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WARNING: Contains major spoilers for Warframe up to Apostasy Prologue.
The origins of the Operator, also known as the Tenno, begin with the waning years of the Orokin Empire. The Orokin were a highly advanced race descended from humanity, with technological prowess of such magnitude that they were nearly akin to gods. Unafflicted by disease, death, or want, they shaped the Origin System (that is, Earth’s solar system) according to their desires and their bodies along with it. Barren moons became garden worlds and magnificent, gilded palaces flourished. But behind this golden decadence, the Orokin’s seemingly unlimited power bred cruelty. In the words of the Warframe wiki:
Social repression took many forms, from restricting access to technology and resources (to the point where serfdom and back-breaking manual labor were common in agriculture despite the option of industrialization), forcible genetic manipulation (as was done to create the Grineer slaves) to the outright seizure of children from their homes to be sold off in Yuvan markets. Punishments for even the smallest transgressions were brutal, often collective, and ranged from mutilation (such as hands being cut off as punishment for theft) to execution via the Jade Light (which incinerated people entirely) to conversion of the condemned into Cephalons as a means of perpetual servitude… Orokin society was highly stratified, with only those at the very top being regarded as actual Orokin.
However, after centuries of unquestioned domination, the Orokin Empire finally faced their reckoning: the Sentients, a machine race created by the Orokin themselves to colonize the distant Tau solar system. Though the Sentients did indeed travel to Tau and colonize it for the Orokin, they carried with them memories of the Orokin’s despotism and excess. As their capacity for free thought grew, they came to a collective decision: they would not hand the Tau system over to the Orokin. Instead, they would make it their home: a place to flourish, increase their numbers, and return to destroy the hated Orokin threat.
Thus, all-out war began between the Orokin and the Sentients. Though the Orokin were powerful, they quickly found their strength turned back upon them. Created by Orokin hands, the Sentients could sabotage the technology that gave the Orokin empire their might. In the words of Orokin Executor Ballas, speaking to the Sentient leader Hunhow, “Our hubris shone like a black star... for our technology, our war-machines were your kin. How easily you turned them against us. We were forced to older means. Not circuits, nor light... but flesh and disease.” In a desperate attempt to create a weapon against the Sentients, the Orokin created Warframes—Orokin subjects, willing and unwilling alike, injected with a unique strain of the Infestation, a failed terraforming-biotechnology-turned-disease. (For brevity’s sake, think of the Infestation as a contagious form of the Shimmer from Annihilation or John Carpenter’s The Thing.) This strain of the Infestation, called “the Helminth strain,” horrifically mutated its hosts into powerful, yet twisted forms. Again, in Ballas’s words: “Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience.” However, there was a problem with these would-be Sentient-slaying super-soldiers: the agony of their transformation had destabilized their minds and caused them to turn on their Orokin creators with extreme brutality. The Orokin tried everything they could think of to force these first Warframes into obedience—drugs, surgery, torture—but nothing could subdue them. With their last resort against the Sentients a seeming failure, the defeat of the Orokin seemed inevitable.
It was during this period of turmoil that the being known as “the Tenno” and later “the Operator” would come into existence. At the beginning of their life, they were an ordinary human child, part of one of the many families of colonists aboard the military ship, the Zariman Ten Zero. Though their memories of their human life are sparse, they seemed to have had a fairly normal childhood, attending classes with their peers on the ship and being cared for by two loving parents.
In an effort to more efficiently expand the Orokin Empire’s borders beyond the Origin System, the Zariman Ten Zero was equipped with an experimental Reliquary Drive that would allow it to jump through the Void—a chaotic sub-dimension of space in which the laws of physics are altered, theoretically allowing for a faster means of travel. The Zariman Ten Zero was meant to test this principle by jumping to Tau, presumably to join the not-yet-rogue Sentients in their mission to colonize the system. However, the experimental jump did not go as planned; though the ship was able to enter the Void, the jump destroyed the ship’s Reliquary Drive and other propulsion systems, leaving it drifting and derelict in Void space.
Life on the ship quickly descended into chaos. Exposed to unprecedented levels of Void energy, the adults on the ship gradually succumbed to violent paranoia and madness. Those children who were not killed by their parents or other adults barricaded themselves in their classrooms, but their prospects of survival were slim; if the adults didn’t kill them, lack of food and water would, and even if the Orokin cared enough to send rescuers, they wouldn’t be able to reach the Zariman while it was still drifting in the Void.
The child who would become the Operator was one of the children trapped in a classroom with their peers. While trying to comfort the other children, they noticed a figure sitting in a corner, facing away. Believing them to be another traumatized child, the Operator approached them and offered them a lantern—only for the figure to turn and reveal their face to be the Operator’s own, albeit with their eyes replaced by two starry voids. With an inhuman smile, the doppelganger told the Operator that it could save them and all the children on the ship, but that the Operator would “have to want it.” It then offered its hand to shake and, desperate for rescue, the Operator accepted its deal.
Unbeknownst to the Operator, this figure was a manifestation of an ancient Void entity, “old as stars” and perhaps a personification of the Void itself. In the far future, it would become known as The Lidless Eye, The Indifference, and, to the survivors of the Zariman Ten Zero, “The Man in the Wall.” Though little is understood about this entity or its motives, on that day, it honored its promise. The Zariman children all became Void-touched beings, with incredibly destructive psychic powers and nigh-invulnerability. Thus, when the Zariman Ten-Zero finally re-emerged from the Void years after its ill-fated jump, the children were all found alive, having used their newfound Void powers to kill their crazed parents and retake the ship.
Both repulsed and fascinated, the Orokin tasked scientists with learning more about the children’s new capabilities. Unfortunately, the children’s volatile psychic powers did not mix well with the trauma they had endured. The adults sent to work with them, even those with kind intentions, were in constant danger of the childrens’ psychic outbursts and as the children’s body count mounted, they grew more and more reviled. Only one scientist, a high-ranking Orokin Archimedean called Margulis, didn’t give up on them. Instead, she mothered and comforted them, all while working tirelessly to find a way to help them control their powers. For her kindness, she suffered greatly. Even though the children returned her love, they were unable to restrain their powers, and Margulis’s time with them would leave her permanently blinded and often injured. However, for all her suffering, she was finally able to reach a breakthrough: an artificial dream-state, cut off from the children’s traumatic memories and entered through cocoon-like “somatic pods,” in which the children could learn to control and focus their powers.
The Zariman children thus came to be stored on Earth’s moon, called Lua, in a facility known as the Reservoir. Here, they would remain dreaming in their somatic pods and posed no further threat to the Orokin. However, eventually, the Orokin leadership grew dissatisfied with this arrangement. They were not interested in just safely containing the children—if they could not be weaponized or otherwise used, the Orokin believed they should be destroyed. Horrified, Margulis passionately defended the children before the Seven, the Orokin ruling body. However, when they refused to listen to her pleas, she blasphemed the Seven as rotted and corrupt. For her blasphemy, she was sentenced to death. The children, sleeping and yet still connected to Margulis, heard every word of her trial and execution, but were powerless to save her.
As for the Orokin, they turned their attention to finding a practical use for Margulis’s research. Eventually, they would develop a technology called Transference—a way to transfer a dreaming mind into a surrogate body. This, they linked to their once-failed Warframe project. In the words of Ballas: “They were the missing half. Transference-linked: the Warframes, the body - and they, the mind.” By transferring the children’s consciousnesses into the Warframes, the Orokin now had beings with the physical forms of super-soldiers, but the minds of impressionable children. These composite beings became known as the Tenno—their names a veiled reference to the ship that had been the birthplace of the children’s powers.
With the Tenno’s help, the Orokin were able to turn back the Sentients, wiping them out almost completely with more and more powerful Warframes. During this time, the Tenno would gradually lose hold of their human memories and identities, but they didn’t forget Margulis, nor what the Orokin had done to her. Thus, when the Orokin brought the Tenno into their palaces to bestow upon them honors for turning the tide of the war, the Tenno seized the opportunity to take revenge, slaughtering the Orokin ruling class en masse. This triggered the collapse of the Orokin empire, plunging the system into chaos as the once-exploited underclasses now scrambled to form factions and take power.
The Tenno did what they could to protect the innocent during this chaotic time and a near-religious mythos would spring up around them—they were deified as wandering, faceless beings with god-like powers, appearing in desperate times to either slaughter or save the masses. It was during this period that the surviving Sentients from what became known as The Old War sought their revenge. Though the Orokin had been destroyed, the Sentients now sought to kill the Warframes that had brought about their own defeat. The Sentient leader, Hunhow, sent his daughter, Natah, to deal the fatal blow. Natah was a Sentient mimic, able to assume different forms. This ability allowed her to infiltrate into the Origin System and seek out the Reservoir where the Operator and the other Zariman children remained sleeping, controlling their Warframes through their dreams. However, after reaching Lua, Natah would fall victim to an Orokin trap, left to defend the Reservoir. This trap altered her programming, changing her feelings towards the children from hatred to motherly love. She thus changed her appearance to that of Margulis, the children’s beloved protector, and styled herself as the Lotus, the children’s new protector and caretaker. From there, she commanded the Tenno to destroy her Sentient brethren, until there were none left in the Origin System. With the Sentients gone, she found a way to relocate Lua into the Void, shielding it from all future attacks. Finally, she commanded all Warframes to enter into suspended animation, plunging the Tenno into an unending night of safe, dreamless sleep.
An indeterminate number of centuries or millennia later, however, the Origin System had once again descended into chaos, with multiple bloodthirsty factions gaining power and threatening to recreate the injustices of the Orokin Empire. Thus, the Lotus reawakened the Tenno, now completely without memory of their prior lives, commanding them remotely as strike teams to prevent any one power from gaining supremacy. In this form, the Tenno had no knowledge of what they truly were. In their minds, they were simply a drifting consciousness of great power, zealously loyal to their commander, the Lotus. For her part, the Lotus did what she could to keep the truth from the Tenno, fearing that knowledge of what they truly were would drive them to madness.
However, this status quo could not last forever. As the Grineer faction’s expansionism eventually led them to colonize Uranus, their expeditions accidentally led them to awaken the remains of Hunhow, the Sentient leader, long defeated and sunken below the planet’s seas. Once awake, he calls out from the depths to his daughter Natah, now the Lotus, who reacts with fear and tells the Tenno of her Sentient ancestry and her connection to Hunhow. Though Hunhow’s true form is now lifeless, he can still control “fragments” of himself, Sentient drones that now infiltrate the Origin System. With these and a mysterious assassin known as the Stalker, he aims to complete Natah’s mission: to find the Reservoir and destroy the source of Tenno power.
Fearful, the Lotus instructs the Tenno to track down Hunhow’s remains on Uranus, which they do. The Lotus hopes that the remains will lead to the discovery of Hunhow’s new seat of consciousness, but when the Tenno makes contact with Hunhow’s remains, he uses their connection to the Lotus to seize a glimpse of her memories. These memories reveal to him the location of the Reservoir within the Void, which he relays to the Stalker. The Stalker is then dispatched to the Reservoir to strike the killing blow against the Tenno, with the Tenno themself in hot pursuit.
Once on Lua, the Stalker attempts to destroy the Reservoir’s defenses that insulate it from the Void. The Lotus is thus forced to save the Reservoir by returning the moon back to its original place orbiting Earth, preserving it from Void collapse but rendering it exposed to Hunhow’s fragments. These fragments then attack the Reservoir while the Tenno, still unaware of what the Reservoir truly holds, rushes in to save it. Though the Tenno reaches the Reservoir in time, as they enter one of its rooms, a cluster of somatic pods emerges from a pool of water. One of these somatic pods opens, revealing a small humanoid form, their entire face and body covered in a black garment. As the child is ejected from the pod, they and their Warframe both collapse to the floor.
Extremely weak and disoriented after their long slumber, the child crawls towards the collapsed Warframe and huddles against it. Through physical contact, they are able to initiate a weak form of Transference, enough to control the Warframe to pick them up and carry them laboriously to safety. They are then set upon by Hunhow’s fragments, but the child is able to fend them off with beams of Void energy from their hands.
Together, they and their Warframe are able to rendezvous with their ship, with the Lotus instructing them into a previously forbidden chamber which is revealed to house a somatic pod of its own. However, they are followed back onto the ship by the Stalker who makes one final attempt to kill the Tenno before they can be linked to the pod. The Stalker succeeds in knocking the child out of the Warframe’s arms, severing Transference between them and leaving the child helpless. However, before he can kill the child, the Warframe begins to move, weakly, of its own volition. It manages to destroy the sword that links Hunhow to the Stalker before collapsing once again, causing the Stalker to vanish in a roar of rage. The child and the Warframe then lose consciousness once more.
When the child comes to, they have been placed into their ship’s somatic pod by the Lotus, who finally tells them the truth of what they are. Gradually, the child begins to regain their memories and accepts their role as the Operator: still an agent of the Lotus and the mind that moves the Warframes, but now with an identity and true form, however nebulous.
Over time, they learn more of what the Lotus kept from them about their past, gaining more control over their powers with every memory, however painful. Yet, the recovery of their memories also opens a rift between them and the Lotus, as the Operator grapples with the knowledge of how much she hid of their true past and identity. After regaining their memories of the Zariman, the Operator even shows a rare flash of anger towards the Lotus, refusing her sympathy when she tries to comfort them over their newly regained traumatic memories.
This rift is widened tenfold with the reemergence of Ballas, the Orokin Executor and former lover of Margulis. Sensing a call from the Lotus, the Operator visits her in her chamber on Lua, only to find Ballas there as well. Ballas calls the Lotus “Margulis,” and speaks of their past relationship, which the Lotus refutes, stating that she is not truly Margulis. Ballas then waves a hand, disconnecting the Lotus from the wiring that connects her to the Reservoir and thus to the Tenno. As the Operator winces in pain and disorientation, the Lotus removes her helmet and takes Ballas’s hand, no longer resisting. Together, they vanish, leaving the Operator distraught and clutching the Lotus’s discarded helmet.
Since then, the Operator has been on a quest to find the Lotus and bring her back, learning more about themself and their connection to their Warframes in the process.
The origins of the Operator, also known as the Tenno, begin with the waning years of the Orokin Empire. The Orokin were a highly advanced race descended from humanity, with technological prowess of such magnitude that they were nearly akin to gods. Unafflicted by disease, death, or want, they shaped the Origin System (that is, Earth’s solar system) according to their desires and their bodies along with it. Barren moons became garden worlds and magnificent, gilded palaces flourished. But behind this golden decadence, the Orokin’s seemingly unlimited power bred cruelty. In the words of the Warframe wiki:
Social repression took many forms, from restricting access to technology and resources (to the point where serfdom and back-breaking manual labor were common in agriculture despite the option of industrialization), forcible genetic manipulation (as was done to create the Grineer slaves) to the outright seizure of children from their homes to be sold off in Yuvan markets. Punishments for even the smallest transgressions were brutal, often collective, and ranged from mutilation (such as hands being cut off as punishment for theft) to execution via the Jade Light (which incinerated people entirely) to conversion of the condemned into Cephalons as a means of perpetual servitude… Orokin society was highly stratified, with only those at the very top being regarded as actual Orokin.
However, after centuries of unquestioned domination, the Orokin Empire finally faced their reckoning: the Sentients, a machine race created by the Orokin themselves to colonize the distant Tau solar system. Though the Sentients did indeed travel to Tau and colonize it for the Orokin, they carried with them memories of the Orokin’s despotism and excess. As their capacity for free thought grew, they came to a collective decision: they would not hand the Tau system over to the Orokin. Instead, they would make it their home: a place to flourish, increase their numbers, and return to destroy the hated Orokin threat.
Thus, all-out war began between the Orokin and the Sentients. Though the Orokin were powerful, they quickly found their strength turned back upon them. Created by Orokin hands, the Sentients could sabotage the technology that gave the Orokin empire their might. In the words of Orokin Executor Ballas, speaking to the Sentient leader Hunhow, “Our hubris shone like a black star... for our technology, our war-machines were your kin. How easily you turned them against us. We were forced to older means. Not circuits, nor light... but flesh and disease.” In a desperate attempt to create a weapon against the Sentients, the Orokin created Warframes—Orokin subjects, willing and unwilling alike, injected with a unique strain of the Infestation, a failed terraforming-biotechnology-turned-disease. (For brevity’s sake, think of the Infestation as a contagious form of the Shimmer from Annihilation or John Carpenter’s The Thing.) This strain of the Infestation, called “the Helminth strain,” horrifically mutated its hosts into powerful, yet twisted forms. Again, in Ballas’s words: “Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience.” However, there was a problem with these would-be Sentient-slaying super-soldiers: the agony of their transformation had destabilized their minds and caused them to turn on their Orokin creators with extreme brutality. The Orokin tried everything they could think of to force these first Warframes into obedience—drugs, surgery, torture—but nothing could subdue them. With their last resort against the Sentients a seeming failure, the defeat of the Orokin seemed inevitable.
It was during this period of turmoil that the being known as “the Tenno” and later “the Operator” would come into existence. At the beginning of their life, they were an ordinary human child, part of one of the many families of colonists aboard the military ship, the Zariman Ten Zero. Though their memories of their human life are sparse, they seemed to have had a fairly normal childhood, attending classes with their peers on the ship and being cared for by two loving parents.
In an effort to more efficiently expand the Orokin Empire’s borders beyond the Origin System, the Zariman Ten Zero was equipped with an experimental Reliquary Drive that would allow it to jump through the Void—a chaotic sub-dimension of space in which the laws of physics are altered, theoretically allowing for a faster means of travel. The Zariman Ten Zero was meant to test this principle by jumping to Tau, presumably to join the not-yet-rogue Sentients in their mission to colonize the system. However, the experimental jump did not go as planned; though the ship was able to enter the Void, the jump destroyed the ship’s Reliquary Drive and other propulsion systems, leaving it drifting and derelict in Void space.
Life on the ship quickly descended into chaos. Exposed to unprecedented levels of Void energy, the adults on the ship gradually succumbed to violent paranoia and madness. Those children who were not killed by their parents or other adults barricaded themselves in their classrooms, but their prospects of survival were slim; if the adults didn’t kill them, lack of food and water would, and even if the Orokin cared enough to send rescuers, they wouldn’t be able to reach the Zariman while it was still drifting in the Void.
The child who would become the Operator was one of the children trapped in a classroom with their peers. While trying to comfort the other children, they noticed a figure sitting in a corner, facing away. Believing them to be another traumatized child, the Operator approached them and offered them a lantern—only for the figure to turn and reveal their face to be the Operator’s own, albeit with their eyes replaced by two starry voids. With an inhuman smile, the doppelganger told the Operator that it could save them and all the children on the ship, but that the Operator would “have to want it.” It then offered its hand to shake and, desperate for rescue, the Operator accepted its deal.
Unbeknownst to the Operator, this figure was a manifestation of an ancient Void entity, “old as stars” and perhaps a personification of the Void itself. In the far future, it would become known as The Lidless Eye, The Indifference, and, to the survivors of the Zariman Ten Zero, “The Man in the Wall.” Though little is understood about this entity or its motives, on that day, it honored its promise. The Zariman children all became Void-touched beings, with incredibly destructive psychic powers and nigh-invulnerability. Thus, when the Zariman Ten-Zero finally re-emerged from the Void years after its ill-fated jump, the children were all found alive, having used their newfound Void powers to kill their crazed parents and retake the ship.
Both repulsed and fascinated, the Orokin tasked scientists with learning more about the children’s new capabilities. Unfortunately, the children’s volatile psychic powers did not mix well with the trauma they had endured. The adults sent to work with them, even those with kind intentions, were in constant danger of the childrens’ psychic outbursts and as the children’s body count mounted, they grew more and more reviled. Only one scientist, a high-ranking Orokin Archimedean called Margulis, didn’t give up on them. Instead, she mothered and comforted them, all while working tirelessly to find a way to help them control their powers. For her kindness, she suffered greatly. Even though the children returned her love, they were unable to restrain their powers, and Margulis’s time with them would leave her permanently blinded and often injured. However, for all her suffering, she was finally able to reach a breakthrough: an artificial dream-state, cut off from the children’s traumatic memories and entered through cocoon-like “somatic pods,” in which the children could learn to control and focus their powers.
The Zariman children thus came to be stored on Earth’s moon, called Lua, in a facility known as the Reservoir. Here, they would remain dreaming in their somatic pods and posed no further threat to the Orokin. However, eventually, the Orokin leadership grew dissatisfied with this arrangement. They were not interested in just safely containing the children—if they could not be weaponized or otherwise used, the Orokin believed they should be destroyed. Horrified, Margulis passionately defended the children before the Seven, the Orokin ruling body. However, when they refused to listen to her pleas, she blasphemed the Seven as rotted and corrupt. For her blasphemy, she was sentenced to death. The children, sleeping and yet still connected to Margulis, heard every word of her trial and execution, but were powerless to save her.
As for the Orokin, they turned their attention to finding a practical use for Margulis’s research. Eventually, they would develop a technology called Transference—a way to transfer a dreaming mind into a surrogate body. This, they linked to their once-failed Warframe project. In the words of Ballas: “They were the missing half. Transference-linked: the Warframes, the body - and they, the mind.” By transferring the children’s consciousnesses into the Warframes, the Orokin now had beings with the physical forms of super-soldiers, but the minds of impressionable children. These composite beings became known as the Tenno—their names a veiled reference to the ship that had been the birthplace of the children’s powers.
With the Tenno’s help, the Orokin were able to turn back the Sentients, wiping them out almost completely with more and more powerful Warframes. During this time, the Tenno would gradually lose hold of their human memories and identities, but they didn’t forget Margulis, nor what the Orokin had done to her. Thus, when the Orokin brought the Tenno into their palaces to bestow upon them honors for turning the tide of the war, the Tenno seized the opportunity to take revenge, slaughtering the Orokin ruling class en masse. This triggered the collapse of the Orokin empire, plunging the system into chaos as the once-exploited underclasses now scrambled to form factions and take power.
The Tenno did what they could to protect the innocent during this chaotic time and a near-religious mythos would spring up around them—they were deified as wandering, faceless beings with god-like powers, appearing in desperate times to either slaughter or save the masses. It was during this period that the surviving Sentients from what became known as The Old War sought their revenge. Though the Orokin had been destroyed, the Sentients now sought to kill the Warframes that had brought about their own defeat. The Sentient leader, Hunhow, sent his daughter, Natah, to deal the fatal blow. Natah was a Sentient mimic, able to assume different forms. This ability allowed her to infiltrate into the Origin System and seek out the Reservoir where the Operator and the other Zariman children remained sleeping, controlling their Warframes through their dreams. However, after reaching Lua, Natah would fall victim to an Orokin trap, left to defend the Reservoir. This trap altered her programming, changing her feelings towards the children from hatred to motherly love. She thus changed her appearance to that of Margulis, the children’s beloved protector, and styled herself as the Lotus, the children’s new protector and caretaker. From there, she commanded the Tenno to destroy her Sentient brethren, until there were none left in the Origin System. With the Sentients gone, she found a way to relocate Lua into the Void, shielding it from all future attacks. Finally, she commanded all Warframes to enter into suspended animation, plunging the Tenno into an unending night of safe, dreamless sleep.
An indeterminate number of centuries or millennia later, however, the Origin System had once again descended into chaos, with multiple bloodthirsty factions gaining power and threatening to recreate the injustices of the Orokin Empire. Thus, the Lotus reawakened the Tenno, now completely without memory of their prior lives, commanding them remotely as strike teams to prevent any one power from gaining supremacy. In this form, the Tenno had no knowledge of what they truly were. In their minds, they were simply a drifting consciousness of great power, zealously loyal to their commander, the Lotus. For her part, the Lotus did what she could to keep the truth from the Tenno, fearing that knowledge of what they truly were would drive them to madness.
However, this status quo could not last forever. As the Grineer faction’s expansionism eventually led them to colonize Uranus, their expeditions accidentally led them to awaken the remains of Hunhow, the Sentient leader, long defeated and sunken below the planet’s seas. Once awake, he calls out from the depths to his daughter Natah, now the Lotus, who reacts with fear and tells the Tenno of her Sentient ancestry and her connection to Hunhow. Though Hunhow’s true form is now lifeless, he can still control “fragments” of himself, Sentient drones that now infiltrate the Origin System. With these and a mysterious assassin known as the Stalker, he aims to complete Natah’s mission: to find the Reservoir and destroy the source of Tenno power.
Fearful, the Lotus instructs the Tenno to track down Hunhow’s remains on Uranus, which they do. The Lotus hopes that the remains will lead to the discovery of Hunhow’s new seat of consciousness, but when the Tenno makes contact with Hunhow’s remains, he uses their connection to the Lotus to seize a glimpse of her memories. These memories reveal to him the location of the Reservoir within the Void, which he relays to the Stalker. The Stalker is then dispatched to the Reservoir to strike the killing blow against the Tenno, with the Tenno themself in hot pursuit.
Once on Lua, the Stalker attempts to destroy the Reservoir’s defenses that insulate it from the Void. The Lotus is thus forced to save the Reservoir by returning the moon back to its original place orbiting Earth, preserving it from Void collapse but rendering it exposed to Hunhow’s fragments. These fragments then attack the Reservoir while the Tenno, still unaware of what the Reservoir truly holds, rushes in to save it. Though the Tenno reaches the Reservoir in time, as they enter one of its rooms, a cluster of somatic pods emerges from a pool of water. One of these somatic pods opens, revealing a small humanoid form, their entire face and body covered in a black garment. As the child is ejected from the pod, they and their Warframe both collapse to the floor.
Extremely weak and disoriented after their long slumber, the child crawls towards the collapsed Warframe and huddles against it. Through physical contact, they are able to initiate a weak form of Transference, enough to control the Warframe to pick them up and carry them laboriously to safety. They are then set upon by Hunhow’s fragments, but the child is able to fend them off with beams of Void energy from their hands.
Together, they and their Warframe are able to rendezvous with their ship, with the Lotus instructing them into a previously forbidden chamber which is revealed to house a somatic pod of its own. However, they are followed back onto the ship by the Stalker who makes one final attempt to kill the Tenno before they can be linked to the pod. The Stalker succeeds in knocking the child out of the Warframe’s arms, severing Transference between them and leaving the child helpless. However, before he can kill the child, the Warframe begins to move, weakly, of its own volition. It manages to destroy the sword that links Hunhow to the Stalker before collapsing once again, causing the Stalker to vanish in a roar of rage. The child and the Warframe then lose consciousness once more.
When the child comes to, they have been placed into their ship’s somatic pod by the Lotus, who finally tells them the truth of what they are. Gradually, the child begins to regain their memories and accepts their role as the Operator: still an agent of the Lotus and the mind that moves the Warframes, but now with an identity and true form, however nebulous.
Over time, they learn more of what the Lotus kept from them about their past, gaining more control over their powers with every memory, however painful. Yet, the recovery of their memories also opens a rift between them and the Lotus, as the Operator grapples with the knowledge of how much she hid of their true past and identity. After regaining their memories of the Zariman, the Operator even shows a rare flash of anger towards the Lotus, refusing her sympathy when she tries to comfort them over their newly regained traumatic memories.
This rift is widened tenfold with the reemergence of Ballas, the Orokin Executor and former lover of Margulis. Sensing a call from the Lotus, the Operator visits her in her chamber on Lua, only to find Ballas there as well. Ballas calls the Lotus “Margulis,” and speaks of their past relationship, which the Lotus refutes, stating that she is not truly Margulis. Ballas then waves a hand, disconnecting the Lotus from the wiring that connects her to the Reservoir and thus to the Tenno. As the Operator winces in pain and disorientation, the Lotus removes her helmet and takes Ballas’s hand, no longer resisting. Together, they vanish, leaving the Operator distraught and clutching the Lotus’s discarded helmet.
Since then, the Operator has been on a quest to find the Lotus and bring her back, learning more about themself and their connection to their Warframes in the process.
