i always felt that the story from M2 continued seamlessly into Mi. the reasons why both the Mi manual and Ne Ced Malis are considered by some to be different timelines are circumstantial at best.
Mi manual:
the only discrepancy i see is about the final whereabouts of Durandal. he says "Lh'owon's second moon" [If I Had a Rocket Launcher, I'd Make Somebody Pay (Terminal 1)], Tfear says "a heretofore undetected station located in an asteroid field on the fringe of the Lh'owon system" (Marathon Infinity Manual). both this discrepancy and the fact that the commander talks as if he was winning the battle can simply be lies... wouldn't be the first military officer to be winning a war until he suddenly lost it, right? the important parts of Tfear's message are that he was going to use the trih xeem no matter what, and that using it freed the W'rkncacnter, turning time and space upside down in a chaotic mess in which our Jjaro tech lets us swim back and forth between timelines, searching for a way to put the genie back into the bottle.
Ne Cede Malis:
the only discrepancy between this level's term and the M2 story is this sentence: "It's too bad, perhaps if I could have delayed the Pfhor from using their weapon, I could have sent you to explore the ruins of Lh'owon, perhaps what you found would give us the answers that we now need so desparately: how to stop this chaos, the purpose of the station on which you're currently standing, and why the chaos hasn't come here yet." everybody's take on this one is that we did explore the ruins of Lh'owon, so this is a different timeline. but we only explored the ruins of one citadel, and we were searching for information about the S'pht'Kr and Toth, not trying to find "how to stop this chaos, the purpose of the station on which you're currently standing, and why the chaos hasn't come here yet." i believe what Durandal is saying is that with more time he would have sent us to explore more, to find other ruins, other places. after all we had a full planet to search, lots of possible old myths that could shed some light on the W'rkncacnter, on the station, on how to use it, etc.
so in my mind the thing goes like this: M2 story ends with us about to run away from Lh'owon with a demented AI and the remaining S'pht. Commander Tfear happily triggers the trih xeem, sees the chaos, sends a message ("we did our best, we won... until we lost"). the W'rkncacnter's chaos wave catches us before we leave the system and we end up (probably crashing) in a misterious Jjaro station while time and space start to misbehave. Durandal complains that we have no idea how to run this place, so we don our sexy Jjaro underpants and start bouncing around until things are whole again.
making any sense?
best,
yaco\
