One year had passed since the Terrans had become known to the species of the galaxy. A year of relative peace. As the great powers of the galaxy shifted in their place, taking their positions within the new structure, the cracks that had begun to show over the centuries either broke completely, or were forced shut by the pressure. Yet, in all this, the Terrans had kept to themselves, dictating nothing to the peoples of the galaxy, trading only little, and then only outside the bounds of Citadel space.
On Irune, homeworld and center of the Volus business empires, the people had begun to stand on their own. Still they were a client race of the turians, their great trade ships, larger than even the mightiest warships, but without a single weapon to their name, were protected by turian guns. Yet, in secret and in the open, they began to build their fleets. Ship hulls, once empty for more goods, found themselves stuffed with the tools of war, should it ever come down to it, and increasingly, the turians found their services less required.
On Khaje, the great cathedrals of the hanar sometimes fell into hushed whispers, as blasphemous statements echoed among those quiet halls. The Terrans technology was great, and their mercy was becoming known. Surely they were the Enkindlers reborn, said those whispers, and many a tendril would point to them as someone to whom the hanar should be joined. Those in charge kept those voices in whispers though, knowing that if they did so, it could bring down everything they had built for themselves since climbing out of the sea.
On Dekuuna, the great forger of the mighty elcor, one couldn't take a step without some pheromone argument assaulting your nostrils. The streets were often awash in those who protested their treatment at the hands of the Council. Always in the background, their voice ignored by those who took their slow and deliberate speech to mean they were slow of wit as well. The leaders listened, but ultimately kept themselves joined to their allies of a thousand years.
On Sur'kesh, the words spoken in whispers on other worlds, were shouted openly between Dalatresses. Powerful families threatened to tear apart the foundation of their society, until finally a quorum was called between the greatest families. There, it was, after days of heated debate, decided to stay their course. It had only been a single year so far, and the Terrans were strong, but so was the Council. The technology they were developing would soon even things out, and the status quo could return.
On Palavan the whispers were heard not at all. Their society prided itself too much on their unity to allow such things to pass their mandibles. That was not to say nothing changed. Values, the core values of their people, had been shaken. The young had seen the old lead them into ruin, because the old believed themselves to be the sole arbiters of what was just and right in the galaxy. Now they strove to live up to the ideal itself, and provide true justice, and in the months that had followed the Shanxi Incident, they had lived up to that, routing out corruption where it hid, in their own ranks and the galaxy, and giving the turians back a measure of pride, not in themselves, but in their purpose.
On Thessia, words were spoken openly, but softly. Discussion and deliberation on talking points were found in every cafe, and every lip seemed to have a different opinion on it. The Matriarchs were still respected, however, and when they called for order, it came. They quieted the fears of the people, reaffirming that they, the eldest and longest lived of those in the galaxy, would continue to be that guiding hand that would shine the light of wisdom in those dark corners where fear and ignorance continued to fester.
On all these worlds, life slowly settled down to what it was before. There were new faces in the galaxy, but to those who had been there for so long, such things happened. For the majority of citizens, this was just another story on the evening news, something to tell the children about at bed time. Some still worried, but they became fewer and fewer as the weeks went on. Soon, on most worlds, there would be no talk of the Terrans as anything special.
On most worlds...
OoOoO
The Hegemony Senate was at a stand still. That wasn't rare at any time, but with everything that had been going on, it was becoming a problem. Before, it was easy. Take a few 'volunteers' from the military caste, and you could simply go out and claim a few colonists on some backwater, bring them back, and make a profit on the market. Now, with the Council breathing down their necks on everything, the Senate demanded to know where their forces were at all times. It was becoming harder and harder for the Cultural Committee to do it's job.
New blood was always needed. If not for the mines, than for those in the upper castes that had...exotic tastes. Tastes that were best served by an asari whom you owned, or perhaps a nice turian man, broken over weeks of training. Now you were lucky to find a pleb, the lowest rung of batarian society, up for grabs on the market. The trade of the Committee was being disrupted, and life was becoming harder for those head hunters, and every single one of them knew who to blame.
The Terrans. Worse than being impossible to catch, as four expeditions had shown, their space was almost as impossible to pass through. You would be minding your own business, using the lesser known relays to jump behind a turian picket line to make a stab at some out of the way colony, and then a huge Terran ship would just appear in a flash of light. Not that many knew what happened after that, as there had yet to be a single survivor of the attacks. Oh, they knew the Terrans claimed their people were merely being held until they were rehabilitated, but the batarians had made similar claims of Council agents that had vanished in their space, and knew it for the lie it was.
So business had begun to slide, as skilled slave became harder to find, and the plebs had been pushed into roles formally filled by outsiders. In just one year of this the Cultural Committee had had to put down a dozen revolts, always caused by some pleb, moved up into administration, growing just a bit too full of himself, and encouraging the lesser people to rise up against their betters. Worse, due to the frequency of them, they'd had to start leaving some of them alive at the end, or risk bankrupting whoever was in charge of the business, thanks to the rising price of slaves.
This could not continue. They had to take some of the momentum back. Before, they had been the fourth most powerful race in the galaxy, able to match the turians, or even those blasted asari shot for shot. Now they were failing fast. Their fleets weren't as well manned, and their tech was falling farther and farther behind the times. They'd even had to pay for the latest developments lately, rather than simply raiding a salarian colony and grabbing a few of the frogs to do that sort of thing for them. It was disgraceful.
There were whispers though. Leviathan Command, the tech development center that had helped propel them to match the greats of this galaxy, was working on something. Whether it was a plan or a weapon, or something even more, no one could say, but everyone working the factories noticed how fast they had converted to pumping out these walking tanks the salarians had designed for them. Something was coming, and it was going to be big.
OoOoO
On Tuchanka, things were growing better for the average krogan. Not that that was hard, considering how fast things had gone downhill. A year ago, they'd been warriors, born to fight and die. Then they'd just done mostly that last part, when the Blood Pack had tried to whip them into an army and throw the turians off their world. The assaults had been ill planned though, with many just being a variation of running screaming at the bastards. Thousands of krogan had fallen to the guns of the turians then, and thousands more in the turian counterattack, which left what little civilization the krogans had had before ground down to just families, struggling to survive the blasted wastes of their home, begging at turian boots for food.
That had been their lot, one last grasp for a victory that was far out of reach, and now death. Even the Blood Pack was different, being run by a vorcha of all things. No krogan leader could step up to unify them, and those who looked on their people, did so with the dejectedness of a person knowing that had once been great, but were now a thread snap away from being nothing but a memory, a faded nightmare of the past for asari to tell their daughters at night.
Then the light had come again. The Mothers to guide, and the Father to lead. Five months ago they'd simply appeared as an answer to the prayers of their people. They gathered to them all the disparate clans, promises of food and clean water enough to entice even the most cautious of holdouts to come to their halls. Once they had their people gathered, they lived up to their promises ten fold, providing not just sustenance, but wisdom to their people.
The Mothers spoke of what they had once been. No, not the mercenaries and warriors of the last millennium and half, but farther back. They spoke of grand cities that had once dotted the world, of forests and swamps that had covered their planet. The krogans of the past had broken that world, tamed those forest, and drained those swamps, to make this a world of not just survival but life as well. They spoke then of what had befallen them, the fires they had used on each other that had burned all that.
The Father spoke then. He told them that such was the way of their people. They were violent, for the world they came from demanded it of them. And then, when they had nearly destroyed themselves, the salarians came. They had promised much, but demanded something in return. They had demanded that the krogan forget those cities, forget the tamed wilderness. The salarians needed them to be violent, to be savage and powerful, where none of their own could be.
And the krogan had become that. They had embodied violence and death, with none able to stand before them. Even the rachni, the seemingly endless horde of insect like monsters, had been broken by the legions of krogan, until the last brood mother had met here end at the barrel of a krogan rifle. Victorious, they had joined the Council on their great Citadel, to sit at their side like some kind of trained dog, to be used when it was in their best interest.
But the krogan were not hounds, and they had been asked to become war itself, and so continued to fight. After all, what else could they do? The salarians had demanded they give up all else, so violence was all they had now. Then they were a threat, and rather than try and help them discover something more, the Council had simply gone out and found a new dog, the turians, and used them to beat down the old, shattering their war machines, and neutering their people.
Now here they stood. They could accept this, go out like some of the young wanted, in one last blaze of glory, prove the Council right, that they were nothing more than dogs. Or they could spit in their faces this one last time. They could build again, learn again. There were works of art buried under the dust of two thousand years our there. They could make art like that again, even bring the old up from those forgotten times, and shove it right in the face of those fools, show them what they had lost by forcing the krogan to be their warriors.
This was the rallying cry that gathered the krogan people, the banner to which they began to flock. The Council races looked at this, and just shook their heads. The krogan, as anything other than warriors, was an absurd ideal. Still, it would keep them quiet, and in this time of turmoil, that was a blessing. So they were left alone, with a few watchful eyes being kept, but otherwise they were allowed to be that something more that the Father promised they could be.
The gun would always be the great tool to the krogan, and most still trained in that, but to be a part of this new Tuchanka, this Convexity as the Father dubbed their state, you must know more than just a gun. Now when a young krogan put down his weapon after a day's training, he would take up the plow, and grow a field, or take up the brush and paint an image. Slowly, but surely, they were learning to enjoy what they could be, if someone simply showed them that there was more to life than just violence.
In secret, far from the eyes of the Council, or even their fellows, the Father and the Mothers met with the greatest of this new generation of krogan, the ones who made masterpieces, or made new life from the dust, or even a new engine for a vehicle. These were given a special rite, an almost holy ritual where the blood of the Mothers would be gifted to them, and the impurities of the salarians could be shed. These young ones, male and female alike, would leave, but speak not a word of this miracle, for the time was not yet right for others to learn of it.
So passed the krogan's year. First building themselves up in arms, only to be put down farther than ever before, and now to rise again. Their allies in secret continued to deliver things, supplies of both nourishment and rebuilding. The Mothers and the Father knew this put them deeper and deeper into the debt of those who gave them these things, and always feared that a price would be asked. But no shipment came with such a demand, and so they moved onwards, towards a future that would be bright for every krogan.
OoOoO
On Rannoch, the year had brought the most changes of anywhere else in the galaxy. One year ago, no one living walked the plains of the great desert. One year ago, the sky had only held the ships and platforms of the geth. One year ago, there had been no plans for the future, no hope for a chance at joining the galactic community. One year ago, only mechanical eyes had seen the great sun rises and sun sets of the world, or seen the beauty of the rock canyons as shadows danced on every wall.
Now there were people here again, young and old, tall and small, and most importantly of all, biological and mechanical. Quarians now roamed the great city of the south, dubbed New Rayya by the people. Here they laughed, played, and cried. Here, the isolation of three hundred years seemed to fade away, and it was like they had never left this place they called home. Each month brought new colonists from the Flotilla, and soon there would not be a quarian left in space, as they reclaimed their lost homeland.
The geth looked at this, and simply saw what many of them had wanted during the long years. To a geth, right was the quarians in their cities, with children and families. Some even wished to resume their old roles, as helpers of the quarian people, but more wanted to explore. Freedom granted to them by the techniques of the Terrans expanded their horizons. No longer did a thousand voices need to come together to form a thought or idea. Instead they could exist on their own, watching the world play out before them.
Not that this freedom had come without cost. As they had been told, they had welcomed a time limit to their lives, a limit that had not before existed. More than that though, the platforms were denied to them. Those bodies they had lived in were too complex, too many moving parts of their single minds to run, similar to the Terran AIs own woes in that regard. They had not fully been denied the world, however, as every day brought more of the holoprojectors to their world, allowing them freedom both within themselves, and within the the real world.
The Terrans watched all of this, encouraging peace between the two peoples who had stood apart for so long. Here, they found that the strife of three hundred years was not so easily bridged. The quarians often hated the geth, for what the machines had done, and the newly independent geth sometimes hated back. Neither group was willing to come to blows over this, however, and they were slowly seeing things through. Images soon began to circulate of a small quarian girl in her bubble, handing a floor to a platform, as a sign that they could live together.
Slowly, peace began to settle on Rannoch, and her people, both of flesh and metal, began to expand outward as well. Though space was plentiful on Rannoch, some found the 'Walled Garden' stifling. It was home, to be sure, but there were horizons yet untapped. Many of these came to the Factory, to learn to build and invent as the Terrans did, while others clamored for the right to join in the defense of their world, despite the disadvantage of mass they faced.
So jobs were found, places where those with inventive minds, talented hands, or strong hearts could do what they dreamed of doing. Those at home, encouraged this growth of character, as new geth were coded, and new quarians born. Both were seeing rising populations like they had never before known, and those horizons would need to be broadened, if that growth was to continue. And thus passed the year on Rannoch, and her people found themselves enjoying a dream that had been a long time coming.
OoOoO
The galaxy spun on as these events played out. The stars seemed heedless of the tiny lives flitting through their space. And yet, not every life was ignored. Deep in the Darkness, and within the Light, things stirred. The Day was approaching much faster than anticipated. Events were spiraling towards the Time, and preparations were only half done. Still, those in the Dark had done this time and time again, and could see the familiar patterns already emerging. The Pattern ensured their victory.