What Was Our Deal With the Man In The Wall Anyway?

A quick heads up, this article contains spoilers from the Whispers in the Walls quest. I’ll be discussing one of the key parts of the quest, so you should probably go and play Whispers in the Walls first. I recommend taking an Excalibur, mostly for the cool scene in the second part of the quest, mostly for the sake of immersion. There is a defense mission, but it’s Mirror Defense, so the target will protect itself once you’ve collected enough thingies. You don’t really get much of a chance to switch frame, but I also recommend shoving some mods into the Grimoire, which comes at rank 30 but is required for the whole quest.

Okay, spoiler warning out of the way. Time for discussions.

If you’ve played Whispers in the Walls, you’ll come away with one particular thing, and it’s that the Man in the Wall is very, very angry. Mostly at you. For breaking your deal with it.

You see, back in the New War, it’s revealed that the player specifically makes a deal with the Man in the Wall. When the void jump to Tau goes wrong, the Zariman 10-0 gets trapped in the void, and all the adults go mad and start killing everything. The kids all go into hiding across the ship, unable to do anything at first. While the player character is looking after some children in their care, they stumble across a sniveling child in the corner, which appears identical to them.

This doppelganger makes you an offer. “You can save them all, but you have to want it.” They offer you their hand to shake, and the scared child takes that offer. Immediately, the children of the Zariman are granted a huge amount of power, enough to fight back the maddened adults on the ship. Many of them perhaps killed their own parents, and they were all traumatized by the event. When they finally got back to the solar system proper, the kids were placed into a sleep-like state, eventually manipulated into working for the Orokin as their warrior caste, via the Warframes.

However, it was never really… clear what the Man in the Wall’s deal actually contained. Like, at all. At first, it just seemed like a one-sided offer. The Man in the Wall wanting someone to fuck around with, someone to manipulate. The Man in the Wall originally saw us as some sort of curiosity, and never seemed to actively hinder us. Freak us out? Yes. But hinder us? No. In fact, its interactions with us always seemed exploratory more than anything else. While he does outright help us and the Lotus at the end of the New War, that seems like the only thing he’s actually done. He just seemed to ask questions during Chains of Harrow and the Sacrifice. There doesn’t seem to be any real agenda to anything.

In Whispers in the Walls though, this changes completely. Suddenly, the Man in the Wall DOES have an agenda, and it involves helping him break out of the Void. Throughout the whole quest, the Man in the Wall becomes antagonistic and aggressive towards us. As we build the Jahu Gargoyle, the Man in the Wall openly mocks us. When we go to collect the last part of Entrati’s Grimoire, we are met face to face with the Man in the Wall, using our Operator or Drifter’s body, and he demands that we give that last page to him. When we refuse, he outright attacks the Sanctum Anatomica, only for our Tenno to put his corrupted, stolen Entrati Vessel to sleep.

At the same time, the Man in the Wall claims we have broken our deal. That we’ve run away from our end of the bargain. But this deal was never made clear to us, aside from the fact that he’d let us save them all. Was our deal really that we’d help the Man in the Wall escape the Void? Or was it intentionally left open-ended so the Man in the Wall could call on us later? I kinda doubt it was the latter, because

For the Tenno, this seems like a bad thing. If we’ve broken our end of the deal, then the Man in the Wall can just take way our power, turn us back into, well, helpless children. He could react in all sorts of ways. He could have struck us down as we handed that page back to Loid. But he didn’t. He attacked the lab, yes, but he didn’t kill us or Loid. He just unleashed his minions and kinda just left.

Thing is, I think the Man in the Wall is still bound by this deal, and so are we. He claims we broke it by not handing over the Grimoire page, but at the same time, he didn’t immediately end HIS end of the deal. Because maybe not all the Tenno were saved, and he hasn’t finished fulfilling his end of the deal. Or maybe attacking the Tenno would break his end of the deal, and he wants to use that moral superiority against us.

It’s a bit of a mess, but since we don’t know the full details of the deal, there’s no way of knowing WHY the Man in the Wall acted like he did. However, it’s very strange that he hasn’t broken his end of the deal. Perhaps he still needs us for something…