Right. This was all before my time, so keep that in mind.
[A drink, to clear her thoughts, or to at least give her time to think.]
So, you have Earth; it's the homeworld, where humans evolved, where we come from. Eventually, it gets crowded, polluted, people want out— so we start making colonies on other planets, places to expand to and live. Farm life. Once we discovered FTL travel, and then Mass Relays, we started doing it other star-clusters.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, the aliens have had this tech for thousands of years. They've got empires, militaries, laws, ancient wars between each other, the whole thing. And after a rough couple of wars with species that came through unmarked parts of the relay system, they have a law; nobody uses unmapped relays. Fair enough.
Problem is, Earth is on the other side of one of those unmapped relays. So when the first scouting ships come through, and see the whole Turian fleet? The Turians open fire, no questions asked. Those scouts never come home. But I ask you, do you think humans quit that easy?
[Of course they don't. Humans are stupidly stubborn; it's one of the species' best qualities, truly.]
Anyways, that was our first encounter with non-human intelligent species. Show up, get a gun to our heads just for having the gal to exist. Not a good start. Garrus is Turian, by the way— so you see how far we've come. [And drink. This story is getting a bit long.] The Turians decide, fuck it, and even though they had to know that this was a First Contact situation, and that we were no more aware of what their laws were than we were that they existed in the first place, that apparently didn't count as an excuse in their books. So they go right back through that unmapped relay, and they bring a fleet. They start doing their damndest to bomb everything to hell that won't surrender, and to subjugate anyone who does.
But what they don't expect is, humans basically never accept that kind of treatment; so the whole time they're beating us down, we're stealing their weapons and developing our own. Inside of a hundred years, we've gone from being the most technologically backward species in the galaxy to being one of the most advanced. That's humanity. And they choke on us, long enough that even they can't pretend this is a legitimate military action anymore. The Citadel council steps in, and puts a stop to the fighting.
A lot of people are still pissed about the whole thing, to be honest. It's not hard to see why: the Counsel made it clear that they had no intention of following their own rules, and that they expected us to follow them despite that, even if we weren't technically a Citadel species at all. Leads to a lot of anti-alien sentiment... honestly, I can't even say they're wrong, most of the time. You want to know the real crock of shit? Most Turians won't even call it a war. The Relay 413 Incident, they call it; the most important war in human history and it's an incident.
no subject
[A drink, to clear her thoughts, or to at least give her time to think.]
So, you have Earth; it's the homeworld, where humans evolved, where we come from. Eventually, it gets crowded, polluted, people want out— so we start making colonies on other planets, places to expand to and live. Farm life. Once we discovered FTL travel, and then Mass Relays, we started doing it other star-clusters.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, the aliens have had this tech for thousands of years. They've got empires, militaries, laws, ancient wars between each other, the whole thing. And after a rough couple of wars with species that came through unmarked parts of the relay system, they have a law; nobody uses unmapped relays. Fair enough.
Problem is, Earth is on the other side of one of those unmapped relays. So when the first scouting ships come through, and see the whole Turian fleet? The Turians open fire, no questions asked. Those scouts never come home. But I ask you, do you think humans quit that easy?
[Of course they don't. Humans are stupidly stubborn; it's one of the species' best qualities, truly.]
Anyways, that was our first encounter with non-human intelligent species. Show up, get a gun to our heads just for having the gal to exist. Not a good start. Garrus is Turian, by the way— so you see how far we've come. [And drink. This story is getting a bit long.] The Turians decide, fuck it, and even though they had to know that this was a First Contact situation, and that we were no more aware of what their laws were than we were that they existed in the first place, that apparently didn't count as an excuse in their books. So they go right back through that unmapped relay, and they bring a fleet. They start doing their damndest to bomb everything to hell that won't surrender, and to subjugate anyone who does.
But what they don't expect is, humans basically never accept that kind of treatment; so the whole time they're beating us down, we're stealing their weapons and developing our own. Inside of a hundred years, we've gone from being the most technologically backward species in the galaxy to being one of the most advanced. That's humanity. And they choke on us, long enough that even they can't pretend this is a legitimate military action anymore. The Citadel council steps in, and puts a stop to the fighting.
A lot of people are still pissed about the whole thing, to be honest. It's not hard to see why: the Counsel made it clear that they had no intention of following their own rules, and that they expected us to follow them despite that, even if we weren't technically a Citadel species at all. Leads to a lot of anti-alien sentiment... honestly, I can't even say they're wrong, most of the time. You want to know the real crock of shit? Most Turians won't even call it a war. The Relay 413 Incident, they call it; the most important war in human history and it's an incident.