: The chaotic-being-thingy wasn't mentioned in the M2 ending; Durandal had
: Lh'owon evacuated because the Pfhor were about to destroy it via the
: Trih'Xeem.
Yes, and to clarify this a bit further, Blayne, you've taken information from the final terminal of M2, which occurs just before the Pfhor release the Trih'Xeem, and the final screen, which occurs in the distant future, looking back at events that took place over the subsequent millenium or so. The W'rkncacnter was never mentioned in M2 and your recollection of T'fear's reaction to the ensuing chaos actually came from the Infinity manual.
Sooo . . . the big question of the day is, did the events in the M2 final screen actually occur, or did the release of the W'rkncacnter in fact doom that timeline to ultimate failure? Although personally I have a real problem with multiple timelines (actually I'm a proponent of the theory that time is an illusion, but more on that some other time), I tend to look at multiple timelines the way they are handeled in Star Trek (with the one exception of the episode where there are multiple Warfs). Thus, all of the timelines must come together in the end or lead to dead ends. I think that Marathon canon, as fickle as it probably is in reality, probably supports the notion that events of the M2 final screen did occur. The Infinity final screen occurred long after that, Durandal was still clearly himself - not some weird merged Durandal Thoth entity - and he clearly never escaped the closure of the universe.
So, how to put all these things together? There are two possible scenarios - either the events of Infinity fixed the M2 timeline by containing the W'rkncacnter across all timelines (if they are transdimensional creatures, this makes sense), or the events of Infinity supplanted the events of M2 with the exception of the M2 final screen. With the first scenario, preventing the release of the W'rkncacnter allows the M2 timeline to continue as if nothing happened and, since the other timelines were generated by the release of the W'rkncacnter, they never actually happened. It's a bit of a paradox, but one that was exploited a lot in Star Trek TNG. In the second scenario, only one timeline prevailed - one in which the player was abducted by Tycho and in which the player ultimately carried Durandal's primal pattern after his core was completely destroyed. The player uploaded his pattern into Thoth's core, which is where he would have resided at the end of Infinity as Lh'owon's star imploded under Jjaro containment and the planet went cold. Since the latter doesn't sound too exciting, I tend to favor the former, which is pretty much what the Rubicon team did, although they did slip in a place or two by mentioning Infinity-specific elements in their scenario.
Still, I think that there is a lot that coul be done with the second option if you assume that Durandal and Thoth get a divorce and Durandal finds another ship to subvert and if you assume that the player's god-like status is only temproary, at the behest of the Jjaro. Nah . . . let's stick with option 1. However, because of the player's role in M2 and Infinity - I believe that I mentioned this somewhere in the Rubicon Volunteers series or elsewhere in this forum - the player would remember everything. Isn't that Ironic - Durandal has no recollection of Infinity, but you, the player, do? The reason that I believe that this would be the case is that your movement among timelines was facilitated by the Jjaro and made possible by your Jjaro implants. So at the end of Infinity, you would suddenly find yourself back at the end of M2 at the moment the Trih'Xeem was released.
BTW, Blayne, you may not have access to the games themselves, but you do have access to all the terminal and final screens. Just click on the logo at the top of this post.
