[quote]Dr. Shim shrugs. "I think the Traveler did something paracausal to Venus. Something that cut across space and time. The Citadel seems to come from the past of a different Venus than our own. It doesn't have to make any sense by our logic, any more than the Moon's new gravity."[/quote] Look at cuts in unreal to real... Look at mirror state of light to dark in Witch Queen... Mirrored and opposite... The shattered throne, still important...

There was the test of time there... A lot of focus on the center and pulling of time... Yes times conflux exist and is tested there... But there have been many reasons for their tests and understandings... So, I think they knew their ill intent before entering... I think "she" saw herself...

[quote]Maya Sundaresh walks at the center of the group. She's been too quiet lately. What happened to them wasn't her fault and maybe she'll believe that soon. "What could you do with it?" she murmurs, staring up. "If you understood it?"[/quote]

[quote]"They're not us any more." Maya looks down at herself, at the cache of her self-forks. "We're not going anywhere. We're sending them. They're diverging."[/quote] Stopped seeing them as anything living, or "real"... Just copies... Plenty here that think that way...

Esi, Warmind... Someone else, with letters in their name, maybe written into stories for understanding, under another guise... [quote]Even now, operating remote bodies by neural link, the team's thoughts are relayed through the warmind who saved them, sandboxed and scrubbed for hazards.[/quote] [quote]Chioma Esi suggests. She's the leader. She kept them together when it seemed like they faced actual, eternal torture. She pulled them through.[/quote] Who would get past the darkness, who could bring them out of darkness...

[quote]They rescued themselves from the inside of a Vex mind, two hundred and twenty-seven copies of themselves, untortured and undamaged.[/quote] Stop thinking linear... [quote]SUNDARESH: Twelve? The operational Vex platform? That's incredible! You must know what this means - ah, so. It's not good, or you'd be on my side of the desk. And it's not urgent, or you'd already have evacuated the site. Which means...[/quote]

[quote]ESI: I'm telling you it's full of humans. It's thinking about us. SUNDARESH: About - oh no. ESI: It's simulating us. Vividly. Elaborately. It's running a spectacularly high-fidelity model of a Collective research team studying a captive Vex entity.[/quote] She sat there thinking about her loved one... Like a really weird creepy relationship... Not healthy, love my wife, but lordy no...