by Twitch » Fri Feb 27, 2015 7:40 pm
Well, first my findings with the minecart:
The minecrart, which goes from village to boiler, is the longest of any of the inter-island passages. My whole floating idea is clearly wrong, because upon closer inspection there are obvious cement pillars anchoring it to the sea floor, and it winds around the way it does simply to avoid rocks.
However, there is a section in the middle of the underwater ride where the sea floor is not visible, as if there is a huge canyon there. There are also no pillars in this canyon. It looks like the only spot in the game where we can SEE the separation in progress.
What's odd is that the rest of the ocean floor is not a similar canyon; if Riven was one island which broke apart, then why would the sea be shallow around the islands, and then have a large and deep chasm right between the islands?
I think some of these inconsistencies are caused by Atrus trying to fix the island. It would make sense, and here's why:
Gehn is known to ignore details which he deems irrelevant, so it is likely he wouldn't have been verbose about the underground geology of the age. He did the exact same thing with age 37.
So if Gehn introduced a contradiction that implied the islands should drift apart, they wouldn't be able to do it naturally, so the force of the Art would be driving it (at a very fast rate, apparently.) Once Atrus started fixing the age, all he would have to do is define things like subterranean mechanics and tectonic drift, which would therefore slow the expansion of the islands down to what would be possible following natural rules. So when Riven was pure Gehn, the space between the islands wasn't geologic; it was just large swaths of immensely deep ocean because he didn't put the laws in place to account for the drift. In comes Atrus, and suddenly the ocean floor is defined, filling in all the gaps between the island. The chasm we can see underwater is the result of thirty years of regular plate tectonics pulling the islands apart and forming a regular old faultline. (Very fast plate tectonics, yes, but remember that they are being forced to occur by the contradictions) In fact, it's possible that Boiler and Temple islands weren't even drifting apart anymore after Atrus introduced these changes, allowing the construction of a regular wooden bridge.
As far as the position of the fissure; The fissures we see always form at link-in points, and drop you at a link-out point. This makes sense: places where links occur are probably the most stressed areas in the expanse; why WOULDN'T it drop all of the debris it collects right on top of where D'ni is buried, the epicenter of all linking? No doubt the Bahro can influence them to some extent, but I doubt they had anything to do with the one that occurred in Riven; it forms at the link point of a poorly-written world, and everything that goes into it lands on top of where it was linked in from. Heck, when the Riven cleft first formed, the Grower wasn't even born yet, and Releeshahn hadn't been started. Why would the Bahro put that fissure there, then?