Here's the deal people, I write, you pick what happens next. It's a choose your own adventure except I'm not going to give you any concrete options, you can try and do pretty much anything you want. If there seems to be a general consensus on what people want to do then I'll do that and if everyone is just shouting random crap then I'll just pick which ever one seems the most fun. You don't have to be terribly specific either, no "Go west" crap. Just something like " Try and find food" or "Light homeless man on fire" or " Bite elbow"; I'm human and as such can work on vague ideas. That said, on with the show. The year is 2042 and the secret to time travel has finally been discovered. Using this theoretical knowledge the international technology giant WFE has constructed a prototype time machine in an effort to market cellphones to Puritan Colonists in colonial America. You were chosen to carry out this dangerous mission by the single virtue that no one will miss you if you happen to disappear. Before your departure you are taught various methods of wilderness survival as well as given basic combat instruction (WFE BSD combat course consists of 30 lessons, the first 26 of which are titled "Proper fetal position and sobbing technique"). The day of your departure comes quickly and you find yourself in the prototype test chamber; the company scientists assure you of the machine's complete safety from their vantage point behind a 6 foot lead wall. With little left to do you press the required sequence of buttons to begin the temporal distortion which should catapult you back to New England circa 1640. As you hit the last button twelve copies of yourself, all in various manners of dress and of various ages, blink instantly into the room and scream in unison "DON'T DO IT!" Amongst your clones is a strange black haired woman in some sort of jumpsuit, brandishing a pistol. She seems rather annoyed.
There is a sound not unlike a giraffe being thrown into a jet turbine, the world seems to become quite mushy, you have the sudden sensation of being able to communicate with your left foot and you spontaneously grow mutton chops. Then the world goes black. You awake, rather groggily, in a dumpster filled with packing peanuts. Much to your confusion your clothing seems to have been replaced by tightly wrapped, form fitting, pink tinged cling wrap and your briefcase is now filled with mice. You pull yourself from the dumpster and look around for some sort of clue as to where or when you are. You're standing in an alley which is looking out at an abandoned street of closely packed brick buildings, each of which displays a massive, brilliantly bright neon sign. The sign on the building nearest to you reads "ITS A FUCKING ARCADE". Upon closer inspection you see that all of the buildings are ordinary shops (butcher, baker, clothing store, video shop) with names that are interspersed with various obscenities. They all appear to be open.
You look around, attempting to ascertain where or when you are. You're in an alley between two brick buildings, the road in front of the alley is lined on either side with similar, squat brick buildings and two massive apartment complexes loom in the distance. Behind you is a concrete wall and to your left side is the dumpster. It's night out but it still seems unreasonably bright. You have no idea where or when you are. You turn back to the dumpster and begin to dig through it, looking for something of use. Beneath the packing peanuts there are dozens of objects, including: a trash bag full of old clothes, several sections of cut rebar, a rusty screwdriver, a coffee stained but otherwise empty journal, several empty card board boxes and a sleeping homeless man who yells at you incoherently before passing out again. You gather up several of the rebar pieces, the screwdriver, the journal and two sets of clothing and stuff them in your briefcase after releasing the mice.
You try to think of how to proceed and begin to whistle absentmindedly. Much to your surprise one of the mice from your brief case returns to you and cocks it's head quizzically. After a short period of trial and error you figure out how to make the mouse follow simple instructions. With the big stupid grin of someone who's just done something impressive but more then likely useless you order your mouse into the briefcase. The mouse could really use a name but you can't quite think of one; maybe you'll decide later.
In a stroke of inspiration you declare the mouse to be Reginald and set off toward the arcade. The door is sticky at first but opens suddenly, nearly causing you to fall as you stumble into the arcade. Inside there are dozens of games set up along the walls of the room and each blinks and squels expectantly. The one nearest to you on the right is titled "Lovecraft:non-euclidean combat" while the one on the left is dubbed "Bone Marrow Fiesta". There is a man behind a counter to the far right; he seems only mildly disturbed by the fact that you're dressed in clothing that smells of rotten meat. Other then the man at the counter the arcade is empty. Your attempts to frighten him with your strangely intelligent mouse illicit only mild grumbles and rude gestures. Sullenly you begin to search around the room for a quarter, until finding several under a game call "Seizuretron".
With your newfound wealth you decide to play a rousing game of seizuretron. Upon inserting a coin the full title appears on screen as "Polybius 2: Welcome to the Seizuretron". Almost immediately the screen becomes a warping convoluted storm of colors and discordant shapes as insane and desperate whispers seem to fill the air around you. You are vaguely aware that your fingers are twitching nervously and that your entire body feels as though it's in a paint shaker. The whispers become increasingly fierce and penetrate your ears like white hot needles, but you cannot understand what they're saying. Your head begins to ache uncontrollably and your mouth works on it's own, mimicking the the whispers, now screams, assaulting your ears. An instant later your entire body jerks suddenly and becomes completely stiff, your jaw locked in an exaggerated scream. Before you black out you make out the words "Game Over" on the game screen.
You awake to Reginald's insistant squeaking and pull yourself up off the stained arcade carpet. Judging by the light outside, it's morning. You press the start button on the seizuretron but the screen remains black and unresponsive. You look behind the machine and find that it has no cord to plug into the wall. Baffled, you can only shrug and go about your business. In an attempt to garner more cash you try to pry the coin slot of one of the games open, however you lack the necessary strength to do anything more then hurt your hands. Rubbing your sore knuckles, you give up on trying to open the machine by hand.You dig the screwdriver out of your briefcase and begin to systematically disassemble the coin intakes on each machine, stealing the contents before reassembling them. You collect $145.50 in quarters, roughly 7 pounds worth of change, and stash it in your briefcase. With nothing else to do, you wander outside into cold the early morning air. The street is still deserted and the neon signs have yet to be relit; in the distace there is smoke rising from an unseen source.
You walk a ways up the street to the bakery, apply named "PASTRIES AND SHIT". The bakery consists of a large glass counter displaying their confections as well as a small table with a cash register. Behind the register sits a gelatinous mess of pale skin and black fuzz which gurgles at you as you step into the shop. Attempting not to stare, you order several loafs of bread and pay out the required $5.00, leaving you with $140.50. Afterwards you step outside and sit down on the curb, tearing off hunks of bread and shoveling them into your mouth. You give several pieces to Reginald, who seems quite happy with them. Once your hunger is satisfied you stuff the remaining bread into the briefcase (which is now quite full) and look around. The smoke in the distance has grown steadily thicker and is beginning to cover a large area of the sky.
Deciding it best to avoid the ever expanding cloud of smoke you strike off in the opposite direction, toward the twin apartment complexes which loom far down the road. As you walk you notice that the buildings around you appear to be vibrating ever so slightly and that their edges appear fuzzy or out of focus. There is a mild rumbling and what you can barely make out as whispering before things suddenly snap back to normal. Behind you the smoke continues to expand.
You reach the apartments within a half hour and are marveled by their size: they are two monolithic slabs of concrete rising a half mile above the rest of the stark, featureless city. Above the front door is a large, etched steel plate reading, "WFE Affordable living containers". A large smiley face is etched under the sign. You attempt to recall exactly what the whispers in the seizuretron said but your attempts are in vain as their exact words continue to elude you. Your attempts to remember however seem to have distorted the world even further as the apartment complex before you is beginning to sway to and fro and distort as though being looked at through a bad tv reception. The sky is becoming increasingly dark despite the rising sun and strange amorphous shapes appear on the edge of the horizon. You blink your eyes in an attempt to make it vanish and much to your surprise it does. You feel the strange sensation of almost remembering something but are unable to recall what it is.
On one of the outer walls is a poster which reads as follows:
Super low one month rate of only $15 for a basic model human storage container. Container includes Air*, mostly clean water, an excrement hole and a tv with 50,000 channels.
In small print at the bottom you can make out the sentence "* May not actually include air"
You head inside the apartment lobby and are surprised to find nothing there save for a vending machine, poster and single elevator. The poster is a table displaying the various rates for the different apartments and explains how to order a key from the vending machine. After roughly 10 minutes of dropping quarters into the machine it spits out a single white keycard with the number 45333 emblazoned across it. After an extended elevator ride you find yourself on floor 453, a claustrophobic concrete maze of dead ends and dull, rusted steel doors. It takes you several minutes to navigate through the confusing labyrinth, dodging around open holes and corpses, before you find your room. Inside is what can best be described as a outhouse with a tv taking up most of the wall. Its only 5 foot high and maybe 4 foot deep and lacks any form of illumination beyond the television.
You step inside, sit down on the, uh, throne, and turn on the tv. On it is some sort of reality show which seems to be about nothing outside of people being repeatedly bludgeoned with various blunt instruments. On a whim you decide to try and put your hand into the television. You quickly find that you cannot put your hand into the television and wonder what could have compelled you to do such a stupid thing in the first place. After flipping through a few channels you decide to explore the apartment a bit more. You ride the elevator up till it's highest floor and then take several flights of stairs up to the roof of the building, emerging on a flat, featureless roof covered in bird excrement.
The city stretches off in all directions away from you, an endless urban sprawl which continues unabated to the edge of the horizon. There are several other larger structures visible around the city, great glass and concrete colums which rise from what you would assume to be downtown, as well as what appear to be artillery cannons though they are nearly as tall as your appartment and have barrels easily several miles long. From your time observing you gain a partial understanding of the city's lay out and think that you could probably navigate anywhere you need to go.
You decide to head off into town and check around for some sort of source of income for later. You pick the direction of the smoke as your heading and wander off down the street. There are other people on the road, though it's hard to tell if they're civilians or soldiers; many have some form of body armor on and almost everyone is carrying a gun. As you navigate through the alleyways and seemingly derelict homes of the city your vision begins to blur once again. For an instant you feel the sensation of falling in all directions and the image of an infinite starscape billows out before you. You clutch your chest as you realize that you can't breathe and barely remain conscious against the sudden onslaught of pain in your head. You try to steady yourself by grasping hold of a wall but the brick crumbles to dust as your hand passes through it. You stumble out of the alley and grasp wildly at a passing man, trying desperately to convey your desperate need for help. As get close to the man his cheeks grow hollow and his skin goes gastly brown and dry, his entire body seems to mummify and fall to dust before your eyes.
After a moment more you manage to catch your breath and force your eyes to focus. The people around you are staring. Amongst them is the jumpsuited woman from the lab, who smiles quite maliciously at you from her distant vantage point. You attempt to explain the situation but the citizens only continue to stare, dumbfounded. After a few silent moments you decide it best to bid a hasty retreat and duck back into alley running rather frantically back toward your apartment. Half way there you realize that all these symptoms started not long after you played the Seizuretron and decide instead to check out the game. The arcade is open when you arrive but the man at the counter is nowhere to be seen. You walk to the back of the arcade and find the Seizuretron cabinet right where you left it, another collection of scattered change beneath it. You scoot the game away from the wall and begin to examine it, looking for anything of interest. On the back, near the bottom is a warning label roughly the size of a business card which reads:
Polybius 2:Welcome to the Seizuretron is owned and operated by the WFE corporation. WFE accepts no responsibility for loss of limb, sanity, life or other harm sustained while using this product. Possible side effects of Seizuretron exposure may include:
Headache, eyestrain,hallucinations, seizure, blindness, paralysis, speaking in tongues, maddening revelations, destructive temporal fields, quantum space-time dislocation of ones self or others, and sore throat.
The warning label on the machine makes you rather nervous and after some deliberation you decide that you need to test the device on another subject. You walk outside and look around for someone to use as a test subject but the street is empty. You jog up the next block but find it equally empty; even a furtive stone through a window seems to bring no attention. Disappointed, you return to the arcade as somewhere in the distance a siren is faintly howling. As you stand, staring at the machine, you remember Reginald and pull him from your pocket. He tilts his head in mild bewilderment and stares at you. If you truly wanted to test the machine again you can only think of two options: Test it on Reginald, or test it on yourself.After a moment of thought you decide not to use Reginald and place him several feet away in what you hope will be relative safety. You insert a coin into the game and brace yourself on the cabinet, laying your finger on the start button. After a few deep breaths and an instant's hesitaion you press the button. At first the game seems to boot up as usual, but almost the instant the strobing, pulsing colours begin to appear things go very differently then before. The machine, the room around you and indeed the entire world grow hazy and fragment, disintegrating into static before vanishing entirely. Behind this veil of static lies a starfield and a vast nebula, an endless expanse of glowing ether punctuated with throbing, luminous eyes. You hang, suspended, above a planet you do not recognize in an alien sky. As you stare at the unknown stars you feel as though something is probing your mind, leaving behind bits and pieces of information you don't quite understand. Strangely though, you are at ease with it all and do not fight the unknown, invasive force. You close your eyes.
When you open them again you are standing back in the arcade. As you step away from the machine you notice an extra shadow on the floor next to yours. You turn and come face to gun barrel with the jumpsuited woman from before. She's smiling.
"Die, Chronophage"
As the woman pulls the trigger you duck down and forward, slipping beneath her arm and shoving her backward. In single burst of frightened strength you manage to shove her backwards through the arcade's plate window. Wasting no time you scoop up Reginald and your bag before bolting out the door and down the road, ducking as you hear shots ricocheting off the store fronts. A frantic dash through alleys and side streets ends as you come to a massive clearing dominated by an artillery cannon that stands nearly a half mile high. You bend and rest your hands on your knees, trying to catch your breath. The cannon fires, unleashing a shock wave powerful enough to nearly knock you off your feet and deafening you with the concussive blast. As your hearing returns and the ringing subsides you notice the siren from earlier has only grown louder and that there are oddly shaped shadows swimming through the clouds. In the distance you can hear what sounds like a bell tolling underground, deep reverberating tones which vibrate in your bones.
As you catch your breath you force your legs to move and jog off across the wide clearing, passing beneath the automated loading machinery of the cannon as you do. Above you the shadows are more distinct now: they're massive, judging by the shadows, many times larger then conventional bombers and bearing multiple pairs of wings. In the distance you can hear the faint sound of whisling, punctuated by jarring vibration and new plumes of smoke rising from the city. Just as you make it to the otherside of the cannon something glaces off your head, knocking you to the ground and leaving a burnt, weeping gash from just above your ear to just below your temple. Shocked and scared you scramble off the ground and hide behind a heavy metal girder and a series of shots ricochet off the metal around you.
In the distance, running from where you entered the clearing, you can see the woman in the jump suit. She looks injured and is bleeding from several cuts inflicted as she fell through the glass window. She's gaining ground quickly and seems to be able to run faster then you. The nearest exit out of the open ground is at least 100 yards away and is completely exposed.
As the woman draws closer you crouch down, waiting for the cannon to fire. The instant before it does you start running, protecting yourself with your briefcase as best you can. The shockwave of the cannon firing causes you to stumble but completely knocks the woman off her feet. The few shots she manages to get off are erratic and miss you by several feet. You continue running escaping the clearing and charging through the streets beyond. Behind you you can hear the distant click of running feet on concrete but for an instant it seems like the sound is growing farther away. Then there's a sound like three deep chimes and something shrieks past you, carving a bowling ball sized hole in the solid concrete wall ahead. You redouble your speed, trying desperately to vanish amongst the maze of back alleys and side streets but the chimes follow you, blowing gaping holes out of everything around you. Finally you reach a large thoroughfare which leads off in two directions, the one on your right leads toward down town while the one on your left leads back toward your apartment. You can't waste time thinking, the chimes are only getting closer.
You turn right and jog off down the street, ducking as a succession of shots tear through the buildings around you, scattering pulverized concrete and rebar. The road is mostly open, save for a few abandoned vending carts set up intermittently along the sides of the road. You run in your best erratic pattern, attempting to throw off your aggressor's aim as bursts of unseen force tear massive gashes in the scenery. In the distance you can hear what sounds like angry screaming and the familiar chimes tone several extra times. Instinctively you leap to the side, hiding in an alcove created by the entrance to a store, as a crater the size of a small car appears where you had been moments ago. There's a distinct clicking sound before area around you is filled with an unfocused hail of bullets which tears away bits of your cover and reduces windows, vendor carts and anything unlucky enough to be unprotected to rubble. The woman begins to yell something but is drowned out as several dozen hundred pound bombs fall from the sky and reduce the world to deafened silence, choking smoke and blinding dust. You cough and try to try to clear the dust from you eyes as entirely random bursts of gunfire echo around you.
You duck into the building, music shop by the look of it, and climb the wrought iron spiral staircase that leads from the lower to the upper sections. You smash a window with your brief case and make it out on to the roof just in to see a bolt of white hot energy arc out of the dust below and obliterate a near by building. After a few aborted starts you finally summon the courage to jump from the roof of the music store to the roof of the building next door and from there to the next. You're several houses down when another bolt erupts from the dust, arcs off the ground and curls into the building ahead of you, turning your next stepping stone into a crumpled pile of smoldering debris. The roof you're standing on is a good 12 feet above the hard concrete surface below and theres no way you can make the jump to any of the other buildings around you. You think you could probably jump from the roof but you're not sure if you'll be in good running shape afterwards.
You suck in a deep breath, close your eyes and concentrate, attempting to call forth the memories implanted during your vision. For an instant you feel immense power surge through you, before it fades away into nothing. As you open your eyes you see the the jumpsuited woman step forth from the dust, clutching a piece of shrapnel embedded in her belly. With a bloody smile she raises her gun at you and pulls the trigger; the chimes ring. One. Two. Elsewhere in the city one of the great cannons fires but, oddly, the massive shell vanishes the instant after it escapes into the open air. It reappears a moment later, still traveling several hundred miles an hour, directly in front of the woman. The shell skips like a stone on water, collides with and obliterates a cluster of houses before glancing off the ground and detonating several miles away. There seems to be nothing left of the woman outside of a red smear on the pavement.
Before you can celebrate a massive pain tears through your entire body and you collapse to the ground in agony, clutching your head as though it might explode. For several minutes you lay on the ground, writhing in pain as ever organ, vein, tendon, nerve and miscellaneous cell seem to burst horrifically open before reforming. After the pain subsides you find yourself capable of new and horrible acts. With a thought you draw the necessary compounds from the bloody smear on the road and use them to reenforce and strengthen the muscles and bone of your legs. You grimice as the mucles grow painfully fast, tendons snapping and reforming under the strain. When it's done your legs literally steam in cold air, the new muscles twitching expectantly beneath tightly streched skin. You drop off the roof, landing as though you had merely stepped off the bottom step in a flight of stairs, and set off in search of some sort of cover. The bombs are falling harder now and the enormous multiwing aircraft are dipping below the clouds. The cannons are firing at a blistering place, tearing aircraft from the sky and hurling explosive payloads beyond the horizon. After searching for several minutes you come upon a large concrete structure, a library, and head inside. The library is made up of several floors, with three underground floors for more books, records and finally plumbing and a boiler. You feel reasonably safe in these lower levels, though its impossible to know if they'll really withstand a direct hit.
You search over the library, and are surprised to find that a great majority of the books are written in a strange new dialect, obviously divergent from english, but containing mostly curse words and racial epithets. You do manage to find several comprehensible books as well as a large encyclopedia and the card catalog computers. The computers have no Internet connection and a quick check of the encyclopedia shows that the term doesn't even exist yet. Looking the word "chronophage" indicates that it is a combination of two words, Chrono as in dealing with time and Phage, from phagein which is literally Greek for "to eat". A literal translation could be "Time Eater".
The books you found are as follows:
Alexander Moench: Father of the Titans
Dreams of the Halcyon: Essays of Peace
Pale white shadow: Ruminations on our closest neighbor
The Transcendent man
Washington:The rise and fall
You open the worn cover of The Transcendent Man and find a very different book then what you expected. Rather then some trans-human dream it's a book of philosophy, specifically a philosophy glorifying war and violence. Its pages are thick with graphic depictions of battle and detailed analysis of the virtue to be found within murder. Beyond it's violence it also supports a type of extreme but unfocused Xenophobia, consigning a plethora of bizarre attributes to it's unnamed enemies and hinting that these attributes could be used against any group regardless of circumstance. Outside, the bombs are still falling.
You open the next book, a hard back with a black and white image of a rather serious looking man on the front. The book is a combination biography and history text chronicling the life of Alexander Moench and his effects on science, specifically his work on military tech. Moench was captured by allies in may of 1945 and after several months in a POW camp was whisked back to America to work on project TITAN, the next in a line of military experiments taking place after the failure of the Manhattan project. His work brought about the maximization of military technologies and the creation of ever larger instruments of war to use against the constant Russo-Japanese threat which had immerged soon after V-E day. Considering the book continues on to the death of the scientists 34 years after his capture its clear that it's that the current date is at least 1980, if not later. The bombing has begun to lighten, but are still going on.
Exhausted from everything thats happened you decide to catch a few Z's before things get hectic again.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
You awake to the sound of muffled gunfire, distant but unmistakibly within the libary. You feel rested and revived, the gash on your head has stopped hurting and your legs feel strong enough to cave in a gorilla's head.
Your surroundings:
You are in the second basement level archives of the library. The room itself is about 20 foot wide by 40 long with a high 12 foot ceiling. All walls are made of concrete. The room is tightly packed with rows of steel bookshelves and file cabinets which present a literal maze to any who don't know their lay out. You are fairly versed in the positions of everything in the room. There is only one exit, a stairwell leading up to the main floor and down to the bottom basment level.
After a quick survey of the room you find a heavy money box with an automatic change sorter built in. A few minutes of tinkering ends as you successfully remove the money sorter, leaving several coin sized holes in the box. You carefully stuff Reginald in and use some of the extra clothes from your brief case to tie together the box and the brief case before jury-rigging the entire thing into a backpack. You knock the books off one of the shelves and partially disassemble it, netting you a 2 and a half foot wide by 4 foot long metal plate and two 4 foot long metal rods. The plate is sturdy and has indentions which make it easy to hold, but is quite heavy, you doubt you could hold it up for long as you are. The rod on the other hand is only about the weight of a steel baseball bat and is probably hollow.
You hunker down behind one of the shelves and get a good view of the staircase, placing your shield in front of your body. You hear foot steps coming down the stairs; they stop on the floor above you and spread out, their hurried footsteps reverberating all across the roof. After a quick search of the upstairs they hurry down to your level, bursting into the room with weapons drawn. They're wearing heavy body armor complete with Kevlar gauntlets, helmet with partial face shield and and full body metal plated bullet proof vests. They're carrying rifles of an odd kind which look something like a combination of a shotgun and an assault rifle with two distinct rotating grenade launcher style clips. Several of the men carry additional weapons, the most common of which resembles an oversized shotgun. Some of the men begin sweeping the room while the remainder guard the entrance.
The soldiers certainly look as though they're actively searching for someone, though they could easily just be searching for any survivors. Their uniforms are the same shade of gray as the concrete around them but they don't seem to have any identifying marks or patches. They do bear a strong resemblance to an example that the "Transcendent man" used repeatedly as an enemy. Deciding that its best to act before you're discovered you render the two soldiers nearest to you unconscious before systematically four more mild heart attacks, rendering them unconscious as well. With some effort you manage to mentally infiltrate the remaining men and temporarily paralyze them. Within a matter of seconds you manage to incapacitate every soldier you see, rendering all but one, the one you wish to talk to, unconscious or paralyzed. The remaining man stands ramrod stiff near the stairs, his finger poised on the trigger of his weapon but unable to use it.
You drop your metal pipe and take the gun from the petrified man, slinging it over your shoulder before attempting to talk to the man. Despite your best efforts to communicate with the man he doesn't seem to understand you and only barks at you in some strange mix of racial slurs, swears and a broken mix of Russian and Japanese. As you attempt to communicate with the man you let your focus slip slightly, allowing one of the paralyzed men to regain some control of his body. As soon as you notice your mistake you attempt to correct but accidentally burn out the man's nervous system, killing him in a rather horrible and loud way.
With a twitch of your fingers you turn the brains of 4 of the paralyzed men to mush and then with another slight gesture sever the motor nerves of the rest of the unconscious men, rendering them harmless. The man you were interrogating continues to bark the same words at you, though you can detect hints of fear in his voice. There are 7 men left, 6 of which are completely incapable of movement, the 7th is completely under your control.
Seeing that your attempts at interrogation are fruitless you flick the soldier in the head and then release him. He stands still for several moments before attempting to attack you with his bare hands. Before he can even manage a single punch however his head begins to enlarge like a balloon, the skin turning dark as blood saturates the tissues. Moments later the skin ruptures and the eyes burst, spraying blood outward like burst grapes. You catch the body before it can fall to the ground and begin absorbing the tissue. Several minutes later there is nothing left of the man other then a very blood stained outfit and the unusable contents of his digestive system.
Body modification.
Enhanced size: Success: Body has enhanced in size from 5'8" to 6'5"
Enchanced muscle mass:Success: Over all muscle mass increase and condensed. Overall strenth has encreased to equal strength of enchanced legs.
Enhanced bone:success: Bone makeup altered and increased in both strength and density. Ribs have become interlocking plates and spine has been enhanced to protect nerves. Some loss of mobility.
Enhanced skin Success: Skin enhanced to leather like quality, thick and tough while retaining ease of movement.
Enhanced organ functionSuccess: All organs have been enhanced to work faster and more efficiently. Circulatory system should keep pace with enhanced body while the enhanced digestive system should help to reduce the amount of food necessarily to fuel the new body.
Reginald's wings were a success as well, allowing him to hover and dart about like a humming bird. You have also enhanced your stores of potentially useful biological material. There are 6 unconscious men left.
You Walk over to the nearest unconscious man and plop yourself down next to his head. With a few gestures you carefully remove the upper portion of his skull and begin prodding away on his brain. You observe how certain changes effect his body and attempt to alter the brain in several ways, mostly unsuccessfully. When the man's brain is finally to degraded to prove useful you absorb it and gain the last bits of knowledge you can. These several minutes of experimentation prove useful as you begin to understand some of the more complex functions of the brain.
Higher level technique unlocked: Coercion: time spent studying the brain has taught you how to manipulate the emotions of others by altering their brain chemistry. Its not a subtle technique and can easily be recognized by those who are looking for it.
Your messing with the brain gives you the idea to attempt to revive your memories, both of your childhood and of the mysterious realm of the Seizuretron. With care you begin to plumb the depths of your own mind. You remember you were born under A Cursed Star, A Cursed Star being the name of the BDSM strip club which operated on the floor above your parent's apartment. Your childhood consisted mainly of playing in traffic, watching cartoons and getting your lunch money stolen by your older sister. You had a special affinity for the strange beasts called examiners, flying eyes with jellyfish like tendrils and often used them to torment small children. This hobby ended when one bit your pinky off. Your adolescence was marked by social awkwardness, mainly because you consistently forgot to wear pants and would often light your hair on fire in an attempt to garner attention. Your teenage years were the days of your first romance, which unfortunately twice involved having to get skin surgically untangled from your girlfriend's braces, once for the lips and once for a more sensitive region. Your early adulthood is more of a hazy of drunkenness and pornography then anything and you're still not exactly sure how you managed to pass any classes. You got a job at the WFE headquarters to further fund your quest to destroy your liver. As you attempt to uncover the strange cysts of memory planted within your mind by the arcade game you come to an impenetrable barrier of some kind which halts your attempts at recollection. Its clear that you're not experienced enough to circumvent this yet.
As you return to your body and consider the events of your past you decide, just for the heck of it, to give yourself a foot long sausage roll. So you do and for some reason you feel much more manly. As you are admiring your handy work, this song playing in your mind, you hear the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.You listen carefully to the footsteps above. There are dozens of feet, too many to make out the exact number of men. They seem to stop on the floor above you and one of them yells something down in the same strange Japanese - Russian mix as before. They seem to be waiting for a response. As quickly as you can you gather the bodies and blood, combing and compressing them down to a sphere roughly 3 foot in diameter. You roll the mound of flesh behind a shelve just in time to hear the men above shout down the same phrase again.
You gather up as much ammo as you can, as well as one of the oversized shotgun like weapons that the men were carrying. Its actually a grenade launcher which several types of color coded rounds. You can't understand the writing on the rounds though, so you have no idea what they are specifically. The rifle on the other hand has two distinct types of ammo, a shotgun like flechette round and a normal rifle round. You can only fire one type of ammo at a time though. As you roll the flesh ball out near the door you hear the men shout down one more time. Moments later you hear several metallic clinking noises and a handful of grenades bounce down the stairs and into the room.
Continued
Here
Author
Topic: Temporal Anomaly: I've got a baaaaad feeling about this (Read 23805 times)