The lore of (what's probably) Eureka Orthos

[Cleretic]

So it turns out that the Allagan Eureka we saw in the 6.3 live letter isn't from nowhere! A fair few people knew this already, and it's actually explained by an NPC in-game. But since nobody had copied down this NPC's dialog out-of-game as far as I could find, I've decided to get it myself.

All of this is from the Expedition Scholar in Eureka. The Scholar's actually hanging around the home base of every Eureka zone, but mostly only talks about the aetheric wackiness of the island, or to sell you Aetheric Stabilizers in Hydatos. But in Pyros (the third zone) she's actually available to talk to you about the original Eureka, the one that our Eureka was named after. I've copied it all down here:

The first thing you need to know about the ancient legend is that there is more than one! Though, I suppose you could say that the various extant fragments add up to a single legend's worth of information.

Alas, given the myriad sources from which it's been compiled, what we know is full of contradictions. But what we can say for certain is that it was a grand labyrinth constructed in the twilight days of the Allagan Empire, in which weapons of terrible power were squirreled away!

I say we can say this for certain, but due to all the contradictions surrounding other details, most scholars have long since dismissed Eureka as a faerie tale deserving of no further scrutiny.

At least that was the case until the Seventh Umbral Calamity unearthed the Crystal Tower, which was also previously believed to be wholly fictional. After that, well, everybody stood up and took notice, including the Sons of Saint Coinach and the Students of Baldesion.

I'm glad you asked! You see, according to most sources, Eureka was buried beneath the Crystal Tower!

The tales sometimes describe the structures as being related to one another in some fashion, so when the Sons of Saint Coinach started poking around the Crystal Tower, there was an expectation that they'd find evidence of the legendary labyrinth as well.

Unfortunately, their efforts thus far have yielded nothing save an increasing certainty that wherever Eureka is, it is definitely not beneath the Crystal Tower. But hey, knowing where not to look is still a step in the right direction, is it not?

That there is the million gil question, isn't it? What wondrous and terrifying weapons of unimaginable destructive power could be contained within Eureka?

Untested Allagan prototypes with the potential to reshape the world. Cursed relics obtained by Archmagus Noah through a pact made with the rulers of the voidsent. Or perhaps sacred treasures bequeathed to mankind by the golds of eld! The possibilities are endless!

Alas, this is one of the points of contention upon which the extant sources do not agree. It may well be that the authors of these accounts from the Third Astral Era had no idea what weapons had been hidden inside Eureka, and so let their imaginations and their writing run wild!

I love that this actually has nods to both the FFIII Eureka, and the original plan for FFXIV's Eureka. For those not in the know, in the original FFIII Eureka was a hidden bonus dungeon, which contained both a bunch of bosses and the game's strongest jobs, Sage and Ninja. If you want to check it out now, it is in the pixel remaster, but isn't in the 3D version.

We've learned over time that there was a plan for a Eureka similar to that original in FFXIV; it was apparently what Nero's wrist communicator/detector thing blipping at the end of the Crystal Tower was originally supposed to be a hook for. We don't know what sort of content this original Eureka would've been, just that it was going to be located under the Crystal Tower.

And, for what it's worth: the name 'Orthos' was one of the alternative spellings of what's now commonly called Orthros, a two-headed dog from Greek and Roman myth; child of Echidna and Typhon and brother of Cerberus, it was killed as part of the Labors of Hercules. Orthros has never faithfully appeared in Final Fantasy, but the name was likely-mistakenly given to Ultros in a few early translations. Not sure how much any of that could matter--FFXIV very rarely does faithful mythical adaptations--but I do notice that with the exception of Hercules, every character I mentioned in this paragraph appears in FFXIV as a voidsent. A pattern of importance? Who knows, at this point.

[sidurgu-12]

So in a way eureka orthos is an allagan pandaemonium? Given their founders and fandanial i can see it.

[Cleretic]

So in a way eureka orthos is an allagan pandaemonium? Given their founders and fandanial i can see it.

More accurately I think it's supposed to be Allagan Baldesion Arsenal, as it's explicitly a weapon vault rather than a zoo or a lab. Granted we're looking at the Allagans here, who love them some horrible biological crimes against nature, so it's entirely possible that all three of those things look effectively identical.

[Lyth]

Thanks for posting the background information on this. Orthos was probably just a research facility designed to extract out the power from Eureka, similar to the ones we've seen for the other Third Astral primals that Allag captured. Perhaps the Allagans had devised a means to replicate Eureka's ability to produce weapons that evolve and grow in strength with the user, this time of i620-i630 quality.

Did they ever say where Galuf actually found the primal in the first place before it ended up on the Isle of Val? I know that they were ultimately contained on the Isle of Val, but that might not have been the starting point. The Crystal Tower itself was well buried after the Fourth UC to begin with, so escaping Orthos would have been quite a feat.

[kaynide]

Interesting; considering the Crystal tower acts as a sort of huge mana battery to…conduit.. between the void and source, it would not surprise me to learn they were making weapons using voidsent…along the lines of the Diabolos Armament.

In fact, given the text on the Diabolos Armament Triple Triad card, I would theorize it to be a foundry to produce void-powered warmachina, with the intent to use them to fight the dragons way back when.

Card text for reference, bolded bits for ease of reading:

Eikons were perhaps one of the greatest threats to the Allagan Empire, and the Allagans devoted a great deal of their resources to two primary means of combating them. The first were warmachina akin to the Ultima Weapon, designed to feed on the very life force of the Eikons they were built to destroy. The second were biological weapons resembling the recently unearthed Diablo Armament, designed to harness the power of entities from the void.

The Allagans had long believed the voidsent could make for powerful thralls. However, there were two key obstacles to their weaponization.

Firstly, there was the matter of preparing a suitable host. The strength of the voidsent one may summon is largely dictated by the vessel it will occupy. The entity that might inhabit the corpse of a coeurl, for example, would be several orders of magnitude weaker than one inhabiting the corpse of a behemoth.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, was the unpredictable nature of voidsent and their need to feast on aether. A binding spell could be cast at the time of their summoning to subjugate them, but the efficacy of these incantations drops significantly when employed against the higher echelons of voidsent.

In short, the Allagans required immeasurably powerful hosts and an equally potent means of binding these creatures to their will. Neither could be obtained through natural means, and so, as one might expect, the Allagans turned to science for solutions.

In the end, they chose to use genetically augmented components to create what they believed to be the perfect host, paired with the restraints used to imprison Meracydian dragons.

The weapon discovered in Zadnor was in all likelihood an interim vessel for Diabolos, a demonic voidsent believed to occupy the second rung of the voidal hierarchy. It would not be easily summoned, much less bound, and so researchers speculate it could not have been encountered until after Emperor Xande formed the pact which opened a gateway to the World of Darkness. Moreover, it is quite possible the ancient Allags intended to unleash this chimeric monstrosity upon the fledgling nation of Bozja to test its capabilities.

Though we but glimpsed its power, it appears the Allagans succeeded in creating a formidable addition to their arsenal, perhaps even comparable to the Ultima Weapon. It remains to be seen if more such weapons lie buried beneath the plateaus of Zadnor.

This leads me to ask
1) what is the base creature required for such a powerful voidsent…are the allagans using dragons?
2) is this place the foundry of such creations
3) do they take further inspiration from Heracles, such as Geryon..who guarded the island Orthos the dog lives annnnnd
4) The island Geryon/Orthos/etc lives is called Erythia (air-ee-thee-ah) is pronounced verrrrry similarly to Eureka. Certainly closer than the Bahamut/Dalamud switch.
5) Erythia means, in Greek, “The Red One”… Dalamud connection?
6) “ Erytheia was also the place where, according to one account, the sun god Helios kept his sacred cattle when the Giant Alcyoneus stole them during the Gigantomachy.” Helios ..an Ascian!? Sacred cattle are the warmachina!? Or perhaps the biological creations to host the voidsent?

also me:

[Iscah]

3) do they take further inspiration from Heracles, such as Geryon..who guarded the island Orthos the dog lives

Geryon is the name of the hecatoncheir midboss in the Sil'dihn Subterrane, so I doubt they'd be planning to use it for something else significant so soon. But in any case...

And, for what it's worth: the name 'Orthos' was one of the alternative spellings of what's now commonly called Orthros, a two-headed dog from Greek and Roman myth

I suspect you are going for a more obscure take than what is intended – orthos meaning "straight, upright, correct", thus "true Eureka".

[Lyth]

...

I think this is slightly different. The Allagan 'Weapons' were designed to absorb primals using auracite and utilize their energy. The Garleans later reverse engineered this using synthetic auracite to expand on the original concept. A spin-off to the Allagan Weapons project was to utilize chimeric technology (i.e. genetic engineering) to create 'Weapons' that were partially biological, so that more powerful Voidsent could use them as vessels to be summoned into our world (without having to tear open a large Voidgate or 'Hollow' for them to enter directly). The Diabolos Armament is the one example that we have so far. This is similar to Gargoyles simply using statues as vessels to come across the rift.

Eureka is a primal that makes weapons, with Zantetsuken being the most well known example. The role of this zone would depend on what sort of experimentation the Allagans did on Eureka, be it creating an arsenal of weapons, as a battery like they did with Bahamut and Dalamud, or something completely different.

[SilverArrow20XX]

If you want to check it out now, it is in the pixel remaster, but isn't in the 3D version.

It is. You just don't get Sage and Ninja there, as they were moved to the Earth Crystal.

[Fenral]

I only ever made it to the second zone of Eureka, because it was so tedious, so never had a chance to talk to said scholar in said location. Of course further details would be buried in there somewhere.

So where is it, then? And what's the hook, since the logical starting point, Heaven-on-High, isn't required? Perhaps we'll get a combo quest once you've beaten story mode on both? Hopefully clearing the whole-whole thing isn't made mandatory, since I'm always the odd-man-out for 4-man content.

[Cleretic]

I suspect you are going for a more obscure take than what is intended – orthos meaning "straight, upright, correct", thus "true Eureka".

God damnit, of COURSE it's a pun! Lesson learned, always start with the assumption it's a pun before going further.

It is. You just don't get Sage and Ninja there, as they were moved to the Earth Crystal.

And thanks for the correction here! It's been a LONG time since I played the 3D remake, and I think I might've missed it when I did.