History Headscratchers / Myst

* In any of the first three games, we never learn the answer to the obvious question: who are you? Who is "The Stranger?" Where does The Stanger come from? It is entirely likely that Atrus created (or wrote) the player character into existence for the sole purpose of helping him... All well and good until you realize Atrus just keeps leaving The Stranger stranded in various places at the end of the games and does not seem concerned by this at all. Thanks a bunch! There's no transportation, and no food. Although, that could be because Atrus wrote The Stranger not to have to eat to stay alive, something that's entirely possible based on further information received in the novels. And yet even though Atrus seems nice toward you, he's also somewhat dismissive, in the same way a scientist would dismiss a specimen. Hmm, bit of a god-complex much, Atrus? Not as bad as old, psycho Gehn, but still...

** If the green book had already been in the vault, they already had to know of its existence and by extension the existence of the vault due to the actions they took to [[spoiler:lock Atrus in D'ni]], and thus known the necessary steps to open the vault. Given the rotunda-like nature of the library, if their books had been left open after Atrus removed the first page from each, they could have seen him go into the vault with two pages (and possibly the green linking book, if it hadn't already been in there) and come out with none (assuming [[spoiler:Atrus only linked to D'ni after scattering the pages in the other ages as well]]). Given that they both knew that [[spoiler:due to their sabotage, Atrus would be unable to leave D'ni if and when he linked there]], the only place those pages could have been left was inside the vault. A possible chronology could have been: (1) the brothers are locked in the prison ages; (2) one page from each is removed to avoid an accidental release and placed within the fireplace vault due to its proximity; (3) Atrus explores the surviving ages and discovers the truth; (4) before returning to work, Atrus takes an additional security measure in case of his wife's arrival - he records a message for her and removes additional pages from each book, scattering them in the surviving ages where the evidence of [[spoiler:both sons' misdeeds]] rests, so they can't simply talk her into opening the vault before she has a chance to learn the truth; and (5) [[spoiler:heads to his study in D'ni to concentrate on repairing his son's misdeeds and continue maintaining Gehn's works, discovering too late the sabotage to the Myst linking book there]].

* How could Sirrus and Achenar know where the location of the last two pages were, but not know what the Prison books did?

** Probably the "places of protection" originally held multiple books with a thematic similarity, not just one. Edana, for example, probably shared the giant-tree locker with Channelwood (nature Agess), while Amateria and Voltaic were housed with Mechanical.

** Probably the "places of protection" originally held multiple books with a thematic similarity, not just one. Edana, for example, probably shared the giant-tree locker with Channelwood.

*** He must've suspected them before he went to K'veer with the (sabotaged) Myst book, however: he ''did'' leave messages for Catherine that voice those suspicions. If anything, it's ''her'' whereabouts he must not have been sure of at the time: he brought the Riven book with him, perhaps hoping there'd be something in K'veer he could use to stabilize its connection and make it safe for her to link through and help her people, but without realizing she'd already used it without telling him.

* In one of his journals from ''Real-Myst'', Atrus insists that if you change a Descriptive Book's text, you don't alter the world, you just cause the book to link up with an alternate world that better matches its contents' new parameters. But if changing the book links to a parallel world, doesn't that mean that ''the real Catherine was never rescued?'' Both Atrus and Gehn had altered ("stabilized") Riven's book repeatedly since she left Myst Island, which would've caused its link to shift to an alternate version of Riven. It might be a very close match, complete with an alternate-Gehn and his alternate-Catherine prisoner, but it still wouldn't be ''our'' Atrus's wife whom the Stranger released from prison.
** Myst is not a [[TheMultiverse quantum multiverse]] - there is only one Katherine and Atrus). Editing a Descriptive Book is something like using a reality-bending version of SchroedingersGun; you can't just say that "the sea is warm" when everything else suggests that the sea should be cold, because the link will "panic" and either infer all sorts of requirements that go along with that edit which will probably make the Age unstable, OR, if the edit is significant enough (like striking out entire lines of text), jumping to a different Age entirely. BUT you ''can'' go through and systematically add additional phrases about things you haven't yet written or observed - peculiarities of magma flow in the mantle, say, which will soon cause a fault rupture that opens lava chambers here, here, and here, which will result in new thermal vents and cause the sea to warm up. As long as you haven't already described those kinds of details about the marine geology, it will have always been that way.
*** (This is only further complicated by the fact that the Descriptive Book is only a perfect description of the Age at the moment of the first link; the Riven book describes the enormous tree that Gehn later saws down, for instance, and if Atrus had tried any modifications that depended on the presence of the tree... yeah.)
** Also, Myst was early on, and Cyan may not have had all the rules down yet. They didn't change much from Myst to RealMyst other than adding Ti'ana's grave and the stuff related to Rime.

* In ''Revelations'', why couldn't Achenar have just shoved you out of the way and pulled the amber lever himself?
** because [[spoiler: Sirrus!]]Yeesha faking that her arm was bound wasn't fooling anybody, and he needed to keep the gun trained on her.
** Another possibility is positioning. You're standing right in front of the panel and he's on the far side of it. He may have thought that if he tried to make a dive for the panel, you'd assume he was lying and pull the silver handle before he could reach the panel. Or, being the less intelligent of the brothers, he may not have realized that you'd have any reason to disbelieve him or that Yeesha might try to convince you that he's lying.
** Also, the fact that the console is [[SpecialEffectsFailure clearly an overlay over the view of Achenar and Yeesha]] precludes any sort of three-dimensional interaction with it.
* The whole Prison Book {{Retcon}} really bugs me. I'm not quite sure how Sirrus and Achenar could communicate with you before, even though that breaks the rules post-retcon. When and how did they change from modified Books to modified Ages?
** The official explanation is that they were always Prison Ages and they just couldn't show that in-game (similar to how you only get to see the Linking Books and their places of protection for the Ages whose journals survived the library fire).
** Unofficially, there's a fan theory relying on Riven's explanation that a Trap Book is just a modified Linking Book - it would function as a normal Linking Book were it not for, say, the addition of a few symbols that allow the link to open on this end but close it while keeping the other end blocked. Burning the Trap Book, or editing it and then burning it, would naturally destroy the modifications keeping the block in place, causing the prisoner to finish linking. Atrus's plan had been to trap both sons until he figured out who was guilty, burn that book (dumping him into the Prison Age), and release the other; in the end he just did it to both instead.
*** Which doesn't explain the time differential between the brother's imprisonment and the game, especially why none of the journals on Spire or Haven mention their hiatus in Link limbo. Sirrus and Achenar are both surprised to find no linking book, despite having been "prepared", so to speak, by the pseudo-nature of the books they linked to dumping them in AndIMustScream territory.
** The RetCon works reasonably enough for Myst's red and blue books. My problem is that there's no explanation for how Gehn gets trapped. The book simply could not be a prison age, because the player has to go ''first'', so he'd be trapped. Furthermore, it's important that when the player ''leaves'' the prison age, that he is transported to the 233rd, outside the cage; a simple linking book in the prison age would not do this. There is no simple way for this to work, and Cyan has failed to elaborate on exactly how Gehn was trapped.
** Atrus's journal explains that the Trap Book doesn't link to anywhere; the book keeps the person in the black "between" Ages, but it can only hold one person. If somebody else goes in, the previous person gets spat back out. When you went into the Trap Book from inside the cage, Gehn pulled it from the cage and then went in, getting caught and leaving the Trap Book outside the cage.
*** Right, that explanation worked. But Cyan retconned Trap Books out of existence. The gist of what probably happened is that the Stranger went through, followed by Gehn. The Stranger then somehow overpowered Gehn. (I like to imagine that in the pause while Gehn picked up the book, the Stranger grabbed a big stick or rock and gave Gehn a sound thwack as he linked through, knocking him out.) After this, he took the Book Gehn had brought with him to return to 233, and did the old 'link while holding the Book over a fire' trick or something similar to destroy it.
*** No, the Stranger never used the prison book. The official line is that he talked his way out of it, but the player [[HeroicMime can't really do that]]. ''Riven'' works fine with the retcon, but basically the entire plot of ''Myst'' goes out the window since the Stranger never spoke with the boys ''and'' the books were intact.
*** Though to be fair, if I was playing Myst and got the "Bad endings" but instead of being trapped in a void, I got to explore Haven and Spire at my own whim. BEST BAD ENDINGS EVER!

* In Myst IV: Revelation, why did Sirrus work so hard to figure out how to blow up the nearly indestructible ball surrounding the linking book back to Tomahna rather than working out a way to break open the little tilting drawer used to pass stuff through the bars, or building some device to reach through the bars and retrieve the linking book from its resting place? It follows that he'd have to figure out the explosive once he got to Tomahna to get out of the book vault, but how would he know that before he linked? Even easier, he could set a specific time for Yeesha to visit, link into the book vault and wait for Yeesha to open it at the appointed time, which would be a lot less likely to draw the attention of Atrus than an explosion, since Sirrus had no way to know that Atrus would be trapped in Rime when he blew up the vault. Additionally, since his plan involved abducting her, this would allow him to grab her quietly and proceed to Serenia without the aforementioned explosion.
** Most likely it was the first thing he thought of that might work. Furthermore, he was working with what he was given- there's not much that's stretchy on Spire, and making the parts for a crane arm? "It's really hard to carve figures that small." Besides, he was already working closely on studying the crystals and rocks in Spire (see the rock ship used to get to the second palace), meaning that a static discharge could have given him the inspiration he needed, leading him to hyperfocus on that and ignore more practical courses of action.

* In ''Revelation'', Atrus describes Spyre as a place of eroded rocks that uncannily resemble ancient ruins, and specifically states that the Age has never had any intelligent life. But the stone archways have got iron rings and other details that could have never been wrought by erosion. Someone must have ''made'' them, and it's hard to believe that Sirrus would take the time...
** Boredom does things to you... As for the pictures carved on the stone the fact that the pictures are just mostly just rippling lines(not surprising for wind to preform) with the most advanced carving being shells in areas with the least amount of space... Let's say Atrus was willing to go the extra mile to fool greedy explorers.....

* If creating Linking Books only opens a door to the linked age, rather than creating the age, then how would the poor quality of Gehn's books make Riven unstable?
** He was sloppy and didn't go as much into detail as one would need to create an age such as Riven. Presumably, there were multiple ages that could fit the parameters set down by Gehn in the original linking book, and they all got spliced together into what we know as Riven. Which explains why the Star Fissure even existed in the first place.
** That's not how it works. Riven was always unstable, with or without Gehn. Gehn's bad writing caused the book to link to an unstable Age; however, he also tried to fix their problems by adding additional text to the Descriptive Book that, because he didn't have a real understanding of what the words he was using meant (only what they tended to accomplish), the side effects of all his modifications resulted in a somewhat dangerous environment becoming the brittle catastrophe we see in the game.
*** And Atrus, having taken the time to experiment with how much detail is necessary to change an age, could fix Riven better the Gehn could.
*** No, sorry, this is close but still wrong. The entire problem with Gehn was that he believed the D'ni were creating rather than linking; by extension, he believed the entire substance of an Age was contained in the words of its Descriptive Book, and (rather sensibly, scientifically speaking, if you accept the previous premises) that this substance consisted of smaller parts into which it was reliably divisible (sentences, phrases, words). Therefore instead of actually writing an Age, he would go into the ruins of D'ni, find Books that linked to Ages that had something he wanted, locate the relevant passage in the Book, and copy it verbatim into his new Age. Riven was unstable- and it's made explicit that ''all'' of his Ages are unstable- because that isn't how the Art works. (He stubbornly refuses to accept this and blames his failures on the quality of his materials.) In my opinion it's meant to tie in with the general theme of "the world is more complex than we'll ever understand (even if we do understand quite a bit)". (You can confirm most of this in Riven and ''The Book of Atrus''.)
** Even if you buy that the Books don't create Ages, they just link to existing places, the idea that editing the Book once you've established the connection can ''change the world'' is pretty close to the same AGodAmI trope as if you really ''were'' making them from scratch.
*** Not if there is a ''literally infinite'' number of worlds out there to link to. You're not changing anything except the destination of the bridge- and perhaps very slightly, such that the new destination almost totally resembles the old. This is the Great Tree of Possibility (or something) talked about in the lore (and it's a nice parallel with the many-worlds hypothesis too- Google that if you don't know what it is, chances are (as someone who is likely to be reading this page; ie. a critically-thinking Myst fan) you'll be intrigued).
*** Except if that were the case, then Catherine couldn't be rescued from Riven once Atrus had revised its Linking Book in an attempt to "stabilize" it. It would've taken the Stranger to a different Riven from the one where she was being held. Likewise, Catherine couldn't have saved her people once she'd added the dagger to her homeworld's book, because the people there wouldn't be ''her'' Rivenese anymore.
** It's also possible that the D'ni are wrong and it /does/ create the age. Or that writing it causes it to have always existed, and links to it. Or maybe [[AWizardDidIt Yeesha did it]], who knows?.
** Or editing the Book doesn't actually change the Age. Rather, there are still multiple ages that fit what you wrote, and adding e.g. a dagger falling from the sky merely changes the Age to one that had a dagger about to fall from the sky to begin with.
*** That would have meant all the non-original inhabitants (eg. Catherine and Gehn) would seem to disappear when the book connects to a version of the Age that they didn't enter. Alternatively, entering an age would have to create a copy of you in every version of the Age that the book might potentially become connected to, and all of those clones would carry the same linking book back home.
*** Except in The Book of Atrus, he saw the Dagger appear out of nowhere with his own eyes, when Anna was adding to Riven while he was in it. (Man, this is confusing...)
*** As is established in the last novel, the Art is capable of reaching not just between worlds but between times. You don't need to run the risk of severing the link to a particular world in order to change it - you just write the events you want into that world's future and they will tend to occur. Which is what makes the Prophesies relevant to Terahnee - they were written by a master of the Art in order to influence that world's fate.

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* In Riven, they used a distinctly different sound effect for the linking books; during the ending, [[spoiler:when Atrus arrives and when he exits back to Myst Island, they used the old sound effect from the first game]], which suggests that Riven's books sound different because Gehn made them (and was Doing It Wrong, what with needing the [[spoiler:fire marbles]] or [[spoiler:geode crystal thingies]] to allow them to link). However, for some reason (probably [[TheyJustDidntCare laziness]]), the trap book Atrus gives you at the beginning of the game uses the "Riven" linking sound instead of the "Myst" linking sound. And that [[ItJustBugsMe just bugs me]].
** Perhaps that sound indicates a link that is somehow less than perfectly stable, which would be true of both Gehn's retroengineered Books and Atrus' Trap Book.
** My thought has always been that the style of writing defined the linking sound, and the "Gehn-link" sound was based on the ancient D'ni writing style that Gehn copypasted/imitated all the time. The "Atrus-link" sound was due to Atrus's style being his own, having mostly self-trained. The D'ni linking book would have to fit the style of the ancient writing to be a plausible facsimile of a D'ni linking book, so its link sound would be the D'ni (and thus Gehn) sound. This actually fits with the follow-up games, because the links that Yeesha created that you use in Uru (including the Relto book) sound like Atrus links, which makes sense considering she learned from him.

* Atrus' actions at the end of Riven really bugs me. He just lets you fall into the fissure without even offering his Linking Book on the belief that you'll just find your way back somehow. And this is after already helping him deal with his sons, escape from D'ni, deal with his father, and rescue his wife.
** He was banking on the idea that 1) the Fissure would spit anything dumped in it from Riven back out in the same place and that 2) you would survive the fall. If his Myst book didn't get pulverized by the terminal velocity fall through the fissure, there's no reason to assume the player wouldn't go at terminal velocity either. Also, he jumped into the fissure during Myst's opening credits; he has a glimpse of a feel for what the environment of the Fissure actually does to a human, and knew (or at least suspected) it would be non-lethal. Besides, "sending [The Stranger] back, to the place that [he] came from" was the carrot Atrus dangled in front of you at the beginning of ''Riven'', and offering him a Myst book doesn't really help in that regard.
** Indeed, letting the Stranger use his Myst book would only leave his friend back where it all started: trapped on Myst.
** Except the Stranger is from Earth...which is where D'ni is...which can be linked to from Myst...
** The Stranger found the original Myst book after its fall through the Fissure, so logically the Stranger's place-of-origin is the spot the Fissure leads to. Easier to just send them through the same way than to try and dig a way out of D'ni.

* Saavedro was stuck on J'nanin for twenty years. What did he eat?
** You forget: these ages primarily consist of islands, and islands are surrounded by oceans, and you can catch fish in oceans.
** And there's fresh water surrounding the greenhouse in J'nanin.
** Not to mention fruit from Edanna and Squee meat.
** Presumably, a lot of the fruits and leaves seen in the house on J'nanin were edibles he'd collected.
** The short answer is that he wasn't stuck in J'nanin. He had access to Voltaic, Edanna and Amateria to modify the puzzles there, and had access to the tower in Narayan (once he found all the "poems" in the original versions of the J'nanin lesson Ages). In all of those ages as well as J'nanin, there's food and water sources around.
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* I get that the ice spheres in Amateria are stable by themselves, but how the hell does an ice sphere carry you, a chair and the top of the tower over the Balance Bridge, through the Resonance Rings, and around the Turntable Tracks without breaking?
** The top of the tower never came into it - it's only where the ice spheres were generated. Only the force of the chair on the bottom (or wherever the mechanism keeping the chair upright decides to put it) and the various forces encountered as the sphere moved along the track were subjected to the sphere.
** Also, [[AppliedPhlebotinum that is not normal ice]] - it's produced by a similar generating mechanism as the ice shields on Narayan, which are well-known for their durability.

* In ''Exile'', when Saavedro links into Tomahna, he does actually see you as well as Atrus. Why didn't he consider the possibility that it would be you, not Atrus, who came after him?
** Not really an answer, just a thought - he wasn't really there all that long, and might have mistaken you for him. He also knows that he hallucinates things from time to time.
** Because he spend 20 years going insane and plotting his revenge on Atrus. It simply didn't occur to him that someone else would follow (it helps that he didn't plan for the Stranger to be there either). He evidently didn't consider the possibility that the J'nanin book would be destroyed before Atrus could follow either. So his plan had some major flaws, but he wasn't really mentally stable enough to recognise and overcome them.

* In ''Revelations'', why couldn't Achenar have just shoved you out of the way and pulled the amber lever himself?
** because [[spoiler: Sirrus!]]Yeesha faking that her arm was bound wasn't fooling anybody, and he needed to keep the gun trained on her.
** Another possibility is positioning. You're standing right in front of the panel and he's on the far side of it. He may have thought that if he tried to make a dive for the panel, you'd assume he was lying and pull the silver handle before he could reach the panel. Or, being the less intelligent of the brothers, he may not have realized that you'd have any reason to disbelieve him or that Yeesha might try to convince you that he's lying.
** Also, the fact that the console is [[SpecialEffectsFailure clearly an overlay over the view of Achenar and Yeesha]] precludes any sort of three-dimensional interaction with it.
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* The whole Prison Book {{Retcon}} really bugs me. I'm not quite sure how Sirrus and Achenar could communicate with you before, even though that breaks the rules post-retcon. When and how did they change from modified Books to modified Ages?
** The official explanation is that they were always Prison Ages and they just couldn't show that in-game (similar to how you only get to see the Linking Books and their places of protection for the Ages whose journals survived the library fire).
** Unofficially, there's a fan theory relying on Riven's explanation that a Trap Book is just a modified Linking Book - it would function as a normal Linking Book were it not for, say, the addition of a few symbols that allow the link to open on this end but close it while keeping the other end blocked. Burning the Trap Book, or editing it and then burning it, would naturally destroy the modifications keeping the block in place, causing the prisoner to finish linking. Atrus's plan had been to trap both sons until he figured out who was guilty, burn that book (dumping him into the Prison Age), and release the other; in the end he just did it to both instead.
*** Which doesn't explain the time differential between the brother's imprisonment and the game, especially why none of the journals on Spire or Haven mention their hiatus in Link limbo. Sirrus and Achenar are both surprised to find no linking book, despite having been "prepared", so to speak, by the pseudo-nature of the books they linked to dumping them in AndIMustScream territory.
** The RetCon works reasonably enough for Myst's red and blue books. My problem is that there's no explanation for how Gehn gets trapped. The book simply could not be a prison age, because the player has to go ''first'', so he'd be trapped. Furthermore, it's important that when the player ''leaves'' the prison age, that he is transported to the 233rd, outside the cage; a simple linking book in the prison age would not do this. There is no simple way for this to work, and Cyan has failed to elaborate on exactly how Gehn was trapped.
** Atrus's journal explains that the Trap Book doesn't link to anywhere; the book keeps the person in the black "between" Ages, but it can only hold one person. If somebody else goes in, the previous person gets spat back out. When you went into the Trap Book from inside the cage, Gehn pulled it from the cage and then went in, getting caught and leaving the Trap Book outside the cage.
*** Right, that explanation worked. But Cyan retconned Trap Books out of existence. The gist of what probably happened is that the Stranger went through, followed by Gehn. The Stranger then somehow overpowered Gehn. (I like to imagine that in the pause while Gehn picked up the book, the Stranger grabbed a big stick or rock and gave Gehn a sound thwack as he linked through, knocking him out.) After this, he took the Book Gehn had brought with him to return to 233, and did the old 'link while holding the Book over a fire' trick or something similar to destroy it.
*** No, the Stranger never used the prison book. The official line is that he talked his way out of it, but the player [[HeroicMime can't really do that]]. ''Riven'' works fine with the retcon, but basically the entire plot of ''Myst'' goes out the window since the Stranger never spoke with the boys ''and'' the books were intact.
*** Though to be fair, if I was playing Myst and got the "Bad endings" but instead of being trapped in a void, I got to explore Haven and Spire at my own whim. BEST BAD ENDINGS EVER!
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* In one of his journals from ''Real-Myst'', Atrus insists that if you change a Descriptive Book's text, you don't alter the world, you just cause the book to link up with an alternate world that better matches its contents' new parameters. But if changing the book links to a parallel world, doesn't that mean that ''the real Catherine was never rescued?'' Both Atrus and Gehn had altered ("stabilized") Riven's book repeatedly since she left Myst Island, which would've caused its link to shift to an alternate version of Riven. It might be a very close match, complete with an alternate-Gehn and his alternate-Catherine prisoner, but it still wouldn't be ''our'' Atrus's wife whom the Stranger released from prison.
** Myst is not a [[TheMultiverse quantum multiverse]] - there is only one Katherine and Atrus). Editing a Descriptive Book is something like using a reality-bending version of SchroedingersGun; you can't just say that "the sea is warm" when everything else suggests that the sea should be cold, because the link will "panic" and either infer all sorts of requirements that go along with that edit which will probably make the Age unstable, OR, if the edit is significant enough (like striking out entire lines of text), jumping to a different Age entirely. BUT you ''can'' go through and systematically add additional phrases about things you haven't yet written or observed - peculiarities of magma flow in the mantle, say, which will soon cause a fault rupture that opens lava chambers here, here, and here, which will result in new thermal vents and cause the sea to warm up. As long as you haven't already described those kinds of details about the marine geology, it will have always been that way.
*** (This is only further complicated by the fact that the Descriptive Book is only a perfect description of the Age at the moment of the first link; the Riven book describes the enormous tree that Gehn later saws down, for instance, and if Atrus had tried any modifications that depended on the presence of the tree... yeah.)
** Also, Myst was early on, and Cyan may not have had all the rules down yet. They didn't change much from Myst to RealMyst other than adding Ti'ana's grave and the stuff related to Rime.
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* Several things in ''Exile.'' First, how exactly did Saavedro "change the symbols" used to reach the Narayan book? I can believe he could change the Edanna symbol, and the Voltaic one was possibly hinted at by his experiments, but how exactly did he change the Amateria symbol when it was ''built into the side of the island?'' Second, how was Atrus able to predict or [[AlreadyUndoneForYou reset]] any of the puzzles on Edanna? They mostly depended on the actions of animals, which are rather unpredictable. Finally, the cage holding the Narayan book resets after Saavedro uses it. That would make sense if the puzzle was meant for one person, but the lesson ages were ''built specifically for Sirrus and Achenar.'' How did they both get to Narayan if the cage had reset itself? Hell, how did any of the puzzles work for two people? The ice orb on Amateria only had one seat, and the airship in Voltaic only had room for one person.
** It could be that the lesson ages were rigged by Saavedro to be completable by one person, so he could traverse each age by himself while he planned his revenge. Another possibility is that each lesson age was written to only be solvable by one person at a time, so both Sirrus and Achenar could experience each lesson by themselves. However, until there's some official word on this, we'll never truly know.
*** Many of the teaching Ages' components are probably designed to reset themselves automatically after a first pass, so one boy could complete them and then the other. For that matter, the Linking Books for those Ages might've been designed to switch to a new, nearly-identical Age, complete with freshly-reset obstacles, each time their respective challenges were overcome.
** There were some broken-off pieces of rock from Amateria in Saavedro's living quarters on J'nanin. Presumably he's had plenty of time to chip away at the crystal or tip over stone pillars to alter that symbol. As for the animals, it's quite possible that the original set-up that Atrus designed had used only plants: the journal does suggest that the bird-eating plant was Saavedro's own addition.
*** Bearing this out is the broken remains of a tongue fern on one side of the first Swing Vine chasm, and the fact that the puzzle with the barnacle fruits that Saavedro set up is patently not reset-able.

<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

* How could Saavedro (In-universe) mistake me for Atrus? (When I'm looking in the window) he can clearly see my face. And WordOfGod clearly stated that being a FeaturelessProtagonist the "Stranger" is meant to be a complete avatar of the person playing. So what if a attractive blond woman with long hair and large hoop earrings is playing? Mistaking her for Atrus I can't imagine he'd be "That" insane.
** He wasn't insane enough to mistake (to continue the example) a blonde woman with long hair for Atrus, no, but he's been by himself for twenty years and he's become totally fixated on revenge: if he even noticed the player (assuming you're talking about looking through the window on J'nanin), he'd probably dismiss them as a hallucination, or outright deny any possibility that they aren't Atrus. It's only on Narayan, when he's confronted with the reality, that he has to face the facts.

* Are the Red and Blue Books in Revelation the ''original'' Descriptive Books for those Ages?

* In ''Revelation'', Atrus describes Spyre as a place of eroded rocks that uncannily resemble ancient ruins, and specifically states that the Age has never had any intelligent life. But the stone archways have got iron rings and other details that could have never been wrought by erosion. Someone must have ''made'' them, and it's hard to believe that Sirrus would take the time...

* How could Saavedro (In-universe) mistake me for Atrus? (When I'm looking in the window) he can clearly see my face. And WordOfGod clearly stated that being a FeaturelessProtagonist the player is supposed to be a complete insertion of the person playing. So what if a attractive blond woman with long hair and large hoop earrings is playing? Mistaking her for Atrus I can't imagine he'd be "That" insane.

* How could Saavedro (In-universe) mistake me for Atrus? (When I'm looking in the window) he can clearly see my face. And WordOfGod clearly stated that being a FeaturelessProtagonist the player is supposed to be a complete insertion of the person playing. So what if a sexy blond woman with long hair and large hoop earrings is playing? Mistaking her for Atrus I can't imagine he'd be "That" insane.

** The name of the MMO, URU (that is, "You Are You"), answers the question in general terms, although there's speculation as to exactly who Atrus's friend is since that person lived long before the time setting of URU, and there's at least one argument that the Stranger was Dr. Sharper. In the novels and the later games, it's established that the Star Fissure leads to a location in the New Mexico desert on Earth, and furthermore D'ni is an underground cavern also on Earth. Therefore, the Stranger is a regular human, likely American, and not Atrus's creation. At the end of Myst, you're left to wander among the original Ages of that game, all of which contain reasonable access to food and water (and a clear return path to Atrus). At the end of the second game, you drop back into the Star Fissure, ending up back in New Mexico (which is "back where you came from" and from which you could presumably go to your home), and the events of Exile see you visiting your friend Atrus at his house in Tomanha and ending up back in his house when you're done. Since he treats you as an old friend in Exile and you're visiting his home, it can be assumed that you still had access to the original Myst book at the end of Riven (the same one you used to get to Myst in the first place) and you maintained contact with Atrus and Catherine after you met them (which would lead them to offer you access to Tomanha for Exile and later, Revelation).