Inusannon

The inusannon were an ancient spacefaring race that flourished and then vanished long before the rise of the Protheans. Little was remembered of them, but their legacy ran deep through galactic history: it was from the ruins of inusannon civilization that the Protheans first learned the principles of mass effect technology. Like so many advanced peoples before and after them, the inusannon were exterminated by the Reapers.

A vanished people#

The inusannon were known to have existed at least 127,000 years before the era of Commander Shepard, and very little of them survived into the historical record. They warred with another race, the thoi'han, over colonization rights to the garden world Eingana around that time. No records of the conflict remained, but most historians agreed that both peoples wished to settle Eingana and neither was willing to share, and the two lost hundreds of ships in a series of battles whose debris still covered the world long afterward. The inusannon were also known to have inhabited Ilos at some point, long before the Protheans found and colonized it. Like countless civilizations that rose to spaceflight before them, the inusannon were ultimately exterminated by the Reapers, having been wiped out roughly 50,000 years before the same machines harvested the Protheans.

Legacy and the Protheans#

The most enduring mark the inusannon left on the galaxy came tens of thousands of years after their destruction. After achieving spaceflight, the Protheans discovered the ruins of inusannon civilization and from them learned the principles of mass effect physics, which allowed them to develop faster-than-light technology. This knowledge gave the Protheans a significant advantage over their contemporaries, and they kept it secret for centuries. The connection between the two peoples was physical as well as technological: at least some Prothean cities, those of Ilos in particular, were built directly upon the older ruins of the inusannon, a civilization the Reapers had already erased. The living Prothean Javik, recounting his people's history, identified the inusannon as the race that had preceded his own and as the true origin of the mass effect technology that humanity would later attribute to ruins on Mars.