Lover of Pixels

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

"I…overheard your question, Amir." Drifter caught Eleanor's hesitancy to admit to her eavesdropping, and let it go. "And my interest was piqued. I've actually wondered the same thing, considering…"

Eleanor projected a series of images into their head, all of them featuring Drifter in various stages of transferring in and out of their collection of warframes—mostly by choice, though on one occasion Drifter saw themselves forced from Voruna by a brutal point-blank hit from a Scaldra RPG. Voruna was thrown back, the sword-steel bodice of her torso spider-webbing with cracks that glowed a hot and angry red. There was a blinding white flash of light and a loud crack that sounded like something being drawn taunt, then snapping. The image came back into focus, and there was Drifter, materializing out of a strange fuzzy halo of red light that seemed to have been expelled from Voruna right before the warframe crashed to the asphalt of one of Höllvania's many streets.

Drifter suffered the same fate a moment later, falling to the ground and tumbling like a combat dummy blasted off its anchor. Blood spattered across the dark road from various gashes and wounds on their body—the once incorporeal tenno now beaten and bloodied on the ground.

The truth of the matter was, Drifter wasn't sure how their void-powered abilities worked. What was it that allowed them to dematerialize and take control of warframes? What gave Drifter the ability to blend their mental self with the physical aspect of a frame? And what made them wholly physical upon ejection—bearing the wounds and the mental echos of the armor they'd just worn?

"I can try to explain it, but it kind of just comes down to 'void fuckery'," Drifter said with a slight shrug. "As a tenno, my basic biology is human—blood and flesh and all those bits. But, tenno biology has also been altered so that it reacts to, and can be manipulated by, void energy."

"Yeah, but, where do you go when you're doing your mind-meld thing with your warframes?" Amir asked, his fingers mindlessly drumming on the table top.