[quote]Hey community peeps, Something has continually nagged me during my tenure as a Guardian in Destiny. It started with a simple observation regarding the Speaker: This guy seems kind of shady. As my interactions with the Speaker increased sporadically, and then even more so as I ran into him during repeat missions to replay old encounters, the observation grew into a series of questions: Why is this guy acting so shady? Who decided this guy knows what the Traveler intends or wants? Is this guy working FOR the Traveller, or acting as a form of warden perhaps? Just as important: if the Speaker isn't what he is made out to be... What does that mean for my toon's role in this game: past present and future? What does that mean for the creatures/aliens/worlds around us and how they relate to us and vice versa? Here are some general thoughts of my own as well as pieces I've picked up from other sources, some of which may support each other and some of which may contradict each other, but I think they are interesting enough to have bearing on the future of Destiny's story... these are just seeds of thought. Would love to hear thoughts on them from the community. 1. The Traveller "sacrificed himself" to keep humanity safe. From what? From the Darkness that was pursuing to siphon its power. I'm paraphrasing a little. So what are Guardians? Creatures of different races that have learned to siphon the Traveller's power to become more powerful themselves. - Doesn't that sound like the Darkness to you? - Did the Traveller's sacrifice KILL us to begin with to save humanity and itself? - Could our Guardian's motives and intentions before death have been different than what they are post-resurrection? - The following link is from a post from a Reddit user who "startled" a Dreg. The Dreg shouted out "It's the Darkness!" as a response to seeing the user's Guardian: http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2gd9lr/i_overheard_a_fallen_dreg_say_something_and_now_i/ Pretty interesting, no? 2. This leads me to the next question: Is the Traveller even a good guy necessarily? - Is it maybe more of a weapon? - Is there a reason why all of these creatures have materialized and are coming after it? Is it a Cold War/Weapons scramble in space? - Are these creatures that WE call the Darkness, possibly trying to save themselves from extinction by destroying the Traveller? 3. Assuming the Traveller is a good guy... what is the Speaker's role? - Why can he not tell us about our past, or the Traveller's past outside of general summary? - Why does he seem so detached? - The Mouth of Sauron - Who says he even speaks on behalf of the Traveller? - Are his actions keeping the Traveller dormant or in some sort of captivity? Is he tapping into its power for his own gains? - Did he resurrect us to rebuild the Traveller's army, and the Fallen/Vex are trying to stop what happened to their systems and ours from happening anywhere else? Are we in a cosmic Custer's Last Stand? - The Grimoire Card labeled as Enemies: The Darkness basically summarizes what The Darkness is from the point of view of different groups on Earth. Some imply that the Traveler itself triggered the Collapse, or that it knew the Darkness was coming for it and hoped to use the Solar System as a sacrifice or a proxy army. From the card marked Legend: The Black Garden - "...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." I think there is a lot of writing between the lines that we aren't picking up both in game and especially in the Grimoire cards. I just want to leave this on a final note: Remember the first Halo game. What did we know about this "robot soldier" Master Chief? Did we know anything about John-117 and what happened to him as a child? Did we know about Catherine Halsey and Cortana's history? Did we identify with Keyes yet, or the Pillar of Autumn, or the incredibly diverse and rich backstory of the Sanghieli and the rest of the Covenant races? How much reading did we have to do outside of the game itself to begin cracking that amazing story open? How many years did that effectively take? Whatever you thought of Reach itself... who else was excited just to see Dr. Halsey rendered at last? The other Spartans in the Spartan programs? The allusions to John's past that you could really only ever put together if you spent time researching? I don't know about you but I feel so grateful to Bungie for going about things the way they did with Halo, I was excited to find out more about the story and to come up with theories and speculate, and so stoked when some turned out to be right. As I'm sure many of you were as well! When you look back on that first game after you've played a few... so many thing were there, but we didn't realize them during those first couple of of playthroughs with no other context. I know to many I am just preaching to the choir, and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on some of the ideas above. I know that others aren't happy with the current amount of revealed story, and I certainly understand why those of you would feel that way... but I'm hoping that for at least a few of you this gives you that spark of curiosity I haven't felt since reading some of those Eric Nylund books. Happy gaming and see you at the Tower! Please share your views on this or anything I'm leaving out or overlooked so far![/quote] If you stand around agent Xur long enough you hear him say the darkness is a mirror of the traveller. Rasputin even detected huge gravity waves at the edge of the solar system when it first detected the darkness, as told by a grimoire card.