Elysium: the colony attacked in the Skyllian Blitz of 2176

Elysium was the oldest human colony in the Skyllian Verge, founded in 2160 in the Vetus system of the Petra Nebula and grown to 8.3 million people with another 223,500 in orbit. It is best known for one day in 2176, when a large pirate and mercenary force under Elanos Haliat came down on it in the attack that became the Skyllian Blitz. The Alliance held. Depending on the background the player chooses, Commander Shepard was there when it happened.

What happened at Elysium?#

In 2176 a large force of pirates and mercenaries commanded by Elanos Haliat attacked the colony in what became known as the Skyllian Blitz, and the Alliance drove them off.

The consequences ran wider than the planet. The Blitz prompted a significant increase in Alliance patrols right across the Terminus Systems. One of the ships present at Elysium was the frigate SSV Agincourt, aboard which Navigator Pressly was serving. He earned his commission off the back of the fighting. Haliat himself survived, and Shepard may run into him in 2183.

If the player takes the War Hero background, Shepard was on shore leave on Elysium when the attack started. Shepard pulled together a resistance force and held the enemy ground troops off single-handed for long enough that reinforcements could arrive. That version of events is only true in the playthroughs that choose it, and a Shepard with a different background was somewhere else.

The alpine paradise#

Elysium was chosen for comfort as much as for position. Low gravity, atmospheric pressure a human could live in without equipment, and a climate that people actually enjoyed made it an easy sell, and settlers of every species turned up early in its colonial life.

The Alliance hero Jon Grissom picked it for his retirement on a criterion of his own. Asked what he was looking for in a colony, he said he wanted the one where the sun had the decency to set at a reasonable time. Elysium's day runs 27.9 hours, close enough to satisfy him, and he arrived in 2160.

A hub by geography#

Founded in 2160, Elysium was humanity's first colony in the Skyllian Verge and sat only a few hours' travel from Sidon. It also sat at the junction of several primary and secondary mass relays, which did more for its growth than any recruitment campaign could have. Five years after its founding the population was already in the millions, and close to half of those residents were not human.

That demographic balance shapes daily life on the planet. Non-human arrivals require extra screening, so security on Elysium is very tight, and it stays that way because the colony has been hit by pirates and mercenaries more than once. Its airspace is held by mobile planetary defence cannons rather than by ships, since the starship complement stationed there is relatively light. Materiel and volunteers from the colony went into the Alliance Second Fleet, which was posted near Arcturus until the Reapers destroyed it.

Grissom, and the academy he ignored#

Grissom got five quiet years before the outside world found him again. In 2165 he was drawn into an investigation of an attack on an Alliance research station, and in 2176 the Alliance commissioned the Jon Grissom Academy in his honour.

He never went. Invitations arrived and he turned them down, and he stayed on Elysium until he died there in 2186 at the age of seventy-five.

The Collector scare#

The Collectors never attacked Elysium. The colony still paid for their campaign. In 2185 a security advisory about the Collector threat led to every scrap of traffic and trade between Illium and Elysium being cancelled, which held the colony's economic development back without a single shot being fired at it.

The same year produced a stranger footnote, and only for players who took the War Hero background. A news report describes a memorial plaza built on Elysium to commemorate Shepard, which promptly got voted the hottest wedding location of 2185. Admiral Hackett ordered that all the money raised in wedding fees go to funds for Alliance veterans.

The names#

Elysium takes its name from the Elysian Fields of Greek myth, where the souls of the heroic and the virtuous were sent. Its capital, Illyria, borrows from a real region in the western Balkans running from northern Albania up into Slovenia.