The lamia

[Anonymoose]

<throws a smokebomb into the thread, leaves a note on the table, vanishes before anyone notices>

The Second Coil of Bahamut seems to imply that the Lamia were Allagan chimeric bioweaponry. Sastasha HM, however, seems to imply that are “over-drowned” pirate wenches. What are Lamia, and can this give insight into the background of other enemies, as well?

This one goes back to deliberate misinformation. It’s in both versions, in English a bit more so. In many games, NPCs tell you exactly what’s going on in the world. They just know everything about the lore and everything is true. In the real world, people don’t always have the answers, even though they talk like they know what they’re talking about.

We wanted Eorzea to have that feel, as well. There are lots of different theories, but not everyone has the right answers. People sometimes assume things that are relative to their own lives; if a Lominsan sees these Lamia with their scimitars and they think pirate, what else could it be, for them? They don’t know about Allagan technology.

[SOURCE]

[Enkidoh]

Also don't forget that the FATEs around Aleport, the Sahagin daily beast quests (and for that matter, the Duty Finder description for Sastasha NM) all pretty much show that the Sahagin and their Serpent Reaver thralls are constantly kidnapping people from nearby villages - although post Sastasha NM that mostly seems to be hapless Maelstrom recruits who are overpowered by the beastmen, who is to say civilians are not also continuing to be shanghaied from surrounding villages by the Sahagin for use as Leviathan's slaves?

Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

[WyrahFhurrst]

snip

That's the one I was talking about! Thanks, Moose!

[Rocl]

While the naga / lamia in general are considered Voidsent... ah, no. The Drowned Wenches and Drowned Courtesans in Sastasha HM are heavily implied, though not outright stated, to be normal women that were overexposed to Leviathan's aether and mutated like everyone else in Sastasha HM. Remember that Captain Madison used to be a normal Hyur, and then in HM he looks like god-damn Davy Jones?

Yeah...

They just share a model / skeleton. That's all.

Ah, but my entire response was based off an interview with the team behind the Lore! (As Moose backed me up so graciously.)

You're right, Ceana theorizes overexposure to aether and repeated tempering has caused the people of Satasha (Hard) to mutate. It's important to note Ceana only sees Madison's corpse, though I doubt her theory would change much had she seen a lamia. However, that leaves us at a loss to explain Allagan Lamia; and I'm not about to so quietly buy "they just reused the model lol" when Koji-Fox has stated that the quest specifically draws on deliberate misinformation. I had a fun theory that the Lamiae were created by Allagans by overaspected a person's aether (since that seems exactly like the kind of crazy experiment they'd do) before the E3 interview, but when a reputable/primary source gives us information it'd be rude to ignore it.

Who knows what horrors the bio-engineered naga/lamia were subjected to under Allag rule to cause them to cry out "Don't look at me!"; who knows what drove them from the only home they'd known for the last 5000 years (Dalamud) to Satasha. The obvious answer is to get slain by the Warrior of Light, naturally. An Allagan chimera tempered by a Primal is an interesting thought, but if such a thing were possible (and who's to say it isn't) then the idea of stocking Dalamud with chimeras as a security force was a really poorly thought out plan (and who's to say it wasn't).

[Frederick22]

That's the one I was talking about! Thanks, Moose!

What moose said ( dev team ), doesnt answer your original comment. We still dont know the origin of those lamias on sastasha, Specially beacuse they could talk and they were know us "drowned courtesan"
There is no way an allagan lamia end up there and got tempered by leviathan. The only logical thing, as someone say before me, is that allagans created lamias by mutating someone with an over expose to corrupt aether. Something similar of what happened in sastasha HM

[Zojha]

Question: Do we have any hard confirmed precedence of this so called "deliberate misinformation"?

I can see that maybe NPCs don't necessarily know what they talk about in their dialogue. But how can we know Byblos, Batraal, Diabolos, Anchag, Halicarnassus, Raskovnik Ferdiad, Frumious Koheel Ja, 8th Order Patriarch Ge Bu or the everliving Bibliotaph by name and title? How do we even know it's the 8th order of Kobolds? How do we know Lady Amandine is Lady Amandine and not some random, exactly identical looking maidservant? We've never exactly been introduced to any of them and I doubt the Warrior of Light is just randomly making these up as s/he goes.

Not only do we constantly get information we cannot possibly have, I can't find a single case where the information we got from the mob names turned out to be false. Heck, the first time we stroll through Azys Lla we apparently guess every creature name right from the get-go. And not just we - Mirror Knights are called Mirror Knights in Thanalan. In the fractal continuum, it is then confirmed they are in fact called Mirror Knights. What a coincidence! Especially when most Eorzeans would probably have called them something like "MechaOwlBear".

That said, it is my belief it's simply a case of re-used models.

[Anonymoose]

Question: Do we have any hard confirmed precedence of this so called "deliberate misinformation"?

My favorite go-to example is the Deepvoid Deathmouse - a very large dormouse that is very unlikely anything more than a very large dormouse. The THM quests have something similar, where the brothers seek out small voidgates in a cave and assume that everything there from bats to slugs are all voidsent - something that currently seems less likely than not. My other favorite example is the Lamia, but that one's probably disqualified from this debate, eh?

But how can we know Byblos, Batraal, Diabolos, Anchag, Halicarnassus, Raskovnik Ferdiad, Frumious Koheel Ja, 8th Order Patriarch Ge Bu or the everliving Bibliotaph by name and title? How do we even know it's the 8th order of Kobolds?

If it's black-or-white, all-or-nothing, the game mechanics themselves crumble, no? They can't all be assumptions and artificially-organic information.

How do we know Lady Amandine is Lady Amandine and not some random, exactly identical looking maidservant?

That's a good example, because it might not be Lady Amandine. Succubi (voidsent) manifest in the corporeal world by forcing their essences into the corpses of dead women. They snack on aether and manifest corporeally using it. Remember how the succubus zapped the Wood Wailers to summon demons? Were those demons still Wood Wailers, or did their essences come through the void and manifest using the dead Wailers? "Lady Amandine" could be the true woman, warped by her consorting with Darkness... or perhaps she was a desperate human who fell prey to a ruse, died, and now has a succubus waltzing around in her skin.

The succubus in the THM story, incidentally, possessed a lalafell, but only manifested after slaying several women to materialize with. There's lots of information to gather and compare and try to find the truth before someone spills the beans. Even with the misinformation, you can find the truth out there somewhere. Questions like the one above only make it into interviews when compile & compare doesn't concretely cancel out or boil down.

Sensing defeat, Milburh the Malicious sacrifices her carnal form to the void where a succubus claims it for her own. Strike down the cultist and drive the voidsent from her corpse.

We still dont know the origin of those lamias on sastasha,

My money is on the idea that the Lamia were in the Bioweapons Storage of the internment hulk that crashed into La Noscea. We barely even went inside of that ship in the Binding Coil - we skimmed the surface and passed through the engine. That's it. And yet we know that, like the other hulks, it probably housed bioweapons and enslaved dragons because cobras and dreadknights and Twintania (oh, my). A hulk crashed into the Burning Wall, and out poured a bunch of Mirror Knights. Why's it so weird that Lamia would come out of another? And we know that they can malfunction and form basic social groups and try to obtain autonomy - that's exactly what a FATE is Azys Lla is all about. Perhaps the Lamia in Sastasha HM just broke out of the hulk and found a nice cave to settle down in.

Madison's crew is probably a different story, of course. Madison himself blames the change on Leviathan tempering them over and over. But look at what they warped into - sea creatures. Like, the same ones in the cave. Madison is taking on the qualities of a kraken, while his crew are becoming like aurelia. Assuming the Lamia were once people ... what sea creatures are they turning into?

And why would two world lore creators (one of them being the team leader) focus an interview answer on something that led further from the truth? I'm not saying they always give the whole truth - those two like to throw gas on the fire and stir the boiling pot - but they do like us loremongers. The answer seemed to pretty clearly imply that Lominsans saw artificial voidsent bioweapons wielding scimitars and (knowing jack about such technology) thought, "Well that's a pirate," and then they saw pirates that'd been severely messed up by something (they themselves blame Leviathan), and decided, "Well, must have been the same thing. Drowned pirate ... wenches! IT ALL MAKES SENSE!"

[Frederick22]

snip

I didnt say I didnt agree with what you said, it was beacuse the dev team answer its well hahahaha, for me at least was kind on confusing how they answer, unless I didnt undestand that correctly.

But well what the hells weredoing lamias on the sastasha caves? and also why ( assuming this creatures can talk ) they were woried about they look?

if they were allagan they were, but hahaha there was a lot of small details that proven the orther thing.

[Anonymoose]

So are you impling that Madison and his crew didnt get extra tempered by levhiatan?

For now, I'm actually mostly inclined to believe Leviathan is at fault for the fish-pirates. Sure, the door's open for the idea to be wrong; Eorzeans aren't really known for getting the story straight on the first try... but the "we didn't get much information" door swings both ways, and the dialogue after the quest is a lot of exposition to not be at least partly true. The idea of being tempered so hard that your body is twisted into something else (perhaps something nearby or related to the element in question) hasn't really come up anywhere else, has it? Might as well take everyone at their word until we have anything else to go on. Imho, their explanation just doesn't explain the Lamia given what we know now (prior to that interview, even I once suggested that perhaps the Allag were harnessing primals to warp people, not Leviathan of course, since he wasn't around back then... etc. etc. etc.).

Friends─this man's unnatural form can be attributed, I believe, to the excess absorption of water-aspected aether. A living being can only absorb a certain quantity of aether before suffering adverse effects. To be altered so drastically requires a fatal dose, yet our subject here lived long enough to be struck down. A most peculiar case indeed...

I have heard that a primal creates thralls by showering mortals with its own aether. Could this be an extension of that process?

If being exposed once to a primal's aether is enough to corrupt the mind, 'tis plausible that repeated exposure corrupts the flesh.

[WyrahFhurrst]

snip

Agreed. Ceana could have been right, or we could find out that there's some crazy parasite that makes a person into an Illithid-like monster. If over-tempering was a thing, then wouldn't we see it happen to other Tempered people? Certainly other Primals would figure out eventually by now, and not just Leviathan?