Quote Originally Posted by Veloran View Post
There doesn't seem to be any lower-limit to how small a clan can be. There are some with thousands of members, and others that consist of like two yurts. Moreover, the striking blue hair of Mide and Dayan is a distinctive feature of the Hotgo clan, every member we see has it, and it's a trait that comes from the two of them.
Remember that, for player convenience, populations that we see are assumed to be much smaller than the actual populations, distances are much smaller than the actual distances, and so on and so forth. The fact that we see only two yurts is no indication as to how big the tribe actually is. At best, we can use it as a measure of how large the clan is in proportion to other clans. There are less than a dozen Dotharl NPCs, but I don't think we're supposed to imagine that they're actually that small in population. It's possible that there are actual two-yurt clans, but we can't assume so just because of what we see in-game.

Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
Mide specifically says the author of the codex was her ancestor in 'The Folly of Youth'.
Still not a guarantee! Even assuming she's not mistaken (and she's been mistaken about several things in this plotline), "ancestor" does not necessarily mean an unbroken bloodline is involved. Many societies, upon adopting someone into the family, treat them in every way as a blood relative. That's just picking nits, though - I do agree that there's very likely some blood relation. Even so, after just a few generations, genetic diversity means that a whole lot of Mide's DNA would have had to come from other sources, with only a few bits and pieces passed down from the founder Mide (even if we assume a frankly uncomfortable amount of inbreeding).

Maybe waiting for you to learn advanced physics so you don't just stare at them blankly when they try to explain how it works?
*Whines* You mean I gotta STUDY??? Dammit, future me, where's the cliff notes version???

I think you could have a lot of fun with a story where someone planned around stable time loops to achieve stuff. "I think I need some help with this... oh, hi Future Self, thanks for coming."

Would be a challenge to keep everything straight and you'd have to have some kind of limit on how often they can pull stunts like that, but it would be interesting.
I actually HAVE written such stories. (Nothing published; all message board drabbles and one school project.) In one such story, a character used time travel to loop back in time over and over to make an army of herself to challenge a tough enemy in a fight. She still lost, in the end - fatigue and injuries carried forward with each loop back and were eventually too much for her - but she distracted the enemy long enough for one of her allies to finish the job.

Interest in scenarios like this are one of the reasons why I tend to get so involved in these discussions when stuff like Alexander comes up.

Quote Originally Posted by Vyrerus View Post
We can't be sure that the, "summoning" by the Illuminati was actually a real summoning any more than Mide's "summoning" three years prior. And even if it was, which it wasn't, that still wouldn't be his original conception.
We can't be SURE, no, but unless specifically told otherwise, we can assume Alexander had a "birth" of some kind, just as other actors in the story do. Alexander's journey to the past may be the first time he was viewed chronologically, but it wasn't when he was created. The offscreen summoning Iscah mentioned is very likely this birth; the Goblins summoned a Primal, just as other beast tribes do (and likely with Ascians teaching them how). Roundrox likely had a large part in shaping where and how the summoning took place, taking cues from the Codex to do so, but in all other ways it was likely a typical summoning. It's probable that, ruthless as they are, the Illuminati probably jumped straight to mass sacrifices to pump up the power of the resulting primal (just as was done for the original "Extreme" trials).