#I become more and more glad for how AMAZING AND THOROUGH the DF one is

[tmae3114]

RESET RELATED DISCUSSION MY BELOVED

@flavos-df​, this is actually the first time I’ve heard this theory in my time active in the fandom and it’s a really interesting possibility! There’s been a few theories about what the “closest match” that got merged with in the Reset was and I’ve seen “a starship” be suggested before but not the Mage specifically!

This got very long and way out of my control, so more under the readmore to spare everyone else’s dashboards XD Also I apologise for the wall of text, I was a lot more legible before tumblr took away my horizontal lines and therefore my ability to easily mark segments >:T Also also, I cover a lot of ground in here and I hope it doesn’t come off as assuming it’s all stuff you don’t know! It’s mostly just force of habit from uni, establishing my evidence for what I’m saying & all!

I’d say that, right at the start, there’s a couple of quick it-was-meant-to-be-quick-but-I-infodumped-at-length-about-specifics-so-they’re-quite-long-actually things to establish! For the sake of clear communication & being on the same page & etc!

The first is what my own actual stance re: the Kordana quests & their lore is and the second is that we do know for sure that Cysero and Sys-Zero are the same person and why we know that. And then, after that, actually talking about your theory that maybe Sys-Zero and the Mage were merged in the Reset! Because that’s a cool theory and I’d like to talk about it!

1. My Stance On The Early Kordana Quests

I feel like it’s only fair to establish where I’m approaching the conversation from, since the nature of human beings is that even when we try to be objective, our own opinions will bias our interpretations at least a little! That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing (depending on the circumstances), generally just a neutral one, but one to be aware of! So, y’know, letting you know what I think so you know where my interpretations are coming from XD

So, the Kordana thing!

The thing about the Kordana stuff is that it was released before MechQuest launched. Ruins of Kordana was released on the 7th of September, 2007 and MQ launched just under a month later, on the 1st of October, 2007. (The ninja version of the quest, The Hunt Begins, which has some additional dialogue relating to how the Wind Orb came to be in Kordana’s care but otherwise identical dialogue, released on the 30th November 2007, just short of two months after MQ launched)

What this means is that Kordana’s information about the Reset - and, thus, anything relating to MQ - predates pretty much all of the lore later established in MQ. And, well, it shows. Kordana describes herself as the “onboard Artificial Intelligence” for a “Heavy Battlemech” with “a crew of 251 humans, and 72 cordemi”. This is significant because that information in general doesn’t line up with what we actually see in MQ. Most mecha do not have onboard AI or large crews! They’re pretty much always piloted by a single pilot! Even starships that turn into mechs tend to have a single person crew aboard when doing so! Most significantly, though, the cordemi are a species we have never encountered in MQ. They’re not even off-screen allies, they’re entirely a non-entity. And all of those inconsistencies make sense because, again, Kordana’s information predates the entirety of MQ as a game!

Because of all of that, I tend to view Kordana’s information as a case of Early Installment Weirdness. It’s not retconned insomuch as it’s.... comparable to an early draft that was left in, imo? So I tend to apply that to what she says about Cysero as well! Yes, she heavily implies that he’s a starship of some kind but we can see from everything else established later that even if that was an idea that they had, it didn’t carry forwards.

My approach tends to be that if something Kordana said lines up with information we got later (e.g. the Reset is A Thing That Happened, reality was rewritten during the finale battle of the Shadowscythe War, Warlic may or may not remember) then it’s canon but if it doesn’t (e.g. implications of Cysero being a starship, the existence of the cordemi), then it’s not. Obviously, not everyone views it this way, this is just the way that I do!

2. Cysero and Sys-Zero are Definitely The Same Person

We have pretty strong evidence that as far as, like, consciousness and selfhood goes, Cysero and Sys-Zero are the same person. Cysero is post-Reset Sys-Zero. Cysero even, unlike every other person we know of other than Safiria, remembers being his pre-Reset self!

(People like Kordana, Jack Crescent, and Myalos, I’m not counting as “remembering their pre-Reset self” because they don’t have post-Reset selves the way other characters do. They came through the Reset more-or-less intact and more-or-less unchanged)

The short version is that I’m sure of Cysero not being a starship and definitely being post-Reset Sys-Zero because both DF and MQ tell us so and it’s been referenced in AQW as well! (Which is significant because, canonically, the AQW timeline is the result of the AQ/DF/MQ timelines getting mashed together in another timeline reset, though in an entirely different way than our Reset, which you may or may not have already known :p)

In MQ, during EndGame (when the Reset happens), the Hero of Soluna encounters several people as reality is reasserting itself. The following dialogue occurs:

<You>: Woah... Oh boy. Someone please tell me everything is really back to normal and you guys are part of some Renaissance fair. Warlic: We have been expecting you. <You>: Warlic!? Is that you? What in the world did you do to your hair? It got all... emo. Wait! Artix? Robina? Safiria? Is that.... Captain Sys-Zero? 

That’s the MQ finale itself identifying Cysero as Sys-Zero (how the Hero recognised him is a mystery, the only resemblence is the hidden eyes!) even if there’s clearly more uncertainty than with the others.

In DF, the most significant quest for this is CyseRedux, where we help Cysero break spacetime and bring a bunch of different versions of himself together from across timelines (y’know, as one does :p). These versions include his AQ counterpart (via implication, courtesy of mentioning being from “five years or so” in the future), his AQW counterpart (obviously, via the art style), a portrait in the background of real life dev Cysero, and...

...Sys-Zero! Who gets a dramatic entrance with his scarf flowing in the wind indoors and then an extended sequence where he and Cysero nod vigorously at each other and exchange no words. Which is then followed up by:

Lim: Cysero! Cysero: Yahoo? Cysero: Yo? Cysero: Ahoy-hoy? Sys-Zero: It's Sys-ZERO. With a Z.

(side note: I grabbed those screenshots from TheRuinedShadow’s playthrough because I didn’t want to go do the boss battle in this quest in the middle of writing this reblog :p)

That’s Sys-Zero showing up when Cysero is messing about with timeline counterparts of himself, the two of them acknowledging each other, and Sys-Zero then responding to the name “Cysero”, if only to correct the pronunciation for addressing him specifically. Additionally, CyseRedux was released in 2010 and EndGame in 2013, so this predates the actual Reset happening!

So that’s MQ and DF telling us that they’re the same person more-or-less covered - there’s a bunch of other little things regarding Cysero scattered around DF but hunting them all down would be overkill for this, I think.

Finally, that time Cysero and Sys-Zero being the same person was referenced in AQW! (I specify this bc the MQ timeline has been referenced more than once in AQW, iirc, including one time Cysero poked fun at Dean Warlic’s hair)

Back in 2015, there was an AQW release that involved running around Cysero’s house, and one of the rooms you can find in there contained this:

Which at the very least ties Cysero and Sys-Zero together but together with the MQ and DF stuff feels like more fuel for “yep, same person”. Especially since almost every other person who changed in the Reset, he remembers it, adding weight to the “never forget” scratched into the wall. The portrait of Sys-Zero is self explanatory but also significant is the “Yo-Da” drink cup there because we see Sys-Zero drinking one of those in MQ, on his way to Tibattleonia prior to getting caught by the Shadowscythe and nanovirused. Something like that is a personal touch, y’know?

3. OKAY, that’s established, now let’s actually talk about your theory

Nothing about Cysero and Sys-Zero being the same person actually prevents some kind of merge with a starship during the Reset!

The possibility that the files that got merged into Sys-Zero in the Reset were the Mage is a really interesting possibility, especially since it would explain where exactly his absolutely bonkers power levels game from.

In terms of power source, we know that the Mage, and more specifically the Reset, was powered by the Dragon Heart Shards. We don’t know much about them, iirc, but I’m pretty sure it was implied at some point that they were the pre-Reset counterpart to the Elemental Orbs? I haven’t been able to verify that so I might have just made it up but either way we know that the Dragon Heart Shards were immensely powerful, given that just one was enough to provide enough power to conquer a planet (the Planet Yokai questline in the Wormhole Saga). Even though the majority of the power was drained protecting the Mage from the Shadowscythe’s Doomsday Device and the subsequently coffee maker and actually activating the Reset, since they’re pretty heavily implied to be magical, there’s no established reason they couldn’t have regenerated over time! Plus, the Universal Backup was completed before they were drained, so they may have just gotten refilled that way.

Pretty much everything we know about the Mage comes from EndGame and Dean Warlic actually explains how old the ship is just before explaining the “backup for the universe” thing you mention in your original post!

Warlic: If you are seeing this, then the Universe has been already been destroyed. Warlic: You are aboard my personal Starship, the Mage. Warlic: This vessel was created in secret over the past several years for this very situation. Warlic: Upon detecting a galaxy-wide implosion the ship automatically teleported you here and entered a protective stasis field. 

When he references “the past several years” here, he’s specifically referring to years during the Shadowscythe War (i.e. the plot of MQ) so we know that the Mage doesn’t predate the war. It was created specifically as a last-ditch hope in the events that the war destroyed reality. And it wasn’t completed until pretty much the last minute, with Warlic actively working on it during the March of the Shadowscythe storyline (though nobody was sure exactly what he was working on, in-universe) and the hero having to fight Korin for the Dragon Heart Shards for it. And we actually know the exact moment Warlic completed the backup because right after the hero finishes their confrontation with Drakath about the Black & White Dragon Boxes and Lady Celestia arrives to save the Black Dragon Box, this happens:

Which is very neat because it means we know why the universe restarted at the point that it did:

But that’s me going off on a tangent. Whoops!

Anyways, with what we know of the Mage, there’s not much particular reason for Sys-Zero to have been closely involved with it. It was Warlic’s secret project, as far as we know, and the only person other than him we see involved in it is Char. Sys-Zero was much more active out on the front lines of the war, being a Hero of Soluna and everything. That said, I’m absolutely sure that he and Warlic were friends. They don’t get to talk much but what little we do see points to friendship for me.

If the Mage is the “closest match” that got merged with him in the Reset, possibly it wasn’t because of any actual similarity between them? Maybe it was related to how Warlic organised the files in the backup?

Anyone remember the Kordana quest in the Wind Orb saga? And how she basically implied that Cysero was a starship?

Am I wrong in thinking that Cysero was The Mage (Dean Warlic's starship)? Because iirc Sys-zero's starship was the Reliant, and I mean,

"A mage?! Oh, I see! What a clever idea!"

I feel like that would make more sense if, well, yknow. The Mage became a mage.

Wait wait I just remembered something.

The Mage was used to backup the entire universe.

Cysero is weird. Reality-bending levels of weird.

He does things that shouldn't be possible. Knows things that a normal person shouldn't. Way past the occasional fourth wall break to remind the Hero to read the name above the dialogue box.

A literal diety recognizes him as another higher being (listen I know Zeuster is weird but he counts as a diety in my eyes).

And people call him mad.

But how much power would it take for something to backup the universe? At that point, no sky could ever hope to limit you! And what would happen if that something with such immense power had to turn into a someone?

The only thing I'm a bit iffy on...

Why was the starship the closest match?

Well, Dean Warlic knew Sys-zero, dare I say they may have been friends. And we never really hear of The Mage before the finale, so we don't know how much time he spent in it. But he definitely spent enough time in it to build it into A UNIVERSE SAVE FILE, so hey.

Maybe Cysero was the AI aboard The Mage. Idk, some kind of sentient autopilot system. Maybe they were friends too.

Maybe that's why Kordana knows he would remember her. We don't know what DW and The Mage were up to back then after all (and Warlic is old af, this could have been centuries before the events of MQ), so maybe they went on a mission abroad and that's how they got in contact with Kordana?

Could also theorize that DW and S-0 had an inside joke between them that resulted in DW nicknaming The Mage Cysero, but who really knows. That's more of a headcanon than anything though.