Final author's notes (updated and revised 5/27/2011)
These notes used to be placed at the end of Chapter 5, but looking back, it feels awkward for such long notes to be a part of the story, so I've given them a dedicated space here.
Well, this story is finally over at last.
One of the things that made writing this a blast was Overlord's intense soundtrack. The music for Overlord set the tone perfectly for the entire mission, and I did the best I could to recreate that atmosphere in the making of this tale. In my mind, I can effortlessly sync the scenes with the music: my personal favorite is the moment in Atlas Station when Tali and Legion are cut off from Shepard and ambushed by geth in the core mainframe room.
It's amazing how many things I didn't plan to include. I would estimate nearly half this story was stuff that I hadn't planned on. Stuff like Tali's injury, the scenes on the Normandy, blowing up the crashed geth frigate… this was all stuff I came up with on a spur of the moment while writing.
My goal with this story was to patch as many plot holes as possible in Overlord while taking Tali and Legion along. Among the many plot holes I hoped to patch were:
1. Where did the geth come from?
2. Why didn't David hack the Normandy instantly?
3. Why couldn't the Hammerhead's VI get hacked?
4. Why did David wait until Shepard hit the override at Prometheus before hacking the geth there?
5. How did Shepard get hacked?
6. How did David transmit himself to the Normandy if the satellite dish at Hermes Station was destroyed?
… and more.
I want to talk about the fifth point. The explanation I came up with involving the haptic adaptive interfaces is not my idea: it's right out of the Codex. Read it for yourself. I merely concluded that a wireless connection would be involved from the available data.
In addition, I utilized some of the cut data from the Overlord DLC. The biggest example is Archer's "five additional data packets." Originally, there were supposed to be eleven data packets to find in the DLC, until Bioware wisely decided to cut it down to six.
You may also be amused to note that this story was also one long advertisement for the Firepower DLC pack, particularly the Mattock and Geth Plasma Shotgun. Hell, the Phalanx even made a cameo at the end, though personally I like the Carnifex better.
About the ending: The ending was always meant to happen the way it did. In fact, that was probably one of the first things I'd settled on even when I was writing the first chapter: Xen had to be involved somehow. I hadn't read Mass Effect: Ascension and Retribution until the beginning of May (after this story was already started). I was extremely surprised and pleased to see an admiral matching Xen's description talking to Kahlee Sanders.
Daro'Xen being the one to speak to Kahlee Sanders is not explicitly stated in Ascension, but it is a fact that two Admirals interviewed Kahlee when she boarded the Idenna. One of those admirals was interested in the Reapers as a hyper-advanced AI in order to take over the geth. The other admiral was interested in sending out scout ships to find suitable worlds for quarian colonization.
Neither of these admirals was given a name or even a gender (probably because back in 2008, Bioware hadn't nailed down every aspect of their lore yet for the quarians). However, based off of those characteristics, I think it is safe to say that the admirals who spoke to Kahlee were Daro'Xen and Zaal'Koris.
I have to admit that it is possible it may have been Rael'Zorah... but let's assume it wasn't.
The final conversation between Archer and Xen heavily references the novels Mass Effect: Ascension and Retribution. In this story, I have set the timeline as follows:
Omega-4 mission: October 2185
Overlord: Two weeks later (November 2185)
Lair of the Shadow Broker/Retribution: February 2186
Doing so leaves ample time for the events of Inquisition, Deception, and Arrival to play out in 2186, and then Mass Effect 3.
I toyed with the idea of taking the Renegade ending to Overlord, but I realized that would be wildly out of character considering how I've written Shepard; to get that ending, I'd have to have Shepard be way more of a Renegade than he is in this story. Plus, there would be sure to be a very violent confrontation with both Tali and Legion, and I wasn't sure how to go about that.
I am absolutely convinced Tali's recruitment mission will have the biggest consequences for Mass Effect 3. However, maybe it won't. That's why I left myself an out regarding Xen's acquisition of the Overlord data, if it turns out to be pointless.
Finally, I've received a PM asking if I'm going to write for Lair of the Shadow Broker. To answer that question: no. If anybody reads the reviews in this section, you'll know that I'm an avid fan of Tairis Deamhan's "Dark Witness" fic, which is already in my mind the definitive Shadow Broker novelization. Check that out if you're interested in LOTSB. That's one reason why I glossed over the events of that DLC in this final chapter.
I do have future Mass Effect ideas I'd like to work on, but time will tell if I get to them or not.
Anyway, cheers, and thanks for reading.