Slight inconsistency with the new raid?

The previous two tiers of the pandaemonium raid took place in elpis, so the fact that we were the same size as the ancients is explained away by the events of the main story.

But the latest raid takes place in the present, so we would be our normal size. So why are Athena, Themis, Lahabreah and Ericthonios all the same size as us? Should they not be like, twice as big in the present?

This same "issue" shows up with Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus in Ultima Thule as well.

I just assume they're being auto-scaled due to limited aether.

This is explained by an NPC dialogue in between the first and second battles of the raid:

Ruissenaud: "I've read that the ancients were much larger than the people of our era... Perhaps Athena endeavored to make them less imposing."

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cassar

This is explained by an NPC dialogue in between the first and second battles of the raid:

Ruissenaud: "I've read that the ancients were much larger than the people of our era... Perhaps Athena endeavored to make them less imposing."

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What I really love about this is that the explanation is wholly satisfying without it being an explanation at all - it's a character speculating.

It goes to show that often we don't really want wholesale explanations for everything, we just like to see that the characters (and by extension the writers) ask questions just as we do.

It's cowardice. Anabeisos would've been so much better if every single part of the script was the same, but the Ancient characters were thirty feet tall.

I suspect an actual reason, though, was because Athena's choice of host was our size, and she has an ego. If she has to be this small, then everything she recognizes has to be scaled to match, because her world can't not revolve around her.

...or maybe one of the imperfections she noticed and wanted to fix was 'we're too damn big'.

Looking at Young Hephaistos, I'm blaming Athena for why Male Highlanders don't get eyebrows. She likes that look on a man and she was lurking in the Aetherial Sea trying to remove all eyebrows off male characters but only snagged one subrace option. ;p

Athena was in Claudien's body, meaning she was modern people sized. All the others were regular modern souls inscribed with memories of the ancients, so not exactly as solid as all that, either.

They're not the originals; they're replicas conjured from memories.

There's no reason to not have made them normal-person-sized.

Maybe Athena just didn't know. She possessed Claudien and never questioned that the body she was in was not to scale with what she expected. So the creations she made wound up scaled to match her.