There are several posts here that could be considered commands, but Paris was the only one to bold his, so we'll go with that.
Hmm. We could search fridges and the like. If we're lucky some scientist might have taken a sample of their own blood. But the chances are low and we don't have much time left.
We could call it a day and instead leave some rats here hidden for surveillance, but there's always the chance one of them can detect the energy that links then to us and track us.
We could go directly to the source, so to speak, and try to raid the barracks to find a scientist to kill so we can eat their memories, but that would draw a lot of attention to us.
Or we could try to bypass the lock, either by animating the door and ordering it to open or simply brute-forcing it with the crowbar, but there's always the chance that will activate some sort of alarm.
The way I see it, there's two options that don't carry as much risk of triggering an alarm.
First of all, find a vent and send a rat through it. If we're lucky, it will be able to make its way into the lab. If we're even luckier, the security system is one way and it will be able to use some sort of emergency release to open the door from the other side. But there's always the chance that won't work. If it doesn't, have the rat find some way to kill itself if it can't make its way back to us, preferably in a way that doesn't leave much evidence. I dunno, maybe we can send it through a toilet?
Second, search for personnel reports, id cards, duty rosters, whatever might help us figure out who has access to the labs. Try to find a juicy target, someone with good permissions that wouldn't be too hard to Target. If they leave the lab to visit the town at any time, we can target them then. Or we could even target them right now, perhaps by sending our rats to get some of their flesh. Sure, it might wake them up, but if we're lucky they'll just think it's hungry rats.
You lift a rat up to the nearest air vent and wait for it to squeeze through. You then stand by the lab door and wait, watching the tether for that rat slowly move about like some sort of necromantic compass needle. After a few long minutes you hear the door knob begin to rattle. Slowly, jerkily, the knob turns and the door clicks open a half inch. You grab the knob and open the door the rest of the way and scoop the rat up as you step through.
The archive room is almost entirely filled by a series of hand crank rolling shelves: metal shelves on tracks that are normally tightly clustered together but can be cranked to open up space between them. You walk to the end shelf, the only one that's contents are immediately accessible without moving any other shelves. Its full of cardboard boxes, each labeled with a cryptic project name, each densely packed with papers. There's enough data here that you could dig through it for days, maybe weeks, and still not read it all. Faced with such a wealth of knowledge you decide to focus on the three projects you know are currently active at this site. The content on the shelves goes roughly alphabetically (they seem to only care about the first letter, letters after it are ignored) so you easily find what you're looking for. You start with the first project in line: Project Mortar.
You pull out the box and sit on the floor, rapidly removing files and papers and setting them to the side as you skim through them. A lot of it is technical, and not technical in terms of necromancy, just technical. There are sheets of what look like physics formulas and calculations about shear forces and load bearing potential and so forth. However, among the dry and impenetrable theory you catch glimpses of the truth. Mortar seems to be named not after the weapon, but the building material: the project seems entirely centered around mechanical and structural improvements that can be made to animated bodies, and to living ones as well. In the undead category they seem to have mostly been toying around with extensive replacement of organic tissue, trying to test the boundaries of when the animation will fail. Apparently they desired to overcome the inherent issues with animated inanimate objects by grafting those objects into or onto a corpse and letting the animating force of the body handle it. They seem to come to the conclusion that there are certain ratios of replacement beyond which the corpse will just fail to animate or remain animated. Some of the example images and diagrams are of what appear to be animated plate armor, but these are in fact complex intertwinings of flesh and steel. Organs, muscle, nerves, all stretched and bolted to the armor, the living core of a pseudo-golem.
There are also extensive tests related to the amalgamation of living and necromantic tissues as well as living and inorganic supports and structures. The theory behind it seems to be one of gentle anima infusion during the implantation process, such that the natural animating force of the living host is "Tricked" into "Accepting" the foreign material as part of itself. There are more images -necrotic muscle fused onto living, metal reinforced bones, multiple organs and missing organs-, more diagrams, survival times plotted on graphs as a slowly declining curve, notes regarding methods. They seem to have had some success, though they cannot surpass certain ratios here either: after a certain ratio of an arm or a leg is replaced, or a certain amount added, there is universal rejection and necrosis. Both sides of the project seem to be pushing to get past these ratios, but also working within the limits they have and producing good results.
The fatal incidents seem to be related to what the notes call "Fatal Necrotic mania"; a sort of manic, violent episode that seems to overtake some patients once the fatal ratios have been crossed. The condition is apparently short and always ends in the death of the subject.
You return the papers to the box and the box to the shelf, moving on to the next one.
Project Puzzle-box is an odd one. It has about the same amount of documentation as the previous one but its spread across a great deal of time. The first documents are hand written pages instead of typed ones, undated and appear to be incomplete. There are even half burnt pages and pages with the ink badly smeared by water. The next section of pages start up years after the first set, and the third set start up still years later and appear to be the current project's papers. From what you can tell, the project has always had the same goal: The intact removal of a conscious and self sustaining "Soul" from a living host. The early papers define the "Soul" as "The interwoven mix of Anima and Memories which exists only within a functional organic vessel" and states that trying to remove it from a living host is like "Trying to free wet tissue paper from barbed wire without tearing it." According to the notes the Soul collapses back into the constituent parts of Anima and Memories upon the death of the vessel and that the process is irreversible; therefore the task of removing an intact soul from a living creature seems near impossible as removing it kills the creature, resulting in the soul's collapse, while killing the creature results in the same.
The method, which was first spoken of in the hand written notes and then cared on through the other sections, is to carefully separate the soul from the body like one would untangle two cords. The body is slowly "Disassembled" and the soul siphoned off during the process. The obvious difficulty is that of keeping the subject alive until the very end. The hand written notes talk of a "Line" past which they cannot successfully proceed and the subsequent documents seem to be equally stuck. However, through them you can find hints of something. The original notes are incomplete, ending abruptly, but the other notes make reference to a "Successful case". It appears that- at least once- this technique was successful and everything from then on was simply trying to replicate it.
They are using humans of course; its well documented. Humans, Dogs, Rats, Apes, all manner of creature and techniques. Still nothing.
The final project, Project Sinker, is a small series of files and they are almost entirely filled with failures. Sinker appears to be more of a thinktank than anything, few experiments are listed and those that do show up seem...haphazard. The goal of Sinker is the "Attraction of larger Phantom life forms which dwell in 'deeper' sections of the anima and are otherwise usually not accessible." They appear to have tried many things, from the release of memories as a sort of "Chum" to attract them to the straight up religious of prayer and incense. The only true success they report is a historical example of a large scale mass execution drawing a "Whale" from the depths of the Anima. The end conclusion of the group seems to be that large phantoms are "Easier made than captured."
You check your watch: 4:15.
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Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 118411 times)