Thread: Revelations from Patch 3.4

Originally Posted by ZhaneX

The implication was...

Well, the thing is...

I got that they essentially became disembodied aetherial spirits like the Ascians, I'm just not sure how or why returning to the First Shard would cease their existence. Only question I really still have from the MSQ, aside from "How the hell did Nero get into Cartenau?!"

Originally Posted by ZhaneX

Eh, personally I just chalk it up to "Just how things work".

They gave up their mortal lives to become disembodied spirits in the Source, but I don't particularly see a reason why that existence would continue upon their return. Thus in returning, they give up that disembodied form, and pass on as normal.

Which is precisely why Ascians of the Source need to borrow bodies or risk disappearing into... Nope, Ascians play by the exact opposite rules, requiring a host to manifest only in worlds besides their own, where they can apparently come and go freely as aetherforms.

"Established rules be damned, we want to make it bittersweet" is just how this game rolls. And my eyes every time it happens, but meh.

I can't help but wonder

if the First's status as a void devoid of all life had something to do with this? Maybe its not just the WoDs that went to the Lifestream, but everyone that was in the first as well. Only that there was no Lifestream to go to causing the souls to be in a state of limbo until Minfilia reverses the situation.

If that's the case, it might explain the discrepancy a little. There would b e two sides, material and metaphysical, and the latter has to be recreated first to continue the circle of life before working on the material side. The reason being the souls are in a state of Limbo, dead but unable to reincarnate because of the lack of lifestream, so Minfilia has to create a destination for the souls to be converted into aether first and then recreate the material realm to give the new aether a destination to form.

tl;dr. The WoD are dead because the metaphysical side had to be recreated first, leaving no room for their physical bodies. A simpler theory would be that they willingly sundered their souls again to be reborn with the rest of the First or that the void thing meant there were no bodies for them back there..

About the WoD

I am also a little confused about what exactly happens with them. If they were able to use the echo like the Ascians they could just grab a corpse and live on, just like the sahagin that put his soul into the body of the other sahagin. Maybe Alphinaud did not know it better and assumed this and we will later learn that this is not true? I am also not sure why exactly they want to go back to their own world if they just die there anyway. It makes much more sense if they somehow end up being alive since they would be able to met their friends again. But if they stay death than they could have just stayed here. (And made sure that the WoL wont mess up like they did )

And its told that their world is only on the brink of ending like the 13th so it was probably saved by Minfilia.

About Mide and Alex

Maybe someone can say if I am wrong but does the ending of Alex mean that somehow Mide and her boyfriend are the founders of their tribe but at the same time somehow lived at our time too? Were they reborn and are still kinda in an endless circle? I mean they are born in our time, "die" there and are sent back and founded their tribe only to be born again later to start the event with Alexander? @_@ So in a way since they will always end in the past, does this mean that they will never be reborn into a better future? Or maybe its just something SE overlooked? This would also make the two the first true cases of reborn people. We only ever heard that someone will be reborn if they die from the scions but never saw it first hand....ugh my brain hurts

Originally Posted by Alleo

About Mide and Alex

It is implied that

The past for Mide and and her boyfriend is their perfect world/future. And they weren't dead. They were in the computers of Alex. Also this is but one of 3 stable time loops, the first being the Summoning itself and the second being Alex luring half the party into the past so that we would not be frozen in time and sent on a one way trip to the Lifestream

Originally Posted by Alleo

About Mide and Alex

Maybe someone can say if I am wrong but does the ending of Alex mean that somehow Mide and her boyfriend are the founders of their tribe but at the same time somehow lived at our time too? Were they reborn and are still kinda in an endless circle? I mean they are born in our time, "die" there and are sent back and founded their tribe only to be born again later to start the event with Alexander? @_@ So in a way since they will always end in the past, does this mean that they will never be reborn into a better future? Or maybe its just something SE overlooked? This would also make the two the first true cases of reborn people. We only ever heard that someone will be reborn if they die from the scions but never saw it first hand....ugh my brain hurts

I was actually so happy they did this.

This is known as a bootstrap paradox; a closed time loop in which something affects the past in such a way as to create itself with no beginning or end. Mide and Dayan weren't reborn or anything, their personal timeline just runs counter to the normal flow of time. They are born in the future and inevitably die of old age in the past. Their future selves that are born are just two people born completely normally, no reincarnation or anything.

To explain, there two different prevalent theories on the implications of time travel.

The first suggests that going back in time and changing something creates a divergent timeline (the new Star Trek films are based on this, as is the Stein's Gate series). This theory sidesteps all concept of temporal paradoxes by allowing every change to create an entirely new reality. In this theory time is mutable.

The second theory suggests that time is immutable, it simply cannot be changed. If you go back in time and 'change' something, all you're actually doing is creating the circumstances for time to go on exactly as it already did. Your interference in history is a predetermined event that ALWAYS happened. The easiest way to think of this is to lose the notion of time as a straight line. Time is not linear. All times exist all at once. A 'change' at any point is a change to the whole.

The Alexander story arc subscribes to the second theory. If you notice throughout the story we went back in time several times and every time we didn't actually change anything, all we did was cause things to happen exactly as they did. That is exactly what happened to Mide and Dayan. They essentially went back in time and created the origin of their own tribe, the Enigma Codex and the primal itself. Alexander only ever came to exist because of the legend passed down through their tribe, yet that legend itself comes from Alexander. The primal has no true origin, he is quite literally timeless.

As a small aside regarding Alexander I believe there was a rather meaty tease for the MSQ dropped in at the end there:

Dayan tells Mide that Alexander could see across all of time and space. He had borne witness to every permutation of potential histories (an interesting idea given that this is part of the mutable time theory yet the story arc itself follows the immutable, but I digress). There was a point beyond which Alexander could see nothing though: the point at which the WoL would have to make a choice. If Alexander cannot see beyond this point then the implication is that whatever lies beyond it is outside of time itself. The WoL is going to quite literally decide the fate of existence.

Originally Posted by Alleo

About Mide and Alex

The problem with time travel is you have to get used to fluidity in the flow of time. It's not too hard to grasp once you do, but it's like this:

1. Mide, Dayan, and the others are born in the (relatively) recent past. They assemble and summon Alexander.
2. The events of the Alexander raid play out.
3. Alexander sends Mide and Dayan into the distant past to live out their lives as members (or possibly as the founders) of the Hotgo tribe, taking with them Roundrox' Codex fragment and the idea of Alexander, leading to 1.

So, temporally speaking, our distant past is their future. It is, as Quickthinx says, a closed circle, just like with his attempt to make Alexander turn us into ash:

1. Quickthinx freezes us in time and tries to force Alexander to atomize us.
2. Our future selves, having been deemed worthy by Alexander, save us from being turned to ash.
3. We engage Alexander Prime and prove ourselves worthy, allowing our present selves to save our past selves. If we don't, it causes a temporal paradox that kills us.

Alexander did judge us, just as Quickthinx wanted - in the future - and found us worthy. So he was doomed to fail from the first. The "time is a closed circle" is really funny coming from Quickthinx, when you think about it. For a gobbie clank who considers himself enlightened, he sure is dim if he doesn't understand you can't change the past even with time travel...

As I said earlier, don't even ask where or when Alexander and Schrodinger / Shanoa began to exist. They're temporal singularities; there is no logical answer.