The Great Tree

[Ashtar]

I suppose most of you have read Sharper's new journal by now. Thank goodness he was keeping an eye on the DRC with the Spyroom. If it wasn't for him, we wouldn't be back in D'ni. But at the same time, I keep wondering why in the heck he had Phil's Relto book? And then by his own admission in his journal, my thoughts were that it was taken without Phil realizing it. And if so, then why? If Phil would have had his Relto book, then he may have been able to escape during the collapse of the Guild hall.

But knowing how shrewd Doug & Phil were, it could be they staged his death to make the DRC believe he had died. After all, Phil has been to places that others have never seen and I'm sure he wanted to keep those secrets away from the DRC. So perhaps his ending has not yet been written
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Uru Live KI #: 69208

[NSymon]

The whole 'To D'ni' pack just raises even more questions then we already had. I'm intrigued with the new Dr Watson story and how that will go, it was very interesting reading his journal, a man on the brink of collapse, but slowly finds a new path and sees himself as the next storyteller. Is Dr Watson still down in the cavern?

I'm not sure about Douglas having Phil's relto book and what it all means and how it affected Phil and the collaspe of the building. Even I think in Dr Watson's journal he says they found no body, but only his KI device. So to me Phil is still very much alive and continuing his journey somewhere with the help of the Bahro and Yeesha.

[Professor Askew]

I concur with Farlesis. I don't for a minute believe that Phil is dead. Not when someone has the power to transport people from one place to another w/o a Book. I'm not sure I understand the link between the blue light of the Great Zero and the lights of the "Shell" but it's apparent that there's some kind of Magic afoot....and that's why I believe Phil is alive.

As far as Sharper's role in all of this? Aside from Watson (apparently) he's the most changed person. It's reflected in his Journal and even more so in the Chat Logs. Hopefully they will continue to expand on these characters in each and every expansion pack. Hopefully post-Live buyers of Uru will stick with the story and get to know these characters as well as we do. Wait a minute....I never met a one. LOL.

Was Douglas a good guy or bad guy? You could ask that of almost every in game character. That's what made Live so interesting. That's what makes Uru so interesting. Sure, the Ages are beautiful...but what they represent isn't.
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Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[taniith]

If I remember correctly, the chat log from the Phil event has Phil saying somthing like "they're up here, they're waiting for me" as in, the Bahro were up there with him, and they were watching what happened to him. With that in mind, I would agree that Phil is alive and well and on his journey, because the Bahro saved him as the building collapsed.

Edit: found the Phil chat log:

[brian]

I'm not worried about phil.

And as for Sharper...
I'm sure everyone already knows my feelings on the subject. I've spoken about it a number of times. Everyone has their quirks, myself included. I consider him a friend. I kept hoping I would bump into him in Teledahn.
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#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

[KnightShayde]

complete xp1...then go back and finsih reading the NEW enrites in his journal...makes for interesting reading...)
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/to Dn'I ..and beyond..the path of the shell beckons..the journey, not the destination, continues. I await the return of the true URU

[Jon]

Ashtar- hero or villan?

He was a human; he had flaws. A few really big ones. *coughblackmailcough* He also had a lot of good qualities, too. Most people on this forum agreed with him to at least some degree. He was a great source of dynamism for an otherwise static DRC; he kept them from simply ignoring the explorers by demonstrating that we were a force to be reckoned with.

And Phil's no more dead than I am.
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The laws contrived by the Proud are their security, and their undoing. Such laws make disobedience a virtue and obedience a sin.

[Ashtar]

[Gadren]

yeah, love te DRC as well...

(waits to get lynched by rabid Sharperites)

i'm not the biggest fan of Sharper (didn't like his hunting for sport, and keeping things secret. it seemed he was in it for personal gain, rather than helping the restoration effort for te good of all), but i'm sure he's a nice guy...

and since he lessened his anti-DRC stance, i can tolerate him.

[NSymon]

I never agreed with Sharper's hunting but even he addmitted later on that it was wrong. There were very good reasons why Sharper kept a lot of stuff close to himself, trusting people hasn't been easy for him, after being let dow so many times by people, you soon begin to wonder who you can trust and so you only surround yourself with a core few people who will spread the message. Sharper is very much for the explorers, he showed us down in the cavern what we could do and accomplish if we worked together. But that's just my own opinion.

[CuzinJohn]

[Trahald]

[Durin Mephit]

Sharper's flaws are part of what makes Uru such a great experience and why I miss Live so.

To some degree, in the original MYST games, there is a sort of black and white perspective imposed on the player.... Gehn, Sirrus, Achenar are all evil. Atrus, Catherine, and Anna (though we never meet her) are good. We are meant to gradually learn of these traits by uncovering the worlds they have opened up, and exploring how they affected those places.

Saavedro was more interesting because he was the nemesis in Myst: Exile, yet he was not a fundamentally bad person. This made him more human and more believable than the characters from the first two games.

But Uru is even more real because the characters we met in Uru Live demonstrated a range of greys, and were not black and white at all. None of the DRC members, from Watson to Kodama to Sharper to Zandi, seemed to be bad people, but sometimes they did bad things, and each had their own ideas and approaches which conflicted.

Consider these two people in particular: Watson and Sharper.

Watson was quite right to distrust Yeesha's Relto books because of the way they defied all he had learned of the D'ni's writing. The timing of her appearance, so many years after the discovery and first investigations of D'ni, must have seemed terribly suspicious. We also know that Watson was tormented by having one of his team die years before, and that event left him as an extremely cautious man. His motto was truely Safety First. But, Watson was perhaps _too_ cautious; his overreaction to events of the past led him to upset others such as Sharper. Whether or not Watson can truely be faulted for Phil's accident is hard to say; if he'd restrained others less, might Phil not have strayed from the proverbial fold?

Sharper, like Watson, has blamed himself for the situation with Phil Henderson. In Sharper's case, we now know that he had taken Phil's Relto book at some point, for an unknown reason. We know also that he had some questionable practices in hunting, and that he brought Shroomie parts back to the surface at least once (bringing body parts of a foreign lifeform up to Earth's surface seems like a particuarly bad idea to me). How much blame should we level on Sharper? He was not evil; he probably made some bad choices, even did some questionable things intentionally yet he did not consider all of the potential consequences. Sharper was more charismatic and less enigmatic than Phil, and we credit him with guiding folks into the foundation of the Great Tree.

Stories are more believable when the characters aren't all good or all bad; it's harder to relate to a goody-two-shoes or a twisted and diabolical evildoer, but we can understand people who face their own inner demons each day.
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Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Professor Askew]

Great summation, Marten. And, yes....the grays are usually more interesting. ...
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Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[Jon]

That's not even to mention Yeesha, who's so gray she look slikt a tie-die T-shirt.
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The laws contrived by the Proud are their security, and their undoing. Such laws make disobedience a virtue and obedience a sin.