Headscratchers / Strife

• So, the thing with Blackbird and the Multiple Endings never made sense to me. In the bad ending it's implied the entity was Blackbird all along (or killed her at some point and was impersonating her). Yet in the good ending it turns out she's a real person and still alive. How can these both be true?
  • We never physically meet her outside of the Good Ending, so the Entity has more than ample time at any point to track her down and replace her on the comm.
  • In-game Schrödinger's Canon. In the bad ending, the Entity was always Blackbird. But in the good ending, they were separate individuals.
  • If Blackbird was real from the beginning, then most likely some event happening in the background of the Bad Ending leads to Blackbird's hiding spot being discovered and The Entity impersoinating her. I see two possible causes: First, revealing Macil's betrayal and killing him could disrupt The Front's operations momentarily, and it just so happened they could've prevented a raid on one of their civilian hideouts at that time. Second and I feel personally more likely, The Oracle was responsible. He was in direct contact with the player character and thus in indirect contact with Blackbird, and was the only enemy Sigil wielder besides Macil to potentially have the opportunity to find out about Blackbird through the player character's connection to her.
• I've never been able to figure out how Blackbird deduced that Macil was really a badguy during the Golden Ending path when you have to shut down the cyborg factory. She immediately deduces he sent 200 resistance troops to their deaths, which is one possible explanation, but why would she consider that more likely than that the fighters got ambushed or captured, and that the Order decided to cyborgify them rather than waste perfectly good bodies? Also, if Macil was the villain behind the whole thing, why would he then send you to stop the evil plan he himself set into motion?
  • Fighting from the Inside?
  • If I recall, Blackbird's remark comes right as you come across a teleport beacon sitting right out in the open, the same beacons used to deploy rebel soldiers. I can't recall if they show up anywhere else in areas controlled by the Order, but I'd always assumed that was meant to imply Macil was surreptitiously directing resistance soldiers into the facility using their teleporter devices, using beacons provided to the Order.
  • Blackbird isn't just watching you, but also relaying and compiling intel behind the scenes for you. I always assumed that when you finally got to the inner chamber, she received confirmation of Macil's actions by other agents.
• Why is the "Oracle cult" fake? I have always found it strange that the chanting hooded figures in the Oracle's inner sanctum are hologram projections instead of real people. I don't understand the point of that.