*Chaser POV*
In my time serving the Lotus, I have seen many, many weird things. Mad grineer scientist releasing an ancient bio-weapon? Check. Mad corpus scientist who dissects warframes and makes them into his evil pet? Check.
But this...This is a different kind of weird altogether.
I am on my orbiter. Specifically I am on the lower decks, next to the old storage compartment across from that infested door. Everything seems normal, lights are all on, all systems are still functioning, and the infested door is still...well infested.
And yet...
Something is off. I don't know what it is but something is definitely off.
Like many tenno across the system, I rarely experience fear. I mean what is there to fear when you are an ancient soldier, right? But this is one of those rare times, no this is even rarer.
I am not scared. I am simply terrified.
Slowly I get up and take a few steps forward, peeking around the corner towards the mid-deck where the arsenal, mod station, and foundry are located. I hear the foundry buzzing, still crafting that Hate blueprint. On the wall there is that picture of the Lotus I purchased a while ago.
Everything seems normal...maybe I am just paranoi-
"Hey"
I jump in shock, whirl around, and fall on my rear, only to find no one. I do a double take, looking for anything or anyone who could've decided to pull a late halloween prank. Again no one is there.
'Its okay Chaser, just...calm down, you've had a long day...even though that has never really affected you before...'
In fact that is a good point I just brought up. Didn't I just wake up? And if that is true then why was I napping in the corner of my orbiter? And since when did I nap? Sleep on a regular schedule, sure, but I never take naps.
"Breathe girl, breathe," I try to calm myself down. "Also, may want to lay off the Ostron folktales for a while."
I pick myself up and move cautiously up the ramp to the mid-deck. Sure enough everything is fine in my rather dark orbiter compartment. Still trying to calm my nerves I check the foundry.
"Hate 75% Complete"
Seeing this lifts my spirits a little, soon I will wield the scythe of my dark obsession!
But, wait, wasn't it already crafted?
Then something catches my eye: another blueprint is crafting, one which I do not remember starting. The foundry user interface must be bugged again (damnit Ordis!) because I cannot scroll down to view what the blueprint is.
Suddenly the holographic interface shuts off displaying only what I can assume is a repeated error message:
"01010010 01100001 01110000 00100000 01010100 01100001 01110000 00100000 01010100 01100001 01110000..."
I slam my fist down on the accursed machine. This better not mess up my scythe!
"Ordis, can you get this blasted thing working again?" I call out to my ship's cephalon, expecting the usual obedient, glitched reply.
Instead a loud screech blared through the ships comms system, forcing me to hold the sides of my head as I feel like something is being ripped out of my body. Or was it something ripping me off of something else?
"Ordis? Ordis, what the hell?!" I yell as I stagger up the second ramp to the main view port. Every step I take seems to make the room darker, the closer I get to the top of the ramp, the more violently the room spins. I have a pounding headache that makes me want to rip my body open to release whatever is writhing within me. Then I reach the upper deck.
And the pain stops. The noise fades.
I am on my hands and knees now, slowly recovering from whatever that was. I get one leg underneath me and grasp the comms scanner for balance, before lifting my head.
I scream.
For hanging in the middle of my upper deck from a wire is a mass of darkness in the form of a smaller humanoid.
I scramble backwards in shock, tumbling down the ramp into my lower decks. I turn to retreat further into my orbiter, but something makes me freeze solid.
Standing in my arsenal is another humanoid figure. Dark, slender, and hovering a few feet off of the floor. It appears to be a warframe, but its like I am viewing it through a damaged visor. Its form flickers, chunks of it disappearing for split seconds. All but the head.
The faceplate was featureless, shrouded in darkness, but the one thing I could make out was its two glowing white eyes. They didn't just look at me and through me, they seemed to stare far beyond me and into an unknown place.
I begin to turn to scramble back up the ramp when I see the articula above the ramp has changed. Before it was a banner of the solar system, now it depicts a corpus ship with two other warframes, an Oberon freyarch and a Loki knave. Both are down on the floor, but I see no blood. Despite articulas being still images I swear their heads turn to look at me, and while warframes don't have facial features to express emotion I can see the fear and sorrow in their gaze. It sends a clear message to me:
"RUN"
I try to do so but my body does not respond. Instead my head turns to look straight up.
Right into the glowing, white eyes of that dark warframe. No emotion, no anger, or sadness, or joy. Just that blank, unblinking, empty light.
"yeHoidKd"
That's all it says before it extends its claw-like fingers and thrusts them into my chest before extracting them once more. As my vision fades I don't see a heart, or a mass of viscera. In fact, what it pulls from my chest looks a lot like....
...A hand?
***
I have never shot from lying down to bolt upright so fast in my life. In fact it actually kind of hurt to be honest. But pain was overridden by fear as all I can see is darkness. Then my eyes began to adjust, and I can make out bookshelves.
'I'm in the library,' I slowly got my breathing and heart rate under control.
"What the hell was that?" I asked aloud, to no one. They were all probably outside with Applejack, her new frame was supposed to be complete today. "Maybe I should consult Avalon or Spirit, possibly the Lotus if they do not know what to make of this."
With that and a quick glance to confirm everything was normal, I headed towards the door.