Ascian Masks on Gaius’s belt: Fandaniel and….?

[Anonymoose]

I'm always eager to challenge the conclusions people are willing to leap to. I'm all for picking favorite interpretations, weighing probabilities, highlighting logical inferences, etc. but prematurely concluding things is difficult for me.

I appreciate that we're going as far as, "That mask looks feline, so Fandaniel is a solid guess, but we don't know it for sure." Gaius does mention that his quarry in the Burn got away. Perhaps he'd only had that mask on his belt for a short time, having just ganked Fandaniel's vessel, and he jumped into Asahi's body on Maxima's crashed ship while we were dealing with the Imperials. Perhaps. But we don't know for sure whose masks those are.

Likewise, though... We figured out a way to kill Nabriales in 2.5, and some-the-hells-how Galuf knew enough to dunk Emmerololth (even as a Hail Mary) as far back as 2.2. By 4.5, Gaius is so knowledgeable about what the Warrior of Light and Ascians have been up to, HE tells US about the hierarchy, HE tells US about the true relationship between original and risen sundered, HE tells US that Emet-Selch is a hitherto unknown third Original. He'd gathered Lahabrea was dead. He knew of Nabriales's attack on the Rising Stones. He identifies on his own the Elidibus has taken Zenos's body for himself. Obviously, he was mostly just showing up to give a PowerPoint presentation from the Dev. Team about the latest round of adjustments to the lore... but are we so easily concluding that he cannot have possibly identified a way to utilize his intelligence to trap and shear the aether of an Ascian soul? A difficult task, yes. But we didn't kill Lahabrea, either, and he was an Original. I've got the door open that at least one of those masks might be a real risen-sundered kill, if for no other reason than SE seems to be rushing them into the woodchipper as fast as possible.