S L A I N D U S T R I E S
Definitely Not
Human
The sector is filled with other creatures, ranging from those nearly the size of a man to those only visible through a microscope. This section covers some of the more numerous of the species in CS1.
p i G s
Carnivorous Pigs do dwell within Cannibal Sector One but, despite their viciousness and bulk, they have always been considered a choice meal for eve-rything else that lives in the sector, so in this area at least their numbers have dwindled leaving only the toughest and most cunning Pigs still alive.
The boars and sows of Cannibal Sector One stick to the less used tunnels and never come out. Over the years they have all become albinos and have learned to gather into small herds, protected by the boars as they go about, rooting through the sewage of the tunnels. Elsewhere the Pigs are solitary, and this behavioral change only came about under the direct pressure placed upon the Pigs within Sector One. An unprepared Operative can congratulate himself on taking down a boar, only to find three more in its place.
While the Pigs of Cannibal Sector One are rarely
seen, they are the most brutal and hideous of the Carnivorous Pigs to be found anywhere on Mort.
They are not an easy kill, even for the experienced Cannibal hunting parties who still seek them out whenever they can for their much prized meat and skin.
”You could say I’ve made a career out of killing Carnivorous Pigs. You’d be wrong, it’s more like it made a career out of me. I’ve fought them eve-rywhere, even found someone in Uptown who’ll pay good credits for a fresh Pig corpse. Don’t ask me why. Hell, I even fought a Pig that had taken a triple dose of Ultraviolence once. Don’t ask me about that one either. Still, I have never, never had as hard a time of it as I did one time out in Sec-tor One. Massive it was - marbled white flesh and tusks as big as my arm. It went down, eventually, but what I didn’t realize was that there was a whole herd of the bastards. Want to see my scars?”
Brion, Human Operative, SCL B..
B u G s
All of the Cannibal Sectors have insect life dwelling
D E F I N I T E L Y N O T H U M A N
S L A I N D U S T R I E S
Rats are ubiquitous on Mort. No matter where you are or where you go, it is said you are rarely, if ever, more than five yards from a rat - except in Uptown. Even the standard Mort rat is still such an ugly brute that most people of an unscientific or ignorant background do not believe that the labo-ratory or pet rat is of the same species.
Rats are survivors, and many comparisons can be drawn with the Carrien in their tenacity and fast breeding capabilities. Like the Carrien, all efforts to eliminate the rats have failed and they continue to swarm through Downtown and the sectors in greater and greater numbers.
M o R T R a T s
The standard wild Mort rat is Rattus norvegicus (the brown or ‘sewer’ rat) on Ultraviolence. Rat-tus morRat-tus ranges between 22 and 3 centimeters in length with a long, scaly tail and short round earlobes. It is found anywhere there is flowing wa-ter and food, and is, therefore, found everywhere in Mort City and the Cannibal Sectors. It is not fussy and will eat anything, alive or dead. All Mort citizens who do not want to wake up with rat bites have their homes proofed or lay traps or watch over each other while they sleep. Mort rats prefer the dark and stick to the shadows or act nocturnally.
Female Mort rats have - litters a year of -12 rats, and Mort rats are fertile from 1-2 months old.
Mort rats are not timid and do not flee from the sight of Human beings unless they are attacked, in which case they are just as likely to turn and fight as they are to run away. The filth they eat makes their bite extremely infectious, and there are a few diseases that are spread exclusively in the bacteria infested nest of the Mort rat’s mouth.
Mort rats tend to travel in family groups of 10-1
individual rats and when one rat considers some-within them, from the flies to the lice that infest
people’s bodies, and the parasites that are flushed out of the city into the badlands every single day.
Cannibal Sector one is different. For whatever rea-son Cannibal Sector One has larger, meaner and more diverse insect life than every other Cannibal Sector put together.
The inexperienced Operative may consider insect life to not be much of a threat. Sealed in his ar-mour away from the stink and without feeling the flies crawling across his flesh, he has every reason to feel secure. The insects in Cannibal Sector One are of a hardier breed though. Even harmless flies can rise up in a cloud and clog a SCAF bike’s en-gine or a Stingray’s blades with their bodies, caus-ing it to crash, then the flies and midges lap up the blood of the stricken crew and lay their eggs in their corpses.
Of particular concern is the rise of ‘The Hive’, the strange area in the south of the sector where the insect species are working together in a single direction and for unknown purpose. It has been built up into a huge conflicting mass of different nests and hives. ‘The Hive’ is a dangerous area, and one in which SLA and the Soft Companies have expressed a great deal of interest.
R a T s
There are rats all over Mort. From white laboratory mice, and rats that are loved by many Uptowners and Suburbanites, to the filthy crawling things that infest Downtown and the sewers and, finally, to their gigantic and mutated relatives in the Cannibal Sector.
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Giant rats are vicious and never flee once they enter a fight. If they are attacked, then the entire pack will turn on their aggressor and fight until the last rat. Their powerful jaws mean that some of the unpowered armours can be damaged by them and gnawed through if they are not killed quickly.
Unfortunately, the scent of a dead giant rat tends to attract more giant rats that then get caught up in the killing frenzy with the rest. Dubbed ‘tunnel piranhas’ by some wag, a pack of giant rats can strip a man to the bone in a few minutes.
Giant rats also eat sewage, just like the normal Mort rat. However they also hunt Mort rats and larger prey if it can be taken unawares. Some of the Cannibal Clans use unwanted children or cap-tured Operatives as bait for Giant rats, tying ropes around their neck and making them walk through rat-infested areas until they are attacked, at which point they haul their captive, now covered in rats, back in, kill the rats and feast on a combination of Human and rat flesh.
R a T s W a R M s
A rat swarm comes about when a disaster or a sud-den shortage of food affects an area previously in-fested with rats. It is a product of overpopulation or of a sudden threat to the rats. In the case of disasters, these are most often either attempts by SLA to ease the rat problem in an area or the result of a sudden flash flood. In the case of a shortage of food, it is simply that there are too many hun-gry rats in one place and they need to move on and spread. Somehow, almost every rat of every spe-cies in the area knows this information at the same time.
The rat swarm is a seething mass of furry bodies all moving as one, charging out for some distance in a straight line, swarming over and attacking anything and anyone that gets in their path. After a reason-able distance, usually around 1-20 minutes away from their point of origin, the swarm disperses, breaking apart in all directions like the pattern of a firework explosion, after which the rats lay low and catch their wind before settling into their old routines.
Needless to say, rat swarms can be dangerous and can occur at almost any time. Even the use of a grenade or the setting of a fire during a combat op-eration in Downtown or the Cannibal Sectors can cause a sudden rat swarm and a bigger problem for both attackers and defenders. Some of the cannier Cannibals and the Scavs appear to know this, and thing an enemy, they all consider it an enemy,
at-tacking together. In spite of this, the Mort rat is the easiest thing to kill in the Cannibal Sector and is at the bottom of the food chain, feeding on the sewage and turning it into rat flesh that, despite being diseased and toxic, is a tempting and tasty treat to everything else that lives in the Cannibal Sector.
G i a n T R a T s
The giant rat is, or rather was, a stable mutation of the Mort rat and has now established itself as a sep-arate species. The giant rat, Rattus mortus superior is between 0 to 0 centimeters in length with a long, scaly tail and short, flat, rounded ears that are kept pressed very close to the body. Hooked claws enable the giant rat to cling to any surface and the musculature of the jaw and the great size of their teeth enables them to gnaw through just about any material given time. The giant rat is omnivorous but, rather than being entirely a scavenging crea-ture, the giant rat hunts in family packs numbering from – 10 individuals. Found in similar areas to the Mort rat, the giant rat is even more sensitive to the light and so sticks to the Cannibal Sectors and the lowest reaches of Downtown. The giant rat has
- litters a year of - young and is mature enough to breed after 3 months.
D E F I N I T E L Y N O T H U M A N
S L A I N D U S T R I E S
have been known to use established rat warrens as part of their traps.
”Ratta, sleek, furry, fat, delicious. Ratta everywhere, almost taste good as person but easier catch, yes?
Ratta tasty, ratta good eating. Troub’ is ratta think same ‘bout us, yes?”
Djingo, Cannibal.
f l o R a
The plants of CS1 have also undergone evolution, originally the trees and shrubs of central outskirts, what now lurks in the Sector no longer has any re-lation to what once grew there. Most of the plants were killed in The Fall, those that remained were left without people to tend to them and most of them perished shortly afterwards. What thrived were the weeds and shrubs that were originally kept down by various pesticides and pulled up by gardeners. From Redvine to Orientan Knotweed, the plants out here are hungry and you don’t see them coming.
”Located squad Rodin. All six members were down in a patch of Redvine, one was still alive and we were about to make a rescue attempt when we saw that two of the vines had penetrated their armour and bulges were making their way down the vine towards the nexus of the vine. I wasn’t about to expose half my team to recover someone who was already dead sir, no matter what their SCL.”
Ranger Cameron: Returning from recon.
a l l T h e p l a G u e s o f s l a
Disease is rampant in the Cannibal Sectors. The creatures there are extremely resistant to disease and their gene pool so varied and mutated that even the most virulent outbreaks rarely take out more than a single Carrien pack or Cannibal tribe. These creatures are, however, riddled with viruses, bacte-ria and parasites that, while controlled in them, are still deadly to anyone cut, bitten or otherwise in-fected. Every pool of water is home to colonies of such microscopic nasties, and every ragged piece of metal harbors much deadlier things than tetanus.
The creatures of the Cannibal Sectors eat, breed and wallow in this filth. They crawl with infection, and often it is not the teeth of the thing that bites you that should concern you, but rather what is be-ing carried on those teeth.
n e c R o T i s i n G B a c T e R i a
Ever present and, perhaps, the most prevalent of all bacteria in the Cannibal Sectors, necrotising bacte-ria infect wounds from bites and scratches caused by host organisms. When the bacterium infects a less resistant host, it kills the flesh surrounding the wound and devours it, making it rot at an accel-erated rate. The wound grows into the body until it reaches vital organs, at which point the subject dies.
B a c T e R i a l B l o o M s
In the diseased wastelands you will find bacterial blooms of all kinds. These are thick communal mats of bacteria that feed upon the filth and grow so thick they might be mistaken for algae.
”Down at my feet you may see what appears, at first glance, to be a simple puddle of water. Lovely stuff that you can boil up to make it drinkable you might think. Well, you’d be wrong. For starters, there are very few Cannibal Sector organisms that can be killed by anything as pussy-whipped as simple boil-ing. Additionally, the water fell as acid rain and has likely leeched all sorts of shite out of the ground here. That scum mark around the edge shows it was once much deeper, which means it was probably used as a watering hole by something, something that may still come here. Lastly, that cloudy mass to one side is a bacterial cluster; on training once we had someone just touch a dab of water with that in to his tongue. He shat himself to death in two hours. You may find that funny but when someone is having convulsions and loops of ragged, half-dis-solved intestine are being shoved out of his rectum by his own body the comedy aspect soon wears off.
Stick to your rations. Any questions?”
Angus McCrae, Frother Sector Ranger.
These blooms provide food for some of the less obnoxious mutations of the Cannibal Sector, but these are creatures specially adapted to the proc-ess. To these hardy bacteria, a warm body and the relatively cushy conditions in the stomach, bladder and bowel are a paradise where they can reproduce even faster. The body’s immune system is power-less. The bacteria multiply immediately, using up the body’s food store and spread into the bowel where they supplant the body’s natural bacteria and produce massive amounts of gas. The subject of the infection will find himself suffering from cata-strophic dysentery, the expelling of large amounts
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of gas from both ends of their digestive system, vomiting and, as the bacteria run out of food in the stomach and intestine, they will begin to work on the body itself. In the final stages, the infected per-son begins passing sections of their own stomach and digestive tract before succumbing to massive internal bleeding. The bacteria will continue to digest the dead body until nothing is left.
M a s a R i n ’ s l e G a c y
Everyone is familiar with DNA Hallmark tattoos.
Making such complex biotechnological modifica-tions inheritable traits was the result of a massive scientific effort and has a great many long-term implications for health care. That breakthrough was not made overnight.
Many experiments failed and were discarded; some researchers were tempted away from SLA by offers from Soft Companies and many of those compa-nies tried to replicate SLA’s research. They were not entirely successful, and their failures led to the creation of many of the mutations seen today. One such scientist was Andre Masarin, a brilliant and ethically devoid scientist who specialized in the im-provement of the DNA tattoo. He theorised that it would be possible to insert genetic codes into the sequencing of the tattoo that would increase the possibility of mutation in otherwise healthy cells.
Removed from active service within SLA, he found work under DarkNight.
Mutations have occurred in the Cannibal Sectors for as long as they have existed, but Masarin’s Legacy is relatively new and is responsible for the sudden upsurge in frequency and degree of muta-tions occurring.
The commercial virus carries the payload of rewrit-ten DNA into the subject’s cells and rewrites them, tagging the changes as dominant traits so that they will carry to the next generation. Masarin’s Legacy acts like an early experiment along those lines, with the difference that it rewrites sections of DNA at random and makes them dominant traits.
Most often this results in a twisted mess that lives only moments before dying. Occasionally it pro-duces something that can live and those surviving mutations are carried even more strongly to any young fathered by the successful mutation.
For Operatives this does not usually cause the infected any problems until they choose to repro-duce. The child they have suffers massive and
ran-dom mutation and most often has to be put down.
On extremely rare occasions, infected Operatives have suffered random mutations.
l o c k T i G h T
Carrien are filthy creatures and carry many infec-tions on their teeth and claws. While necrotising bacteria are carried in their saliva, their claws tend to carry a different microbe altogether.
The Locktight bacterium affects the muscles, caus-ing them to stiffen and paralyze in a clenched po-sition, spreading out from the point of infection until the whole body is affected. Fatalities due to Locktight are usually caused by paralysis of the dia-phragm or by tension in the spine and neck causing vertebrae to break under the strain.
Locktight is the most recognizable and treatable of the diseases to be found in the Cannibal Sectors, to the point where those who have made multiple operations into the depths of the sector discuss it in a flippant manner. Away from medical kits and proper cleanliness, Locktight is as much of a killer as the other, more exotic, diseases.
a p o c a l y p s e f l u k e
Some taboos exist for a good reason. Eating your own species is bad because of all the things you could eat; those of the same species as yourself are most likely to be harbouring an infection or para-site that could affect you. It is little surprise that the Cannibal Clans are rife with parasites, flukes, worms and paramecia.
The single-celled, flagella-waving terror dubbed by SLA scientists as ‘The Apocalypse Fluke’ is al-most omnipresent in the Cannibal Clans. In the degenerate and hardy Cannibals of the sectors, this infection has reached a grudging détente with their mutated and aggressive immune systems, result-ing in a partial infection. In anyone other than a habitual and several-generations deep Cannibal, the fluke breeds rapidly in the bloodstream and then begins to devour nervous tissue. This causes
The single-celled, flagella-waving terror dubbed by SLA scientists as ‘The Apocalypse Fluke’ is al-most omnipresent in the Cannibal Clans. In the degenerate and hardy Cannibals of the sectors, this infection has reached a grudging détente with their mutated and aggressive immune systems, result-ing in a partial infection. In anyone other than a habitual and several-generations deep Cannibal, the fluke breeds rapidly in the bloodstream and then begins to devour nervous tissue. This causes