Quote Originally Posted by RyuDragnier View Post
He HAS been a pretty big manipulator and planner up to this point. He planned the whole soul crystal stuff in 5.3 during the final battle with us (which may be where he disappeared to when we were fighting the adds), so him having planned one last "encore" for a curtain call isn't out of the question. Not to mention the unexplained existence and stalking of THAT SHOEBILL (no, I can't forget this thing, it haunts me).
Do we have evidence he planned all of that at exactly that point? Because I'm pretty sure the crystals were kicking around for a long time (and are by all rights appearing to be the real deal ones they used to ascend the rest of the Ascians), the only real question is how they ended up where we found them. And there's a lot of explanations for that, chiefly suspecting Hythlodaeus or perhaps Elidibus dropping them.