#especially since that's ridiculously similar to what teshin teaches the drifter in the duviri paradox

[fandom-geek]

albrecht entrati has the most arse-backwards methods of harm reduction i swear to god

...anyway. as ppl may have guessed, i wrote this post before i did the new year's eve do-over. i'm still deeply suspicious of how he knows about the operator and the drifter both existing in the same timeline or why albrecht is interested in tau, but hey, he can't eat all the blame for that - yonta admits to disabling the reliquary drive's safeties before the jump [1]. the zariman wasn't meant to reach tau in one massive jump.

but first! the kalymos sequence. "protect the vessels. repair. rebuild." the thing that leads albrecht to declaring it complete? the drifter befriending and growing close to the hex, and using that trust to save their lives.

i have questions about whether albrecht was in duviri at the same time as the drifter and knowingly left them behind, or if duviri's void nature means it always existed once the drifter created it and albrecht arrived before them. but either way, the "repair" and "rebuild" of the kalymos sequence seems to mean... fixing the drifter's isolation and rebuilding their support network? absolutely insane, i love it.

like he theoretically could've gone about it a ton of different ways, but instead forced the drifter's hand by telling them to let a city blow up and then shooting them and amir for good measure.

this man is literally the most normal orokin we know of.

and what does this mean for my thoughts on his involvement with the zariman? well, he realises in his trip to duviri that euleria created the tales to teach children how to protect themselves from the void, and the tales went on to be a foundational part of the entrati's involvement in the zariman.

you've also got the lanthorns (aka lanterns), which map voidspace onto realspace. this is presumably to make navigating the void safer. there's the exolizers, which are decorated with entrati obols, which reduce void contamination and prevent void cascades. and then there is, as melica frequently reminds us, albrecht's own archives which were used to form the curriculum. you've got the safeties on the reliquary drive - a drive which is still actually free of void corruption, even as it creeps as close as it can get.

albrecht was an outsider in orokin society. he'd been humiliated for who knows how long during his failed void experiments. drusus thought him a madman "fit for the asylum". parvos granum boasted of stealing from him without consequence in a society obsessed with ensuring the orokin were treated appropriately. once he learned of the zariman, would albrecht have had the power to stop it, even knowing what danger they faced?

then there's his line about "the unholy zariman parade". that could be a man who regrets his involvement and what his "all for the greater good" methodology did to those onboard (especially when you consider the zariman wasn't meant to do the trip in a single jump). or it could be a man who knew that zariman was fucked and worked with his daughter to do everything they could to save those onboard from the void?

and he still failed them, to the point that a child had to make a deal with the thing that he unleashed to escape and one version of them got trapped in the "execution circus" for centuries. that another child consigned themselves to oblivion to protect the origin system against that monster. that countless more were forced to become comatose child soldiers, who eventually turned on their abusers and murdered them all. no wonder he talks about repentance and absolution, huh?

[1] i footnoted this entirely because yonta is insane and i love her. [Angel rank] Yonta: "I'd figured it out! How the Zariman could jump all the way to Tau in one big bold leap, disabling the safeties in sequence. If I had it to do again, we could make it."