That all makes sense, but it's not the first thing I thought of while reading it. It does make more sense if Sally looks up to her as the survivor she wishes she was. I also read it tainted by past personal experience of attempts helping of strangers being taken very badly.





To use a timely Star Wars analogy, Lara is about halfway between Jedi and Sith: Strong sense of what's right but willing to bend it pretty far, and a very strong conscience. The Jedi order wouldn't believe she'd uphold their values, and the Sith order wouldn't believe she had the hunger for power necessary to survive.

So it completely makes sense they'd retcon her somewhere else because she's unpredictable. Even if they retconned her to accept membership in their team, they'd STILL retcon her away, since she's be too likely to dislike what they're doing and turn on them.

The one person they probably forgot to retcon away though is Faite, because she has the annoying tendency to see it coming and vanish entirely until she decides to reappear at a time convenient only for herself. Of course, if she was around she probably wouldn't really do anything but visit nu-Hood to mock him about his bad retcon choices and that he's already doomed himself to destruction.





The Earth collision with another Earth-sized object leads me to believe, at the very least, that it's a garbage dump for broken dimensional Earths that have been destroyed already.





That's definitely possible. Maybe he was afraid to use extremely high voltages because they seemed to be too difficult to control and could accidentally kill allies around him - until he saw Lara use it in a very controlled manner, without touching anyone she wanted to keep safe.

It's too easy for someone to think of a shotgun as too inaccurate and too collateral-damaging until you see a real pro use one with absolute pinpoint accuracy.