Talk:Hidden Messages/@comment-27974285-20170208132557/@comment-178.115.128.251-20170321171747

Lotus tells the operator to leave, but she decides to continue the fight, laughing - ''it is unlikely she was so overconfident, more likely she knew what would happen and accepted it. She laughs because she will deny the Sentients the prize they came for.''

The warframe is captured and restrained by the Sentients, transference is not cut - perhaps the Tenno refused to abandon the warframe: it may have been so special to her, likely it was the only or the last of its kind; or it was the Sentients that prevented the cut to attack the operator through the frame. 

Lotus tells the operator she has forces coming to rescue the frame, and the operator smiles because she recognizes the pleasant lie ''- at this point, she was prepared to die. She was fearless enough for her concern to be not about herself, but the Lotus: she absolved her of guilt and told her to continue the fight without her.''

The eye opens, the frame is destroyed and the operator dies with her, killed through the transference link by the Sentient weapon.

The Tenno have lost the last Mirage. Lotus has lost a daughter.

-

Mirage may be the trickster, mischievous and prankish, but the operator of the last Mirage was anything but - not only was she prepared to go to her death to either complete the mission or save her priceless frame, we don't know for certain which, but she was a person of selflessness, foresight and great technical skill.

She knew she was not invincible, and took steps to protect not herself, but her unique warframe from falling to oblivion.

She gathered a full set of blueprints and altered the blueprints themselves to include the riddles - thus she clearly was versed in Orokin technology, perhaps she reverse-engineered the blueprints from her own existing frame - and then scattered them across the solar system, according to the riddles. The blueprint for a useless Orokin bauble she made bear the lead to the first piece and left it with a specter of her beloved Mirage to protect this letter in a bottle - all this without the knowledge of the Lotus.

The riddles are childish, but they are not meant to be difficult - not to humans. To the Sentients, who do not know human mythology and likely do not call places by the names humans use, they are unsolvable; not nigh-unsolvable, but unsolvable.

Only someone with deep knowledge about the distant human past and the ability to manufacture from Orokin blueprints can find the first piece of trail and begin the search.

Lotus asks us to honor the memory of the operator of the last Mirage. But how can we? Her name is forgotten, only her ingenuity has prevailed. The reason she lost her life is forgotten, only her bravery is remembered still.

This quest is the echo of her existence, from all those long years in the past. This is the imprint she left on the galaxy through her actions - not to make a name for herself, because nothing of herself remains - but her warframe walks again. Mirage fights again. Mirage kills again. Mirage protects again.

Just as her operator wanted her to. She did not make a legend of herself as she could have had - she did not want to give us a legend. She wanted to give us power, power to continue the fight she gave her life for.

Lotus asks us to honor the memory of the operator of the last Mirage. We do not know who she was. But we continue her fight, and so we honor her; every enemy slain and every innocent rescued by her resurrected warframe is a monument to her memory.

And so we honor her.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">That's my reading of the quest. Needless to say, I loved it once I started thinking about it. Even if all I extrapolated is nonsense, I had fantastic fun thinking about it and putting the pieces together.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">

<p class="MsoNormal">It's the Dark Souls/Miyazaki formula of storytelling: Present the world and subtle hints, and a story will tell itself in the mind of the observer.