I’ve been thinking about how the Infinite Forest is super underused and one really cool way to use it. Enter this strike concept: Skyshock Alert. Spoiler alert for Dreaming City
Osiris summons the guardians because of a massive energy spike, weird anomalies, and a firewalled section of the infinite forest that Osiris can’t access. After entering the Mercury gate, you traverse the forest section to get to a simulated world. However this time, you notice all of enemies acting very strangely, like the Vex simulation is nearly crashing. The past simulation pillar looks like it’s crumbling, and sections of the forest don’t seem to load in correctly. Once you make it through the forest, the simulation mysteriously opens and you somehow end up at a simulation of Earth, but at a very crucical time in the lore. Specifically...
The Collapse
The guardians have to fight through the minions of the darkness, such as the Vex or the forces of Black Pyramids. The Vex are simulating The Collapse, but such a simulation at this scale requires so much computing power because of the ontological forces at play. Quria Blade Transform, the Taken Hydra responsible for introducing the Vex to the darkness, mentions this in the lore entry react|choose|act (spoiler alert):
“While Vex cannot normally account for the paracausal influence of Light and Darkness, I am no longer simply a Vex. And where no elegant analytical solution exists, we may apply massive computational power to generate a reasonable facsimile. This was the approach used against Saint-14.“
So you fight through the darkness and face one of the darkness’s champions. Once you beat the final boss, the strike end at the moment the Traveller dies and you are forcibly returned to Mercury. The amount of computation needed to simulate the energies of Light and Darkness causes the simulation to forcibly eject non-simulated entities. After all, we know that the combined energy of Light and Darkness created the Distributary, a pocket dimension where the colonyship Amrita ended up and whose passengers became the Awoken. Osiris notes that the Vex could have just allowed the Guardians to be destroyed with the Vex terminated the instance and that the Vex possible created this simulation for the Guardians to see. The Vex needed the Guardians to know the nature of their true enemy because of what might be coming soon...
