Two thousand years ago, there was a war. That, in an of itself, was not unusual, war was the one constant in the universe. Where life flourished, there was war. Be it the mundane war of one animal striving to live through the day by killing another, or the war of a single cell, merely trying to keep itself together against the harshness of existence. Conflict was how we truly come to understand the world, and it helps us to learn our place within the grand tapestry of existence.

This war though, it was different than most. On a planet in the M51 Galaxy, a small green orb called Tirol, there lived a people. These people had learned, in the course of their wars, how to use the power of life itself, the thing we call genes and DNA, to create warriors. Over countless conflicts, which scarred the face of their world, they improved these soldiers, each defeat of one leading to an advance, its victory for another gaining a needed resource to push themselves farther.

These warriors were called, the Zentraedi. Their power seemed unstoppable, and dozens of races fell before their might as they traveled the stars of their galaxy. One such race, one that gave them much difficulty, was the Invid, who's power was much like the Triolians, the power of life. However, where the Triolians fought for their power, improving it through the mind,the Invid discovered instead, a natural means of altering themselves, of evolving to ever greater heights using a plant they called, the Flower of Life.

Capturing a sample of this simple looking flower allowed a Triolian scientist named Zor to create a near infinite energy source, one he dubbed, Protoculture. Using this in conjunction with their weapons and systems, the Triolians created something they called, Robotechnology, which allowed them to create even bigger, better weapons, conquering and enslaving dozens of races in only a few short years, including the evolving Invid, the powerful Marduk, and the warrior Praxian.

Each conquest only fueled the drive of the Triolians, who renamed themselves the Robotech Masters. Soon, they applied the Protoculture to their genetic experiments as well, causing the Zentraedi to not only become nigh invulnerable, but increasing their size an entire order of magnitude, and their mass greater still. These now fifty foot tall warriors ensured the dominance of the Robotech Masters over the entirety of the M51 Galaxy, and they began to look beyond.

Zor, his body preserved for almost a thousand years using advanced techniques of the Triolians, lived through the wars, and continued to design weapons based off the Robotechnology he had pioneered, eventually creating the ultimate weapon. Equipped with the first Protoculture Matrix, a machine that produced a seemingly unlimited quantity of Protoculture, he called this magnum opus, the Super Fortress, with a weapon on it capable of obliterating a planet, or even causing a star to go nova.

It was at this point, this turning point of history, that Zor came to realize what this constant war had done to his people. They lived only to conquer now, and when a seemingly small rebellion, a few hundred fools, decided to make war on them, his people did the unthinkable. They turned his greatest creation on the entire planet, wiping it out with a single shot, a bright flash consuming all that was before it, and finally awakening a long dormant part of Zor's spirit.

Disgusted that his people would go so far to kill only a few, Zor decided to deny them his great work, and, with a few seemingly innocent actions, he was able to cause the Super Fortress to Fold out of the galaxy, warping it into unknown space. The others of his race reacted as one would expect, executing him, and ordering their soldiers to scour all of space for the great ship, for they could not have it, or worst of all the Protoculture Matrix it housed, fall into the hands of their enemies.

Two hundred and twenty five years ago, another war was raging. On a small blue planet, at the edge of the Milky Way, there was a species, a race known as, Humanity. They were confined to their own world, even after making a few light steps onto other planets of their solar system. Now, however, they used all their resources to fight one another, for the weapons of destruction, their greatest powers, had been disabled, and it allowed their third world war to rage for a decade, with no clear winner in sight.

Nations fell, battles turned on a single bullet, and there were no such things as civilians anymore. Each person was a world unto themselves, and even as their governments pressed them harder and harder, the people just wanted the fighting to end. As if answering their prayers, a great light fell from the sky, a powerful thing that destroyed half a continent as it came down, before slamming into an island in the south pacific, an island called Macross.

This fallen star turned out to be an alien ship. Where it had come from, how it had gotten to earth, no one knew, but the remaining leadership, seeing this threat to their existence, this massive warship, set aside their differences, and began to work in unison to prepare for what they felt would be the inevitable invasion. Hammering out a peace accord, the nations of the world formed a United Humanity, and began to work to restore the fallen ship to functional status.

Over the next decade, humanity flourished. The technology of the ship, mixed with human ingenuity and elbow grease, catapulted the young race forward. Leaps and bounds in almost every area, from military to the private sector. Yet, those at the top, those who knew all that had been discovered in the ship, despaired, even as their fellow man celebrated. These advances spoke of a culture so far beyond them, that if they came to reclaim the fallen vessel, humanity would be destroyed utterly.

On the day of the great ship, the Super Dimension Fortress Macross' maiden voyage, the fears of the leadership were proven, as ships appeared in the sky, and attacked. That was the beginning of the Robotech War, as the Zentraedi, massive warriors all at least forty feet tall, made war on the humans of Earth. Humanity surprised the stoic warriors though, using the technology of the SDF-1 to its fullest, fighting off assaults that should have smashed them, even when the great ship was isolated from their home.

Still, the Zentraedi had spent almost a millennium tracking down the Super Fortress, and the prized Protoculture Matrix within, and they weren't about to allow these micronians, these beings that didn't even come up to their ankles, to win. In desperation, the armada was assembled, five million heavy cruisers, and the Command Fortress, were moved into orbit of that small blue sphere. On the command of Dolza, leader of the Zentraedi, they fired, and in a flash of light, the Earth was devastated.

Humanity was not completely spared, as billions were killed in the attack, but they had one final trick to play. For you see, the Robotech Masters had so designed the Zentraedi that they had no culture of their own. All they knew was war, and in their thousand year search fro the Super Fortress, they had been rendered almost a joke. Even the idea of something other than training or fighting was alien to them, and when exposed to Earth culture over the course of the war, and the year long pursuit of the SDF-1, they learned to want something more.

This caused a revolt in their own ranks, and Dolza's armada went to war against itself, as a song, a simple song, was sung by a small human girl, and it gave every warrior that moment of pause. In to the great confusion stormed the very object of the Zentraedi's search, the SDF-1, and its powerful weapons. Using those weapons, the power of a small sun, they tore great swaths of destruction through the fleet, obliterating many vessels, until finally it destroyed the Command Fortress itself, chopping off the head of the Zentraedi, and ending the war in space.

Rebuilding from the ashes of the world, the civilians who had survived, either in shelters or inside the SDF-1 itself, began to spread. Of humanity, a scant seventy eight thousand souls remained, though of their enemies, the Zentraedi, almost four million survived. Still, they were warriors, and recognized the defeat to mean they were no longer a great power. Most chose to settle with the humans, some even using a new technology, micornization, to become like the human, standing eye to eye with them as the world began to grow again.

Not all Zentraedi did so, however, many saw themselves not just as free from the Robotech Masters, but free of the humans influence as well. Some demanded conquest still, and they rallied around a banner, the banner of Khyron, last of the Zentraedi Warlords. This madman brought two years of war to the already broken world, and drove the planet Earth to near exhaustion. His insane quest eventually took him against the humans and his own kind, decimating their numbers even further, before finally dying in a suicidal attack which destroyed all of his forces, and the SDF-1, which was still damaged from the previous war.

When this final conflict settled, the people looked around again. Now less than half as many people survived, and only two million Zentraedi. Worse, what parts of the world they had been able to recover were now rendered into lifeless wastes, unable to support the life of the humans. It was then that something was proposed that changed the destiny of all on Earth. A man had discovered how to use the growth technique Khyron had used to enlarge micronized Zentraedi on humans as well.

Desperate to survive in some form, humanity, all thirty thousand survivors of it, stepped into tubes alongside their Zentraedi allies, and together they grew into giants. Beings of size and mass to rival the gods of old, with bodies that required no sleep, and could survive off Protoculture slurry, which, thanks to the survival of the Protoculture Matrix, was plentiful. These two million and then some people, those who survived the process, decided to drop the barriers between them, the people taking a new name, Terran unto themselves.

This new people began to rebuild in the wasteland, slowly but surely returning a few patches of green to the once lifeless world. Better yet, as they rebuilt the natural world around them, they began to rebuild the technology base of their people. No longer constrained by the wants of sleeping, eating, or any of the usual failings of biology, they instead threw themselves into increasing those sciences that had languished in the years of war, causing the quality of life to skyrocket for most Terrans.

In two hundred years, the population had blossomed, going from a few scant million, to almost thirty five billion, and a civilization that spanned a dozen or more worlds within the Sol system. From Mars, to Venus, from the moons of Jupiter, to those that circled Saturn, Terrans had expanded. With their hardy biology, it took little to make a world that they could inhabit, and better yet every new expansion seemed to increase their knowledge of the universe, allowing them to unlock new technologies.

So went the history of the Terrans, who only sent a single expedition beyond the boundaries of Sol. This Robotech Expeditionary Force had been sent to the M51 Galaxy, home of the Robotech Masters and their great empire, with the purpose of forming relations with the long ago makers of the Zentraedi. However, upon entering this space, the Terran forces were startled to find only dead worlds, and suns that burned out of control in systems that had, only a millennia ago borne verdant life.

It took the researchers of Earth only a few decades to determine what had happened, painting a dreadful picture of what an Empire became as it fell. Without thinking, the Robotech Masters had sent their entire armada into the sea of stars, scattering the Zentraedi far and wide to seek the lost Super Fortress. So great had been their need to find this weapon, that they had never even considered what might happen when their soldiers were absent.

So it had passed that war had torn the M51 Galaxy apart, and the Robotech Masters, bereft of their warriors, fought with the technologies that Zor had crafted for them. With such wanton disregard did they wield their weapons that world after world had been burned away, until, in a fit of possible madness, they had destroyed even their star, leaving Terrans the only known life in the universe now.

Saddened, and more than a little frightened, the leaders of the Terran Federation, the governing body of all Terrans, decided to isolate themselves for now, to not expand their borders until needed. Such time would not come for a few generations, they had assumed, and so they allowed their people to flourish and take every piece of land and space Sol had to offer, until an surveyor around Pluto made a discovery, one that startled every mind in the system.

Charon, Pluto's cold, ice moon was not a natural body. No, it was something far more than that, for the ice had grown around a hard core, something that had been constructed by an unknown race. Quick to study this structure, Terrans found something that defied the physics they knew, a device that, rather than fold space, as their own warp technology did, instead used some kind of gravity alteration to sling a mass from one location, to another.

Seeing this fantastic new device, many a young Terran was enthralled, and their elders, unable to truly hold back a popular tide, a need of the human nature of the Terrans to explore, and the Zentraedi nature of them to dominate. So a great expansion began from Sol, into the Local Cluster. On worlds that were easy to inhabit, colonies sprung up, and one worlds of harsher nature, mining towns began to grow. Terra had come to the stars, and soon enough, those who ruled these stars would learn just how mighty Terra could be.

(Author's Note:

This story is a work of love of two great franchises, the Robotech Universe and the Mass Effect one. I've seen almost everything involving both, including reading the novels(The first two Mass Effect Novels are still worth tracking down, and Robotech: Battlecry was really good to, though I would recommend the game over the book for being more unique)

Anyway, before you go forward, I figured I'd inform you of some things that have caused some questions from the readership so far. A bit of a cheat, I know, but it's what I do.

1) The Terrans are 60 feet tall, with only a few feet difference between most individuals.

2) The Robotech timeline used goes only up to the end of the Reconstruction Blues era. It was both my favorite part of the story, and was a bit less...a lot less confusing than later stories.

3) This only crosses over Robotech and Mass Effect. I will drop names of some other franchises I enjoy, but they are the only two universes involved.

4) I'm looking for a beta, someone to help me go over the story as I write it. If you're interested, please drop me a PM here, or at my email, iceelfshala

5) Remember, if you like it, drop a review/comment/pm along with the favorite. It helps me know how well I'm doing, and helps keep me invested in the story.

That's all for now, and I hope you, my fellow nerds of the internet, enjoy this tale of how a race of giant humans alter the course of galactic history.)