Talk:Mirage/@comment-91.156.135.197-20151229095644/@comment-71.158.175.65-20160408075731

The way I like to think of it is that each Warframe had an initial Operator, the first Tenno to experience Transference with that specific frame, and that first Operator imparted a great deal of their personality into the frame and, somehow, all future copies of that frame (essentially writing themselves into the blueprints that those copies could be made from). This infusion of self also resulted in the distinct power sets of each Warframe.

However, some Warframes were lost, destroyed, or abandoned before blueprints could be made, such as the original Limbo, the original Inaros, the original Chroma, and the original Mirage. While the original Operator might have lived on after this, they would be forever changed by the massive loss of identity that came with losing "their" Warframe. This loss of self also prevented them from recreating their signature Warframe. Hence, that Warframe would be "lost" until its components could be recovered.

The original Mirage's Operator survived the destruction of the original Mirage, allowing them to write down the poems listing the locations of the Mirage parts. They then hid these poems in Orokin Ciphers, and hid the Ciphers in Orokin Vaults, potentially to prevent the Sentients from obtaining Mirage's parts and creating a being like the Chroma encountered in "The New Strange".

However, that's just my personal interpretation. I'll probably be proven wrong with time.