Hi r/VALORANT,

I'd like to share my three main theories as to why Fade was unaware of Omega earth (which I will just call OE.)

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The first and simplest of the theories is this: Fade was aware of OE from the start, and faked her surprise when interrogated by Cypher. It seems highly implausible that her intel gathering nightmare was able to find 'the last six months of mission archives' and yet didn't so much as glance at them in order to find out what exactly the VP was fighting. So why lie? To gain the trust of Brim and Cypher, and get on the VP to find whomever she is looking for? Why not just approach them and ask to join?

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I think this solution is the least likely, mostly because if it turns out to be true, Brim and Cypher will seem massively incompetent for allowing Fade to join in the first place. Fade also lacks a clear motivation for deceiving the VP.

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Another possibility is that Fade is lying, just not about OE. We don't have any proof that she actually found the VP's mission archives, or that she knew the location of the VP's HQ before joining. We are aware that she knows quite a lot about agent's personal histories, but nothing that wouldn't be written down outside of the VP, notably, she seems unaware of the multidimensional nature of KAY/O and the fact that OE Jett was the perpetrator of the Venice incident. I would not be surprised if Cypher and Brim believed this, as Cypher seems quite confident that OE will be a revelation to her.

The primary issue with this theory is that it calls into question Fade's info gathering capabilities. In order to believe this, you have to believe that Fade cannot determine the agent's greatest fears with her powers. This seems unlikely to me, as while she could have found out all of the information in the dossiers without supernatural help, she found out a ton of personal information that even the agents themselves never seem to mention, such as a possible origin for Astra's powers, or Reyna's haven for radiants (which I doubt Reyna would have told kingdom about.) I don't believe that she could have found all of this without some kind of mindreading ability.

On that note, lets talk about her powers. Fade has the ability to produce scary shadow monsters and (if she is to be believed) the ability to determine peoples greatest fears. How does Fade determine the other agent's fears? She offhandedly answers this in a voice line, stating she 'pays a heavy price to commune with Nightmare,' this suggests that her abilities do not allow her to find the agents fears, but to communicate with a entity of nightmares called Nightmare.

Now, if Nightmare is an independent entity to Fade, one must ask if it is entirely under her control? Even assuming each dimension has it's own Nightmare and that the Nightmare Fade communes with is alpha Nightmare, could it possibly be feeding her false information to fulfil it's own goals? Furthermore, could Omega Fade be controlling Nightmare and using it to turn alpha Fade away from discovering Omega Earth?

To be honest, this seems the most likely possibility to me at the moment, however it does lead me to wonder why Nightmare would assist her in scouting out the portal location on OE, and why Omega Fade would be working with the OE VP.