Headscratchers / Myst III: Exile

• 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.
• 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, 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.
• 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.
  • J'nanin is very brightly sunlit, and Atrus's study isn't. (He's got D'ni eyesight, he likes it dim.) Saavedro probably linked in from the same spot on the beach where you always link into J'nanin, and his eyes hadn't adjusted enough to make out faces in the three or four seconds he stood there.
    • Actually, when you chase him to J'nanin, go down to the elevator and take it up to the room he's in (without adjusting it beforehand), he'll actually call out to you through the elevator window. He sees you clear enough and even acknowledges you, so it makes no sense for him to assume Atrus came after him instead of you.
• 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 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.
• How could Saavedro (In-universe) mistake me for Atrus? (When I'm looking in the window) he can clearly see my face. And Word of God clearly stated that being a Featureless Protagonist 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.
  • The sunlight outside on J'nanin is very bright compared to the chamber, and the two windows of the elevator further distort the view. Probably Saavedro only saw a back-lit silhouette through the porthole-window, and his wishful thinking filled it in as being Atrus.
• The puzzle on Narayan blatantly requires one person to stay behind, but Atrus clearly expected both of his boys to be able to finish and move on together. Unlike most of the puzzles, we know it wasn't altered. They must have managed it, but how?
  • The doorway blocked with branches may have been open originally, so the boys could move freely between the two shield-bound areas. The challenge may originally have been to power up a signaling device so that the natives would come with a sky-boat to pick them up, not to access a vessel that was already parked there.
  • It's also possible that the "branches" doorway mentioned above was actually a gate that had a way to open or be unlocked from the gondola side, but the gate has been rendered immobile through years of disuse. In this case the puzzle would be the same for Atrus's sons as it later was for the Stranger and Saavedro, with the addition that the person who was on the other side could simply open the gate for the other(s) to use.
• How did Saaveedro "change the symbols" when the corresponding "poems" would have never changed?
  • Changing the poems was not the point. Saavedro just had to change the symbols so that Atrus could not reach Narayan so easily.
• What exactly is stopping Atrus from rescuing Saavedro if the Stranger abandons him? We know he still has the J'nanin Descriptive Book so couldn't he use it to travel from there to Narayan and release Saavedro? One might assume the Book was destroyed in the fire but according to D'ni lore, if a Descriptive Book is destroyed, then all of the Linking Books connected to it should cease to function. Since all the J'nanin Linking Books still work, that means the Descriptive Book is still intact. So did Atrus just forget he had it?
  • Possibly one or both boys kept a select few books for themselves, whether for sentimental reasons or purely to gloat over. If so, J'nanin's Descriptive Book might be one of them, and could be gathering dust in some blue- or red-decor room on an unpopulated Age whose Linking Book has been ashes since the first game.