So, as you guys might know back during E3 it was announced that Nier: Automata would be coming to Xbox One under the subtitle of BECOME AS GODS. Being who I am, that being an Xbox gamer due to my PC playing like trash when it tries to play Nier: Automata (10 fps, not kidding; the opening prologue? Took an hour and a half for me to play it on my PC. In-game time? 35 minutes) I decided to pick it up again on Xbox One because yours truly has the capital to do it. And let me say, it is a great game. If you have a PS4 and haven't played it, pick it up cheap at GameStop. If you have a rig that can play it, get it on PC. And if you're an Xbox fagboy like me, pick it up and prepare for the feels.

That being said, mild spoilers ahead my dudes. You've been warned.

So, as you may know, if you've played this series and if you've played the game before you'd know that there are multiple endings in this game. As in 26 of them. No, I'm not shitting you. There are 5 "canon" endings where they're all considered "good". Then there's all the rest which all rely on killing certain characters in a certain way or dying in a certain fashion. If you fancy learning what those are, here ya go: nierautomata. wiki. fextralife Endings+Guide (just remove the spaces). So, while playing through and learning all about the secret endings I had an idea as I do. That was, what if I was to write a crossover with Mass Effect? I mean, synthetics are considered to be abominations, what could possibly go wrong? Everything?

So, with that, I came up with the following idea: what if one of the alternate endings from the game allowed for all named characters to continue living? A "happily ever after, we're not dead" ending. That way we get to keep 2B, 2A, 6S, 6O, and the other named characters that we love from this game. That and this opens the opportunity for more characters as well. Continuing though, what if the Adam and Eve android-machines inspired something long forgotten since the age of Humanity: Exploration?

And so, this is where this came from. So, without further ado, the other stuff before I let my imagination go buck-wild.

Summary: Adam and Eve inspire something in the YoRHa androids and the Machines that haven't been seen since the age of Humanity: exploration. Leaving their cradle of a solar system, they enter new territory leading to new challenges as well as new tales to be told for generations. For the glory of Mankind!

Rating: T+ - M for blood, violence, language, and other such things.

Disclaimer: I own nothing except my copy of MS Word and my laptop. Mass Effect belongs to EA and Bioware. Nier: Automata belongs to Platinum Games and Square Enix, I only own the idea and dialogue that's not ripped from the games. See the foreword for the full disclaimer.

XxXxXxX

Two Pods flew over the ruins of the City carrying another Pod. The concrete and steel that made up this city slowly were crumbling and rusting away with each passing year, but yet they still stood as a monument to past grandeur. The white and grey buildings lying in contrast against the greenery and wildlife that sprung back up after humanity's demise millennia ago. Despite the never-ending conflict between the androids and the Machines in the city and the surrounding area, the city's state rarely changed. It only changed more recently with the actions of the Machine Androids Adam and Eve.

As they flew above the city, one of the pods spoke up in a mechanically digital tone. "Question, Pod 042. Did the data salvage restore all of their past memories?" the female sounding one asked.

"Yes," Pod 042 answered, it's vocal patterns that reminiscent of a man.

"And are those recovered parts of the same design as previous ones?"

"Yes."

They continued to fly over the remains of the city's landscape. "Then… won't that simply lead us to the same conclusion as before?"

"I cannot deny the possibility." They changed course slightly towards a specific skyscraper whose windows had been long since blown out eons ago. "However, the possibility of a different future also exists." Three more Pods formed up behind them, carrying three different parts alongside them. "A future is not given to you. It is something that you must take for yourself." A fourth pod observing all of this moved in between them all and saw that on the top of this specific skyscraper the YoRHa Androids 2B and 9S laid motionless on the concrete, almost serenely. The pods proceeded to repair the two androids. A few buildings away, A2 was just as motionless in a blown-out windowsill, her perch overlooking the other two.

XxXxXxX

Centuries later.

As with all things, life finds a way to go on. The same is said for the Androids of YoRHa. Through the assistance of the Pods of 2B, 9S, and A2 the Androids had been able to recover many of their friends and allies and were able to rebuild once again. The Bunker would never be as it once was, being the digital equivalent of a quarantine zone. Those that were immune to the virus and couldn't spread it were allowed to collect personal effects as well as the android shells and black boxes so that they could be recovered. Small expeditions were sent to the Moon to salvage whatever data remained in the 'human bunker'. What they found were messages to the Androids, not individually, of course, of wishes of luck and messages of gratitude.

Almost mimicking their human creators, they started to build a city of their own. It was utilitarian and served as a refuge for all YoRHa androids where they could figure out what to do next. It didn't take long to build considering that they didn't need rest, controlled a vast autonomous robot workforce, and all of their thoughts and decisions happened in the blink of an eye. It took less than a week to build the small city. Although, humans may have called it a small town. After a year, almost a lifetime for an android, a message came through from the Adam and Eve Machine Androids. It was a challenge to aim for the stars. If there was one thing that those two understood, it was ambition, something that humans always had. And so, YoRHa turned its attention to the stars and started space exploration.

They started with small teams exploring Venus and Mars, although the former was done with exceptional care due to the corrosive nature of the atmosphere. The latter of which ended up with very interesting results. Signals were found of an anomalous nature. When followed they led to the Deseado Crater where after months of digging, mostly due to the transportation of heavy mining equipment, it was discovered that there was a base there but it wasn't of human origin; the design aesthetics weren't there for it. Searching the facility confirmed that this wasn't human. There were computers in which the coding was written in a completely alien language, and this was considering the origin of the Machines. With the mass computing potential of YoRHa's androids, they were able to crack open the computing systems and what it revealed was shocking: they weren't alone in the universe. While this wasn't super earth-shattering news, they all knew now that the aliens that sent the Machines had long since been dead; but this was new, these were aliens that had watched humans before they had just disappeared. The instruments recorded early human development as well as everything that led up to their demise. They called themselves the Protheans and existed well over fifty thousand years ago.

In this research, outpost weapons were found that were reverse engineered to figure out how they worked. Ships that had an FTL drive that utilized some kind of the second mechanism which was missing. There was a reactor as well which used the same foreign and exotic material which had many different properties to it. The first was that when it was used as fuel, it would make anything that a field that would alter the mass of an object making it lighter or heavier depending on the setting used. When used on a smaller scale it could accelerate flecks of metal to absurd speeds which would match the firepower of a large caliber firearm. The larger the piece of material was and the faster it accelerated, the more power it had. As it was said by a 21st-century physicist: 'Sir Isaac Newton is one mean son of a bitch.'

But there was more when the archive was discovered and the word was spread around, a pre-recorded message from the Adam and Eve androids: it was a challenge. A challenge to have the same ambition as their human creators. And so, to explore the solar system more efficiently, every city on earth had their cities stripped down and melted down into usable metal for deep space exploration vessels which would, in turn, find more metals and repeat this process. In the end, when the androids were done, only the city in which 2B and 9S had arrived in had been left alone as an epitaph to their engineering prowess; automated drones were beset on restoring The Last City to pristine conditions. It took over a decade to perfect it, but the city looked like a shining jewel in the desolate landscape of green. It looked like anyone could live there, but it was a ghost town. There had been talks for many years as to whether the androids should inhabit it, but one of the biggest rebuttals is why they would even need it. Cities were areas of commerce, business, government administration, and housing.

As years of deliberation went on, it was more apparent on how human-like the androids were. Androids traded with each other. Scrap was traded for equipment and scrap and equipment were traded for services. It was just how humans used precious metals, gems, and paper money to trade for goods and services. YoRHa was essentially a system of governance that was situated in the Bunker as a capital. The Resistance had its own system of governance at the leadership of Anemone. So did the Machines that were headed by Pascal. They were all little nations themselves and none of the Resistance nor Pascal's Machines could make it up to the Bunker (or another Bunker complex), and YoRHa androids that survived the Machines' virus had no place to go. So, it was decided that one of the buildings near the city's center would be used as an administration office and politics center. This would allow for an efficient coordination center. The Operators set up shop and started to coordinate cleanup efforts across the planet to get rid of any hostile Machines. There were others similar to Pascal's Machine group and were allowed to continue.

Research stations were set up on various planets and moons of planets for research, to help understand what readings humans had taken before their extinction to make sense of them. It was considered to reactivate the Large Hadron Collider, but this would be massively expensive in materials to reactivate. In this time the mysterious element found in the alien reactor was studied further and the ability to use it as a fuel source was refined. However, there were very few deposits of this mass-less mineral; most of it was deep in the Oort Cloud. Mining expeditions were planned and sent out with the first of the mining vessels built. They returned months later with hundreds of metric tons of the mineral which allowed for more research and development to be formed on it. It didn't take long for the androids to create new androids to be involved in R&D, this gave rise to the Type R androids. Their creation was quite interesting, the personality matrixes were taken from the scanned brains of humanity's best and brightest. The Type R's were the first to start giving themselves names like the humans of old did, not to be confused with names like Anemone or others.

One of the Type R's had discovered an odd signal coming from Charon, Pluto's moon during a communications analysis of one of the mining ships returning from one of the Element Zero deposits. The ship had gone completely dark for twenty minutes while they were in the visual range of Charon; when the moon hid behind the planet's shadow, their communications resumed. This R unit commissioned the Joint Council for a scientific expedition to investigate Charon. She was allowed to go; however, an entire squad of B units and their S partners were sent. It was unknown if the signal was naturally occurring, manmade, or alien made. This research craft, a repurposed and retrofitted freighter, had been equipped with one of the newer Element Zero (or eezo) powered reactors. What happened next was completely unexpected. When the craft approached Charon, the moon exploded in blue lightning as energy spikes were registered. When it was all said and done, a giant tuning fork looking structure emerged from the ice and rock of the planetoids' moon.

Remaining cautious, the R-type's craft approached the massive tuning fork structure, a massive five-kilometer long mass of alien metals; seeing as nothing was happening the decision was made to approach it. When they approached a lance of energy branched out from the rotating gyros' center and touched the ship. The ship started to be dragged along and was accelerated to an absurd speed causing it to disappear from sight and the solar system. Back in the Sol system, an entire fleet was being summoned to destroy the 'tuning fork'; but in a far-flung off system, later found to be Arcturus, the crew pulled themselves off the deck and started to analyze their situation. They were in a completely different star system and were around thirty-six lightyears from Earth and Sol. They spent the next few hours analyzing the tuning fork to figure out what it had done. Obviously, they weren't teleported and they accelerated. It took several hours at least as how Earth would perceive it, but running the theories and other information through the computer networks, the crew figured out how to use the structure to get back and where they were. They returned as heroes in scientific history, the R-type that led this research mission called himself Grissom.

With the revelation of the nature of the tuning fork, an expedition to explore the structure and the opposite structure were performed. Mining the database onboard revealed that this was a 'Mass Relay', a structure that facilitated a mass-free corridor between structures. It was further revealed that this structure had been there for more than fifty thousand years. As for why it was left there was unknown, but it was thought to be related to the alien outpost on Mars. With a new part of the galaxy opened to them, the androids started exploring further, creating the revised Type-E models, the Explorers; not to be confused with the Executioner Type-E models. These E models had personalities that were akin to 1900's explorers' personalities like Jacques Cousteau, Buzz Aldrin, Amelia Earnhardt, and Charles Lindbergh. They took off with small teams in the small exploratory craft as soon as the nature of the Mass Relay network was revealed. Type-E's were sent off with at least one Type-S and sometimes a Type-B model android in case a combat situation while exploring arose. And so, the old meme of human exploration came to pass once again, journeying forward in the hands of their creation. Many colonies were formed as scientific and military outposts as well as expansion zones for the androids. Many clean cities were created on garden worlds, worlds that would have been perfect for human life. They were zero impact, outside of the structures placed upon them. Outposts and civilizations were placed in extreme environments such as those in little to no atmosphere, extreme heat, or cold as androids had so much higher tolerances and didn't need to breathe, even though they emulated it out of some weird habit.

An unstoppable expansion of the androids happened for almost a thousand years, that is, until two ships came out of a Mass Relay in the Shanxi system.

XxXxXxX

The YN Minerva sat quietly on station around the Shanxi Mass Relay on patrol. They didn't expect trouble, at least not trouble from back home or in the colonies. While there were androids that went rogue from YoRHa's vision and decided to do their own thing, few turned to piracy. So, there were few, but not many and they were far on the other side of the colonies, far outside of their area of patrol. This posting was considered calm for obvious reasons.

"Sir, there's a buildup in eezo static coming from the Relay," an Operator unit reported.

[From this point I wasn't entirely sure where I wanted to go with this.]

To be continued…?

XxXxXxX

And that's where I'm going to call this one. This one has been sitting around on my PC for a while. In that intro, I made mention of the Nier Automata release on Xbox One, which happened in 2018. This was when this file was created for this story. This was one of those interesting story ideas that have been covered by multiple persons on this website, but like many other ideas, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, as I do. I might come back to this one, I may not. As for which characters would be involved in the story, I would like to have an android Shepard, but as for what model he/she would be, I don't know; maybe a B/A/G model depending on what role I would want them to play. One of the big things that this story would want to explore would be how would the rest of a galaxy that hates AI reacts to an entirely AI race that doesn't act like they expect them to.

That's all I have for this one, see you in whatever I decide to do next.