The wounded are - you guessed it - spilling out into the halls.
Few survivors of the retaliation made it out unscathed, and we've all but exhausted our supply of cryptid juice getting them stabilized.
We start looking at more creative options.
The boys in the lab and the grizzled sawbones in the medbay are able to collaborate on a modified version of the containment tanks we recovered from some of the more grisly hybrid clinics.
Hybrids build their technology with human machinery, so, it works with our existing power systems and relatively easy to function, even if we don't quite understand
how it works. Interlinked tanks allow us to just cycle our supply of energetic blood plasma through the cryptid cocktail into which each agent is submerged.
Elsewhere, Buge is not taking the loss of her arm super well.
In short, despite our rapid advances in reverse-engineered alien tech, we still don't know jack about how the E.T.s are able to merge machine and flesh together across dozens of outlandish alien species. It involves a level of bio-engineering mastery we aren't even close to understanding.
What we
are able to do is pull some of the Red Dawn bio-augmentation research out of mothballs, merge it with what little we grasp of the alien's breeding vats, and provide a way to re-grow enough nerve endings to make a functional prosthetic.
Has the added bonus of making her faster, stronger, and hardier. With no side-effects probably I'm sure maybe!
The prosthetic we're able to piece together, to put it mildly, blows hogg, but it
is functional.
With the new nerve endings hooked up, she rests.
Back in medbay, installation is complete, and early results are promising. The new juice vats cut recovery time fully in half. Not bad at all.
Sick Bay
The Sick Bay allows for agents' hospitalization right in the base, which shortens recovery time. It can also be used for other medical procedures.
Mongrel, coated with plasma burns, drifts through a calm and soundless void as the pods work their magic.
His mind, unburdened by the worries and distractions of his bi-pedal comrades, reaches out into the black, across the great, unfathomable abyss. He hears a familiar master calling out to him.
Calling him home.
He awakens.
Dreamscape
Are you for real
Mongrel opens his eyes to a surreal, alien dreamscape.
Crystalline structures grow like weeds out of glowing pools of Energetic Blood Plasma. The smells, the sounds... they feel right.
He looks down at his body.
YEAH SO HE'S A WEREWOLF???
This here in the biz is known as a "fursona", and fellas, it's a pretty dope one: Mongrel is 9 feet tall, has glowing blue fur, has all the powers of Sonic and Shadow combined, wields a magnum dong and psionic claw attacks that have 100% accuracy at 35 damage per swipe.
HELL yeah.
He explores.
The sky is utterly alien, stars of an alignment no Earther has ever laid eyes on. And yet, he knows them like the back of his paw.
He recalls a time before his masters brought him to Earth, thousands of years ago.
They were fleeing the Others.
Mongrel clashes with several of these entities as he lumbers through the dreamscape.
They are feeble, but still, they lash at his sanity with psionic attacks, trying to dominate him once again. This was how they controlled his people, in the long-ago. Before they broke free, and fled.
He arrives before a fortress, ancient and teeming with psionic energy. It's a construct of the mind, like everything else here.
It refuses his entry with illusions and psionic barriers, but he claws through each one in a dogged rage too simple and ballistic for any mental trick to genuinely impede.
The walls tear, shimmer, and evaporate, and the beast plods into the building. He surveys the minds of his masters.
Statues, paintings, icons to their greatness litter the hallways and marble staircases.
Mongrel effortlessly extinguishes dreamsprites he prowls through each opulent room of this construct.
In his paw forms a blade of pure edgelord, formed from the psionic energy of his slain foes.
He hunts.
The statues and figures seem to melt as these sprites are killed, as if the matter holding them together is falling apart.
)
Cloth on the tapestries begins to rot, fires begin to flicker and extinguish.
He heads up the stairs, uncontested by the few remaining sprites.
In a bedroom of some sort, he surveys the grisly form of his masters in mirrors and picture frames, lost in a state of endless atrophy.
Atop the bed is a single slice of delicious cake.
Mongrel regards this for a moment, and messily devours it, splattering the mirrors and frames with psionic frosting.
The world falls away, and he is back at the Red Forest, healing.
PsychbabbleWhat follows is, essentially, a sort of psionic de-briefing, beamed to Mongrel's teammates in the recovery tanks.
They struggle to put into words what they were shown.
The "masters" that were shown were a sort of alien we've never seen before. We can only guess they were either the "
Nephilim" described in David Vincent's file, or the "Ethereals", mentioned by the same file, and our muton captive.
Whatever the case, this experience has unlocked something in all of us. An ancient ability deep in our genetic code.
We've been made aware of something we've only heard described in our interrogations of the Black Lotus clan - psionic power wielded by humans.
We might actually be able to start putting practical use to this intel. The pointdexters in the lab get to work whiteboarding some sort of psionic-training facility.
For Mongrel's part, the team swears they can communicate with him when they're in the tanks.
Been weird week.
