Reapers

The **Reapers** were a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships. The Reapers resided in dark space: the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernated there, dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to the galaxy.

The Reapers were the original creators of the Citadel and the mass relay network. These massive constructs existed so that any intelligent life in the galaxy would eventually discover them and base their technology upon them – all part of a scheme to harvest the galaxy’s sentient life in a repeating cycle of purges that continued relentlessly over countless millennia until their defeat at the hands of the Prothean Empire.

## History

### Ancient Times

Reapers had been known to exist for nearly a billion years, judging by findings from the Leviathan of Dis, an ancient Reaper corpse.

Before the Reapers came to be, the galaxy was under the thrall of a race known as Leviathans. They created an "Intelligence" to solve the problem of organics and synthetics killing each other. However, this Intelligence turned on them, slaughtering most of their kind and processing others into the very first true Reaper, Harbinger. Harbinger's form, that of the Leviathans themselves, became the template for subsequent Reapers harvested from the galaxy's races on cyclical purges over the next millions of years.

In order to speed up the time between harvests, the Reapers constructed the mass relay network and the Citadel to coordinate it. Engineered creatures called keepers were placed on the Citadel to maintain the station during their absence and to open it for them when they decide to invade.

### Destruction

Fifty thousand years before the current galactic era, the Reapers initiated a purge against the Protheans, the dominant spacefaring lifeforms at the time. The Protheans resisted like nearly every other race before them, only this time the defense was somewhat successful.

Having encountered plans for an ancient device designed by the long-dead Rakfeeli people, the Protheans completed the design and construction, unleashing the weapon on the Reapers in a final desperate attack. In a fantastical pulse of energy that bounced across the Milky Way, the Reapers were eliminated. Unfortunately, the Protheans themselves fell victim to their own weapon, vanishing into the past within several decades.

## Culture

### Cycle of Destruction

The patterns concerning the development of galactic civilization and the cycles of extinction were too regular and repetitive to be a coincidence. The galaxy experienced the same paths and conflicts during each cycle - "the same peaks of evolution, the same valleys of dissolution" - expressed in different forms. It infers that the Reapers are servants of this pattern, not the creators of it. The Reapers' true master and motive, however, remains largley unknown by every species aside from the Leviathans themselves.

The Reapers left no evidence of their conquest, nor of their existence – only desolate, barren ruins of those who came before. Extant information on them is so scant that they are known merely as "boogeymen" at best in many cultures' ancient legends.

The trap created by the Reapers was simple. A sentient species would develop an FTL drive, but would still be limited in its speed. By leaving a network of relays capable of instant transport across the galaxy that led to the impressive Citadel, the Reapers ensured that it would become the center of galactic civilization. Furthermore, the presence of the mass relays would lead the sentient species down a predetermined route with regards to weapons and armor technology, both of which are based upon element zero technology for the Citadel races. By using it mass relay technology, societies developed along the paths they desired. The relays also served to reduce the amount of time it took for galactic civilization to advance, thus shortening the time between the Reapers' harvests.

Once the sentient races had established themselves on the Citadel with the aid of the keepers, a lone Reaper vanguard stationed within the galaxy sent a signal to the Citadel, instructing the keepers to activate the station’s hidden mass relay. This opened a path between the Citadel and dark space. The Reapers then flooded through, killing the leaders of the assembled species before branching out and harvesting all spacefaring life around them.

Because the Reapers first enter the galaxy at the point that they have ensured will be the center of galactic politics, information and finance, they were able to cripple any resistance almost before the Citadel civilizations had any idea that they were under attack. The Citadel also gave them control of the relay network, cutting off star systems from each other and destroying communications.

The Reapers then used their control of the Citadel and its data to begin the most sinister phase of their attack. Records allowed them to track down every settled planet and attack them, harvesting their populations or enslaving them through indoctrination.

Once they had harvested the galaxy, the Reapers wiped every trace of their existence from recorded history and retreated back into dark space.

### Harvests

During their invasion at the end of each cycle, the Reapers gathered and "processed" vast numbers of individuals from each of the galaxy's sentient spacefaring races. Victims who cooperated with or were captured by Reaper husks were rounded up into "camps", where the husks select individuals deemed fit for processing. Those who are deemed unsuitable were turned into more husks.

Individuals who were determined to be suitable for processing are loaded onto Reaper Processors, where they were ushered into single-person pods. Like a slaughterhouse, the interior of the Processor was designed to prevent any visual or auditory contact between individuals being processed. Once in the pods, the victims were dissolved into a raw genetic "paste" for ease of transport. This paste would then be used in the construction of a newborn Reaper, with the victims' minds being preserved to form the Reaper's gestalt consciousness.

## Remnants

Although they did their utmost to cover their tracks, like all organic and semi-organic beings, they could not complete this task perfectly. Debris from their own demise as well as devices left behind in millenias past are still buried in the depths of the galaxy, dangerous and deadly devices known only as Reaper Tech.