Okay: three questions. Don't feel like you have to answer all of them.
First of all, I'm designing an area in which the avatar can enter a dumbwaiter to ascend to an otherwise inaccessible room. The avatar would need to jump onto a table and then click on the opening to duck into the elevator in the same way as the Myst Island fireplace; the elevator would then ascend with the camera frozen in place, the camera would cut to the upper floor, and the avatar would automatically crawl out of the dumbwaiter. My question is whether we have the ability to use the Myst fireplace animation, since I don't see it on any lists of avatar animations. Honestly, I don't know if this would even work for my purposes, since the avatar animation has to pause for the elevator to ascend. Is this possible?
Secondly, let's suppose I wanted to use the animated Nexus terminal that shows up in a few Ages (the one with the spinning gear at the bottom). Let's assume I know nothing about libPlasma (a good assumption). How would I go about extracting and using this model, and would this preserve the animation and sound that go with it? Is this even legally acceptable at this point?
Finally, the door that the player is trying to bypass by using the dumbwaiter mentioned above is unable to open due to a jam in the mechanism. I'd like it to emit sparks when the player tries to open it. From what I've read of particle systems in Blender and Plasma, I'd probably be better off making planar quads and animating their positions and textures to simulate sparks, but I thought I'd ask what the status was on this. What would I have to do if I wanted to use particles instead?