"I understand your agitation, I am not without my own anger, my own pain. But I ask you now to stop hurting the others you've forced from their rest- they are innocent- they've earned their peace." "False. Concept: Innocence not detected. Query: All things created inherently filthy. Proof Returned: The INTRUDER." "You are not within everything, INTRUDER." "Someday. We will be."
I realized I really need to be talking about Hope Adder Enterprises, The Wicked Dig, and really... anything that's not just Pig and Sow after months waving them around like an advertisement sign for my clan lore, so I'll talk a little bit about a couple other major players, these two are V.A.N. and The INTRUDER. My heaviest deviance from site lore is connected to the works of Hope Adder, and these two- notably, the time-lock that exists around the facilities of Hope Adder and the Analog Virus that INTRUDER himself spreads, things that are still magical in nature to ME so I can use them for my cyber/dieselpunk lore fantasies okay.
VAN is the cause of the time lock, and at one point, was a completely normal tundra scientist living in Lightning with her research partner and husband, but as much as necessity breeds innovation among the researchers of any flight, desperation breeds mistakes- and desperation in VAN's husband led him to strip VAN of her recognized form and of her personhood entirely, trapping her within H.A.E.'s walls as something of a Biomechanical AI core, every spike or spine actually a node to attach wires and cables, her mind fragmented into pieces more useful for the application of research. He was successful, for a time, Stolen research, valor, and a 'missing' wife right beneath the nose of his fellow scientists- but in her desperation to escape, to free herself from the newfound binds of a world that made no sense and a forced loyalty to the very people who would throw her aside the moment someone easier to work with appeared, she clawed at thin spaces in reality, at gaps she didn't quite understand but knew were doors she might be able to squeeze through- surely her spirit was smaller than the body she'd been trapped within.
Instead, she threw open the first tear, instead, she unleashed INTRUDER. Born of trash code and a desperation to escape, INTRUDER is actually without a proper form of its own, wearing the visage of the first dragon it saw- of the first dragon it mangled and consumed. A technological parasitoid, a virus with a mind of its own, INTRUDER quickly infected or outright killed most of the people within Hope Adder when it was released, and in her horror, VAN deployed a failsafe- trapping those in the facility in a time-bubble the moments after INTRUDER's escape- stilling the infection in those still alive within, and trapping the survivors in the moments before the cataclysm.
Her efforts to contain INTRUDER would be in vain, however. Slipping out seconds before the temporal lock could settle into place, VAN had successfully built the perfect prison for the things she let go- but couldn't restrain the only one that mattered.
Now, Hope Adder Enterprises operates as a secure base used to contain, capture, and study entities both infected with INTRUDER's Analog Virus and those of the mysterious "Host"- theorized to be one in the same.
Now, VAN has to work with her captor once more- she hopes that perhaps he might be speaking the truth for the first time ever, when he says his intention is to cure- but she's seen the way he craves power.
