More about Matrix's schematics and physiology— dunno how many more of these I'll make but I'll probably keep making them until I run out of stuff to chatter about LOL
Anyway, most humans and exos have a typical load-bearing endoskeleton. Everything else is held up and oftentimes kept in that place by the skeletal system. Moved by the muscular system in humans/awoken, and their synthetic counterparts for most Exos.
Matrix's load bearing distribution looks like THIS.
He has a non-functional endoskeleton, but his armor is quite literally an exoskeleton. He doesn't have any inner plating, his innards are stuck to the armor he has on and because of that he doesn't even have a typical muscular system, albeit he is able to integrate parts of newer exos to his own frame(he— uh— stole a dead exo's arms and ashen wake to fix himself at some point) albeit not "properly". Whenever he dies or if the light is drained from him for whatever reason his arm can and WILL fall off because it's actually only held there by Matrix's shoulder socket, it's like popping a socket in and out whenever he dies because the socket wasn't actually meant to hold anything, so the light does light things for it. I actually picked the techun's regalia chest for this guy because of the bio-lights. In Matrix's lore it's just something that looks similar to the chest piece, it's not actually part of the set. He actually has more limited movement and flexibility than most others because of this, most prominent being the fact he can twist his body but not really bend his back. The difference isn't that glaring, but it is enough that Matrix can be visibly considered "stiff" where flexibility is concerned.
His endoskeleton exists if only to trick his exo mindframe into believing it has all the correct parts and hence will not just terminate itself via DER. Same with how his head works, he has a tongue and an esophageal counterpart, it just doesn't work. Considering the mindframe Matrix(and by proxy the 11 before him; same make and model— hence the XII on his leg, Matrix is number 12) were harvested from an old OLD soldier— there's a very brutal reason for their tolerance that I'll explain in another post cuz trigger warnings.
Either way, Matrix is actually like a crab in the sense where his body is a shell. His innards are attached but nonfunctional(he has exo's counterpart of a complete biological endocrine system, digestive system, excretory system, and skeletal system). But the parts are completely for show, again— tricking the brain into believing that they're human because they have the parts, even if said parts do not work or function in any regard.
He's a goofy guy, but at the points in time in the doodles where he uses ashen-wake was literally months after he's woken up. So everything on his person is STOCK from when he woke up in the DSC in these pod things.
The only reason he even has ashen-wake is because he robbed it off a dead guy in the EDZ after he lost one of his arms escaping the very dilapidated DSC(hijacked an abandoned jumpship and crashed in the EDZ). He ended up repairing himself by just attaching the new arm to his existing hardware joints and it kinda just works(mostly) because his existing structure isn't actually that different from modern exos. It's just which active parts are what makes the extreme difference.
If you're wondering what time Matrix wakes up? A month or so after the guardian defeated the witness. He's a little over a year old by now(counting from Final Shape to Edge of Fate to Renegades). He's supposed to reflect my own journey as a player through the game, even if his ghost Mochi has been around since the red war and had just been hitching a ride on my warlock OC(Cygnus; I'll get to him eventually).
I'll probably get more into how Matrix was even made and what he was intended for(haha Clovis War Crimes go BRRRRR) in a different post because of how explicitly brutal the process was. Also because Clovis breaks the Geneva convention so much I would rather put a myriad of trigger warnings in explaining than just putting it up here with the more general information on Matrix TwT
Also no, nobody has any idea Matrix is like this during this point in time except for Mochi(She's Matrix' ghost, I'll explain her insanity in another post). She'd kinda already known Matrix was weird but even she didn't expect THIS degree of weird.
The more recent versions of him you could see wearing cuirass and different armor pieces is actually post edge of fate DLC where he got "repaired", I say that with heavy quotations because he basically got de-shelled. He still won't ever have a proper exo face, but at the very least by this present point in time(Renegades) he's not entirely a crab anymore haha.
