Aiight, gonna try and live up to that self avowed rep as #1 troublemaker. Also try to keep this sketchy for the moment, and not get exhausted by my own verbiage / lack thereof…
No one imagined riding on the backs of dragons. Nor the idea of infiltrating a Tower with a dragon as your companion? However, these plots were all carried out by humans of the civilization in centuries past.
That is a very seductive reinforcement of the picture of the dragons “ending the ancient world”, and/or the Heresy dragon finishing a mission it had attempted before? Yet virtually everything afterwards seems more to constrain such notions…
It’s great to have something like official terms and clear motives for the Preservation Faction and the Technology Destruction Faction. It’s a curious read to me because it simplifies things almost more than I want, but at the same time it serves to generally confirm most of the fundamental elements I’d already surmised about that area of the Ancients’ story.
Though it is expanded upon later, the Towers? primary use was to stimulate the renewal of the air and surface of the planet, and preserve an environment in which humans could thrive and breed. As with the village of Zoah, for instance, the Towers would irrigate the forest, give ?blessings? (fruits and small aggressive life forms used as food) to the people, and attempt to continue existence.
This aspect in particular, directly suggesting the citizens of Zoah are nominally allied with the agenda of the Preservation Faction.
However, that is not to say that the Towers only granted favors to humans. There were also many aggressive life forms produced with the goal of preventing the excessive proliferation of humans by thinning out the population. This way, even if the human race produced a lot of heirs, everything would still be under control.
Almost eerily close to terms I’ve employed before myself, so it’s uhh, pretty much impossible for me not to grant credibility. lol
And it’s nice to have confirmation of what had already been suspected about the Tower distribution map. Representing a specific understanding after the time of Eins, and not necessarily comprehensive or complete. Some odd phrasing about the “strong will of the Preservation Faction” and slight confusion regarding the significance of the Towers’ assumed similarities in that first page stands out to me, though hard to say why…
On the second page, one of the main persuasive devices in my own big ass theory gets shot down:
These played the role of preserving and rejuvenating the soil and surface of the planet and were used to retain the moisture level of the surrounding earth. The second, known as ?ships? during the Shelcoof Incident (elaborated upon on P. 147), take on a form reminiscent of battleships as they float through the skies. These served to rejuvenate and preserve the atmosphere, in addition to possessing circulation capabilities that allowed them to suck in polluted air, purify it within, then release it. In addition, these Towers produced H2O, caused rain to fall, created the seasons, and preserved the oceans. What both types of towers have in common is the **production of bio-engineered1 monsters. On one hand, these bio-engineered monsters were used by the humans as a food source, **on the other hand, there were also individuals created in order to curb human overpopulation by thinning the herd.
Though I can hardly complain, as the whole of the material renders the need for that argumentation largely moot. It would appear that the main purification processes are carried out directly by pure-type systems; yet it’s also made more explicit than ever before that the Towers “produce” the same type of monsters that people will then eat! (and I laughed at that diagram of Shelcoof ‘pooping out’ bio-engineered monsters)
Some of the information pertaining to Azel is provocative, again without any overt new revelations, and again difficult for me to explain easily. It both reinforces that she’s special, but that she’s not… or something:
Azel was a drone (a man-made life-form resembling a human) seized from the Preservation Faction by the Destruction Faction and played the role of the device used to explode and destroy the Tower. She also possessed the ability to operate the path between the deepest part of the Tower and Sestren. Without her, it would have been impossible for Edge to set out towards Sestren, even with the dragon. The Destruction Faction may have programmed Azel with these powers in preparation for the appearance of the one capable of deactivating Sestren.
There’s a subtle deeper thread here, tied to the potency of the TDF (Technology Destruction Faction).
Even among the bio-engineered monsters produced by the former civilization, the individual possessing the strongest capabilities was the dragon. Both the Preservation Faction and the Destruction Faction were participating in its development, but there is no record of its large-scale production. The reason the dragon appeared during the Azel Affair is related to the situation during the latter days of the former civilization.
I’m seeing a strong indication that both these major factions were very equivalent in knowledge and expertise - something I believed before - and unequal mainly only in their numbers / support. On the surface this argues for the likelihood that Azel’s powers may have been further augmented by the TDF after they stole her away, but there’s still a great deal of weight behind the notion that she was a unique project from the start… and the issue becomes a little more agitating personally…
The Destruction Faction was convinced that the battle would end with the Preservation Faction?s victory and that mankind would fall into ruin at the end of the conflict. True to their conjecture, the majority of mankind went extinct, and all that remained was Sestren, who inherited the will of the Preservation Faction and continued to direct the Towers in their activities aimed towards environmental and biological preservation. However, at the end of the conflict, all that remained of the will of the Destruction Faction, who believed that ?the life of the planet and the continued existence of mankind is not something to be controlled by technology?, was formless criticism. This idea was successfully programmed into the as-yet-incomplete Sestren as the determination that ?the future of humanity ought to be decided by humankind?. However, Sestren itself discovered the existence of the program and removed it from its functions, regarding it as a bug. As a way of dealing with these circumstances, the program was also configured to turn itself into a dragon. The dragon is an organic life-form molded from the will left behind by the Destruction Faction during the latter days of the former civilization.
I don’t know how much it might perhaps be, shall we say gained in translation, but this phrasing again agitates. I still get an image of something metaphysical from it all, like some of the ancients are literally imbuing their own psyches and fates into these systems, if even in a collective fashion. Though here again the connotations introduced by Abadd’s mission and perspective can seem to clash with the generalized / abstracted understanding of this depiction. If things were not so simple for one faction, that also might apply for the other…
And I like the “mediator” angle for tying up a lot of otherwise scattered questions into a fairly unified theme, but it’s also the most challenging addition for me to process, as it spawns just about as many new questions. Like the fresh Sky Rider confusion; direct conflict with other assertions relating to the Divine Visitor; how and why the Seekers (presumably) would have this information; and… was Kyle Fluge truly a “juvenile”?!?
However, there remains absolutely no record of the infiltration and destruction of Sestren and the Towers by a single dragon. When a dragon appears, there is always a rider. But why are riders necessary? This is because there must be a human to make the decision put forth in the original goal of the program: ?Humans ought to decide their own path.? That is to say, the rider is a mediator that chooses the path mankind will follow. Thus, the dragons moved to destroy Sestren and the Towers based on the will of the mediators. As for surmising the conditions for the choice of a mediator, it is said that the selected person must be a youth who recognizes neither the will of the Preservation Faction nor the Destruction Faction, which date from the reign of the former civilization.
“It is said” by whom? I’ve come to interpret this manner of evasion of accountability, as a not-quite-direct invitation to skepticism. Perhaps even usually about something important, yet with a lot of haze over the details. So I think I should believe it, just not entirely as such. Like I want to know how/why they think they can say that much about that 2nd mediator, without apparently knowing anything else at all about him?
That’s it for now, and I’ll try to actually focus on some of the more dragon specific elements and reply in the other thread Solo.
EDIT: I don’t even know why I was using quote formatting, bad readability…