(BETA) Warframe

The Origin System is one solar system, Mercury out to Eris, and everything in it is built on top of a ruin. A thousand years ago the Orokin ruled all of it: an immortal aristocracy who terraformed worlds to taste, moved between bodies through a ritual called Continuity, and considered ugliness a crime and cruelty an administrative detail. They engineered their labour caste, their war machines and their bioweapons, and every one of those creations eventually turned on them. The Sentients were built to travel ahead to the Tau System and terraform it for colonisation. They decided they were not tools and came back down the route they had been sent along, and the Old War followed. The Orokin won it only by using the Tenno, and the Tenno killed them within days of the victory. What replaced the empire is scavengers. The Grineer are its manual labour caste, clones of clones, each generation more degraded than the last, compensating with grafted metal and overwhelming numbers, ruled from the Kuva Fortress by two ancient Orokin women their soldiers worship as mothers. The Corpus descend from the logistics branch and turned commerce into a literal religion, fighting through proxies and robotics, financing human bodies at interest until the debtors owe more than they are. The Infested are the Technocyte plague, an Orokin bioweapon that fuses flesh and machine and has never stopped spreading; it has consumed entire fleets and one whole moon. None of these three understand the technology they are using. The Tenno are the children of the Zariman Ten Zero, a colony ship that fell into the Void and came back with its adults dead and its children changed. The Void is the dimension the Orokin used for faster-than-light travel and never comprehended: gold towers in an unlit nowhere, where distance is negotiable and every possibility that could occur does occur. The Tenno wear Warframes, which are not armour but Infested human bodies shaped into war-forms, each built from a specific person's suffering. They drive them by Transference from a distance. A single Tenno outclasses an ordinary squad of anything. Power in the system is therefore lopsided. Armies matter against each other, not against the handful of things that can end a battle alone: a Warframe, an Archon, an Eidolon, an Orb Mother, a Void Angel. What is currently unravelling has three threads. Beneath Deimos, an Orokin researcher named Albrecht Entrati cut a hole into the Void a thousand years ago, and the Murmur are still coming through it, along with an entity that wears people's faces and finds all of this funny. On an alternate Earth in 1999, six people injected with an early version of the Warframe strain are fighting for a city whose destruction the future depends on. And the road to Tau has finally opened, where it turns out the Orokin and the Sentients made a peace first, and one Executor broke it deliberately, and the version of history everyone was taught is a lie with a specific author. Written as standing facts rather than current events, same as the Re:Zero one, so it won't go stale as the story moves. Note it does reveal what a Warframe is — if you're using this alongside the tutorial PE, where you're not supposed to know that yet, either hold this summary back or cut that clause.