#operator rell

[worrywrite]

Let me pitch two quest concepts to you around this idea. It would be a two part quest.

Part 1) Through the red veil (prerequisites: chains of harrow, duviri paradox)

The operator gets a message from drifter and they meet in the in-between space. Something has shown up in Duviri that the drifter cannot explain: a Warframe they've never seen before seemingly moving all on its own. Whenever the drifter gets near it, it vanishes. They offer to swap with the operator for a short period so they can see if they can make anything of it. The operator must then traverse an isolated area of duviri slowly being overtaken by murmur, fighting their way through as the murmur slaughter all of the duviri creatures there. Until they encounter the Warframe. But unlike with the drifter, the operator can get closer and the frame doesn't flee. The operator attempts to use transference, but gets caught in a strange tangle of memories by accident. Because that's what this frame does, it interacts with memories (abilities somewhere between Nyx and Oberon with a passive similar to Dante), and if isn't empty. The operator gets sucked into a chaotic scene aboard the zariman as a tenno, something that feels slightly familiar but off. The operator sees what gets shown in the cutscenes when the drifter and the deal with wally was introduced, but from a distance and with some distortion around Wally. The operator is seeing things from Rell's perspective in the drifter timeline. Things didn't turn out great in that timeline, but also didn't turn out too dissimilar. The zariman never left the void, but the orokin where still able to make warframes (by encasing soldiers, as with Stalker and Umbra) and any tenno that where able to survive in the void except for drifter were able to figure out a rudimentary transference and the orokin where able to figure out how to contact them. In this timeline, Rell is capable of remembering everything that happens while in transference across both timelines, contributing to the troubled mind of Rell in the operator timeline. This is revealed to the operator across several missions where they need to find the memory Warframe (I'm leaning towards calling it Orpheus) in duviri and play through some of Drifter!Rell's memories. This includes them escaping the zariman and the murmur consuming it into a safe little enclave like Teshin has and then being able to contact the orokin through transference in the drifter timeline where they make Rell the Orpheus frame. The quest concludes by allowing drifter!Rell to linger in Teshin's enclave and occasionally during open world duviri play there can be a murmur incursion and an NPC frame piloted by Rell will come to help quell it. You can also unlock the Orpheus frame from these incursions.

Part 2) Across the Wire

Drifter Rell tells your drifter counterpart that they're remembering things they're sure never happened. About a Warframe they never piloted (harrow), and events that never transpired to his knowledge in the drifter timeline. Rell remembers the murmur completely consuming the orokin system until only the incomplete sentients remained. The drifter tries to help Rell filter through these memories and the player plays through the collapse of the operator timeline orokin empire as operator Rell. The missions go from the initial betrayal in an orokin city by tenno piloted warframes while Rell remains mostly clueless as to what is transpiring. Rell is able to resist the commands of the lotus as she drives them to kill their masters, she herself not entirely clear where the order she is following comes from. The missions then move to lua, where Rell is left without command of the harrow frame, and attempting to escape while the lotus begins the sequence to send lua to the void which Rell fears above all else. An orokin defector, the founder of the red veil, contacts Rell looking to help any tenno escape, but it's just Rell left. The red veil's escape plan remains, Rell must use an emergency escape pod to flee lua before it can be drawn into the void and a stolen rail jack will pick them up. The void cascade left behind in lua's wake washes over the pod and Rell meets his drifter in the current as they commune briefly before Wally arrives looking like your operator and drifter Rell shoots/stabs them, severing Wally's control over his operator self and paving the way for Rell to properly hold Wally at bay until the events of chains of harrow transpire/forever because of how continuity works. This unlocks drifter Rell as a summon in normal missions.

the children yearn for the mines tenno rebellion

[tinsinart]

The man in the wall...

Fanart of Warframe's Chains of Harrow quest! The sound design on that bad boy is some of my favorite ever.

[renard-dartigue]

Guys? I started playing Warframe again and of course I need to merge it with Sleep Token somehow.

[harrowleaf]

Got a shitton of cleanup work to do in Warframe before I can start with The New War, but at least I thought I could change my Operator to make her more of her own character and not just a self-insert for me.

Her name is Aura, after the AI character from the .hack franchise.

[sirenium]

this is something I really don't like about the quest, myself. like you're trying to get me to believe that my operator, the character meant to represent my autistic ass, was a neurotypical ableist little shit? no. I will not have it, I will twist the canon thank you.

Also just kinda resent the way Chains of Harrow kinda. Establishes that your Operator isn't neurodivergent cause you're part of the "in crowd" that's ableist to him.

It's just. Vexing.

[keoulkeech]

"Natah, I think the Operator is spending too much time with Palladino and the Red Veil"

"Do not worry, Ordis. I’m sure it’s just a phase."

I bought the “It’s not just a phase!” outfit for my Operator

Now on a more serious note during one of the chats with Eleanor she told me about religion on 1999. "You're going to have to tell me what [a Nun] is, Eleanor."

I presume goths from 1999 inspired their aesthetic on the devotees of Lua (generally the New Moon has a black palette so probably the aspect of Lua Nova) this bit of information was the "last push" for me to buy the set.

The cross is for Rell who died for our sins.

I think I may finally give my Operator an actual name. Something related to Lua...

[meatball-headache]

I have finally completed the quest I've been waiting since the beginning to play.

It was fine :p

Compared to the Second Dream or the War Within, there's no comparison. This was a main quest, but it had all the structure of a sidequest, just the Lotus and others talking while you did a normal mission. Although, the tone was shifted dramatically. Is this the Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard) of Warframe?

It's a main quest, but the structure—and rewards—are more in line with the "Warframe quests" they're calling them now—sidequests that just give you a new Warframe. I'm thinking about Limbo, Octavia, Gara, Atlas... stuff everyone else has probably long forgotten and done years ago, but me with my snail's pace :p

And yet it is a main quest, required to advance the story, and, the story touches on some points about Margulis and the Void. Which means that unlike some Warframes like Nidus or Mesa or Yareli, my boy Harrow is tied closely to the core lore! That's a point in favor of maining him :D

Warframe's story is few and far between—especially the way I play. This isn't Final Fantasy, that's for sure. This isn't even Destiny. But it's like I've said before, it's like getting to level 100 in Pac-Man and suddenly there's a cutscene and Pac-Man is going, "The ghosts... I can hear them in my sleep... they give me no peace... when will it end?" It's something that comes late, and suddenly recontextualizes the entire experience. When 200 hours in, you find out that Lotus saying "Wake up, Tenno" at the very very beginning wasn't talking to the Warframe statues. It's a different kind of weight and impact that FF, certainly, but it's weighty and impactful all the same.

So. In the Second Dream, you have flashback dialogue where Margulis is arguing with—I think Ballas?—about what to do with the Tenno. Margulis wants to protect them, and for that she's conviceted of treason and executed. At least, that's how it's framed. I didn't pick up on it, but when I watched some Second Dream reaction videos, those players and their chats pointed out that Margulis and the Lotus have the same voice. And, I believe there's a line about Margulis being blinded... So, if Margulis and Lotus are the same, then Lotus wears that mask because she's blind?

In the Chains of Harrow, Palladina mentions the "Blind Queen," and then addresses the Lotus as such. She's practically worshipping the Lotus at points. And, it hit me: that's entirely appropriate. I mean, who is the Lotus? She seems to be operating independently. There's hints of factions throughout the system, Cetus, Fortuna, Red Veil, Steel Meridian—we don't have a Russian novel's worth of a cast of characters, but, Lotus is unaffiliated with anything. But, think about it. She's in our ear constantly—in all our ears. Lotus is communicating with every Tenno, all at once. And, in the Second Dream, we saw some of her powers in action: she can move the entire Moon into the Void just like that—and bring it back. Warframes already have this incredible magical power—they're magic, no way around it, they are using magic—but the Lotus is just on another level.

Here's a spoiler, though. I've seen some streamers and such playing, just grinding Nightwave or something, but something was different for them... When the Lotus pops up with her generic dialogue, "You've found a fissure. Use reactant to crack open your relic," and what not... it doesn't say "Lotus." For them, it identifies her as "Margulis." So... Lotus must be Margulis. But... how? Wasn't Margulis executed? Why would Margulis have these godly powers? And... isn't Lotus actually Natah? How does any of this fit together?

Rhetorical questions, obviously, do not answer.

In the Chains of Harrow quest, we deal with a Tenno named Rell, who was, I guess, outside of the Lotus network. Rejected and cast away for being autistic or something, and left on their own, they, what, made direct, intimate contact with the Void? Rell constantly mentioned the man in the wall, which was dismissed as a hallucination—but, I'm guessing from that Lotus Eaters login screen that there's something to it. I mean, of course there's something to it, it's a video game story, weird dreams and hallucinations and stuff like that are always more real than Occam's Razor stuff. But, there was also a suggestion that the Void wasn't a place or something like a natural phenomenon; it was a being. The Void is someone.

Man in the wall... Lotus Eater... Margulis... Natah... Warframe's story is dripfeeding some deep lore, some secret narrative. It's, honestly, more in line with a Dark Souls than a Final Fantasy; it's not a story about what happens, it's a history about what happened. Piece by piece we're figuring out what happened in the Old War, what happened to the Tenno, who we are and where we came from. Needless to say, I really like stories like that. Soulsbornes where you're traveling through a broken land, piecing together what happened long ago, or something like No Man's Sky or Nightingale, where you just putter around building your base while these strange hints of some obscure history float around you.

Also? I miscalculated. For some reason, I thought The New War was right after Chains of Harrow. Actually, I have no idea when it happens, because for some reason, this quest doesn't pre-appear in the Codex. I have a dozen quests that say "Prerequisite: The New War" or "Prerequisite: Angels of Zariman" or something, teasing me with what's to come... but, The New War isn't among them. I'm given to think it's a very big deal, bigger than the Second Dream... I don't want to know anything about it at all, so don't say a word :D ...but my point is, I won't be getting to it today, after all. I need to let the Chains of Harrow soak for a bit. Then I have, what... Sacrifice? Apostle something? And then Prelude to War. I'm not doing more than one per... weekend, really. Gotta give it time to hit, y'know? So, it'll be a while. Maybe we'll do the New War for Christmas :p

Potential mains:

Hydroid. My classic, absolute boi. The tentacles are very convenient to get all the monsters to chill out—and the floaty damage helps me find them. He's got a really strong melee weapon and a Kuva Hek, so he's decent.

Hildryn. Her 3 and spamming 2 is super cool and just keeps her alive forever. Energy independent, which is nice. She's got the Amprex, too, so she can just chain-lightning a crown.

Harrow. Lore-appropriate, aesthetically awesome. He has Scourge Prime, Knell Prime, and War—my loremaster, I guess :p But his abilities aren't quite as potent at wiping out a room... But I like the Void Priest motif.

Baruuk. Again, I like the neutral-feeling, Patient Monk motif. The Doan skin is absolutely incredible. Once his 4 gets charged up he does more damage than anything, but outside of that he's got a strong but slow gun, Kuva Chakkhur, I think it's called, and the Broken Scepter for his melee, which is a little janky, but, again, stylistically appropriate. His name doesn't begin with H, though :\

I also love Lavos and Yareli, and I'm intersted in Oberon and Sevagoth. None of them are nearly as powerful, though.

...I just felt like typing. Thanks for reading :p

Remember, no spoilers!

[xelitzenith]

Why do people assume the tenno can't age even though Rell exists and proves overwise?

(Screenshot below)

I don't understand where it saids they can't?

The only reason the operator appears the way they do is because of cryoasleep. So unless it's been retcon the tenno can infact age.

[mcflea1999]

About Cass

Name: Cass (is it short for anything? Who knows! She sure doesn’t!)

Age: Appx. 26 - 28

Pronouns: She/Her

                                        ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗

                  • ───────────────── •

TIDBITS // & // DETAILS

》 Cass has a prosthetic right hand, details of how she lost her hand are still undecided (either it was lost in a stover attack on the vallis, or sometime during a 1999 loop)

》 While her younger, alternate counterpart is very much masculine presenting and resents and denys any form of femininity; Cass herself does not and is unsure where they both diverged on that front. "I guess they had some sort of epiphany I didn't..."

⬇️ LORE BELOW ⬇️

Zariman (Pre & Post Void Jump Accident):

Cass was born on the Zariman to her parents [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Her mother was a very low level Archimedien, whilst her father was (INFORMATION CORRUPTED) meaning she grew up with very little attention from either.

She was friends with, or at least friendly with Rell and remembers him despite how much time had passed (and as of currently, she does not know of his fate in the Operator's timeline)

Cass did not intend to kill her own parents, even though she had lured them both into a room to quarantine them and see if they'd come to their senses on their own, both were too far gone and ended up leaving her with no choice but to end their suffering after they attacked her whilst bringing them their rations.

She survived nearly a year alone on the Zariman after shaking The Man in the Wall's hand, scavenging daily for food and water before Duviri fully developed (loosing her mind just enough to create it)

Duviri:

The Operator being stabbed in their timeline resulted in Cass also feeling the sensation of it in Duviri. And while no blade cut through her, a scar was left behind nonetheless. A swirling mass of twisting voidmetal permeates over her chest and back, a reminder of how she broke free from Duviri's loop and the paradox she was now entwined with. The phantom sensation still haunts her, the feeling amplified by spending too long in the void or in Duviri

The New War:

After meeting Ordis and starting to make plans to save Natah/Marguls/Lotus and take down Narmer, Cass made it her mission to break into the Operator's quarters, desperate to find at least something to use as a bed since she was so tired of sleeping on the cold wet floor most of the time. She did manage to get in eventually, much to Ordis' dismay, and found piles of floofs and blankets which she happily nested in and slept for a solid 21 hrs before getting to work

(She did steal a bolarolla floof to keep for herself)

Not wanting to leave a child to finish a War on their own, Cass took it upon herself to save Natah/Margulis/Lotus

Angels of the Zariman:

{Data Unavailable}

Whispers in the Walls:

{Data Unavailable}

1999:

After Transferring into Arthur's head and being spat back out, Cass lost consciousness out from mix of pain/shock/disorientation when Arthur stabbed through her hand, leaving her lying in a heap with her Excalibur kneeling just as limp beside her. When Arthur went to go haul her back to the mall for questioning, the Excalibur frame reanimated itself and clambered in front of her, stopping him from touching her. It was the one who picked Cass up and carried her back to the mall, following Arthur along silently as he grilled it with questions about what was going on, what she was before once again going inert and unmoving once she was situated and restrained.

(Cont.) Later, when Arthur learns more about Transference and Warframes, he asks why her body didn't disappear when she took over the other Excalibur in order to carry herself back to the mall. Cass has no recollection of this and assumed Arthur had been the one to carry her; neither have answers to how it happened and nether want to know them.

Cass sees both Aoi and Eleanor as sisters, and Arthur as an older brother

She and Arthur sparr on occasion, Cass shocking (and horrifying) him by how skilled and unafraid she is going up against a (proto)warframe with nothing but her squishy human body and a sword. "Its not like I haven't faught a warframe as myself before. I've done it all without a warframe or overpowered weapons and Kullevo still knew admit defeat"

[bi-hop]

it's so funny having been on the rell medarda train for ages and then having to essentially shuffle it off to "not at all true in the way I envisioned it, very unlikely to occur in another way". spoiler-ific rambles under the cut

cannot vibe with mel being rell's mother, timeline bullshit that is currently going on aside, bc that would demand mel choosing to not only enter the black rose in a more involved capacity (fine, whatever, not that I think that is reasonable after the finale), agree to be the headmistress of a school, and then be perfectly willing to torture and essentially kill other mage children (as shown in rell's color story, those drained usually end up starving to death if not cared for) just to empower rell while simultaneously torturing her too. her being called a wolf now at the end of the series aside, I simply cannot think of her engaging in such cold calculus, and for what? to help leblanc of all people have a weapon against mordekaiser? lawl

like I don't mean any harm in saying this but if we accept that mel is a powerful mage on her own, why would she need to do this? her house might be in trouble, but i have no doubt she'll be able to maneuver herself into a better position, especially with the retinue of soldiers currently at her disposal. additionally, I think what grates at me is just that the theory either operates on the premise that mel is a worse person than she is or is manifesting her becoming an abuser, which is shockingly awful

but whatever, this is all just my rambles. people are allowed to think what they want, I am just also allowed to go ???

[themanwhomadeamonster]

oh my GOD i deleted my rant by accident im gonna cry lemme try to remember what i wrote but tl;dr not really a theory but me trying to arrange my understanding of albrecht and tmitw

i title this: wallbrecht is everything everywhere all at once

also i wrote this at 5-6am and didnt sleep so shit's probably messy

ok so a major theme in warframe that recurrs in warframe is the loss of identity or sense of self. natah/lotus/margulis, erra becoming pazuul, teshin being controlled by the worm queens, the operator dissociating and believing they're our warframe, then the operator losing themselves to the worm queen and the operator (+rell) confusing ourselves with tmitw himself , the drifter in duviri, warframes themselves losing their sense of self (umbra at some point, and potentially arthur and aoi down the line), albrecht worrying who really left the void dimension, the remaining entrati family themselves!. we're also told many times that the void gives but it also takes, and that it's heavily influenced by strong emotions

in cosmic horror stories usually the horror is a representation of something else. in lovecraft's works it's often his disgust with people of colour, viewing them as something completely alien. in bloodborne part of it is the fears of pregnancy and dealing with offspring. i haven't played darkest dungeon but i've heard that it's about trauma and how the overwhelming traumatic events become too much to bear that people go mad. in the lighthouse, part of the horror is that people will fight and kill just to know the truth, or what they believe to be salvation

so i think albrecht's horror was his fear of losing his identity. we knew from the clock's archives that his experiments hadn't been going well prior to the bell incident. he was losing respect as an archimedian, maybe he lost respect as a father and husband too. i think a lot of us theorise already that albrecht IS the man in the wall, not a doppelganger like tmitw literally was with the operator. but tmitw being omnipresent means that they can freely simultaneously be and not be other people, the paradox of eternalism. albrecht is now the void, he knows every timeline and every outcome and potentially every person (except operator/drifter because they're already void in multiple senses of the word) but he is also still one human. the human mind can't reconcile knowing everything, that's just madness. lucky that kids aren't as self aware as adults!

the void isn't evil nor good. it gives and takes merely because that's the way the universe works, very vaguely dare i say the law of conservation in (a very sci-fi way) action. the void is in the grand scheme of things is just a natural phenomenon of the universe. but the overwhelming emotion present during the 10-0 accident (if that even was an accident) and albrecht's own experiment just happened to be fear, so the void literally embodied the concept of fear and became a person, vecause that's just what the void does. it became an unknowable being behind a veil just beyond our perceptive reality that understands the plights of humanity a little too well. it could have manifested into something friendly and offered us and albrecht a deal in a polite way if the circumstances were right but it wasn't. tmitw is a manifestation of the void so whether the man - albrecht - wanted to or not, he had to approach our operator in their greatest moment of fear. what he did have a choice in, though, was to offer a deal. and what better way to secure a time loop, multiple ones even, that will guarantee your becoming wally than to be a time-space hopping entity who can exploit a bunch of scared kids who didn't know any better.

i don't know what we'll be using the vessel for but i don't think we'll be using it to fight a giant wall (and if we are it won't be the climactic final fight). i don't think we'll ever overcome the void, and we don't need to. the void just is. but the man in the wall literally is just a man. and i know people dunk on bad cosmic horror when the spooky thing is actually just a person or has sympathetic motivations but i think here warframe may be able to pull it off well. it's a cosmic horror that's made life miserable over multiple lifetimes, but the horror simultaneously is just a victim partially of his own doing because the cosmic horror never was alien, it's just a person who's scared of losing himself, just like the lotus was and just like our operator was. the cosmic horror IS the person in the stories who faced the horrors, who faced themselves in the seriglass bell - all it took to differentiate us and albrecht was an *accident* (though at this point it was probably intentional)

we need to confront albrecht/the man in the wall and try to stop his madness. but like many cosmic horror stories go, i think he's trapped no matter what. he'll either overcome his fear of losing himself and become one with the void, leaving us for good, or he'll try to return to gomaitru. but the fact that he's not the same as he was before and neither is gomaitru, with what he's seen and experienced as tmitw will be so maddening that he'll have to leave for the void once again in a suicide mission if he still can't reconcile with *what he is* now. in true cosmic horror fashion we will probably never fully know his motivations till the end, being a greater being than our scope of thinking - and with eternalism in place, maybe albrecht reconciling with himself was what already happened back in the seriglass bell

[helpful-hardware]

no one else is really talking about how the 'chains of harrow' quest ruins warframe entirely, so i'll add my rambling (if i misunderstood something let me know):

from the jump, it's obvious that rell is autistic. perhaps too obvious, as a minigame of sorts with emotion flash cards is used throughout the quest, really trying to drive home how he has a harder time recognizing and understanding emotions. oh, and he's implied to be a savant because of course he is. so many autistic characters that were written by allistic writers are stereotypical savants and it really annoys me.

also: there's a part in rell's flashbacks where he briefly asks to be "fixed" before his mom reminds him that he's "not broken". i honestly feel conflicted about this part because yes, autistic people need no cure and should have our differences accepted and understood, but the way it's brought up here rubs me the wrong way.

this flashback also makes palladino suggest that the "emotions he so often failed to grasp" are the key to restoring his humanity which-- okay. no one is EVER "less human" because they don't feel or understand emotions in the same way as other people. but that's what this quest seems to imply by that, and that's just not how you should talk about autistic people.

also rell's whole situation is being used for horror, adding onto a long line of tales made by neurotypicals where any mind deviating from the norm is something to be feared. speaking of that, here's the big plot point that pisses me off.

rell was on the zariman ten zero ship, along with the rest of the children who would become tenno. he was cast away by the rest of the children, and margulis for his "weirdness". this means that to some degree, your player controlled operator is COMPLICIT in ostracizing an autistic child and essentially leaving him to die.

this detail pisses me off so much that it made me uninstall the game. now okay, i'm not saying you can't write about autistic people dealing with ostracization and neurotypical bullshit, but the way it all was handled here is fucking awful. and since rell plays a crucial role in other lore details, this is something i can't just brush aside.

[alteredsilicone]

Random Duviri lore that I might use later:

>Albrecht arrived "early" in Thrax's reign, built his labs and then disappeared.

"The other stranger came far earlier in Thrax's reign, before even the Bleeding Earth."

>Albrecht's visit preceded any disturbances by the Void/Wally, we can assume this was when the kingdom was still intact.

>Duviri was LARGE, like a genuinely giant kingdom, most islands are now lost and consumed by the Void

"From horizon to horizon lay island after island, each one different, bearing distinctive color and life."

>Some islands were lost naturally, some were destroyed on Dominus' orders

"I dream of a Lost Island returning one happy day, or an entirely new island appearing, birthed from the Void. But this place has not changed in so long, except for the worse, and there is no reason for hope. One day, I am sure, the Void will engulf us all."

>No new islands are made, which means that whatever Duviri started as, it is only deteriorating.

"Void Storms were not unknown in Duviri, but the storm I shall speak of was unlike others. It hung in a red veil across the sky. There was a great sound like tearing metal, and all at once a pelting rain fell. Not water, but broken metal chains, in lengths and coils and great rattling whipstrands."

>The rain of Chains coincides with the Operator freeing Rell, it also destroyed the Lighthouse and killed Mathila's husband, whom nobody talks about anymore.

"With admirable presence of mind, he describes a form steadily approaching out of the Void. A monstrous hand, possessed of only three fingers and a thumb."

>Garmi lived to tell the tale of witnessing the Man in the Wall. Presumably this is the first sighting in Duviri.

"We could not know that down on the lake bed, a portal to the Undercroft and formed. Predatory creatures writhed in. They were golden, slender, with massive fanged bivalved maws. And they were ravenous. They devoured the rainbow eels, and then they devoured each other until only a handful were left."

>A cute story about an island that served as a festival spot which also tells that Void portals would spawn spontaneously and that those led to the undercroft and that things from the Void would crawl into Duviri (in this case - Golden Maws).

>MITW emerged from the ground in the Galleria and that scared Thrax so much, he ordered the island destroyed without much thought.

"How I loved the Galleria. It was and island of simple beauty, where white statues rose out of the ground as if they had grown there. They were classical in their features, masked in due propriety, each bearing an instrument or an emblem of their craft. I gave them names: the Scribe, the Scryer, the Shawzinist."

>Might use these titles for my own purposes, assign them to my OCs.

>The Doll Mausoleum is a faux graveyard made by the Drifter to honor the Tenno lost to the Zariman. Dominus Thrax is drawn to it for some reason. It is now lost to the Void.

"When adults came to collect their children, they noticed an additional oddity. Among the Hollow Children were exact duplicates of themselves when they were younger. Each day there were more of them."

>After the Rain of Chains, Limini (?) started appearing, as well a Wally-mimics of the adults.

>There apparently was a powerful family of wine-makers who saw themselves as Orokin and did not respect Thrax. Thrax destroyed their island for this.

"When Duviri came into being there were many islands whose contents were - to put it bluntly - horrific. The Execution Cyst, the Golden Hive, the Inversion Tree, Stitcher's Gulch and the Bountiful Swamp were all notorious, but each met a natural end, engulfed by the Void. Lorn was exiled deliberately."

>Duviri wasn't just beautiful, there were odd places even before the coming of MITW. Also the island of Lorn is haunted and the shrines you reassemble in Duviri can summon those ghosts - Thrax Grineer?

"The stuff was dark, almost black. It had a heavy metallic odor suffused with grave spices. One venturesome soul tasted it. His eyes instantly became pitch-black orbs, his voice a smoky whisper."

>The Bleeding earth tells us of an island that suddenly started bleeding... Kuva.

[voidtongued]

I assume youre not much of an oc type of person, but did you have any like backstory or smth planned for Rev Tal?

Oh buddy you have no idea how wrong you are about me not being an oc person. I have a spreadsheet of like 40-ish ocs. This here blog voidtongued used to be a full on warframe roleplay blog but. most of my rp parners went inactive in terms of the writing aspect (we still chat and play the game and talk about how much we miss role-playing from time to time but a lot of us are. adults with full time jobs now and it makes it difficult to do that)

ANYWAY. Short answer is yes. Long answer is beneath the cut lmao

Rev Tal is a Venusian-born Tenno, raised by people who would later become some of the first Solaris. They were on the Zariman Ten-Zero, and after the void jump accident their possible existences diverged into The Operator and The Drifter. Blah blah, events of the game story quests with some minor canon divergence (Rev Tal being far warmer to the Grineer in any situation because they recognize the average Grineer trooper as a brainwashed soldier and as much of a victim as they are, etc), and slowly began to develop an intense distrust bordering on hatred of The Lotus. After the events of The Apostasy Prologue, they effectively renounced the Lotus and became a full-time Arbiters of Hexis operative Tenno, preparing for the coming Sentient invasion.

Things... Changed after The New War, with the apparent death of The Operator, a rift opened to Duviri, where the Drifter had been. Drifting. Surviving. Trying to find a way out and back into the reality they were "originally" from. The Drifter learned how to navigate the Void's reality and unreality, and has had dealings with the Murmur that left them changed and bitter. During the events of The New War, the Drifter and the Operator met face-to-face and realized that they were technically two parts of a whole individual, now styling themself Big Rev to differentiate from the child Rev Tal had been.

Big Rev is the best of both worlds - The Operator's energy and drive to succeed tempered by The Drifter's perspective and adult emotional maturity.

I've written two fics on ao3 from. forever ago. regarding Rev Tal's story - How to Make a Martyr and Voidtouched. HTMAM was written after I finished the Sacrifice iirc and was determined to un-fuck the in-game depiction of Rell and TMITW in Chains of Harrow, and Operation Hostile Mergers was the impetus for me writing Voidtouched (iirc Hostile Mergers dropped like, while I was writing it and I went back and reworked some things? it's been like three+ years i do Not remember). I was gonna write more, but I got busy with school and life and my brain, computer, and hands decided to explode and I had to take an extended break from the game. I'm back now though, and very behind, and I keep toying with going back to what was going to be the third installment in Rev Tal's story, the Guardian's Song, which would've gotten into their backstory more formally, but with the number of things that have changed with TNW and the Duviri Paradox and now Whispers in the Walls and eventually Warframe 1999. I'd have to do a LOT of reworking and i dont. wanna.

[kassil]

Warframe Rambling

Some speculation with regards to the upcoming Duviri Paradox. Semi-spoiler-ish stuff past the cut.

So what we know, at the moment, is that the Plains of Duviri is some kind of pocket dimension in the Void, ruled over by an entity known as Dominus Thrax. The Plains are caught in a time loop, controlled by the same. We'll be playing as the Drifter, occupying the chronological stretch between when Paracesis gets run through the Operator and when we pick up as the Drifter in The New War.

I've seen some theories about who Dominus Thrax is, and have some notions of my own as well as thoughts on the ideas others have had.

The simple one is "some Orokin fucker who escaped into the Void before the Tenno killed him" but DE usually doesn't go for the simple answers. Evidence in favor: command of an Orowyrm, the distinctly Orokin trapping of various designs present. Evidence against: it'd almost certainly have to be another one of the Seven, and the only one I'm aware of being involved in a way that might allow for it is Tuvul. Last I heard, he got eaten by wolves.

Another popular one is "a third version of the Operator" - one whose bargain was selfish and seeking safety, rather than seeking to protect their fellow children (the Operator) or refusing the original deal (implied to be what the Drifter did.) Evidence in favor: the people who populate the realm, who are implied to be created by the will of Dominus Thrax, seem to regard Drifter as him. Evidence against: DE tends not to repeat the same trick too often in their quest for ongoing novelty, and this would be another round of Your Operator Got Soaked In The Void, Wow Weird Huh.

One I thought of after seeing the previous one, plus some information about how Duviri will work: Dominus Thrax and the Drifter are one and the same, the result of the Void operating on the Drifter's mind until they became an amphisbaena of sorts. Evidence: again, the realm seems to recognize Drifter and Dominus as the same. Logic: if you failed to save everyone, you might end up in a self-destructive spiral, such that you turn against and try to punish yourself; the "days" are referred as Spirals. The realm seems engineered to torment and punish the Drifter for no clear reason, at this point. Evidence against: I admit this seems like a stretch, and would be weird mind-game-tricks even by the standards of Void fuckery.

There's a theory that this is a version of Rell who made a bargain. I don't know what the evidence is, but Dominus doesn't particularly feel autistic-coded to me, and the last round they took some pains to make sure Rell was solidly sympathetic. Doing a flat demi-villainous autistic character seems more tone deaf than what we've already had.

The last one, and the one I'm most suspicious of, is that Dominus is some version of Albrecht Entrati, either the reflection that the Man in the Wall showed as for him, or as a timeline where he chose the power of the Void for himself over returning to realspace with the keys to the Void in the form of the fingers of the Man in the Wall, or the "real" Albrecht who didn't manage to escape and instead took refuge into a Void pocket, spiraling inward on himself as the only Really Real thing. I give this some credence, because Albrecht's own notes indicate that he's not sure if he's the "real" Albrecht, or if he's his own doppelganger, having escaped from Untime, and Mother from the Entrati family seems convinced that her father is just on the other side of the Untime Door, waiting for her. Sure, she could be delusional about it, but it could also be that she's on to something in that Infestation-induced semi-madness.

Edit: ...I guess I was right with the shower-thoughts guess of Drifter and Dominus, or at least closer than any of those other guesses. Dominus is a character brought to life to hold all those emotions that a kid would be experiencing with everyone else on the ship Dead or Worse.

[trackerkitsune]

Some Duviri lore fragment thonks:

Acrithis says that there were only two people who ever came to Duviri from elsewhere, and we know that one of them is Teshin, and the other is 99% likely to be Albrecht Entrati.

So we have the locations 'Monk's Landing' and 'Scholar's Landing' respectively mentioned in the lore fragments.

But we also have 'Watcher's Landing'. Clearly associated, from her talking about Garmi (Mathila's husband), with Harrow and Rell.

So we now have an unknown third person landing in Duviri and the questions: Who was Garmi? How was he associated with Harrow and Rell, since he said he was 'keeping It at bay'?

This fragment brings up a really good indication that our actions in the Origin System have had huge impacts on Duviri as a whole, too - the 'rain of broken chains' clearly alludes to the Operator breaking Rell and Harrow's chains.

So, following that... what happened on the island of Cornucopia? (The Bleeding Earth fragment)

We can probably guess what the Hollow Children were on Academe, considering Wally visits the Orbiter often enough.

Where did the blood come from? What kind of creature's blood is it? What event happened in the Origin System happened to cause this in Duviri? Why does the blood cause people to get black eyes and speak in 'smoky whispers'?

Who were the ghosts on Lorn? Who were the statues of, the ones Acrithis named the Scribe, the Scryer and the Shawzinist?

What's the timeline of all of this happening, too?

We know the Liminus are made from a child's nightmares, and I theorise that they're a parallel to the hunting parties of adults on the Zariman going by the similarity of their posing to the posing of the adults in the Rell webcomic.

So many questions and thoughts!!