Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[kaynide]

So, there's not one but two waterfalls in the middle of the ocean. I know magic is a thing, but still. Where is the water going? How is the ocean level not dropping after however many years of constant draining? This makes me even more curious. lol

I mean at some point I fully expect the game to go hollow-earth-theory/underworld/Agartha at some point. I don’t expect it for DT.

Rather I expect the surprise zone to be the Dimensional Cleft a la FF5 (Hildibrand mentioned visiting the place with Greg after all…and Hildy often reveals massive lore tidbits…)

This also makes sense forward thinking for expansions as the cleft can serve as a means for dimensional travel and/or reuniting with characters from the first…allowing them to join the main cast or sunset others (like Y’shtola or Thancred)

[SannaR]

I mean at some point I fully expect the game to go hollow-earth-theory/underworld/Agartha at some point. I don’t expect it for DT.

Rather I expect the surprise zone to be the Dimensional Cleft a la FF5 (Hildibrand mentioned visiting the place with Greg after all…and Hildy often reveals massive lore tidbits…)

This also makes sense forward thinking for expansions as the cleft can serve as a means for dimensional travel and/or reuniting with characters from the first…allowing them to join the main cast or sunset others (like Y’shtola or Thancred)

Aren't we there already with the hallow earth? We can literally dig down through the mantel and end up into where souls go to wait for their next life. Or if you two certain ancients put on a show for the rest of the Aetherial Sea.

[kaynide]

Aren't we there already with the hallow earth? We can literally dig down through the mantel and end up into where souls go to wait for their next life. Or if you two certain ancients put on a show for the rest of the Aetherial Sea.

I’m not convinced that took place literally in the planet’s core so much as its own thing. I always saw the aetherial sea as the FFXIV version of the astral plane of d&d fame.

[Iscah]

Rather I expect the surprise zone to be the Dimensional Cleft a la FF5 (Hildibrand mentioned visiting the place with Greg after all…and Hildy often reveals massive lore tidbits…)

"Dimensional cleft" in the context of FFXIV just sounds like a mangling of "dimensional rift".

[Cleretic]

"Dimensional cleft" in the context of FFXIV just sounds like a mangling of "dimensional rift".

Exactly right, actually. Early translations of FFV (I believe most famously the fan-translation patch) opted for the Cleft of Dimension for the part that was later called the Interdimensional Rift.

It makes sense in that context; in V it seemed like the Rift was sort of the wound left from cramming the two worlds together, so 'cleft' was actually a pretty good term for it.

[kaynide]

"Dimensional cleft" in the context of FFXIV just sounds like a mangling of "dimensional rift".

My point was not so much what the name is, but rather that it would be a physical place we go to.

In a similar vein to how the void was originally visited in the raid series but then later locales were added in Endwalker.

[Iscah]

My point was not so much what the name is, but rather that it would be a physical place we go to.

And my point is that we've been there and it seems to be a non-place that you can't actually stay and visit.

The World of Darkness seems plausible from the start to have more locations in it, or certainly once we had the more detailed explanation of what it really was. The rift is different, being a space between worlds and was never a world itself.

[MikkoAkure]

Considering places like the Sea of Clouds produce water from nothing but magic (crystals), we need a magic place for water to drain before we're drowned by magic water coming from above.

[Anteiron]

The "problem" is that people keep drawing this flimsiest of connections to a line that is probably just paving the way for us to actually visit other reflections (plural) in the future. It also assumes that we're going to burn through all of Emet's sightseeing recommendations in a single expansion and leave nothing for later.

Additionally, after Y'shtola has put so much work into devising a way to cross the rift, it seems unfair to just drop the answer in her lap from a civilisation that already has it figured out.

What if it were Y'shtola's experiments that brought solution nine to the source? Maybe I remember wrong, but she was the only one we didn't see leave for the new world.

[kaynide]

Wellll, if we want to speculate on whether S9 is even around or not, some details "that are probably true" if we take what we've learned at face value:

1) Tural had been in a state of constant war up until ~80 years ago.
2) The capital city of Tuliyollal was founded by the current Dawnservant Gulool Ja Ja, who unified the varied "disparate" peoples.
3) We don't know if Tuliyollal was founded on older ruins that predate the current city-state.
4) One of the four claimants to the throne (who remains unnamed), sees the fall of the Garlean Empire as a reason to invade/conquer Eorzea/Othard/whatever.

Which raises questions...

If S9 exists and is known,
1) why isn't IT the dominant nation on the continent, or the seat of power if incorporated into the wider Turali people?
2) why would the "Evil" claimant wanted conquest, why choose to sail across the seas and do arguably a much more complicated conquest/expansion INSTEAD of just marching north?
3) and on that, why move their armies away so they couldn't defend against potentially aggressive actions from S9?

So...
A) it's pacifist/isolationist aka Sharlayan 2: Electric Bugaboo
B) it is "unknown" to the general population
C) something is wrong (cursed/frozen in time/dimensional rift/shifted in some weird way)
D) Exdeath? Exdeath.