, they had a much more pressing issue in the form of the unknown vessel that plowed into them as it re-entered realspace. None of the personnel on board the station had ever seen a ship like it before, human or otherwise. Nonetheless, they had a duty to rescue any possible survivors to hopefully better understand their situation.

"Get me the coordinates to wherever that thing crashed," Alan said with renewed urgency. "Send every available security team to that location, and contact the Council for a science team."

"Aye, sir," another officer replied before turning their attention to their screen. A few minutes later, they relayed the coordinates to the First Officer, a location somewhere in the northern pole of Illium, where the temperature is more tolerable to life and where life wasn't consigned to skyscrapers due to the lethal heat on the surface. That at least meant that if there were any survivors from the crash, they wouldn't perish from the elements before rescue would arrive. Amid Alan's excitement and worry, however, he could've never known that what he just experienced was first contact not with an alien race, but something from another galaxy entirely.

Surface of Illium, ten minutes earlier

Meanwhile, on a settlement located in the northern regions of the planet, Laarix Axyria was casually unloading her ship of supplies; foodstuffs, equipment, medical supplies, the typical sort of stuff. Although Illium was well known for dealing in more... indecent wares, the 120-year-old Asari pilot refused to stoop to such lows. She was more than content to ship legal goods between planets, enjoying the solitude experienced during the journey, and it paid well enough. Being a pilot also meant that she had to learn to make repairs on the fly, which meant that Laarix knew her ship, or any other for that matter, inside and out. The location she landed at was nice enough, high enough in longitude so that building on the surface was possible and where the heat wasn't as lethal as it was in other places. She conversed with a local human worker as she began to unload her cargo, her biotic aura glowing slightly as she effortlessly lifted one of the crates into the air and walked down the ramp with it.

As she casually offloaded more and more crates, a fellow pilot, a Turian named Vekan, walked up to her. He was famous, or infamous depending on who you asked, for his boisterous tales and a tendency to exaggerate things out of proportion.

"Laarix," he greeted excitedly. "How are things?"

"Fine," Laarix responded. "Nothing too interesting, which is what I like."

"Always the quiet hauler, huh?" The Turian laughed. "C'mon, you must have something worth talking about."

"Not all of us have the luxury of crashing into an asteroid belt, Vekan. Some of us prefer the more... predictable routes."

"Predictability is so overrated, Laarix! You're missing out on all the fun!"

"The last 'fun' I had was when a bunch of pilots nearly blew me up," Laarix retorted with a smirk. "I'll leave all the 'fun' with you."

Vekan nudged the Asari pilot playfully. "Admit it, you long for more excitement in your life."

"Excitement yes, danger? Not so much," Laarix replied as she moved yet another crate with her biotics. "I much rather prefer a smooth journey than a life-threatening one."

The two continued their conversation for a few more minutes, with Vekan telling one of his signature stories while Laarix finished unloading her cargo. They were just about to head off together to get a drink when the sound of a distant explosion interrupted them. The pair turned their heads to the source and saw Nebalus Platform engulfed in a fireball.

"Holy shit..." Vekan said in shock. Laarix could only look on in silent horror as the fireball covering the still surprisingly intact station expanded to completely block their view of it.

"C'mon, we should get going," she urged, trying to vacate them from the situation as quickly as possible.

"Wait, I think I see something else," the Turian said as he pointed at another object. Laarix looked over and saw another object covered in flames that was coming towards them. At first, the Asari couldn't make out the object due to the flames and smoke covering it, but as it drew closer, she heard the sounds and the engineer in her knew that it was a ship; the scream of rending metal, the death cries of engines trying futilely to regain altitude were sounds she was painfully familiar with and they chilled her to the core. She was ripped from her thoughts by Vekan tackling her as the doomed ship flew overhead, the sound of tearing metal and engines dominating their hearing as it crashed somewhere off in the distance. The two of them got up just in time to see the smoke rise from where it crashed along with uncountable amounts of local security vehicles heading in its direction.

"Was..." Laarix panted out. "Was that excitement enough for you?"

Vekan stood up and brushed his armor off. "Bit more than I would've liked, but hey, at least the day isn't boring anymore."

"'Boring' would've suit me just fine."

The Turian craned his neck forward as if he could look through the vegetation and terrain. "Should we go help or something?"

"No, hell no. We're pilots, not emergency responders. It's not our business to get involved."

Vekan sighed, his eyes still filled with curiosity. "In that case, let's go get that drink, maybe someone will drunkenly spill it out."

Laarix laughed at that. "You think the news will report this?"

"I doubt it, but who cares about the news when you have a first-hand account from me?" Vekan jabbed his thumb at himself, to which the Asari pilot groaned.

"Goddess preserve me, I'd believe a fiction novel before your account," she said in jest.

"You're just jealous that my stories are more exciting than whatever novel drew your attention," he said with a laugh as they both walked towards the bar, unaware that, in another galaxy, another empire, one far more superior than the Asari, was watching akin to watching microorganisms in a drop of water through a microscope.

Information Data Logs

History of Humanity in the Era of Galactic Dominance: The history of humanity's rise to a galactic superpower is the history of the Interstellar Solar Technocracy. Like every single empire in the galaxy, current or past, humanity faced struggles, strife, and torment before ever leaving the atmosphere of Earth, the taste for war was ever-present in humanity. We are naturally violent beings, so is it surprising that we nearly beat ourselves to death long before space travel was a reality? Where Orbital Rings, Ringworlds, Strategic Command Centers, and FTL travel merely works of science fiction? When atomic power was seen as a poison that would destroy our world while we were choking out the mother that raised us with our fossil fuels? As we have developed into a society truly deserving of the stars, our history was constantly under threat of being lost to bureaucracy and ultimately forgotten. This is why we have created the Imperial Department of Historical Preservation, its task is to document every action humanity ever made, glorious and despicable, in the far past and the potential future. The department has created five eras of human development pre-Technocracy, which will be summarized below.

1. Pre-Unification AKA Era of Biligerence (1945 - 2046): The pre-Unification age of humanity is the shameful majority of humanity's pre-space travel age, where actual space travel was nothing more than throwing probes into the nothingness of the void to gather readings that would return long after the people who originally approved of the plan were dead and buried and where "colonization" was nothing more than a person landing on our celestial body planting a flag of their nation-state then returning. We were also shamefully governed by a pathetic and treasonous extra-national group known as the United Nations where "democratic values" and "peace" between the various nation-states were discussed and it was not uncommon for armed conflict to break out between two nation-states. This all ended when in the year 2040, an unknown terror group attacked the U.N. headquarters in New York, causing the already failing group to finally snap and officially dissolve, causing the members to consolidate power in their respective federations. The Chinese mainland suffered a power vacuum that led to Fei Lin "Arden" Yang to take power and title himself "Imperator." He then assimilated the majority of the Asiatic nations and Eurasia through both diplomacy and sheer military strength, forming the Asiatic Sovereign Technocracy. The United States and its allies formally formed the Coalition of Democratic Nations, annexing the South American continent when they opposed joining the Coalition. The remaining nations who wanted no part in both juggernauts formed the League of Neutral Nations. By the beginning of the year 2046, the Earth had three major players, with two hating that each other even existed.

2. War for Societal Unification (2052 - 2088): In the year 2049, the League was being influenced heavily by the Asiatic Sovereign Technocracy, with generous scientific assistance and economic donations that allowed the League to prosper and grow while completely relying on the Technocracy for military defense. This heavily angered the Coalition who tried to lecture the League about the "dangers of authoritarianism" and the importance of "democratic values." This had no effect as in the year 2052, the League formally announced its integration into the Technocracy, causing the Coalition to execute a "preemptive strike" against the League which caused the Technocracy to declare war on the Coalition, formally starting the War for Societal Unification. Initially, the Coalition had success in combating the Technocracy but the Coalition was lazy and arrogant. They relied on pre-unification equipment and tactics while the Technocracy was constantly researching and developing new military technology and training new tactics after each defeat. After the Coalition's defeat at Morocco, the Technocracy began to move into Coalition territory, with Eastern Europe falling in six months and incursions beginning at Alaska. With Technocracy troops moving from Canada and South America, the United States fell and the majority of the remaining Coalition members fled to the British Isles which was then invaded and conquered. The Coalition formally surrendered in the year 2087 and by the year 2088, every trace of Coalition influence was erased with every member executed for crimes against humanity.

3. Era of Stabilization (2090 - 2110): In the post-war period on Earth, the Technocracy was in the middle of an administrative crisis due to acquiring vast amounts of territory and needed a solution. They then divided the now-global Technocracy into Imperial Territories (Imperial Territory Meiguo, Imperial Territory Jianada, etc.) while the Technocracy itself was still in the region of Asia and Eurasia, stabilizing their populations. The Imperial Territories enjoyed relative autonomy from the Technocracy, they were free to govern themselves however they wanted but they always had to swear loyalty to the Technocracy. To many in the Territories, life was normal except for the occasional oath sworn. There were some protests and demonstrations in response to this, but they were not popular and were put down relatively quickly. The Imperial Territory structure is still used for various vassals and integrated pre-FTL societies today.

4. Era of Consolidation (2112 -2199): In the year 2112, the Technocracy had finished reforming the government to support global dominance and began to consolidate power and absorb the various Imperial Territories into the Technocracy proper and form the Imperial Asiatic Technocracy. Reactions to this ranged from warm welcomes where each minister hugged Technocracy representatives and reluctant acceptance to begrudging acceptance or even outright denial and armed resistance. The ones who resisted had their government crushed and replaced with Technocracy governors. After each Territory was absorbed into the Technocracy, an intense elimination of the religions of humanity began; religious sites were repurposed, believers were executed and artifacts were destroyed. Many more atrocities occurred in this period but it was also a period of immense technological advancement; nanites were developed and integrated into society, and space exploration began in earnest with mining operations on the moon and research stations on Venus that are still present today but have been repurposed into tourist attractions. There was one incident that slightly decreased interest in space travel, however, which was the Ulysses Project. The year was 2166 and six prototype colony ships packed full of loyal citizens of the Technocracy were dispatched to the edge of the Oort Cloud to utilize a wormhole thought to potentially send them to Alpha Centauri and initiate interstellar exploration. None were ever heard from again save for one. Although this dismayed the population, it also spurred them on to develop safer ways of FTL travel, ultimately resulting in the hyperdrive being created and installed on a ship in the year 2198.

5. Era of Galactic Expansion (2200 - 2300): With the discovery of the hyperdrive, humanity expanded at a massive rate; mining operations were established on the moon, the asteroid and ice belt, the Jovian moons, and Saturn, floating science stations on Venus, all of which are still used to this day, although the ones on the moon and the Venus science platforms were converted into tourist destinations. The hyperlane system was also discovered during this period, allowing humanity to finally become an interstellar species and officially renaming the Imperial Asiatic Technocracy into the Interstellar Solar Technocracy. Alpha Centauri, the destination of the doomed Ulysses Initiative, was the first to be explored and claimed, with the first human colony on another planet following soon after. Sirius, Eta Cassiopae, Tau Ceti, Barnard's Star, Procyon, and Van Maanen's Star soon followed, along with the creation of the first battlegroup, the Beijing Battlegroup, which prior only numbered three corvettes, now in the present numbered one hundred and twenty. As humanity's interstellar borders grew and grew, more technologies were discovered and implemented, like cold fusion energy and sentient AI systems. Anomalies were also discovered, things that did not match our understanding of nature that resulted in either glory or tragedy. The first discovery of alien life was an ironic one; the remains of what we now know as the "First League" were discovered during a routine survey and sparked heightened xenophilia amongst humanity's now four worlds. The first proper alien contact occurred in 2266, with what we now know as the Galactic Hesukar Regime, our most staunch ally. Nanites had already been fully integrated into Technocracy life, further expediting humanity's development.

6. Era of Galactic Prosperity AKA The Golden Age of Humanity (2300 - _): With the advent of communications with our galactic neighbors, humanity experienced a surge in exploration craze; record numbers of scientists not seen in any point of time, new divisions of the burgeoning Imperial Science department couldn't be made fast enough, and accidents due to unsatisfactory training from the struggling Imperial Academies received by said scientists rose at an unsettling rate, forcing the Imperator to enact stricter measures to quell the excitement, lest we drove ourselves into the ground through sheer excitement alone. Other alien civilizations were discovered, with some welcoming and friendly, others indifferent or wanting nothing to do with us, and others even hostile, which we along with our allies managed to pacify or outright crush. The Galactic Community was also established, allowing various alien races to come together and discuss grievances and establish galactic laws which kept all the empires in check. It's the best time to be a human, our scientific prowess is second to none, our navy and armies are the most powerful, our economy is booming, and our empire spans countless stars. We've subjugated or destroyed all who dare stand against us, and our allies are many. Although the Imperator knows full well that the golden ages often precede a brutal collapse, who says that we can't enjoy the moment?