Be Known, Be Loved, Be Yourself

egg

You learn really quickly that not only do fish have individual personalities and emotions but they also have memories and recognize people! There are certain fish who will only come out for me and hide for everyone else. The pufferfish spits at me because she gets pissy that I haven't fed her. The flowerhorn bites everyone but me and my coworker when we clean his tank. I trained a fire eel to come up and eat directly out of my hand.

One, but not the same

So, protoframes are normal people in 1999, in the city-state of Höllvania, that have been injected with a serum implied to have been extracted from Warframes in the future, by a asshole time traveler.

This gives them the power and partial appearance of the Warframe they were injected with. But notably, they aren't the actual Warframe.

Arthur Nightingale is turning into the Warframe Excalibur. But he isn't the person that will become the original Excalibur that the serum was created from in the future.

Except Flare Varleon. Flare is the lead singer and last surviving member of the rock band Temple and the Rippers, and used Temple as their (nonbinary) stage name. And they've been injected by, and is slowly turning into the warframe... Temple. Their stage persona.

This is the only Warframe that exists in 1999* but not in the normal, future timeline.

Flare eventually realises that the reason they share a name, is that they ARETemple. The original Temple. Once they turn completely and their humanity is fully gone, they're planning on hitching a ride on a comet that's slated to return to the solar system in time for the main timeline to happen. Which will allow the asshole time traveler to extract the Temple Protoframe serum from Temple, who is Flare, which can then be injected into Flare, to turn them into Temple, so Temple can hibernate into the future and allow the Temple Protoframe serum to be created, which is only possible because the Temple Protoframe serum was already created and injected into themselves.

Fully recursive nonsense.

from the warframe wiki 🫡

So in case anyone needs it: