: I can't remember exactly. It was really just my own speculation and
: interpretation. After finding all of the terminals that night, I went to a
: website and also read the Legendary terminals, which are totally
: different. Most of them are sort of the journals of Mendicant Bias, and
: then Offensive Bias. Basically, I recall that after Offensive defeated
: Mendicant, he said that he was going to load up what was left of him onto
: some ships and bring him home. Somehow I made the connection that part of
: Mendicant must have been loaded into the Forerunner Keyship that was in
: High Charity, the one that MC stowed away on at the end of Halo 2. As you
: recall, in Halo 2 Cortana said something like "There's a construct in
: here, it's fighting back. It's unusually formidable." I think that
: was Mendicant Bias. I think that many thousands of years ago, an alien
: race discovered the Forerunner Keyship, probably the first Forerunner
: artifact they found. Part of Mendicant Bias was contained in it, just a
: small part of him, mind you. And I think it was Mendicant Bias who
: manipulated those aliens into destroying the Forerunner's heirs, humanity.
: The aliens eventually became the Prophets, and the things Mendicant told
: them eventually became their religion. Just a theory. ;)
omg i think you're right
this is massive!
it explains mendicant bias saying on one of the terminals 'the missing shard, they brought it back to me! now my reconstruction cannot be stopped'
so basically a shard of mendicant bias's consciousness was able to manipulate The Covenant species into finding Earth in order to activate the portal to the Ark and allow him to escape his prison. it's like Durandal all over again (except on a much bigger scale... hell, maybe MB even orchestrated the re-release of the Flood)
small theory i had though was that The Flood themselves were of AI origin, and the presence felt by Cortana was the Flood/Gravemind (on the High Charity network)
