Ok folks. It's been a long while since I've had the material to warrent a new addition to my Footenotes series. While we are a long ways away from having more solid material to work off of, the recent revelations in the OblivAeon kickstarter gave a ton of really juicy information.
Lets talk about The Void.
At the very begining of all things, there was The Wager. The Wager that nothing would happen (see Wager Master bio). The interesting thing to take away here is that there were sentient beings around in this vast nothingness to make this wager in the first place, so something must have existed before all existence was, well, brought into existence (geez, did I really just type that?). What is this thing that existed? The Void. Primal temporal energies. And there must be beings that existed and harnessed that power, those being ones that made The Wager.
Moving on, we all know that The Wager was lost as time/space reformed into existence. As we know from Wager Master's bio, he was the product of the sum total of all "Impossible Possibilities" that arose out of existence being created. As I have speculated in my previous Footenotes, the flip side to that coin is that the sum total of all of the "Possible Possibilities" produced that Multiverse as we know it.
Lets take a few steps back in time for a moment:
In Sentinel Tactics, the main plot arc seems to start when a newfound powersource is identified and there are more than a few folks that are very motivated to get their hands on it. We are shown that Citizen Dawn and RevoCorp are both battling to get their hands on this source of power. The Oblivion Shards.
In the new OblivAeon kickstarter, we are introduced to the highly anticipated Ft Adamant complex environment. Here is what we know about Ft. Adamant from all the information we have so far: Ft. Adamant is controlled by the US military. They have a secret instilation where they have a "hero training" program, as we see the Southwest Sentinels get recruited for. They also have a prison and run secret testing on subjects like Choke for undisclosed, but not doubt nefarious, reasons. As we see in the ARG comic for Ft. Adamant, we see a rather disturbing revelation that Ft Adamant and te US Military have a working relationship and corrospondence with FILTER. And we now know that Adamant houses objects of incredible power such as Deadline's power crystal from the Enclave of Endlings as well as a handful of Oblivion Shards.
When Chokepoint enters Ft Adamant, a battle starts between her and our Southwest Sentinels where they are completley outmatched. The disturbing thing here is that in the Ft Adamant environment bio, it states that no alarms were sounded even though her entry was completly "un-stealthy". This seems odd (this is a plot point to keep an eye on, but at least at the moment it is slightly out of the scope for this discussion. Worth mentioning in passing however). During the battle, the Sentinels discover a secret room containing the Oblivion Shards. They each take one, enabling them to weild the incredible power the stones possess. As the Kickstarter has shown us, with this newfound power, they become a team called "The Void Guard". This name is pretty important because it shows a direct link between the Oblivion Shards, the power they have, and The Void.
Where did Ft. Adamant get these Shards from and how did they even find them? Remember I said that Ft. Adamant has obvious connections to FILTER? Well, FILTER, as we know from KNYFE's bios as well as the Block, has access to and has seen many alternate timelines and universes. They have the technology to create The Block, a prision that is outside both time and space. Where did that tech even come from? KNYFE knew that FILTER knows a lot more than they were letting on which is why she left. It seems possible, maybe even highly probable, that FILTER with all of their incredible technology and access to all places inside and outside the space/time of the multiverse knows about the Void, what it is, and the power within it.
Allow me to draw your attention to a card that I have always found incredibly odd and suspicious. "FILTER Agent" from the Time Cataclysm deck. Now, why would he be in such a deck (besides the mechanical purpose of having a Block representitive), and why would his flavor text say he needs to "collect specimens"? What the hell does FILTER, an interdimensional prison running organization, want with specimens? Specimens of what? This question bugged me to no end for years on these forums. But then the Kickstarter introduced another Environment. The Nexus of the Void. Maybe, just maybe, FILTER has known about this mysterious place for a while and been doing research on the island and its inhabitants to study what the Void is. If this is true, then it seems that FILTER might have found these Oblivion Shards on that island and sent them to their friends at Ft Adamant for further testing.
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There are a few other notable instances that we need to talk about.
Akash T and her hero deck. We have not seen the deck yet, but we have seen and read about her her promo. She goes to the Void Nexus in search of more power and she gets it. Infused with the this power of the Void, she starts to sport a hole or a spot on her chest. Her promo bio states that when you take of this power, it will take back.
That in and of itself didn't seem very enlightening. But then we were introduced to LaCommadora and her promo Curse of the Black Spot. The base Commadora speak about her almost not surviving the "temporal" energies of the Black Spot that was seeking to take something back from her. She wears a "timelocked suit" in order to keep these temporal energies from taking anything further. Her Black Spot promo shows her with this hole in her chest. And what is really interesting about it is that it looks pretty much identical to the hole in the chest of Akash T after she takes power from the Void. I don't think there is a coincidence here folks. There was something about being outside of Time for so long that the Void obviously did not like. The power it gave her (and probably gave her boat), it was seeking payment in return that might have cost her her life, or maybe worse.
Another major point that we need to bring up here is the "Scholar of the Infinite" promo. The bio for his promo specifically says that Scholar has become a gateway between here and the infinite void. Now that is interesting isn't it? We see Scholar on the incap side dissapearing and fading away slowly, almost like he is fading away from time itself, like the temporal energies of the Void is "taking something back". Scholar had to weild a massive amount of Void power I'd assume to become a selfmade gateway between our reality and the Void. Could Scholar also have this Black Spot and we can't see it under his clothes? And probably more importantly, if Scholar is weilding Void energies to that level, could this mean that his Stone is actually an Oblivion Shard itself?
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There is a hole (no pun intended) that I can't seem to fill just yet. That hole specifically is Argent Adept. The Virtuoso of the Void. We know that there have been many Adepts over the years and they are all able to somewhat share knowledge and power through the ages through the use of the instruments that they specialized in, allowing future Adepts to collect those instruments and gaining power of previous Adepts. How Argent Adept is connected to the Void is largely a mystery. But the name strikes as a hard indication that there is a connection to be made. Is the Adept an agent of the Void? A musician to the backdrop of silence and darkness? Or is the Virtuoso a combatant of the Void, anethema to that silence and darkness with his sound? He wields no Oblivion Shard and his intruments are not items of power in and of themselves. Maybe the clue to unlocking this mystery is within the Adepts timeless battle against the elemental Akash Butah. Consider some text from his bio for a moment:
As long as human cultures have existed, there has always been a Virtuoso of the Void. A master musician who holds back the tide of chaos and destruction through their connection to the primal forces of the natural world. There is only ever one Virtuoso of the Void at a time, and each of these druidic songsmiths faced down the avatar of annihilation known as Akash’bhuta as she rose time and time again to break all order in the world.
Primal Forces of the natural world. Could that be a hidden reference to the energies of the Void? Remember at the begining of these piece I talked about The Wager and what likely had to exisit before the Wager was made and lost. The Void, original and primal energy. In my previous Footenotes series, I talked a lot about the concept of Chaos vs Order and how it might have something to do with the Wager and our Cosmic Entity OblivAeon.
Whoever made that initial Wager thought that "nothing would happen", that "Order" would hold and continue on undisturbed. But it didnt. Something did happened and the "Chaotic" nature of all creation took palce.
Akash Butah is the physical embodiment of the very nature of Chaos on Earth being equal parts creation and destruction.
In the earliest records of civilization, there has always been mention of a champion of order who fights against the destructive ways of Akash'bhuta
So Argent Adept is a "champion of Order" to Akah's embodiment of Chaos. If we extrapolate that out a bit, The Void before The Wager was also the embodiment of Order in a way. Looking at it through this lens, Argent Adept being an agent of the Void could make sense.
If we choose to go down this theory road, we have to look at OblivAeon and his agenda of ending all the "chaos" of the multiverse as being part and parcel to this entire idea. OblivAeon likely existed before The Wager, and if my previous theories are at all correct, than OblivAeon was an active participant in The Wager itself. However, I'd like to revise part of this theory from my previous Footenote (which you all must have gone back to read since I have brought it up on multiple occasions now right?). I don't think OblivAeon represents chaos and I don't think he won that bet. I now think that he was the one to loose The Wager. Given that his goal is to combine the entire Multiverese (which was a result of that lost wager) down to a singularity in order to destroy it all would mean a return to the vast nothingness of only the Void, I doubt he would want to destroy something which he foresaw in the first place. It seems more likely that he is still pretty sore that he was wrong in the first place and that he has had enough of this game life and would like to put an end to it before the beings in the multiverese get too strong, seeing as they are already tampering with powers and energies they dont understand from the Void and Oblivion Shards.
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Thanks for reading another installment of Footenotes. Please check out my other entires into the series if you are new around here because there are a lot of really great discussions that take place in the comments that are worth reading for any of you interesting in theories and stories (though there are some that might be considered outdated by this point, like my entry on Mainstay).
We are just getting started on this topic since the OblivAeon expansion is still fairly far away from being in our hands. I am 100% possitive there will be a metric butt ton of art and flavor text that will speak directly to the topics above. It's an exciting time to be here for the end of the Multiverse.
That's why I am here.