RichKiller

Although Die Rise itself had very little story, it introduced concepts which have been used since Origins to begin solidifying the Aether storyline. While examples vary, I want to bring in two of the unexplained examples: Now, since this post has inspired me to finally have a look into the Mahjong game, I thought I'll be sharing this: Mahjong has different types of tiles. There are those who are referred to as "Honor Tiles", which consist of the four winds, as well 3 dragons. So since the Easter Egg revolves around the dragons, this seems to be a good reason as for why picking this game to be used in the Easter Egg (beyond it being a a traditional Chinese game).

I love the John Dee references: Pretty sure that's the inspiration for the ring of skulls in the void bow: A Painting of John Dee, Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, Contains a Hidden Ring of Skulls WWW.SMITHSONIANMAG.COM The life and work of John Dee contained a strange mix of science and magic Wish we had more information about the denizens to know what's going on there:

My educated guess is that he was on one of Ascension Rockets, as we know monkeys were sent to space, specifically the Silverback himself by his uniform. He may as well escape with the "main" Ascension Rocket itself (Don't overthink what happens when you destroy the rocket lol).

Dead Ops Arcade, by the very least its first iteration, is canon to Aether. Besides a magazine showcasing up in Five, it was recently confirmed that Silverback was in Ascension: https://www.treyarch.com/game-intel/2020/12/Dead_Ops_Arcade_is_Back I personally don't think Silverback has made it to Kino (at least when you open up the power). Turning out the power leads to the spawn of the Nova 6 crawlers and the ceiling gets slightly ruined, the same ceiling that the Nova 6 crawlers come from.

I think there is plenty of evidence for Samantha and Richtofen being controllers. Here are a few quotes on that matter, there are much more.

@PINNAZ JDelgado is one of the astronaut names in Moon

This post is from 2012 my friend. It's outdated. Of course the earth is broken, shattered and scattered.

The conversion generators are tied again to the energy fields: My guess is that the conversion generators simply convert the 115 from solid to liquid, which connects again to the 115 flow.

I think this thread is a bit outdated but it does touch some interesting concepts, that were starring mostly in BO1. "The ancients found a way to breach the void ; Follow in their footsteps." - Samantha, Origins. Aether in the story is supposed to be the space in between matter (similarly to physics theories floating around, they even got support from Einstain). What keeps the universe in tact is Element 115, in the proper amounts. 115 flows all around creation, in the space at the void, i.e the Aether. Opening rifts and jumping between dimensions is super dangerous because it messes with the flow. This ties into another concept which is "energy fields". You can read more about fields in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_field irl the term "energy fields" is meaningless because energy does not have a direction. However, it could very easily make sense with the zombies story, as the Aether is not limited to our 3D world, and so technically the energy can be directed "in and out of reality itself". A field directly implies a flow when you have interactable matter. This is also tied to Agartha as well. The Casmir affect is directly tied into Aether, as it speaks about Vaccum, which is technically a space without matter, but as we know such places are occupied by the Aether. From wikipedia, you can once again this concept is connected to wormholes (i.e rifts):

"Thank god we will all be gone because If Monty ever found this place, we would have been in a world of shit." "Maybe now with us all gone, the children will truly be safe" This seems to be the good ending: Monty loses, the children are safe, and you're not in a world of shit. Dempsey actually wants to die there, he knows what would happen if Monty found the place, and it doesn't seem to be any good. Meanwhile you have the other cipher: "If you are, then all hope is lost. I'm the last one. The others... they're... gone. We failed." "No matter what we do, what we fix, we still end up here." Clearly here you see Dempsey saying the situation is bad. But Dempsey actually has a last hope. And that hope is Richtofen: I hope Richtofen established contact with the others. Woke them up. It's the only way now. It's up to them. Now this rises questions on their own. In particular, it means that some version of Richtofen survives. As I've said, the answers as I see them are in The Giant. I would say that the paradox isn't resolved at that point of time, but don't concern yourself with that just yet. See if you can understand the rest of The Giant first.

I love the original thread, it's so on point and it was written back in Origins. I wouldn't say the repeated insertions are cycle iteration, but just how maps work, as a part of the cycle. Thanks for resurfacing it @Rapt Seemingly the cycle resets Primis when some characters die in the forest: This seems to be the good ending, in which Monty does not find the forest. In this ending, everyone are gone. This may imply that in the bad ending, someone does not die in the forest and the cycle continues (kinda like Mob of the dead). I'd argue it's Richtofen. It also lines very nicely with The Giant, in my opinion at least.

This is tied to another question I've been wondering about, which is when Origins actually start? Similarly to The Giant, it seems like the crew again forgets how they really got there. "You don't even remember, how long this has been going on, how long we have been trapped here" (Samantha to Richtofen in Origins) Similarly, in the beginning cutscene you see Richtofen looking at his hands. You may think this is because he is shocked he killed Maxis, but what if he is just confused at what happened previously and where is he now, in the same way the characters from The Giant seem to get confused? Food for thought.