User talk:TheByzantine

History of Wraeclast
Hey, I saw that bit you added to the History of Wraeclast page about the the flavour-text of the Waterfall Cave zone. Well-spotted, and good job! Screwtapello (talk) 10:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure if editing my Talk page will send you a notification that I've replied to your comment, so I'll reply here. If you want to converse via a less-awkward medium, I've put some contact details on my user-page.

Re: the end of the Vaal, they were certainly up to something that involved killing a lot of people; as well as Rathpith Globe, see the flavour text of Bloodseeker. Also, Eramir says the Vaal used Virtue gems... it may be a coincidence, but the motif of 'virtue gems + staggeringly high body count' is something we also see with the Empire's thaumaturgists just before the fall (Chitus gifting 'his favourites' to his thaumaturgists like Malachai and Maligaro), and also in Lunaris 3, with Piety and Dominus. It's quite possible that the Vaal were attempting the same operation that Malachai worked towards with the Gemling Queen, and Dominus is working towards with Piety and the Exiles (see the Open Beta trailer).

On the other hand, that's a lot of conjecture, and we don't even know if the Vaal's sacrifices and their gem-research were done by the same people (the Diamond Supporter Newsletter #20 suggests the Empire's religion was vehemently opposed to the Empire's Virtue Gem research; the Vaal are loosely based on the Inca, so if their human sacrifices were religious, it's possible their religion could have been opposed to their Virtue Gem research too), so I can't in good conscience write that they were seeking immortality.

My main point was just that nobody seems to claim to have conquered the Vaal, so their downfall must have come from inside (either a dispute, like the Purity Rebellion, or a cataclysm caused by a failed experiment) rather than from the outside (being conquered by barbarian tribes while weak from decadence, or diseases brought by conquistadors, or something like that). Perhaps it could be better-worded, perhaps the whole thing should be deleted until we have some firmer facts.

Re: the Oversoul's escape, it's fairly confusing. Yeena says "A vast creature, a thing of shadow. I saw it escape from a black prison and climb a man-crafted mountain, drifting up its four, sheer sides like the mist that reaches for the clouds. It gathered at the peak of that mountain and ate the heart from the sun." I think there's two things involved here: there's the darkness that the player releases from the Vaal Ruins, and there's the contraption the player fights at the top of the Ancient Pyramid. The thing you fight is not the darkness itself, because it's obviously at least partly mechanical, and nothing mechanical escapes when you push that big metal ball off its pedestal. It's also not "a vast creature, a thing of shadow", as Yeena describes. The other clue is that Helena says Maligaro pulled a similar trick, conjuring a darkness that covered the land (although presumably he figured out how to dispel it afterwards).

My hypothesis: the Vaal's thaumaturgists figured out how to conjure a darkness, much like Maligaro would do centuries later. Unlike Maligaro, they never figured out how to dispel it, but they did figure out how to bottle it. Later, they devise a kind of thaumaturgical mecha, perhaps as a tool for the afterlife of a king or queen, much like in Ancient Egypt, or if they actually were researching immortality, maybe as a vessel for an immortal spirit to interact with the physical world. At any rate, after the player releases the Vaal's bottled darkness, it captures the mecha, and then when the player destroys the mecha they also... somehow... dispel the creature that was connected to it. If I had to guess, I'd say the "Vaal Oversoul" is the contents of the mecha, not the mecha itself, and that it was called the Vaal Oversoul because of the all the Vaal souls required to summon it in the first place.

Of course, I've no evidence for any of that.

Screwtapello (talk) 08:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)