Disclaimer: Obviously, I don’t own Mass Effect, which belongs to EA/Bioware. Though Rylia is entirely my own creation.
A couple of quick notes about this fic, before you get started :-).
1) Something that's always frustrated me is how few Mass Effect fics out there do much with anyone but the humans. Yeah, I get it, 'Humanity Fuck Yeah' is fun. But, honestly? Where are all the fics with Alien protagonists? The Asari in particular are a wealth of interesting possibilities to play with. So, I wrote an Asari protagonist...with an OC female human that got inserted. Part of the reasons for that is that I've also been wanting to play with a system lightly inspired by a couple of fics on Spacebattles. Starflung Wanderer being the better of the two, though not the one that originated the system. The system I'm using is not a direct copy, since I also mixed it with the idea of an Omniversal Market that you see in some COYAs. But there are similarities.
2) This was first conceived and written when I was in a mood, struggling to write the Shiki arc of Halfway Broken. The result of me needing to vent a bit is that this fic has a light amount of Crack! to it. It's Crack Treated Seriously, not pure Crack!, but its still present. This also, as it happens, caused the story to escalate into sexy territory much faster than normal for my works. That's entirely because of the professions I gave the two characters that merge at the start of the story, entirely for my own amusement. That said, while the fic is likely to have more lemons that average, it is still Plot First, Porn a distant second at most. Unlike Mass Effect: Final Error, which is my only true 'smut fic.'
3) The people Rylia summon's from the Marketplace's 'Help' section are all voted on by my Patrons, so if you don't think they make sense, blame them :-p.
Chapter 1: Dissonance
“Holy mother of horse tits, who shoved an icepick in my skull?”
They lay there, disoriented and confused, only vaguely aware that the weak voice might have been their own, as their mind bombarded them with disjointed images. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, those images became less and less disjointed, but not the slightest bit less confusing. All of them were memories, that much was clear despite their pounding head. Yet, there were two sets of memories. One set insisted they were H@!%^ &!@$d, a thirty-four-year-old human woman from Earth. From 21st century Earth. The other set insisted that they were Rylia T’naai, a 97-year-old Asari most recently of Illium.
The mental dissonance only grew as the pain faded. The human memories were by far the stronger, the more immediate, the more themselves. Yet the body they were slowly becoming more aware of by the moment was very clearly that of Rylia. ‘Feminine’ curves more generous than Ha!%^ &!@rd, blue skin, and the thrum of biotic energy running through their body. Of course, the very fact that they were so aware of that thrum spoke to the human memories. Rylia considered it normal, while her mind now found it out of place.
Resolution of that dissonance came by inches, or perhaps centimeters, since Asari apparently used something closer to that measurement.
She had no idea how long she’d lain there, nor how she had gotten there. But the end amalgam of Rylia and Haz%^ slowly resolved itself into something workable. Haze^’s basic thought processes came out on top, the logic-driven framework and extreme will that her human life had possessed beating out the greater number of years of an Asari who had largely drifted through life just having fun.
At the same time, Rylia’s memories had won out in piecing together their body’s sensorium and instincts. She’d spend thousands upon thousands of hours in this body, mastering every muscle playing a Bioti-Ball Power Forward for the Armail University team. Then, just for good measure, thousands more in her job as a stripper on various worlds across Citadel Space. Rylia knew this body, it was hers, and her instincts won out even as the mental half of the equation became more the motivated human and less the lazy, hedonistic and unmotivated stripper who’d apparently taken some very questionable drugs the night before. Purely for the excitement value.
Which wasn’t to say that Rylia T’naai had been stupid. Far from it, in fact. The very fact that she’d graduated from Armail University with an advanced engineering degree before the age of 100 told one exactly how brilliant she’d been. Yet, the fact of the matter was that she hadn’t gained that degree from copious amounts of hard work…she’d literally just been born as that much of a latent genius.
Unfortunately, like many bored geniuses, she’d found the idea of sitting in a lab and dealing with idiotic management who couldn’t find their ass with both hands and an assisting lidar targeting array…less than appealing. She’d put more effort into bioti-ball than her degree anyway, and like all Maidens, wanted to get out and see the galaxy. So she’d fucked off straight from graduation to a strip club audition, and leaned into her considerable athleticism and good looks (even for an Asari!) to get the job.
It was a traditional Asari Maiden profession anyway, so no one had really asked questions.
Heck, even her family hadn’t really minded, given the most common alternative was usually becoming a merc, and mercs died a lot more often than strippers did. Pretty much any Asari who actually reached the Matron stage and did the whole have-a-kid thing was wealthy enough to act as a safety net when their kid hit the Asari version of a rebellious teenager phase. Her own mother was no different, cheerfully helping support Rylia until she’d started making enough money to go it on her own.
It was expected that Maidens would have some wanderlust. Such was considered just a part of how Asari grew up, and was a major contributor to why they’d been the first race to reach the Citadel in the first place. They weren’t driven in the same way Humans could be. But Maiden curiosity was a powerful thing, which had pushed exploration efforts into the stars far more quickly than was typical for most species. Asari were, in truth, almost as well known for exploration as for diplomacy. Maidens could easily compete with humans for the sheer urge to poke things they maybe shouldn’t with a stick. In fact, finding out humans had that same urge had horrified most of Citadel space, as they’d all imagined another entire race with Asari-like poke-it-with-a-stick tendencies.
Thankfully, much to the humans’ own considerable bemusement, the rest of the galaxy had eventually come to the conclusion that humans had better impulse control than Asari Madiens. Humans that frequented the wilder areas of the galaxy in general were still getting used to the occasional relieved response of ‘oh, thank god, you’re just a human. I thought from the suit you might be an Asari Maiden.’ Such was the level of reputation for dubiously intelligent actions of the Asari most likely to be found in such places.
Ultimately, Telefia, Rylia’s mother, had been immensely pleased that Rylia had held her own wanderlust and questionable decision making off long enough to finish Uni. The degree would be there when she calmed down from the ‘wild years.’ Asari memories were far better than most species in the first place, and there were literally thousands of schools across Asari space that specialized in ‘refresher courses’ for older Maidens and new Matrons.
Those courses were, themselves, an ancient tradition. Such schools were intended to return any skills that Maidens had lost to their wild years so that they could better contribute to the Asari people once they settled down a bit. Most of them were even free, to some degree, sponsored by various Matriarchs who headhunted those schools for more stable employees.
Absolutely none of that past had given Rylia a particularly strong will.
Not, at least, compared to a human born into a lower-class family who’d clawed her way up to some measure of actual success. Sure, that success had started as putting herself through college as a hentai artist who eventually ended up working at a game studio doing concept art and story boarding for…female characters with generous figures. Still, she’d been making over 80 grand a year and had a professional name people had started to actually recognize in the industry. For the daughter of a blue-collar factory worker and a line-chef, she’d done fucking amazing for herself.
As such, it wasn’t really a surprise that the final amalgam mind favored the human side heavily, even if it accepted a lot of helpful bits and pieces from the Asari side in order to make something fully functional. With the pounding in her head finally reduced to a dull ache as the dissonance faded, Rylia was almost ready to start properly figuring out what the fuck had happened when a new complication appeared.
**********************
Mental Dissonance Resolved. System initializing. Please Stand By.
Initialization…12%.
**********************
Rylia blinked several times, but the floating box in her vision refused to go away, the ‘initialization’ percentages slowly ticking upward. So, either she was having a very vivid dream or…no, she wasn’t going to go there. The fuckery with having multiple incredibly detailed sets of memory wasn’t something that a dream or hallucination could possibly cover. That meant that, one way or another, a human had somehow been iseakied into an Asari. Which, now that she had her mind sorted out, was very worrying.
That human had, after all, played the Mass Effect games. Worse, the ‘Rylia’ memories had known about humans, as well as who the current Councilors were. Which meant she knew that she couldn’t be more than a couple of decades prior to the start of those games…and the names of various things matched enough to be worrying. Of course, on the flip side, it was also clear that the Mass Effect games had shrunk the galaxy a lot. There were trillions of Asari, with dozens of major colony worlds and quite a few minor ones as well. Likewise, there were a lot more species involved in Citadel Space than the games had shown.
Oh, the games had apparently covered all the major species, but there were half a dozen minor ones for every major species. The Asari and Salarians both had their own client species, just like the Turians did. Though the Asari treated theirs quite a bit better than the other two, who tended to exploit them more heavily. Not that the Asari were innocent of that. But when you could afford to wait a few centuries to get any return on investment from a new species, there was no need to be as heavy-handed as the other major races were. Heck, even the Hanar were more abusive with the Drell than Asari were with their own clients.
Which, honestly, was probably why their client races hadn’t appeared in the games. No one really complains about being taken over and peacefully uplifted by a race of gorgeous sex icons. Doubly so when said icons want to have sex with you, build families, and invest in your culture since it’s the new interesting thing. All of which was fascinating to work through from a new perspective that actually cared to make use of Rylia’s knowledge instead of ignoring it, but was also sort of not relevant to the moment.
Both humans and Asari had ‘isekai’ stories. Heck, it was even a popular genre among bored Asari maidens who wanted to imagine themselves on cool adventures. Which meant she could certainly grasp the concept of a…what…reincarnation?
A transmigration of some sort anyway.
She could even grasp the idea of them having a ‘System.’ She supposed that all there was to do was wait and see what sort of ‘System’ she’d ended up with, while quietly hoping it wasn’t one that wanted her to go out and punch a bitch in the face.
Neither of her lives had been the combative sorts.
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System Initialization…100%
System Online…
Welcome to the Omniversal Market! Where everything can be had, for the right price!
Good Luck, New User. If this System has found you at all, you and your reality are going to need it…
**********************
Well…that wasn’t fucking ominous at all, right? Of course, assuming that the plot of those games that the dominant half of her had played was accurate at all, she could see what the message meant. It did imply that she wasn’t just meant to fuck around with whatever this system was.
Which, well…what was it, exactly?
Rylia almost jumped as that thought brought up something like a series of help files in her brain. Once her heart started again, after what felt like entirely too long a pause for her wellbeing, she worked her way through what the mental help files could tell her. The Omniversal Market System was, well, just what it said on the tin, so to speak. Apparently, it served its user as an interface through which they could buy and sell almost anything from scrap to…technology from other realities?!
She spent several long seconds, double checking that she hadn’t misread that section, before mentally willing the interface back into existence. On it, she could see several options.
**********************
Omniversal Market
Purchase: Items, Knowledge, Resources, Help
Sell: Market Sell, Market Auction, Dimensional Barter
Currency: Credits, Karma, Favors
**********************
Rylia quickly lost track of time as she opened each of the menu options in sequence. The Sell options were actually the easiest to understand, when she eventually got to them. She could, apparently, sell anything she had ‘ownership’ over to the market in exchange for credits. According to the help files, ‘ownership’ was a very loose term, and didn’t care anything about legality. It just had to be hers in some fashion. Very much a ‘possession is nine tenths of the law’ sort of understanding of the concept of ownership.
Auctions were apparently only for rare items and could net more than just currency for the seller. Unique, highly customized prototypes, items with conceptual weight, rare collectables, or even original items made entirely by the System user might be things you could auction, instead of just selling to the Market System itself.
In turn, if you found something rare enough for other users of the System to bid on, you might well earn a ‘favor’ currency from someone powerful enough to pay in something custom. Other users who might have already taken the effort to combine a dozen techbases into one powerful item were just one example. Asking them for a bespoke solution to a problem was one thing a ‘favor’ was good for. It also worked the other way, being able to offer up bespoke solutions for a rare item on auction.
The last ‘Sell’ option, Dimensional Barter, could allow you to trade things straight across with other users, skipping any exchange fees from the System. Want a specific technology from Star Trek? Well, a user in such a universe might just be willing to trade tricorder technology for high-end omni-tool schematics. Of course, that was much too low end of an example, from what she could see. It was too easy to just buy either a tricorder or omni-tool from the store, even if the tech level of your current reality did seem to affect prices. The vast majority of the Dimensional Barter trades seemed to be for much larger ticket or rarer items. As in, the smaller ones were talking about trading entire starships from different realities. There were some exceptions for mixed-tech items, but she didn’t spend too much time looking through specifics, with the rest of the System to explore.
Of course, all of the Sell options paled in comparison in complexity to the ‘Buy’ options. Rylia lost most of her time on those menus or, more accurately, the massive series of Sub Menus involved. The sub menus started out, by default, by showing Mass Effect technology. Since even a small glance around her room earlier had showed her she was in Rylia’s apartment on Illium, this made complete sense. The default menu was for locally available technology.
Even that default menu was also, however, comprehensive. Dozens of sub menu options allowed her to see everything from omni-tools and biotic amps to guns, then straight on to starships and more. Notably, a few things Rylia had done searches for were cheaper than her memories said they should be. By a varying amount that she strongly suspected was the retailer markup in each case. She could get name brand clothing for a fraction of its normal cost, for example. Though, in that specific example, with the brands that were best known for quality there was still a significant difference between them and lesser competitors. Likely a result of superior materials or manufacturing methods that upped the base cost of the item.
Of course, the default menu was only the tip of the iceberg.
A dropdown menu allowed her to select other realities’ technology. It was, sadly, technology only, with no sign of magic on offer. A few looked a bit like magitech, in the same way that Biotics were borderline magic, but there was nothing that screamed ‘enchantments and spells.’ Yet, even with that caveat, there were hundreds of realities listed. Some of which she recognized, some of which she didn’t, and some of which she immediately wanted to delete before their connection to her System caused Eldrich Horrors to leap out at her.
Admittedly, that last one was mostly because Warhammer 40k was on the list, but she felt justified in her instinctive reaction of ‘NOPE’ upon seeing that one.
Also of note was something that took her a bit of time to sort out. Apparently, the farther away from her local tech base something was, the more drastic the price differed from the things she could buy from her own reality. Quick checks of something like transporters or replicators from Star Trek showed they were expensive. To the point she could buy a ship, a fairly large one at that, from her own reality for the same cost. It did work the other way, too, though. Some items could be cheaper, even if they were useful, just because they were from a lower-level tech base. Sometimes, this produced weird interactions that she took note of as potentially useful to exploit.
Fallout tech, for example, was cheaper due to its crudity, but not always truly cheap if there wasn’t a local equivalent. The Institute’s teleportation tech was cheaper than Star Trek’s transporters, but still far more expensive than most of the other tech from the Fallout-verse. Meanwhile, Synths weren’t actually that pricey, presumably because Mass Effect had both advanced AI and the ability to create pretty convincing robots. As seen by Cerberus’s creation of the Eva Coré android, which could fake being human well enough to infiltrate the highly-secured Mars Archives. In fact, though it was expensive, a quick check showed that such androids were available from her ‘default’ store. They were marked as ‘future’ tech, implying they didn’t exist yet, which in turn likely explained the expense. But she could get them.
As a whole, this meant that some careful selections could allow her to achieve effects like teleportation more cheaply than normal, or acquire improvements from one tech base to apply to her own without too much cost. She would just have to look for more advanced tech exceptions in lower tech bases, or find tech that had crossover with the Mass Effect tech base.
Back on point, the options available weren’t just for finished pieces of tech or some of each reality’s set of bullshit materials. The ‘Knowledge’ category was, in some ways, even more interesting than the individual items that could be bought. It could provide complete understanding, at least as complete as the universe you were getting it from had knowledge on a subject, of whatever you purchased the knowledge of. It didn’t seem to download straight to your brain, but she quickly identified several different realities with tech that could help with ‘flash learning.’ Though she imagined all would have some level of drawback.
The ‘Help’ category, for it was a category, was a bit more disturbing, given that it offered people for sale. Thankfully, a bit of investigation turned up why every single option was currently greyed out for her. Apparently, ‘Help’ could only be purchased with Karma points, earned for doing objectively good things.
A bit more digging when she found an actual help document for the Help category farther explained that the individuals listed were not slaves. They were people who had, by various means, made deals with the System in some fashion. Said System claimed it would only match you with ‘compatible individuals,’ but farther went on to explain that such matching was almost the only advantage you would have with them. They couldn’t betray you and were required to serve you to the terms of their contract for a specified period. But once that period was over, they were free to do what they wanted otherwise. It was up to you to convince them to work with you rather than fucking off and doing their own thing after the contract period was up.
The part of her that was still human was a little dubious. The part of her that was Asari, on the other hand, didn’t have any issue with it. Apparently, indenture contracts weren’t unique to Illium. Illium had the most shady laws regarding them, without the numerous protections built into the laws of proper colonies, but more honest versions of the practice were apparently quite common throughout Asari space. Given how long-lived Asari were, it actually sort of made sense, too.
Normal indenture contracts, on a proper Asari colony, had specific term limits and extensive protections that made it more like a particularly binding employment agreement than slavery. The differences served two genuinely useful purposes. The first, most obvious purpose, was to provide upward class mobility. Even an Asari with nothing but who had dreams of say, starting a business, could sign herself into indenture for a set number of years in order to see a potentially very hefty payout at the end. This aspect of the system allowing them to gain capital for their own ventures as a result. Something which, in a species that could live for a thousand years or more, was a completely sane choice. What was a decade or two of service for enough money to start your dream business at the end?
The other purpose, which explained a lot about what the other side got out of it, was that it provided a way for Matrons and Matriarchs to get potentially flighty maidens to actually stick around. If a research project or political movement was projected to take fifty years to really gain traction? That wasn’t the non-starter for a 500-year-old Asari that it would be for a fifty-year-old human. Yet, getting the minion-level help to make it all work to stick around for even half that duration might be hard. So, instead of constantly replacing the pool of Maidens who made up your minion-level employees? Simply buy a few dozen promising indenture contracts and it would work out fairly well for everyone involved.
It was a system that wouldn’t work nearly as well for a species where ten or twenty years was a major chunk of their lifespan. For the Asari, though, where that was two percent or less of their life expectancy if that didn’t die from accident or violence? For them, it was an entirely sane system. Which left Rylia feeling oddly okay with the ‘Help’ section of the System, at least once she thought it through all the way.
Eventually, after what she was fairly certain had been several hours lost to her exploration of menus and options, Rylia managed to tear her attention away from the System. Partially because her body was informing her in no uncertain terms it had needs, and partially because she kinda had some more immediate problems even beyond those basic needs. First, she needed to use the Asari version of the bathroom before she burst. Which might prove a slightly interesting experience in and of itself given that she was mentally more human than Asari now and there were a number of interesting anatomical differences…
… … …
Thankfully, her memories of ‘Rylia’ thoroughly exploring her own body over the years had kept the temptation to do some new explorations to a minimum. Which wasn’t to say she hadn’t indulged a little when she took a shower. Rylia had a high sex drive even for a Maiden, and her previously human mind had been that of a curious pervert who still drew hentai on the side. All of which had certainly made the temptation of a little masturbation in the shower hard to resist. There were some fascinating things about Asari biology that were…
No. Not the time. Focus!
With certain hygiene needs taken care of, and a surprisingly good frozen meal put through a fancy sci-fi version of a microwave, Rylia felt almost hum-…er…Asari again? Which meant that it was time to attempt to take stock of just how utterly fucked she and the galaxy were. First, where was she in the timeline and what did she have to work with? Well, the latter was actually easier to sort first, given that she still had all of Rylia’s memories.
Thankfully, the answer was mostly positive, too.
In the immediate term, Rylia hadn’t been stupid enough to take a random new drug when she had work the next day. In fact, after quickly checking the date, it proved that she still had another 36 hours before her next shift. She had a few other things to do in that time, but Rylia had planned for the entirety of today to be free in case of a bad trip. Ending up mostly subsumed by an invading consciousness from another reality probably counted as a bad trip, come to think of it. Of course, since it was more of a merger rather than a take over, ‘subsumed’ wasn’t quite the right word.
Regardless, she had time to get her thoughts in order, which is what mattered right now.
In the longer term, or at least medium term, Rylia was honestly pretty well off. That wasn’t the norm for Asari dancers, not unless they worked at some seriously high-end club somewhere…or provided more ‘services’ than just dancing. Even then, well, there were a lot of Asari out there in the galaxy, the majority of them at any one time being Maidens. ‘Curiosity killed the Maiden’ was a far more common phrase than ‘curiosity killed the cat,’ in Citadel Space, for a good reason. Something that resulted in a much smaller number of Asari actually living to the Matron stage than you might expect with another species.
Given that sheer number of Maidens at any one time and how common being a stripper was as a choice, it wasn’t normally super high-paying work. Rylia was gorgeous even by Asari standards, and seriously fit from all the Bioti-ball. Yet, that wouldn’t have been enough for more than a middling level of pay all on its own.
There were, however, benefits to the fact that Rylia had been a genius, even if a lazy one.
Specifically, Rylia had identified an opportunity in the, at the time, barely known humanity. She’d started her stripping career just three years after humanity’s little scuffle with the Turians, and like every Asari Maiden, had been super interested in humans. Maidens almost always went hard with new races, seeing them as the most interesting new thing when they showed up, and the Matriarchs outright encouraged it. After all, how better to suck a new race into political bed with you than to sic your horny teenager equivalents loose on them to have fun?
Humans had been even more susceptible to that, given how close in appearance they were to Asari, but there had been a bit of a catch. Specifically, that the humans barely had a united government at the time, and they were initially all sorts of paranoid about allowing aliens into human space. Stupid Turians screwed that up for everyone! Well, Rylia hadn’t given up entirely, and had spotted a trend in the human ‘net that she could take advantage of. Apparently, humans loved to consume content by ‘streamers,’ and the sexier and more exotic those streamers were, the better!
Rylia had lept in with both feet. Both feet, a fantastic pair of tits, an exotically alien pussy, and absolutely none of the silly nudity taboos humans and other species had.
It surprised the human woman now shoved into Rylia’s mind as the primary pilot not one single bit that a lot of humans had instantly simped hard. Sexy, exotic, alien who was an expert at teasing people for profit? Yep, that checked a bunch of boxes alright. Better for Rylia, as one of the first Asari to realize there was a market for it, she had gotten in early and built several million followers. Close to fifty million at this point, actually.
In truth, she now made the vast majority of her money from those followers, but Asari were social creatures even more than humans were. Which was the sole reason that Rylia had kept jumping from world to world, getting part-time gigs for a year or two with various strip clubs. The fact that any club she joined would instantly get a trickle of her richer followers showing up to watch made it an easy sell to get herself hired. Clubs that had humans were still a hot commodity, even ten years on from them first popping up. Doubly so anywhere near Asari space. A stripper that would virtually guarantee you pulled in some humans? A hotter commodity still.
Heck, despite not strictly speaking, being a porn star? Rylia had featured in the very first issue of Fornax earlier this year. Something the original Rylia hadn’t thought much of, but her new memories form Hazel told her in no uncertain terms that Fornax would end up becoming a pretty major porn producer in Council space. One of the only Human companies that actually managed to edge into that usually Asari-dominated industry.
All in all, it meant that Rylia was actually pretty damn well off for a stripper.
It also, sort of, told her where she was in the Timeline. Her human self hadn’t exactly been an expert on the Mass Effect timeline, even if she could be sure it would be the same. Which wasn’t certain at all, given how much different the galaxy was in Rylia’s memories, compared to the limited scale of the games. That said, she had a hazy idea that the first game had occurred sometime in the 2180s, by the human calendar. A quick check on her omni-tool showed it was currently late 2167CE. So, assuming the Reapers were actually a thing, and the timeline wasn’t too different? That meant she should have a minimum of 13 years to work with. Hopefully more.
Not a lot of time. But with the Omniversal Markeplace? She’d make do…