Earth to Palaven

This comic based on a post among of hundred great posts brought by @garrus

Wrex and Garrus also are my fave team squad and bros

This comic based on a post among of hundred great posts brought by @garrus

Wrex and Garrus also are my fave team squad and bros

2018 Random Mass Effect Sketch Dump.

Basically the leftover stuff I haven’t got plans on refining anytime soon that’s still pretty enough to show off!

Inktober #29-31

I’m trying to outline what the Hierarchy service might look like for fic purposes and also my own curiosity. this is what I’ve come up with so far. thanks to @damalur for giving me ideas to work with. ages are approximate.

15-20yo:

enlistment, basic training (no active duty)

high school/first year of university equivalent. possible fields of study:

history (I assume they would already know basic turian history; this would include galactic history, possibly with electives)

basic firearms

other stuff like math and possibly some species politics? idk

20-22yo:

skill assessments

first combat assignments, low-risk with experienced support teams as backup

skill reassessments

repeat

22-25yo:

specializations confirmed or chosen. paths diverge from here

higher education for specializations requiring further study begin here:

pilots: piloting school ofc

field medics: nursing school, BSN equivalent, MD PHDs go on to study more

non-combatant engineers: mechanics and machines

active agents: extensive ballistics study, advanced tactics, recon, further broken down into skillsets

infiltrators: coding, circuits, basic engineering, etc.

biotics (rare): specialized studies, then cabal, mostly in reserve

depending on specialization possibly also: small arms, explosives, infiltration tactics, SAR

etc. for further roles in the military eg scientists

25yo-onward:

redeployment or reassignment to bases, labs, departments, depending on tier rank and specializations

or, for those who have jobs lined up (police, public service, etc.), formal leave

(mandatory service ends around 29-35yo depending on behavior, rank, and future within the Hierarchy. the average/expected time to leave is 30yo.)

Here’s the main place my headcanon differs: they take less time to get soldiers out in the field. Because their mandatory service starts at 15, I suspect turians mature faster than humans do. I also suspect that their educational system is more efficient (and it has the benefit of being year-round). I haven’t decided if this means that they’ve already completed a high school equivalency upon entering the service or if it is finished within a year or so of them entering the military, but I think by sixteen or so, they’d be at that point.

What I envision for mandatory service is that it begins at fifteen; basic training lasts… maybe eight to twelve weeks. After that, depending on the current needs of the Hierarchy, some soldiers may be immediately deployed (in times of greater need) while the rest (more in times of lesser need) go on to advanced training, which includes additional general studies, technical education, and/or officers’ school. Advanced training usually lasts one to three years but sometimes up to four or five for highly specialized tracks. Because the military is so integrated into turian society, there’s a far broader range of non-combatant positions than there is in the human service.

Typically by sixteen to nineteen, you’re a fully-trained working serviceman. Additional training and education occur either on the job or on a rotational basis between assignments. As the end of the service period draws closer, soldiers planning on leaving at age thirty are given more education for their civilian career if necessary.

Extremely specialized tracks would allow for longer training periods, but you’d either have to show a great deal of promise in your field or agree to a longer term of service. (This is my working background for Garrus’ mom – her background is that she left the Department of Intelligence at age thirty with a doctoral equivalent in some fuzzy field involving linguistics and computer science, which was possible because she was so gifted at it. She continued to work on and off as a civilian contractor for the DOI while raising her kids.)

I also think it would be possible to obtain a work-release that would allow you to leave the service early, which is how Garrus is such a young pup when he starts at C-Sec. That decision threw everyone around him for a loop, because by all accounts he had a promising career in the military. Some turians are able to obtain a release-from-service before they ever even start mandatory, but there’s definitely a stigma that goes along with that, especially if it isn’t accompanied by something like “But I was the only one who could take care of my two ailing parents and fourteen sick sisters.”

One thing I try to remember (sometimes) is that Palaven’s year is the length of 1.2 Earth years, so a turian 15-year-old has actually lived the same amount of time as a human 18-year-old.

The codex also indicates that mandatory “service” means public service, not strictly military service. Police, fire department, civil engineering, sanitation workers, civil administrators, heck, probably agricultural workers and teachers could count as being in public service. I feel like a lot of people miss this, when thinking about turian service.

So I think there is a lot of skill and aptitude assessment going on at the start of the service period, with the goal of identifying appropriate specializations, though I’d guess a lot of turians cycle through a few work assignments before settling into a specialty.

My headcanon, then, is that as long as you’re in a service position (C-Sec counts), you can transfer from one form of service to another. I don’t think Garrus obtained a release from mandatory service, he simply transferred to C-Sec. I’ve never quite made up my mind whether working for a Spectre also counts as service, or whether he’d finished his mandatory service period by then, or what.

Ages: I’d completely forgotten about Palaven year lengths. That kind of twists my ideas about ages, but nonetheless, I also don’t want to limit ideas about turian service to what we consider normal compared to our human ages so I’m reluctant to pin myself down to one idea because I like leaving some things open to sociocultural and biological differences.

That said, if service ends at 30 (from the wiki: Soldiers receive a year of training before being assigned to a field unit; officers train for even longer. Most serve until the age of 30, at which they become part of the Reserves. Even if they suffer injuries preventing front-line service, most do support work behind the lines.) that means they’re equivalent to our ~36yo in terms of life lived when they leave the service, assuming they judge time the same way if they serve off-planet or on space stations, the Citadel, etc. So that’s our equivalent to 18-36yo, or roughly 20 years, which is a long ass time, even accounting for a species with an average lifespan of 150yrs. I think that turians would be taught/most would believe that if it’s in the service of the force, it’d be worth it, but it also seems strange to me when in times of peace, the Hierarchy would keep its citizens in mandatory service to turian interests and only turian interests for 15-20yrs, so I’m inclined to think the ‘mandatory service’ length is shorter than 30yo, but many tend to stay on by choice.

Also about starting at age 15, I’m mostly fed by my own headcanon with this: even though they’re our equivalent to 18 they may not go through puberty or adulthood socialization at the same time, rate, or even in the same order as we do as we do (eg some parts of their brains/bodies may mature in different orders than ours, including puberty). I had a lot of early assumptions that turians enter the service at 15 specifically because they aren’t full adults yet, and the Hierarchy takes them that young to shape them at a critical point in their lives. They wouldn’t see it as malicious or brainwashing, just standard. (I’m going out on a limb here, but remembering turians are an apex predator species, the idea of discipline and order at a young age might have been introduced early in their civilizations. Even if you’re a “rulebreaker” like Garrus, it’s seen as an expected thing to learn discipline mentally, possibly a mentality starting after the Unification Wars to prevent other civil wars, and then after the turians entered the galactic scene with salarians and asari, for the sake of interracial politics. That the krogan, another apex species (I’m assuming), don’t have a similar system to tame teenage rebellion and channel aggression in a healthy way, is probably another reasons turians see them as barbaric and violent.)

Requirements for service

I just did some reading and found this on the wiki: Turians have 27 citizenship tiers, beginning with civilians (client races and children). The initial period of military service is the second tier. Formal citizenship is conferred at the third tier, after boot camp. So ignore what I said above about tiers lol. You only become a legal citizen after boot camp, which is likely at least by the age of 17, depending on your performance. I think I also have to keep in mind that some turians will inevitably fail or perform poorly, and some will exceed and excel faster than others, so ages really matter less than aptitude.

Agreeing with @kuraiummei above re: C-Sec, that was my thought too. Personally I’m not sure I’d think of Garrus transferring to C-Sec as he would another division of the Hierarchy, since it’s not within turian space jurisdiction or Hierarchy law. It might be the same if someone transferred to the force on Palaven though, and C-Sec is almost assuredly a highly respected profession for turians and as of ME1, and primarily turian-run, so I doubt there would be a lot of roadblocks for people wanting to join. If a black ops agent wants to transfer to work on another force outside of Hierarchy jurisdiction (like the STG or asari commandos, or the Alliance when they made the Normandy), I’d assume they’d have to go through a bit more bureaucracy just on account of having on record that one of their agents is no longer within their active forces to confirm it’s legit, and not like, some cleverly worded paperwork hiding a mercenary group. But they’d still have to go through less hassle it’s a public service position, compared to like if they decide they want to go into retail or become a painter.

Out of the military

Poor performance: That leaves me wondering what happens if someone just… doesn’t do well lmao. Surely there are some kids who just aren’t good at following orders, like Garrus, and go against the cultural norm but aren’t violent or inclined to take criminal paths? At some point there may be a discussion like “Okay, you kind of suck at following orders, so this is your tier, you now have formal approval to go to culinary school or something.”

Nihlus is a good point. I assumed like Garrus that his performance was so good they found reasons to keep him around, and the reasons to remove him never managed to be enough to outweigh them. But I haven’t given it that much thought.

In defense of the automatically translated years: If you look at the Mass Effect Timeline on the wiki, the year 2183 CE actually stands for 2183 Council Era, and year zero was the formation of the Citadel Council, but in the intro of ME 1, it gives us years on that scale as measurements for the advancement of the Human race, presented as Human roman calendar years. So either Humans have synced themselves to a galactic calendar (Ha! Bloody likely…), the Galactic calendar of the Council (Which was presumably something decided upon by all the Council races) somehow is nearly the same as Earth standard (Wow, also really unlikely), or? Our translators automatically convert numbers for us. :3 If you’ve got an explanation for that one though, I’m all ears. 

Side note of interest: If the Timeline is correct Aria took over Omega sometime in the 1980s, about the same time Windows was first released. XD

I am wheezing right now… send help. 

Coffee break

Commission for @definitelynotafishgirl who requested a gift for @angelwingsl3 since they will celebrate their birthday in a couple of days!!🎊💕

Happy B-day!! 

Male Turian Adopt

$35 USD

INKTOBER 2018! Mass Effect edition!

October is the month of Inktober, and its time to fill those sketchbooks with doodles!!