Turns out that there’s a hidden quest that came alongside the Empyrean update! Well, not really a quest, more like a short cinematic teaser that is locked away in some retched corner of the Veil Proxima. I should point out now, this is massive spoiler material. Material I shouldn’t even see, because I don’t have Intrinsics 7 yet, a clan mate who has rushed through everything helped me and other clan mates get to the mission. But more on that later.

Spoilers ahead!

The cinematic is about 8 minutes long, including loading times. It really is just a cinematic. I had prepared to go into that mission with my Loki and a high range and duration Radial Disarm build, complete with my five Forma Paracesis and all my nice Sentient-killing gear and it turned out I didn’t need any of those. In hindsight, maybe I should have switched to my nice-looking Operator… Oh well.

I’m getting distracted. The cinematic starts off with a war just off Lua. Sentients VS Tenno. Railjacks and Archwings VS Sentient fighters and ships. It’s chaos. There are Sentients everywhere. We zoom in to Lua where an Excalibur Prime is fighting off a bunch of Sentients and is doing fine until he switches to a Burston Prime and gets knocked out by a weird, big-handed Sentient. Turns out, sonic claps are strong. We don’t really see what happens because a Mag Prime with an Orthos Prime interferes and attacks the Sentient.

Everything fades to black and we switch to what I assume is the much larger part of The Reservoir, where debris is falling from the battle above. There are dead Sentients, Dax Soldiers and Warframes everywhere, notably a dead Nova Prime (which is kinda weird because Nova was supposedly designed and built by the Tenno Council later on) and a female Dax who… isn’t dead and is scrambling to safety.

This Dax gets picked up by a long-legged Sentient, who I originally thought snapped the Dax’s neck, but ends up just cracking her visor. This Sentient is interrupted by the Lotus and flanked by a bunch of Tenno Operators, all in their vanilla suits. If you’re like me and have a face mask or bright yellow hair, you can tell which of these Operators is you.

This Sentient turns out to be Erra, Natah’s brother, and he calls out to Natah, claiming that the Tenno are keeping the Sentient Queen hostage. The Lotus responds by saying that she only recognizes the enemy, then gets her gang of Operators to shoot lasers at Erra, screaming that SHE IS THE LOTUS. The scene zooms into our character, who only somewhat seems to be aware of what’s happening.

We snap out of that vision and find ourselves in a new vision, watching Natah and Erra discuss their plans to destroy the Tenno. They have Ballas, the Orokin asshole who approved the creation of Sentients in the first place, on a lead like a dog, and they all say how things are going to plan, the universe is divided and in disarray and that it doesn’t matter whether the Tenno are listening to them, because the Sentients will win. There are nodes which you can dash to, but there’s no burning eye thing like in Apostasy Prologue so you don’t need to move. You can just listen.

Erra then demands that Natah “calls the Tenno home” and Natah makes a pretty horrible screaming sound…

And that’s it. We’re back on our ship and rewarded a blueprint for a weapon that we can’t reliably build and that’s it. At first glance, there isn’t really much to say, it all seems… pretty in line with what the other Prologue quests have been about. It does prove that there IS more than one Tenno and that there are actually a huge number of Tenno controlling a lot of Warframes. But apart from that? There’s not much.

Apart from one thing.

During the first vision during the Old War, something is amiss with both the Lotus AND the Operators. They all have… weird glowing eyes. Eyes that my own Operator doesn’t have. They actually look like the weird eyes that the Man in the Wall has, which makes me think that the Man in the Wall is influencing these visions or something.

The only problem with this quest? it’s very damn hard to obtain. The ONLY way you can get it is to get to level 7 Intrinsics (or get taxied) to a certain mission in Veil Proxima, do a mission and explore a weird anomaly. The anomaly in question is a Sentient ship with new enemies in it (and a chance to drop rare mods and parts for the aforementioned gun blueprint). But this mission is only available for 30 minutes every 3 hours – a smaller window than for Eidolons. Fingers crossed this changes soon, but there’s a lot of potential loot in these Sentient ships, so it’s a bit… weird.

Oh and you have to smash a large, red crystal. That’s what unlocks the Erra quest.

You do have a very tiny window though and it IS very easy to fuck up the mission, which is in the hardest Railjack areas. If you’re going to go for the mission, I highly recommend going for a dedicated squad. There’s little chance you can unlock the quest with randoms, at least now without some difficulty.

Still, interesting times ahead, am I right?