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So, I had a silly thought. Based off a single story seed, with each person who responds adding a section of one hundred to five hundred words, a group-write story. Not so much an RPG or Survivor Game because the idea is to create a traceable, coherent narrative.

Then run the same thread on Necrontyr Online, and see how the two stories diverge and how quickly they become unreconcilable!

So, the story seed is thus: A Quarian scientist is examining the data from Haestrom in the aftermath of the Tali recruitment mission in Mass Effect 2. She discovers that a strangely fluctuating energy signature has attached itself to the star and has bee absorbing its energy, causing the star's rapid ageing. She has discovered... a C'tan.

Story sections should please be written in past tense, third person with a semi-omniscient narrator. If that didn't mean anything to you, then just try to mimic my style and use a spell check!

Tori'coor vas Moreh squinted as she examined the data in front of her. It didn't seem quite right, but the idea that they might have lost a whole squad of marines for useless data was unconscionable. The first part confirmed what their long-range scans had implied – that rate of Haestrom's decline had increased even further than when they had first established the colony on Dholen. The second part was what really got to her. There appeared to be a second energy field attached to Haestrom, inside the field of Geth platforms. More than that, it appeared to fluctuate rhythmically, almost reminiscent of... of... of speech. The energy cloud was communicating with the Geth somehow... and with the Quarian team.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she chewed her lip, thoughtfully, working to pick apart and attempt to translate the signal, starting with the assumption that the... cloud... was transmitting in some dialect of Quarian.

I can imagine Cerberus and the IOM getting along rather well.

Honestly, I think the more exciting approach is to say that the Mass Effect storyline is really just Warhammer 3k. It's humanity as it reaches to the stars initially.

Imagine a thousands of years after the assimilation of the reapers and the synthesis of organic and synthetic life, which has spread throughout the galaxy. An extremist human organization emerges on one planet where their synthetic elements have been disabled by E&M radiation. Imagine the grimdark image of them trying to separate unwilling victims' organic and synthetic elements through intrusive surgery.

They lead a religious war against the "taint" of synthetic life, which inevitably leads to war and extermination of the Council Races. Their coup de grace is the destruction of the Mass Relays, isolating humanity and the lesser races throughout the galaxy, until the Great Crusade many millennia later.

Alternate idea: a Mass Effect vessel in the process of an FTL jump intersects with the warp and is ejected into real-space some time in the 41st millennium.

While those are potentially interesting stories (although I personally have never read a good "ship A falls ito universe B" fic), they're not the idea I had, so... feel free to write those if you want to. This idea bombed completely anyway, nobody even tried to write a section.

"This is it. This is the place."
The Eldar Prince's ears twitched as the pilot finally spoke up. All this time, all of the prediction and prophecies of the Farseers had finally led to this point. Through the crystalline viewport of the small vessel, his amber eyes gazed upon a being older than him, older than the sun it currently leeched off, older than time itself. This being had been present when the universe first came into being, and it had seen matter and antimatter warring before itself.
And he was going to kill it.
Prince Meris turned to the beings behind him, and prepared his monologue. He had waited weeks for this moment.