Wands and Warframes

Growth

Growth

A couple of hours later Harry is holding a crying Hermione after she's had time to calm down.

"I'm a horrible person. All I wanted to do is wipe them off the face of the planet. How could I feel like that?"

"Hermione, you're not horrible, you're young. You've also got Titania, a frame that most can't even get until they have woken from the second dream. I knew her creator for a little while, and she was driven. At the time the earth was uninhabitable for everyone, even the precursors to the Grineer. She developed the plant and animal life that now lives on earth. While Titania is a manufactured Warframe, Silvana poured her heart and soul into her, using every possible trick to give her a life and purpose beyond war. That calls to the person who followed me into the forest rather than suffer at the hands of others. The person that helped Neville look for his pet, and helped me with my English.

"You are still young, but the hints of the woman you will grow into are already there. If that means that you have strong morals and opinions, all the better. It's far to easy to lose those and end up doing the expedient thing than the right thing. Equally, it's also easy to go the other way and show compassion even when innocent people are suffering."

Hermione leans back, "What do you mean?"

"Take my mother as an example, as she's been all three. When she arrived in this system she was Natah, Sentient from the Tau system here to prevent the Orokin from doing to Tau what they did here. She was merciless and unfeeling in her actions, making no distinction between the Orokin, the rulers of the solar system, and the serfs and slaves underneath them. The corpus existed even then, but they didn't have the power or influence they do now, as all of the executives were Orokin, or controlled by them. The Grinner were a slave race sent in to places that were too dangerous for people to go, but needed the flexibility of thought of organics instead of drones. Then she took over our care, whether she was sent by her father, defected, or was captured and reprogrammed we'll probably never know. But she modelled herself off of my first mother. Margulis. She had a fatal flaw in Orokin culture, she was principled, compassionate, and powerful. She was put to death when I was 11 because she refused to let us be turned into weapons. She believed in her husband, Ballas, even when he voted to put her to death. Even when all the evidence said that he was playing his own game and she was in his way.

"After the war she then defied her father and became The Lotus. Someone that was a bit of each of the people that came before, but was also her own person. Someone that had enough compassion not to go on an all out war against the Corpus or Grineer because of the innocents that would get caught in the crossfire, but also strong enough not to ignore their atrocities and work to protect those who needed protection. I would say that around 75% of the missions we take are paid for by 'Spoils of war' instead of the communities that requested our aid."

"Why don't you go after the Grineer?"

"Because, despite everything that they do on earth and mars, they also mine in some of the most inhospitable parts of the solar system and trade with the unaligned colonies. They also fight against the infested, same as the Corpus do, and they have the manufacturing base to do so. Of course both sides have made that particular problem worse at times. But anyone that will fight against the final weapon of the Orokin is needed. When you're more experienced, you'll need to do your own share of missions against them, and the first time will be absolutely terrifying. It's why we haven't taken the orbiters to your earth even though we could, and why you are probably going to have the most unpleasant experience ever before we do return. Warframes are made with the same biotechnology as the Infested, so if we're not careful we can spread it. That earth just doesn't have the ability to deal with it, and we don't have enough numbers to control it if it got loose there."