#rambelles

here's a brief recap of the three fontaine world quests, because we're going to need them:

in the narzissenkreuz adventure team quest, we accompanied the tiny oceanid ann in order to save a "princess lyris", only to find out that she never existed and this was all a fictional tale—one, though, that has its roots in the real narzissenkreuz institute.

in the elynas quest, we saved mamere from getting her paintings stolen, and found out that she was painting with elynas's blood. a man named jakob ingold has been trying to collect this blood, and now, apparently tries to revive the dragon itself—for a cause that is beyond even the abyss's plans.

the quest with the institute of natural philosophy wasn't quite as plotful, aside from the fact that we simply were led to the institute thinking it was the narzissenkreuz institute, and found plenty of old records. it's also where the narzissenkreuz ordo's quarters was buried inside, and where we managed to unite ann and seymour to continue their story.

now, from the many ancient texts and artifact/weapon descriptions i've managed to piece a rough idea of what happened 500 years ago, which i will try my best to summarize coherently according to my understanding:

the narzissenkreuz institute, which had an oceanid as its director and basil elton as its vice, was a special unit founded with the purpose of protecting fontaine against the evils (of khaenri'ah, presumably). that being said, they housed orphaned childen. these included the mary-ann we see in "the real annapausis" (whose consciousness was transferred to our oceanid ann), alain, rene, and jakob.

it was said that "the director and her sisters went off to fight the evil at its source" (nymph's dream), which i'm assuming is khaenri'ah, while the vice director set off for the seas in the Sponsian ship where she eventually passed. shortly after, the institute was disbanded. before the vice director (basil elton) set off, though, she had entrusted the children of the institute to her close friends: emanuel gullotin and karl ingold (marechaussee hunter).

alain guillotin and mary-ann guillotin, taken up by emanuel, became marechaussee hunters; rene de petrichor and jakob ingold, in the meantime, headed for sumeru's girdle of the sands with karl ingold to research the remmants of the lord of amrita. (if you did the quest, you would've had "rene's investigation notes" in your inventory—which essentially describes what they've been researching; rene appears to have recently turned into a young adult, while jakob is still "a child", but they both sound... young.) it also seems that before this, they infiltrated elynas—in the investigation notes, they seem to be hiding their condition from karl; later we find that jakob seems to be surviving on elynas's blood.

sometime after this, alain guillotin is enrolled into the institute of natural philosophy where he researches (i assume) the mechanics of arkhe and pneuma-ousia annihilation; rene and jakob are also enrolled in there some time later. at first, they were working on the same research (alain's), until rene and alain eventually broke off their working relationship (noting that they, including mary-ann, still hung out together as friends), apparently having disagreed on something.

now we saw jakob ingold— which clearly means him having absorbed elynas's blood (and all those research) has somehow given him the powers of immortality, which rene and him had been researching in the desert; although it appears that rene has found a different way of implementing immortality. rene, in his "memories" as told in the book of revealing, discovered a way humans could surpass death by dissolving in the waters, their consciousness preserved even as doomsday comes (i assume this is how the water from the primordial sea came to be rediscovered after ages), and chose himself as the first test subject to be dissolved. alain, meanwhile, went off to establish the fontaine research institute that studied clockwork and created the meka we see roaming around fontaine now—i personally think the specific use of clockwork was intended to allude to the underlying goal to surpass their time. but yk, that might be overkill.

mary-ann's end, though, was never quite explicitly told. and in fact, the "mary-ann" we see in annapausis described the place in the book as her tomb, even though the story (whether the one we were going through, or the literal story you find in the fountain with the "statue of princess lyris") was unfinished. she might not have been a particularly "important" character in the history, but she was significant to each of the other childen— the various notes always expressed joy whenever they see mary-ann, may it be alain who was said to care for his sister (so much that he made her seymour), rene, jakob, even carter (alain's assistant).

this is important because, coincidentally, it resembles ann's role in the narzissenkreuz adventure team fairytale. ann was described to be their leader, a sort of mascot, among the team fighting against the fell dragon. and in fact, each of the characters we met resemble someone in reality: 'al' is from alain, 'ney' is from rene, 'jak' is from jakob, and 'mori' from seymour. (the others are... a bit complicated and i cannot yet discuss them because I'm Still Thinking, and that'll go besides my current point.) basically, the fairytale was literally told with the children as real life inspiration. (even though, of course, it was cut off quite annoyingly.)

then, it's worth understanding the tale to understand their true motives as well. the tale talks of the adventure team's existence essentially to help princess lyris to protect her realm and fight against the big bad evil, the fell dragon narcissus. narcissus was fighting her for "a treasure of hers that he did not have", and in order to help fight against this evil, princess lyris shared her time with her friends, time that allowed them to be ahead of the dragon's attacks. but in the end, the dragon still had the upper hand; eventually she trapped herself in the high tower, entrusting a treasure to the adventure team: a bright pearl of water.

common sense tells that this princess lyris alludes to the archon of their nation, egeria; the adventure team being the narzissenkreuz institute, while the fell dragon narcissus is the khaenri'ahn invasion. judging from this, then, it appears that the archon left behind this "bright pearl of water" as the last thing before she trapped herself in the high tower. and that's it— that's the end of the story, so we don't know how the rest of history went. well, except for the fact that the former hydro archon is, in fact, dead, and now we are left with a most ominous prophecy: of the original sin, of why it's exclusive to fontaine, of why the oceanids do not recognize their current archon, of why furina is exempt from this prophecy—and what she is waiting for.

i have so many questions, and no idea of how to approach them in a methodical manner—so i will first point out all the things that bother me.

i wondered why this problem is exclusive to fontaine. regarding there is a problem of exception mentioned in rene's notes, where the children's constitution are different from karl's; i still have no idea the nature of this distinction, only that rene and jakob's bodies are like the power of the sacred lotus (i.e., the former archon's power). at first i thought that this distinction may be the reason for them being susceptible to the primordial seawater's effects, but without understanding the distinction, it doesn't help in answering the question.

then, again, i wondered what their real motives was. neuvillette says that the former archon left furina with the prophecy—but it doesn't sound like a problem so much as a statement of what's to come. we don't know what egeria actually believed. but i went back to the final feast teaser, and found that egeria actually had some narration:

the original sin is the fairest: everyone sinks. make the most of the final feast, because for the sinners, the curtain call has come.

which certainly does make it sound like she sees them all as sinners, and that they have always been bound to sink.

the interesting thing is— this might not necessarily be a bad thing, no matter how we see it as a crisis. even the victims of the disappearances case regard dissolving into the waters as "relief" (vigniere from the AQ); even the people say this is just like returning to whence they came from, and mary-ann of the sunflower annapausis says that together, as one body of water, they can become strong. in line with this, perhaps rene's act of dissolving into the seawater doesn't seem so much as a radical act anymore.

i always come back to this line at the storybook:

"So, in Narcissus's story, I'm the evil villain?

it may sound like an innocent question, but a fairly odd one for a child to be asking. and i believe it says more than it seems. for one, i'd like to point out that narcissus is another term for the flower daffodil, which symbolizes rebirth—the narzissenkreuz also means "narcissus cross", aka, death of rebirth. which makes sense when you think that they're enemies of "the fell dragon". but why would they be fighting rebirth? perhaps because the narzissenkreuz institute were fighting the prophecy, which they, including egeria, perhaps, believed at the time to be a good thing.

i say "at the time" because, look at what became of the children. in essence, they became "villains". rene, for one, founded a source of the primordial sea, which was certainly what led to the current problems—and, hence, what would lead to the realizing of the prophecy. jakob is out here trying to revive elynas in order to use his blood to strengthen human lifespans, so that they can overcome the surmised cataclysm that would come? to turn everyone immortal? meanwhile, alain's deviced a way to subvert the usage of celestia's elements by making work of pneuma-ousia power. essentially, they are each fighting for rebirth, instead of fighting against rebirth. perhaps not precisely rebirth, but a way to preserve humanity, to subvert the crisis. even mary-ann, in a sense, had managed to attain this goal, by preserving all her memories—despite it being unfinished—in that storybook.

and in fact, perhaps that's also why the story ended there—because it was that point, when the cataclysm occurred, where the story's moral had shifted, and they had each lost their original intention to fight. because they then realized that they needed better ways of handling this crisis, only to have one of them revert to that crisis itself. tl;dr: the prophecy ceased from being a crisis, instead becoming rene's perceived solution. which is.... interesting, to say the least.

again, it sounds radical, but it may very well hold water. one interesting thing i noted from the canotila quest was that where we saw the dark power of the abyss in "the end of things" as predicted by the world-formula, canotila instead saw a nice place with flowers, etc. and when we were talking to elynas, he noted that "the things they (the primordial dragons) enjoyed were not things that humans valued". it's similar to this situation—two different viewpoints may see the same thing to be two very different things; either salvation or destruction. which then brings a lot of suspense toward the resolution of the AQ—what, truly, will become the best solution for them? would being dissolved save the people of fontaine? or would they find a way to subvert both the dissolution and the destruction? (obviously, it's probably the latter—the question, as always, would be how? to answer that, we need to know more on why they are subject to this sin, and that is not a question i can answer, despite this Very Long Rambling. i am most stressed)

but if nothing else, at least i've figured that the foretelling of this disaster is something that's originated far before the cataclysm, from egeria's time. perhaps it'd be something like rukkhadevata & nahida, where rukkhadevata had her own way of solving the issue with combating forbidden knowledge, but it led to a whole other issue, and nahida had to find her own solution.

one thing still perplexes me, though— furina's perspective in all this.

at first i thought she may be the "pearl of water" referred to in the storytale, since it would make sense that that's where the next archon comes in—but since furina is supposed to be older than nahida (as said by neuvillette in nahida's introduction), it seems unlikely. though it's always possible that this happened several years before the cataclysm, it wouldn't align very nicely; one would assume the princess trapping in her tower to be an event that took place during the peak of the cataclysm, so the life born out of the pearl must be sometime after that. but the possibility remains.

or perhaps one shouldn't take the story too literally, and assume she was simply handed the gnosis after egeria's passing—but why? who is she to begin with? and what then is the pearl of water that the princess left to the narzissenkreuz? it must bear significance, if it was left in the story at all (and something the storyteller felt important enough to be named after the child she was telling the story to, lyris). perhaps the pearl thing was only an expression, and it was meant to allude to the passing of her gnosis to the next archon. but of course, this is only conjecture.

furina's behavior... is perhaps simply a consequence of her original personality, under her circumstances. her personality aside, though, what would her woes we hear in the fountain mean? what does she mean when she say "interminable"—what, exactly, is she waiting for in unbearable loneliness? it doesn't make much sense for her to be waiting for the prophecy to come; otherwise, she'd have no reason to research it for so long, gathering intelligence, when she hardly cares for the nation's affairs. surely she wouldn't be waiting for divine intervention to come save her from her business? lyney and lynette note that she always appears to be "acting"—so what is she acting for? why does she aim to judge other gods? if she wants to prove that other nations are also at fault for "sinning", then wouldn't she need more time, instead of being impatient? nothing seems to add up with her. perhaps she wants to save everyone, but perhaps she is tired as well. perhaps she doesn't feel like she's capable of it, and wishes for release to come instead. is that what it is? who knows. who knows. it's impossible to tell, with someone with so many faces.... it's very interesting. furina is certainly a very interesting archon.