“People can change.”
“Yeah. But can you?”
In a world where light is a luxury and military-grade monsters stalk in every shadow, a young girl awakens without knowledge of who or where she is. What she does know is that she has a mother, and she must find her at the hub of the expansive tunnel network to get answers. Determined to navigate this subterranean hellscape alone, she is defenseless… until a brutal encounter with a beast unlocks an amazing latent ability to alter her body as she sees fit.
She sees a golden opportunity to turn the tables on the predators and arrive safely at her destination. However, she discovers that to transform her limbs into weapons and her skin into armour, she needs raw biological materials and a visual blueprint.
Meaning that if she plans on surviving the savage creatures that hunt her in the underground passages, she has to start hunting them.
She just might need a friend—or two—after all.
I knew exactly what I was going to do the moment I received the project brief. The plot outline. The characters. I just needed to flesh out some of the details. I’d been reading quite a bit of the web serial Twig lately, in which a group of genetically engineered/vat-grown children are sent out by an academy to take down threats. I was fascinated by the biopunk setting and the juxtaposition of vulnerable-looking children and their secret inner powers.
I photomanipulated everything: taking the faces of people and getting the poses and backgrounds from stock photos, and the scales of reptiles and chitin of insects, and Leonardo da Vinci sketches, and just splicing everything together.
Context
There was a massive network of underground research facilities spanning a small country, growing beasts in labs for military use (probably the Cold War). In one facility, a neural parasite gained sentience and took over the brain of one of the scientists, who ended up releasing many of the lifeforms. These creatures released the rest, and subsumed, cocooned, or otherwise killed all the scientists in that facility. They bred and migrated to neighbouring facilities, breaching their security and slaughtering the employees within.
Character: Tamara Clay AKA Project Thysía
Tamara was a work in progress – designed to be the apex predator of all underground beasts being created in that particular facility, a kill switch only to be activated if any of them escaped and couldn’t be contained through conventional means.
Hyper-adaptable, both mentally and physically. Tactical mind. Physically appears to be a twelve-year-old child, but is actually seven months old and has been active for three days. Small enough to look unintimidating, but extremely fast and durable. Not fully developed or trained, as she was activated prematurely. Still has memories of the lab – in particular, the lead scientist of the team that worked on her.
Character: Dennis Howard
Dennis is a seventeen-year-old aspiring engineer. Before the incident, he was a low level maintenance intern, usually assigned to grab coffee for employees and clean up viscera. He was grabbing cleaning supplies from a closet while on rotation when the lab-grown beasts broke out. He locked it, and when someone came and pounded on the door and rattled the knob, he didn’t open it – something that still haunts him. He has been living in the labs since.
Impulsive, makes dangerously rash decisions. Kind of goofy, nice guy. Resourceful. Melted off half of Tamara’s face with industrial solvent that he mixed himself, when he thought she was a monster come to kill him. She regenerated and used his face as a blueprint to reform a human face. He then joined her on her journey because why not.
Character: Project Sparkle
I really need to rework this design, because it’s not wholly mine. If Tamara is the apex predator, this bug-like creature is the bottom of the food chain. Designed for recon purposes, it has little to defend itself with. It communicates using bright lights and pheromones, and shows flashes of surprising intelligence as it accompanies Tamara on her quest. Secretly being piloted by the neural parasite, who reveals its desire to kill the lead scientist at the end…
