Template:Alliance Era/doc

Alliance of Four Great Races
The Lanteans that were left were later part of the Alliance of Four Great Races, with the now advanced Asgard, the Furlings, and the Nox. The intention of the Alliance was to use the diversity of different civilizations to develop the greatest chance to defeat the Reapers.

Alliance-Reaper War
After invasion of the Reapers sparked the Alliance-Reaper War around 754,000 B.C.E. the Alliance, in particular the Asgard, responded by making more advanced technology, which the Reapers simply assimilated and became resistant to. For some time, the Asgard fleet, under the command of Supreme Commander Thor, was able to hold the Reapers off. Eventually, however, the tide began to turn in the Reapers favor. The Furlings were the first member of the Alliance to fall, their largely pacifist ideals before joining the coalition meant their people were in no way prepared for war. The Nox on the other simply disappeared, their worlds all went dark in the same instance and all investigations noted that they had all vanished in the same second and without warning. The Lanteans soon retreated, their numbers already so small, they feared for their survival.

A small group however remained as the others departure to parts still unknown, and gifted the Asgard all their technology, including a highly advanced form of cloning. The mental patterns of Asgard that became ill or fatally injured could now be preserved by "downloading" them into computer memory crystals and the patterns could be later placed in a new cloned body. This made the Asgard effectively immortal and now able to resurrect their greatest warriors, generals and leaders, allowed them to finally turn the tide against the Reapers, scoring numerous victories.

Over the course of three centuries the Asgard and Reapers fought, even as the last of the Lanteans who remained with them passed away from natural causes, killed or accident. However in these years the Asgard had greatly changed, to the point where they began to modify their cloned bodies to make them hardened for war against the Reapers, an act the Lanteans had warned against.

A side-effect soon appeared however, that left the Asgard incapable of cellular division through meiosis. In essence, their bodies were a genetic template, and they were incapable of sexual reproduction. Their ability to copy the template, combined with an ability to transfer an entire Asgard mind via computer from one body to another, gave each individual a measure of immortality: when a body failed with age or was killed, the mind was transferred to a younger body. However, deterioration caused by copying the same template over and over again caused genetic decay over the years. To combat this, the clones were subtly altered with a controlled mutation at some point, but still the Asgard eventually reached the limits of their technical ability to continue cloning themselves. Without the ability to reproduce new Asgard and any lost before their minds could be moved to a new cloned body, meant the species had entered a slow and eventually sharp decline.

The excessive use of the cloning process began to damage and degrade the Asgard genome and they devoted considerable time and resources to the project, but their best efforts proved fruitless as the Reapers continued to assault their borders.

Their final attempts to repair the genetic degradation caused by continuous re-cloning failed, resulting in their genomes corrupting at a much more significant rate. Unwilling to die a painful death, the Asgard decided to commit mass suicide and destroy themselves but not before taking as many Reapers with them as they could.

Using a second technology gifted to them from the Lanteans, the Asgard declared their surrender to the Reapers and lowered their defenses. The Reapers swarmed in to take the last few dozen Asgard worlds. At that moment, the Asgard caused the stars they controlled to explode, destroying the worlds, the incoming Reapers, and the Asgard. The result was the largest lost of a Reaper force in battle ever.