#drushka

[atwas-gaming]

Finally finished Axiom Verge 2. Man, that in-an-out of The Breach game mechanic was confusing. Spoilers ahead, and be warned: these are only initial reactions. I could be wrong about everything I'm about to say. I need time to fully analyze all the notes and dialogue.

So, uh... wow. Is Indra who I think she is???

Neither of these is mine.

She's looking for a Patternmind to be able to get back into the Breach, she wanted to change her name, she loves Shakespeare, and the game started with Indra drowning, which Ophelia from Hamlet is famous for (suicide by drowning, that is).

The question I still had was, how did she get so BIG? She was still only as tall as a normal human, but the Rusalki are HUGE. Then I remembered the faceless Rusalka we saw in The Emergence:

So, maybe Drushka or Damu or both of them together put Indra into this thing.

But more importantly, I'm questioning everything that Ophelia told Trace even more (although I was already skeptical). Ophelia said she used a Scry to find Trace so he could stop Athetos. But what they actually did was to build a pre-Athetos version of Trace from the nanogates left behind in the first rebirth chamber that Trace used on his first visit to Sudra.

This is how Ophelia knew about the Scry. But she didn't need to use the Scry to find Trace and use him, they already had him. They built him from the nanogates:

My understanding from all this is that Ophelia was going to go into the Breach with the Scry to get Trace, but Katrahaska stopped her. Ophelia killed Katrashaska, took the nanogates, and used them to build Trace with a rebirth chamber.

So what Ophelia told trace about the Scry and going into the Breach was half the truth. The other half is that it didn't work. Ophelia said they "extracted" Trace from the Breach. Well... they did "extract" him, in a way, but not from The Breach, just from pre-Athetos DNA.

So, even though Ophelia may be the least manipulative of the Rusalki, she's still not to be trusted. Not too surprising, when you know the kind of character that Indra was. But then again, perhaps Ophelia simply can't say too much with the other Rusalki listening. After all, none of them know who or what she really is or where she came from, and it's clear that Veruska thirsts for an opportunity to destroy her.

One thing's for certain: in the AV1 note "The Outsider," they mention "Drushka's obvious interest in her." Indra went to Drushka for help to get into The Breach. I'd thought "The Outsider" was referring to Elsenova, because she's manipulative, and both Veruska and Ophelia don't seem to fully trust her. But... no. "The Outsider" was actually Ophelia.

I'm going to have to analyze the notes in both games and see what's really going on, not just about Ophelia. For instance, Trace left a note in Eridu that he was going to go "upstream, to the Filter or beyond"- well, we found the Filter in AV2, and Hammond and Samara "beyond" the Filter, although we couldn't get to them. Trace went "beyond" that, then?

And I still have no clue how Trace- the original Trace, the one that turned into Athetos- went from wanting to protect the universe, just as Hammond and Indra have tried, to the monster Athetos who mass-murdered an entire race to get to the source. I know the notes say he wanted to find the "root," but to murder an entire world? But if he wanted to go "beyond" the filter, then he was looking for a way to get to that place where Hammond and Samara were locked away. I still see no excuse for mass genocide; but at the same time, I have trouble believing that he was a power- and knowledge-thirsty beast who would kill anyone who got in his way. Athetos himself told Trace that he could only provide a portion of his reasoning, or the Rusalki would kill Trace, too.

I do know this much, tho: I need AV3, stat!

[wildragon]

AV2 sprites exploration

So I dig in Axiom Verge 2 files in hope to find unused content. Beware here will be spoilers!

- First, Indra. In the last part of the game her original body dies and her “original self” too, leading to the secret ending where she find her daughter in the after world and take her in her arms. In this scene, Indra is of course in her orginal body, but there’s also sprites of this with “Nano” Indra.

Original:

Nano:

- I don’t know why, but Drushka have 3 different spritesheets

- Drushka’s soldiers are named “EmergenceSoldier“ in the files

- Some E3 demo “Save Labels”

- Few things from AV1 are here like the Axiom Disruptor menu, used as place holder I guess

- Also a cutscene?

- But most interesting AV1 left-over is Elsenova! While few parts are missing (head, body segments and canon) a sprite named “capsule” is here and not in AV1.

And that’s all for now. Sadly I didn’t find Trace in the files :(

[timeclonemike]

Axiom Verge 2: Here We Go Again

So Axiom Verge 2 came out not long ago, but I don’t have a Switch and I don’t trust the Epic Games Store. Rather than wait and possibly get spoiled, I bit the bullet and watched a Let’s Play.

Consequently I can now build on this post. Cutting for length and spoilers right about here.

The Filter: The biggest revelation that AV2 provides is a refinement of the multiverse theory, plus defining some terms from the original game. Trace’s note next to his wheelchair mentions going upstream to the Filter or beyond for answers. As it happens, “upstream” refers literally to the Worldstream, and different universes are connected to each other in a serial fashion. The terminology used to describe the connections is upstream and downstream, with upstream leading towards the Source Worlds that are the progenitors of all other universes. Likewise, the Filter refers to worlds in the worldstream that function as firewalls and safety mechanisms to keep disruptive influences from downstream worlds from traveling too far up, since disrupting one world can damage all of the worlds downstream from that world.

We even get to see the Worldstream or some analog to it when Indra (the protagonist of Axiom Verge 2) travels to the Filter world upstream of Kiengir (which is either upstream of or parallel to Earth) and the background of the rooms is a MASSIVE fractal pattern originating from / coalescing into a singularity off in the distance.

There are also some notes from Trace to Dr. Hammond, his research partner in the cutscene for the first game who took Trace’s revolutionary theory and turned into a way to make Faster Than Light communication and computing technology. Dr. Hammond also finds herself in a unique position to test one of the possibilities implicit in Trace’s theory, namely if the existence of an afterlife is somehow accounted for in the multiverse. One of the notes in the first game says that different instances of a person across the multiverse can survive events that their counterparts do not, but that the survivors have no idea that they even have a counterpart who died.

What happens in the second game is more about what happens to the ones that didn’t make it, because Dr. Hammond is communicating with Indra through the prototype superluminal communicators (called ansibles) scattered here and there, but Indra can also find Hammond’s body and a suicide note in some of Kiengir’s ruins. Dr. Hammond refers to where she is as a sort of “detention center” that she needs Indra’s help to escape from, and this help involves hacking the control computer in the Filter world. An earlier message at an ansible mentions data throttling, which seems to refer to the memory limitations of the ansible prototypes themselves; they can only send so much data over their operational lifetimes.

Except there’s Trace’s original paper and the axioms he starts with, where reality is described as algorithms running a universal / multiversal simulation, and cognition is a sub-algorithm within the parent algorithm. Put it all together and the game all but states that there is an afterlife, but it operates on the same rules as life - it’s an adjacent or related universe to our own and minds / spirits / souls / cognitive algorithms can migrate between those universes under certain conditions even if the material body they used to pilot is no longer functional. At least, that’s what normally happens, but for some reason the transmigration of souls was limited or stopped or throttled. It’s semi-implied but never explicitly stated that there’s a trans-universal system in place to keep the Worldstream stable, and the Lamassu computer network that controls Kiengir is part of that network, and the fact that realities are starting to glitch and break down further implies that this system is damaged or overwhelmed.

Trace’s Motivations: Trace never shows up in the game, and only gets mentioned here and there in a few notes. The game takes place in the 2050s and Trace’s lab accident was in 2005, with Dr. Hammond starting Hammond Corp and making money hand over fist in 2007 by selling the world zero-latency computing technology. Hammond’s suicide note explains that Trace was already exploring the Breach before she started her company, but she hasn’t heard from him in decades and the entire antarctic expedition was just so she could try to find him again. She mentions a few things in passing that come up in the first game, like a device called a Scry that can locate anything in the multiverse, and the term PatternMind which Trace was but Hammond was not.

By itself, this would seem to imply that we don’t know anymore about what Trace saw or experienced that turned him from a pacifist to somebody willing to commit genocide. But there’s another factor in play, one that has nothing to do with Trace at all at first glance.

At a certain point in the game, Indra gets stuck in her alternate drone form until she finds the right upgrade to become human (well, humanoid) again. She can still communicate with people, such as the survivors from Hammond Corp’s expedition and one of the Kazakh members of a Russian expedition that came through the portal and decided to settle a world upstream of Kiengir. However, coming back to revisit those areas and talk to those survivors later may result in them not being in the same spot anymore. Instead, there’s a sort of flying enemy that looks like a miniature version of the first boss of Axiom Verge. People who examined the game’s code found that there is actually an “infection” mechanic involved based on time elapsed since Indra comes in contact with the survivors.

That the survivors turn  into the types of monsters we see in Axiom Verge 1 is significant on its own, but it takes on more importance when we consider the endgame cutscenes. The Kazakhs have settled and colonized an upstream world, while a few of them are staying in an adjacent world where time passes differently; this is explicitly so that they can observe and track the changing of society over long spans of time and direct its evolution. After beating the final boss, Indra decides to team up with Drushka, the leader of the Kazakhs and a name mentioned in one of the notes found in Axiom Verge 1, in order to further her own goals.

Here’s the thing: What we see of the world that Drushka is standing watch in, called The Emergence, looks so similar to what we’ve seen of Sudra as to be almost identical. Given how time is explicitly stated to pass at different rates in different parts of the Breach compared to the worlds in the Worldstream, it isn’t out of the question that the Kazakhs were the ancestors of the Sudrans. The only problem with this theory is that long before anyone from earth showed up in Kiengir, the Lamassu had upstream technology brought in to allow the locals to defend themselves, as part of its broader directive to safeguard the Worldstream from disruption. Some of this technology included Rebirth Chambers - Indra even accesses the Filter through one - which was later destroyed to prevent too much cultural contamination. That technology had to come from somewhere, so either the Kazakhs inhabited a world adjacent to Sudra or downstream from it so there were similarities in art and culture and architecture, or the Rebirth Chambers and other advanced technology were themselves brought to Sudra from upstream worlds and simply shut down rather than completely destroyed after the Sudrans nearly wiped themselves out.

In either case, the important part is how Indra is subtly implied to be some sort of nanotech Typhoid Mary. She might be the actual source of the Pathogen that wipes out Sudra, not Athetos. In hindsight there is a hint to this effect in the first game because after Trace starts getting sick and hallucinating, there is a Rusalki called Ophelia that saves him. He doesn’t have any symptoms for the rest of the game, implying he is cured. If it was something unique to Trace that made him immune, he wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place and neither would Athetos. Same with him getting better, if Trace could do it so could the original. So it had to be something unique to Ophelia that she couldn’t - or wouldn’t - do for anyone else.

And during Axiom Verge 2′s credits, we see a detailed close up look of Indra’s nanotech-enhanced body. The face and head look a LOT like Ophelia. Not conclusive by itself, but too similar to be completely shrugged off as coincidence.

And that has got me thinking.

I ended my first post pondering what Trace could have found in the Breach or while traveling the multiverse that caused a pacifist scientist to turn to genocide to achieve his ends. It’s possible that nothing could, because he didn’t. Maybe Athetos didn’t release the pathogen on Sudra, the Rusalki did; it’s shown in the notes that they resented the way that the Sudrans crippled them and reduced them basically to talking heads, but still had some influence over what was going on either through manipulating the priests or through exchange of data that the Sudrans were unaware of or incapable of understanding.

Athetos refers to the Rusalki as masters of war just before the final battle of Axiom Verge 1. He might have shown up at Sudra thousands of years prior to the events of the game as Trace, gotten healed, traveled up to the Filter to try to learn more, and then come back after the flow of time had changed to find a civilization on the verge of collapse from a virulent contagion that turned people into monsters. Trace may be a pacifist, but he will still use the Axiom Disrupter and all of its bells and whistles to protect himself in game. It’s entirely possible that the original realized that the Rusalki were trying to escape Sudra and would cause devastation throughout the Worldstream, and he applied his knowledge to create weapons and tools to turn himself into a one man army once he realized he couldn’t cure the pathogen. (Or maybe he did try to come up with a cure, and the Rusalki’s retaliation / interference was what made him realize what was actually going on.)

He doesn’t say any of this before his boss fight because he realizes that Trace and the Rusalki have the advantage now. Trace can keep coming back using the Rebirth Chambers, so Athetos has to come up with contingency plan. The secret ending shows Trace in a Dream Algorithm set up by one of the Rusalki, but Athetos shows up and shoots him, telling him it’s time to wake up. During his boss fight, Athetos shows the ability to manipulate the environment to a certain degree, spawning in new enemies and replacing power cells for the Breach Attractor when Trace destroys them. It’s not clear if this is a result of Sudran tech of being a PatternMind, but whatever the reason, it’s possible that Athetos was doing all of it to buy time.

Time for what?

To hack Trace’s Nanogates so that the Rusalki couldn’t control him anymore.

Trace keels over not long after the final battle, but Athetos showing up with a gun implies that Athetos was able to at least get a Trojan Horse into the nanogates that would wake Trace up when the remote overrides were disabled. Then Trace could wake up, find all his equipment again, and take the fight to the Rusalki before they could cause too much damage to the Worldstream, possibly including Earth.

The only truly glaring flaw in this theory is that it doesn’t account for why Indra would side with a bunch of genocidal robots, one way or another; she refers to the storage bay in Axiom Verge 1 as where “our bodies” are kept, and these are massive war machines, while her humanoid nanotech form is about human sized. The Lamassu refers to some fairly devastating war machines from upstream worlds and the Rusalki might just be those machines; she was heading to the world they were stored in because it might have the technology to restore one of her Apocalypse Arm upgrades - the child Damu that controls her drone body - to a flesh and blood body that can live a normal life.

There is a big gap between trying to help this kid she found and teaming up with sentient weapons platforms to devastate the multiverse. At least as big as the gap between Trace being a pacifist and Athetos committing genocide.

Like so many sequels, Axiom Verge 2 has raised even more questions than it answered.

[pvfa-r]

Do you think any of the Rusalki used to be human too, like Ophelia?

oh man thatd be SO cool

first instinct is No, because like. the rusalki treat ophelia as an outsider, like shes not one of them or smth (cant believe even the robots are xenophobic) but man if some of the rusalki were human thatd be so fukcing cool???? like maybe ophelia was the first and they were like "hey. hey we should do more of this"

like what if drushka became a rusalka after ophelia thatd be so awesome

[angisfunland]

Hammond sighs in relief again, looking up at Veruska thankfully. "Do not dare bring up Drushka, Veruska! Do not even dare! Just get this over with! Give me Hammond, or else I will not hesitate to use the gatebreaker on Oracca!"

Oracca is cowering on the other end of Indi.

“And now you take your envy and loneliness out on everyone else…” Veruska admonishes, “You disappoint me, Ophelia.”

[mbarrick]

Lignum - A History Ken Drushka, 2002 Lignum Ltd., CA, 2002 Signed by Tim Kerr and Jake Kerr — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/3IyIlJq

[yummyummy-404]

Descartes a Kant by vgaliciaphoto Sandra Michel AKA Drushka Petrova Descartes a Kant Mexico City 2018 January 7, 2019 at 06:24PM

[alejandralopez90-blog]

Ella tiene frío #drushka #monkey #cold #lying #relaxed

[atwas-gaming]

I just went through the Emergence in AV2, and I gotta say, it's like whiplash. Just as I'd gotten used to, "ok, it's different characters, different setting, even a different time, but I can enjoy this"... And then all of a sudden, I'm seeing Sudran motifs, hearing a remix of the Absu theme, talking to Drushka, walking past a Rusalka, and save in a partial rebirth chamber. I'm not exaggerating when I say that seeing the name "Drushka" made me physically jump.

Head's reeling. I'm gonna need to process things before I can properly form any theories.

[atwas-gaming]

This note has me baffled. The Breach interferes with Rusalki electronics, yet Indra can come and go freely as a drone- and only as a drone?

The only conclusion I can draw is that the Rusalki and the Arms are made with two different kinds of technology. I haven't fully analyzed the notes in AV2, but my initial impression had been that the Antarctic expedition was using Sagigan (Sudran? not sure if there's a difference) tech to create their own tech, and that the Rusalki were made by the Kazakhs who ventured into the Emergence. But... that doesn't add up, not with this note. If the Rusalki were made with Sagigan/Sudran tech, they should be able to enter the breach just as Indra's drone does.

This, then, calls into question the idea that the "Old Machines" were, indeed, the Rusalki. They simply could not have been- the "Old Machines," so closely guarded by the Sudrans, must have been native Sudran tech- meaning, most likely, the rebirth chambers and the Arms.

"The Old Machines, those perennial tokens of bad fortune, were our one-time salvation. Eternal harvest. Eternal happiness. Eternal life."

The Rusalki cannot grant eternal life, but the rebirth chambers can. And one Rusalka- probably Ophelia, as "The Storm" bears no trace of an accent- was begging Eshinimma for access to the rebirth chambers, meaning the Rusalki did not have access.

This also calls into question my own theory that Athetos built the Axiom Disruptor and all his tech from Sudran technology. Because Trace's drone cannot enter the Breach, it takes damage just as Trace does.

However, the dinger-gisbar (flamethrower), which can only be found using a code written on a Sudran tablet, works with the Axiom Disruptor, meaning that at least some of the AD upgrades must have been made by the Sudrans, and the AD itself was built to be able to use them.

My conclusion, at this point, is that both Athetos and the Kazakhs used Sudran technology, but filled in the gaps with their own technology and/or materials, which are not Breach-compatible. And, as we see when we meet Drushka in the Emergence, the Kazakhs do have a Rusalka in their possession- the Rusalka that Ophelia was incorporated into.

[angisfunland]

"Drushka?" Trace whisper-asks Elsenova. Hammond interprets Veruska lifting him up slightly as Veruska possibly handing him over to the drones, so he starts to squirm and scream.

“She had interest in Ophelia a long time ago, but we do not know what happened to her,” Elsenova telepathically explains to Trace.

Veruska pulls Hammond back and starts petting him again. “Hush, dear. I am not done yet.”

[angisfunland]

"What?!" Ophelia exclaims. "No! That is not-" "And you want Hammond, don't you, dear? Oh, Ophelia-" Veruska begins, but is cut off by Ophelia yelling, "ENOUGH!"

Veruska continues on, “You have been lonely since Drushka vanished, so you latch onto this human out of envy over Elsenova and me!” she lifts Hammond up a little. “It is okay. I understand.”

[alejandralopez90-blog]

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Ella come helado #drushka #helado #feliz #comiendo #agusto

[alejandralopez90-blog]

#drushka #observando #Ely

[alejandralopez90-blog]

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#drushka 🐶

[alejandralopez90-blog]

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#drushka #juguetona 🐶💜