[ChicletPrime]

extrapolating comment, bear with me here.

Let's go with the idea that I'm the missing princess/queen/surviving heir to some throne of Philos. We escape our dying planet through the wormhole, arriving on a new planet as beings of energy whereupon we start warping reality around us because we're fish in a different sort of ocean now. Some of us learn to shape ourselves into the forms of the local species, some of us just stay chaotic. Maybe when we crossed, we brought everything with us including OUR dangerous wildlife which would explain the Wanderers who really are a danger.

So Xavier, beloved loyal guard of a shattered kingdom, protects the small heir while also trying to make this new world into a home which requires some focused slaughter as Lumiere. Cue whatever the hell happened to us, age 7, and he loses us. We turn up later amnesiac and unaware of our very special heritage and he just.. leaves that alone? No, wait, choke collar. The Bad Guys™ take us or a bunch of us for experimentation to exploit that which makes us valuable only we ..escape, or are released or.. something something?

It could technically work. We absolutely could have met Rafayel as a child and forgotten him. Grandma breaks us out of the high tech bio medical facility, guilty of her war crimes and we grow up with Caleb, who is probably also a test subject in the lab with us. Zayne has his medical thing going on, either in on the project or working with Grandma after it to help us back to some semblance of normalcy.

Some of this has to be at least in smoking gun distance!

[ChicletPrime]

7. STELLAR GUIDANCE

• Jeremiah out here, giving away the game. Hands me all my secret identity stuff with a chatty little "..don't be so formal! I just never thought I'd actually be able to help you. It's so..."
  
• Xavier better get out his sword again, information is happening
  
• "Silently, Xavier positions himself between Jeremiah and me."  boo-yah! god, i am really growing to like this guy the more i look past the soft voice.
  
• did Xavier just... just pierce my ear?!
  
• oh. secret transmitter. phew.
  
• they'll be able to track my location even if there's no signal. i'm going to end up in an abandoned warehouse being worked over by rough guys with rubber hoses, aren't i?
  
• aaaand a poison counteragent.  this is getting serious. and a needle with a knockout drug. lovely. i am armed for bear. and rubber hose guys.
  
• i don't think this is the time for a bouquet, bunny. but i appreciate the gesture? you better pay Jeremiah, he might also be sunshine but everybody needs money to eat.
  
• are these flowers weapon grade?
  
• "The girl's figure fades into the dawn. The light in the greenhouse dims like a fire on the verge of being extinguished."  please don't tell me Rafayel is lurking under the rhododendrons.
  
• Xaxier: "It's flawed." oookay, now THERE's a line out of nowhere. the plan? yes. its a deeply stupid plan but we're going with it because we're the Main Character, damn it.
  
• eeeeeeee!!! "Were you able to stay calm when you saw her for the first time?"   EEEEEEE! okay, hi, excuse me, just choking for a gleeful second. c'mon c'mon lay it ON ME already!
  
• Thank you Jeremiah for being not okay with just letting me go into the N109 Zone (implication: alone). You are my new favorite floral guy.
  
• "It will be safer compared to Linkon City in a few days."  What the fuck.
  
• oh my god, there's a Prime Directive going on.  excuse me "Non-Intervention Principle", or NIP.
  
• there we go. at least direct confirmation that my home exploded because of Nefarious Things, and hidden truths.
  
• okay, sure. i'll bite. how long HAVE you guys been here? and what's a Backtracker?
  

i am thinking. i got nothing beyond haze. a registry of people that came over, scattered maybe on landing and that's way to try and identify them all again? 

• "Don't you have the feeling that people's memories of us are also becoming fuzzier? Especially in recent years." Jeremiah, you're are SO going to get a sword to the throat in a minute, this is GREAT.  i have no idea what any of this MEANS but this is fantastic.
  

• You're here by mistake? EVEN BETTER.  poor stranded aliens.
  
• what do you mean you might be being erased (implied: from memory)? This isn't some Aeon Flux bullshit is it? oh wow, could it be Aeon Flux bullshit? i am thinking SO HARD.
  

just like a planet that strayed away from orbit, only to be ripped apart by gravity.

• what in the bleeding hells is going ON here? hello, Caleb? or is that just a throwaway line for poetry.
  
• what the fuck is Traceback II??? my head so asplode here. there's more in this chapter it feels like than the rest of the main story up til this point, this is boggling.
  
• traceback, backtracker... are they trying to find people through time?
  
• oh no, just trying to communicate through the Tunnel. which, honestly, WOULD be trying to talk through time.
  
• "You will return in one piece. I'll make sure of it."  wow, Xavier. okay. lets just save your whole civilization, one florist at a time i guess.
  
• this isn't Philos and we're not truly immortal. wow. okay. how not quite immortal is not quite immortal? AM I HALF IN LOVE WITH AN ELF?
  

Okay, Challenge level time. More tea needed. Maybe something with a LOT of sugar.

[Coldsaturn]

Hell yeeeeeeeah we're going places, finally things are thinging and puzzle pieces are falling. Some of them are falling in the right direction and positions, others are in the correct area, and others are there to trick you into forcing a square into a circle.
But yes, before we get into the thick of theorizing and me trying to support your exploding brain without spoilering anything, can we just comment how absolutely crazy the amount of info that we get in chap 8 is??? It feels like we spend entire chapters in the early part of the section doing nothing but having lunch with Zayne here, taking a stroll with Xavier there, inconveniencing Raf for the heck of it, and little more. It's like 80% filler and 20% plot relevant info. And then you reach chap 8 and they're like "surprise test! hope you memorized every word of the previous 7 chapters, right? Because boy oh boy you're gonna feel lost otherwise"
I'm here to help you avoid too much backtracking (see what I did there?) so you'll save time, but our elders in the fandom had to walk uphill both ways to put all the info together.

Now, before we do anything else, I'm going to ask for your trust and gently push you into doing something: go back to the very beginning of the game, chapter 1. Watch the starting cutscene again.

- Flower shop named Philo, Jeremiah, Xavier (impossible to talk about one without mentioning the others)
The name in honor of their...home planet? So that they can remember it? So that they can feel at home?
Thanks Jeremiah for your service, we would still be in the dark if it were for Xavier and MC's stupid habit of not asking the right questions. So they're a certain kind of immortal. Off the top of my head I'd think about the two biggest versions of immortality we know in fiction: you literally can't die no matter how much someone tries to off you; you won't die of age, but you certainly can be killed by external means. There are a few others that play around the idea of an eternal consciousness more than an eternal body, but we don't know yet if we're in that kind of sci-fi, do we.

- "does Xavier travel on his light, or as light?"
tomayto tomahto. Is his evol a part of his biology or a simple tool that he uses? Some evols collaborate better with the body of their owner than others.

- Jeremiah is "not young"?
Time to possibly confuse you again, because I don't think you're remembering this detail, but Xavier and Jeremiah (and others connected to them) aren't the first instance we find in the game where we are made aware that X person does not show their age. The first we meet is Raymond, that dude you visited with Zayne because he was having hallucinations and then died after acquiring a painting made by Rafayel. Raymond also had something interesting proudly on full display in his big living room.
I'm not saying the two things are the same, but there's only so many instances of people defying the confines of a normal human lifespan before it starts getting suspicious.

- "why do i need a disguise to get into the N109 Zone again?"
It's not an area very fond of Hunters or tourists. If you're there, it's because your hands are dirty at least in some capacity.

- "the voice line went right into my ear at close range"
Needless to say, but this game needs to be listened with headphones because they got the whole stereo thing going on that gets so good in certain parts.

- "Jeremiah walks in...aaaaand immediately walks right back out."
LMAO I love Jeremiah so much. That poor third wheel.

Your theory is definitely in the range of the smoking gun! You got some things right, others are in the general vicinity of the correct answer. Keep piecing things together, you're onto something. 
At this point I'd tell you to start carefully reading whatever Anecdote has been unlocked for you, and if you don't have them yet, then consider working on the affinity with the LIs because their backstory is essential to understand what the hell is going on, since our MC is in the dark. 

- "Non-Intervention Principle", Backtracker, Traceback II 
And the right question: "how long HAVE you guys been here?"
If there's a Traceback II, there must be a Traceback I, right? And yeah, they're here by mistake, and it's a mistake that might just have to be fixed.

[ChicletPrime]

Now, before we do anything else, I'm going to ask for your trust and gently push you into doing something: go back to the very beginning of the game, chapter 1. Watch the starting cutscene again.

friend, you do not have to softshoe telling me to go back and watch a chapter again. any chapter at all. i am starting to think i need to go over some key fucking points before i continue on.

i am taking a break to update my webpage with the newest pictures. its amazing how much has happened in the last day.

Okay, noting the trio of Xavier, Jeremiah and Philo for some nebulous later date. I only just met J. though so as far as I'm concerned, him and Thomas live together and will show up in Chapter 11 for a double date with us.

That one card I picked up for Xavier where he talks about dissipating into starlight - I guess their immortality is the sort that they're fine right up until they aren't. You can live forever until you die. And J. did specifically point out that they're not on Philos anymore, so I suppose that's relevant for how much life they can actually have.

Did they suck their planet dry, trying to sustain themselves?

This is kind of out of left field because I haven't really touched on this yet, but some of me does wonder about time and time re-setting. I need to watch the literal intro again, there was definite mention of looping and now I'm wondering just how that plays into all of this (or if I remembered it wrong, from the long-before-times of two weeks ago when I first saw it).

Your comment about evol(s) playing better or worse with the body of their owners -- eh? Are.. are evols a symbiotic thing then? Not a mutation, but a graft? Is THAT what Ever is doing - splicing cores into humans that can't handle them? That would illuminate the comment about "that thing is with her", if what's in my heart is another being fused to me in some manner. Which, hey, Zayne! Maybe him and his evol are locked in a dominance battle for control and Zayne isn't always winning.

I remember clocking the merman skeleton in Raymond's swanky mansion. If there was some mention of expanded lifespan beyond the norm at play in that scene, it went right over my head for sure.  Raymond was just an old guy with too much money and terrible taste, and he probably deserved whatever crawled out of the painting and ate him.

I think Xav's affinity is around 35, Rafael JUST dinged 30 today, Zayne is around 46 or 47.  I notice when Rafe dinged, the DATE option in the 5* stars I have for him came on, so that's a thing now! I admit, I am still hesitant to go through those stories until I get through the main story, call me weird, I don't mind.  I still have more audio and video files to get through in that tab, so will be doing more of those tonight if that helps.

phew. i had no idea this game was this well constructed. i am going to miss it when it devolves to just grinding levels :P aw, who am i kidding. i love digital acquisition, its all the joy of having stuff without needing to invent in a storage locker.

[ChicletPrime]

well, this little chunk of text conversation from earlier is taking on a whole new level of innuendo.

[Coldsaturn]

Avoid the comments, of course, but this is the complete story from chap 1 to chap 8 of Under Deepspace. Useful if you want to check some parts out without actually playing the chapters again.

Definitely put a pin on: are they simply immortal, or did they get immortality through something related to their planet?

"there was definite mention of looping"
There was!
I'm resisting sending you more world lore stuff, but I shall wait patiently for you to finish the main story and read the Anecdotes/World Underneath texts.

"Are.. are evols a symbiotic thing then? Not a mutation, but a graft?"
They are described as a gene, so it is an evolutionary thing. We don't know how they came to be though, if it's because of gene manipulation or if they just spontaneously appeared. 
My point was more that the way a character feels and embodies their evol is different from person to person. Some of them are at such odds with their power that it feels like an external object forced in.

Raymond is relevant both for Rafayel and also for Zayne. Interesting dialogues were had that day!

"I admit, I am still hesitant to go through those stories until I get through the main story"
That's totally fair! And once you're done with chap 8, the other three sections of main story we have are way shorter (Long-awaited reverly has two chapters, prologue to tomorrow 3, homecoming wings 2), and they'll all be open to you because your profile level only stops you from accessing the last chapters of Under Deepspace.

We're all hungry for new main story content, hopefully they won't have us wait too long. All the cards and myths etc. do keep on building on the lore and world, so it's not time wasted while waiting.

"we can sit on it (throne) together"
Yeeeeeah not relevant at all

[ChicletPrime]

okay, got a few cards leveled a bit and got through the next Challenge fight using the lighter sword for aoe damage. i am NOT good at melee - i've queued up a video that explains the claymore a bit more with some tips and i'll practice in the training room later.

CHAPTER 1: Singularity Echo

• Day 1326 target anchor lost no response from base Traceback 2 is about to pass the event horizon and enter the black hole -- we are stuck in this loop -- this never ending journey
  
• the radio DJ says "please enjoy this gift we received from Deepspace from 14 years ago. These electromagnetic signals have traversed time and space, a miracle of the ages. one day we will be able to evolve from our current limitations, transcend the boundaries of life and reach the stars. at a certain moment in the future we can pass through the Deepspace Tunnel and discover the future awaiting us."
  
• i.. don't really understand what that means, but its absolutely touching on everything revealed so far. if "Traceback 2" lost its anchor and fell into a wormhole, it went back to past that started again, a chain of events and time leading up to Traceback 2 again and a wormhole event sending it back to the past again, over and over?
  

CHAPTER 2: Close Encounter
Okay, this is Raymond's mission. Things I paid more attention to:

•  there's a large pool covered in algae outside. if he swam a lot before, he's not doing it recently.
  
• the central mer-skeleton is mentioned as resembling a girl sitting crosslegged. i have no idea how you tell gender from an articulated skeleton but they said it, i noted it.
  
• Raymond's in his "collection room". Zayne's been here before, he's given permission to just go and he doesn't ask for directions
  
  

CH2: Powder Keg

• okay, this must be the bit you were mentioning.  While I'm eavesdropping, Zayne says the remote monitor has "determined his age to be younger than what it actually is". odd phrasing. so Zayne's knows Raymond is older than the equipment says he is. Also, i didn't really think it important at the time but there's no avatar for Raymond, just a black shape.
  
• sounds like Raymond is head-hunting here. he's offering Zayne the best staff, best lab.. "even the best treatment". wow, stuff you don't clock when you start a game. and that whatever Zayne has accomplished to date, its nothing compared to what he could do (paraphrased). what he actually says is ".. just another beginning in your career".
  
• Zayne's hand has "countless faint scars". huh.
  
• oh, Raymond didn't die here, he's just unconscious. i guess some of me just really wanted him dead for some reason.
  
• description of the painting: "At the edge of the sea, the water is gradually stained crimson like something is being torn apart, swallowed, and coalescing into a blood clot."  well, there's some imagery!
  
• why am i trying to Resonate with it? am i a fool? i am a fool.
  
• and there's Rafayel's song. god, this is So Beautiful. no music, just singing and the sound of the ocean waves.
  
• there's a girl, half in the water (can't see her legs, they're in the water) - crying and laughing at the same time.
  
• it may not mean anything, but when Raymond's been airlifted to hospital with Zayne and I'm standing alone in the courtyard with the algae covered pool, i can hear whispered voices. this place is in the middle of nowhere, there shouldn't be the sound of people.
  
• so, let me guess. Raymond is one of Xavier's people, he captured one of Rafayel's people or fell in love with her or her with him, he kept her in the pool until she died and then he had her skeleton mounted for some really macabre reason.
  

[Coldsaturn]

I don't know if it's the same one you have, but I found this very useful. Also for you who doesn't like voiced video tutorials, it's all text to read with the video showcasing what is being described. The claymore is indeed crazy strong.

Chap 1 prologue:
Traceback II was 3 years into their voyage when they lost their target AND lost communication with their base. It isn't clear right now whether they always intended to enter the blackhole or whatever malfunction happened made them fall into it. We also still don't know who or what was their target, but you can make informed theories.
They went through the black hole and you correctly wrote that they went back into the past. This would explain their Non-Intervention Principle since that's usually a pretty standard practice for time-travel: you gotta avoid time paradoxes. It would also explain Jeremiah's comments about people's memories of them becoming fuzzier, and how their presence there is a mistake.

Questions: Traceback I? What caused the malfunction/loss of target/loss of communication with base? They're definitely intervening now, so what would that imply for their future selves?
It's pretty clear now that Traceback is the name of the spaceship, and Backtrackers is the name of the team in it. They backtrack, but why?

Raymond:
pin the name of the company Raymond mentions: Xander Sciences.
"i guess some of me just really wanted him dead for some reason."
He is dead. One of the next times you meet Rafayel you're with him in a bar/restaurant, and you get chased by a paparazzi who wants a scoop on Rafayel now that Raymond is dead and Raf is the last connection to him.

"so, let me guess. Raymond is one of Xavier's people, he captured one of Rafayel's people or fell in love with her or her with him, he kept her in the pool until she died and then he had her skeleton mounted for some really macabre reason."
Ok you made 4 conjectures (Raymond is Xavier's; captured a lemurian or fell in love with ther or she fell in love with him; kept her in the pool until she died; mounted her skeleton for some macabre reason"), 2 of which are correct. You need to go darker.

[ChicletPrime]

the mysteries are so mysterious! If I had to guess more, I think its the last two that are most likely to be correct -- he kept her in the pool and then kept her bones. Maybe they are magic bones full of long life giving aether.

darker?! oh shit, okay. let me me think on it.

that video you clipped for me is the one i bookmarked last night to study with! you got my back, for sure.

Xavier did say that some people were already ignoring the NIP so I guess he's just some level of giving up on the idea himself and just going balls to the wall with arranging things how he'd prefer them to go. Which honestly I think he's been doing since we found each other (again) anyways.

I read the Anecdote last night for Xavier that talked about how we met for what I presume was the first time. That "Philos" is Earth, only Earth that lost its core (??) and got a new one (?!?) and now the world is fragmented into what sounds like pieces of tectonic plate, held into some vague stasis by said new core. It sounded like travel was near impossible between the segments, that I guess traversing over the fractures (??) where the world started to break up and then was stabilized is just not a thing you can do anymore.

And there's a school where we're all taught combat with wooden swords, and I have some flavour of Protocore Syndrome before it's called Protocore Syndrome because my heart is too weak to give me the longevity that it's implied everybody else has or will get. And I make friends with the cool and aloof Xavier through no fault of my own, with his bodyguards/jailors always in the offing to keep us apart. And then I watch a meteor shower with him because we snuck out, then he disappears back into his (royalty?) shell and I get REALLY sick and then crawl my way back to the place we were once together to watch the stars and he shows up out of nowhere, and I rest my head on his shoulder and die softly.

It was SO SAD.

(EDIT: I kept putting the Anecdote in past tense, but it could very well be the future. in fact probably HAS to be in the future.)

And then I was doing a Challenge with Xavier right afterwards in a Deepspace Trial (?? the one you pointed out anyways where you get affinity from, 3x a day, which I am now going to make a point of doing when I don't need the stamina for everything else) and he said just as we were entering combat "Even a wooden sword could take care of this." and I just * melted *.

EDIT: Time travel paradoxes. Two schools of thought - 1) don't kill your own grandpa or you'll break up your own existence. Avoid everything you can, don't get involved lest you change something irrevocably. 2) Do whatever you want, time is fixed and you were always meant to be here and everything you do has already happened and will happen again. You can't mess up something you can't change.

I am leaning towards 2) at the moment for this story. We'll see.

EDIT (AGAIN): Hang on. Hold up. Putting aside the question of whether near-immortality comes from Lemurian bones, did Rafayel do an actual premeditated murder? In vengeance for the dead mermaid that Raymond got, kept and then gruesomely displayed after death?

[ChicletPrime]

PS: Also, just to clarify its not that I'm against video tutorials per se, its just that I don't see why I have to listen to 10 minutes of somebody talking V E R Y S L O W L Y for something that could be a bullet point list I can absorb in four seconds.

Combat videos, especially like the one I found and you linked, are kind of that in-between perfect. You can see it happening (and they do it full speed AND slow-mo which is very appreciated) and there's a written description for clarity and then highlighted areas to specifically watch.

Like, the end-game raid fights in FFXIV are monsters of visual distraction. If you know what you're looking for (and sometimes you have to be aware of three different things in about a half second to get proper positioning) its "easy". But untl you know what you're seeing, its all a visual mess meant to get you killed.

There are people who do guides that are about a half hour long, explaining everything. But I watch videos from a guy who cuts all the extras and just gives the attack name, what it does, what to watch for and only on the really hard mechanics does he do a slow-mo recap with arrows. His guides are usually under four minutes and they're fantastic. All meat, ZERO fluff.