Appears In: DRC Forums (mentioned)
Race: Human

Elias Zandi, also known as Eli by his close friends, was a wealthy archaeologist and the father of Jeff Zandi. He often travelled around the world looking at sites and bought a number of valuable artifacts, claiming a connection with the items.

As time went on though, he began to only concentrate on artifacts from his area of expertise, which was the south-western region of the United States. He claimed that there was a special mystery about the artifacts there. It was during this time that he became quite close with John Loftin due to the fact that Loftin was able to find quite a number of artifacts that interested Elias Zandi.

When Loftin found the D'ni digging machines, Elias became ecstatic and began to concentrate solely on the tunnels. On the 19th of March 1988, Loftin and Elias went on an expedition that led to the top of the Great Shaft. It was at this stage that Elias began to feel like D'ni was his home.

In 1989 Elias and John Loftin made their third trip down, and finally found the D'ni cavern. After this discovery he began to contact people to help with expeditions and releasing the information uncovered. He also bought thousands of acres of land around the tunnels.

In 1990, John Loftin, Elias and Dr. Watson went down on a three week expedition and ended up going all the way to Ae'gura where they discovered a number of artifacts including Catherine's Journals. They later went back in 1991, but only Dr. Watson and Elias made it back to the surface.

Elias fed the information uncovered from Catherine's Journals up to the Miller brothers, from which they created Myst. Elias wanted them to release the information found in D'ni as fiction, so that only those that felt what he referred to as "the call" would come to D'ni.

In 1992, it became apparent that Elias believed that some people were partially D'ni, and had a very different opinion on how D'ni should be restored than Dr. Watson did. Elias wanted to fill up the cavern with people who believed that they were partial D'ni. As time went on though, his health deteriorated. In 1993 he had open-heart surgery, where his doctors urged him to take it easy. However, he refused.

In 1995 Elias was ecstatic as small groups of people began to search for the entrance to D'ni saying that they "felt the call". Later on that year Elias had an argument with his son Jeff Zandi about how the restoration of D'ni should take place. In 1996 Elias died of a heart attack, leaving his money to the D'ni Restoration Foundation and the acres of land to Jeff.