Headscratchers / Myst IV: Revelation

• Why couldn't Achenar have just shoved you out of the way and pulled the amber lever himself?
  • Because 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 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 And I Must Scream territory.
    • None of Sirrus's journals mention that he was ever expecting it to be easy to link back. Achenar's do, but he's not very mentally stable, and probably did think himself wrongly imprisoned.
    • So maybe getting dumped out of a burned Trap/Prison book scrambles a person's memory of their time spent stuck in the link? That would account for the brothers' journals not mentioning the time lapse or their interactions with the Stranger, as well as their failure to recognize you from the first game: so far as they knew, they'd just linked directly from Atrus's library to Spire and Haven.
  • 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.
    • Even with the red and blue books there's a missing piece of information that the Stranger would not be expected to glean: The pattern on the fireplace. Is the player truly expected to believe that, by chance, the Stranger manages to find the pattern book among the other burned books in the library, and goes through all the patterns until they find one that does something?
  • 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 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! Notably, this was one of the problems some people had with Myst V; they'd get the "bad" ending just to revisit Myst Island.
• 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.
• 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.....
  • Sirrus's journal mentions how he'd cannibalized parts of his rockship-network to power up his crystal instrument. The seemingly-purposeless rings and chains and so forth might be former attachments for other branches of that network, from a period when he'd ventured to other neighboring "palaces" in search of more resources.
• The advanced steampunk mechanisms inspire a lot of questions in any Myst game, but some of them are downright odd:
  • To get to the lakeside pier from Yeesha's room, a combination lock must be solved - but a simple lever opens the door from the other side. It's like having a backdoor to your house that is only locked against the inside.
    • That is repeated, in a much more understated fashion, by the door between Catherine's study and the Myst III sun room. That might be a bit less justifiable than Yeesha's example (young girl more concerned with having a small private spot rather than security risks), however, given that the sunroom doubles as the designated linking chamber for anyone in a different Age who is able to link to Tomahna.
    • The locking mechanism might be an old water-safety precaution, left over from when Yeesha was a toddler and hadn't yet learned to swim.
  • The kitchen and living room is connected by a single rotating bridge to either Yeesha's or Atrus' room. That has to be harder to build than just making two bridges, and also less convenient to use.
    • This could be a nod to Atrus's great desire for security. Having such a design allows for cutting off the kitchen and Yeesha's room from the rest of the house like a "safe room".
    • Also, if someone is in the position to use Yeesha's pier as a "back door", then they've either swum or climbed up the waterfall, or climbed over the cliffs surrounding Tomahna. In either case, there are better places to gain access (the former; the Sirrus/Achenar link chamber, the latter; any of the roofs.)
  • Sirrus has spent twenty years on Spire, having brought nothing with him but (if we're generous) a backpack of camping supplies and maybe a screwdriver. He built, from scratch, an entire high-voltage power plant and routing system. Okay. And he built needlessly intricate door mechanisms and locks in an Age that had no other inhabitants. Okay. But machine-tooled steel grate walkways and floors?
    • Perhaps some or all of the amenities (such as they are) in either world were written in during the original creation of the worlds. Atrus wanted to create prisons, not deathtraps, so including stuff like working infrastructre ( on Spire) or a bizarre broken cargo ship (in Haven) would be a way to help the imprisoned being survive.
  • More Bamboo Technology than steampunk, but Achenar's security measures seem rather wonky also. He supposedly built one of the gates to keep the local scavenger-critters from swiping his stuff, yet didn't the main thieving species in Haven have wings? How's a gate supposed to stop flying creatures?
    • Those creatures - they're called Karnaks - don't fly, they glide. If you watch carefully near the ship, they stay airborne for only a few seconds, then dive into the water. When Achenar built the elevator and bridge into the ship, he wasn't in the best state of mind, judging by his journal, or even just as crazy as he was in the first Myst game. This was before he killed the last Cerpatee. And when Achenar built the lock to his cabin, he at least knew a bit more about those creatures then.
• This question's really a bugger. Achenar needed to insert the Life Stone into the old memory chamber's heart, which worked. However, by breaking the glass to get at it, he caused his own death by being poisoned by the plant's fumes. But there were breathing kits in the shaft leading into the place, and they looked to be in fairly good shape. How come Achenar didn't use one of those first?
  • Achenar felt remorse for the terrible things he and Sirrus had done over the years. He likely felt that he would achieve some measure of redemption if he sacrificed himself to save his sister. He even says as much as he's dying: "Better this way. All the things I did."
  • The Memory Chamber was on the verge of collapse. He probably didn't have enough time to grab a breather and still save Yeesha and the Stranger from being lost in Dream permanently.