[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[Alardem]

Anyone ever wonder if Justine's insanity was derived in a similar manner to Mandus - from a paranormal artifact in their possession? I personally wonder if she ever got her redemption...

[Clord]

Hehe, maybe Alexander is behind it all and just works from the shadows.

You know how some people react when someone send them a message about something which could save their fortune etc. Mandus was truly desperate like Daniel was before him.

I'm mostly just joking of course.

[Kein]

This is my opinion on the whole "why isn't the Shadow following Mandus even though he touched the orb" situation.

The Shadow seeks out any person who touches an Orb, as we all know. In addition, we know from the previous game that blood warding is a legitimate technique to curb the Shadow's advancement. One specific journal entry struck me as intriguing in that it detailed the Aztec blood rituals, something very similar to the blood warding Daniel did prior to Amnesia: The Dark Descent:

And I said, look, my darlings, can you see it? And they said Yes, Daddy, Yes, we can see it. A tall, weathered cap of a steep sided pyramid, so like those of Egypt. Stone falling away from the summit, vines crawling about intertwining the stucco serpents that thrive about the steps. A palpable sense of stillness, a weight of forgotten. And this, here, this is where the king sat. And this is where the priests lived. This house, this is the house of the dead. And here, where the sun strikes, this is where they threw the hearts that were not consumed.

No, my darlings, they most certainly were not savages. You see, they believed that the sky could fall on their heads and they truly, truly believed that offering blood was the only way of stopping this from happening.

Perhaps, my darling. Perhaps they were mistaken altogether. Or perhaps their tragedy was they could simply not spill blood enough to prevent the sky from falling upon them.

Most of us have come to the consensus that Mandus killed his children in Mexico following the Orb's revelation. I believe that the Orb's revelation was the catalyst for his bloodthirsty crusade to "cleanse the world". By killing his two sons on the steps of an Aztec temple he basically followed in the Aztec's footsteps of blood sacrifice (which can possibly be interpreted as blood warding). In this case, killing his children in Mexico set him forward, per say, and allowed him to have leeway from the Shadow for some time.

This time was then extended upon his arrival in London when he almost immediately began work on his grotesque, blood-spilling factory. The entire machine could have been continuously warding the Shadow from ever setting foot near Mandus due to the immense amount of bodies it seemed to have been discarding.

That was my thought at first, but then I re-played DD and according to the original setting - there never was enough blood for Shadow to completely shrug it off. Daniel killed many, many people and to what cause? Shadow still followed him at the beginning of the game.

So - no, there is no consistent and strong (in-universe, canon-wise) explanation why Shadow is not following Mandus. At all.

[Ghieri]

This is my opinion on the whole "why isn't the Shadow following Mandus even though he touched the orb" situation.

The Shadow seeks out any person who touches an Orb, as we all know. In addition, we know from the previous game that blood warding is a legitimate technique to curb the Shadow's advancement. One specific journal entry struck me as intriguing in that it detailed the Aztec blood rituals, something very similar to the blood warding Daniel did prior to Amnesia: The Dark Descent:

And I said, look, my darlings, can you see it? And they said Yes, Daddy, Yes, we can see it. A tall, weathered cap of a steep sided pyramid, so like those of Egypt. Stone falling away from the summit, vines crawling about intertwining the stucco serpents that thrive about the steps. A palpable sense of stillness, a weight of forgotten. And this, here, this is where the king sat. And this is where the priests lived. This house, this is the house of the dead. And here, where the sun strikes, this is where they threw the hearts that were not consumed.

No, my darlings, they most certainly were not savages. You see, they believed that the sky could fall on their heads and they truly, truly believed that offering blood was the only way of stopping this from happening.

Perhaps, my darling. Perhaps they were mistaken altogether. Or perhaps their tragedy was they could simply not spill blood enough to prevent the sky from falling upon them.

Most of us have come to the consensus that Mandus killed his children in Mexico following the Orb's revelation. I believe that the Orb's revelation was the catalyst for his bloodthirsty crusade to "cleanse the world". By killing his two sons on the steps of an Aztec temple he basically followed in the Aztec's footsteps of blood sacrifice (which can possibly be interpreted as blood warding). In this case, killing his children in Mexico set him forward, per say, and allowed him to have leeway from the Shadow for some time.

This time was then extended upon his arrival in London when he almost immediately began work on his grotesque, blood-spilling factory. The entire machine could have been continuously warding the Shadow from ever setting foot near Mandus due to the immense amount of bodies it seemed to have been discarding.

That was my thought at first, but then I re-played DD and according to the original setting - there never was enough blood for Shadow to completely shrug it off. Daniel killed many, many people and to what cause? Shadow still followed him at the beginning of the game.

So - no, there is no consistent and strong (in-universe, canon-wise) explanation why Shadow is not following Mandus. At all.

To be fair, you don't actually see that much blood in TDD, while Mandus spilled A SHIT TON OF BLOOD.

As seen in the tripery.

A SHIT TON!!!!

[Corbent]

I'm still not sure about the orb thing. Maybe it's not an orb as in "The Orb". Maybe it's in fact a stone egg containing the pressence of an ancient Aztec God who gave Mandus the vision of the atrocities to come and convincing him that through blood sacrifice that God could enter our realm and put an end to it. Mandus horrified with his visions sacrifice his kids as proof of his commitment and begins his works on a machine for mass sacrifices to this god to essentially bring the end of the world.

Mandus, Dark Messiah of Steam and Clockwork.

[Mechavomit]

I'm sorry, where does it say that Mandus touched the Orb? I must have missed it. As for the egg being an Orb, didn't the twins touch it first?

[Awaclus]

-How there are water monsters in this game (although they might have been dwelling in the Temple and migrated into the Machine once it reached that far down)

I thought that they were the Tesla pigs.

[Alardem]

-How there are water monsters in this game (although they might have been dwelling in the Temple and migrated into the Machine once it reached that far down)

I thought that they were the Tesla pigs.

They were the first failures of Mandus' experiments on combining pig with man, left to rot in the sewers beneath his factory. Apparently these first prototypes would flit back and forth between dimensions, accounting for their sparkling, their invisibility, and their insanity.

Makes me wonder whether the Pigs attack Mandus out of revenge, out of loyalty to the Machine, or if they're simply hungry.

[FromTheSidelines]

That was my thought at first, but then I re-played DD and according to the original setting - there never was enough blood for Shadow to completely shrug it off. Daniel killed many, many people and to what cause? Shadow still followed him at the beginning of the game.

So - no, there is no consistent and strong (in-universe, canon-wise) explanation why Shadow is not following Mandus. At all.

To be fair, you don't actually see that much blood in TDD, while Mandus spilled A SHIT TON OF BLOOD.

As seen in the tripery.

A SHIT TON!!!!

This.
Also, it was Alexander who said that torturing people would keep back the Shadow. I believe dick-all what Alexander told Daniel about the Orb, frankly. My thought was always that the vitae tainted blood was needed to open the portal back to Alexander's home dimension, and he gave not a wit about the Shadow and whether it would eventually kill Daniel.

I like what Lazoriss said about different Orbs having different deities within with different guardians. The Orb from TDD was found in the tomb of a deity called 'Tin Hanan, mother of us all'. With that in mind, the slime left behind by the Shadow always reminded me of a kind of poisonous cosmic afterbirth. If the consequences of the Shadow's procession (or even the Shadow's existence itself) were specific to the deity in Tin Hanan's Orb, then the Guardian of Mandus's egg could be specific to it and not attack in the same way.

I also wonder if Mandus ever actually directly uses his Orb. It's very heavily implied that it showed him visions of the future that gave him the motivation and the knowledge needed to build his machine. However, I'm not sure he'd have to use the thing to receive visions like that. Daniel saw 'alien memories of spiraling towers, endless deserts, and impossible geometry' upon merely touching the Orb. And I don't know if that would count as use, as the Shadow doesn't seem to be chasing Daniel himself down until he runs into Alexander and, for their experiments, actually starts directly using the Orb.

To sum the last paragraph up, the way I see it, the Orb's power is like the wind, and there is a big difference between building a windmill and feeling the wind on your face. I think Mandus just felt the wind on his face, and didn't actually build a windmill to power his machine.

[Corbent]

I think the Egg = Orb thing is speculation. In the note about the corpse he directly references the orb. "I smell the Orb upon him" and when he refers to his artifact it's always "the egg".