A Cursed Galaxy 2 (Patreon)

It didn’t matter who you were, where in human space you came from, what beast your curse drew from, or if the prey were alien robots, there was a deep, primal thrill that came with hunting. And that’s what combat was, Shepard mused as his claws turned a geth drone to scrap. He hadn’t served with Jenkins or Alenko in a combat situation before, but he was unsurprised when they shifted to wolf-based forms.

Lycanthropy was the most common form of the supernatural curse that had infected every human more than a century ago, but Shepard had worked alongside a wereboar, werelion, and Mindoir had been home to a family of werebats, before the batarians had attacked. From a quick glance, Alenko had the most common degree of lycanthropy, his body resembling a fused hybrid of human and wolf, while Jenkins’ was among the weakest that Shepard had ever seen, more akin to the iconic Wolf Man from the early Twentieth Century.

Regardless, the three of them made their way along the hillside towards the digsite, cutting down geth drones as they went. They made fast progress, until a towering, red humanoid geth unit appeared and the fire from it had a nasty surprise.

Shepard and Alenko hid behind trees as Jenkins howled in pain, his armor weave suit riddled with holes and the wounds leaking out trails of smoke that reeked of a scent that every human knew. Jenkins dropped, and Shepard pulled up his omni-tool. While not a combat engineer, he had a few programs on his omni-tool.

Popping out from cover, Shepard sent an Overload at the geth unit as Alenko used his biotics to reach Jenkins.The large geth staggered, and Shepard concentrated. In an instant, he’d traversed the tens of meters in a flash of blue, claws cutting through the alloys, plastics, and ceramics that made up the alien robot.

Biotic charges were part of Alliance basic training, and while most biotics used omni-tool based claws to deal with enemy forces wearing anything more durable than basic clothing, Shepard had never needed to. His own strain of lycanthropy was strong enough that his claws had never had any trouble cutting through anything he’d used them on.

Examining the surroundings as Alenko examined Jenkins, Shepard spotted a pair of additional geth units. Lifting both arms, Shepard lowered his wrists to provide a clear firing line for the Garmr-class shotguns mounted on the armor of his arms. A short stucco of fire, and the geth units dropped.

Turning back to Alenko and Jenkins, Shepard walked over and asked, “Damage?”

“Silver rounds. Penetrated armor. Strain too weak push out. Survivable, out of fight,” Alenko reported as Jenkins writhed in pain.

Shepard snarled, dropping a medevac beacon on Jenkins, even as his mind raced. The geth knew about silver, which made no sense. Humanity had been very careful not to let that information spread. It was something that no human talked about, ever. Hell, a large number of humans didn’t know about it.

In the end, however it was that they learned about it wasn’t important at the moment. Getting to the beacon was the crucial matter.

Turning away from Jenkins, Shepard looked up towards the sky, catching a glimpse of the strange ship rising up into the sky, the Normandy flying by. Turning to Alenko, he said, “Must move, Jenkins picked up soon.”

Alenko gave a nod, and the two continued. Nearly ten minutes of moving through the trees later, they were fighting through another pair of geth units. It was easy enough, the two of them falling into a comfortable rhythm, when Shepard’s ear twitched. Finishing with his current geth unit, Shepard turned to face the direction of the colony, catching sight of something that caught him by surprise.

It wasn’t the fact that there was a survivor who’d continued fighting the geth, especially considering their armor showed they were part of the Alliance military. It was the fact that their strain of lycanthropy resulted in them taking a full lupin form, but much larger than any wolf ever had been. He’d heard that there were some cases like that, but he’d never met anyone with that strain of lycanthropy.

Loping down the hillside towards the colony proper, Shepard approached the currently quadrupedal soldier. Seeing them, the soldier dropped to their haunches and lifted a paw up in an approximation of a salute.

“Artillery-Chief Ashley Williams of 215th, on shore leave,” they barked.

“Report,” Shepard ordered.

“Returning hunt, hand ship descend, robots attack, didn’t have weapons, lucky have armor, fight ever since,” Williams reported, pacing back and forth with anxious energy. The pidgin language that had been developed a century prior specifically for use with muzzles lacked elements of many natural languages, but it got the job done.

Unfortunately, it lacked a word for Prothean, so after a moment’s consideration, Shepard asked, “Alien beacon found, know location?”

Williams perked up, nodding, “Big excitement when found, this way.”

Williams took off at a jog, leading Shepard and Alenko back into the colony, the buildings and ground still scorched from the geth attack, and a large number of spikes scattered around, with more than a few dead humans attached.

Shepard and Alenko did their best not to pay too much attention, knowing that the Alliance would be here to investigate soon, but Williams seemed almost obsessed with them, growling angrily.

Before either man could say anything, however, the four of them rounded a corner and found themselves in the colony center, and on the ground was Nihlus. Keeping his senses sharp and watching for any threats, Shepard loped over to Nihlus, even as the strange ship rose up into the air, departing the planet with an aura that made Shepard’s teeth ache.

“Keep watch,” Shepard ordered as he knelt next to Nihlus.

There were faint, rasping breaths coming from the Spectre, something that surprised Shepard, given the bloody mess that was the back of his head. Slathering medigel on the injury, Shepard sent a message to the Normandy, looking up as Williams began to growl at some nearby crates.

“Wait! Don’t shoot, or bite!” a voice called out as a figure came out from behind some crates, hands held up.

“Why salarian here?” Alenko asked, staring at the obviously terrified salarian.

“I’m a geneticist! I help with the programs to introduce new animals into the various ecosystems on the planet,” the salarian babbled, his frog-like eyes glancing between the three Alliance soldiers. “I come out here when I need to get away from my coworkers, that’s why I survived, I was already here, please don’t shoot me!”

Gesturing to Nihlus, Shepared asked, “What happened?”

“The turian? Wasn’t the weird mechs, another turian, the one who arrived with the mechs. That turian recognized him, called him Saren, and seemed to know him. He relaxed a bit, and Saren shot him, before leaving. I think he was heading towards the spaceport. There was a bunch of activity going on down there earlier today, I think Raymond mentioned an Alliance crew coming to pick something… oh, you’re the Alliance crew, aren’t you?”

“Stay hidden,” was all Shepard said in response, dropping another medevac beacon for Nihlus.

The salarian needed no encouragement, moving back into the crates. With the witness secured as well as they could for the moment, it was time to move on. The colony was mostly clear, the few bodies to be found impaled on those mechanical spikes, so it was time to secure the objective.

“Why spike bodies?” Alenko wondered out loud, looking at the spikes the geth had set up and then impaled the dead upon.

“Mind-war?” Williams suggested, her snout wrinkling in distaste. “Would scare uncursed.”

“Unlikely,” Shepard interjected. “Wasteful, not efficient.”

That was when the nearest spikes began to retract, bringing the bodies down to the ground. Then the bodies stood up, but it was clear that it wasn’t because they’d survived. Wires and tubes criss crossed their bodies, lit by blue cybernetic lights.

“Fire!” Shepard shouted, leveling his shotguns at the...husks of the colonists.

A volley of shots, and the husks fell to the ground, but a second wave was coming, fast enough that a few reached them. Supernatural claws and fangs met dead flesh and twisted metal, and the metal lost. Staring down at the dismembered remains, Shepard knelt down, carefully examining them and scanning them with his omni-tool.

“Nanites, eat parts of body, use build machine parts, highly not efficient,” Shepard said, reading out the results of the scans.

“Why make mindless husks?” Williams asked, her head cocked in confusion. “Die too easy, more robots be better.”

“Try make hybrid husk?” Alekno suggested with a shrug.

In the end, it didn’t make much of an immediate difference. Whatever the geth were trying to do, the end result was a force that would be a threat to a percentage of civilians when it wasn’t a full moon. Seeing as triggering the shift was something that could be learned, and even the weakest strain of lycanthropy made one able to outfight the best baseline human.

“Continue,” Shepard ordered, leading Williams and Alenko deeper into the colony.

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Lycanthropy, Wolves, & Humanity: A Preliminary Examination of the Supernatural and its Effects on Human Society, Culture, and Military Philosophy, Part I

By Professor Mordin Solus

Published (27th May), (2159)

The common belief is that the trend among sapient species is a gradual increase in knowledge and understanding of the natural laws of reality. Assuming that a species is not destroyed by some means, be it internal or external, it would stand to reason that eventually said species will master spaceflight and become an interplanetary species. Until [2] years ago, it was also believed that by this point, a species would discard beliefs in things such as curses.

Humanity has proven this belief to be incorrect. Thorough examination, including in depth scans, genetic analysis, and extensive interviews, have demonstrated that lycanthropy has no scientific basis. The initial hypothesis was that humanity had yet to develop the technology to determine how lycanthropy functioned, but if this is the case, then I must say that the Citadel species lack the technology as well.

In absence of a scientific explanation for the mechanics for such dramatic physiological changes, in some cases including up to a doubling of an individual’s body mass, this paper will instead focus on the societal impacts of lycanthropy upon humanity, beginning with a look at the historical trends and how it spread.

To begin with, it is important to clarify what exactly lycanthropy is. Lycanthropy is the word used to describe the ability humans possess to transform into an animalistic form that grants them greatly enhanced physical capabilities. The word stems from an ancient form of the human language Greek, and translates to “wolf-human”.

While there are some rare individuals amongst the human population whose abilities allow them to adopt forms drawn from other animals, and thus technically speaking are not lycanthropes, over 95.6289% of humanity have wolf-based alternative forms. As a result, lycanthropy has become a “catch all” term to refer to the supernatural ability in general.

A wolf is a highly social endurance hunter native to the northern hemisphere of the human homeworld. In basic body structure, it is remarkably similar to varren in a textbook case of convergent evolution. In social structure, they are organized in packs of four to ten individuals, led by a dominant male and female who are the parents of the rest.

Humans evolved in tropical grasslands as highly social endurance hunters, making them remarkably similar to the wolves that they encountered as they spread from the continent they evolved on to the rest of their homeworld.

This similarity, I believe, is something that cannot be understated. Even before lycanthropy became widespread, humans recognized that of the animals that lived on their homeworld, only wolves and their domesticated subspecies, dogs, had endurance comparable to their own. Their instincts, both for the need for social bonds and as hunters that could not fight off rivals alone, mirrored their own.

Tales of lycanthropy reach far back in human history, along with tales of other monsters. As of the time of this writing, there have been no credible sources supporting the existence of such monsters from human folklore. A full examination of such tales will be the focus of future research papers, however I want to briefly discuss one that was frequently depicted in entertainment as being in a war against lycanthropes: vampires.

A vampire, at its most basic, is a dead human that through some supernatural means continues to ambulate and is required to feed on living humans to sustain its semblance of life. The specifics of how this works, the exact powers that the vampire possesses, the weaknesses, and how intelligent they are vary by telling. However, they serve to demonstrate the similarities between wolves and humans, and how relatively little lycanthropy has affected humanity as a whole.

If vampires were real instead of lycanthropy, then the turians never would have had a conflict with them at Relay 314. Because they would have gone extinct before reaching economical space flight, let alone discovering Prothean technology. Humans and wolves are similar enough that the addition of wolf instincts from lycanthropy did not have civilization ending consequences.

There were still consequences, beginning with…