Prologue
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Disclaimer: This is a fan work. I do not own Mass Effect, which belongs to Bioware. Who are, in turn, very tragically owned by Electronic Arts. 

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Author's Notes:

First, for the record, I altered Oriana's age just slightly from canon Mass Effect. In canon, she's only 17 when the events of Eden Prime take place. As I wanted her involved, not to mention wanting to give her time to actually influence the timeline, I upped that to her being 19 at the start of Mass Effect 1. Not a huge change...but I wanted to put it out there in case anyone did their research and called me on it ;-).

Second, don't expect canon to be followed. There will be similarities and canon events...but a lot will be derailed or different. By the end of Mass Effect 1, canon has diverged in a MAJOR way. The story is completely different by Mass Effect 3. 

Third, this story was originally an extra reward for a Adult Games page I run. For a variety of reasons, I split my fanfiction works off into their own thing. You can find the Patreon I run for them via my profile. This story is COMPLETE at this point, but a few chapters are still in early access as of my cross-posting this to Scribble Hub. 

Lastly. As I already said, this was originally an extra reward for an Adult page. So expect a LOT of kinky smut. Despite that, however, there is also a serious plot here. Enough that you could technically read the whole thing without ever touching the smut and still get a coherent canon-divergence story.

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Story Start:

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The building shivered as the Reaper's main beam swept through it, incinerating two more lab techs even as they tried desperately to activate their prototype. Oriana Lawson threw herself out of the way of falling debris, tripping over the body of an Asari with a two-foot spear of rebar where her heart should have been. She scrambled away from the corpse in horror, purple blood on her hands. Then, the face of the Asari registered and jarred her out of her adrenaline haze.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit, shit!

The body she had scrambled away from was Matriarch Geduli's, the very Asari that was supposed to be the target of their prototype. If she was dead, then...a whine of powering machinery wrenched at Oriana's attention as the desperate efforts of the project staff paid off. Against all odds, the Parallax Machine was powering up! They hadn't even known if it could power up, let alone under these conditions! But...with Geduli dead, who would they send back? She glanced up at the terrified project staff, just in time to see an I-beam come down, shattering the main console and trapping everyone else, if it hadn't killed them outright. The machine was powering...and Oriana realized she was literally the only person that could reach the pad. With a deep breath, she powered up her biotics and charged. Then...everything went black as she struck the portal just as it powered up.

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Oriana groaned in pain, feeling like she had the night Miranda and she had gotten properly drunk, in some misguided effort to talk about their shared past. No, this was actually worse than that. Instead of nausea mixed with a pounding head, her whole body was throbbing with pain akin to a hangover. She desperately curled up and tried not to think. Words came from somewhere, the tone alarmed even if she couldn't make them out. A hand touched her, causing her to flinch and the world to lurch sideways as a result. Then, the pain became too much and she blacked out again...

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The next time she woke up, the pain had lessened, but not entirely vanished. She groaned again and pried her eyes open, finding the stark-white of a hospital ceiling above her. It took several minutes for her eyes to properly adjust, her vision only slowly giving up its meandering ways to settle down and let her analyze her situation. Had the Parallax Portal failed? Had the first time she awoke been survivors pulling her from the rubble? But no, there were no hospitals on the remote moon the project had been settled on. And this wasn't the base infirmary, the walls there had been gunmetal grey, not hospital white. As that processed, she abruptly sat up, yelping in pain as the action caused the throb of agony to return for just a moment. She heard a medical alert pinging on the machinery in the room, but ignored it in favor of looking at herself...

Son of a bitch. It had worked. The mad, insane, stupidly idiotic and impossible plan had worked! It must have, since her hands were smaller than they should have been...as were her boobs. Huh, she'd had her Double-Ds by 16, so she must have come back farther than that. Which was a relief, honestly. The Parallax Machine had been intended to target an Asari for a reason, as even the wild pseudo-science they were working with seemed to indicate that someone could only be sent back a percentage of their own lifespan. When she'd charged into the beam, she'd been afraid it either wouldn't send her back far enough to make any difference at all...or that it would, you know, atomize her. It had been calibrated for an Asari, after all, not a human. But it had worked, or at least it looked that way, despite all the bullshit pseudo-science they were working with.

Project Parallax had been an insane long-shot, sponsored by the Shadow Broker of all people, though Miranda seemed to have thought something was humorous about that. The idea, in crudest form, had been to skip someone's mind back through the weave of time and into their previous self, in order to try and prepare the galaxy for what was coming. Oriana had wanted to do something, anything, to help out, and Miranda had directed her to the long-shot project. Probably to keep her somewhere remote and safe, Oriana knew that...but the project had actually worked.

Oriana's whirling thoughts were cut off as the medical room's door banged open and doctors rushed in. She looked at them in confusion, then remembered the pinging of the medical alert. She opened her mouth to speak...only for a Salarian to dose her with a hypospray to the neck. She tried to protest, only to find her eyes growing heavy. The blackness took her again moments later...

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