- "My name is Leonard Church, and YOU WILL FEAR MY LASER FACE!"
- —Epsilon in Think You Know Someone
The Monitor is an ancient artifact that acted as Epsilon's body for a brief time. According to Tucker, since this piece of technology is very ancient the Aliens worshiped Epsilon, as if he were a living god, while he took control of it. It is represented as the Forge monitor in Halo 3.
Role in the Plot
During the Project Freelancer Saga, the Insurrectionist Leader and C.T. obtain data holding information about the artifact. Using that information, the Leader heads to the desert after C.T.'s death, and allies with the Aliens there. Together, they kill the original dig team and take over the site. Things become complicated when the Reds and Blues show up. Caboose then finds the Monitor in one of the temples and uploads Epsilon into it. When Epsilon leaves the desert and makes his way to the Freelancer Offsite Storage Facility, he discards the Monitor there and inserts himself into a robotic body. When Epsilon stands up to Tex, she takes the discarded monitor and uses it to beat him with it.
Some time later, when the Reds and Blues returned to the desert, led by former Freelancer Agent Carolina, it was discovered by leftover data that the Monitor was in fact the ancient artifact the Insurrectionist Leader and his crew had been searching for. Although the Blues are able to identify the artifact as Epsilon's former body, Carolina becomes enraged to learn that they had casually abandoned it at the Freelancer facility. In Along Came a Spider, the Monitor is seen on the Staff of Charon as one of the various trophies that Malcom Hargrove had collected from Project Freelancer.
In The Shisno Paradox it is revealed that the Cosmic Powers are in fact ancient Monitors. Chrovos is also later revealed to be a giant powerful Monitor.
Trivia
- The use of the Monitor as Epsilon's new body led to filming problems, due to the fact that Forge games, the only method possible to use a Monitor as a player character, forced team colors onto the players. This meant that characters with less common colors, such as Simmons (Maroon) and Tucker (Aqua) could not be used in the same shot as the Monitor. The use of post-processing composite shots and minor recoloring (such as Grif changing colors from Orange to Gold) were used to work around this issue.