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teratoscope · 5 years

Text

Enluss

The little shaggy guys started turning up at the camp perimeter the night after you cleared out the den of cunningbears that were sabotaging the mass drivers two klicks out west. You’re pretty sure they’re some kind of mutant. You get lots of those out in the green zones, and the brass gives you hell if you break protocol for indigenes, so for the time being you’ve let them be beyond reading them the packaged non-aggression pact speech. Not like they knew what you were saying. They kept so quiet that most of the crew was pretty sure they don’t talk. They’d shown up right at the edge of camp for two weeks straight, just watching with those big dark eyes that shine when you fix ‘em in the light. Then Tae got shitfaced last night and tried to punt one. They dogpiled him, jabbed him in the neck with this fuckoff huge needle, and vanished into the buffalo grass. Tae’s drinking buddies ran him to the field hospital and strapped him down so he wouldn’t break his own spine from the convulsions. Tae died sometime later that night. That’s what you’re hoping, anyway. That’s the story you’re telling everyone else. You were the one that got tapped for observation duty, and the one who sterilized the area when you realized he was starting to sporulate.

HD 1 MV 120’ AC 12 AT by weapon Special assimilator, virotech

assimilator—Enluss don’t have immune systems so much as they have re-education camps for foreign contaminants. They always have advantage to resist poison, infection, and toxic environments, and once they’ve made a successful save they never have to roll to resist it again.

virotech—nearly all Enluss technology is the product of powerful retroviral agents that directly alter the user’s phenotype. An Enluss can typically maintain one virotech infection per HD listed for an individual specimen. Virotech is contagious; any living thing that makes fluid-to-membrane contact with an Enluss has a 1 in 6 chance of contracting a system. Virotech is keyed to the user’s precise biochemical register, and the transition to a new host is messy at best. The infected must make a Constitution check; if they fail, they lose 1d3 points of Constitution permanently and the infection manifests immediately. If they succeed, their Constitution score is set to the raw result of the check and recovers by 1 point/day; the infection manifests when the infected’s Constitution score returns to normal.

1d10 Virotech Infections

1. Bombardier Pox. Horny conical growths on chest, shoulders, and back spray caustic fluid on command. 1d6 acid damage in a 15’ radius centered on the user, Dex check for half.

2. Gecko Palms. Subject gains a climb speed equal to ½ their MV.

3. Froglung. Subject becomes amphibious, but only swims as well as they ordinarily would.

4. Komodo Mouth. On a successful bite attack, subject’s victim makes a Constitution save after every full rest. On failure their max hp drops by 1d3. Effect ends after victim receives advanced medical care, dies, or manages three successful saves in a row.

5. Kevlar Rash. Skin bunches and hardens when struck with a strong blow. Subject gains 1 damage reduction vs. kinetic attacks the first time they’re damaged each round; this effect dissipates after a full round without being hit. At DR 3, halve MV; at DR 6, reduce it to 1/3. Effect caps at 6.

6. Accelerator Fever. Subject can move at double their base MV and act at the top of initiative on command at the cost of 1d3 hp/round.

7. Vorpal Osteogenesis. Subject’s hand (determine which one randomly) becomes powerfully muscular to compensate for liquified bones, which erupt from fingertips reconfigured into inch-long talons. Subject gains a claw attack for 1d6+1 damage; this attack scores a critical on a 17-20. Hand is miserably clumsy for all other purposes.

8. Transponder Blisters. Subject develops a cluster of antennae and subcutaneous resonators running from the base of the neck to the jawbone that allow them to tap and gauge distance and direction on radio signals within a 20 mile radius. Actively seeking a band to scan requires a Wisdom check and an exploration turn.

9. Alzabo Syndrome. Subject’s tongue becomes extendable and develops a thorny, hollow tip designed to bore into spinal columns. Subject can take an exploration turn to hull and drain a recently-killed or restrained life form; for the next eight hours they gain access to all of the eaten party’s memories ranging from the moment of death to the last time they slept.

10. Alcubierre Organ. Subject develops a faintly glowing growth just above the sacrum that makes the bearer passably spaceworthy and allows subtle massaging of space-time. Subject gains an EVA speed of 90’ and can teleport to any location they have a clear mental image of but will need to messily devour a full-grown person’s worth of calories within an exploration turn of arrival. Failure to satiate the hungers of warp-debt inflicts their own hit dice in damage each round.

1d6 Enluss Weapons

1. Pherogun. 600’ range. Cast ceramic single-shot air rifle. Takes a full round to load. Deals no damage, but specially brewed ammunition vaporizes on hit and binds to the skin, making the target smell overwhelmingly confrontational/appetizing to most organisms. Wilderness encounters happen twice as often, and reaction rolls with wild creatures are made twice, taking the least favorable outcome. Counterscent is usually carried on the wielder’s person, rarely more than a single dose. Effect wears off after a month or if the victim is set on fire for at least 6 points of damage (cumulative).

2. Babel Spore. 60’ cone. Sickly-sweet grayish haze deployed via back-mounted sprayer. Targets within cone make a Wisdom check each round; on failure they can neither use nor comprehend spoken or written language. Pantomime and evocative groans still work. Victims get followup checks to purge the spores after every full rest.

3. Tracker Spear. As normal spear, but on a hit that beats AC by 4 or more, a section of the head breaks off in the resulting wound and puts down taproots. The head requires 2d6 days of dedicated care from a competent surgeon to remove, and so long as it has blood to feed on it will broadcast its pre-assigned radio signature. A target marked this way will never surprise a party of Enluss and attempts to cover tracks or shake off pursuers always fail if the pursuers are Enluss or know their encryptions.

4. Slingbears. Like underfed, shaved, eyeless infant koalas. 30’ range, 1d6 damage on impact. Take a Strength check at disadvantage to dislodge, deal 1d6+1 at the end of each subsequent round attached as they savage with tooth and claw. You can try to kill them while attached; they have 1 HD, AC equal to their victim’s +2 if you’re trying not to hit your friend or yourself, and if you hit but don’t kill they deal maximum damage this round. Utterly helpless once dislodged; they have no notion of how to function without something to latch onto and maul.

5. Starter Grenade. Fragile clay jar with an airtight seal, containing a voracious, quick-growing yeast culture. 30’ initial area of effect, can be hucked up to 60’ by hand or 120’ with a sling. Anything in the area of effect must make a Strength check to pull free of the sticky morass; otherwise they are immobilized until somebody else extracts them and their microbiome is savaged by the yeast’s rapacious hunger, granting an immediate extra Constitution check against any diseases they may be suffering from and disadvantage on all checks vs. disease in the future, barring three days of probiotic treatment. On the second round, the yeast mass grows another 60’, plus 30’ for each target it already trapped. On the third round, the mass solidifies into a huge, misshapen lump of hardtack. Starter Grenades are ineffective in sterile environments.

6. Hornet Claw. Set of four pheromone-bound, heavily armored descendants of V. M. Japonica. Bred for obedience, venom potency, and stinger size. Each latches to a finger stinger-out, forming a sort of living bagh naka. On a bare-handed melee hit, the wielder deals 1d3 Constitution damage. A full rest and a successful Con check or healing check recovers 1d3 of this damage.

Enluss is not a species. It is a movement.

Enluss is the alternative to death. It is the struggle to create, regenerate, and sustain in a world that does not want you.

If you could see the kind of future that would come to pass without us, you would have no choice but to become us. Without us there would be no war, because there would be no world to fight over. You and me and everyone else here would have choked to death on the poisoned air many, many years ago, and nothing would grow here, and the waters would fall silent and still.

It has happened before, in another time.

If we had begun sooner, even a generation sooner, if we had been brave instead of desperate, we would never have needed to leave. We would have reclaimed our world from the worst part of ourselves with time left over to heal it. Instead we had time enough to run away and try again here.

We have seen your mistakes before. We made them. You possess the same craven attachment to false comforts and poisonous ideologies that nearly killed us. You live at war with your own bodies, which you refuse to meaningfully change. You weigh your actions based on outcomes that become irrelevant in spans of time shorter than a single life-cycle. You cling to a notion of self that treasures its worst features and diminishes all that makes you meaningful.

And until you see this and understand, the parts of this world that live and grow will be your enemy. So it was before we came, and so it will be long after we are gone. All we have done is given you a fighting chance.

When we are done, you will either finally deserve this world, or you will feed something that does.

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