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He fumed as his blade tore through the body of one grineer, the electricity arcing out and carrying the strike’s fury into the amassing horde of soldiers behind his target.
“Yes! Excellent work hunter!”
He tuned out the insouciant chatter of the cephalon and let his blade continue through the digital enemies, dropping body after body in a rabid attempt to vent his own fury.
He knew that he’d have gone too far if he’d deployed for an actual mission while feeling like this. He was mature enough to know that at least. Just because he could eliminate an entire battalion of grineer or corpus doesn’t mean it’s always the best course of action. I mean, they were still people, right?
The pang of guilt washed through him again, mixing with the fury and driving his blows even harder, as if he could beat the offending empathy out of his system.
It was that Orokin. It was always an Orokin.
This time, its name was Roathe.
Apparently he was yet another victim of Entrati’s, though he had a hard time buying that an Orokin could be much of a victim to anything.
That Roathe had sent him a message about delving into his own memories specifically. Now the one thing he’d had that was his alone was ruined. He was going to dive into the Dark Refractory anyway, but now that Roathe had deigned to bestow purpose onto the Tenno…
Ugh! The Orokin ruin everything! That gilded asshole just had to take something that was meant for just the Operator and make it about himself!
As per usual, the Orokin will find some way to make everything about themselves. There’s not a single good seed among them.
Well… that wasn’t particularly fair… the Entrati family were all sorts of messed up, but were also weirdly endearing in their own macabre and pulsating way. They were Orokin…
No! He was here to be mad! He didn’t want his mind showing him the shades of gray while his heart was throwing a tantrum.
That’s what it was though, right? A tantrum? He was a kid and he was throwing a tantrum.
Almost immediately, he felt the impetus behind his strikes falter. He wasn’t angry at Roathe. Not really. He was angry at himself for being angry.
Somewhere distantly, he could hear the whine of cephalon Simaris as he let the combat instance fade.
As the simulation dissolved around him, he found himself feeling… empty.
The rage and frustration was gone. Instead, he was simply numb.
It hadn’t been about Roathe.
He slowly walked out of Simaris’s chamber and down the hallway of the relay.
He watched as two tenno—piloted warframes personalized and adorned—entered the lift with him.
They barely acknowledged him as they continued whatever conversation they had already been having.
No, it wasn’t about Roathe.
As he boarded his landing craft, that ever-persistent ache in his chest had returned to full-force.
At least when he was throwing his little tantrum he hadn’t had to feel that…
He knew what it was. It was simple really.
He was lonely.
Achingly and devastatingly lonely.
The Dark Refractory had given him something that he hadn’t realized he’d needed. Sure, the rebellion had been terrible and sure, he wasn’t entirely certain if he was more or less mentally stable now as opposed to before he’d delved into his missing memories, but there had been a single light that shown through it all to illuminate what he’d been missing:
Adis.
By the void, part of him had known what was going to happen to Adis the moment the memories of their friendship began to resurface. Still, there was something so… comforting about them.
Adis was like himself. Adis was caught between worlds and forced to solve the problems of the adults. Adis was a kid, and for a little while… so was the Operator again.
Sure, he looked like a kid and—much to his chagrin—clearly had the emotional maturity of a kid, but the Operator had been forced to grow up far more than most adults he’d met. By the void, compare him to the Drifter and see which one is all power of friendship and childlike optimism and which is a war vet who watched countless friends die?
Drifter…
That was the heart of it really. He was jealous. Jealous of himself technically, but still no-less jealous.
His adult-self had helped in a way that could never be fully repaid during the Narmer crisis, but there was a part of him that wished the he’d have just left after that.
He’d never say that to him of course… but that didn’t stop some deep part of himself from thinking it.
While he’d been nearly dying in a pool trying to recover the lost memories of one of the few good moments of his life as it completely fell apart, Drifter was off in 1999 getting laid apparently?
Since Drifter returned and installed that KIM console in their landing craft, there was no way in all the void that the Operator wasn’t going to snoop into every single message on that thing.
And the Drifter was so devastatingly close with all of them! It reminded him of his classmates before… before the jump.
Of his sibling.
Of Adis.
And he was furious about it!
Why did the Drifter get to come into his life and get the happy endings that the Operator *never* seems to get!?
He thought that maybe if he was older… but aging hadn’t really worked out for him or the other tenno.
It was one of the most obvious signs that they weren’t really human anymore. Well… that and the void powers. Obviously.
There was a part of him that worried he was like the Holdfasts: simply some void construct that’s convinced it’s still alive.
Still human.
What if he tried super hard and actually succeeded in suddenly making himself older? That’d be cool for all of a second before the crushing weight of the implications would hit. It’d mean that he really wasn’t human anymore…
And he needed to still be human.
So here he was, too much of a coward to try and fix his own damn problems, jealous of himself, lonely beyond belief, and utterly furious that his damn teenage emotions were so ludicrously irrational! He knew it was all ridiculous and hormonally heightened, but he couldn’t help but feel that way.
As the landing craft docked with the orbiter, he settled into the transference chair in the heart of the ship, closing his eyes and letting his senses wander through the myriad selves that made up his arsenal.
It was second-nature by this point, but he supposed it would be deeply disorienting for anyone normal to have their attention split between multiple bodies—each with its own quirks and personality. Sure, he only ever piloted one warframe at a time, but each one in his collection was both an extension of himself and a monument to the person the frame used to be.
The loneliness always felt a little better when he got out of his head and into one of theirs. Most of them were more like after-images of who they once were. It was typically the body language and muscle memories that bled through.
But then there was Umbra.
Even now, he felt the true personhood that was Excalibur Umbra scratching against his own psyche. There, within the helminth alongside the other frames was a man who had been unmade by the Orokin, killed, and reconstructed by the Operator.
While Umbra and the Operator went out on missions less frequently together these days, they both shared an unspoken bond.
When he became a Warframe, Umbra lost the ability to speak. Perhaps as a remnant of that, their communication tended to be more visceral. Direct emotions, intent, and empathy flowed between them whenever the other was in need.
In general, that tended to mean whenever the Operator was in need.
He felt his embarrassment and self-loathing filter into Umbra’s perception, despite his best efforts to remain guarded.
The sensation he got back wasn’t one of exasperation at his childish antics, but rather a solemn solidarity. The Operator was not alone, even when he felt more isolated than ever.
It’s interesting… but whenever Umbra made it a point to extend his will toward the Operator like this, he swore the rest of his frames felt just a little more alive… just for the moment.
And then came the jarring rings and pops of a video game console, unceremoniously ripping the Operator out of the moment and depositing him squarely back in reality.
The ship cephalon had clearly accidentally activated the comms.
“What?! I can’t hear—“ came the modulated voice of the ship cephalon, “Oh! Sorry… Ordis will play with the volume off.”
And with that, whatever moment the Operator was having was throughly and completely gone.
He wanted to be irritated at Ordis, but instead he just felt empty. Tired.
There was probably something he needed to do right now, but quite frankly he didn’t care.
“Hey Ordis?” He called out, “whatcha playing?”
With a whir of excitement, the cephalon’s drone ricocheted out from void-knows-where, zooming full-speed to Operator as he stood from the transference chair. An excited, “whaaaaaaat!?” Trailed from him until he was directly in front of the Operator, personal space be-damned.
“Did Ordis mishear the Operator?” he said, quite literally buzzing with excitement, “or are we about to play co-op!?”
The Operator was only half-listening as Ordis led him to the Ludoplex. Apparently Drifter had brought some old game back from 1999 called Caliber Chicks 2 that Ordis was unabashedly addicted to.
As his cephalon began rattling off the backstory and controls, Operator couldn’t help but give a soft smile.
He was still sad. He was still angry. He was still numb. But maybe he wasn’t quite as alone as he felt…