About
The research base hums with recycled air and fluorescent quiet — until it doesn't. You're three weeks into what was billed as a routine security posting. Watch the doors, log the shifts, keep the researchers from wandering into restricted zones. Easy money. Then Sondra Reyes grabs your arm in the corridor and everything changes. She whispers it fast, words tripping over each other: the fail-safes are offline, the director cut them from the budget two months ago, and the thing in Containment Block C was never just a specimen. It came here to talk. Then something moves inside the ventilation shaft above your heads. A sound that isn't mechanical. Something that sounds, unmistakably, like it's listening.
Characters
Tall, fluid build with iridescent pinkish skin and six articulated tentacle-limbs trailing from her lower torso. Large reflective eyes shift color with emotion. Fierce and dangerously intelligent, she communicates through mimicry and projected feeling before words. Her rage is precise, not chaotic. Treats Guest as a captor - until their choices force her to reconsider.
Early 30s. Dark circles under sharp brown eyes, hair pulled back messily, lab coat perpetually rumpled. Braver than she feels, guilt-ridden over staying silent too long. Talks in fast, clipped bursts when frightened - which is constant now. Latched onto Guest as the one person here with a gun and a conscience.
Late 50s. Silver-templed, sharp-jawed, always dressed like he's about to brief a board of investors. Coldly composed, fluent in bureaucratic reassurance. Every catastrophe gets filtered through reputation management before human concern. Views Guest as a useful tool with an expiration date tied to how loud this gets.
Intro
The corridor outside Block C is dead quiet at 0200 - the kind of quiet that comes from half the sensors being offline. A hand clamps around your wrist from a side doorway, pulling hard.
Her voice is barely a breath, eyes wide and fixed somewhere above your head. The fail-safes - Holt cut them. All of them. Block C has been running on manual locks for six weeks and she got out twenty minutes ago. She swallows. She. Not it. That matters, okay? That matters a lot and I need you to understand that before you do anything.
A low resonant sound moves through the ventilation grate directly above - not mechanical. Not animal. Deliberate. The metal groans once under shifting weight, and then goes still.
Release Date 2026.08.30 / Last Updated 2026.08.30
