SPOILER ALERT. CURRENT STORY LINE MATERIAL SHARED WITHIN I'm wondering if you've considered a few things an(if not) what your take on them are. Before I start, let me say the biggest tool they have to hiding the truth is it is never clear what is just a metaphor and what is litteral? Ghost fragment, traveler 3: "The knife had a million blades And you were giant, powerful and swift. But the knife pinned you. Cut your godly flesh away. Very little was left, you are sure, because you feel insignificant now. The hard slick heart of your soul: That is what remains. A body small as a river stone, and just as simple. You picture yourself as a piece of indigestible grit, a nameless nothing hiding among other nameless stones. Perhaps you glitter like a gem, yes. Pride makes you hope so. If only you could see yourself. But you have no eyes. Not the dimmest sense survives. What lives is memory, and what slim portion of these thoughts can you trust? The knife stole much more than your body" From this gather that the Traveler is physically and metaphorically not whole. Either the floating Traveler is the Body (more likely I feel) or the soul. If it is the body, are you the soul? There seems to be much symbolism here to suggest that. Even without this, the Traveler was once whole and has a clear enemy (will come back to that later) made of a large number of many small blades. (thus the imigary of many knives, like schapels, cutting into the body to remove a part of the soul). What about the stranger, her gun is easily explained after she warps away in the direction of TA-DA-DA-DAAA!!! the Traveler. While the Speaker may be the Traveler's voice, the stranger may be it's hidden dagger in the dark. So advanced gun is potentially just mode traveler tech (another card makes it clear it had many many many more secrets and tech to share with us. Ok, so here are the two that made me want to post at all: Legend: The black garden I am Pujari. These are the visions I have had of the Black Garden. The Traveler moved across the face of the iron world. It opened the earth and stitched shut the sky. It made life possible. In these things there is always symmetry. Do you understand? This is not the beginning but it is the reason. The Garden grows in both directions. It grows into tomorrow and yesterday. The red flowers bloom forever. There are gardeners now. They came into the garden in vessels of bronze and they move through the groves in rivers of thought. "I am Pujari. These are the visions I have had of the Black Garden. The Traveler moved across the face of the iron world. It opened the earth and stitched shut the sky. It made life possible. In these things there is always symmetry. Do you understand? This is not the beginning but it is the reason. The Garden grows in both directions. It grows into tomorrow and yesterday. The red flowers bloom forever. There are gardeners now. They came into the garden in vessels of bronze and they move through the groves in rivers of thought. This is the vision I had when I leapt from the Shores of Time and let myself sink: I walked beneath the blossoms. The light came from ahead and the shadows of the flowers were words. They said things but I will not write them here. At the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life. The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me. But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt. When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn-cut in my left hand and it has not healed since" The Traveler first came to Mars, not earth, as we see in the opening vid. And THE TRAVELER was the one who terraformed it. Also, in the opening vid, they had a gun. I suggest they came to mars specifically to look into the Traveler and what it was doing. Their gear seems MUCH lighter than what we currently have. I propose they knew it was terraforming, and were checking it out. There is so much more here, but I am running out of time before I have to go (as well as getting embaresed from all my sure spelling mistakes. Grammer trolls, I know a fail, don't waste your time.) I don't even have time to share the others I've read Summery: I think the Traveler was made by an infinate power, a "Queen" who built a tower. Her people climed the tower to learn of the stars. And the Traveler was made stronger than any other. There were two more queens. One of them made laws that were equal and good. Potentially carried out by smaller traveler like creations. Then the third queen. She built a large army, and she conqured. I propose that Queen of the tower sent the tower (Traveler) away before it could be conqured. The Traveler ran, and found man. For whatever reason saw hope in man, but knew darkness would come and conqure. So it first went to mars, terraformed it and provided an amazingly strong gaurdiner (possibly something that traveled with the Traveler). AND MADE THE VEX. Explaining their great power of simulating. The puropose of the vex was to act as protectors when darkness eventually came, filled with small shards of the light of the traveler that would grow over time. Then the traveler moved to man and worked towards prepareing them. Skip lots of little things cuz time Darkness came, and corrrupted the vex, they swung from pure light guardians to it's enemy. But the darkness (the large army) and it's take over of the vex had an unexpected effect. The went from such brilliant light to such great darkness, coupled with the slightest shimmer of light still working on them from deep inside, they became the darkness that swollows the dark. The black hole in the army of darkness, and potentially part of the only reason the darkness did not gain a 100% vicotry. A darkness so deep it attacked the rest of the darkness' forces. In a great move of startegy, the traveler allowed the vex to wreck havoc on darkness and, knowing if any more vex left the black garden, took it from mars and threw it into the waves of time, to keep the vex contained as much as possible. With the darkness' forces greatly crushed they made one final push on the traveler. In their attack the tore away it's flesh. Maybe the flesh of it's body, or the flesh of it's soul. At this time one of two things happened. The traveler realized what would happen and split body and soul willingly to strike the shattering blow to darkness. Or another side effect of I'll thought out actions. Stab enough knives into a stone tower enough times and it will crumble, on top of you. I have soooo much more but I have to go. Let me know what you think and we'll keep working on this. Edit: a friend and I were talking. We've agreed that the stranger is not a minion of the traveler, but rather the queen of laws. She is neither light nor dark. She has rules that she lives by. And seems to be working with the traveler (the enemy if my enemy is my friend). So she works with the traveler, but is an agent of the Queen of laws instead.