Revelations from Patch 7.4: Into the Mist

[Cleretic]

Thank you for trying to help sort it out!

I'm still not 100% sure if that lines up though? I didn't think to check the Unending Codex entry for the Storm Surge until after making my post, but it explicitly dates it at around 450 years ago, which fits in with Sphene's account of things and the level 100 MSQ dungeon as well. The part that really made me think twice was the flashback during the patch itself, quoting Robor as saying "When lightning threatened this world, we attempted to use the key to flee again like our ancestors once did." and I thought that sort of implied they tried to use it during the time of the Surge?

Thinking more there's also the fact that only a few days at most passed in the Source when the dome showed up in Shaaloni, meanwhile *30 years* passed underneath it, indicating a very severe time difference. So if Krile in the Source is 22 years old currently, wouldn't that mean her parents would have dropped her off from the 9th a long time ago too?

All of this sort of points toward Krile's parents being alive a lot longer ago, and if that's the case, Miyali shouldn't still be alive (or have known her sister)?

I think you might be thrown off by an ambiguous use of 'we'. Which is fair, I think everyone assumed the meaning you're taking at first, and we're realigning our assumptions based on that.

When Robor says 'we attempted to use the key', it's a non-inclusive, communal 'we'; 'we as a people', rather than 'we as a group that includes me, the person saying this'. He's saying that the milalla of the Ninth tried to use the key, not necessarily a group that explicitly includes him and Alayla.

As for the timeframe, it's always been established that time flows at different rates between reflections. It's a little hard to factor in the thirty year jump for Heritage Found specifically, because we don't necessarily know the 'science' of it (was Heritage Found running on 'Ninth Time', or was that a third entirely different time scale?), but it does mean that the time scale is unknown, albeit something we can roughly estimate; like I said last page, Miayli looks in her fifties or sixties, so while we don't know how much older Alayla was, we can reason that the trip that ended with the key and Krile going to the Source, on Ninth Time, happened decades ago. I estimated thirty or forty, but it could be much longer, especially if I'm misjudging Miayli's age and/or Alayla was significantly older than her sister. I feel like at maximum that trip could've happened a hundred years ago on Ninth Time; that'd be a surprising amount of time, but everything we know would still track.

This new time scale does make sense with all the known evidence; we aren't left with more questions than back when we assumed Alayla was alive 400+ years ago, just different ones.

[Diclonius]

I think you might be thrown off by an ambiguous use of 'we'. Which is fair, I think everyone assumed the meaning you're taking at first, and we're realigning our assumptions based on that.

I appreciate the responses because this one bit had me scratching my head hahaha!

I had certainly considered the possibility of Robor using 'we' in that way, but the very next line in that same flashback, "Alas, no matter what we tried, we couldn't invoke its power. We had all but given up when Preservation approached us with an offer of partnership." made it sound especially self referential, 'us' being himself and Alayla, and it would be very weird phrasing otherwise. Being descendants of the Speaker, it would make sense for them to have had and tried using the key too.

I distinctly remember that bit about time being inconsistent and constantly in flux across the reflections from SHB, which is probably why I was basing the assumption of the 9th's time being much faster off of the dome discrepancy, but I suppose you're also right in that it could have caused a third, entirely separate, crunched time scale when the fusion occurred, and the 9th's flow of time is only slightly faster than the Source's.

Assuming this is all correct and Robor and Alayla were alive much more recently than 400 years ago, it does beg the question why those sentences were phrased in such a way, or why it took Preservation hundreds of years to reach out and look into the key if the Milalla coming from another world was common knowledge? I'm curious how Robor's dialogue is laid out in other versions/languages now too, I'm not sure if that might provide any insight either.

[Cleretic]

I appreciate the responses because this one bit had me scratching my head hahaha!

I had certainly considered the possibility of Robor using 'we' in that way, but the very next line in that same flashback, "Alas, no matter what we tried, we couldn't invoke its power. We had all but given up when Preservation approached us with an offer of partnership." made it sound especially self referential, 'us' being himself and Alayla, and it would be very weird phrasing otherwise. Being descendants of the Speaker, it would make sense for them to have had and tried using the key too.

I distinctly remember that bit about time being inconsistent and constantly in flux across the reflections from SHB, which is probably why I was basing the assumption of the 9th's time being much faster off of the dome discrepancy, but I suppose you're also right in that it could have caused a third, entirely separate, crunched time scale when the fusion occurred, and the 9th's flow of time is only slightly faster than the Source's.

Assuming this is all correct and Robor and Alayla were alive much more recently than 400 years ago, it does beg the question why those sentences were phrased in such a way, or why it took Preservation hundreds of years to reach out and look into the key if the Milalla coming from another world was common knowledge? I'm curious how Robor's dialogue is laid out in other versions/languages now too, I'm not sure if that might provide any insight either.

So, my best reckoning on these...

Factoring in that extra line (I didn't remember it off the top of my head), the milalla were trying to get the key to work for a while. That 'we' is both historic and current; they probably were trying for hundreds of years. Probably not consecutively, I'm imagining 'every generation we give it another shot', but they just haven't succeeded.

As for why Preservation wouldn't have stepped in until very late? First of all, we can't assume that they would've necessarily cared for a lot of that time; they ultimately used it to solve a resource and energy crisis, so it's entirely possible it just wasn't an avenue worth pursuing/caring about for a long time. After all, Calyx was rather famously cool with going small and sustainable with the 'five thousand Endless' plan in the earlier patches. But on top of that, we don't actually know how accepted and recognized that fact is; we know that's true because of sources we found independently, but from Preservation's side? The milalla are just a cultural minority with a specific origin myth, and a religious artifact that doesn't do the thing they say it should. That doesn't exactly sound like something you'd pursue as Plan A to me.

[Diclonius]

So, my best reckoning on these...

Factoring in that extra line (I didn't remember it off the top of my head), the milalla were trying to get the key to work for a while. That 'we' is both historic and current; they probably were trying for hundreds of years. Probably not consecutively, I'm imagining 'every generation we give it another shot', but they just haven't succeeded.

As for why Preservation wouldn't have stepped in until very late? First of all, we can't assume that they would've necessarily cared for a lot of that time; they ultimately used it to solve a resource and energy crisis, so it's entirely possible it just wasn't an avenue worth pursuing/caring about for a long time. After all, Calyx was rather famously cool with going small and sustainable with the 'five thousand Endless' plan in the earlier patches. But on top of that, we don't actually know how accepted and recognized that fact is; we know that's true because of sources we found independently, but from Preservation's side? The milalla are just a cultural minority with a specific origin myth, and a religious artifact that doesn't do the thing they say it should. That doesn't exactly sound like something you'd pursue as Plan A to me.

That makes more sense, thank you for helping!

I'm guessing their lack of success is because the soul of Azem is needed to make the key function in the first place, and the Speaker was the only Milalla to be possessed of it since the time they fled the Source. Either way I still find it to be very questionable phrasing and I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one confused by interpretation.

I think Calyx and Halmarut know a lot more than they're letting on based off the latter's ominous foreshadowing, and Ascian plots tend to be rather far reaching from experience, so I do find it weird that they wouldn't have foreseen an energy crisis or sought out the key much sooner if they were knowledgeable about it. Then again, it's unclear how deep the extent of the Winterer's involvement in the 9th is just yet, so we'll have to wait and see if this is all part of the plan!

[EdwinLi]

That makes more sense, thank you for helping!

I'm guessing their lack of success is because the soul of Azem is needed to make the key function in the first place, and the Speaker was the only Milalla to be possessed of it since the time they fled the Source. Either way I still find it to be very questionable phrasing and I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one confused by interpretation.

I think Calyx and Halmarut know a lot more than they're letting on based off the latter's ominous foreshadowing, and Ascian plots tend to be rather far reaching from experience, so I do find it weird that they wouldn't have foreseen an energy crisis or sought out the key much sooner if they were knowledgeable about it. Then again, it's unclear how deep the extent of the Winterer's involvement in the 9th is just yet, so we'll have to wait and see if this is all part of the plan!

This does bring up a lot of questions about Azem though....

for starters, when was the Key created by him will be among the first set of questions people will be asking since the Shards did not exist until after the Sundering.

The other is what was his main goal with creating the ability to travel to other Shards?

How did it become lost in the first place until it was found?

and among many other things.

either way it seem this expansion was just setting up for the eventual focus on who Azem was.

[Cleretic]

This does bring up a lot of questions about Azem though....

Also, this entire theory breaks down when we remember what the actual history of 'successful Key uses' is. ...In fact I'm not gonna spoiler tag this because this is all pre-7.4 stuff. We do have three unambiguously successful Key uses.

1. Use by Speaker Loquloqui to get from the Source to the Ninth.

2. Grafting of Alexandria onto the Source, by Preservation.

3. The 'twelfth floor' portal to Living Memory (or at least its closure, we don't know the whole process), also by Preservation, specifically Endless Sphene.

If you want to give partial credit of 'well you got the Key to do something even if it wasn't what you planned', Preservation gets at least one extra count through the failed experiments we learned about in 7.3, and plausibly the first use of the gate by Robor and Alayla, but we don't really know any details there. But crucially, there's one person who hasn't gotten a successful use out of the thing: us. As in, the only person that we can say with some degree of confidence does have Azem's soul.

So either Azem's soul is not actually in any way necessary, or Preservation have made some very alarming discoveries!

[Cilia]

FYI, that one didn't come with this patch; Hildibrand's stuff is coming in the 7.x5 patches, and you just played the 7.35 one!

For what it's worth, while I was surprisingly on board with the 7.25 Hildibrand questline, the 7.35 one mainly got a reaction of 'wow, y'all found One New Joke'. Sometimes Hildibrand has a habit of going all-in on different variations on one gag, and this time they really hoped the Oglop joke was a massive hit.

Well 7.3.5 was the Deep Dungeon, and I'm not at all fond of the mystery dungeon playstyle so I just kept to my usual crafting and dungeon grinds. As someone who is very fond of IX (while cognizant of it's shortcomings), seeing another small reference to it was very nice. There were other jokes in there, but I still want an oglop minion now that they're confirmed to exist in XIV's setting (and are far from the most egregious reference, even to IX).

Also, this entire theory breaks down when we remember what the actual history of 'successful Key uses' is. ...In fact I'm not gonna spoiler tag this because this is all pre-7.4 stuff. We do have three unambiguously successful Key uses.

<snip>

So either Azem's soul is not actually in any way necessary, or Preservation have made some very alarming discoveries!

A lot of this comes from how Azem's symbol (Sol) showed up when Queen Eternal started to invoke the Key's power, but it's very important to remember that we ultimately still know nothing about the artifact's creation and original owner. It sounds like something Azem would make, and if anyone could make something like that it would be the Ancients (Ascians), but we also know that Azem was sundered and would have no reason to make such a thing beforehand. It's able to defy known laws regarding travel across the reflections, but in such a way that remains unreliable to everyone other than Calyx... who has Ascian backers, so it's clear he knows more than we do at the moment. If anything the Key functions like Halmarut's recently revealed power to punch small holes in reality on a grander scale.

They can't keep us in the dark about this thing forever, and since I seriously doubt 8.0 is going to be a sojourn across the Storm Surged Ninth, answers will have to come sooner than later unless we're just going to meander across referenced but unexplored Source locations like the Blindfrost and Nagxia. That said... Halmarut's ominous foretelling might only apply to the Storm Surged Ninth, and there's a curiously unused gate in the park where we fought the Behemoth during the MSQ...

One last note regarding references:

The route into XIV Treno isn't a 1:1 reference to IX; after exiting the Electrope Mine you grind down a derelict railway into the Treno Lowlands, referencing IX's South Gate cable car. It's not necessary to take the cable car to get from Quan's Dwelling to Treno in IX. Clearly, jamming references in wherever they can. Additionally, IX's Mist Continent had a similar population spread but in a different direction (IX's Mist Continent cities had to be on highlands due to the denser than air Mist making surface settlements hazardous; in XIV they need barriers to protect themselves from the perpetual thunderstorm and levin monsters, and are connected through railways rather than by airship).

On top of Queen Stella's gazebo, the Stellazio coins themselves are scattered across Treno, locked away in metal cages similar to those Queen Stella kept them in. There's no way to interact with them, but it's a fun little Easter Egg.

In addition to the bosses referencing Treno's item shop, most if not all of the trash mobs are enemies fought in random encounters during IX (using XIV models and levin glowups, of course).

Doctor Tuphut, Sphene's Milalla tutor who took the barrier technology back to Treno, is a clear reference to Garnet's tutor Doctor Tot from IX who similarly lived in Treno.

The VIII insert Doomtrain still retains a reference to it's Japanese naming through it's demonic roots. It's original name, Glasya Labolas (also used for the second boss of Syrcus Tower), is one of the 72 demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon. VIII references this by requiring 6 copies of 3 items (666) and the Solomon Ring to acquire it as a GF. The name of it's trial in XIV, Hell on Rails, is a subtle but clever nod.

... and now I have to do PvP this season up to Rank 15 because they put an MGSD G-Warrior as a minion reward and MGSD is my favorite Gunpla line (Strike Noir / Vidar when Bandai?). God damn it.