Most turians seen in Mass Effect games wear the facial markings of their home colonies. Like so:
This custom was established during the so-called Unification War, which started and ended some 2500 years before the events in the games. This is the Codex entry on the Unification War:
Two hours before the attack on Therum.
The atmosphere in the mess hall wasn’t going to improve Shepard’s mood, that was damn sure. She wasn’t hungry, either, but she was obliged to attend because there was no telling what would happen otherwise. Following Alenko’s advice, she had ordered all the officers to sit at the same table with all the aliens who had suddenly made themselves at home on the Normandy, but she was no longer sure it had been such a brilliant idea. The several meals they had all taken together during the two days of flight from the Citadel had been a study of intercultural screw-ups on so many levels that it was difficult to keep count even without the added angle of being constrained to a seat that granted a direct line of sight into Wrex’s mouth. He was sitting at the head of the ‘alien’ side of the table, to Shepard’s far right, and when he noticed human stares, he belched so loudly that the plates shook. Then he started picking his teeth with the three-inch talon of his index finger.
Two hours before the attack on Therum
Shepard hated Therum long before she laid eyes on the desolate, maroon disk through the open viewports in the bridge. There was a nearly imperceptible tug in her gut as the Normandy fired the last thruster sequence to put them in orbit. The engines wound down, and time seemed to halt in the motionless silence.
And then, despite all her efforts, it started going backwards.
I wrote up an introduction to the setting of Mass Effect for people who have not played the games, but still wish to read my fanfiction. It’s riddled with links and pictures, which is by no means a guarantee that it’s not boring and even less, that it fulfills its purpose well. So I invite everyone who reads to help me improve it. Thanks, and have fun!
The stories about Saren and Nihlus are all conveniently set before the beginning of the first game (well, with the exception of Ghost in the Machine), and therefore only loosely constrained by the actual events enacted in the second and third. These focus exclusively on the adventures of Commander Shepard as she strives to postpone and eventually repel the Reaper invasion. I won’t summarize the games here; suffice it to say that the basic assumption behind Mass Effect 1 and 2 is that the Council refuses to believe the Reapers are real and the invasion imminent, so when they do appear in force in Mass Effect 3, the galaxy is far from ready and, to make things worse, fragmented by internal conflicts.
