D'ni Zoological Studies: More Zoological Discussions
10 January 2012
Checking in at the forum in readying to post my completed documentation of the Bluff Pelican hunting cycle, I see there are some interesting discussions afoot. DLordofTime and janaba1 have speculated that the Payiferen rocks have luminescent qualities, perhaps in the form of embedded crystals.
larryf58 says he found some blue fireflies by a lake in Kadish Tolesa, which puzzles me. I don’t recall ever seeing a lake there, just the puddles along the forest path and at the big lock mechanisms. I’ll have to ask him what I missed seeing there. I wonder if he’s seeing the same blue fireflies I found or if he’s discovered some other ones.
He also documented the Wahrk remains found at The Cleft and there is some animated discussion going on about how the skeleton got there. Here’s another animal I’ve failed to include in my photographic library. I’ll need to add it to my list.
Along with some of the others participating in the discussion, I’ve always thought the Wahrk fell through the rift when Riven was destroyed. We now know that in general, when things fall into the rift, they land at The Cleft unharmed as the Myst linking book did back in the early 1800s. So my assumption is that the Wahrk landed safely enough but died of exposure in the desert. Its skeleton remains intact and fully articulated to this day, so the Wahrk clearly wasn’t torn apart by the collapsing process the way the rift telescope was. The telescope still lies out in the desert as a twisted pile of metal, just as we observed in the records of Riven’s collapse.
DLordofTime remarks that there is a theoretical connection between the rift and The Cleft, though no one understands why; we simply see the connection as we land there after leaping into our Relto fissure. And the Riven fissure leads to The Cleft as witnessed by the various Riven artifacts we see there (the Wahrk skeleton, the telescope remnants, the Moiety dagger).
I’ve been wondering whether there is a Bahro connection with the rift. Whenever we end up in a Bahro cave, our Relto books won’t work and we must leap into a starry expanse in order to leave. So would the rift be something of a linking nexus for the Bahro? Rather the way we think of hyperspace working for space travel? A hub from which all destinations can be reached?
Deck 15 reminds us that Katran wrote how Gehn would throw rebellious Rivenese through the rift in order to see what happened to them, to see if they survived. Fortunately for us, his experiments were inconclusive. Nevertheless, I must assume that the Rivenese arrived safely just as the Myst linking book did (and just as we do from Relto). Perhaps they were taken in by some kind-hearted locals; at least I’d like to think so. If they survived, then perhaps there are living descendants somewhere here in New Mexico even now. I’d love to track some down and interview them. Surely there would be some family lore regarding their Rivenese ancestry. Perhaps they would even have preserved the Rivenese language, history, artifacts... It would be an amazing find and some fascinating lost history to add to our records.
Well, enough of this for now. I need to post the rest of the Bluff Pelican hunting cycle records. I’ve created the slideshow too and am posting a link in the thread.