Revelations from Patch 7.4: Into the Mist

[Cassar]

Part of me is happy that we can finally put the most annoying theory in all of Dawntrail to bed, though. Because we now finally know what the Arcadion's logo is, and we can stop pretending it looks like an Ascian sigil!

I don't think so... Are you implying that they change the logo every time a new champ is crowned? The president's transformation into the Lindwurm happened relatively recently (3 years I believe they said), and there have been multiple champions that attempted to defeat him in those years, so the logo would've changed for each champion.

Maybe the logo is just the Lindwurm, since it's a legendary creature and has been for centuries, but this would mean that it's just a coincidence that the Lindwurm happened to play a very important role in the history of the Arcadion.

[Carin-Eri]

I don't think so... Are you implying that they change the logo every time a new champ is crowned? The president's transformation into the Lindwurm happened relatively recently (3 years I believe they said), and there have been multiple champions that attempted to defeat him in those years, so the logo would've changed for each champion.

Maybe the logo is just the Lindwurm, since it's a legendary creature and has been for centuries, but this would mean that it's just a coincidence that the Lindwurm happened to play a very important role in the history of the Arcadion.

Another wrestling trope: changing the (side) plates on the championship belt to reflect who the current belt-holder is. This could be seen as being a 'digital' version of that.

[SilverArrow20XX]

I don't think so... Are you implying that they change the logo every time a new champ is crowned? The president's transformation into the Lindwurm happened relatively recently (3 years I believe they said), and there have been multiple champions that attempted to defeat him in those years, so the logo would've changed for each champion.

Maybe the logo is just the Lindwurm, since it's a legendary creature and has been for centuries, but this would mean that it's just a coincidence that the Lindwurm happened to play a very important role in the history of the Arcadion.

If I recall, it's only been Tyrant that has attempted to defeat him, and nobody else has been able to defeat Tyrant.

[Fenral]

Bit late to this one. I blame the three-hit combo of end-of-year work nonsense, Octopath 0, and most importantly Inazuma Eleven. (Seriously, Yoshi-P, if Hino Nohi is asking for another collab give it to him. Please. My team could easily make room for a few of the Scions, and there's a whole crossover gag you could do by making Alphinaud use Mugen the Hand. Please.)

MSQ!

The first quest felt like it was intended as the last quest of 7.3 and got pushed back a patch for some reason. It feels like that's not the first time this has happened either, but it really stuck out this time.

This is supposed to be the FF9 expansion, but this entire episode had big FF3 energy. Go to new town in dire straits, help out a bit, go out and punch something really, really big to solve two or three problems at once, pick up a mostly useless pointer to your next destination, and set out again as the whole town sees you off with a smile.

On that note, though, it's kind of a shame how self-contained it all is. Lumull is the most fun NPC we've had in a while, but he and the rest of Krile's surprise relatives are just going to be sort of there now. We might go back for a bit on a Porxie delivery if we need an excuse to run into Halmarut again, but other than that I don't see them doing much with Treno long-term.

And on that note, did I just hear Saori Hayami? She's definitely going to be around a while if they're bringing out the big guns. And Calyx is now a plushie. Chance of future minionization has increased by 300%. If they wanted to sell us on the Winterers not being our next batch of antagonists, it worked.

Overall, a good patch MSQ. Running with an FF-party-sized group (with Sphene in the NPC slot) always works better than trying to constantly find something for everyone to do. I'm kind of wondering where Thancred and Urianger got off to now, though.

[Cleretic]

Another wrestling trope: changing the (side) plates on the championship belt to reflect who the current belt-holder is. This could be seen as being a 'digital' version of that.

Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. Either this is just how it goes, or the Tyrant's been the champion long enough that he's become the branding.

Either that or he's the 80s Hulk Hogan of the Arcadion, and he's just the mascot regardless of championship status.

[Dikatis]

Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. Either this is just how it goes, or the Tyrant's been the champion long enough that he's become the branding.

Either that or he's the 80s Hulk Hogan of the Arcadion, and he's just the mascot regardless of championship status.

He's outright stated to have never known defeat prior to his match with the Warrior of Light. So it's definitely this.

[Diclonius]

The Storm Surge happened four centuries ago, but Preservation and all the interdimensional research stuff (at least the parts that Krile's parents were involved with) started much later.

I think it roughly went like this:

• Over 400 years ago, things start to shift towards lightning. Times gets hard.
• Roughly 400 years ago, electrope is figured out. Wars start to secure it. War intensifies the lightning aspect shift, the world is basically ruined as a result. Alexandria, Treno, and a few other settlements hunker down.
• Some point between then and now, Preservation starts researching interdimensional travel.
• Roughly 20 odd years ago, Krile's parents chuck her through a portal they helped make.
• The present day.

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)?

[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.