Hello everyone please be kind to me as I basically become this over Vena's lines and cope with having very little lore on them rn and spending two hours going through all the voice lines I had access to
BEFORE WE START
I am aware that the new protos give lore and more lines when they are your railjack crew, but as my railjack isn't even high enough to hire them and the wiki has not been updated with all their lines yet, I am going based off the Garuda lore tablets we got and her voicelines and some clues from around her ship, okay? Okay.
SPOILERS AHEAD
First thing's first... I don't think Entrati had anything to do with these protos.
Crazy opening, I know, but based off of some of Vena's in and out of transference voicelines, there is zero mention of Entrati or anyone like him. You know what there is though?
Mentions of Cephalon Parvos. Specifically, lines like she knew him personally and already had knowledge of transference and the tenno. Specifically being able to perform transference as protos.
When you transfer out of Vena, there is a chance she'll say this:
Hm, that's interesting. How would he know about the uncomfortableness that can come with coming in and out of transference?
Vena has a lot of lines about money, payment, about how expensive she is and how you're wasting her time by running around when she can be earning credits.
(I didn't get screenshots of these, I've been writing them all down, but-)
"You are either very wealthy or very stupid for leaving me here like this."
"I'm. Expensive. Leaving me here is expensive. Did you hear me?!"
"Time is money!"
"I hope I was expensive."
"I am a debt worth bleeding for."
"Time is money. Money is blood. Let's go collect."
"Going to have to pick up the pace if we're going to meet our quota!"
"Every minute you're gone, you pay me in blood. I don't care whose."
"There are only two gods. Blood and Money. You just died at the hands of one!"
"A debt. Paid."
"We are about to add a new line to our ledger."
"That one has a debt to pay."
Which is very Corpus of her, isn't it?
But there's one line she says that really sticks out to me.
"Once a puppet, always a puppet… Just more literal now."
From all of her money talk and violence talk, it kinda sounds like A Sister of Parvos talk, doesn't it? And it's interesting that when you're fighting Vena, who's the mini boss?
A Sister of Parvos.
Still following me? Thanks!
Let's veer for a second and talk about the Garuda tablets and how Vena acts and speaks, and how Orion especially acts around her.
Throughout the Garuda tablets that we can find around Vena's area, we meet an unnamed Archimedean who has been tasked with creating a Garuda strain for who we can assume is Nitokh.
In her first tablet she is on the outside level headed, but nervous on the inside. She's careful about her words and instantly feels her stomach turn when she says what she thinks is the wrong answer to the soldier and turns herself to make her words seem ignorant and innocent to 'appeal to his vanity.'
But she's not a nervous wreck, just nervous. Who wouldn't be when facing one of high orokin?
This Archiedean is smart and she is well acquainted with blood and war. She knows who and what she is.
"Former Lorist aide, I believe. Extensive combat experience. Scraped our troops back together at significant personal risk. No stranger to carnage… well, that'll help you keep your head in this place. The Executor has a certain reputation."
This strain was never meant to create a good warframe in the soldier sense, it was always meant to be something blood thirsty and with a clouded mind.
"Yes," I croaked. I struggled to cough the words out and they came all at once, like a pellet. "But he will not be himself! The Warframes are beset by madness, all of them. Perhaps, if I deliberately impede the neuroptics, I may be able to temper it in the forge..."
She gripped me by the throat.
"You will do no such thing," she breathed, and I felt the hot stink of her, charnel and close. "The madness is the best part."”
A few drops on the predictive lens, commingled with the samples of the consort's own blood that the Executor had provided, allowed the device to model what manner of entity would ultimately result. Tall, regal, hideous.
Then as we continue with the tablets, her nerves turn, growing into disgust and sick sympathy for a stranger. She is coming to the realization that she's just a pawn in a game she has no money in.
She knew she was dead she walked through this door and as they said above, she was all about risk. She cares about people by the way she risked herself in war, but she doesn't want to die either, at least not by someone else's hands, not tortured the same way Nitokh hurt those birds.
There is no regret. I was a condemned woman from the moment I arrived. My only freedom is to secure my own execution.
I have been used all my life. Caged by these proud golden birds. But in accepting this bitter blessing, I will finally fly free. What do I care if my freedom lasts no longer than the dawn? I shall know it, taste it, in all its fleeting reality.
In her last tablet, we see how her speech changes. She is more short, less put together, her sentences are no longer long and she's obviously holding onto what's left of her mind. It's only when she starts to go into the Garuda talk does she start to get violent, bloody, painful.
The agony is exquisite. Marching ants inch through my veins. My skin blisters and sloughs off in plasticated scrolls.
I am no Orokin. I will not leave them tormented and twisting, beaks gaping, gasping and screaming. I will bring decisive death. Swift and sweet. Final.
The Executor will have her assassin, but not the one she imagined. They will break down the door, Garuda will unfurl her claws, and the crimson thirst, oh, it shall be legendary. I shall stride through her hall clotted with gore and feathers.
I wonder how many I will slaughter before they take me down.
I wonder if one of them will be her.
The Executor wanted blood. And she shall have it.”
Now we go to Vena.
Vena, for all her talk is... strangely normal. She talks and jokes just fine when she's not in the middle of battle, jokes about not touching each other's asses in the box while you're heading to Ryoku's ship and gets annoyed with people attacking her while she's hacking.
She makes jokes and teases Ryoku and *you* as you work together. and hell, she's a good captain of her ship. She knows exactly what to do and where to go to make him hurt and to get under his skin so he puts his guard down and messes with his men.
For someone who's supposedly supposed to be about nothing but bloodlust, she's still got a lot of personality outside of that!
At least, until she starts fighting... Then she starts to lose that.
Her voice acting becomes shaking, strained, painful, she laughs and lot and also... moans a lot, but a lot of the times it sounds almost... painful.
She becomes less Vena and more the blood queen she is known to be.
She sounds like she becomes unstable. Clouded.
Almost like a certain Archiedean, who starts to lose herself in her bloody imagination once she starts getting ready for battle.
Hell, if you do her emote, you can hear her a gasp for air, like it's painful and BONES CRACKING.
STILL READING? I PROMISE WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE.
So what the fuck does all this mean?
I think Vena and Ryoku were both close to Parvos, but I think specifically Vena was a Sister of Parvos.
She has a huge thing with loyalty and twisted love much like the sisters do with Parvos himself, and embraced her change more than Ryoku did. She thought she was doing a good thing, being a loyal sister and listening to him like any good sister would.
So if great and wonderful Parvos gave her the chance to be something more, a better tool for him, why wouldn't she take it?
I think much like our Archiedean friend, Vena was really smart. She was a decent person, at least as much as she could be for the environment she was in. I mean, who knows what the Corpus are like twenty years into the future, but anyway-
The Garuda strain twisted her loyalty and her idea of love for both people and battle and made it into something worse.
Truly, I don't think Orion would still stick around her this long if she was really this bad all this time. I think Orion might have known Vena as a completely different person. In the cutscene he is in front of her, only glancing at her and then right back at Stalker and he's almost leaning away from her.
Hell, yknow what he says to her in the missions?
He WANTS her to practice. To get that bloodlust out for a little bit so maybe she can come back with a clearer mind.
Vena was a good soldier. She cared about Orion and Orion cared for her and maybe she always had a crush on him, hell, maybe before the serum it was mutual at one point!
But we know that the Garuda serum drives someone mad. It twists and turns their body and mind and makes their desires something extreme and terrible and uncomfortable.
This isn't the woman Orion knew. She's a stranger now, but she's still his mentor and once his friend and look at how twisted she's become from their younger days.
He can't love her like he used to (in any way that means, family, friend, something more, something less) and the serum won't LET HER love him any other way.
I will leave you with this. Do you know what Vena does if you revive her? She YELLS at you. She growls out her words like they are betrayals.
I keep thinking about Vena saying this, it's been rattling around in my brain since Wednesday.... I want to know more about her/ her and Orion!!! I'm eating up the literal crumbs that's been handed to me ;o;o;o;o;o;
I noticed these quick shots hidden in the newest teaser and I’m going absolutely insane over this.
Also all of the Tenno’s son all grown up. I’m so happy. I do love how they incorporated both names as different versions. Almost akin to Drifter and Operator.
