Mad theory, given this and Vapnoople's declaration that there was immense power to be had on the other side of the dimensional gate: There's a very, very old dimensional rift here. The energy it gives off is dangerous to local life, like the untapped Dyne water was, but on a much larger scale -- the cursed waters. The women who would become the first Queens and the (early? first?) Great Cetaceans worked together to contain and tap that energy, both safeguarding four-dimensional life locally and making (some of) that energy available for themselves -- possibly by way of the mirror network for the Queens and something else for the Great Cetaceans, or perhaps the Great Cetaceans also have/had access to the mirror network. (That level of detail about the mirror network & its power source was never explained to most of the younger Queens, who just learned how to tap it via the network. That's the safe power source Lucrezia complained that they had.) That was at least millennia ago, maybe tens (even hundreds?) of millennia ago. The original builders of the containment system are long gone, the power source and the maintenance needs of the containment system weren't passed on, and it's been slowly breaking down -- not totally broken yet, but leaking at an increasing rate. Agatha & company and the Great Cetaceans are going to need to figure out how to repair or replace it. (Or close the rift.) The instructions in the Skifander room may be for exactly that.
Optional bonus madness:
The Brek'kah stone was involved in creating the original containment system -- as was the the first second-breakthrough Queen of Skifander. (Tekvari may have been that queen.) Both stones will be needed to repair or replace the containment system. Zeetha moving the local stone may have accelerated the breakdown process.
That haloed Queen skeleton was either one of the original builders, or a later Queen who knew enough to investigate & try to do maintenance but not enough to survive. (Dubious -- not close enough to the power leak.)
The Dyne water is affected by a similar but much smaller rift. Alternately, it's a related rift, and that the Queens are all female while the Heterodynes are almost all male is somehow related to the containment system, and the occasional birth of female Heterodynes echos the breakdown in the containment system. (Did the interesting changes to the local wildlife ramp up again while the castle's energy extraction system was down and raw Dyne water was making it out of the castle? Did this contribute to Europa being increasingly full of stray monsters, or was that very local to Mechanicsburg?)
Lucrezia, without access to the "safe" energy, was using a more perilous energy source. That's what bent and then shattered her mind, prompting her to go more and more cyborg, and also making it impossible for her to achieve second breakthrough until she could use Agatha's brain for it instead of her own altered brain.
This mad ranting needs a tie-in to the barrier between Europa and the Americas ...
Karl's assertion that "without proper mental shields that would have been a terribly bad place for one such as you" ("there" being through the rift/gate that Vapnoople went through) supports the notion that *if* Lucrezia has been playing with unsafe power sources, she's likely to've taken some mental damage. (Possibly also true of various Heterodynes over the years? Agatha's had raw Dyne water, but only the once ...)
On the other hand, Zeetha says Luheia was the first queen of Skifander, and that the loss of one of the Brek'kah stones predates Luheia's birth, so the speculation about Tekvari as a Queen of Skifander is wrong. Albia talks about Luheia as a Queen she knew personally, so if Tekvari or someone else from Skifander took one of the Brek'kah stones to use to contain the cursed waters ... she wasn't a ruler of Skifander, but she might have been a spark who became one of Skifander's pantheon of gods? Or perhaps Skifander's pantheon is (some of) the set of people who were involved in creating the containment system? Zeetha said Skifander's patron goddess is Ashtara, so if their pantheon is the first set of second-ascension sparks before the "Queens" convention became a thing, perhaps Ashtara was from Skifander -- or created Skifander? -- and Tekvari is from somewhere else?
Grah. I'm not actually expecting much coherent history from before Albia's time, but I really hope we get at least a basic description from the perspective of Skifander. When the story eventually gets there ...
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girlgenius_lair2021-11-15 05:13 am
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Mad theory, given this and Vapnoople's declaration that there was immense power to be had on the other side of the dimensional gate:
There's a very, very old dimensional rift here. The energy it gives off is dangerous to local life, like the untapped Dyne water was, but on a much larger scale -- the cursed waters. The women who would become the first Queens and the (early? first?) Great Cetaceans worked together to contain and tap that energy, both safeguarding four-dimensional life locally and making (some of) that energy available for themselves -- possibly by way of the mirror network for the Queens and something else for the Great Cetaceans, or perhaps the Great Cetaceans also have/had access to the mirror network. (That level of detail about the mirror network & its power source was never explained to most of the younger Queens, who just learned how to tap it via the network. That's the safe power source Lucrezia complained that they had.) That was at least millennia ago, maybe tens (even hundreds?) of millennia ago. The original builders of the containment system are long gone, the power source and the maintenance needs of the containment system weren't passed on, and it's been slowly breaking down -- not totally broken yet, but leaking at an increasing rate. Agatha & company and the Great Cetaceans are going to need to figure out how to repair or replace it. (Or close the rift.) The instructions in the Skifander room may be for exactly that.
Optional bonus madness:
End mad ranting. :)
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Karl's assertion that "without proper mental shields that would have been a terribly bad place for one such as you" ("there" being through the rift/gate that Vapnoople went through) supports the notion that *if* Lucrezia has been playing with unsafe power sources, she's likely to've taken some mental damage. (Possibly also true of various Heterodynes over the years? Agatha's had raw Dyne water, but only the once ...)
On the other hand, Zeetha says Luheia was the first queen of Skifander, and that the loss of one of the Brek'kah stones predates Luheia's birth, so the speculation about Tekvari as a Queen of Skifander is wrong. Albia talks about Luheia as a Queen she knew personally, so if Tekvari or someone else from Skifander took one of the Brek'kah stones to use to contain the cursed waters ... she wasn't a ruler of Skifander, but she might have been a spark who became one of Skifander's pantheon of gods? Or perhaps Skifander's pantheon is (some of) the set of people who were involved in creating the containment system? Zeetha said Skifander's patron goddess is Ashtara, so if their pantheon is the first set of second-ascension sparks before the "Queens" convention became a thing, perhaps Ashtara was from Skifander -- or created Skifander? -- and Tekvari is from somewhere else?
Grah. I'm not actually expecting much coherent history from before Albia's time, but I really hope we get at least a basic description from the perspective of Skifander. When the story eventually gets there ...