Attribute Dice: 10d
Knowledge exchange: Proteans can exchange their skills with a physical touch. At will, the Protean gains any one skill at a time at the same rating as the person they touched. This skill degrades by 1 pip every day or every time they use the skill.
Extinct: The Protheans are believed to be extinct.
The Protheans are an extinct Type III Civilization alien race that was highly advanced in technological, social, and spiritual matters. It is of general belief that most of the various spacefaring races throughout the galaxy would still be confined to their home systems (if not their home worlds) were it not for the Prothean artifacts and constructs that guided their technological advancement.
Protheans are an anthropoidal race. They have two pairs of eyes with each eye possessing dual pupils, and two pairs of nostrils. Their heads are covered in a thick, layered carapace that gives them a distinctive shape. The skin surrounding this carapace is a pale blue-gray color mottled with muted yellow spots, but their hands each have three fingers, and their feet each have two widely-spaced toes. A unique attribute of Prothean physiology is an experiential exchange system based on physical touch. By touching something or someone, a Prothean could recall its experiences. This system can transfer complex ideas, with a Prothean being capable of learning a new skill or foreign language with a single touch. This sensory mechanism arose because the Protheans evolved as hunters and needed to be thoroughly aware of their environment. This is similar to the idea of psychometry. From the few specimens of Prothean genetic material that have been found, modern scientists have learned that Protheans have a unique "quad-strand" DNA structure. It has also been hypothesized that Protheans were resistant to low levels of radiation because of the discovery that Prothean comm towers produced small but significant amounts of ionizing radiation, enough to damage the DNA of creatures such as fruit flies and bees.
Their statues show a humanoid body with a squid-like head, the tentacles hanging off the face much like a beard.
Very little is known about the origins of the Prothean race. After achieving spaceflight, the Protheans discovered the ruins of a previous spacefaring race, the inusannon, and from those ruins developed FTL technology. The Protheans would expand throughout the galaxy. Eventually, the Protheans faced a hostile machine intelligence which threatened to overwhelm them. To defeat the machines, the Protheans decided to unite all of the galaxy's sentient organic life under their empire. Organic races that resisted the Protheans were soundly crushed. In time, each of the servant races assimilated into Prothean culture and came to think of themselves as Prothean. The Prothean Empire held its own against the machines in a conflict known as the "Metacon War".
At some point the Protheans learned of the existence of the Reapers and their cycles of galactic destruction through studying the ruins of other extinguished civilizations. Several countermeasures were devised, including the Crucible, which was based on designs left behind by previous civilizations. In the event that the Reapers prevailed, the Protheans also began extensive observation of primitive species such as the asari, hanar, humans, quarians, salarians, and turians; it was hoped that some Protheans would survive the Reapers' purge and go on to unite these species to create a new empire.
The Prothean empire was wiped out approximately 50,000 years ago. Despite their complex technology, the Protheans were methodically wiped out by a race of sentient and genocidal machines known as the Reapers. Though the species was exterminated, a select few surviving Protheans managed to leave behind a series of clues and warnings of the Reapers' impending return.
The Protheans' belief that they could hold their own against machine intelligence was shattered with the arrival of the Reapers, who were far more advanced than the machines the Protheans had been battling. Even though the Protheans already knew of the Reapers, they were nonetheless caught completely off-guard by the scale and rapidity of the assault. The Reapers entered the galaxy, instantly decapitating the Protheans' government, isolating Prothean systems from one another. Reapers gained access to all of the Protheans' census data and star charts, allowing them to effectively track every Prothean in the galaxy. The Protheans' greatest strength, their unified empire, proved to be their downfall. As the Protheans were united under the leadership of a single governing species with a series of subordinate races, the Reapers were able to quickly undermine the Prothean hierarchy and cause Prothean forces to become scattered when their ruling body had been compromised. On top of that, as all the races within the Empire conformed to a single military doctrine they proved unable to adapt and compensate for when the Reapers identified and exploited their weaknesses.
Over the next several centuries, the Protheans would fight the Reapers from system to system, world to world, and city to city. If necessary, whole colonies were sacrificed and abandoned to the Reapers; while the Reapers concentrated on subsuming the inhabitants of those colonies, the Protheans had time to regroup. In the long run, however, this strategy was extremely costly, depriving the remaining Protheans of whatever infrastructure and manpower they had given up. Inexorably, the Reapers conquered, enslaved, or destroyed Prothean-controlled planets. Indoctrinated Protheans acted as sleeper agents for the Reapers, infiltrating and swiftly betraying their own kind and revealing the Protheans' dwindling hiding places and carefully laid plans to survive the destruction. Growing desperate, some Protheans made repeated offers of surrender, but these were always met with silence. Some Protheans believed that the Reapers could be controlled, but fell prey to indoctrination in their attempts to harness Reaper technology, sabotaging their race's attempts to destroy them with the Crucible. After centuries of careful, systematic work, the Reapers had killed or enslaved every Prothean in the galaxy, and stripped their worlds of resources. Removing all traces of their presence, the Reapers then retreated into dark space and sealed it behind them.
As thorough as they were, however, the Reapers had overlooked a single world. The Conduit research team on Ilos, of which all records were destroyed in the initial attack, survived the first wave of destruction. The facility went dark in order to avoid detection and the staff agreed to go into stasis, hoping the danger would soon pass. Vigil, a VI, was assigned to watch over these Protheans in cryogenic stasis until the Reapers had gone, then wake the staff so they could begin to rebuild. But as the centuries passed and the Reapers persisted in their genocide of the Protheans, Vigil's power supplies began running low, and the cryo pods were in danger of failing. Following contingency planning, Vigil began cutting power to the pods of non-essential staff to conserve energy. When the Reapers finally withdrew, only the top researchers — a dozen individuals — were left. Vigil woke them, and the scientists pieced together what had happened. They soon realised the situation was dire. Without sufficient numbers to sustain a viable population, the Prothean species was doomed. Desperate for contact with others of their kind, a carefully-coded signal was sent to the beacons on other planets. Though it was unlikely there were other survivors, the scientists thought it was worth the risk to try reaching them. The signal not only contained a warning of the Reaper invasion, but a description of Ilos itself, to give them hope.
The surviving Prothean scientists knew that rescue was unlikely. Instead, they chose to protect the races they had been studying, spared destruction due to their lack of advancement, and began working out where the Reapers had come from, and how. After decades of study, they worked out the connection between the Reapers, the Citadel, and the keepers. Using the Conduit, the Prothean scientists left Ilos, travelled to the Citadel and altered this signal. The fate of these Prothean scientists is unknown.
Ilos was not the only place where Protheans tried to survive in stasis. Nearly one million Prothean warriors and their commander, Javik, were stored in cryogenic lifepods in a bunker facility on Eden Prime. Javik's mission was to lead the warriors in rebuilding the Prothean Empire once the Reaper threat had passed. Before the facility could be sealed, however, indoctrinated traitors leaked its existence to the Reapers. Hundreds of thousands of stasis pods were destroyed in the attack on the facility, killing their occupants. To preserve the few remaining survivors, the facility's VI, Victory, initiated a neutron bombardment to purge Reaper forces. The bombardment also severely damaged the facility and rendered the systems responsible for automatically awakening the Protheans from stasis inoperable. As Javik's survival was a priority, Victory was forced to divert power from the remaining stasis pods to keep Javik's pod working as long as possible in the hope that future civilizations would discover it and revive him.
The Protheans were very technologically capable and scientifically curious. As well as studying developing races like humans and the hanar, they built a galaxy-wide communications network using beacons that transmitted information directly from mind to mind, and created data storage devices that still worked fifty thousand years later. They also developed a form of VI technology and used cryogenic preservation techniques, which could help an occupant survive a neutron bombardment, as well as advanced architectural design and intricate holographic interfaces. The architecture on Feros and Ilos shows the Protheans were able to build and maintain enormous cities and arcologies. In addition, at least some of their cities - those of Ilos in particular - were built upon the ruins of a previous civilization, the Inusannon, which had been wiped out by the Reapers 50,000 years prior.
The Protheans were also skilled at creating kinetic barriers. They built elaborate defense grids using barrier curtains and a kind of personal defense shield that acted like an energy bubble, surrounding and levitating the individual who activated it. While inside, the person was impervious to harm but helpless, similar to a stasis field. Perhaps the single most advanced piece of technology developed by the Protheans was the Conduit. This was a feat unequaled by any known contemporary or precedent race Various Prothean ruins still survive on planets like Feros, Quana, and Therum, as well as many known yet unexplored sites in the Attican Traverse, with more unknown sites believed to exist elsewhere throughout the galaxy. While these ruins are surprisingly intact for their age, many were plundered long ago with time and generations of looters having picked their dead cities and derelict stations clean. Functioning examples of Prothean technology are rare.
In addition to the technology they left behind, the Protheans left a greater influence through their in-depth study of other races. Their work has had the greatest impact on humans and the hanar. A Prothean ruin on Eletania yielded an ancient recording from a Prothean data recorder that was implanted into a Cro-Magnon human. The hanar, who call the Protheans "the Enkindlers", credit them with giving the hanar sentience and language, and worship them as an elder race who allowed them to become civilized.
The Citadel was the Prothean seat of government, and the heart of their galaxy-wide empire. Although the Protheans were a single race, as they expanded and assimilated other spacefaring races into their empire, those servant races adopted the name "Prothean" for themselves as well. This assimilation was not always peaceful, as advanced species who attempted to deny or oppose their admittance into the empire were forcibly conquered and assimilated into Prothean society. The Protheans justified this cultural reconditioning by claiming that if the races who opposed them were actually stronger than the Protheans, then they would take the Protheans' place as the galaxy's dominant civilization. This ideology was also dictated by necessity. After the Protheans encountered hostile machine intelligences, they ultimately decided that all organic races should join together for the sake of survival. The beacons and the Eletania ruins suggest that, like the asari, the Protheans were comfortable with the notion of transferring data to an individual's mind. They invested heavily in their scientific research, a policy that eventually paid off, if too late to save their own species. Prothean society was heavily regulated; playing games of chance was an offense punishable by death.
Little is known of the Prothean military, it is known that they possessed fleets capable of defending their empire from threats. The flagship of the Prothean navy, Penumbra Apex, was equipped with a cannon similar in power to that of a Geth Dreadnought. Also, the Protheans produced Particle Rifles for their Infantry and had at least one Force-user near the end of the Reaper Invasion.
While all evidence points to the Protheans being completely wiped out by the Reapers, this was not the case. The Reapers are believed to have attempted harnessing the genetic material from millions of Protheans to create a new Reaper. It is speculated by EDI that this attempt failed and so the Reapers decided to repurpose this substantial number of captive Protheans to suit the needs of the Reapers. Mordin speculated that these Protheans were indoctrinated and after a prolonged period of time as indoctrinated slaves, they were given cybernetic modifications to compensate for their growing lack of ability, which was a side effect of indoctrination. After several cloned generations, most likely during the centuries of Reaper genocide against the Protheans, the Reapers eventually decided to genetically rewrite these Protheans. These captives were transformed into an entirely new race which cooperated with the Reapers and would eventually be known to the citizens of the galaxy as the Collectors. Being a rarely seen species whose existence was questioned by most, the Collectors resided in the Collector base, a space station located in the galactic core. Nobody had ever returned from a trip there and a Collector had never been examined, thus the Prothean/Collector link had never been discovered. Collector technology, while very advanced, no longer resembles Prothean technology, the species likely having developed on its own after the Reapers completed the genocide of the Protheans, also adding to the belief that the Collectors and Protheans are unrelated. The Collectors are presumed to have been left with partial access to Reaper technology, possessing Husks, and Reaper technology which protected the Collector base from the harshness of the galactic core.
For the next 50,000 years, the Collectors would periodically travel to the Terminus Systems and make efforts to acquire seemingly unimportant items or small numbers of very particular types of individuals from certain species in exchange for their advanced technology. Whether the Collectors were always acting as directed by the Reapers during this time is unknown and the reasons for these transactions were never revealed by the Collectors. Immediately after the destruction of Sovereign, the Reaper known as Harbinger began directing the Collectors in the abduction of what would have eventually been millions of human colonists as part of the Reaper plan to create a Human-Reaper, part of a renewed attempt to begin the next cycle of extinction.
