State of the story, questions. Spoilers inside.

And in the meantime someone took your shtick, but isn't doing nearly as good a job of it. We missed you, Ultimus I'm actually serious.

Is there any place where one can read through Papa Smurf's plot exposition dump without having to suffer through the iTrials? I wanted to try ParagonWiki, but was advised that what's in there is incomplete and redundant.

Neither the gods nor the Well of the Furies are magic in nature. For the gods, that's actually stated repeatedly in canon. Both Virgil Tarikoss and War Witch agree that first there was the power of the divine, and then there was specifically and separately magic. They disagree on who discovered/developed/invented magic, with Virgil insisting it was humans from whom the gods learned it (and he's probably wrong, given Ermeeth's fate) and War Witch insisting that Tielekku discovered magic and taught it to the other gods, who in turn taught it to humans. This is actually a central point in the war between Tielekku's pantheon of good gods and Lughebu's banished pantheon of dark, life-stealing gods. Lughebu and his allies were monumentally stronger than Tielekku's alliance, having one god to each of her hundred, and still nearly winning. It was Tielekku who brought magic to the battlefield that eventually turned the tide and earned her the victory.

What the Rikti did on their world wasn't to "kill magic" because magic is not a thing. You can no more kill magic than you can kill the concept of objects moving in relation to each other. What the Rikti killed was their gods, which they accomplished by murdering all of their followers. Magic they did not kill, simply stopped practising it and forgot how to do so.

The Well of the Furies is never specifically said to not be magic, but it has also never specifically been said to be. With that in mind, to just ascribe anything that's unexplainable to "magic" is a mistake, especially since this game has such an abstract take on power origins. The well is not of a specific nature, but rather it boosts the nature of whoever is using it. The well is all origins and no origin at the same time, because it depends on who's benefiting from its power.

I don't know what the actual nature of the Well's functioning is since Angry Smurf won't tell me about it unless I raid stuff, but I have heard tell of Wells dying if they don't have people to powers, since the well appears to thrive on "recycling power." My impression is that these things are sort of like power sinks, granting great power to individuals who are already powerful, but then taking it all back AND taking the power the individual originally had when said individual dies. And the Well seems to like pitting these powers against each other. I could be wrong, but from my perspective, it's a clever idea - give great power to everybody, send everybody on a great war, then take back everything you gave out, with interest.

I'm not sure if the Well can actually die, however, and the Rikti's Well is tied to the Rikti themselves. As I understand it, as long as they exist, so will it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Hah! Thank you! That explains a lot, and it's actually a pretty cool idea to follow up on. "Incarnates" always bugged me as a basic design, being servants of the Well or, at best, defiers against its will but still using its power. Including the "Ascended" concept as a self-made, self-contained, independent powerhouse is much, much more attractive. Thanks for going through the trouble of reposting this.

Is there any other amazing info like this that Prometheus won't say unless I run a specific iTrial?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

When that day comes, I hope Gilgamesh becomes our new guide.

Why?

In my headcanon of City of, Gilgamesh was originally a half-god who managed to 'woo the Well' so to speak and didn't even need to seek the Well out, the Well just said "you're so awesome! Have power!" and thus, Gilgamesh became the "Two thirds God, one third man" we know him as mythologically. But when Gilgamesh could not be controlled by the Well, even though he basically drank directly from it, the Well felt increasingly jilted and created Enkidu as another means of control.
It backfired and Gilgamesh taught Enkidu hot to be awesome and have fun like him, and finally the Well killed Enkidu and withdrew its support from Gilgamesh. And so, for several thousand years now, Gilgamesh has been biding his time, waiting for a chance at revenge against the Well of Furies for killing his best friend.

Plus, if Gilgamesh is an arrogant jerk to me, I'd actually be able to accept it (no small part because of his depiction in Fate/Stay Night) since he was the first Incarnate, one of the first named humans, one of the oldest heroes ever, and and was the king of a mighty and ancient civilization and duo'd the Humbaba iTrial with Enkidu.

You tell me he didn't earn his right to be a smug jerk and look down on us.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

To paraphrase Han Solo, "I dunno, I got a pretty good imagination."

It's interesting - rather a number of NPC's have told us, at various times, "Do/Don't do this or you'll have to deal with me!". It seems like a pretty decent number of them have been... dealt with.
Might not be the best kind of threat to make, is all I'm saying.

They all make the generic excuse of "I'm nothing like anything you've ever faced."
When they say, it typically dooms them to defeat.

I kind of imagine that with how we're progressing so far, by the time we'd be ready to ascend and Prometheus tries to threaten us, he'll realize we've already come too far, he can't stop us if he wanted to anymore and has to keep trying to bluff.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I see it as bad writing. Devs want to give us a roadblock, a reason why we can't get more power or progress in a certain direction. So just have someone threaten and try to scare us if we go down that path.

All it does is tick players off, though :\

Yes, they are, and no, it isn't.

"Magic" and "their gods" are not the same thing. The Rikti are indeed said to have killed their gods, based on the notion that gods need worship to survive. Kill the worshippers, starve the god, lovely jobly. Magic is entirely and completely unrelated to the gods and cannot be "killed." The Rikti don't practice practice magic and thus lack the knowledge of how to use it. They are, therefore, forced to resort to converted descendants of the Mu bloodline to whom magic comes naturally without having to train in it or know what they're doing. One would assume that they, as smart as the Rikti are, they'd have been spending their time since Angus McQueen's Division: Line learning about magic.

You don't need gods to use magic and you don't have to deal with magic when dealing with the gods. The gods in the City of Heroes fictional universe are not inherently magical.

Honestly, with Papa Smurf, I think it's deliberate. It's not uncommon to have a character threaten the player to not do something on pain of death as a que for the player that he should go do exactly this right now. Then have the character carry out his threat, let the player defeat him and you have both your plot railroad AND the player feels like it was his decision AND you give him a boost to the ego. Everybody wins.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

As said by Prometheus, The Rikti share the Well of the Furies with Primal Earth.

And, of course, Luke was full of crap when he said Leia was rich. Her planet had just been blown to bits. And Luke knew squat all about her finances unless Obi-wan had told him, and money isn't the sort of thing that crazy old wizard probably knew anything about.

Wells are, explicitly, stated in game, 100% canonically, NOT magic.

What do oyu have to do to get Prommie to say this? That, and I could have sworn I saw someone post part of a tree about kheldians and their well. I wondered if PBs and Nictus can draw from both at once or something like that

Venture likes to talk about ducks here. Personally, I think any conflict or confusion around this point is a symptom of having poor definitions for both magic and the Well.

I believe it's under the 'What is the Well of the Furies?' section that asks about how Wells relate to the Kheldians and Battalion.