Rainbow sat on the balcony of the consulate's office after Luna had gotten her out of custody, the Princess herself wasn't there anymore as she had meetings to catch up to. The hospital had begrudgingly agreed to sign her out as Rainbow had absolutely no intention of going back there and let nurses worry about her while she would be stuck in a bed. Dash hadn't seen Fluttershy yet but wasn't really that angry with her anymore, she'd of course look into ways of fixing herself but for now would live with the condition as it didn't seem to hamper her too much other than general discomfort.
Sighing deeply Rainbow looked at the messages on her omni-tool for the hundredth time, reading the message from the Commander once again. The Normandy would be docked at the Citadel by now already so she should be getting up to the docking bay to rejoin the crew while Shepard took care of some business with a new crew member picked up on Illium. Picking herself up from the ground Rainbow proceeded to find a shuttle to take her over to the docks instead of flying in the direction herself’, from there it wasn’t a long walk until she found the stealth corvette attached to the station’s docking clamps. The airlock automatically opened as she approached, cycling its decontamination system.
“Welcome back aboard, Rainbow. Glad to see you in one piece after we pulled you out of that other ship,” Joker greeted, having turned around his chair away from. “Gabby in particular was distraught seeing you like that.”
Rainbow winced slightly. “Is she okay now?”
“Better but I think seeing you about will cheer her up some more,” Joker said as he turned his chair back around to face his controls again. “Oh and Fluttershy’s at the main battery along with Garrus screwing around with the Normandy’s new gun.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks,” Rainbow said as she walked deeper into the ship, only to stop right before she entered the elevator down and moving over to the lab instead. Professor Solus was humming a tune while working as Rainbow entered.
“Ah, Rainbow Dash. Unexpected. Not used to seeing you here. Must be matter of injury?” Mordin immediately said as he noticed Rainbow enter.
“Yeah, just wanted to ask if you may have any solutions?”
“Hmm, troubling. Unsure. Will look into. Skin graft not feasible in limited timetable of Reaper’s arrival,” Mordin thought out loud. “But! Need to work on collector drone countermeasures. Not effective enough yet.”
“Alright, I’ll leave you to it then,” Dash said, walking out of the lab and now went down for real, passing through the crew quarter towards the frontal battery. Some of the crew looked surprised to see her up and about but did leave her alone.
“The Thanix was reverse-engineered from Sovereign’s main armament after it was salvaged. The stuff is technically top secret… unless you know the right people of course.” Garrus could be heard talking from the side of the cannon.
“It’s also a massive drain on our power systems,” Gabby’s voice pointed out. “If you’d just let me...”
“Change my settings? You’d mess up my calibrations completely!” Garrus replied as Dash peaked around the corner, finding Garrus and Gabby facing off with Fluttershy in between.
“What’s going on here?”
All three others in the room turned to look at her, Gabby and Garrus with a look of surprise though Fluttershy had her face hidden underneath her hood.
“Rainbow!” the little griffin leaped over and pulled her into a crushing hug. “I’m so happy you’re okay!”
“You seem quite well, colors,” Garrus smiled, though Fluttershy remained quiet in the shadows.
“Better than it could have been,” she admitted, ruffling the feathers on Gabby’s head before turning to Fluttershy. “Shy-”
“I’m sorry, I-” Fluttershy cut her off only for Rainbow to do the same as she pulled her into a hug.
“Shy, I’m beyond pissed that I’m stuck in this stupid thing but I don’t blame you for that. I’m walking again and we’ll find a fix later because I don’t really feel like going like this for the rest of my life,” Rainbow plainly told her, “There’s plenty crazy stuff out in this galaxy that can probably fix me.”
“Ahh, that’s sweet!” Gabby cooed, “Almost as sweet as it would be if you gave me access to the Thanix’s power distribution and control systems, Garrus,” she added with an as sweet as possible voice.
“How about you two work together on the system?” Fluttershy chuckled along with Dash before the yellow pegasus tried to meditate again. “Neither of you is going to get everything you want if you can both get like seventy percent you’ll both at least be happy.”
Garrus grunted and sighed, “Fine, we’ll work something out.” Gabby cheered in response as she pulled the turian along to the control panel where they started talking tech on the ship’s specifications and power control.
“Let’s leave those tow to do their thing, they’ll need some time to hash things out,” Fluttershy smiled, leading the two of them out of the cannon’s control bay. “Dash I’m really s-”
“Drop it Shy, I want it off my mind for the moment.”
Fluttershy felt silent as she followed Rainbow to the port observation deck where she jumped on one of the barstools, getting a drink from behind the bar.
“Ugh, they still don't have cider for us,” Rainbow grumbled as she settled for a turian beer.
Fluttershy smirked deviously as she picked two human ciders from behind the bar and opened them up. “Who says they don’t?”
Rainbow stared at the can for a moment. “You know we can’t drink these, right? They’re levo drinks.”
Shy just shrugged and chugged down a swallow of the drink. “It’s something Shining actually found out via Fidelis. The Earth’s apple trees are far related to Equestrian apples. Ponies apparently can consume both types of food even though we're dextro's.”
Dash looked at the cider in front of her in wonder before looking back over to Fluttershy. “How in the world did you not figure this out earlier? Didn't you ever accidentally eat the wrong food?”
“Of course not!” Fluttershy said slightly offended, “I'm very careful with what I eat.”
Dash snickered as she took her first sip of the cider, quickly followed by the whole can. “Oh, that's good. I really missed cider. Not that these are anywhere near as good as AJ's stuff of course.”
The two of them shared a couple more drinks in peace before Fluttershy spoke up again. “Think we'll ever see them again?”
“Duh, of course,” Rainbow replied full of confidence. “We've got a group of awesome friends both here and at home, as long as that's the case I won't give up on them.” Dash was then reminded of something she'd found on Omega. A stack of singed and crumpled letters coming out of a storage compartment of her armor, the distinct cutie marks of their other 4 friends still visible. “You shouldn't either.”
Fluttershy looked a bit paler as she recognized them. “Thanks Rainbow.”
The intercom then blared to life as the Commander spoke. “Normandy crew, prepare for imminent departure. We've gotten intel on a disabled collector ship we will be investigating.”
Downing the last bit of cider Rainbow placed the can into the recycler. “Guess we'll be going back to work then.”
“Let's go find the commander then, I'm sure we'll have a briefing soon.”
Two people working at odds get a togetherness of only 70%? Thats orthogonal. Now if they work in synchit gets them a 40% improvement. Especially if they plug Dash in as well.
Oh look, a wild ackbar appears. Its supereffective?
So, it looks like we won't be getting back to the situation in Equestria for quite some time.
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Are you sure?
That means Legion.
10345314
That'll be a fun encounter :3
Of course, Rainbow can't stay mad at Fluttershy for long; not after not seeing her and likely worrying about her safety.
10345318
With the comment about something big coming, that probably means the proto-reaper. Or... maybe not?
Any chance the Reapers got a pony colony a cycle or two ago? What are the chances there's a Reaper-sized Pony out there somewhere?
10345422
Given that the reapers harvest organics and incorporate them in constructing new reapers, logic tells me there should be pony reapers too. Or at least something similar to the collectors. Since ponies and Protheans were both spacefaring species 50000 years ago, and considering what the reapers did to the Protheans, turning them into insect-like creatures that capture people and put them in pods and whatnot... maybe it wouldn't be too surprising if there are pony collectors too...
wait...
I have some questions, not related to this chapter.
It's already been established that griffons and dragons were not originally native to Equestria, but what about the rest of the sapient species?
There's minotaurs, hippogriffs, diamond dogs, buffalo, bufogren(?), breezies, yaks, kirin, abyssinians, centaurs(?), gargoyles(?), changelings, sea serpents, sirens, storm creatures, cave trolls, bird-people (I dunno, the wiki doesn't say what their species is called).
And then there's everyone in Klugetown.
There's a lot of sapient species in Equestria.
So my questions are;
Where'd all these species come from?
Are Tatzlwurms Equestrian Thresher Maws?
Is Equestria the name of a planet or a country?
Is Equestria in the Horsehead nebula?
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tbh, I never really liked the human reaper since every single reaper except that one has the recognizable bug-like design
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Yeah, same. But that still doesn't answer my most important question- Is Equestria in the Horsehead Nebula?
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Good pun, bad location
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Major ME story spoiler territory here. Don't read if you don't already know how the games end.
Well, the central premise in the Mass Effect series is that the Reapers are the result of the Citadel AI being given a task by the Leviathans 65 million years ago. To wit: To preserve life at any cost.
The problem with this mandate is that it doesn't allow for natural causes. Age, infirmity, hostile action, and so on. Life ends. But the program isn't written to be flexible. The Starchild AI, created by the Leviathan race, can only act on its prime directive directly. Lacking a way to achieve biological immortality, it found a way to preserve all organic life indefinitely so that it could reset the galaxy in the shortest time span to turn the whole galaxy into a giant test machine. Eventually, statistically, immortality would happen somewhere. When found, it would be harvested, studied, and the evolution applied to every other race, including all the races who had been harvested.
Here's the thing. After all that time exposed to the Indoctrination signal, not to mention the pyschological trauma of being harvested, any race brought back that way would be utterly insane. But that's not Starchild's problem. It only has to cheat Death, not ensure the races are sane at the end of it.
Now, enter the alicorns. Immortals, who apparently know how to pass on that ability to new ponies. I can see why Celestia's ancestors were so paranoid about hiding their world. If Starchild ever found out about immortals, Equestria would be the only thing that would matter to it. The Reapers' mandate would probably change overnight. Instead of harvesting the galaxy, you'd have a Reaper fleet scouring the galaxy looking for a hidden star system.
I strongly suspect the Elements are going to be needed in their entirety if I'm even remotely close on this one.
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Biological immortality is irrelevant to the Starchild. The problem the Starchild was created to solve was that technologically advanced organic races would always eventually create synthetic life, and that synthetic life would always eventually rebel and destroy its creators. Unchecked, this would eventually lead to a galaxy dominated by synthetic life, with organic life exterminated. The Starchild's mission was to prevent the extinction of organic life (as a whole, not each species).
The cycle of Reaping the galaxy every 50000 years was not about resetting an experiment. The point was to wipe out synthetic life before it could get too powerful. Leave the galaxy alone as long as it safely can, come back after enough time for someone to develop new synthetic life, destroy the new synthetic life and all civilizations capable of recreating it before the next cycle, and repeat. Exterminating organic spacefaring civilizations each time was an unfortunate necessity to postpone the next creation of synthetic life.
Apparently, synthetic life actually capable of peaceful coexistence with organics is something that's never happened before this cycle, even though there are small hints of past examples before the Geth, showing that the Geth are not unique in this regard. And that's in canon, not talking about whatever ponies made in this story.
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It kind of sounds like you never did the Leviathan DLC for ME3. They explicitly say all the things I mentioned in my post in that conversation with Leviathan. I'm attaching a link to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEqlG6bhZ80
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I did play Leviathan, along with every other DLC. I watched the linked video just to make sure, and it does not mention or even imply the Starchild or Reapers seeking immortality at any point. It does mention using the cycles to turn the galaxy into a series of experiments with evolution, but says nothing about the goal of these experiments. Combining that with what the Starchild itself tells Shepard, it seems obvious that the goal was synthesis, not immortality.
The cycle of harvests done by the Reapers is a solution to the problem of synthetic life threatening to destroy organic life, but it's a solution that requires ongoing maintenance indefinitely. I hadn't remembered the bit about evolution experiments, but the Starchild is seeking a permanent solution to the synthetic vs organic conflict, not immortality or even life extension.
Sorry I couldn’t vote on the last voting chapter it was 50/50 for me and could not decide.
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if the creator goes that route that would be a bit interesting to think however, 1. how did they separate from the control of the reapers and 2. why would they be able to become good and colorful like they did in the later seasons... hmm though still maybe changelings are/could be pony Reapers, who knows.
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Damn straight it will! Collectively, they are the best character in the franchise! *Unapologetic Legion Stan*
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...you just broke my brain. Someone call Thorax, quick! It looks like we need to fast track his story arc.
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Canon lore from ME3's multiplayer mode: Surviving Collectors, now freed from Harbinger's "Direct Control" switched sides, joined in the fight against the Reapers. Yeah, it's stupid and simply an excuse to have them playable, but it IS canon.
Figures. I finally get back into reading this thing, and I am astounded by exactly how much I’ve missed...
Eh, I can do it over a week.
Shepherd commander We are still building a consensus
Rainbowdash from burned into the frying Pan...
We just have to teach RD to dance the robot alongside Legion
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It's a trap?
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10345422
Hot damn... Good one especially if allraces get one individualy...
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One Earth Pony, Pegasus & Unicorn respectivly
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Sounds like Equis is a arch project. Save all races on a world...
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It's probably only the main processor in the shape of the species it is made off...
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11170553
You deserv a medal for best comedian
10354022
Fucking EA cash grab...
By the time the crew is taken I already have usually all main and secondary missions done.
Kinda sad a lot of content is skipped.
I wonder why we never got a Krogan romance option.