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Factions > The Towers
Rewritten by Geoffrey Duke, April 2004
 
The Towers are ancient metallic monoliths, or in other words, towering machines built by the rulers of the ancient civilisation, only known as the ancient ones, to regenerate and protect the planet's environment. In the Ancient Age rival nations waged war on one another, causing untold damage to the environment. After centuries of fighting the warring factions agreed to build these Towers for the sake of forging a forseeable future for their planet which didn't involve the planet tearing itself apart or dying in some other equally dramatic fashion. The Towers were meant to restore a planet ravaged by wars of unimaginable destruction. A network of these non-decaying metallic structures was built across the continent during the Ancient Age, and endured for thousands of years. They purify the land, air and sea in order to render a dead planet fit for habitation. However, the Towers also breed armies of viscious bio-weapons which work to guarantee that the terraforming process is never interrupted. Once an area has been regenerated, or is in the process of being regenerated, these bio-engineered predators are deployed to guard the delicate ecological balance the Towers have created, and remove anything that threatens to tip the scales. Human beings, of course, fell into this category. The ancient ones essentially built the planet an immune system to stop human beings from raping it of its natural resources.
The Ancient Age came to an abrupt end almost 10 000 years ago when the ancient civilisation was consumed in fire by its own bio-weapons. Dragons especially, are remembered as beasts that rose up from hell and brought the fires of hell with them. The citizens of the Ancient Age, or ancients, can only be thought of in terms of gods by the primitive tribes of the Panzer world because they know no other way to describe a civilisation of people who could create sentient lifeforms and accomplish almost anything with the aid of their advanced technology. The ancients are therefore seen as nothing less than gods and dragons are revered as messengers of those gods. The question these people should be asking themselves is: what kind of gods would unleash hell on the world? Humanity needed to be cleansed from the planet if there was any hope of repairing the lasting damage its warlike nature had inflicted on the planet already, so the human race was pushed to the very brink of extinction. However, the ancient ones never intended to wipe out the human race; on the contrary, they wanted to keep humans under control. By reducing the human population to numbers of no consequence, human beings no longer risked destroying themselves, much less the planet. The bio-weapons the Towers bred to maintain the ecological balance the Towers had created were meant to protect human beings from themselves by stopping them from wasting the planet's natural resources killing each other. A growing human population is the bane of the planet, because the driving force that is human nature compels it to waste massive amounts of natural resources expanding and fighting. Such a drastic measure of perpetual extermination was perhaps the only way to ensure the survival of the human race; no other race has the potential to invent its own demise. In other words, humans are a wasteful race like no other with the potential to create weapons capable of wiping out all life on the planet. A human population clinging to the brink of extinction poses no threat to the world it inhabits, nor do a negligable population of humans risk wiping themselves out in genocidal wars or global warfare.
 
No one remembers how or why exactly the Ancient Age ended other than some obscure myth inherited from previous generations of dragons ending it in fire, but within the Empire it is rumoured that the Towers burnt whole continents to the ground (no doubt by setting loose vast armies of pure type bio-weapons). After the ancient civilisation collapsed, the cycle of regeneration commenced in order to begin healing the arid, wartorn wastelands stretching across the world. As time passed, the Towers gradually lost their power, and the cycle was never completed. The purpose of the Towers notwithstanding, humans were free to live in a world where they once again controlled their own destiny. Obviously the logic behind all of this is insane. It's impossible to say if the immune system the ancients put in place to protect the planet helped or hindered the remaining inhabitants. Did humanity survive in spite of the Towers, or because of them?
An AI incarnate called Sestren Exsis was created by the ancients to control the Tower network. It resides within extra dimensional passageways said to exist between time and space that span the length and breadth of the world networking the Towers into a cohesive whole. These passageways, which are often referred to as Sestren space, are marked by distinct gleaming patterns of gold energy that seem to drift with a mind of their own. Whether these tunnels physically exist as another dimension or whether they are an elaborate virtual reality is the subject of much debate. Sestren can be reached through an active Tower, but no human method of opening a gateway has been found yet. Each Tower is supposed to be guarded by a powerful bio-engineered dragon, but the one in Panzer Dragoon Saga was an exception to the rule. The whereabouts of its guardian dragon are unknown...
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Panzer Dragoon Zwei: Shelcoof
 
Shelcoof was a massive rectangular ship constructed out of a boney-white metal material similar to the material used to build anti-gravity engines (the similarities are too apparent to ignore) that is said to be a Tower of the sky. Shelcoof was activated by the Sestren AI for a specific task: to kill the Heresy dragon who had entered the body of a coolia. A year after a heretic winged coolia was born in the village of Elpis (a Greek word meaning hope) and slowly began to take the shape of an actual dragon, the huge hovering ship annihilated the village from the sky using a vertical energy beam which filled the horizon with a shockwave of the purest white as it struck the earth in the hopes of killing the dragon before it reached maturity. Of course, Lundi, the rider of our dragon savior at the time (the same dragon Shelcoof was sent to eliminate), sought revenge for the destruction of his home and began a journey that would change his life forever. Mounted on Lagi, Lundi trudged through the burning remains of Elpis in search of the ship responsible for the carnage, but by this time Lagi's wings weren't strong enough to fly and Shelcoof fled the scene. Afterwards, Shelcoof flew north towards the Empire where even whole fleets of Imperial warships eager to seize the monolithic ship couldn't block its path. The Empire was in awe of the gigantic ship's power; the Imperials naturally chased it until they couldn't afford to lose any more of their own ships.
Lagi and Lundi didn't let anything deter them from chasing the ship themselves no matter what horrors it had in store for them. Shelcoof unleashed wave after wave of pure type bio-weapons to fight against it pursuers, and yet the fledgling dragon denied its would-be assassins its death, save the death it dealt every last one of them. Shelcoof kept unleashing bio-monsters while heading south east towards Georgius (it is not known if its choice of destination had anything to do with the Tower of Uru or not). Lagi and Lundi survived the many perils directed towards them whilst never keeping the ship out of their own scope; by now, Lagi had grown so powerful that nothing could stop him. The two eventually caught up with the ship over the snow white clouds of Georgius where they intended to deliver it the justice that was long overdue. There they destroyed half of its forward anti-gravity engines, inflicting a mortal blow from which Shelcoof would never recover.
 
Shelcoof wasn't finished just yet though: the ship's riderless grey guardian dragon merged with the bottom of the ship in an attempt to upgrade itself. Lagi and Lundi blasted it out of a giant cocoon, peeling away layers of a thick outer shell to reach the core, from which it emerged in a much larger form reinforced with grey-blue metal armour-plating. After the two watched Shelcoof plummet to the earth, the upgraded guardian dragon came after them with vengeance in mind. Even though the guardian dragon's sheer size made Lagi seem tiny in comparison, that didn't stop Lagi from blowing it up into many tiny pieces, making sure that it could never return to oppose Lagi...
 
Now that his mission was accomplished Lagi bid farewell to his dragon rider and soared off into the unknown. As the dragon and rider departed each other's company the only thing Lundi could do was witness the ancient skyship responsible for destroying his home burst with blinding rays of white light overhead. Shelcoof lay bent, broken and powerless on the ground below enabling Lundi to indulge his explorotory whims and allowing Lagi to succumb to his restful desires. The dragon had spent his energy but took advantage of Shelcoof's inactivity to hibernate until Panzer Dragoon's tumultuous events took shape (a period between 71 A.F. and 89 A.F.) At some point after Lagi woke up, the remnants of Shelcoof regained a tiny measure of power (the front half minus half its engines hovered itself up from the ground). What could only be Sestren erected an intense whirlwind around the craft in order to prevent interlopers (namely human beings) from stealing any of the defunct ship's technology (a normal Tower could thus control the weather but it seems the maelstrom was artificially created by the combined efforts of flying sentries).
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Panzer Dragoon: The Empire's Tower
  During A.F. 89, the Empire detected trace amounts of energy north west of the Imperial capital, and discovered the tip of a collosal black Tower protruding from the seabed. The Tower has since been deemed the "Empire's Tower", because it was the only Tower the Empire was given the opportunity to study for a long period of time. All other excavations stopped so that the Empire could focus all its resources on harnessing what Imperial legends called the ultimate weapon. An arsenal of smaller but nonetheless deadly ancient weapons was unearthed (according to the Panzer Dragoon introduction sequence), and used to create strife with the surrounding nations. Perhaps the beam cannon fitted to the Grig Orig was one of them. However, the English translation of Panzer Dragoon is notoriously inaccurate and we know that the source of the Empire's advanced technology wasn't a single Tower, but ruins scattered across the continent. Also, by this time, the Empire had already conquered all of its neighbors. The Empire's domination of the region remained uncontested.
The Tower just outside of the Empire's capital city was only partially active when the Empire discovered it, and is why the Empire was able to detect it at all. At the beginning of Panzer Dragoon while the Empire was still in the process of excavating the ruin, a monotonous voice which sounds as if it was spoken through a large voice amplifier is heard coming from the Tower, thus stating the activation of what it calls Unit 01 and Unit 02. A black dragon and its drone rider raced towards the Tower with the sole intention of activating it before the human meddlers could harness what their eyes couldn't see as anything other than an ancient weapon and claim it as their own. Excavating the Tower drew the unwanted attention of the Sestren AI watching over the Towers who in turn awoke the Tower's guardian dragon, also known as the Dark Dragon (a descriptive name if nothing else), as a direct response to the growing human threat. By now humanity had grown in numbers that were begging to be "reduced", so activating the Tower would be the solution to all of Sestren's immediate problems. The Heresy dragon soon intervened to stop the Dark Dragon from reaching the Tower, at which point the Dark Dragon's task of activating its defenses became all the more urgent.
 
The human Empire tried to energize the dormant ruin with battleship engines, but to no avail. Days of painstaking research led the Imperials to the same impasse. However, the Tower showed signs of life as soon as two dragons breached Imperial airspace. Despite deploying the bulk of its massive armada, the Empire couldn't stop the two dragons from breaking through Imperial defense lines and reaching the Tower. Kyle, a human hunter, took the reins of Lagi (in the form of an armoured blue dragon that would leave a very deep impression on Imperial history) who was responsible for much of the destruction after the death of its original (probably drone) rider, but unbeknownst to the Empire, the black dragon it was chasing ridden by a decidely inhuman yet human-shaped entity with glowing eyes was the real enemy.
 
Side note: At the end of Episode 2, the Dark Dragon intercepts Lagi en route to the Tower outside the Imperial capital. The Dark Dragon and its rider were able to create tornadoes in otherwise calm environments, which is a glaring sign of their connection to a Tower built to control the environment. I'd cast serious doubt on the notion that these tornadoes merely followed the Dark Dragon, or that wind pressure suddenly dropped in its vicinity at that time. After its defeat, the Dark Dragon continues flying towards the Tower with all the urgency of a servant desperate to fulfill the will of its masters. At the very beginning of the game, the Dark Dragon only kills Lagi's first rider (aka the Sky Rider) during a brief aeriel battle, but not Lagi himself, at which point it shoots off into the distance content to leave Lagi unharmed. Killing Lagi/the Heresy dragon was obviously not its primary objective; activating the Tower was. Of course, there may be other reasons for why it sought to kill the Sky Rider first and foremost. The Sky Rider could've posed a threat so huge to Sestren that the Dark Dragon was left with no choice but to target him for immediate termination. Activating the Tower was still higher on its list of priorities than killing Lagi, otherwise it wouldn't have hesitated to kill Lagi after delivering such a crippling blow. The Dark Dragon was fixated on reaching the Tower -- a fixation that prevented it from remaining after killing the Sky Rider.
 
The Tower went active as soon as it received and confirmed instructions from Unit 01, aka the Dark Dragon. The distorted electronic voice of the Tower wasted no time in executing its plans. By now the drone was in range for its mind to become one with the Tower and take the final steps to bring it online. The Dark Dragon and its drone rider fully activated what seemed to be a partially active Tower in the light of the voice heard coming from it long before the Dark Dragon arrived. Hundreds of pure type creatures rose up from the sea with one thing on their collective mind: population reduction. The Imperial Warships guarding the Tower fell from the sky within seconds of its activation when the Tower's own guardians were ordered to secure the area -- a task that happened to involve invading the Imperial capital and reducing its population.
 
Lagi and Kyle chased the Dark Dragon through the besieged Imperial capital, letting nothing stand in their way. The bio-mechanical monsters that weren't setting the capital ablaze homed in on the dragon rider duo, so they were forced to fight their way through an army of pure type creatures to the source of the recent carnage -- the black Tower itself. As if swarms of giant insects and the remnants of the capital's own defenders weren't enough, hovering silver metallic sentries fired streams of laser beams at the approaching armoured blue dragon and gun toting rider. Anything attempting to block their path was shot out of the sky as Lagi raced towards the Tower.
 
After activating the Tower, the Tower's guardian dragon used its power to grow a few dozen times bigger in order to crush Lagi in the palm of its hand (metaphorically speaking). Each of the four sides of the tip of the Tower folded outwards into four sections to expose alien machinery at its core. Now that the Tower was active and its bio-weapons were devouring the denizens of the Imperial capital alive, the Dark Dragon's purpose switched from activating the Tower to defending it. The same electronic voice heard originating from the Tower earlier pollutes the airwaves again, identifying the Dark Dragon as Unit 01 before it enters the Tower and exits as a huge flying armour-plated serpent, even though the Tower confirmed the activation of two individual units at beginning of the game. I've always believed that this Unit 02 Sestren speaks of was the Dark Dragon's drone rider, but nothing in any of the games can provide a firm framework for this belief, not to mention the Tower receives instructions from Unit 01 (i.e. the dragon itself) to enhance its strength when we all know the drone was the only one in any position to send instructions (due to the fact he was in control of the dragon). However, the drone and the Dark Dragon were synchronized, which meant they acted as a single mind, or in other words, a unit. If that was true, then who or what was Unit 02? The Heresy dragon and/or first in-game rider is the only answer, which *can* mean the ancients or Sestren created it, or better yet, lost control of the dragon.
The events of Panzer Dragoon are replayed in one of Sestren's memory orbs in Panzer Dragoon Saga, in which the voice of the Sestren AI identifies the Dark Dragon as D-Type 01 the moment it reaches the Tower. Whether you believe the voice emanating from the Tower in Panzer Dragoon itself was the voice of the Sestren AI itself speaking through the Tower, or the voice of an automated ruin, the inescapable fact remains that some unseen force was telling the Tower what to do for all to hear. In my mind that force can only be the Sestren AI. D-Type 01 can mean prototype dragon in Japanese (01=proto type D=dragon), which is a term that carries connotations of something experimental. Prototype dragon could've been how Sestren defined the Dark Dragon's final serpentine form; all things considered, the name seems more than suitable for a dragon enlarged out of all proportion. If the memory orb was meant to show us that Sestren activated the prototype dragon, then the unknown voice coming from the Tower that gave the Tower step-by-step instructions and ordered the Tower to take the Dark Dragon to full strength was almost certainly the voice of the Sestren AI working behind the scenes. The Tower and the Sestren AI couldn't both activate the prototype dragon unless the voice heard coming from the Tower was the voice of the Sestren AI or the Sestren AI speaking through the Tower.
As we know, before the Dark Dragon enters the Tower, we hear the words "Unit 01... confirmed" come from the Tower itself, but when the Dark Dragon is shown reaching the Tower in Sestren's final memory orb, the voice of Sestren shouts out a similarly worded sentence: "Activation of D-Type 01... confirmed". The use of the word "confirmed" in both statements strikes me as an intentional way of revealing the true identity of the speaker. These statements cannot overlap for any other reason. The Towers are said to be tools of Sestren with which it imposes its will on the world. The only thing we really know is that Sestren is a place that controls the Towers, and that they cannot function with any measure of independence without the ubiquitous AI at the center of it to coordinate them. Nothing changes the fact Sestren was controlling the Tower. What would be the point in killing the Sestren AI in order to shut down the Towers if the said Towers were autonomous? If the Towers were indeed autonomous (as in they could order bend pure type monsters to their will) it would defeat the purpose of having the Sestren AI to control them.
 Kyle and Lagi manage to kill the Dark Dragon in a dramatic final confrontation and destroy the Tower, but not before hordes of bio-monsters laid waste to the Imperial capital, wiping out a large percentage of its population. When the armoured blue dragon flew inside the Tower, orbs of pure white energy gathered around its horn, causing it to start glowing bright white. The dragon's horn drew more and more orbs of white energy into it as if in preparation for a massive release of energy until it was on the verge of exploding. Soon afterwards the Tower vanished in a bursting display of dense rays of white light which gushed out of the Tower in a manner reminiscent of the last moments of Shelcoof.
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Panzer Dragoon Saga: The Tower of Uru
 
The Tower of Uru is a huge shining gray monolith located on a small island near crystal clear lakes graveyard to the genetic engineering labs of Uru that is also home to a submerged drone production facility. The Tower and labs are connected through underground and underwater passageways; however, the ancient laboratory is inundated to the extent of being almost inaccessible by outsiders seeking to find a way inside.
In A.F. 119 the Tower of Uru became the focal point of Panzer Dragoon Saga when the Empire finally learnt just how to control it. The Empire had failed to control a Tower 30 years earlier, but recent research findings guided the Empire to the missing element that had eluded it for so long: a female drone named Azel was the key to unlocking its power. Highly motivated to seize the ultimate weapon as its own and nothing but, the Empire intensified its excavation of ruins along the eastern frontier. The Empire didn't know why Azel was programmed to control the Tower yet, and yet it was all the Imperials needed to know.
 
However, the leader of the rebellious Black Fleet and Imperial traitor, K.F. Craymen, found Azel's cryogenic resting place first. The Black Fleet, led by Craymen, a former high ranking member of the Imperial Accademy, began what would ultimately prove to be one of the most successful rebellions against the Empire yet. Craymen sought to activate the dormant Tower of Uru in the hopes of ending all wars. Craymen himself believed that the only way the stop humanity from destroying itself was by allowing the will of the ancients to go unchallenged. If someone or something didn't control the human race, nothing would stop it from walking down a destructive path. Craymen knew that the Tower would restore the desolate landscape once activated, but he was also intimately aware of how the restoration process drastically balanced an ecosystem. In an ironic twist of fate, Azel had been stolen in the Ancient Age during her creation and reprogrammed to destroy the Tower Craymen had every intention of activating. Craymen woke her from thousands of years of cold sleep to be rewarded with an intense loyalty. More than mere gratitude; Azel's attachment to him bordered on subservience. Craymen twisted her true purpose for his own goal by exploiting her fragile emotions. Even Azel deluded herself into believing that Craymen wanted to "save the world" by activating an ancient ruin built to literally regenerate and protect the environment, even if this meant wiping out a majority percentage of the current human population. When Craymen took Azel, he made one fatal mistake: by slaughtering Edge's mercenary companions who were guarding Azel's excavation site, he created his own worst enemy. This helps to further convey the game's theme of humans creating something they are powerless to stop.
 
Craymen wiped the Imperial capital off the face of the planet in an attempt to stop the Empire in its tracks by somehow sabotaging local ruins. The capital was burnt to the ground in a single blinding flash of light. The Emperor's approach towards remedying the problem was to harness the Tower. In fact, the destruction of the capital wasn't even at the forefront of his mind; he refused to allow anyone to delay his plans. When the Empire's capital city, for all intents and purposes, disappeared in the explosion, most of the Imperial forces stationed in the region no doubt disappeared along with it. The ruthless rebel leader seemed to be closer to accomplishing his goals than anyone could even hope to imagine...
 
The Emperor, furious with Craymen's latest endeavour to thwart his dreams of controlling one of the ancient Towers, sent his command fleet including his own flag ship, the Grig Orig (a veritable flying fortress loaded to the brim with guns, not to mention equipped with a powerful beam cannon) to pursue Craymen, but the traitor was always one step ahead of the Empire. Refusing to surrender, however, the Imperial command fleet relentlessly chased Craymen all the way to the Tower.
 
The Grig Orig and several warships escorting it surround the Tower in spite of the Heresy dragon's attempts to stop them. The Grig Orig's beam cannon combined with the rest of the Imperial fleet proved to be more than the dragon could handle. Unlike in previous battles, the Empire came prepared for a confrontation with a dragon. The Empire's collosal flagship alone was all but unstoppable.
 
Edge who began his own hunt for Craymen after what now seemed like a lifetime ago arrived at the Tower just before the Empire launched its final attack to seize it. In Edge's eyes Craymen is nothing but a murderer, but when Craymen explains his motivations to Edge when Edge meets him in person inside the Tower, Edge learns firsthand that Craymen had nothing but noble intentions. Craymen knew everything there was to know about the purpose the Towers served in the greater scheme of things and shares his knowledge with Edge to help him understand why the ancients thought it was necessary to build them in the first place. Edge is shocked to discover that the purpose of the bio-weapons manufactured by the Towers was to protect humanity by shackling its growth while the Towers slowly but surely rejuvenated a world torn apart by ancient wars. The bio-monsters protected human beings from themselves by stopping them from wasting all the natural resources; in essence, they were meant to be the guardians of the ecosystem working to save the human race from itself. The Empire exemplified how destructive, muderous and power hungry humans can be unless they were somehow kept under control. Wars were merely a product of uncontrolled human nature after all. We can safely assume Craymen knew everything the Empire knew about the Towers since his position within the Imperial Accademy (as Examiner) gave him free access to Imperial research (he became aware of Azel the moment the Empire did).
There's a reason why the lakes of Uru were so clear: the nearby Tower purified the water for the sake of creating a clean, habitable environment perfect for fish-life. Why am I so convinced that the water is artificially purified you ask? Because of what Craymen says when Edge beholds a whale swimming underwater on the other side of a window as if it was a rare sight while travelling through a passage inside the Tower of Uru: "The path to Uru. That is the purpose of these ruins, or what we call the Tower. It creates a habitable environment for an already dead planet...". Craymen's words can be taken out of context, but in this context there's no doubt in anyone's mind that he is referring to Uru as a prime example of what the Towers were truly built to accomplish. As long as humanity wasn't completely wiped out (which Sestren had no intention of doing), then the planet's ecosystem could be restored without fear of humans standing in the way of this goal. Pushing humanity to, and keeping it at, the brink of extinction meant it could never grow out of control and destroy itself. Even if the Tower of Uru restored the world, humanity would just consume it again. Craymen wanted the Tower itself, or Sestren to take control of everything, including the future of the human race. Craymen wanted to fulfill the will of the ancients who built the Towers in his own way. Unfortunately, the Empire had other plans; Craymen and Edge can only watch as the Imperial fleet positioned around the Tower begins blasting entry points into the Tower's control room.
 
Removing all opposition, the 7th Emperor himself captured the Tower. Edge returns after his failed attempt to stop the Imperial seizure of the ruin to the last place where he met Craymen only to find Azel and Craymen surrounded by Imperial troops with the Emperor floating in his throne above. He literally gloats over them as Craymen tastes the bitterness of defeat. Being so close to the Emperor lends Craymen the rare opportunity to put an end to his plans for global domination once and for all. Craymen draws a hidden weapon from his sleeve, fires once in the Emperor's general direction and barely misses before being knock to the ground again. Craymen's punishment is delivered when the Emperor presses on the right arm-rest of his throne which is a firing mechanism for a concealed automatic weapon. Azel is a helpless observer as Craymen is shot multiple times, and rushes to his aid as soon as the Emperor has finished punishing the man for his defiance. Azel can do the one and only thing she knows how to do to help Craymen...
 
Particles of energy gather around Azel as she cries out to the Tower in distress in the full knowledge she is in fact fulfilling the purpose Craymen himself had given her, the very opposite of what she was programmed to do. And as if the Tower heard her scream, the sleeping giant came to life to come to her aid. Power began to flow like sluggish blood through metallic veins to every crevice of every corner, filling the Tower with the power it had been denied for so long until it was full of life once more. A trickle of faint energy became a torrent of power as the moving energy currents gained momentum and pervaded the room with a humming ambiance like no other.
 
The Emperor's glee quickly turned to horror, however, when he saw with his own two eyes what had truly awoken. Preceded by its own rapidly approaching shadow, a deadly pure type creature armed with a huge retractable claw better described as a scythe pounces on one of the Imperial intruders and massecres the rest with extreme prejudice. Craymen is still alive, even after being on the receiving end of automatic weapons fire, but ultimately becomes one of the first victims of the very Tower he strove to activate.
 
As soon as the Tower was disturbed from its long slumber, its bio-mechanical defenders blanketed the sky and overwhelmed the Imperial warships surrounding it outside. Not surprisingly, the Tower of Uru released thousands of pure type creatures to sanitize the area of anything that amounted to a potential threat. The Grig Orig whose beam cannon malfunctioned in the face of the oncoming swarm of pure type creatures was simply outnumbered. The Empire's flagship couldn't even hope to stand against such an overwhelmiing force sent to erradicate the invading Imperials. Not one Imperial, nor Imperial ship withstood the onslaught.
The Heresy dragon's current rider, Edge, saved Azel. All three later returned to deactivate the Tower menace permanently, as opposed to temporarily saving the world from this problem by just destroying one Tower. Once at the Tower's core, Azel opened up a rift in time and space leading to Sestren, giving the Heresy dragon an opportunity to fulfill its programming: the deactivation of the Tower network. Edge and Lagi left for Sestren space, but Azel remained. She, too, fulfilled her ancient duty, but of her own volition. She had honoured the wishes of Craymen by activating the Tower, but by seeing the destruction it was willing and prepared to wreak on the world for herself, she chose to bring its reign of terror to an end. She was meant to destroy the Tower all along, but in the end, this didn't change the fact she chose to carry out her duty, not be enslaved by it. Only in the end was she a slave to no one but herself.
 
Azel initiated the Tower's self-destruct sequence, causing the Tower to release all of its energy at once. Raw energy flowed up through the Tower's veins until it burst from the tip, splitting it into fragments. The escaping energy expanded into a whirling colume that completely engulfed the Tower. The Tower itself melted under the pressure of the release of so much energy, which forever severed its imperceptible pathway to Sestren space. The fact that the Tower still stood more or less in one piece proves how sturdy indeed the exterior truly was. Lagi probably didn't blow up this Tower in the same manner he obliterated the previous one, which vanished without a trace, because killing Sestren would accomplish the same goal. How long would it have taken for all the many separate Towers to be destroyed via Lagi if Azel hadn't opened a window [of opportunity] to Sestren I wonder?
The Tower of Uru didn't have a dragon guardian per se. Atolm was Azel's guardian, even if the pair did try to prevent Edge and Lagi from reaching the Tower. Instead, the Tower of Uru had other defenders. A ship the size of Shelcoof, named Mel Kava, spread an impenetrable layer of fog in the Tower's vicinity. The ship needed to be destroyed before a clear flightpath could present itself (Craymen reached the Tower via an Uru passageway, which he closed afterwards).
After Edge and Lagi destroyed Sestren Exsis, the planet started experiencing violent climate changes and the landscape shifted in uncontrollable surges. Shutting down the Towers permenantly caused the world to undergo a metamorphasis as if they had lost control of not only maintaining a balanced ecosystem, but also keeping it in a stable condition. Temperatures went from one extreme to the other in different regions where temperatures were uniform before, whole regions of land were swallowed as their foundations collapsed under their own weight, and before Azel left to find Edge after he didn't return from Sestren, electrical storms shook the earth. How could shutting down dormant Towers have such a devastating impact on the environment? According to the information contained in Panzer Dragoon Orta most of the Towers were dormant as opposed to dead during the time the Saturn Panzer Dragoon trilogy is set, but not all as some of us were previously led to believe. There are two theories regarding the role that the malfunctioning Towers played in the greater scheme of things:
1. The permanent deactivation of the dormant Tower network led to climate changes that suggest the Towers, although dormant, were still keeping the environment from changing for the worse (while presumably helping it change for the better). Whilst the Towers lay dormant/sleeping they couldn't reach out to the environment far enough to regenerate it on the same scale as they could when active/awake, but it appears they could still stabilize what was a dying planet by all accounts. They prevented the planet from shaking itself to pieces, but by the time they were taken offline by the Heresy dragon, they had already stabilized the planet for a sufficient length of time for it to finally settle.
2. The few remaining Towers that were active struggled to maintain the environment in the absence of the rest of the Tower network. The Seekers believed that the Towers wore down over time and therefore weren't working efficiently. What if the Seekers meant to say that most of them became inactive over time? The Seekers may not have located every Tower on the continent, which in turn may have given them reason to believe, or created the misleading impression that the Towers weren't active when some of them were quite the opposite. However, the voice heard coming from the Tower in Panzer Dragoon does suggest that the dormant Tower was still partially active, unless it was in fact the voice of the Sestren AI monitoring the Tower from behind the scenes.
The Towers were holding nature at bay; if nature threatened to tear the planet apart then perhaps the Towers helped save it. Once the Towers lost their firm grip on the environment nature took its course. The planet began reshaping itself thereafter; the dreams of whatever paradise the Towers were attempting to shape by themselves died with them. When the Towers were destroyed the will of the ancients that lived on in the form of the Towers finally joined them in death. No one will be quick to forget their legacy.
Side note: The Heresy dragon sought to free humanity from the will of the ancients for reasons of its own, but the dragon has never existed to thwart the Empire. The Empire has merely stood between the dragon and its goals. This is a prevalent misunderstanding; Lagi has a vast amount of sympathy for the plight of human beings, otherwise he wouldn't seek to save them. That sometimes means saving them from themselves.
Click here to view a map pinpointing the location of the Towers I have written about in this summary.
Shelcoof was first sighted near Elpis. The lines are the paths the dragon took in each Panzer Dragoon game (the red line, gray line and black line represents the flightpaths taken by the dragon in Panzer Dragoon, Panzer Dragoon Zwei, and Panzer Dragoon Saga, respectively).
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Related Articles:
Factions > The Great Fall
Factions > The Ruins
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Destroy the mutant stealing habits; it is the village's code. The Will of the Ancients is an unofficial fansite that is in no way supported or associated with SEGA or Smilebit. Panzer Dragoon, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Panzer Dragoon Orta and all other official Panzer Dragoon content is © SEGA, 1995-2003. Everything else on this website was made or written by Solo Wing Dragon unless otherwise noted. Please ask me first before using any content on this website for fan or commercial purposes.
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