When Navarro fell, the Rain Makers took everything that wasn't nailed down, determined to understand every facet of the technology left behind. Weapons, prototypes, even power armor, they took it all.
It's typical for power armor users to make their own modifications. The Tesla armor left behind for Arcade Gannon was always intended to be his and, during the battle of Navarro, his father reported for duty in his own, a set Arcade had assumed was lost forever.
So when one of Aguta's soldiers greets them in a familiar X-01, the pattern of scratches undeniable, the welding he recognized because his father was also left handed—he can't believe it.
But he has to, because there's a compartment inside the chest, beneath a detached weld that he knew would reveal a space just wide enough for a photograph.
"It's you! But with a beard! Is that your father?" Clover says over his shoulder, peering at the polaroid of his father in the armor, holding a little Arcade that shields his eyes in the bright California sun.
In the crates of storage from the destroyed base, Arcade finds more remnants from his childhood, but the only thing he deems worth keeping are his father's glasses.
And as he rubs his tired eyes, he slips them on and sees his father staring back at him in the broken window pane. A man who devoted his life to the wrong side of history and yet his most obvious legacies were the soldiers he left behind that were willing to raise his only son, and his son who denied him. Arcade knows he'll never understand his father, motivations or otherwise, but that doesn't mean he has to question himself or carry the corpse either. In an aging warehouse in northern California, Arcade finally buries his father.
And the world has never been so clear.