Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders.

Wait, it's not the equivalent of that, it's exactly that.

However, today they've got something a bit better than that. Yes, hard to believe, but they do.

Joe Staten, along with Frankie and Robert McLees, at the request of mnemesis and Finn, granted the HSP an interview that contains some silliness, some pretty solid information, and some heavy hints about the Halo Story.

Let's sift through some particularly salacious morsels and read between the lines, shall we?

Click "read more" from the front page for the entire article.

JS: Unlike races such as the Unggoy, the Kig-Yar were space-faring long before joining the Covenant. While it would be more accurate to call Covenant Kig-Yar ship captains "privateers" (with commissions granted by the Ministry of Tranquility), yes: they have been know to engage in acts of piracy on human ships. But these events haven't always helped the Covenant cause...

So Staten confirms that the teaser texts on the Joyride site indeed are accurate. Jackals do operate as pirates, and here we see the specifics of the operation; that Covenant bureaucratic structures even approve of this. While interesting, though, it's probably not going to have much impact on the way the major storylines develop, or indeed on gameplay.

Robert McLees, answering a question about the previous Covenant-Flood relations, points only to this image.

A few things of note about it: bipedal body structure, the single eye, and the lines radiating from the head.

[image:10288 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] It's worth noting that like humans, all the major Covenant species seem to be bipeds. Elites, Grunts, and Jackals clearly are. Hunters, while colonies of worms, are organized into bipedal forms with two arms and two legs. Drones, while presumably insectoid and possessing of more than two limbs and wings, do walk upright as if they were bipeds. Plus, we've yet to see Flood-infested Drones, so perhaps they are excepted from this warning, as Hunters seem to be. Prophets also appear to be bipedal. If the image represents a Flood-infected form of some sort, the fact that it is bipedal may indicate either that the Flood can only infect bipedal forms, or that all known forms of life that have so far been infected are bipedal, and so that all the resulting combat forms have been bipedal. Certainly it is the case so far in the Halo games.

The single eye is interesting because we already know that the sensory organs of Flood combat forms are redundant, replaced by the sensory ganglia that usually protrude from the chest. That's why a human combat form with his neck broken and hanging slack at its side can still, apparently, see and shoot you. As such, the image of the eye is probably not meant to be taken literally, and not meant to signify anything in particular about any individual Flood infected unit. It may be more an indication of the nature of the Flood as a whole; for instance, the body may represent all the Flood infected units: combat forms, infection forms, carriers, etc-- while the single eye represents the hive mind, controlling and directing all the others. However, as Gravemind appears to be neither bipedal nor even ambulatory, this may also not hold up.

The lines radiating from the head might signify many things. It may signify some sort of mental power-- perhaps Gravemind is telepathic? Or perhaps telepathy is what links all the individual Flood units to Gravemind. It might also graphically represent the risk of infection, as the Flood spreads from unit to unit through the infection forms.

The HSP asked about the Cortana Letters, Durandal, and Rampancy in Halo and essentially got an answer only on the first of those subjects, as well as some interesting info about I Love Bees:

JS: Canon is tricky (see my controversial statement about "I Love Bees" - believe it or not, we're actually working to answer the "is it, or isn't it?" question right now!). The Halo story has as many loose threads as influences. And we do our best to sew the former into canon as we find them - are reminded of their potential. The Cortana Letters are an excellent example of this phenomenon. For all sorts of reasons, they lingered in canonical purgatory for years. But when we needed some compelling dialog to remind folks what's at stake in Halo3: Bam! Newfound utility! Alas, I'd have to say that, as of now, the only canonized parts of the letters are the fragments we pulled for use in the announcement trailer.

So there's a solid answer there: the Cortana Letters (if indeed they ever were canon) are no longer canon, except for the bits taken for the announcement trailer; which essentially says that the trailer itself is canon. Which we already knew.

Staten nicely dodged the question about Rampancy, but did seem to offer a bit of clarification on whether or not I Love Bees is canon. Staten earlier said that if they had to draw a line, that ILB would not make the cut. The quote above seems to indicate that they are now making that cut.

While it is not unequivocally stated here, I think the change in title of the latest Halo novel is the best indication of how Bungie is addressing this question. Initially to be called Ghosts of Coral-- a human colony world mentioned in the I Love Bees radio drama-- it is now called Ghosts of Onyx, a world that is not mentioned in ILB at all. To my way of thinking, this is a clear indication that Bungie did not want the novels to make any clear link to ILB at all, lest that be seen as an indication that other elements of ILB are canon, which might potentially conflict with what is to come in future novels or in Halo 3.

Asked a straight question about when the Forerunner disappeared, Staten gives us-- surprise, surprise-- a straight answer:

JS: Inscrutable alien beings with problematic ethics never die... they just fade away. But if what you're asking is: when did the Forerunner take their "Great Journey," that would be about 100,000 years ago - around the time our Homo Sapien ancestors decided to migrate out of Africa. Mind you, that's a hotly debated paleontological theory.

Like the Jjaro before them, the fate of the Forerunners seems destined to remain shrouded in mystery. The monitors say they died; the Covenant seem to say they sublimed into paradise, and Staten says they faded away.

Regardless, what we do get here is a few things. We get a date that jibes with other dates. For one, the 100,000 year war (whether that means between the Elites and the Prophets or between the Covenant and the Flood) seems to be contemporaneous with the period since the Forerunner disappeared.

Since that is the date the Halo system was last used, we must assume that the Ark, which we now know the be located on Earth, was functional at that time, and I think we may safely assume it was located in the same place. That homo sapiens might choose to migrate away from Africa around the time that thing last opened up and shot beams of light into the sky seems logical to me, at least.

Of course, there's still the question of why humanity survived. Staten seems to confirm here when the installation was used-- that it was at a time where, at least in the physical sense, humanity existed in its current form. Humanity on Earth today-- referred to by the Monitors as Reclaimers-- are homo sapiens, as were the beings who migrated away from the continent where the Ark is around the last time the Ark was fired.

That, to my way of thinking, lends a significant boost to the idea that in addition to whatever role the Ark plays in firing the Halo system, that it is also somehow privileged-- perhaps protected-- from its effects.