Well I'm back.

First off I would like to express my thank you to the many readers who sent me. I know my random departure and deletion of all my work must have been concerning. I was in a bad state mentally back during the Pandemic era and just wanted to wash my hands of everything without having any more writing obligations. For a long time it was a struggle to even write anything. I still feel that but this Uplifted reworking progress is starting to get my gears grinding. I have been writing the follow up in my head for years and it might be time to get it down.

It is hard to believe that the first story in Uplifted was written in 2012. 12 years. It's hard to believe how fast time few. I just turned 20 and was feeling very pumped to write mass effect fiction. I remember sitting in a Skype chat (Jesus I'm old ) with another writer called SergiusTheGreat and Octo8(?) I was drinking and smoking things when a wild thought came to mind:

It's 1942 and a Quarian scout ship crashed on Earth. They are found by the Axis.

Sergius encouraged it, and so I wrote the first chapter. It was a runaway success and a whole series got written.

Fast-forward a decade or so and I'm rereading it and I had come to hate it. I still liked the core idea but a great deal of details felt so off to me, a product of how young I was. Sensibilities change so I deleted everything. I very nearly didn't save any copies. I had no intention on coming back. But I saved it.

At the start of this year I got to thinking that maybe I should re-release it, but instead of just doing grammar and spelling fixes and deleting excess, I was going to alter things deeper. I won't go into the details here (if you're interested I'll post the alterations at the conclusion of each story) but I will talk about one important thing. I wanted to alter the main character. I had years to read this privately and came to a conclusion. The main character was too young, he was too cocky and arrogant, he was too edgy, he was too emotive and he was too quick to downplay the ideological system he was raised to believe in. The first problems were based around how young I was. I thought 24-25 was old. I thought it was cool to be an edgy boy. Worse was how I would downplay his ideological beliefs. When you're writing a literal National Socialist as a protagonist you going to try to shortcuts to downplay it – "oh he don't actually believe in it!" it was all just a validation move to get people to like what I was writing. Author insecurity is a hell of a thing.

Now he is aged up, significantly less arrogant and significantly more in tune with his belief system. The war up until the start of the story has affected him much more. He will likely not be as likeable.

Uplifted as a whole is a bit of a janky first story. I have done what I can but this story has some moments I really don't like. It will be elaborated on after. Reading back on this series, the writing quality improves over time. So does the size of the story. I will do what I can to trim the fat, but there is so much content.

I will be releasing this story one chapter per day. There are 16 chapters to start with. When it's done I will start work on the next, or if I'm motivated I'll work on it in between releasing this. That will shorten release time.

Now on to the disclaimer to the new people stumbling into this story: If you haven't figured out a story about literal Nazis from the point of view of a literal Nazi isn't going to be a nice one. I don't like having to issue a trigger warning, but this isn't 2012 anymore. People are very sensitive and AO3 in particular seems to be very sensitive from what I've seen. I remember all the fun angry PM's I got when I first posted this story declaring I was a Nazi enabler and this was back in 2012. So I'm going to get this out of the way: This story and its immediate sequel are flat out written as pro-National Socialist. As the series progresses we peel away the National Socialist rhetoric and dogma. This series gets progressively more violent and cruel. This series is period accurate in all respects. There is racism, anti-Semitism, there is homophobia. I will not shy away and edit it. It would diminish the story if I whitewash language. The humans in this story are not nice, the quarians in this aren't much better. You will understand as the series goes on. I hope that will be enough to sway the urge to get mad at me.

Now that I've spoiled the story, consider yourself warned.