I’ve had a spinfoil theory for a while now, that doesn’t have too much basis for it, but it’s worth handing off to the resident Rasputin fan here to see their take on it.
So, we know that Rasputin very much did not shoot the Traveler. He had plans to, and he was convinced to some degree that it would work, but he never did.
What if it wasn’t the Traveler he shot, though?
When he confronted the Witness at the Gate of the Garden like how we did, he got out of there somehow, and I don’t think collapsing into a heap on the floor for naptime would have saved him there.
First point is, the Lunar Pyramid is on the moon, same as the new Gate. I know the keyword there is ‘new’, but with how Vex stuff works, for all we know, once a place becomes a Gate, it was always a Gate, bear with me there.
Second, that would have been the same general area that Rasputin had LOKI CROWN pointed, whatever it was. We know the Witness didn’t intend on pulling any punches with the Collapse, so Nezarec could very much have been leading the charge straight against the Traveler.
Third, we know that all of the Pyramids are linked to one another and the Witness through the Egregore, so it could stand to reason if a Pyramid was disrupted, it could break the Witness’ focus, even just momentarily.
And fourth, we’ve seen how the Cabal can adapt to paracausal forces and counter them, and it’s Rasputin’s job to be paranoid, I could buy that he had the Traveler studied just for the sake of always having a silver bullet in case it went rogue. Keyword, singular, silver bullet.
What I’m thinking is, what if, during the final moments of the Collapse and Rasputin’s duel, he made the choice to redirect LOKI CROWN’s firepower at the Lunar Pyramid and put that to ground instead of the Traveler? Severing the Witness’ connection like that, even momentarily, would’ve been enough for him to initiate MIDNIGHT EXIGENT.
That’s a lot, I know, but I feel Very Strongly about Rasputin being able to stand up to paracausal forces in any way shape or form even if Destiny’s going to boil down to ‘Light and Dark Good, Everything Else Unimportant’, and thinking of him having a victory like that gives me a bit of vindication. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I can’t imagine Rasputin having anti-paracausal weaponry and not at least trying it against the Pyramid Fleet the way he tried everything else. Odds are good that Rasputin launched LOKI CROWN, or reused its assets under another name, against the Witness. He may have repurposed it into the SURTR DROWN mentioned as "in progress but negative effect." Keeping the Traveler from leaving would be a lower priority at that point than just finding something, anything, that worked. And if he did end up in a face-to-face where the Witness, let’s say, took offense at Rasputin’s rejection of the honor of Disciplehood, kneeing it in the balls with a nuclear warhead would be the best way for him to escape. But from what we've heard so far Nezarec's Pyramid was hurled into the Moon by the Traveler's detonation, and it’s not (yet) canon that Rasputin ever met the Witness at all. I'd like to give Red at least partial credit for the kill on Nezzy, but until we get more details I can't justify it.
I will die on the hill that Rasputin is too big not to be at least a little paracausal. If Darkness “comes from within” and the eliksni can directly manipulate ambient Light then I don’t see why Rasputin needs a permission slip from a beachball to go ham. Paracausality is fundamentally a matter of thought and will and Rasputin has both of those in spades. Arguably he’s never been anything but thought and will. And are we really pretending that a couple kilometers of ice is all it takes to stop a Worm God? Rasputin kept Xol pinned, not that glacier. He says he doesn’t understand it, but neither do Guardians and we manage just fine. Honestly I think the main reason he doesn’t use it is because his story arcs go very hard-scifi and the writers avoid the space magic. This season will put that to the test though and I can’t wait for the results.
But even without direct paracausality Rasputin can and should be able to step to paracausal threats. The Hive die to an orbital laser strike same as everyone else (even if they sometimes come back). The Cabal have built Light- and Darkness-suppressing tech, and if they can work it out, Rasputin can too. He also had some serious weaponry during the Golden Age, and not just "secular" stuff.
In the message outlining LOKI CROWN Rasputin discusses "full caedometric and noetic release," and in another lore card he’s moving an “annihilation-pumped caedometric weapon” into place. "Caedometric" is not a real word, but we've seen it a couple times in Destiny. It literally translates to “cutting-measure” or “to cut the measure” and I think it means weaponry that directly warps spacetime, similar to the Culture’s “gridfire”: damage done by invoking the mass-energy structures underpinning space. Caedometric weapons are also wielded by the Ecumene in its fight against the Hive - this is some very advanced tech - and said weapons are only authorized when the Ecumene orders “maximum theater overkill.” The potential for collateral damage is likely very high. They work, too: they can’t kill Oryx, but the Ecumene’s forces slay him in the material world often enough to force him back to his throne. Rasputin’s caedometric weapons are likely much cruder and weaker than the Ecumene’s, like the first nuclear weapon compared to today’s - but it’s still, y’know, a nuke.
Noetic weapons are for another type of battlefield. “Noetic” means relating to the mind or to knowledge itself, and this is Vex stuff: weaponized patterns that infect, corrupt, or just plain destroy the mind. It’s one of the contingencies covered in the Codes & Procedures handbook for the K1 Anomaly, which warns of:
NOETIC EVENT. A canary panel has detected a noetic event, including substrate-free syntactic replicators, adversarial inputs, oncomemes, Vex-type viral semiotic signifiers, and frequency-based heuristic exploits.
Oncomemes. What a fantastic word! “Onco” means “cancerous.” Cancerous memes. That covers a lot of memes, really. Rasputin had weaponized memes. He faced the Vex, and he learned from them.
So both caedometric and noetic-type weapons are a) very advanced, b) bad news, and c) part of Rasputin’s arsenal. Neither is explicitly paracausal, but both can be wielded against paracausal entities.
Paracausal weapons did show up during the Golden Age. When Elsie decides to shut down Clovis’ Vex gate by any means necessary, she goes to a research institute dedicated to the Traveler and secures a “topological thought,” an “irreal artifact of the Traveler’s Light,” as the core of a weapon to hard-crash every Vex on the forgeworld. Elsie Bray is brilliant and clever, and when it comes to paracausality it helps to have a mind driven more by the subjective than the objective, but if Elsie could hotwire a paracausal bomb in a couple days I think Rasputin could work out the same idea at some point during the Golden Age. The stumbling block here is the acquisition of said irreal artifact. “Irreal” is a synonym for “unreal,” but in philosophy has more specific connotations of being incapable of existing at all in this reality - not simply “unreal” like a unicorn, but “irreal” like incompatible with our spacetime. While Rasputin could requisition whatever he liked, he probably couldn’t make an “irreal” thing. A finite number of artifacts means a finite number of weapons, and if they all came from the Traveler that’s one of the only sources Rasputin couldn’t commandeer.
So if Rasputin did make paracausal weapons, he would only have a few. I can’t imagine he had a lot of chances to test them, and since it’s paracausal simulating it can only go so far. That would give him a small supply of unique weapons whose efficacy (and side effects) he can’t be sure of. In that case setting them up as a failsafe against the Traveler is the most logical use. The Traveler is the entity most likely to need paracausal weapons to bring it down, and if he has to fire on it then so many other things have already gone wrong that the potential fallout is the least of his problems. Hence this is probably the arsenal he deployed as LOKI CROWN.
In the end I don’t think Rasputin ever expected to use LOKI CROWN for its original purpose, and not because he had faith in the Traveler. I think he intended for the Traveler to intercept and decipher this message, or to observe and decipher his creation of LOKI CROWN, and infer his intent. His ultimate goal wasn’t to ambush the Traveler, but to threaten it. The operation’s real purpose is outlined in the same transmission: “Coerce pseudoaltruistic [O] defensive action,” or in other words, “Make the Traveler defend humanity.” Rasputin didn’t plot to kill the Traveler, at least not in this message. In this message Rasputin put a gun on the table and said, “If shit gets real, you’re staying here to fight. That can happen the easy way or the hard way. Let’s take the easy way, hm?” Rasputin doesn’t want to actually attack the Traveler, since that would both use up his arsenal and compromise its ability to defend humanity. But he also doesn’t trust it. He wants insurance in case it starts looking for the exit. So LOKI CROWN had to be a viable threat, but at the same time Rasputin expects the Traveler to pick up on said threat and be rational (or altruistic) enough not to force him to actually pull that trigger. And one way or another the Traveler did stand its ground. So at some point he likely took that system apart and threw it at the Pyramids the way he threw everything else.
