[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[DarkLite]

Okay, here's a bunch of questions / theories I have:

Dialogue

<Entry Name="v0_mansion2_trigger_child_05">Come and see Papa. We've found an egg, a stone egg!</Entry>[quote]
Likely to be an Orb.

[quote] <Entry Name="vo_sewer_phono_prof_2">And your engineer, this visionary with whom you have embarked upon this course, does he share you views?</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_sewer_phono_mandus_3">Indeed he does, indeed he does. The poor fellow has seen it all before. Now this is not the first great civilization he has wept for.</Entry>

Who is the Engineer, and what other civilizations has he wept for? Is it referring to the Orb?

<Entry Name="vo_factory_mandus_flashback_01_01">Water in his shoes... always the water and the sparks of the embers of the wheels...</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_factory_mandus_flashback_01_02">It's too bony! It's too damn bony!</Entry>

What's this about?

<Entry Name="vo_pigline_phono_prof_1">I can meet him? Your great engineer? How marvellous! I must say Mr Mandus, my excitement is almost unseemly!</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_pigline_phono_mandus_1">Yes, I can see that. Step this way Professor. I will be right behind you.</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_pigline_phono_blank">[br]</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_pigline_phono_prof_2">Mandus? Mandus, where the devil are you? I can't see a damn thing. Mandus!</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_pigline_phono_mandus_2">We are the pig Professor. We are all the pig.</Entry>

What happened to the Professor?

<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbhit_1">Please Mandus no, for your children!</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbhit_2">Smash it Papa, Smash it!</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbhit_3">Daddy, Daddy, please don't kill me.</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbend_1">Yes, yes Mandus. I knew you understood. Just a few seconds more and the egg will hatch.</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbend_2">I am created. My layers peel and the air begins to vibrate around me! Soon, we will be aflame!</Entry>
<Entry Name="vo_temple_orbend_3">It is done, thank you Mandus. Let there be light!</Entry>

Unused lines for an alternate ending?


Journal

<Entry Name="Hint_Streets1_Text">God forgive me, what I have unleashed! I stand and smell the burning city. I see ash upon the wind. I hear the roars of the sickening beasts and the screams as they fall upon the city and drag its people below for the slaughter. Now I begin to understand what the other composite ingredient of Compound X must be. And I also understand this: it is my responsibility now. I must find a way back to the heart of the machine and complete what I started!</Entry>

What are the two parts of Compound X? Vitae, and "Monad Orgone Dispersal fluid" - any idea what these are?

<Entry Name="Hint_TeslaOne2_Text">I am the architect. I am the saboteur. I am the man who murdered his children. I am the man who stood in the duck pond with his dead wife in his arms, wishing the water would bring her back to him. I am the voice on the telephone, I am the butcher who skinned the Professor and beat God to death against the air loom. Only one question remains now. Am I also The Machine?</Entry>

I didn't see this one in-game: did anyone else?

Notes

<Entry Name="Note_MansionBackOffice_Text">Of the few books to survive after those degenerate peasants fired my Great Uncle's castle were his travel diaries. He talks of archaeological digs in Siam, Arabia, which yielded treasures of quite extraordinary worth. And, most interestingly, he hints at those yet to be found, in the Americas where civilisations were consumed by the jungles. Of course, it all makes sense - those conquistadors were only driven so far by their faith - El Dorado did the rest. And yet, there is more. "Find the Temple of the Stone Moon", he writes, "and the world will never more be hungry, and neither shall you."[br][br]My mind is made up. Damn the creditors. I shall leave my work unfinished and I shall take to the Americas, and I will return with my soul richer and my pockets bulging.</Entry>

Looks like he's the nephew of Alexander von Brennenburg and got his notes. This is further supported by the note about the servant grunt he had delivered to him with the "stench of the Orb" upon it.

<Entry Name="Note_SewerPumpRoomTwo_Text">What ungodly temple is this? Beneath the vast boiler, that barnacle bruise, that cacophony, that barely-contained, that swollen heart of hate, what is this stillness, this silence, this palpable air of death I have found.[br][br]What clean blue water without a ripple or a blemish, whose light engulfs me so? What rods fall into this water, this metal so unlike brass or steel, a milky sheen to the surface, a white clean like cotton wrapped upon a pole. Why this humming, this dizzying sense of vibration, electricity, power? How can this deep water be so clear, these rods descend into the earth so?[br][br]And all around, above, where I stand, the machine as it ever is, dark metal, joints, stairs and gratings. Yet here we suckle at the very stillborn tit of god himself.</Entry>

So the Machine is powered by a nuclear reactor, then? How was the Engineer able to build such a device in 1899?

<Entry Name="Note_SewerExperiments_Text">It is the heat generated from keeping the doorway between open that is to blame. We cannot simply pack them about with coolant as we do at the centre where the doorway is. The later versions are kept safe by the freezing temperature of those towers. Up here, where the air is hot and fetid, they become overheated, and their duality tears them asunder, as the other place flies from their cells and their vitae splinters. They live sporadically, torn from one world to the other and back again in violent, unpredictable bursts.

It seems there's some sort of interdimensional gate at the heart of the Machine. What towers does he refer to? What "other world" is he talking about?

<Entry Name="Note_TeslaPigs_Text">I am halved, I am bisected. I placed my feet in the stirrups of childbirth and I hung upside down and the great blade of history cut me in two like a butchered pig and my guts fell onto my children and smothered them in my love. Each half of me still living, but the guts kept falling onto my children. So we each went our separate ways and one half built a machine instead, to hold his hate in and to keep his heart beating. And the other fell into a sleep, to blunt the pain. And then he had terrible dreams and when he awoke, the other had made ovens and killed and skinned and cooked all of those he held dear. And thus, holding onto his guts, he strode forth to find himself and make himself whole again.</Entry>

I didn't see this entry, which is a shame because it's pretty major. It looks like Mandus somehow split into two people, mentally as well as physically, and one half built the Machine (presumably he's in the coffin at the end)?

Other Questions
What is the South Tower for? What is it "suppressing"?
Whose is the heart in the South Tower?
What's with the teleportations? It's not just hallucinations - for example, when you get knocked out at Ignition Control as the Machine awakens and wake up somewhere else. Unless the entire game from then on is a hallucination (unlikely), you physically moved to a different room. How?
Is that an actual Aztec temple at the end?
Whose are the two hearts there? Presumably Edwin and Enoch's, but then whose is the third?
What was the device Mandus used on himself at the end, and why did it destroy the Machine?
Did anyone see the actual Orb anywhere?
What's with the tesla pigs?