What do you get if you feed the bunnies?

Answer? More bunnies. (Apologies to "The Trouble with Tribbles.")


The "Athena Fox" story is stuck on the outline. I'm doing a narrative outline for this one. The other thing that's new is I'm determined to solve most of my problems in the outline and before committing to more development. And right now the outline is stalling at the end of Act I. There's thematic directions I haven't nailed down yet.

So perfect opportunity for other plot bunnies to announce themselves (that, and I've been reading analysis at Kotoku about what went wrong with the Mass Effect series, particularly Andromeda, and fanfiction set in that universe).

The fanfiction I went looking for and found a couple interesting examples of is stuff that takes the basic elements (the core conflict, large parts of the world-building) but starts the story in a different place. Often, in a much earlier place. I'm reading one now where Earth was destroyed hundreds of years before the story began, with the most thriving part of Humanity's survivors being a client race of the Turians. In another, Wrex crash-lands on Earth before we even get to Mars, and takes it on himself to prepare Humanity to defend itself against being taken advantage of by the more advanced species who will be along eventually.



Okay, so here's one plot bunny. First, the Reapers are acting as they are described in almost everything but the massed assault they launch in Mass Effect 3 (even in that game, they continue their old games of working behind the scenes, manipulating, creating divisions, making their enemies fight amongst themselves and turning their own hierarchies and command structures against them by indoctrinating key figures). In any case; they wiped out Earth some hundreds of years ago, just as humanity was discovering their first Mass Effect Relay and was about to move out among the stars.

The Charon Relay is still encased in ice, making it costly to explore the system. Eventually, of course, someone does. Perhaps elements of the Migrant Fleet, still looking for a new homeworld after the Geth kicked them off Rannoch (and, yes, in this story that is explicitly a result of Reaper intervention. It was the Reapers that made possible the chain of unlikely events that sabotaged any ability of the Quarians to stop the Geth problem before it even arose.

They find enough in the ruins of Earth to marvel at the variety of cultures that had once thrived there. They also find the Prothean ruins on Mars...and, if that exists within the continuity of this story, the plans for the Crucible.



For the second Plot Bunny we are on Mars again. This time, humanity is thriving. As in the game, though, they aren't considered competent enough to explore Prothean ruins on their own. That, and again as in the game the Asari had pushed through Council agreements for equal sharing of all finds (despite keeping one of the best ones secret on their homeworld and using what they'd learned from it to become one of the three most powerful races).

And...it falls together all too neatly. Ruined Prothean base full of secrets, and a young and unsure human archaeologist. And in the Doctor Whitman role, an arrogant but naive Asari researcher (sort of a tautology there.) Throw in Batarians or Vorcha or even Cerberus seekers after the same buried secrets as cannon fodder, and you've even got the Prothean Beacon effect for your possessed-by-ancient queen angle. But, hell, I've worked with that plot before. I'm tired of it.



I prefer the third bunny, which is actually just a slightly older version of a bunny that's appeared before. Humanity is new on the scene, grudgingly allowed to visit the Citadel but of even lower status than Volus and Elcor (but not Vorcha...nothing's lower than Vorcha). Their universities have sort of devolved into "read everything the Elder Races deign to share with us" rather than original research.

Our Shepard stand-in might be an engineer, or an academic interested in the Protheans, or who knows. Anything but military. She hooks up with a Quarian on his or her Pilgrimage, a Quarian who is also way too fond of asking the kinds of questions nobody else wants asked. This isn't -- mostly -- a desperate tale of survival like the above, or a lot of gun-play in the corridors. Even if a better setting might be Omega, the sprawling, aging space station version of Mos Eisley. This is in fact heir to the other half of game play in the Mass Effect series, that is, conversations. Lots and lots of conversations. Exploring, asking questions, proposing ideas, trying stuff that hasn't been tried before. It is two young people with a surprising and strong between-species friendship who with humor and intelligence proceed to shake up everything.

And, yeah. In all these ideas the true nature of the Crucible and the Reapers is totally up for grabs, because if you are already going to change the timeline, why stick with something so stupid that so lacks integration with the rest of the trilogy anyhow?