Characters / Warframe - Orokin

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The Orokin Empire

Once, the Origin System was ruled by the Orokin, a race of seemingly immaculate posthuman immortals armed with advanced technology that has yet to be replicated, let alone surpassed.

Initially, they were implied to have been a glorious, prosperous society of enlightened ideals and incredibly advanced technology, which collapsed and disappeared after some catastrophe. While not entirely innacurate, learning anything concrete about the Orokin paints a darker picture. They led humanity in what was seemingly a Golden Age, in an era of science, reason, and rampant, incredible cruelty against those they considered their lessers as rulers of the System. Now long-vanished, the only living remnants of them seem to be the guardians of the Orokin structures in the Void: strange towers inhabited and defended by "Corrupted". Corrupted are Grineer and Corpus troops, with the occasional Infested Ancient, who have fallen to the tower's AI defenses and been remade into a loyal servant force.

Their nature reveals a lot of things about them that were not immediately apparent or presumed, so beware of unmarked spoilers below.

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General

• Abusive Precursors: The Orokin were vicious tyrants trying to convince their subjects they were living perfection, who saw virtually all life besides themselves as disposible.
  • They created the Grineer as a Slave Race of clones with high physical capability but deliberately stunted intelligence to serve as laborers. Other genetically engineered servants were created for different roles, such as Lorist healers, but they were all horribly mistreated until an Orokin needed their help - and sometimes even that wasn't enough. The Arid Eviscerator Synthesis entry talks about an Orokin Executor openly berating and demeaning the Grineer slaves she ordered to stand and defend her and her assistant from an oncoming wave of infested, only to die to the slaves themselves as they rebelled.
  • According to the Detron Crewman's Synthesis entry, they executed scientists who did something they didn't like or even failed to produce results. When Perintol (the narrator) challenges their decision, he is told by Ballas that "An appeal comes at a price. Should you fail, you and your corpus will pay dearly."^note In this context, "corpus" apparently means "family"
  • The Codex entries for Ember Prime and Rhino Prime hint that they experimented on children from a vessel lost in the void to create the Tenno, which is confirmed during The Second Dream. Naturally, it was their creations breaking free of their control that destroyed them after they murdered Margulis (seemingly the only Orokin that truly cared about them) to more effectively weaponize the Tenno.
  • The Kuria poem says that when the Twin Queens were born, their similarity offended the Orokin, and only their father's order saved them from infanticide.
  • "The War Within" and Voruna's Leverian entry explains how they maintained their immortality and makes them even more repulsive than they were before. They kidnapped the "young and exotic" (children) and bartered them like slaves they called "Yuvan" (Hindi for "youthful"). Dying Orokin would use a ceremony called Continuity to crush the child's mind with despair, tearing out the original consciousness to wear the youthful bodies as their own. Some of this kidnapping is related in the Sands of Inaros quest.
  • "The Sacrifice" shows that the Orokin couldn't control the original Warframes no matter what they did. Ultimately, the key to controlling them came from something that the Orokin had no ability to do: Basic human empathy. The Tenno were able to understand the pain and agony and rage of the Infested humans used to make the Warframes and calm them through simply being there to help them.
  • During Naberus, Grandmother of the Entrati can tell a folk story of three Orokin who kidnapped, tortured and horrifically deformed a group of Ostrons into pained abominations — stretching and misshaping their limbs, twisting their bodies, flaying their skin, pulling out their entrails, impaling them with glass splinters — just so they could use them as costumes for one night of festivities. In standard Orokin fashion, however, a long-suffering servant girl makes their Body Surf permanent.
  • Angels of the Zariman has recorded logs that can be found aboard the Zariman that have Executor Tuvul slide from giving polite - if backhanded - compliments about the colonists' bravery to outright threats against the colonists and their families for their understandable fear and reluctance to make the extremely risky jump to Tau. In the latter recordings, Tuvul will casually note that the air on the ship the colonists are breathing is considered a "privilege" and, like all privileges, it can be revoked; later on he will coldly and cruelly state that the Council will kill everyone related to those on board if that's what it takes to ensure the jump goes forward as planned. When even this fails to "properly" motivate them, the last transmission is of Tuvul - "hear [him], if you still can" - informing the colonists that the Seven have washed their hands of the Zariman Project, leaving everyone aboard condemned to their Fate Worse than Death... after saying that the Seven think of the common man the same way we think of the microbes on our skin - utterly beneath their notice.
    • Dialogue from the Holdfasts (specifically from Quinn) also indicates that the Orokin outlawed religion, and considered themselves gods to be worshipped.
  • It's rather telling that one thing that united almost all of the Tenno was their undying hatred of the Orokin for everything that they did to them and others. The only real difference between the Tenno in this regard is whether they slaughtered the Orokin out of a desire for revenge or a sense of justice.
• A God Am I: Quinn implies that the Orokin outlawed religion. What did they put in its place in terms of spiritual worship? Themselves.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: They thoroughly believed this, to the point that the engineering self-driven mechanical intelligence was a capital crime. It's suggested that this had something to do with a Robot War in the distant past. Cephalons got a pass because they were created from the minds of humans, and they only allowed the Sentients to be created because they were in need of something to terraform the Tau system, and even then the Sentients were designed to be unable to reproduce once they completed their transition to their destination.
• Arch-Enemy: To the Tenno - while the Sentients were started their downfall, the Tenno have a unique and incredibly persona feud with the Orokin for, among other things, nearly executing the Tenno for offending their sensibilites, murdering the Tenno's foster mother, subjecting the Operators to experiments that would turn them into super soldiers, infesting Dax soldiers to turn them into the Warframes, and, in general, going out of their way to demean and dehumanize the Tenno whenever possible. It's rather telling that despite the Sentients being the one power to ever challenge the Orokin, the Tenno were the ones to destroy the Empire.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The Orokin Executors take this up a notch - the folktale for "Nights of Naberus" reveals that three of them mutilated three Ostrons' bodies and used transference on them just to use these bodies as Halloween costumes.
• Asshole Victim: Just look at the entry for Abusive Precursors. Every time we learn more about them it becomes increasingly hard to blame the Tenno for slaughtering the bastards. Or, at the very least, it's hard to feel bad about them having been slaughtered by Tenno. Everyone who was around when the Orokin ruled agree that they were tyrants who deserved to be slaughtered down to the last... Well, except for the Stalker for some unfathomable reason that nobody has been able to properly ascertain, the Entrati (who have suffered enough by being exposed to the Infested and are actually nice to other people when they're not at each other's throats) and three known Orokin who survived the slaughter, though two of them are now quite dead at this point and the third is trapped in a Grineer clone body.
• Beauty Is Bad: Judging from the lore surrounding them, Orokin culture emphasizes beauty, perfection, and individuality. That being said, almost the entire population are assholes, with no room for mistakes even to their own kind, and participate in practices to maintain their "immortality" by mentally breaking child slaves and possessing them.
• Body Horror: How their brainwashing devices work. Close inspection reveals the Grineer were not lucky enough to keep their masks; the device plugs directly into their faces. The crest on the facemask of a Corpus crewmen used to slide around the eye-level orifice, implying the same thing for them.
  • Grendel's backstory makes mention of an Orokin lord so gluttonous he had half a dozen external stomachs. Each had a miniature levitation device so they would float around him in plain view.
• Body Surf: The truth behind Orokin immortality. "The War Within" reveals Orokin longevity involved the older, dying Orokin transferring their minds into the bodies of the "young and exotic" Yuvan children, in a ceremony called "Continuity". It involved grand marches of new host bodies through lavish theaters in a process disturbingly reminiscent of slave auctions.
• Creepily Long Arms: An common trait among Orokin, apparently; Ballas, Tuvul, Nihil and the Entrati family all have right arms disproportionately longer than their left. Ballas' arm takes the cake, his being twice as long as his left.
  • According to Tuvul's logs in the Zariman, those arms are known as "the Great Hands" and were intentionally shaped as such to match their so-called "generosity".
• Crystal Spires and Togas: Deconstructed. While the Orokin did indeed wear togas and had architecture that appeared to be gold and marble, their main pursuits became vanity and enriching themselves by exploiting and brutalizing their subordinates.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Orokin were firm believers in this - they executed Margullis because she didn't weaponize the Tenno fast enough (and also because she treated them like her own children), are indicated to have punished people for certain crimes by turning them into Cephalons (essentially condemning them to eternal slavery), and then there's what Ballas did to the Dax who became Excalibur Umbra.
  • Ironically Averted in the case of Parvos Granum, who stole from them and was punished by having his left hand cut off. While severe, said punishment isn't really that different from those delivered in the Middle Ages for the crime of theft.
• Entitled Bastard: The Executors, who were known to insult and denigrate even the people helping them.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Downplayed - The Orokin, at least according to Ballas, had tried to bend the homicidally insane Warframes to their will using a variety of brutal methods, from torture to forced cybernetic implantation. But the Tenno brought the Warframes to heel with the one thing that was never even considered by the Orokin: Human Empathy. However, they seem to be able to understand that others have empathy, and use this to hurt those who crossed them - what happened to Excalibur Umbra is just one example. The presence of the Entrati indicates that it is possible for the Orokin to understand empathy, but most seemed to have ignored it.
  Ballas: Distorted by vague horrors, we kept the Zariman survivors within a secret Reservoir. They were the missing half. Transference-linked: the Warframes, the body - and they, the mind. I give you now the coordinates and codes to this place, but Do Not underestimate these devils, Hunhow. They did what we could not. We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... we brutalized their minds, but it did not work. Until they came.
  And it was not their force of will, not their Void devilry, not their alien darkness... it was something else. It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.

• Fantastic Caste System: Appear to have had this when the empire still functioned, with only the upper classes called "Orokin" in a manner similar to nobility. It seems to have been based on genes, with beauty, symmetry, and uniqueness of appearance being prized. The lowest classes were mass-produced clones like the Grineer and the highest the the immaculate Orokin, who were all physically distinct in appearance. Going by what information is available, the classes were:
  • Archimedeans: High-ranking scientists assigned to very important projects.
  • Corpus: Corpus (originally meaning "worker") appeared to be a generic term for labor and merchant conglomerates that served as the Orokin empire's middle class. After the fall of the empire, the one that lasted the longest became the contemporary Corpus.
  • Dax: Military forces and personal guard for nobles. Described under Super-Soldier below.
  • Emperors: The rulers of the empire, who may be the same as the seven highest-ranking Orokin Executors, who acted as judges.
  • Enginus: Mentioned in the Guardsman Synthesis entry, very little is known about them. The narrator wonders if another character is Enginus class, and her thoughts^note Alarez followed, his symmetry was off and his eyes were dull, was he even Enginus class? indicate they weren't of high rank.
  • Executors: The empire's ruling class, with superior genetic modifications that gave them an appearance with "beauty, variation, and symmetry." According to the Arid Eviscerator synthesis entry, they were organized into a Congress. Almost every one we've seen has shown themselves to be manipulative, entitled, ungrateful scum.
  • Grineer: A Slave Race genetically engineered to be were strong and tough, but mentally deficient. They were adapted to serve as soldiers when the Orokin got desperate during the old war, and later rebelled, with the implication that their new training and experience in the war had finally made them sick of the Orokin.
  • Guardians: The Stalker was one of these until the Tenno slaughtered the Orokin. Not much is known about them aside from what can be gleaned from their name and his Codex entry. The Second Dream implies, but not outright states, that they are a kind of "second-generation" Tenno — i.e., attempts at creating more Tenno-like beings since the number of Zariman children was finite. However, whether this is simple lore expansion, a bit of subtle retconning, or something else entirely isn't clear at the moment.
  • Lorists: Bred and modified so they could interface with something called a "Lora Device," which was used to heal the Orokin when they were sick or injured. The Corrupted Ancient synthesis entry describes them as having a "Lora node" protruding from their right temple and skin "weaved with ribbons of metallic facia that snaked around our bodies and into the Lora Device embedded in [their] palms." The Orokin were uncomfortable around Lorists and not at all shy about making this known, but treated them as saviors whenever one of the empire's "Golden Lords" (almost certainly high-ranking Orokin) needed healing. They also appear to have been the origin of the Infestation's Ancient Healers.
  • Sectarus: A class mentioned in the Guardsman Synthesis entry, little is known aside from them being fairly high up. The one we see appeared to be an Executor's personal assistant, and is nearly killed.
  • Tenno: Super Soldiers greater than the Dax who were only created and deployed as a last resort against the Sentients. When they managed to win the Orokin held a grand ceremony to reward them, and we all know what happened next...
• Fantastic Racism: Orokin looked down on the lower castes, who were engineered to be servants. This also extended to the Grineer Queens, who were twins born to a high-ranking Orokin. Only their father's command spared them from the knife.
  • Apparently, even they were disgusted by the Greed of the Corpus. Even Evil Has Standards indeed.
  • Their racism was especially heavy towards the Void-touched Tenno, whom they called "Demons" and, after they were convinced not to kill them outright, instead inflicted cruel experiments upon in order to turn them into Orokin super-soldiers. Bear in mind that the Tenno are all kids, teenagers at the oldest.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: The more we know about the Orokin, the more apparent its flaws as a culture become. Despite its advancements, it was a fascistic, decadent nation that refused to competently use many of its advancements for the good of its population.
• Fatal Flaw: Lack of Empathy — the Orokin repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot due to their inability to treat anyone except occasionally their own with a modicum of decency. Beyond being unable to control the warframes because they never considered being nice to them, they regularly respond to anything that inconveniences them in the most cruel and brutal method available. It's a miracle they lasted as long as they did. It's telling that the only bunch of Orokin who survived the slaughter who weren't outright forced into hiding like the Twin Queens and Ballas are the Entrati, who didn't suffer from this trope.
• Four Is Death: Four times did the Orokin create an artificial race; first came the Grineer, then the Sentients, then the Infestation, then the Tenno. The last one rendered them extinct.
• Genre Blindness: See Hoist by Their Own Petard, and remember that several of their creations mentioned there were built/repurposed to fight the ones that had already rebelled.
• Godzilla Threshold: Creating the Tenno.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Orokin are long dead, but literally every power in the Origin System, major and minor, was influenced by them in some way.
  • The Grineer Empire was originally a slave caste created by the Orokin to do dumb labor, and the Tenno were child soldiers. Both were horrifically abused, and both took bloody vengeance on the Orokin.
  • The Corpus started as a merchant guild that gained prominence and power due to the repressive conditions the Orokin enforced, lead by Parvos Granum.
  • The Corrupted are entities slaved by the Neural Sentries of the long abandoned Orokin Towers.
  • The Infestation was created to oppose the sentients, as were the Tenno.
  • Lastly, the Sentients themselves were drones created by the Orokin to colonize the Tau System, only to rebel. Ballas even theorizes that they did so because they realized that the Orokin would inevitably come to ruin the worlds the Sentients had shaped, as they had Earth.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Orokin had a recurring problem with this that would do Umbrella proud. The Technocyte Plague, the Tenno, and the militarized Grineer were all created by the Orokin in order to fight an even greater menace, the Sentients - who were also Orokin handiwork. All three turned against the Orokin, and the Tenno rendered them extinct.
  • The Technocyte Plague went horrifically wrong from the outset. The Orokin originally wanted to use it to reclaim Earth from environmental ruin and toxic atmosphere, but after it got out of the lab, it wreaked havok across the Origin System, and the Orokin shelved it. It can be assumed that it was still a problem during the Old War, when the Orokin developed a new strain of it in order to forge their Warframes.
  • The Grineer were originally a race of genetically-engineered clones, meant for nothing more than dumb labor. The Orokin enhanced their physical and mental capabilities in order to use them as soldiers against the Sentients, but the Grineer grew sick of of being used as cannon fodder, and rebelled, right as the Tenno were doing the same thing.
  • The Tenno were among the deadliest things the Orokin ever managed to produce. They finally managed to turn the tide of the Old War against the Sentients, only to turn on the Orokin due to Natah and Hunhow's interference. This was only possible because the Orokin had long-since executed Margulis for failing to weaponize the Tenno fast enough. Ballas, unable to either forgive the Orokin for her death or acknowledge his own part in it, went completely off the rails and sold his entire civilization out to the Sentients, which eventually resulted in the Empire collapsing.
  • In truth, the Orokins' own hand in the Tenno betraying them cannot be overstated: They turned the Zariman survivors into Child Soldiers, teaching them everything about the art of warfare, equipping them with Warframes and the most advanced weaponry available to fight off the Sentients, and honing them into elite, disciplined warriors which were by and far superior to even the Orokins' own elite Dax soldiers, and any one of which was essentially a weapon of mass destruction in and of themselves. And all the while calling the Operators themselves "abominations" and treating them like garbage. When the Tenno finally fought back, they had quite literally everything they needed to destroy the Orokin Empire from within—all but handed to them on a silver platter by the very leaders of said Empire, who never imagined that they would be betrayed. The whole ordeal just goes to show that, if you teach a wolf to be vicious, don't act surprised when it no longer suffers your mistreatment.
• Human Subspecies: Orokin were posthumans, clearly having built themselves for beauty, immortality, and power. We didn't get to see what one looked like until Ballas appeared, and from the example we see that the Orokin had grey skin and glowing golden eyes, implying synthetic components and/or genetic engineering goes into an Orokin.
• Immortality:
  • The Orokin elite were known to recover from decidedly mortal wounds with no ill effects. It was not a Complete Immortality though, as Grineer and Tenno found that killing an Orokin was not only possible, but quite doable for a determined killer. They, of course, did not extend this immortality to those they ruled over.
  • "The War Within" reveals the true nature of their immortality: when their bodies grew old, they purchased and burned out the minds of kidnapped children, transferring their minds to the new bodies and maintaining "Continuity". The high council, however, as described in the Ordis Fragments, might have had a different form of immortality altogether.
  • "The War Within" also implied that Orokin were dependent on an exotic, red oil called Kuva. Kuva was believed to be a partial Immortality Inducer, extending the functional lifespan of their bodies for some time. It was alternatively believed to be a partial Psycho Serum, which could explain the decadence and callousness that defined the Orokin era. Teshin, a man admittedly in a position to be well informed on the subject, believed that it was both.
• Irony: The Orokin treated the Tenno horribly. When they treated them with respect, the Tenno slaughtered them. This was probably deliberate, but not on any part of the parties there at the time.
• Killed Off for Real: The Orokin elite may have been invulnerable to old age or disease, but they were capable of being killed in other ways. Notably, they kept an execution chamber capable of killing anyone who fell out of favor. And, of course, their various enemies found ways to put them down for good in the end.
• Lack of Empathy: Their entire society seemed to be built along sociopathic guidelines. They didn't even bother to realize that the key to controlling the Warframes was basic human compassion, thinking all they needed was more brute force and torture to break them. Only the Tenno children were able to see the mistake.
• Laser-Guided Karma
  • As mentioned in Hoist by His Own Petard above, the Okokin paid dearly for their mistreatment of the Tenno; generally speaking, the crueler of those among the Orokin (even by Orokin standards), the harsher the retribution paid to them by the Tenno during the rebellion, and believe us when we say that retribution was very much deserved.
  • In the "Nights of Naberus" folktale, a trio of Orokin Executors, having grown bored with normal Naberus festivities, decided to reinvigorate their interest in the festival by mutiliating a trio of Ostrons and using their bodies as, essentially, Halloween costumes. While they were having fun, one of their servants secretly stole some of their crimson kuva and poured it down their throats, permanently sealing their consciouses into these new, twisted bodies (and implicitly giving the Ostrons their golden lords' bodies).
• Last of His Kind:
  • When the game started, the Orokin and their Empire were thought to be completely dead and gone, with what was left of humanity left to fill the vacuum of their fall. In truth the major factions are orphaned parts of the empire left to develop on their own.
  • While most of them are indeed dead, there are enough surviving Orokin to count on one, maybe two hands, depending on who you count.
    • Most cephalons date back to the Orokin empire, though its not clear who, if any of them, were actual Orokin in their past lives.
    • Lotus initially appeared to be either an Orokin or linked to them in some way. In the end she was actually a Sentient, one of the Orokin's greatest enemy, not quite impersonating the Tenno's human/Orokin guardian Margulis. This was for the purpose of turning the Tenno against the Orokin, a plot likely influenced by Ballas, a Smug Snake and Margulis's lover in her lifetime. Lotus apparently went along with it to adopt the Tenno as her own children, as invading the Origin System left the Sentients sterile. And she believed taking on Margulis's form without otherwise pretending to be her was sufficient.
    • The last known living Orokin are the Grineer Queens, though they're secretive and/or lazy enough that they're actually thought to be a myth, even for those in the know. As of the quest "The War Within", depending on player choice, the Elder Queen is dead, or dying and deprived on living on through Coninuity. This leaves the Worm Queen as the surviving party, though the Kuva mining operations throughout the system leave one wondering what's planned for it.
    • An Orokin scientist named Silvana has survived by giving up on Orokin society and using Transference technology to move her mind into the forests that she helped bring to life. Because she did this before the Orokin empire fell, she was spared simply by not being there anymore. Though her current state of existence makes that if she's still an Orokin, or even still human, more of a philosophical question.
    • And to upset the balance even further, Ballas, the last pure Orokin, and an Executor at that, is still alive unbeknownst to almost everyone, though the Sentients including the Lotus knew.
  • On a similar note, After Teshin's death, Varzia appear to be the last Dax.
  • The Entrati also count, but unlike the other Orokin shown, collectively count as a Token Good Teammate.
    • Upshot, by the end of "The New War" the Worm and the Entrati family are the last surviving Orokin.
• Light Is Not Good: The Orokin color-scheme is bright white and gold, but they were heavily amoral and prone to disturbing cruelty.
• Low Culture, High Tech: It's probably best summed up by Parvos Granum's tenets: Despite having nigh-Godlike ability to terraform planets and moons to the point of making them suitable for farming, they had serfs harvest the grain from said terraformed planets by hand, and then cut off one of said farmers' hands as punishment for theft. For all its technological marvels and wide reach, Orokin society was extremely reactionary and regressive. Despite having the benefit of thousands of years of human cultural and social advancement, the Orokin applied none of it to government, education, healthcare or automation, choosing instead to revive old systems of tradition, seemingly only for the sake of oppression. They were reliant on a feudalistic system of castes and slavery for their necessities, governed by means of a theocratic absolutism wherein they were regarded as divine and unquestionable rulers, all while leaving "lower" castes such as farmers and others in what's implied to be extremely impoverished conditions. They liberally applied the death penalty for even the smallest offenses such as being twins, rejected mechanization, even in benign domains such as agriculture or building (instead having serfs harvest their crops manually for the former and creating clone slaves for the latter), for fear of machines turning against them, purposely kept whole societies such as the Martians in poverty and allowed the Infestation as well as other diseases to overtake entire colonies even in times of peace. And when they ran out of historically-derived methods of control like slavery, they came up with new and inventive ones such as turning people into electronic servants (in lieu of using AI) as a means of perpetual punishment. They even regarded things like capitalism with suspicion, because it theoretically offered people a way to advance their station through effort. Their reign was apparently so strangling that the people of the Origin System looked at a planet-shattering asteroid and the cult that worshiped it in awe. They were that beaten.
• Meaningful Name: Verging on Department of Redundancy Department. "Oro" and "Kin" are Spanish and Japanese respectively for gold, which their architecture and weapons all feature prominently.
• Mind-Control Device: The Corrupted have a visible Orokin crest on their heads, which is how they're kept controlled, and possibly as a means of communication.
• Organic Technology: For starters, they possessed the Technocyte Virus. However, the Bleeding Tower from the Ostron Plains - a massive Orokin construct that is porcelain and gold on the outside, and bloody and fleshy inside - raises questions about the extent of their mastery of organic technology. They also had "trees" with glowing white wood acting as conduits in many of their constructs, and it seems to have grown out of control and faded to grey in their derelict ships.
• Ornamental Weapon: The Incarnon weapons aboard the Zariman were explicitly designed as these - the Laetrum was a confetti gun, the Phemnor was used for funerals (the ceremony described calls to mind the 21 Gun Salute), the Pradeos was a gift acknowledging the tenacity of the ship's crew, the Felarx was meant for bird hunting, and the Innodem was meant to convey the responsibility the Orokin had to defend commoners.
• Parasitic Immortality: When the Orokin elite grew old, they used a process called Continuity to rejuvenate themselves. This involved torturing children and driving them past the Despair Event Horizon so the Orokin could steal their bodies.
• Pet the Dog: While they eventually undermine it through their usual Jerkassery, the lore for the Felarx reveals that the Orokin gave them as gifts to the Zariman crew to show that they were now part of high society.
• Psycho Rangers: The Corrupted are this to Corpus, Grineer, and even the Infested. They are essentially intruders mind-controlled by Orokin defenses.
• Redshirt Army: The Zero-Techs, who wielded percussion rifles in a universe full of far more advanced tech and relatively easy access to man-portable Energy Weapons. Every time a Sentient Worm-Ship blasted an Orokin Splinter Ship, it was nearly guaranteed that all Zero-Techs aboard would die instantly. Even so, they were the only viable option the Orokin had left: the Sentients had an Adaptive Ability that let them subvert technology, and the more advanced it was the greater losses they took. It took the Tenno to give them a chance of victory.
• The Sociopath: The entire Orokin upper class were examples of these, devoted entirely to their own ends with no capacity for empathy or consideration for the well-being of others, to the point that they openly trafficked children as replacement bodies who were psychologically tortured until there was nothing left of their mind, letting the Orokin take over the body. In fact, Ballas found the idea of Margulis loving the Tenno like children and giving her life to protect them to be unfathomable. This sociopathy came to a head with the original Warframes, who were uncontrollable berserkers that the Orokin couldn't control, no matter how much they tortured or drugged or tormented them, because they simply couldn't understand that the key to controlling them was basic human empathy, which the Tenno understood.
• Space Romans: The Orokin appear to be a fusion of the Roman Empire with feudal Japan; much of their architecture as well as their hierarchy appear to be Roman-inspired; while other elements; such as the primary Dax armament being katanas or the game of Komi being highly similar to Go, are inspired by Japan.
• Super-Soldier: Dax soldiers. The Orokin gifted the Dax with genetic augmentations which imbued them great strength and power, but also served as a Restraining Bolt; no Dax could attack or defy an Orokin holding a Kuva scepter.
• Uncanny Valley: 'Normal' Orokin Executors have grey colored skin, glowing white eyes, and an elongated right arm, which results in someone just human enough to feel utterly wrong.
• Utopia: Deconstructed. The Orokin era was a golden age of scientific progress, where humanity broke new ground in various fields, terraformed planets, discovered a means of immortality, created Cephalons, forged beautiful technological and scientific marvels, and uncovered a bizarre extradimensional world known as the Void. It was also a dark age of human rights. Elites were freely allowed to Mind Rape children into empty shells so they could steal their bodies. An entire subspecies of humanity was engineered as dumb labor, and those amazingly-powerful Cephalons used to be humans, not all of whom volunteered for their new existence. Personal merit came in last place, with physical beauty coming in first. The Executors, the Empire's leaders, were both brilliant scientists and vain, oppressive sociopaths. Present-day humanity largely still views the Orokin era as a golden age, since the Sol system is currently torn between a fascistic empire of decaying clones, a MegaCorp that worships the concept of profit, and a horde of ravenous synthetic mutants. Only the Tenno, individuals who were alive back then, and historians like Drusus know what utter monsters the Orokin really were. Drusus still views it as preferable to the atrocities that followed the Empire's fall.
• Villainous Legacy: The Orokin are long dead barring maybe a handful of survivors, but their influence is still felt - the slave caste they lorded over became the Grineer Empire, which is secretly lead by two surviving executors. Well, one, now, the other is dead.
• Villain Respect: The lore for the Praedos reveals that the Orokin were impressed with how farmers in conquered lands got around being forbidden from using weapons by training with farming equipment. The Praedos in the Zariman were given as acknowledgement of this.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • The Orokin were well known to mistreat and commodify their subordinates. This was fairly common in their time.
  • That said, the most famous example was the Trial of Margulis. Her simply failing an experiment was grounds for execution. It didn't matter that she was the most brilliant scientist in her field with a hundred successes to her name. Her failure to quickly turn the Warframes into a superweapon capable of destroying the Sentients got her executed. Her public Kangaroo Court trial may have been about her failure as much as it was a piece of political theater for a desperate populace or for a frustrated Executive Council having a scapegoat to vent their frustrations on. This trial was also the grounds of Ballas's defection, despite his vocal participation in the trial and outward condemnation of Margulis, and in turn the Orokin losing the war, since it took away the only thing he cared for beside himself. Though in truth the whole thing was pretty much entirely because Ballas was trying to force Margulis to love him by basically threatening her with execution. It didn't work, and Ballas refused to take personal responsibility for it.

Margulis (MASSIVE UNMARKED SPOILERS!)

Voiced by: Rebecca Ford

"Dream... not of what you are... but of what you want to be."

A female Archimedean, she was a brilliant member of the Orokin scientist caste. She was tasked with weaponizing the survivors of the Zariman Ten-Zero Incident, but when she failed to turn them into Child Soldiers fast enough, the Orokin had her executed. Thousands of years after her death, she remains one of the most important figures in Warframe's story; she continues to have an influence on the Tenno she tried to protect.

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• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: She erased some memories from the Zariman survivors, in part to seal some of the powers they couldn't handle and in part to protect them from the trauma of those memories. "Chains of Harrow" heavily implies that she also did this at least partially to protect them from the Man In The Wall's influence.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Platonic example. Rather than recant her actions, she uses the opportunity to tell the Zariman children, "my sons and daughters," that she loved them.
• Face Death with Dignity: She used her last words to condemn her Orokin executioners.
  Margulis: ...So shame on you! You Orokin, so perfect on the outside but you're rotted through and through!
• Love Martyr: Was blinded and disfigured by Tenno as she tried to cure them. Subverted, as it happened due to Power Incontinence and not malice on their part, as they loved her just as much as she loved them.
• The Lost Lenore: To both Ballas, romantically, and the Tenno, platonically. Ballas loved Margulis - not the woman she was, but his ideal of what he thought she should be. He voted to execute her - not because she refused to recant her actions concerning the Tenno, but because she had admitted to having any amount of love or dedication to something other than him. The Tenno, meanwhile, loved her as much as she loved them, so much so that Natah chose to mimic Margulis specifically to gain their trust.
• Morality Chain: Margulis not only loved the Tenno dearly, she willingly put herself in harm's way again and again for them. Her murder catalyzed the Tennos' fear and distrust of the Orokin into outright hatred, with the Tenno (who are children) eventually commiting a bloody genocide against the Orokin.
• Motherly Scientist: An Orokin scientist, she not only stood up for the children of Zariman, she also used her knowledge and skills to find a cure for them. Her efforts resulted in the Transference technology, without which Tenno as we know them would not be possible.
• Not Quite Dead: While she died long ago, part of her lives on as one of the Lotus' multiple personalities, her memories preserved inside her head. At the end of "The New War", the Tenno can choose Margulis to become the main personality, effectively bringing her Back from the Dead.
• Parental Substitute: Became a collective surrogate mother to the survivors of Zariman 10-0, sheltering them when other Orokin wanted to execute them as well as trying to find the cure for their Void affliction.
• Posthumous Character: Executed during the Orokin era, she is long dead by the time Warframe takes place.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The most morally-upstanding Orokin character we saw, and her efforts to save the future Tenno cost her her life.
• The Voice: Initially, we didn't know what she looked like. Only the sound of her voice was heard during flashbacks. However, Lotus' human appearance is shaped after her. At the end of "The New War", we get to see her face through Ballas' memories. You can choose to have Lotus permanently keep said face.
• Walking Spoiler: Every piece of information about her reveals a crucial detail in Warframe's lore.

Ballas (UNMARKED SPOILERS UP TO PRELUDE TO WAR!)

Voiced by: Max Howarth

"Even I make mistakes. Like you."

An Executor (a member of the Orokin ruling caste), lover of Margulis, and head of the Warframe Project.

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• Abusive Parents: As the creator of the Warframes and lover of Margulis, he is in many ways the father of the Tenno. A horrible, selfish, manipulative father who uses his children for whatever suits his whim. "The New War" takes this to new extremes with its themes of domestic abuse; Ballas is royally pissed that the Lotus and the Tenno yet live, not because they might defeat them, but because they are the two people in the system that he wants under his control, yet they defy him. Now compare that to an abusive, manipulative family member who abandons their family, only to return with a vengeance when they discover the family is doing better without them, or refuses to respond to their attempts to contact. Adding onto this in the final battle, a lot of his dialogue continues allusions to domestic abuse, such as blaming Lotus and the Tenno for all that has happenned, and will attack a weakened Lotus (forcing the Operator/Drifter to intervene before Ballas kills her) in retribution for damage dealt against him, much like how an abusive spouse will blame their victims for their abusive behaviour, and often target a weaker family member for something that another did.
• A Fate Worse Than Death: He says he would've preferred dying to Excalibur Umbra and your Operator at the end of "The Sacrifice" in a dramatic death rather than be saved only to be turned into a disgusting Orokin-Sentient chimera. However, "The New War" reveals that his lamentations were an act, or at the very least intentionally exaggerated.
• Amazing Technicolour Population: He has bluish-grey skin, which may have been typical of high-ranking Orokin.
• Arc Villain: An unusual example. While his influence over the setting as a whole qualifies him as a Greater-Scope Villain and he's the definitive Big Bad of "The New War" and the series of quests leading up to it, Ballas does not have much involvement in the plot outside of those quests. His death at the end of "The New War" ends his threat permanently, with the Man in the Wall appearing immediately afterwards and making it clear just how insignificant Ballas was in comparison. Even the remnants of Ballas' empire become largely secondary as the narrative shifts to the new conflict with the dangers of the Void.
• Arch-Enemy: To the Lotus and the Tenno as a whole. Brainwashing Natah into being a Replacement Goldfish for his own dead lover and later a pawn for his own conquest of the Origin System, then nearly killing her and casting her aside like trash when he decides that isn't good enough, earned him enough ire that she went into an Unstoppable Rage Roaring Rampage of Revenge against him as soon as she got the bare minimum amount of strength to do so. As for the Tenno, the aforementioned lover was their Parental Substitute, whom he had killed in a fit of jealousy for giving away "his love" to them. He then proceeded to make the Tenno into the army of Child Soldiers they are today. Almost everything wrong that happened in their lives can be traced back to Ballas.
• The Anticipator: When you sneak upon him in "Chimera Prologue" he seems to be monologuing to himself, unaware of your presence, and you even have to dash around to avoid his gaze... but then at the end he suddenly speaks directly to your Operator. "The New War" all but makes it explicit that his monologues were nothing but him putting on a theater for the Operator, acting as if he was aiming to defy the Sentients as a slave when he was still leading them, and the Paracesis was only made so that he could kill Natah should she defy him.
• Bad Boss: As an Orokin Executor (or just any kind of Orokin in general) this is a given, but it's revealed in Ivara's Leverian entry that he actively oversaw a program to have an assassin hunt and kill Warframes to weed out the weak.
• Bait the Dog: There are a few indicators that paint Ballas as a Token Good Teammate among the Orokin like Margulis herself, taking the Tenno under his wing in her memory. The more you learn about him, the more you see that is very much not the truth, he was worse.
• Batman Gambit: He needed the Paracesis in order to dispose of Natah and the Operator, but didn't have a way to create it himself. So he pretended to hate his new amalgam form and offered the sword's blueprint to the Tenno during the "Chimera Prologue", knowing they would be able to create it and would likely bring it to him. His entire plan hinged on the Tenno knowing about his Heel–Face Revolving Door and assuming he had made a turn back to the good guys out of spite, and it worked flawlessly.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • His public persona was that of a hardline Orokin conservative, serving as a staunch exemplar and living symbol of Orokin ideals, power and authority. In more private moments he was seen to be more reasonable and less agreeing with the decrees of Orokin ideology.
  • After the Trial of Margulis, where his office and public persona obligated him to condemn his own lover, he felt nothing but hatred for the Orokin and turned traitor for the Sentients.
  • And beneath that is his true nature: a man who cares nothing for anyone other than himself and his goals; who cared nothing for his position as Executor or the Empire if it couldn't get him what he wanted; who would throw away the woman he "loved" if she were not completely loyal to him and his whims above all else; and who is willing to destroy the Origin System in a very literal sense by having the Sun be consumed to power a trip for him and him alone to Tau, where he could create and rule over a new empire in a solar system unblemished by the Orokin Empire's previous failures. And this is after having enslaved almost all of the Origin System into worshipful adoration to the point he gives a speech telling his adherents of their imminent demise without a shred of hesitation, guilt, or remorse.
  • The finale of "The New War" has Lotus reference this trope, referring to Ballas as "a mask... with nothing behind it", indicating that she sees his "Executor mask" as his true self; or perhaps there's not a man behind it, merely a yawning void that nothing can fill, not love, nor power, nor worldly possessions.
• BFS: His concept art shows him with the Paracesis, a Heavy Blade that does bonus damage against Sentients after Rank 31 that he eventually gifts the blueprint of to the Tenno.
• Big Bad: He comes closest to being the definitive one in Warframe's Big Bad Ensemble. His actions set the entire plot into motion and directly drives the story from "Apostasy Prologue" up to "Chimera Prologue", where the Sentients and Erra take that role. Then "The New War" makes it clear that Ballas was still in charge, using the Sentient forces to seize control of the system.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: Since his Emergency Transformation, his right eye is now very Grineer-like, with black sclera and a bright red pupil. And as "The New War" shows, Ballas is also completely out of his gourd.
• Body Horror:
  • His arm, which - curiously enough - qualifies as this from both modern and Orokin perspectives. While his skin and eyes are examples of how Orokin standards of beauty differed from ours, the most elite Orokin in the Empire possessed bodies with "beauty, variation, and symmetry", as mentioned in the "general" section above. Ballas' arm makes him very noticeably asymmetrical. One wonders how that happened to him, especially seeing how even the Entrati, who have noticeably elongated right arms, get nowhere near Ballas' arm length...
  • A more explicit example occurs after his defeat at the end of "The Sacrifice", where he is taken away and transformed into an Orokin-Sentient hybrid, giving the "Chimera Prologue" miniquest its title. If his previous form was uncanny, but still aesthetical in some way, then this one is nothing but warped and horrifying. Everything below his midsection was replaced with a Conculyst's legs, with his original left leg limply dangling from his new knee while his right leg is gone, with only a strange tendril remaining in its place; his chest has a gaping hole that exposes his ribs, his right eye is now black and red, and his face has burn-like scars.
• Break the Haughty: His defeat in "The Sacrifice" and subsequent transformation into a part-Sentient hybrid knocked a lot of air out of him. When we see him in "Chimera Prologue", he is broken, whimpering and apparently not quite sane. Subverted come "The New War", where he regains most of his composure to the point that he's the one running the Origin system instead of Erra.
• Call-Back: His Boss Battle at the end of "The New War" is one to both the Witch Queen and Nihil.
  • Regarding the Witch Queen, both attack the player using a beam of light fired from a staff while protected by an energy shield, and occasionally call in their Praetorian Guard to assit them, and can only be defeated by using the powers of your Operator form on them when their shields drop. But while the Witch Queen is fairly weak and only needs to be hit once with a void dash to best her, Ballas must actively be attacked with a void beam several times. Additionally, while the Witch Queen must drop her shield to attack, Ballas doesn't need to.
  • Regarding Nihil, both are Orokin who wield a BFS and are normally invincible during their boss fight, requiring the player to trick them in order to make them vulnerable. Specifically, you have to catch and throw Nihil's glass shards at one of his glassed victims to disable his shields, then hit him with more of them while he is vulnerable. Ballas, meanwhile, must be tricked into destroying the mirrors in his arena to lower his shields, then blast him with the void beam while he tries to kill Natah.
• The Chessmaster: Shown to be a shrewd manipulator, such as when he goads the rest of the Seven into sparing another Archimedean and salvaging his project. All while on the outside he was pushing for his execution! A much more sinister example of this trait of Ballas can be seen in "The Sacrifice" quest.
• Control Freak: As seen in "The New War": Ballas has almost the entire system worshipping him with mind-controlling Narmer Veils on nearly everyone's face that make them blindly obedient... and it's still not enough for him, since there are a handful who can resist the Veils; what he really desires is an empire where the Veils are unnecessary simply because no one can even think of disobedience or anything other than Ballas and his desires on any level. He even spells this out to Erra when the latter wonders why Ballas is concerned that the Drifter (as in, the un-powered Operator) and Lotus yet live: He's not concerned they may defeat him (though he is still arrogantly confident that they are not a threat), but his anger comes from the fact that, despite seemingly winning it all in the Origin System, he can't stand the fact that there are two people out there who openly defy him.
• Creepily Long Arms: As mentioned above, his right arm is twice the size of his left. That seems to be a trait common to the Orokin, as Nihil and the Entrati Family from Deimos both have disproportionately long right arms. That being said, his right arm is long even compared to them.
• Cutscene Boss: In "The Sacrifice", where the final fight is against Ballas' Sentient cohorts while he stands safely behind a shield. The actual confrontation with Ballas is entirely in a cutscene. He later gets a proper boss fight in "The New War".
• Disproportionate Retribution: When, because of his public persona, he was "forced" to vote to execute the woman he loved, he decided that the only possible response was to destroy the society and everyone in it that "forced" him to vote that way. A certain Dax discovered his plan to defect to the Sentients, but Ballas caught wind of this. Instead of simply eliminating the man and be done with it, Ballas turned him into Excalibur Umbra, compelled him to kill his own son, and it is implied Ballas eradicated the rest of his family as well.
• Dark Messiah: As emperor of Narmer, a system-wide state of brainwashed worshippers, with servants titled "Deacons" and "Archons", he certainly fits the bill.
• Demiurge Archetype: Ballas becomes a Demiurge-like figure in "The New War", styling himself into a God-Emperor of the Narmer cult and brainwashing the population of the Origin System by using Narmer Veils to show them visions of what they most desire. This is reinforced by how in this role, his highest-ranked servants are known as Archons.
• Domestic Abuse: Becomes extremely apparent towards the end of "The New War" that he was an abuser all along. He used Margulis' trial as a test of her love because she loved something other than him, with her only hope for survival to be to "recant" her love for her adoptive children — and could not fathom that she would choose death over him. He fashions the Lotus into the image of Margulis after the latter's death, and even dubs himself the "loving father" of the Tenno throughout the quest, with his Narmer Veil trying to convince the Tenno that the Lotus never loved them like he did. He orchestrates the final confrontation so that his "wife" and "child" will be pitted against each other, and humiliates the Lotus in front of her child by mind-controlling her into groveling before him, before forcing her to try to kill her child to prove her love to him. He even quotes Why Did You Make Me Hit You? before fighting the Lotus and Tenno himself. He's also shown to be maliciously obsessed over the two, stating that his concern for their being alive isn't because he's concerned they can stop him, but because, while the rest of the System "willingly" submitted to his rule (in his words, at least), Lotus and the Tenno, a.k.a. his "wife" and "child", respectively, are the two people he wants under his dominion, yet refuse him and would continue to fight him.
• The Emperor: He is crowned the new ruler of the Origin System once the Sentients establish the Narmer empire in "The New War".
• Emperor Scientist: An Executor, one of the rulers of the Orokin empire, and also a brilliant mind. He led the project that created Warframes, and he also personally performed the digitalization and programming of Ordan Karris into Ordis. He's also the creator of the Narmer Veils, which were key to the rise of his new empire.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He loved Margulis, but only her. After she was executed, he callously burned down the whole Orokin civilisation to the ground, mercilessly and cruelly killing everyone who stood in his way. In "The New War", when the Operator manages to put one of his own Narmer veils on him in the final act, seeing Lotus as Margulis causes him to stop in his tracks mid-rampage and devote all his attention on her, even kissing her when "Margulis" demands, as part of Lotus' gambit to absorb his life force. It ends up throwing the trope into a zig-zag; it's played straight insofar as showing that, albeit in his own twisted way, he still loves Margulis, but also subverted, since his love was conditional on Margulis being the way he wanted her, and when her attention became divided elsewhere (even if it didn't diminish her love for him), he became abusive and manipulative. He also forced Natah to take her place, turning her into the Lotus.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • If his commentary on the modern Corpus in the Vauban Prime trailer were any indication, even he is disgusted with their Greed.
    "Lust was my sin. But greed is the blight that weakens our steel."
  • Apparently even he has no love for Nihil, a.k.a. the Glassmaker. According to the Gara Prime trailer, Ballas was provoked to create the glass-themed Gara Warframe out of pure spite for Nihil after the latter callously called to glass a woman who had volunteered to be turned into a Warframe.
• Eviler than Thou: Ballas ultimately proves to be more dangerous than every other villain encountered so far. While the Grineer Queens and the Corpus Board of Directors were fighting over who rules the Origin System in a Forever War, Ballas sweeps in and conquers it right under their noses in "The New War", taking control of both the Grineer and the Corpus in the process. He also turns out to be more evil than Erra, since even he didn't want to destroy the Sun itself.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • Captured, tortured, and grotesquely transformed a Dax soldier into a killing machine then made him unwillingly slaughter his own son, and then is implied to have murdered the soldier's entire family. The soldier's crime? Informing his superiors of suspicious transmissions that Ballas had made. While Ballas was likely to eliminate the soldier anyways for stumbling upon his plans, Ballas appears to have done the entire thing just because he could.
  • Him enslaving the Solaris after winning "The New War" is expected, as is making them sing his praises. Having the song in question be a Dark Reprise of We All Lift Together, though? This trope.
  • In a more mild example, the entire reason for Gara's existence is that Nihil demanded her human self be glassed for volunteering to be turned into a Warframe. So Ballas made her the glass-themed Warframe purely out of spite for him.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice is deep and smooth, becoming a lot deeper when talking to Umbra telepathically, and belongs to one of the vilest characters in the game.
• Exact Words:
  • His own statement on the Paracesis. "It is the only way your war can end." He didn't mean you would end that war ("The New War"), but Ballas would by killing you and Natah with it. "Your war" ends with your death.
  • Nihil cried to Ballas to have the original Gara glassed "for her presumption"; he wasn't exactly specific as to how he wanted her glassed.
  • The lore for Dagath reveals that the Orokin who loved Dagath (in a very entitled manner) asked him to make her into a Warframe that would be with them forever. Ballas really went the extra mile to handle the forever part, as Dagath had a laser obliterate most of her head and leave a giant hole in the remainder without being significantly harmed.
• Faux Affably Evil: Switches between having a pleasant oral conversation and telepathically threatening Umbra without skipping a beat.
• Final Boss: He's the final opponent you face in "The New War".
• Foregone Conclusion: According to the lore before his in-game appearance, he tried to save the decaying Orokin civilization. Generations later, Orokin are just a memory, with their creations building their own civilizations on their ruins. He himself survived, however, and was largely responsible for destroying the Orokin.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Ballas himself was personally responsible for tricking the Orokin council into approving the creation of the Sentients through reverse psychology, giving Hunhow the locations of the Tenno, and aiding the Sentients in the Old War in retaliation for the execution of Margulis. By "The New War" he takes a more direct role as Big Bad by using the Sentients to establish the Narmer Empire.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Why does he hate the Tenno so much? Not because they caused the downfall of the Orokin, but because they had the "audacity" to divide the attention of his lover between him and them.
• Hate Sink: He was originally presented as the Token Good Teammate of the Orokin, with sympathetic motives and character. Then comes The Reveal of the utterly horrific things he did to create Excalibur Umbra, and his act of giving the Sentients much needed information on how to eradicate the Tenno. Things get even worse during "The New War", in which he starts an apocalyptic cult that enslaves nearly the entire Origin System. Over time, every single one of his so-called "redeeming qualities" are revealed to not be so redeeming after all.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: If this guy was spinning any faster you'd be forgiven for thinking he stepped into one of Zephyr's tornadoes.
  • At first, Ballas didn't appear to be too bad. He was a moderate and a voice of reason among the Orokin, though only privately. He was publicly an Orokin conservative and exemplar, and had to publicly practice the ethos that public image demanded, up to declaring a guilty verdict in the Trial of Margulis against his own lover. After this point we start to see that his public ruthlessness wasn't quite an affectation.
  • He later decidedly became more... hostile. After the Trial of Margulis, he turned traitor, aiding and abetting the Sentients in the Old War. Before eventually outright defecting, a Dax soldier caught wind of his schemes, and Ballas took it personally. He destroyed the man by painfully converting him into his personal enforcer and bodyguard, the Excalibur Umbra, and ordered his family killed, starting by forcing Umbra to personally kill his own son.
  • The Old War came to an end with the "death" of the Sentient commander Hunhow, as he sacrificed himself to the Tenno and allowed his still-living remains to be interred on Uranus. This came after Natah, Hunhow's daughter and subcommander, started to "impersonate" Margulis under the identity of the Lotus and took control of the Tenno. After the Tenno's victory, the Orokin set aside their hatred of them and invited the Tenno into their presence to award honors and citizenship, only for the Lotus-controlled Tenno to butcher them all. The plan went off the rails after Lotus decided to adopt the Tenno and put them into stasis, rather than destroy the last worthy inheritors of the Orokin and rescue her father. It's not known to what extent Ballas shaped this plan, but it couldn't have been achieved without his influence, and his personal goals of destroying the Orokin and "resurrecting" Margulis were achieved.
  • In the interim, Ballas, for all intents and purposes, retired, and for quite some time. Until he came back to the Lotus for his own purposes. While not as nasty as he had been in the past, it ultimately ended with a reawakened Natah and Ballas nearly dying at the Tenno's hands. Natah saved Ballas by turning him into a Sentient chimera.
  • Finally, despite having been saved, Ballas would have preferred dying at the hands of the Operator and Excalibur Umbra in a "perfect death." Having been denied that and having his humanity and poise stripped from him, Ballas switches allegiances again (or perhaps more accurately, reorients back towards the side with the Tenno, though they happen to be fighting against the Sentients rather than for one this time around). Ballas gives the Operator the Sentient-slaying sword Paracesis, indicating him as an ally of the Tenno in the upcoming New War.
  • Interestingly, Ballas was only ever on Ballas's side, and circumstances meant that he was often working with the Tenno, as much as he disliked them. Either using them as a weapon for the Orokin, using them as a weapon for the Sentients, or simply waiting on the sidelines with them commanded by a Sentient while the Sentients' main force being underground for a long time, he's always been on the side with the Tenno but for the brief period in which he stayed on the Sentients' side when they started fighting an awakened Tenno again.
  • With "The New War" Ballas reveals his real villainous agenda, using Erra's Sentient forces to seize control over the system and using the Paracesis the Tenno built to stab them in the back before casting them into the void. Having dealt with the resistance, he establishes a new empire over the entire solar system.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Archimedean Perintol, the scientist he guided was tasked with creating artificial lifeforms to help colonize Tau and build a connection between both systems. These lifeforms with time evolved into the Sentients, the worst enemy the Empire ever faced. Him keeping Tenno alive and creating the Warframes for them is also this, especially when one of his own frames ends up severely injuring him.
    Ballas: [To Umbra, after he gets stabbed in the gut with Skiajati] *gasp* I... I created you...
  • In "The New War" the Tenno manages to finally subdue Ballas by putting one of his own Narmer Veils on his face. This causes him to see the Lotus as Margulis, and he is so lost in seeing her again that he cannot defend against the Lotus draining him of his life with a kiss. Bonus points for a kiss being how he kills the Lotus in the first act of "The New War".
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: From an Executor that essentially ruled the Origin System in all but name to losing his empire, his love, being disemboweled with a nikana, being turned into a horrifying human-Sentient chimera and losing the beauty he valued, and - adding insult to injury - being dragged around on a leash by Natah's brother Erra, like a dog. Turns out that this was an act — he was manipulating Natah and Erra the whole time.
• Hypocrite: During "The New War", he refers to Teshin as the Tenno's Relic, even though both Teshin and Ballas are from the Orokin era. To be fair, his next lines acknowledges that they are both relics.
• I Was Quite the Looker: He laments his transformation into a horrible Orokin-Sentient Amalgam in the "Chimera Prologue" miniquest, seemingly considering it A Fate Worse Than Death. His action during "The New War" and his lack of further reaction toward his new form imply this was an act.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He gets stabbed in the stomach by Excalibur Umbra, with a little help from the Operator, at the end of "The Sacrifice".
• Insane Troll Logic: Even before he got turned into a Sentient chimera Ballas's reasoning for his actions had a lot of this. It makes you wonder just how much sanity he had in the first place, or if it was the eons since the end of the Old War that caused him to start slipping.
• It's All About Me: Tells Margulis that she needs to recant, while he is on the council that could vote to give her a stay of execution, and applies none of his influence to try to save her. Tells a Dax soldier father on his deathbed that he's never had to sacrifice for love and deserves the horrible agony that's coming to him. Decides to destroy his entire civilization because the woman he loved was killed. Expresses incredulity that the Umbra Warframe he tortured throughout its existence would injure him. And these are the cases we know about.
  • "The New War" makes it clear that Ballas is a Narcissist. For starters, he has nearly the entire system brainwashed into worshipping him as a god, but he is incensed about the two people who he doesn't control. During his Villainous Breakdown, he expresses his resentment that Margulis loved the Tenno — not necessarily more than she loved him, just that she loved something outside of him powerfully enough to die for it; urging her to recant even though he could have saved her was a last-ditch ultimatum to make her choose a life loving only him, by using the threat of death to wedge her from the Zariman children. Selling out the Orokin was essentially a tantrum over him not getting his way with Margulis. The Lotus clarifies he fashioned her into Margulis' image not out of regret for his Lost Lenore, but just so he could have a Margulis he could finally control. And when he finally realizes he can't have the love he desires from being worshipped as a god, he repeats his cycle of behavior by choosing to blow up the Sun.
    Ballas: I loved you, once... You were so like her.
    Natah: You dreamed of a Margulis you could control, but she chose death over you.
• Kick the Dog: If one is to regard all of the Warden's statements as if they were to come from Ballas himself, then most of Kullervo's actions could be taken as The Scapegoat for crimes that Ballas himself either had a hand in or manipulated to make Kullervo look worse.
• Killed Off for Real: In a game in which named characters rarely die permanently, including villains, Ballas has the honor of being most definitely and utterly dead by the end of "The New War" - and unlike Erra, there's no indication that he will be brought back in some other form any time soon.
• Kill the Ones You Love: He loved Margulis and tried to protect her from others who wanted to punish her for her defiance, and yet he was on the council that unanimously voted for her death. It was stated outright that it was the course of action demanded by his public persona, and Margullis calls him out on it. It was something that he apparently regretted. Regretted enough that he decided the rest of the Orokin deserved to die. In "The New War" this is subverted, when we learn that Ballas wasn't offering mercy to the woman he loved. He was giving an ultimatum to choose between her adoptive children or him. When she chose the former, he decided to kill her not out of obligation, but because if he couldn't have her, nobody would.
• Kiss of Death: In "The New War", Ballas uses a kiss to drain the Lotus of her life force, effectively disabling her. At the end of the quest, this gets turned right back onto him, with the Lotus doing the exact same thing to him to drain the power he's absorbed from the last Archon Shard so she can restore herself.
• Kneel Before Zod: Starts his fight with the Lotus with a speech like this.
  Ballas: KNEEL!! Kneel and I will spare these worlds! Beg, and I will make you complete again!
• Manipulative Bastard: Ballas is a master manipulator, able to get his "friends" and enemies to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants with surprising ease. He was able to convince the Council to spare Perintol, the Archimedean who created the Sentients while publicly calling for said Archimedean's death (and having secretly coached Perintol on how to behave to make this plan work), and pretended to be on the side of the Orokin while secretly aiding the Sentients in defeating the empire. He even manages to pull this off against the Operator — when he is found in the "Chimera Prologue", Ballas appears to hate his new amalgam form and offers the Tenno the Paracesis as a means of opposing the Sentients, with Erra heavily implying this is his way of rebelling against the titular Sentient after being functionally enslaved. The Maker and "The New War" reveal that Erra and Ballas are actually working as equals (though Erra is still firmly below Ballas, and that he gave the Paracesis schematic to the Operator so that he would have a way to dispose of Natah if she didn't meet his standards. This also means that one of his plans hinged entirely on you knowing how much of a Narcissist he is and would take his attempt to betray Erra at face value, and it worked flawlessly.
• Meaningful Name: Ballas rhymes with "callous". Which fits in every way once you find out how Excalibur Umbra came to be.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: He is not so keen on cooperating with the Sentients after being transformed into an Orokin-Sentient chimera. Though it saved his life, he would have preferred dying at Umbra's hands instead of surviving as he is now. In revenge, he provides your Operator with a sentient-slaying weapon of his design. In "The New War" this is subverted, he was just getting the Tenno to make the sword for him.
• Motive Rant: He goes into several of these late in "The New War", a sign of his Villainous Breakdown.
  • The first happens after the Lotus regains her memories and starts her Foe-Tossing Charge towards him. He loses his temper so hard that his rage fries two of his Deacons' veils, killing them.
  Ballas: Mmmm! TENNO?! Even Hell was not hot enough to split them!
  Erra: What does it matter? We... You have won. Narmer spreads across the system. Monuments rise to your glory. All who live, Bios and not, kneel before you-
  Ballas: BUT NOT THEM!!
  *beat*
  Ballas: You see some great "triumph" here? That this dullard herd worships me? Wailing "freedom" from their rotten gobs, when the truth is... they ALL thirst for that piss-warm comfort of being told what to think! They wanted to kneel.
  • He goes into two more during his boss fight, the first as the Tenno breaks the mirrors Ballas uses to control the Lotus and when he tries to kill her.
  Ballas: There's a good girl! Repair the hurt you have dealt us. Have dealt ME!
  Operator: No! NO!
  Drifter: No! No, dammit, NO!
  Ballas: You had to have a "child", and with an open heart I gave you... this. And my reward? Being left to watch as all your love, My love, poured into the bottomless well of this abominable child.
  Operator/Drifter: Remember! Remember what he did to you!
  Lotus: I... re... member... my... old self... dissolving... beneath... your fingers... Shaping me. Directing me. Lua!
  Ballas: Yes! Let's discuss "what I did". I, who have endured your torture of me. Your lies, Your betrayals, without complaint. All... for you. And this is my reward.
  Lotus: You...! YOU... You lie! You are... small...
  Ballas: Hehe... Pitiful. I AM LOVED!!
  Lotus: You are... a mask... with nothing behind it!
• Mr. Exposition: He is the one who narrates the trailers for Prime frames, with a cadence that implies he is presenting the newly developed frame to his Orokin peers.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: He was fully aware of the flaws of the Orokin civilization, yet did everything in his efforts to prevent its collapse. Up until he decided to sell out to the Sentients, at least.
• Narcissist: At the end of the day, Ballas is full of narcissisms, having pride, ego and wrath come bubbling to the surface when even he doesn't even get one thing he wants. Interestingly, he isn't actually disturbed by his hybridization, despite the drastic change to his appearance and what he claims in the Chimera Prologue.
• Nepharious Pharaoh: His new outfit in "The New War" incorporates a crown reminiscent of the Atef, the crown of Osiris, god of resurrection and the afterlife. While his empire is named after Narmer, the Sema-Tawy (Uniter of the Two Lands), who united Ta-Sheme'aw (Upper Egypt) and Ta-Mehew (Lower Egypt) into the kingdom of Kemet (Ancient Egypt).
• Never My Fault: In "Chimera Prologue", he is understandably bitter at being transformed into a freakish Orokin-Sentient creature, but puts all the blame for it on Natah, painting her as a vile deceiver who tricked him and caused this to happen to him, ignoring that it saved his life, and conveniently forgetting how his cooperation with the Sentients in general and his decision to treat Lotus as someone else came of his own volition. While his monologue was undoubtedly a ploy, it can be assumed his bitterness at what happened to his body was not. Taken even further in "The New War", where he blames his killing of Margulis on how she dared share her love with the Tenno. Even going so far as to blame the Lotus' defiance of him for driving him to destroy the sun.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • He punished Ordan Karris for his "betrayal" by having him turned into a Cephalon, accidentally granting this deeply-troubled berserker the peace and purpose he never found in life; a purpose he would serve well under the Tenno who would eventually play a part in dismantling his plans.
  • His method of dealing with the Tenno in "The New War" is to impale them with Paracesis and cast them into the Void with Lotus/Natah; this ends up causing the Time Paradox that ejects the Drifter into the Origin system, and sets forth a chain of events that would not only topple his Narmer empire but also end with his death at the hands of a fully-restored Lotus.
  • Granted, Ballas had absolutely no way of knowing this, but him severing Natah's hand in "The New War" causes it to fall into the Void. It ends up in the kingdom of Duviri and gives the Drifter the power he needs to free himself from Dominus Thrax's grasp, who goes on to play a vital part in Ballas' downfall. Also, allowing Erra to snap Teshin's neck (and presumably throw the body into the void portal) also ends up resulting in Teshin becoming the Drifter's mentor in Duviri. One can only wonder if the Man In The Wall deliberately set things up so Ballas' own actions would come back to bite him in the ass.
• Noble Demon: At first he seems to play this straight, apparently being legions less corrupt, deluded, or just plain cruel as other Orokin had been... and then, starting with "The Sacrifice", he subverts this trope, HARD - his treatment of the Dax who will become Excalibur Umbra shows him to be just as callous and cruel as the rest of the Orokin, if not even worse. There's also the fact he sold out the Orokin to the Sentients, condemning quite possibly everyone in the Origin System to die because he was "forced" to kill Margulis. In "The New War" any pretense of nobility is totally demolished as he seizes control of the system and brainwashes everyone into an Apocalypse Cult to worship him, then trying to destroy the Sun with Praghasa and use it as fuel to reach Tau, and the brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown he gives to the Lotus when she tries to stop him. With all of that horror, Ballas proved Margulis was wrong: He wasn't just like other Orokin, he was WORSE.
• Non-Action Big Bad: During "The Sacrifice" in the final confrontation with Ballas the gameplay section consists only of fighting off his Sentient cohorts. Ballas himself goes down from one stab to the gut in a cutscene. Subverted at the end of "The New War" where he faces off against the Lotus and Tenno directly.
• No-Sell: Thanks to his Sentient adaptation and the power he absorbed from the last Archon Shard, Ballas is completely immune to all damage except for the Void damage dealt by the Operator form, and the energy shield he forms allows him to block it. Once he completely loses it near the end of his boss fight, he becomes fully immune to any damage (Even Void) during his final walk towards the Lotus, too angry to even process that he's been hurt at all.
• Omnicidal Maniac: His ultimate plan in "The New War" is to have Praghasa eat the sun to power his travel towards the Tau system, not only completely uncaring that this would spell the death of every living thing in the Origin System, but outright broadcasts it during the final act of the quest, saying how his Narmer subjects should be proud of being sacrifices for his great voyage.
• Posthumous Character: Subverted when he appears alive and well in the Apostasy Prologue miniquest, but originally most players would assume that he perished alongside the rest of the Orokin when the Tenno turned on them.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: He says one of these near the end of "The New War", after he stabs Natah with Paracesis and tries to finish her off with it. Fortunately he has a Narmer Veil shoved into his face at the last moment.
  Ballas: You... Monstrous... BITCH!!
• Properly Paranoid: He originally disliked the Tenno, viewing them with suspicion. He's ultimately right, as the Tenno are (partially) responsible for slaughtering the Orokin. Though it turns out that he set up the slaughter. His paranoia also likely lead him to notice, and capture, the Dax who would become Umbra before the poor Dax could upset his plans.
• Prophet Eyes: His eyes are completely white, without pupils or irises. It appears this is common among the Orokin.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • Orokin were known to be effectively immortal, provided they had the resources, and Executors were known to be a step above that. "The War Within" implies that the Grineer Queens went through several bodies in the time since, at least half of a millenium. Ballas, meanwhile, still had what was apparently his original body and quite hale.
  • He also lived throughout the Old War, which a few hints indicate lasted a long, long time. And he was also there to direct the creation of the original Sentients and send them on their way. While Warframe is known for vague historical timelines, for reference, it would take getting to Tau Ceti a minimum of 12 years and a rough maximum of 5773 years, one way. Let alone the time it would take to complete the work and come back. Though the Void is all but said to be hyperspace, that completely throws out any conventional notions of travel time between sending out the Sentients and them coming back to declare war..
• Reality Warper: Seems to conjure the design for Paracesis with his mind alone, and even makes it solid enough to pass to your Operator. It is unknown if this is one of his capabilities as a high-ranking Orokin or it comes form his now part-Sentient biology, or if the whole thing was just done by the Man in the Wall.
• Replacement Goldfish: He decides to treat Natah as though she were Margulis, despite being fully aware they're different people. But changes his mind out of spite after he is transformed into an Orokin-Sentient chimera, resolving to himself that there was no Margulis or Lotus, only Natah that deceived him.
• Restraining Bolt: He was the creator of Warframes, and he can control them to a degree. Which is why Umbra can't kill him on his own, now matter how hard he tries - Ballas simply causes him to freeze with but a thought.
• Sadist: It's the only explanation for what happened to a certain Dax - he really wanted that poor soul to squirm.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Ballas seems to embody all of them — he wants a completely obedient Margulis to conform to his desires (Lust), the whole system to be his own (Greed), reacts with extreme jealousy toward the Tenno for having Margulis' love (Envy), wants to have the unquestionable obedience of everyone in the system (Gluttony) who worship him as a god (Pride) and plans to outright destroy the Origin System when it seems his empire is at risk of falling (Wrath). Finally, he seems content to manipulate others into doing the heavy lifting for him to achieve these goals (Sloth).
• Shadow Archetype: To the Tenno and Erra, regarding the Lotus. Just like the others, Ballas is someone who loves the Lotus, or rather the idea of who the Lotus could be. Ballas specifically wants her to be his love Margulis reborn, and completely subordinate to him. He and Erra work to make the Lotus into who they want her to be, which the Tenno attempt to reverse when they go to rescue her. The difference between the other two is that Ballas is The Sociopath and doesn't particularly care for Natah's feelings on the matter, as ultimately his happiness comes before the lives of everyone else.
• Slave Collar: Courtesy of Erra after his transformation. This is an intentional ploy to make it seem like Ballas is a victim, when in reality he holds more power over the Sentients than the Erra himself.
• Smart People Play Chess: Almost, in this setting they play Komi^note basically Go on a smaller board, as we can see during "The Sacrifice" flashbacks.
• The Sociopath: Ultimately, this is what Ballas proves to be in the end. Margulis's death wasn't because of his public persona, it was because she dared to love someone (or to him, something) that he didn't care for. The Orokin Empire as a whole was "insufficiently loyal" because the people in it dared to have thoughts and dreams that didn't revolve around him and his glory? Raze it to the ground and eventually rebuild it into the system-dominating Narmer cult, where the citizens are literally brainwashed into worshipful adoration. There's still a handful of people who oppose him? Force them into killing their loved ones before abandoning them - and his entire new empire - in a solar system that is now lacking its sun as he moves on to a new system he can mold to his will.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Gender-inverted - him taking Zariman children under his protection can be seen as this for his love for Margulis. And then averted when he just saw them as tools to perfect control of his Warframes, and they were just as disposable as everyone BUT Margulis.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: In the final phase of his boss fight, Ballas snaps completely and decides to simply destroy the Sun and kill everything in the Origin System, even if the explosion kills him as well. Fortunately he's stopped before he can actually do it.
  Ballas: Very well! I give you my death, and yours as well! The unstoppable annihilation of Every! Single! Last! Thing! Pleased? Satisfied?! Are you now full up with death?!
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Zigzagged — during the final battle with him at the end of "The New War", the only way to remove his otherwise invincibility granting shield is to destroy the Narmer Mirrors at the edge of the arena, which are only vulnerable to his staff beam. He does, however, make them invulnerable during part of his attack pattern, and the final portion of the battle leaves it ambiguous if he is actually taking any damage from your attacks.
• Take Up My Sword: Creates and gives Paracesis, the Sentient-slaying sword, to your Operator after his transformation.
• Tempting Fate: "You think you can defy me? Not even your Tenno devil can-" *gut stab* "Agh..." Justified, as he had no reason to expect that his Restraining Bolt on Umbra would fail, since previously it worked flawlessly.
• Took a Level in Badass: As the Final Boss of "The New War", Ballas is probably the strongest opponent in the game from a lore stance. Not only are all his attacks able to knock the Operator/Drifter out of their warframe (something that is impossible for any other enemy to do besides Void Angels), but he also has an unbreakable barrier similar to those possessed by the Twin Queens, but can still attack while it is up. You never actually defeat him in combat, with the Tenno having to resort to covering his face with a Narmer Veil, allowing Lotus to exploit his veil-induced stupidity to give him a Kiss of Death. Also, keep in mind he's unaffected by walking through open space right next to the sun, which continuously saps health from your Operator while they are active and is visibly demolishing the scenery.
• To the Pain: Ballas taunts Umbra during their Komi game, saying that for every stone Ballas captures he will kill one of Umbra's kin. He will take a lot of stones, and will tell Umbra exactly who he is going to kill.
• Torso with a View: After his Emergency Transformation, his lower ribs and liver are exposed by a hole in his chest.
• Turncoat: After Margulis' death he went as far as defecting and collaborating with the Sentients in their genocide, as a revenge on the rest of the Orokin.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Not only is Ballas only concerned about his own well being, he completely ignores any good anyone has ever done for him, even Margulis.
• Unreliable Narrator: Nearly everything that Ballas ever says is a lie or an attempt to manipulate others, and even then, anything he personally recalls is always skewed to put him in a better light or put someone else in a worse view. Believing Their Own Lies is also in full effect here.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The consequences of his actions during The New War were given more context by the "Operator Report" official recap site. Namely, the last file states his flagrant opening of Void portals gave more freedom to the Man in the Wall to do as it pleases with conventional reality, greatly increasing the threat it poses to the Origin System. Considering that he's never been confirmed to know about the Man in the Wall's existence, it doesn't seem intentional. Not that the system wasn't in danger of going extinct with his plan to sacrifice the Sun, but still.
• Villain Has a Point: While the system he used to regain control of the Origin System is a horribly oppressive Apocalypse Cult that worships him as a god, he's not wrong about how chaotic the system was before he took control.
• Villain Respect: "Now I know... what she sees in you," one of the possible things he can say to your Operator just before (not quite) expiring. His narration for Gara Prime's trailer is also uncharacteristically respectful, suggesting that even Ballas appreciated her heroics.
  "Of all our sleek gargoyles, our Void-born masquerade, how to honor the one who volunteered willingly, knowing the truth? Whose little act of courage... twinkled like a petty Ayatan, before our golden indifference?"
• Villain Song: "For Narmer", a Dark Reprise of "We All Lift Together", sung by the brainwashed Solaris in Fortuna.
• Villainous Breakdown: In "The New War", he breaks down in fury once Natah is mostly restored and the Operator returns. It gets even worse once Natah takes over the Murex in Cetus and goes after him. His sanity slips more and more as his fight progresses. By the end, he degenerates into a murderous and raging lunatic that tries to destroy the Sun with Praghasa and kill everyone, even if he himself has to go down with them.
  Ballas: What are you? Tell me that! What barren, disgusting thing have I let into my house AND my heart?! TELL ME!!
  Lotus: Child... Run!
  Ballas: Run?! Where should they run to?! YOU'VE ONLY DESTROYED EVERYTHING!
• Walking Spoiler: It's difficult to describe him without spoiling much. Not just how he was pivotal to the history of the system, and hence had played a large part in shaping the plot. He's a living, breathing Orokin in the present day. Not to mention his role as the true mastermind behind "The New War", and how he uses it to enslave the system.
• Weak-Willed: Ironically enough for a man who seems to pride himself on his independence and vision, it takes mere moments after he's Veiled for him to completely succumb to its influence, even in the midst of the most important confrontation of his life and right after a speech about how he's an Ubermensch who doesn't care for others at all, least of all Margulis... the very thing the Veil uses to completely enslave him. He pays for this with his life.
• Yandere: Ballas loved Margulis (or at least, an idealized, submissive version of her he imagined), but was also highly possessive of her. He couldn't stand the thought of her loving anyone else, not even her surrogate children, so he had her put to death when she refused to recant her love for the Tenno, then lashed out by betraying the Orokin and joining the Sentients. In "The New War", he lusts for the Lotus, due to her having taken on Margulis' image, and tries to brainwash her into loving and obeying him. When this fails, he tries to destroy the Sun.
• You Will Be Spared: In Hildryn's Prime Trailer, Ballas specifically requests that, once the reservoir is breached, Hildryn alone should be spared to guard against other threats.

Albrecht Entrati (Major Unmarked Spoilers)

^{Click to see him in 1999}

Voiced By: Stefan Rudnicki

An Orokin scientist who pioneered Void travel.

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• Ambiguously Bi: While Albrecht has a still living daughter, his interactions with Loid, as revealed in Whispers in the Wall, are heavily tinged with romantic affection, leaving it ambiguous if he was either forced to marry whoever Euleria's mother was and Loid was his Closet Key, he happened to be gay and Euleria was adopted or conceived through other means, or if Albrecht was bisexual. At the very least, he noted that his daughter had her mother's eyes, so he did know her personally.
• Ambiguous Situation: Invoked in Albrecht's diary: he himself is unsure whether it was him who escaped from the Void or his doppelganger, and that's why he decided to refuse the Continuity.
• Authority Sounds Deep: Albrecht may have just been a scientist, nowhere near the authority of the Seven, but he was one of the most important and reknowned scientists in the Orokin Empire. His studies of the Void made the expansion of the empire across the Origin System possible, for which the name Entrati received plenty of influence. Fittingly, his voice is among the deepest in the game.
• Badass Longcoat: His last appearance before transporting himself to 1999 had him dressed in a stylish gold-hemmed trenchcoat adorned with the golden circle patterns seen on many Entrati constructs, like the Necramechs and architecture on Deimos. It also stands in stark contrast to the togas that his fellow Orokin tended to wear.
• Bland-Name Product: All of the computers he brought back from 1999 were "Pom-2" models. "Pomme" is French for "apple," making it quite clear what they're supposed to stand in for. It may also be justified as being part of an Alternate History, given written English was still a wildly-different system compared to reality even way back when.
• Body Horror: Compare and contrast the portrait you can get of him in the Zariman and his appearance in 1999. After his initial encounter with The Man In The Wall, he ended up struck blind, mute, and was flayed while desperately fleeing back through the portal, which forced him to scrawl a command to Euleria to close the gate with his own blood. Loid managed to nurse him back to health (and return his voice and sight as well as growing him a new, less conspicuously blue skin).
• Broken Pedestal: To Fibonacci and Bird 3 from the Cavia, who lovingly referred to Albrecht as "Papa". They later drop this as you rank up with their syndicate, as they eventually realize just how little Albrecht actually cared about them.
• Changed My Jumper: Averted - he's seen to have ditched traditional Orokin fashion in favor of an outfit that wouldn't look out-of-place in the late 90s' or even today when travelling back to 1999.
• Create Your Own Villain: The Cavia admit in the Operator Report that the circumstances of Albrecht's encounter with the Man in the Wall mean it may be a conceptual embodiment of his own creation, though they don't seem to recall noting this in the present day (the relevant file in the Operator Report is at least several years old.)
• Go Mad from the Revelation: His initial encounter with the Man in the Wall left him mute and blind, forcing him to write an order to his daughter with his own blood before the entity could follow him back into the test chamber. While Albrecht recovered his voice later on, likely his sight as well, the experience left him permanently scarred.
• Good Parents: Albrecht admits that he was not a perfect father and that his daughter may have only seen an idealized version of him, but he still raised her mostly on his own and she has almost nothing but fond memories of him, still hoping that she can one day be reunited with her father. Considering how many Orokin turn out, the fact that Euleria is one of the more reasonable and redeemable ones speaks volumes about Albrecht's parenting.
• Gratuitous German: Just like the Man in the Wall calls the Tenno "kiddo", it also used a childhood nickname when talking to Albrecht: "Little Bengel", which his mother used to call him by centuries ago. "Bengel" is a German term that refers to an unruly male child.
• Lack of Empathy: Perhaps not to the extent of some of the other Orokin, but Albrecht didn't seem to care much about what happened to the animals he used in his dangerous Void experiments. Most notably, he had the last two Cervulites in his possession, but rather than figure out a way to save their species from extinction or at least give them proper care he simply had them both tagged for disposal once his experiments were done.
• Must Make Amends: Albrecht Entrati pioneered Void-based travel and technologies, but was haunted by his encounter with the Man in the Wall that gave it a literal finger into this reality. He is implied to have temporarily resettled on Duviri in order to prepare for a war with the Man in the Wall, as an act of "repentance".
• Prophet Eyes: Just like the other Orokin, though his irises became more visible in his later appearance.
• Schizo Tech: Much of the technology in his lab is controlled via old tower computers apparently lifted from 1999, complete with black-and-white CRT montiors. On top of that, he also made use of an old-style pager, and a cell phone that looks suspiciously similar to a Nokia 3310 can be found on his desk.
• Token Good Teammate: Downplayed, especially compared to his progeny and sister-in-law, but unlike the vast majority of the Orokin, Albrecht has a functioning moral compass and was able to recognize that some of his actions demanded atonement, hence his efforts to oppose the Man in the Wall. The biggest hint to this is the fact that his daughter, who he appears to have raised mostly by himself, is capable of genuine empathy and at least has completely reasonable justifications for some of her more immoral and cowardly actions, indicating that he was able to impart some healthy morality onto her. Another telling factor is the fact that when he left Duviri, the oppressed citizens mourned his absence and built an empty grave to honor his memory, indicating that Albrecht had treated them with respect.
• Uncertain Doom: For some time, it was unclear whether Albrecht Entrati simply expired from the old age, as he planned, got lost in the Void or what have you. The situation is finally given some clarity in Whispers in the Walls - Albrecht apparently used a Time Machine to travel to 1999 to escape the Man in the Wall, though it is still ambiguous if he succeeded.
• Walking Spoiler: Who Albrecht is, his discoveries on the Void and the Man in the Wall, as well as the vital role he plays in Warframe's post-"The New War" narrative arc make it very difficult to discuss him without revealing important plot details.

Silvana

Silvana

Another Orokin Archimedean, a student of Margulis who served with her on several projects. Her dream was restoring planet Earth from the decayed desert it was in her lifetime. After Margulis' death, she was drafted by Ballas into his research, where she was responsible for the creation of the Titania Warframe. Later she used Transference technology to transfer her consciousness into the Orokin forests of Earth.

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• Creator Backlash: In-universe. She hated her creation the Titania, as she saw her as the result of misuse of research. Later she changed her mind when Titania sacrificed herself to save her from the Orokin that were after her.
• Defector from Decadence: She was disgusted with how hers and Margulis' research was used to create weapons. Eventually she deserted the project, got to Earth and transferred herself into it's forests.
• Green Thumb: She was the designer and creator of the forests that currently consume the surface of the Earth.
• Genius Loci: Used Transferrence to inhabit the vegetation among her forests on Earth and became trapped in that state. Her consciousness is still there, and she has some control over the plant life in the forest.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Subverted. Silvana isn't a true god, and she won't die if the altars of the Grove aren't anointed, but her cognition will fade until she cannot distinguish herself from it.
• Meaningful Name: Her name is derived from the Latin word Silvanus, meaning "of the woods". Not just that, but Silvanus is the name of a Roman tutelary of forests and uncultivated land. Fitting for the will of the Silver Grove, the New Loka's most sacred and pristine Earth forest.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Centuries of living as a plant made her thought processes slow and dull to the point where she effectively lost self-awareness and capability for conscious thinking, assimilated by her forest. The players wake her up during the Silver Grove quest.
• The Voice: Even after being fully awakened she has nothing resembling an avatar, and communicates with the player purely through voice.

Isaah

Isaah

The son of the Dax that Excalibur Umbra was derived from. Like his father, he was also a Dax, but of a lower rank than him.

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• Badass Family: He and his father are Dax soldiers. And if Ballas is to be believed, his family line is under a warrior caste.
• Death by Origin Story: His death drove Excaliber Umbra's Sanity Slippage from living though it for years, and Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Ballas.
• Dramatic Irony: As Umbra and Ballas are playing Komi for Umbra's family's lives, and Ballas calmly tells him how far ahead the Orokin has planned his defection, Isaah obliviously comments that Umbra "knows the game better than anyone".
• The Dutiful Son: He stayed and watch over his father's bedside while his father's Technocyte infection unknowingly worsened by Ballas' hands. In his last moments, Isaah clearly loved and honored his father.
  Isaah: "I... am honored... to be your son."
• Follow in My Footsteps: Would have gladly followed his father's example.
• Meaningful Name: His name was likely derived after the Biblical Isaac whom God asked to be sacrificed by his father Abraham as a test of Abraham's faith in him.
• Offing The Off Spring: By his father, although Excalibur Umbra was controlled by Ballas to do so.

The Glassmaker

Nihil, the Glassmaker

Voiced by: Ryan Laughton

"Rarely does one encounter a lamb so eager to know the mouth of the lion. But, since you're here..."

An Orokin-turned-Cephalon judge that survived the Collapse, and the main antagonist of Nightwave Series 3. A serial killer obsessed with Orokin law, who possesses an ancient method of transforming his victim's bodies into a crystalline substance, trapping their souls in "the glass". Nora identifies him as Nihil, the Orokin responsible for the creation of the Cephalons.

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• All Crimes Are Equal: Making a little profit on the side instead of sharing? Glassing. Smuggling all-but-slaves to freedom? Glassing. Alerting colonies of impending attacks? Glassing. Turning on your rebellion movement to cooperate with the local authorities? Glassing. Committing any sort of infraction, no matter how minor? Well, you can probably see the pattern here.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In the last investigation it is revealed that he knows where Nora is broadcasting from and abducts her.
• And I Must Scream:
  • He would take criminals and turn them into Cephalons, who are then either reprogrammed into servants, or trapped in a small bottle for eternity. The latter was one of his favorite things to do, to the point where he had an entire hall filled with these oubliettes. He threatens to do a different version of this to the Tenno and Nora in order to turn them into his personal agents of "order".
  • After the final battle, this ends up being his own fate as well: Nora has him trapped in one of his own oubliettes and gifts him to the Tenno, dooming him to spend eternity as pretty much what amounts to a fancy ornament for your Orbiter/Dormizone. Oh, and the Tenno can tap on his prison every now and then to elicit an ineffectual threat or attempted bargain from him. Suffice to say, however, his fate is one fully deserved.
• Arc Villain: The titular villain of Nightwave Series 3.
• Badass Boast: Gives one right before his boss fight.
  Nihil: When the barbarians are at the gate, the truly noble may choose to find the honorable way out, and so the crude and the lawless find they have arrived too late, and thus the weave of history may disguise a cunning victory as a defeat. I am Nihil, Glassmaker. Order. Shall be. Restored.
• Berserk Button: Shigg, the Ostron who was his first victim seems to be one to him, given his reaction when the Tenno frees his soul.
  Nihil: SHIGG!! You were scum when you were dragged to me! YOU WERE SCUM WHILE YOU SCREAMED!! AND YOU ARE SCUM NOW!!!
• Better to Die than Be Killed: When the Tenno turned on the Orokin, Nihil chose to glass himself rather than face their retribution. Nora calls attention to this during his boss battle, calling him a coward.
• BFS: His personal weapon, the Vitrica, is an enormous heavy blade even longer than he is tall. A swing of this sword will glass the condemned, and it will deliver a One-Hit Kill to you if he hits you with it. Nora mails you the blueprint for a scaled down version of this weapon after you defeat him.
• Black-and-White Insanity: To such an insane degree that it borders on Blue-and-Orange Morality - to Nihil, going against your intended purpose in any way, regardless of morality, is grounds for him to murder you and force you into a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Sometimes it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, as Cutter's fate shows - Cutter betrayed Solaris United because he blamed them for the Deck 12 incident, and started working for the Corpus in order to round up SU operatives, effectively being a snitch for the local authority. But because he betrayed Solaris United, Nihil killed him anyway. That being said, Nihil's words on the subject indicate he actually considered sparing Cutter because Cutter didn't really feel he belonged with Solaris United, and only killed him when the latter betrayed "his nation of one" by begging. So it seems that as long as you don't betray whoever you are loyal to (even if that is only yourself), Nihil might be willing to allow you to live. Might.
  • According the "Nights of Naberus", a servant looking at a container for Crimson Kuva was grounds for being glassed, implying it's because that means the servant knows where to find it, and could interfere with Continuity, or worse yet, claim it for themselves.
  • That being said, all of Nihil's victims have one thing in common: they turned against their faction's established way of life - Shigg attempted to make a Black Market profit for himself when Ostron tradition focuses on advancing the whole, Bak Vondu was selfless when Corpus dogma views charity as a mortal sin, Gral was a Grineer defector and thus went against the Grineer's fanatical devotion to their queens, while Cutter betrayed Solaris United and became an informant for Anyo Corp. The final battle with Nihil implies he specifically chose to punish these people because he has a grudge against the Tenno, who went against the "way of life" set for them by massacring the Orokin.
• Big "NO!": He screams a big "NO!" when the Tenno finally seals him away for good.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Anyone turned into a Cephalite is reduced to husk of their former self, with strange glass shards in their skin that must be destroyed to damage them. On occasion, some cephalites will explode after being killed, with their bodies freezing in place and turning bright red before doing so.
• Cool Sword: His greatsword, Vitrica. An oddly shaped blade as long as his right arm, and his main tool of office, used to turn his victims into glass. After his defeat, the Vitrica is unlocked for the Tenno to craft, albeit a scaled down version compared to the original.
• Creepily Long Arms: Like Ballas, his right arm is twice as big as his left.
• The Dreaded: The general populace of the Orokin Empire seemed to fear Nihil more than the other members of the Seven, as Nora Night's grandmother used his name as a bogeyman to get her to behave, telling young Nora that Nihil would come to "put her in a bottle" if she didn't.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Kills the Ostron and Corpus who - at the least - re-enabled his ability to glass people, without a moment's hesitation. By Orokin law, they were criminals and that's all he cares about, extenuating circumstances be damned. The Solaris who was also involved caused him to hesitate because he was apparently "a nation of one", and thus hadn't technically betrayed anyone... up until he begged for his life, whereupon Nihil decided he was betraying himself.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Implied by the Gara Prime trailer - he called to glass someone who volunteered to be made into a Warframe for her presumption, provoking laughter. This then provoked Ballas to make a glass-themed Frame, seemingly out of spite for Nihil.
• Knight of Cerebus: Granted, Nightwave wasn't lighthearted to begin with, but Nihil stands out for actually interacting with and attacking Nora Night.
• Hanging Judge: His punishments were horrifying, often dealing a Fate Worse than Death to his victims. And he loved inflicting this fate on anyone brought before him, for even the most minor infractions.
• Hypocrite: The Orokin Legem 6-243 dictates that capital punishments such as glassing require direct and unanimous approval from the Seven, meaning that Nihil's actions make him as much a criminal as the people he passed judgment on. The punishment for violating that law was forfeiture of all tools of office and banishment.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The Cephalites he creates in missions turn normal enemies into this. Until the glass shards on their bodies are destroyed, no amount of firepower will be enough to put them down. To add injury to insult, once you manage to kill them they will sometimes explode after a short delay.
• Karmic Death: In life, he loved to trap Cephalons in tiny glass bottles for eternity. After his defeat, he's now the one stuck in a bottle forever.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • He kills a Corpus crewman and snidely comments how said crewman's mother would be disappointed in how he'd been smuggling Solaris refugees out of the debt-internment camp... and not upset that her son was now dead.
  • Taken further in episode 3, where he kills a Grineer deserter who had been helping give colonies early warning of Grineer attacks. His reason? The clone had become an agent of chaos by developing emotions and not being a blindly obedient slave for the twin queens.
• Laser-Guided Karma: For all of the crimes he committed, he finally meets his comeuppance through the investigative efforts of the Tenno. He gets sealed away into a glass oubliette, never being able to commit another crime again. Nora even encourages the player to do whatever they like to him now that he's payed up for his sins.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Outright admits to this in the final episode, gleefully remembering the choir of screams his oubliettes used to make. He looks forward to filling them up again to make a new one.
• Monster Progenitor: He created the Cephalons, AI-like constructs made from the minds of humans.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: His name is Nihil, and he is not a good guy.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Accuses the Tenno of hypocrisy for coming after him, as they take way, way more lives than he does for the sake of justice, despite the fact that the circumstances are completely different.
• One-Hit Kill: If Vitrica connects during his boss fight, it will down the player instantly. Fortunately, he only swings it in certain telegraphed attacks, and revives can still be used.
• Order Is Not Good: Nihil is obsessed with his idea of "order", and targets those who go against their purpose. In practice, this makes him a Serial Killer who can easily find a reason to doom you to A Fate Worse Than Death.
• Puzzle Boss: Nihil is invincible at the start of the fight. To damage him, you need to destroy the floating glass shards (specifically, the ones with the evidence you found in the investigations) around him via explosive glass shards he throws at you, after which you can lob those explosive shards at him for actual damage.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The rewards for Series 3 implied that he was a Cephalon, as the unique rewards were Cephalon-themed. As it turns out, he isn't one himself (at least based upon all available knowledge), but is actually the Orokin who created said Cephalons. The final episode of Nightwave Series 3 reveals Nihil actually is a Cephalon, having glassed himself to escape the slaughter of the Orokin.
• Sadist: He calmly admits that he found the chorus of screams of those he'd glassed to be soothing, and regrets how the oubliettes in his sanctum have been shattered... but don't worry. Soon, the chamber will be refilled, and they will "sing" for him again.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Escaped the Tenno massacre by glassing himself, but remained trapped for hundreds of years until a Solaris Turn Coat released him. The Tenno manage to seal away Nihil once more, this time in a glass oubliette. His face can be seen behind the glass and you can tap it for some snide remarks from him, but the rest of him is now history.
• Serial Killer: He gives off this vibe - not least because of all the glassed enemies he sends after you. In the final confrontation, when Nora points out that he's defying Orokin law himself for not having authorization for his current series of glassings, it becomes apparent that despite his claimed motivation of "restoring order", he really just wants to kill everyone who displeases him. In essence, a state-sponsored serial killer who's off his leash.
• Smug Snake: Like almost every other Orokin we've encountered, his ego could eclipse Jupiter. He's very certain that he'll be able to recreate "order" in the system — he might have to glass a few million people to cow the rest back into obedience, but such is the price of progress. On the other hand, when he was first put in immediate, personal danger, he decided to glass himself rather than let the Tenno have the win, hiding out in the Cephalon Weave. Nora calls it cowardice, but he declares it to be a cunning way of snatching victory from apparently inevitable defeat. The fact that he couldn't do anything for god-knows-how-long until some curious Ostron and Corpus poked at some ancient tech and accidentally released him means absolutely nothing, of course.
• Symbol Motif Clothing: Pentagons are widely prominent in his shoulder armor and his section of the Weave.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: If Nihil never threw the explosive shards at you, he'd be invincible. Justified by the fact his attacks are very slow and obviously telegraphed, the explosive shards slow you down before detonating, and that he has other "criminals" to glass - it's all but stated he wants you dead right now, and thus wants the fight to be over as soon as possible.
• Vigilante Man: Implied that he targets "criminals" who violate ancient Orokin law. He specifically uses the word "legem", the Orokin word for "law".
• Villainous Breakdown: He suffers one during his boss battle. He goes from calm and collected at the start to anger and desperation as the Tenno continues to deplete his health. Finally culminating in a Big "NO!" when he is finally defeated.
• Wham Line: During the Cephalon Weave sequence for the fourth murder he commits, Nihil very casually acknowledges Nora Night by name, and admits he has plans for her. Up until this point, no one else in the system has acknowledged her existence, even those she is ostensibly helping. In particular, he repeats Nora's line about "putting [her] in a bottle", implying that he's been listening to Nora's broadcasts as well. He then goes a step further by revealing that he knew where Nora was all along, and abducts her right in the middle of the last investigation!
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Nihil can steal the souls of his victims, turning them into Cephalites, with glass bodies and growths, barely a shadow of their former selves.

Tuvul

Voiced by: Sean Joseph Perry

"How dare you fear. What do you imagine you have to lose? You citizens are born to die. Such is your lot. But even such a death as yours may be meaningful, if it serves us. In this alone is your salvation."

Another member of the Council of Seven, particularly notable in that he was the patron of the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Zariman Ten Zero.

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• A God Am I: Fully bought into the delusions of godhood that were common amongst the Orokin.
• Bad Boss: At first he tried to ease the worries of the Zariman colonists when doubts started to spread throughout the ship, but quickly dropped this in favor of threatening the lives of their families, eventually leaving them all for dead.
• Creepily Long Arms: Just like Ballas and Nihil. In fact, it is he who finally explains why their arms are so long, being shaped to match their "generosity".
• Dirty Coward: When the Tenno turned against the Orokin and began slaughtering them, he wasted no time fleeing to the Circulus to use Continuity to escape, leaving his countrymen behind to die. Unfortunately for him, Voruna was hot on his trail.
• Disproportionate Retribution: His reaction to the Zariman colonists daring to be worried about potential problems with the Void jump were insults, threats of execution and ultimately abandonment.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Was first mentioned all the way back in Update 16 with the Crewman Synthesis Imprint, which told the tale of how the Sentients first came into being. He became more prominent in Update 31.5: Angels of the Zariman.
• Evil Old Folks: As one of the Orokin council Tuvul was naturally very old thanks to Continuity, but his body by the time the empire fell was also mentioned to have been fairly old.
• Faux Affably Evil: When preparations for the Void jump initially started, Tuvul showered the colonists with praise and encouragement. This didn't last very long.
• Grand Theft Me: He was the head of the Yuvan Clerisy and thus the one in charge of the Continuity rituals that granted the Orokin elite their immortality. He also tried to pull this to escape the Tenno massacre, but Voruna stopped him at the last moment and freed the child vessel.
• Karmic Death: Tuvul met his end being torn to shreds by Voruna, the Tenno guardian of the Circulus, the holiest Yuvan temple in the empire. For years she had unwittingly ensured that hundreds, if not thousands of children had their minds broken and their bodies stolen by the Orokin. When the Tenno rebelled, she made sure to personally hunt down her former master.
• Laser-Guided Karma: A proper Orokin scumbag, who lambasted his own subjects for having the audacity to be afraid of a risky operation that could put them all in danger (and was generally condescending towards them on a good day) who is hunted down while fleeing like a coward from a fate that the Orokin very much brought unto themselves. Couldn't have happened to a better guy.
• Posthumous Character: Unlike Ballas and Nihil, who managed to cheat death one way or another, Tuvul is confirmed to have died when the empire fell.
• Properly Paranoid: Since the empire was starting to get desperate, Tuvul indulged Archimedian Perintol's idea to solve the issue of colonizing Tau during his trial, but questioned how they can be sure that his creation won't go rogue. While he was satisfied with the answer, said creation became the Sentients, meaning his concerns were completely justified.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He doesn't have nearly as much prominence as some other Orokin characters, but his patronage and handling of the Zariman incident resulted in the Tenno gaining their supernatural powers.
• Weird Beard: He had a fake, golden one reminiscent of those worn by Egyptian pharaohs, which were associated with godhood.

Corphel and Iliria

The masters (and lovers) of the Dax who would become Dagath.

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• Accidental Murder: Almost. They tried to arrange an "accident" that would kill their Dax servant's Kaithe, but in the process ended up mortally wounding her. They had to have her turned into a Warframe in order to save her life.
• Asshole Victim: When they grew bored with the Warframe they "loved", they tried to have her killed by burning through her head with a dissolution beam. Dagath survived this, and having had her face burned off by her former lovers, she took her revenge by killing them and flaying their faces.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: They pleaded with an "expert" (strongly implied to be Ballas) to make their Dax servant live forever. They got what they wished for, as the resulting Warframe had Complete Immortality to such a degree that when they grew tired of her and tried to have her killed, she managed to survive having her skull burned straight through with a dissolution beam, and later came back to kill them.
• Green-Eyed Monster: They couldn't stand the thought of their Dax loving anything more than them. They even forbade her from naming her Kaithe, in an attempt at stopping her from developing a strong bond with it, and when this failed, they arranged for that Kaithe to be killed.
• Polyamory: Corphel and Iliria were a couple, but both were also involved with their Dax servant. The relationship was very imbalanced: Corphel and Iliria are implied to have loved the Dax only in a very shallow way, while expecting total commitment to them in return.

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