#originium

[na-na-namine]

I’m curious to know how many Endfield players actually care about the game’s story. Or have played the OG Arknights.

I haven’t played Arknights, but I’ve researched enough OG lore to raise an eyebrow at Endfield’s premise of corpos terraforming a planet with evil space cancer rocks, all the while the narrative and surrounding characters/npcs diligently partake in what is essentially unchecked colonialism.

They’re the good guys, btw.

EDIT: Observations and opinions seem to be divisive amongst OG Arknights players, from the comments to this post to further research on what long time players are saying everywhere else.

For now, I’ll just see how this plays out.

[wouldyourfavepaychildsupport]

Would Originium pay Child Support?

Yes

No

Voting ended onJan 10

[sunder-the-gold]

A long post where-in I try to form a loose time-line of Priestess and Oracle's history together, and try to find when, how, and why they clash.

The story of the two architects of Originium: One who wished to devour all of existence, and the other who wanted to toss a light into the future.

[sameoldgb]

It just dawned on me that oripathy and the catastrophes are such a great analogy for capitalism. It grinds people to literal dust, which in turn feed the system back. Natural disasters on such a scale that individual people or groups are powerless to stop. And society grew around it, despite it.

[day-at-rhodes-island]

I have a question for you (well many questions really, big fan of your blog by the way),

do you think it’s plausible that the Sarkaz created originium?

I ask for two reasons: First, in the “A Walk in the Dust” event (WD-7 after story) it’s mentioned twice that the special blue originium crystals were found in a specific ancient sarkaz ruin (and also that current technology can’t replicate them). Second, that smug sanguinarch goes on a tirade in the main story (11-17 before story) where he says that the sarkaz and everybody else have different origins and that all of terra used to be kazdel. 

This strongly suggests to me that any ancient sarkaz ruin was probably a teekaz settlement or something and that any super hi-tech stuff found within was teekaz technology. So my thinking is that if originium was created by somebody for whatever reason, it was probably them.

Excellent question! I appreciate the cited sources.

While the ancient Sarkaz did create new variants of originium (the diαbolic shards that were used to create Ifrit are another example), I don't think they created originium itself. Not because of anything that disproves it, but because I think there's a more likely option.

There is a different ancient race of people that has been consistently associated with supertechnology: whatever the hell Doctor is. My best guess (with the information we have right now) is that they were the ones responsible, and Kazdel came after.

[day-at-rhodes-island]

Everybody ready for another theory?

I've talked about how originium seems to be a form of grey goo, crystalline collections of nanomachines consuming carbon and heat to build more originium, but I don't think that's what it was intended to be.

I mean think about it, it's a pretty bad world-destroying weapon all things considered. It might get there eventually, but anything that has trouble digesting living tissues wasn't built to be an ecosystem devouring apocalypse.

No, I think originium was an attempt to create a different theoretical material. I think originum was meant to be computronium.

Imagine a computer of such monstrously vast processing power that anything could be calculated, and to build it all you have to do is feed it carbon and energy. Just stick that bad boy in orbit and keep tossing it material, let it power itself with solar energy and in a decade or so you could be well on your way to making a jupiter brain.

Then something went wrong. Anything that replicates can make a mistake and pass that mistake along, it mutates, becomes something you weren't expecting. One day a single particle made a mistake, made a single nanomachine in a crystalline lattice of millions incorrectly, and it started to replicate. It began to consume the structure around it, not recognizing it as more of itself. The imperfect crystal spread and fractured the once perfect whole, and pieces fell to the world below.

It burrowed into coal veins, blossomed in the heat of volcanoes, and airborne dust seeded catastrophic storms. Over millennia the originium spread further, changed further, developing varied properties and structures, imprinting information into malfunctioning processing lattices, and the people forgot what was once possible, forgot a time before they lived in a poisoned world.

[day-at-rhodes-island]

So I guess Kjerag is doomed to suffer a Catastrophe now that Karlan Trade is industrializing the country? Could the originium density in the atmosphere be a deterrent to space technology, from exploratory systems to satellites? I love your analysis, but as with anything related to this setting, I’m left with more questions and concerns than answers! Thanks for sharing your knowledge, experience, and theories!

You’re welcome! I have fun with this stuff and I’m glad other people enjoy it.

Okay so, first question:

That is what the theory suggests, but Kjerag might be fine.

Kjerag has never suffered a catastrophe, and while there has been a recent dramatic increase in the number of catastrophes, they aren't a new phenomenon.

The people of Kjerag attribute this good fortune to the divine protection of Kjergandr, which is certainly a possibility, she has been shown to have control over the weather. I'm inclined to believe that the Kjerag environment plays some part in this protection, perhaps the colder temperatures or mountainous terrain hinder the formation of the catastrophes.

Invitation to Wine takes place in an area that seems to be both mountainous and industrialized, so we may be getting some relevant information on this topic very soon.

Second question:

Terra currently has no space technology, as is evidenced by the lack of a global communications network. My best guess as to why that is is there isn’t a good way to turn originium into something like rocket fuel. They might have the tech to technically get something into space, but unless they can get whatever is up there going fast enough to be in orbit (the state of moving so fast that when you fall you miss the ground) they won’t be able to do much other than take readings of the upper atmosphere.

The theory is that the originium in the atmosphere is in its particulate form until it undergoes some sort of stimulus causing it to draw particles together into large crystal structures that then fall to the ground. I don’t think the particles would cause issues for a spacecraft, and you wouldn’t be launching anything during a catastrophe so you should never run into anything larger.

If there were enough of the originium particles they may cause issues with ground-based astronomy though.

[day-at-rhodes-island]

So, the new Rhine Labs manga has this in it:

You see that structure in the middle there? That is a line-angle formula for a napthalene derivative.

It’s obviously been drawn by someone who hasn’t done organic chemistry in a while (there's one too many double bonds in the aromatic rings), but the IUPAC name should be something like: 1,4-something-2,5somethingelsenapthalene.

Why am I excited about this? Well, naptheline is a carbon structure.

Which means my old originium theory just got some good evidence to support some of it’s central claims:

Originium is made of carbon, and carbon-based molecules can be used to alter its state.

It’s not perfect by any means, but a lot of the things in that theory have showed up in the game in some form or another (like how originium slugs can be used for medicine).

It just makes me wonder how much else I got right.