Quote Originally Posted by Diclonius View Post
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.