#nizari

However, because the devs want to expand this conflict in each of their games, and because they want to explore different time periods and regions of the world, this specific conflict rooted in the historical realities of the Levant during the High and Late Medieval period has been stretched out into this shadow war that has been raging for thousands of years from Japan to Britain to the Caribbean.

It's not a problem, but I think it's been very interesting watching this conflict transform as the story expands to meet the needs of the gameplay. It presents this weird alternate history where the historical Templars and Assassins are just one facet of this ongoing ideological conflict. The historical Knights Templar were named after their fortress on the Temple Mount, but the in-game Templars existed for millennia before that point. It's like that joke of two Roman soldiers wondering what their calendars are counting down to.

[image description: two versions of the same digital drawing. the drawing is of a fox surrounded by nine massive eyes, on a solid black background. both foxes are drawn with flat colors and minimal lines, except for their eyes. in the first drawing the fox is red with light grey patches on its chest and tail, and solid, shiny silver eyes. in the second drawing the fox is dark grey with light grey patches and solid, shiny red eyes. the surrounding eyes are the same in both pieces. they have shiny grey sclera and either red, black, or grey irises painted to look almost like vortexes. end id]

it's not for you to know but for you to weep and wonder when the death of your civilization precedes you

At first he passes it off as being worried about losing security because of his agreement with Ames, but at this point everyone knows what's up with the two of them, and they let him have it cause hell they're worried too cause Ames has, again, never done anything like this before, and in waiting at that airlock he's just pacing back and forth and back and forth until he hears that airlock open.

“They came into existence as a separate Shi community, around the middle of the eight century; and, in mediaeval times, they twice founded states of their own, the Fatimid caliphade and the Nizari state. “

(...)

The Nizaris, who are the mains object of this investigation, succeeded in founding a state in Persia, with a subsidiary in Syria. This territorially scattered state, centred on the mountain fortress of Alamut in Northen Persia, maintained its cohesiveness in the midst of a hostile envirinment controlled by the overwhelmingly more powerful and anti-shi Saljuq Turks (...)”

(...)

The Nizari Ismaili state, which controlled numerous mountain strongholds and their surrounding villages as well as a few towns, finally collapsed in 1256 under the onslaught of the Mongols. Thereafter, the Nizaris of Persia, Syria and other lands survived merely as Shi minority communities without any political prominence.

(...)

The name, or more appropriately misnomer, Assassin, which was originally derived under obscure circumstances from variants of the word hashish, the Arabic name for a narcotic product, and which later became the common occidental term for designating the Nizari Ismailis, soon acquired a new meaning in European languages (...)