177: Parallel Realities – Prologue

Title: Parallel Realities
Author: InHarmsWay
Media: Video Game
Topic:  Mass Effect
Genre: Supernatural/Romance/AU
URL: Parallel Realities – Prologue
Critiqued By Herr Wozzeck

Hello, guys.

So, I’m Herr Wozzeck. If you don’t know me… well, I’m the author of the very well-known Mass Effect self-insert fanfic Mass Vexations, which is often considered to be the grandfather of all self-insert fanfiction from that fandom. I’ve also been known to snark at things at one time or another, whether via a straight-up MST or through other things which shall not be talked about here. (E-mail me at herrwozzeck@gmail.com if you wanna hear more.)

And here I am at the Library of the Damned, to provide a guest snark. How do we do it? Oh, you’ll see.

In today’s snarking, we’ll get going with snarking what has to be one of the longest stories I’ve ever taken to the snarking block. It’s huge, it’s massive, and it covers the events of three entire games, including one that hasn’t even been released yet. Frankly, though, there are so many new elements thrown in that it would be kind of impossible to follow the game once it comes out anyhow. And even then, it gets uneven, given that the AU presented here is actually interesting.

It’s too bad the universe exists in a fic that’s so ridiculous and silly that it’s actually brilliant as a result.

Let’s get going, shall we?

We begin this story with a prologue, of course, to give our character some backstory:

Mass Effect: Parallel Realities

Prologue

2158 CE

So this prologue starts in 2158, which places us just after the canonical First Contact War. This means that humanity has just signed the Treaty of Shanxi after getting into a mildly bloody conflict with one of the races on the Council.

Thank you for establishing that.

Now watch as all this canon information suddenly has no importance:

Cerberus agents discovered a rift in space in the Armstrong Cluster, in the Hydra system. It was a recently developed phenomenon. The rift emitted bursts of various forms of energy and radiation and a blinding, bright white light that radiated from its center. Cerberus scientists had probes to analyze the mass before they learned that the rift was a stabilized wormhole.

I would like to take this time to point out that this is just after the First Contact War. If we go by one of the comics, then this means that the Illusive Man just made his manifesto on Cerberus and its goals public. I really doubt that Cerberus has the resources to be investigating odd anomalies in space so soon after its inception.

Despite existing for hundreds of years, neither Asari, Turian or Salarian race were able to find a stabilized wormhole. Humanity, specifically Cerberus, was the first.

Considering that the Armstrong Cluster doesn’t actually exist in canon and the fact that there’s no Hydra system located within the cluster that actually does use the name Armstrong, it’s not terribly difficult to see why.

Cerberus, being the organization that it is, sends a probe through this wormhole. They then subsequently find a parallel reality, the parallel reality of the title. Not only does this happen, but they also find signs that intelligent life exists on the other side of the wormhole. Communications are established, agents are sent through, and we get some establishment of the parallel reality’s inhabitants:

After a month of communication, Cerberus sent agents through the rift to study the alien races and their technology in hopes of advancing Humanity. The alternate universe’s galaxy had six different races: Rak’en (Raak-in), Praetorin (Pray-tor-in), Tia’Zu (Tee-a-zuh), Rasitian (Ra-si-sh-ion), Exion (Ex-ion), and Artician (Ar-ti-sh-ion).

I’d complain about the fact that the pronunciation keys at the end there are included in an arguably needless manner, but let’s consider for a moment that this parallel reality is an original invention of the author’s. The pacing drags a bit as a result of him taking several paragraphs to explain these aliens, but it’s kind of hard to care when the author is doing you the favor of establishing exactly what this parallel reality has in it, as well as clarifying how you’re supposed to pronounce these names.

So that in itself is actually pretty good.

We get an explanation of what each race is. The Rak’en are an insect race, the Praetorin are lizardmen, the Tia’Zu are similar to the Mass Effect canon’s turians, the Rasitians are a race of Voldemort expies, the Exions are the equivalent of the Mass Effect canon’s geth…

..and the Articians…

Well, let’s just say that that’s around the point where things start falling apart:

The Articians were the most interesting of the races. They looked human. Not just similar to humans, they looked exactly like humans. Their physical structures, skin colour, their eyes, noses, hands, arms, everything. All exactly human. Despite looking exactly like humans physically, they were different on many levels. The average artician was at least five times stronger than the average human.

Each artician had natural biotics that surpassed even Asari Matriarchs. What surprised the scientists was that this galaxy did not use Eezo for space travel. Meaning no one could be born with biotics from eezo-exposure in-utero. Articians evolved dark energy manipulating nodes naturally. Something articians share with Asari is that they are also able to mind meld, but it acts on a different, and a far more advance, level than an Asari mind meld.

Asari mind melds transmit sensations, emotions and, on a smaller scale, memories between parties. Articians are able to pull another into their mind and interact with them in their own minds. The scientists didn’t even believe the ability until one of the articians asked for his consent to mind meld with him. In the several seconds they were connected, the Cerberus scientist was guided through several years of that person’s life.

Their DNA was different as well. It was in a constant state of flux that made it neither levo-rotational or dextro-rotational. It was able to imitate genetic structures of other races. It could even imitate human DNA. Perfectly.

Artician intelligence level was far greater than that of a human. They also matured at a different rate than that of a human. While they both reach puberty around age twelve and true physical adulthood at eighteen, articians are mentally mature at age five. Meaning that a five year can have the same intelligence and mannerisms of a fifty year old or older among humans.

If you skipped that whole block of text, that’s fine. All you really need to know is that the Articians are basically better humans.

So to reiterate, Cerberus just happened to find a wormhole that connects to a parallel universe which has an expy of humanity that is better than humanity.

The odds of finding such a thing are astronomical.

But wait! It gets better!

Articians are the most respected race in the galaxy. Tia’Zus and Rak’ens owe their advancement to them. The Galactic Order (their version of the Council) was started by the articians tens of thousands of years ago.

Their galaxy didn’t see war or the gangs, mercenaries or pirates that the Council’s galaxy saw. Because of the lack of threats, they didn’t have any weapons, such as fire arms or ship ordinance.

It almost seemed like a utopia society. Not to say that there was absolutely no crime in the galaxy.

Not only are they better humans, but their galaxy has almost no rampant organized crime, and they’re authority figures that can do no wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have an entire race of Mary Sues on our hands here.

We already have a race of Mary Sues, and we aren’t even halfway through the prologue yet.

Let that sink in for a minute. I’ll wait.

*waits*

Has it sunk in? Good.

Let us continue.

Cerberus is accepted into this parallel universe without any problems. Of course, things start to go bad soon after, given that Cerberus is an organization that is very subversive. They proceed to fiddle around with the technology of this parallel universe, as they’d most likely do in a more canonical situation. Of course, given that Cerberus experiments typically include placing a false distress beacon on top of a thresher maw nest just to see what happens when someone runs into it, things go wrong very quickly with a nanotechnology bit which creates some kind of glitch.

You’d think that a glitch would be easily fixed.

You’d think.

The virus caused the nanobots to shut down organs and mutate the brain, allowing the mind to live. Aggression was radically increased and the subject would attack others which spread the nanobots to other hosts.

Zombies. That was what one of the Cerberus agents called them.

Yes, this glitch starts a zombie apocalypse. No, I am not kidding.

The concept was from their sci-fi movies. Creatures that are dead but alive at the same time.

…

So I guess Lord of the Rings is a romantic comedy now. Lovely.

This virus expands across the galaxy, affecting pretty much everyone. You’d think that someone would’ve gone in and fixed the glitch by the time they hit the billionth-casualty mark, but nope, it still spreads like the plague.

Hm. They must be using Windows Vista or something.

Understandably, these alien races are pretty pissed off at Cerberus, so they go after them with varying degrees of success. Of course, they have their own issues to deal with as this zombie apocalypse basically ravages their place.

The plague threw the galaxy into disarray. There were no weapons for any race to use against the undead.

So you’re telling me that this super-advanced, super-intelligent race somehow couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept of ‘aiming for the head’? They figured that shit out pretty quickly in Night of the Living Dead, and that movie had people who are far less intelligent than these Articians are supposed to be.

A person rose up during the chaos to bring about order.

Whoah, fic, that’s a rather odd time to be pulling that out.

And before you say anything, no, I’m not cutting out material between the previous two quotes: it really is paced like this in the story. We get a short blurb establishing the timeline, two sentences about how bad it all is, and then just talks about this guy.

So who is this person?

His name was John Shepard: An artician and Tiven’vian.

Well, of course someone from the Mary Sue race would elevate them above this problem. We don’t know what a Tiven’vian is yet, but don’t worry, the story will explain it. Eventually.

He was only 5 when he took charge among the panic. Through his strategies, forces on different worlds were able to start fighting back against the plague-ridden. His forces started building weapons to improve their efficiency at the killing the plague-ridden. Things they once used were easily converted to powerful weaponry. Lasers, particle beams… During his mission, his forces were able to locate, capture and interrogate the missing Cerberus operatives. They put him in touch with their leader: The Illusive Man.

Wait…

You’re telling me that John Shepard had the military expertise to fight an army that these people had never fought before, spearheaded an insane amount of technological advances, and engaged in diplomacy, all while he was five years old?

…

*headdesk*

I know you explained the fast maturation bit, but still, this is absolutely frakkin’ ridiculous!

After we get that piece of information, TIM and this John Shepard character talk, without revealing each other’s names. TIM gives the tired Cerberus mantra of ‘we did this for the advancement of humanity’. Keep in mind, Cerberus unintentionally set off a genocide.

How bad is it?

The suffering Shepard’s galaxy was going through did not faze him a bit. Not his galaxy, not his race, not his problem. That was the end of the conversation. That was all Shepard was given to explain why so many had to die. Why his entire specie is extinct. He was the last of his kind and that was all he was given.

…

Well, the Mary Sue race got taken care of pretty fast, I guess. Now we’ve got one more cliché that we can add to this John Shepard’s backstory. Part of a ‘better’ race of human beings, waged war at the age of five, is the last of his kind…

Yeah, this story went off the deep end pretty quickly.

This zombie apocalypse lasts for around five years, at which point Shepard and whoever else is with him manages to shut down this nanobot network. I’m not sure why it took them so long to get to the facility to shut it off, since even the most heavily infested areas wouldn’t be that crowded, but hey, I’m not the author, so I wouldn’t know. This saves the galaxy, except for John Shepard’s people as per what I mentioned above. He’s then given the title of ‘Supreme Commander of the Order of the Galactic Guardians’ (yes, that is the actual title) and becomes the top man of their military.

Keep in mind that by the time this war ends, this kid is ten years old.

King Tut ain’t got shit on John Shepard.

I think I’m gonna start calling him John G. Stupard from now on.

So we get that, and…

Oh, by the way. I should mention the following:

Despite the fact that the narrative frames the discovery of this parallel reality as being a bigger discovery than the canonical discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars, Cerberus hasn’t told anybody else about this wormhole. Yeah, I can buy why they wouldn’t tell the Council, but you’d think they would’ve told the Alliance, given that Cerberus is technically a splinter organization from those guys.

But no, it stays Cerberus’ best kept secret. Somehow.

Anyway. Shepard goes off to do some Guardian-like duties. He’s called into a meeting with all the galactic leaders, and we get this:

“I assume you know why you are here,” the Exion leader chirped in.

“The Cerberus threat.”

“Yes. They have committed great evils against our galaxy. Against your people. And they cannot be allowed to escape justice.”

“I agree. They cannot be allowed to get away with what they’ve done and who knows how long it’ll be until they try something else. Only a small group of operatives were able to cause a galactic Armageddon.”

*groan*

Okay, who let Michael Bay into this parallel reality? Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of three people on the internet who actually like the Michael Bay Transformers movies, but you’d think this parallel reality’s first exposure to human film would be with something a lot less trashy…

“And we need to know more about their organization,” the Rak’en leader added. “Shepard you’re a Tiven’vian, but you’ve only been through a couple of trials. The Trial of Awakening. The Trial of Inferno. The Trial of Fortitude. You still have several more Trials to go through. That means…”

“That means that the plague wasn’t the cataclysm.”

Jajaja-what!!!??

What the hell is this about Trials? Cataclysm? What the hell is this talking about?

I’m not even kidding. There’s been no build-up to any of this, and suddenly we’re waylaid with a bunch of random talk about ‘trials’ and ‘cataclysm’. Where did these odd mystical elements come from?

Explain, fanfic! Explain!

“Yes. It was a trial for something much worse to come. It could very well be Cerberus. So we need someone to go through the rift and find out about them. We realize that there is no race on the other side that looks like any of us, except for you. We could create a specific body for an Exion infiltrator, but that could take time… We thought that you would like to personally oversee this.”

I suppose I should tell you what the premise of this fic is now since I’ve been putting it off for so long.

This fic involves a ‘what if’ with John Shepard. The name is not coincidental: John Shepard is the default name given to a male version of the player character in the games. Furthermore, Shepard is always the last name of the player character. So this whole fic is based around the premise of ‘what if the player character came from an entirely different universe from the one the rest of the galaxy inhabits’.

Yes, someone thought he could make a serious fic out of such a premise, especially when involving what amounts to an entire race of Mary Sues running around doing stuff before they all die off specifically for the purpose of giving John Shepard the most clichéd and needlessly tragic backstory ever.

*sigh*

Let’s continue.

“Thank you, Commander. After everything you’ve done, we well… Owe you everything. We have been setting up a ship for you to take into their galaxy. The ship will be destroyed once you arrive at a human colony leaving no salvageable trace of it. From there your mission starts. You are given full reins in this mission. Find out everything you can about Cerberus and whether or not we are facing a group or a race.”

“I won’t fail.”

Hang on a minute here.

You don’t even know if Cerberus is an entire race yet? The Illusive Man told you that he was working for the benefit of humanity, and yet you don’t know if you’re facing against an entire race?

Granted, TIM never clarified that bit, so I can maybe see why they’d need to investigate Cerberus’ connection to the human race, but come on! These guys are supposed to be ridiculously intelligent! Species that intelligent can’t possibly think that the name ‘Cerberus’ as it’s attributed to people they’ve only known as operatives can apply to an entire race of sentient beings!

*grumble*

So then John G. Stupard conveniently crashes on the colony of Mindoir. Players of the games will instantly recognize Mindoir as the source of Shepard’s Colonist background, which is one of the three selectable backgrounds in the game. As you can imagine, it reeks a bit too much of contrived coincidence to be real.

Trust me, this is hardly the worst of this fic’s many, many, many plot contrivances.

This chapter ends with the singularly odd narrative gimmick of a psych report being filled out by Stupard’s psychiatrist from the ME* galaxy. I’ll skim over it since it’s a lot of information to take in and I can’t snark at all of it.

[*Editor’s note:  ME = Mass Effect,  for those of us who are a little slow on the uptake.  – AR]

So apparently, John G. Stupard is anti-social. He gives the cover story of ‘I was a child soldier captured by a merc group whose name I don’t know’ as his explanation for why he essentially appeared from out of nowhere and has most of his insane Gary Stu abilities. Somehow, nobody seems concerned that he says he was a child soldier who talks about the people he’s killed like he’s a tired old soldier in a canon which isn’t known for having child soldiers in any species. He’s released into the world after being held for a month to determine his sociability, and then he’s adopted by a couple. He goes to school, does stuff with that, and gets into an incident with bullies where his abilities come out.

There are a few other points I can’t really summarize, so here we go:

Though an odd new development with him: He’s volunteered at a recently opened Quarian shelter. From observations I’ve seen him with more social behaviour with the Quarians than with the kids at his school.

This comes near the end of the psych report. And this is a bit odd, considering that the quarians are a race that was exiled from the Council for creating the geth. I’m not totally sure the Systems Alliance would permit a shelter to be built for quarians to stay.

I mean, it’s not possible for this to be plot convenience at all, right? I mean, it’s not like—

He’s even befriended a young Quarian girl at the shelter by the name of Tali’Zorah nar Rayya.

…

Oh.

It’s not a plot convenience at all. It’s actually an excuse to start a ‘childhood friend romance’ with someone who will later go on to join his squad throughout all three games in the franchise. Lovely. The romance was believable enough without the childhood friend angle, thank you very much. Tali’s adorably awkward enough without that. Y’know.

Oh, by the way, Tali is technically the daughter of royalty as the term applies to her people. Therefore, being away from the rest of her people at this point in her life makes absolutely no sense.

We end the prologue on this note:

The Systems Alliance has been really pushing towards having access to Shepard. Word got out about his abilities (both physical and biotic), and now they want their scientists to examine him and even push him towards joining. I would find these actions to be counter-productive towards Shepard’s readjustment towards a normal life. His grades have remained at a steady high, which would give Shepard the opportunity to become a scientist or even an engineer. This of course just makes the Alliance more desperate to have him among their ranks.

So this kid’s abilities go out as the talk of the Systems Alliance. This, for those of you who don’t know, is the main branch of human military once we leave our own solar system in this canon. It’s also multi-national, and was the result of a charter of the world’s most powerful nations at the time of its inception. So John Shepard is becoming the talk of pretty much every human in the armed space-faring forces of the entire galaxy…

…and somehow, Cerberus, which will become a group that splinters away from the Alliance, doesn’t seem to give a crap that some human kid with unnatural abilities is running around doing stuff on some colony.

I’m ruling out that Cerberus is full of idiots because the Illusive Man knows where his assets are and all that jazz, so I’ll chalk this up to them losing a few IQ points due to contact with the Mary Sue race.

And yes, that is where the prologue ends. Yay, we got through the prologue of this thing!

This is gonna be such a fun journey. *rolls eyes*

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