6.1 plothole?

A few lines came up in doing these quests (context, I'm wrapping up 6.5 at this time), and it doesn't seem this is going to get addressed. So.. maybe some of you lore nerds has some better rationalizing or maybe it's a translation thing or who knows..

What we know:

Using the Crystal Tower and a pact with Cloud of Darkness, Allag opened a voidgate during their war on Meracydia.
Vrtra tells us his sister, Azdaja, flew through this voidgate during the war (after which it closed, but that's not important [and maybe just coincidence])
Y'shtola informs us that "For a being to navigate the chaos of the rift, with or without form, there must needs be a guiding agent on the other side."
G'raha points out that, in the case of Allag, technologists served to draw voidsent through the gate to the Source.

These points raise an important question: How did Azdaja end up on the Thirteenth? There was no such "guiding agent" to lead her through the rift.

Vrtra (as Varshahn) does point out that travel through a fissure does not require these conditions. Which... I guess is how they explain the whole "we turned Alzadaal's fissure into a gate, allowing us to pass through like a fissure.

Or is this a misinterpretation, and it's more that a "gate" requires a force on both ends to open two-way travel, while natural fissures are just one-way leaks? (and Alzadaal's fissure only required force on Source end for being already present and open on Void end?)

Or is this just the game can't keep "voidgate" and "fissure" straight all the time?

Or is this just a case of "well, she's a dragon, and they're powerful, lots of aether, technically unsundered, hell, she was angry too so maybe dynamis was involved" which seems like an awful lot of leaps to rationalize..

I think you put more thought into it than the writing team did.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Vrtra (as Varshahn) does point out that travel through a fissure does not require these conditions. Which... I guess is how they explain the whole "we turned Alzadaal's fissure into a gate, allowing us to pass through like a fissure.

Or is this a misinterpretation, and it's more that a "gate" requires a force on both ends to open two-way travel, while natural fissures are just one-way leaks? (and Alzadaal's fissure only required force on Source end for being already present and open on Void end?)

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Actually.. for clarity, what is (or was) in Alzadaal's Legacy? G'raha, on arrival, surmises it must be a gate, given the security. But Vrtra found it as a natural fissure. The alchemists of the time, using a synthetic Atomos, "managed not only to expand the fissure, but also manipulate it as one might a gate..."

a) When we arrive, there is no such Atomos, so why does G'raha conclude it must be a gate? Is he just wrong? Mistranslation?
b) Probably the source of all of this confusion, they converted it to a Serviceable gate, but without the necessary "guiding force"?

This all seems to lead to Y'shtola being wrong/unclear about travel through a voidgate. The "fissure=1-way, gate=2-way" explanation seems to be what clears all of this up well enough, but the game seems pretty hazy on usage..

I haven't gone through all the details, but if it is a situation where a normal being would need guidance to navigate the rift, I think it would be fair to reason that this might be the case for sundered beings but a dragon is aetherially dense enough to force its own way through and/or has additional senses to detect a way through and navigate on its own.

And then I guess there's the matter of the moon later on.. Using the Tower of Babil, we punch open our own gate on the moon to the Void-moon.. and once again we're traveling through a gate (this time not manipulated by a synthetic Atomos) and arrive safely with no such guidance. Best you can do here is Vrtra having the same capabilities I guess..

I think it's just dragons being dragons. Midgardsorm was also able to find Hydaelyn to settle on while flying through space, I can't image that was pure luck.

According to the ancient texts, gates to the void open naturally and accidentally on the Source all the time due to the fact that the Source/Thirteenth membrane wobbles and is already void on the void side. What's difficult is making a large enough and stable enough hole for a powerful essence (or, especially, a physical body) to slip through where and when you want it to.

Even then, though, when has it ever involved the crossing a difficult-to-navigate expanse of rift? That specific claim is what felt weird, to me. (Maybe I'm losing my mind.)

It feels like the writers went in a circle - they invented new dimensional hop rules to make an exceptional trip to the First that should only have worked with the void - not a healthy dimension - and then ... applied those exceptional new standards to the void-Souce membrane despite them not having been present in, say, the Crystal Tower story arc. (The Shadowbringers dimensional hop did require exiting the Source into the rift and then back into the First, but - as I understand it - for wholly different reasons, namely enabling time travel while perhaps also avoiding the direct breach of a membrane between two rejoinable dimensions, assuming you could even get through it directly at all.)

Following on from my previous post, annother element is that we have seen dragons navigating the rift before – specifically Hraesvelgr when he rescued us from Omega's collapsing pocket dimension.

I'm not sure why this is confusing, because I think it's very understandable:

Azdaja travelled through the voidgate large enough to fit her, and then got lost. We've now been into the Thirteenth a couple times (well, the OP hasn't), and can tell pretty easily why someone needs a 'guiding agent': the place is just a morass of darkness with only a few discernible landmarks in a a nebula of shadow. Ours is eventually (past the OP) Zero, but Azdaja had nobody--or at least nobody trustworthy. Azdaja's got a slight advantage in having self-propelled flight, she can traverse in a way we can't, but she's still gonna have a problem of 'where is anything'.

The question of asking 'how did Azdaja traverse the void' is rather easily answered with 'very poorly'.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

The question of asking 'how did Azdaja traverse the void' is rather easily answered with 'very poorly'.

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The question is not "how did Azdaja traverse the void."

The question is "how did Azdaja traverse the rift between the Source and the Thirteenth (colloquially known as The Void)."

The "and then got lost" part is unclear, as Y'shtola's explanation indicates Azdaja should've gotten lost between worlds. The "guiding agent" comment indicates that traversing a voidgate without that guiding force can leave you adrift outside of the reflections.

You are confusing needing an actual literal guide to get around once you're on the Thirteenth with the need for some means to guide any being large or small to actually make it there in the first place.

Voidsent do not need a guide in the Source, but they do need to be guided through the rift to arrive on the Source from the Thirteenth (through a voidgate). Presumably, this works the same in the other direction. To which, Azdaja had no such means of being guided to the Thirteenth.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

The question is "how did Azdaja traverse the rift between the Source and the Thirteenth (colloquially known as The Void)."

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Buddy, imps manage that part. Frequently. Imps manage to find and go through a new voidgate very quickly in 6.1. And imps are weak and stupid! Getting to/from any other shard, not easy, clearly requires some major work and nobody's figured out the science quite yet. Getting to and from the Thirteenth? Happens by accident. Getting a stable gateway big enough to use is the hard part.

In fact, if you want to continue going through the story, 6.4 actually does have someone provide a functional theory for why travel to the Thirteenth is so easy but travel to anywhere else is so hard.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

The question is not "how did Azdaja traverse the void."

The question is "how did Azdaja traverse the rift between the Source and the Thirteenth (colloquially known as The Void)."

The "and then got lost" part is unclear, as Y'shtola's explanation indicates Azdaja should've gotten lost between worlds. The "guiding agent" comment indicates that traversing a voidgate without that guiding force can leave you adrift outside of the reflections.

You are confusing needing an actual literal guide to get around once you're on the Thirteenth with the need for some means to guide any being large or small to actually make it there in the first place.

Voidsent do not need a guide in the Source, but they do need to be guided through the rift to arrive on the Source from the Thirteenth (through a voidgate). Presumably, this works the same in the other direction. To which, Azdaja had no such means of being guided to the Thirteenth.

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If any known being would be able to traverse the rift, I'd expect a dragon to be able to. Just because the sundered would need a guiding agent doesn't mean dragons would also need one. After all, it seems like Midgardsormr was able to perceive the reflections when he approached the Source. If that's the case, then it wouldn't be surprising his children could also perceive them and travel to one while inside the rift.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

In fact, if you want to continue going through the story, 6.4 actually does have someone provide a functional theory for why travel to the Thirteenth is so easy but travel to anywhere else is so hard.

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Your reading comprehension is concerning... The very first sentence of this whole thread points out I'm wrapping up 6.5.

Imps most frequently manage to travel through fissures. As was also pointed out in the first post, Varshahn points out that fissures do not have the "guiding agent" constraint.

And, again, the information we are given is that travel through a voidgate, not a natural fissure, requires some guiding force to prevent any traveling being from finding themselves lost between worlds. I'm willing to take a leap on any given rational explanations, but you've made it clear you're not even reading anything here.

Sorry about missing that you are in fact past 6.1, so I don't even have to remotely step around anything. I'm pretty used to people trying to bring things up the instant they see something amiss and not even giving the story room to add on to the point. (And yes, I'm aware that there's some hypocritical irony in me skipping over parts of the OP because of exactly that assumption.) There's clearly some ends to tie here, it's just that unlike you, I'm fairly sure that the knot does already exist somewhere on this.

I think there's an important thing to ask here, because as I see it, this is a pretty obvious element: Azdaja went through the same voidgate that we did, five thousand years earlier. It was closed and then reopened.

If the trip through a voidgate invariably needs a guiding agent, what was our guiding agent? You've apparently paid much closer recent attention to that raid than I have, so you probably have the answer more at-hand than I do. And unfortunately my usual memory-jogging technique of 'check Gamer Escape' isn't pulling up any results, since the exact terminology only got brought up in Endwalker, and I don't see a similar mention in the Crystal Tower story.

The Crystal Tower raid? Oh, no no no, I have next to no recollection of those events, outside of what we're "reminded" of in the course of 6.x quests. The quotes in the first post are all taken from two sequential 6.1 quests. If anything required specific knowledge from the raid... I certainly would've glossed over it entirely, smile and nod.

However, if I may make some assumptions here: the "guiding agent" serving to draw us through would have been the Cloud of Darkness. Or maybe Doga and Unei?

I'm kinda leaning more now towards Y'shtola's words being poorly chosen/translated.. Rather than directly needing some manner of guidance to a destination, the "guiding agent" may have in fact been a reference to the act of opening the gate in the first place. The gate itself is the "guiding agent" to traverse the rift. An agent, on either side, should be necessary to open a channel. While that particular voidgate remained closed for a time, the connection evidently remained, per the pact.
This would mean Y'shtola was speaking more generally, that one cannot just jump into the rift between worlds and expect to actually land anywhere.. but we don't really hear about any general "rifts" opening that aren't already connected to the Thirteenth.

It does... sorta raise an additional question of how we actually managed to open a gate on the moon... by either conclusion, there should've needed to be something on the Voidmoon to connect to.. I think they vaguely attempted to explain this away, something something Zodiark and Darkness, with a whole load of aether to punch through...

Kinda leads to the idea that voidgates are always exactly as functional as the story needs them to be at any point.

Also,
https://media.makeameme.org/created/...7447a39752.jpg

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

However, if I may make some assumptions here: the "guiding agent" serving to draw us through would have been the Cloud of Darkness. Or maybe Doga and Unei?

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Yeah, the CoD of Darkness was my guess for that. If the 'guiding agent' is specifically sort of a beacon to aim for, it makes sense that she was ours: 'aim at the biggest ugly we can find'. It actually explains why exploratory projects like this hadn't happened before: if the hard part is finding a beacon to aim at in the first place, a mundane exploration is actually pretty difficult, because you need an exceptionally non-mundane target to aim for. (Not to mention the horrors.)

But if that's how it worked for us... then that's how it worked for Azdaja, surely. All factors were still the same then, so she could've easily just gone 'let me at it' and beelined. As for us managing the moon transit, that's actually very similar: not only was there Azdaja to aim at, and not only was there a Golbez nearby to aim at somewhere... but there was also a big stagnant morass of Zodiark aether lingering, too. All of those are pretty easy bullseyes in this scenario.

I still think that on a general storytelling perspective, the idea with travel to the Thirteenth is that the 'tunnel' is the easy part: digging the entrance/exit, and figuring out what to do when you get there, those are the hard parts. But actually getting there? So easy a child could do it, and voidsent child-equivalents frequently do, which is specifically thanks to the fact that the Thirteenth is just (meta-)physically closer to the Source. If travelling to the First is a cross-country trip, traveling to the Thirteenth is driving to the shop around the corner; it's still possible to crash, but there's not that many ways to screw it up.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

It does... sorta raise an additional question of how we actually managed to open a gate on the moon... by either conclusion, there should've needed to be something on the Voidmoon to connect to.. I think they vaguely attempted to explain this away, something something Zodiark and Darkness, with a whole load of aether to punch through...

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I like this and particularly this part because we know the Thirteenth is mostly formless, aka nowhere to have a final destination point or a feature to know that you have successfully arrived at said destination point, except for the islands of Domains created or maintained by powerful enough voidsent. Which is what the guiding agent is- as the only place that has aether to sense anyway. Problem is, said aether in concentrated in said power voidsent, so that Catch-22 of the only place you can aim for is also setting up to confront what's you'd rather safely avoid.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

But if that's how it worked for us... then that's how it worked for Azdaja, surely. All factors were still the same then, so she could've easily just gone 'let me at it' and beelined. As for us managing the moon transit, that's actually very similar: not only was there Azdaja to aim at, and not only was there a Golbez nearby to aim at somewhere... but there was also a big stagnant morass of Zodiark aether lingering, too. All of those are pretty easy bullseyes in this scenario.

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Yeah, as I wrote it out, it made a sort of sense. I think it may have just been explained/interpreted poorly in game in that moment. The "guiding agent" comment referring more to, essentially.. "you can go knocking on the door, but someone on the other side needs to open it, else you'll be lost at the threshold of the between."
CoD had already opened the door on their side, as Allag had opened on ours.
As for the moon... well, I guess we'll just chalk that up to using a battering ram to knock on the door.

As for fissures.. I suppose in this context, Varshahn's comments could instead be taken to mean natural fissures do not need someone here to "open the door," they're just climbing through an already open window, or a doggy door, or our chimney, etc.