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Chapter 1 - The Beast Amongst Flowers
Research Division - Ohio (USA), Site-034, Morgue (1994)
The cold morgue smelled faintly of ethanol and copper. Three men stood around the dissected body of a man; chest cavity open, rib spreaders glinting beneath the fluorescents and strange flowers grew and drained nutrients from the frigidly damp stomach.
Dr. Kenneth Thompson's bald head gleamed under the fluorescent lights that hummed tunelessly, as he tugged at a root embedded within a section of lung tissue. He moved with the efficiency and calm.
“Y’know,” Thompson spoke, scalpel dragging lazily, “you’d think a hippie cult would’ve tried summoning something a little more friendly.”
Edward Samson snorted, scribbling in his notepad without looking up. “I’m still waiting for the day one of these groups doesn’t try to bring something horrifying into the world. Cultists really need better hobbies.” Edward looked up at the body. "Not that it would change whatever happened to him."
Carlos Hemenez shifted against the wall, arms folded across his broad chest, sidearm holstered but always within reach. He appeared uncomfortable being inside that sterile room. “I’ll never understand why I’m in the room for this. The guy’s dead. What’s he gonna do, get up?”
Thompson didn’t look up. “He very much could.” Kenneth replied. "Whatever did this to him is new and y'never know when something might become a zombie."
Samson smirked. “Well, if our 'zombie' here manages to wake up, our friend in the RSS will be ready to bitch and moan at it”
"Shut it." Carlos scowled as he shook his head, muttering. "Anyway, I doubt these guys even knew what they were summoning.”
Thompson paused, adjusting his gloves with a snap. “They never do. It starts with ideas of free sex and kumbaya, and then its speaking in pig latin to conjure forest spirits.”
A twitch from the red flora growing from the corpse's eye sockets caught the attention of the three men as they looked down at the cultist’s vacant eyes. Samson was the first to break it. “So, what do we even call this? What is she? She a carrier for something?
"No." Replied Samson. "Boys in hazmats cleared her. Whatever this is…"
Thompson reached for a specimen jar, plucking one of the smaller flower buds lodged inside the corpse's small intestine with tweezers. “If you ask the mystics in the Progenitus, you might hear it's possessed by a spirit of the forest. If you ask the jesus-freaks in Theology, it's a demon. Me?” He dropped the flower into preservative fluid. Plop. “It's just another anomaly. Doesn’t matter what she is. As long as she's here and not out there.”
Carlos leaned forward. “But she's just a kid, right? I mean we all saw her in temp. How the hell does a dead girl start growing plants in people?”
Samson flipped a page in his notepad, smirking. “How the hell does anything we deal with exist? Let's think about it more, it'll really help us get to the end of the shift.”
For a moment, the three stared at the body in front of them, its mouth slack, eyes hollow, roots and thorns strangling the dead man's heart.
Carlos grunted. “Still… not the weirdest thing I’ve seen in here.”
Thompson raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? What takes the prize, then?”
Samson chuckled darkly, tapping his pen against the notepad. “Bet he’s gonna bring up the jellyfish man again.”
Carlos smirked. “You don’t forget peeling back a ribcage and finding jellyfish crammed in every crevice.”
Thompson groaned. “Christ, don’t remind me. Took me weeks before I could eat calamari again.”
Carlos gave Thompson an inquisitive look. "Calamari is squid Doc. Christ you're a biologist, shouldn't you know this?
"Specialized in humans." Thompson snapped. "And things that look like people. And besides they both got tentacles. Disgusting."
Samson arched his back. A smirk faded from his face.
“You wanna talk disgusting?” he said quietly. “Couple months back I had to cut open something that looked like a man. Almost a man. Broad shoulders, but skinny and skin as pale as snow.”
He stared down at his notes as if he could parse through the memory through paper and ink.
“But the face… ” He tapped his temple with the pen, clicking the back of the pen against his skin. “The face was wrong. Not wrong like something made by bumping uglies with your sister, wrong like… like someone had made a face from the memory of a memory and missed a few details. Too symmetrical in some places. Eyes with no eyelids. Mouth with far too many teeth. When I looked at it, I had that feeling you get when a mannequin looks too real. You know? That instinct that tells you it’s gonna move.”
Carlos frowned. “Uncanny valley. I think that's what it's called.”
Samson’s voice dropped lower. “Yeah… I almost didn’t want to. Felt like if I cut into it, it would wake up. Reach out and grab me.”
Samson paused.
“And when I finally did, when I put the scalpel to the skin and made my first cut…” Samson trailed off, staring at the page in front of him. His pen hovered, unmoving. A look of concern crossed his face as he clicked his pen against his head more forcibly. "I don’t remember.”
Thompson looked up from the corpse, surgical tweezers in hand. “Don’t remember? How do you not remember?”
Samson shook his head. A cold sweat dripped across his forehead. “I can picture the body on the slab. Can picture the cut. And then… nothing. Why can't I remember?"
Carlos shifted uneasily against the wall. “They hit you with amnestics?”
“Not that I recall. And if they did, they didn’t log it. My report just says I completed the autopsy. But if I don’t remember writing it…” Samson rubbed his eyes. "Then maybe I didn’t.”
The three of them sat in silence for a beat, the hum of the fluorescent lights pressing down on them.
Thompson finally broke it with a sigh. “If you don’t remember, odds are it’s for the best. Whatever you found was more than likely bad, or classified. Don't stress it too much. The less you think about the gaps in your memory, the less stress you'll be in.”
Carlos nodded, eyes flicking to the twitching flowers sprouting from the cultist’s remains. “Yeah. We all get amnesticized from time to time. Encounter something memetic and you need amnestics. That's it you probably encountered something memetic. That or whatever you saw was pretty fucked.”
The three sat silent as the artificial sounds of the morgue returned to encompass the silence, the clicking of Samson’s pen, the quiet clink of ventilation, the endless hum of the lights, but in the back of all their minds, Samson’s missing memory sat like a splinter. They all had experienced the gaps. The Authority had taken their memories, for better or worse.
Dr. Thompson finished the autopsy with a weary finality, sealing the remains in cryostorage. The jars of flowers and tissue samples lined the cart like horrid epitaphs, waiting to be passed along to Site-034’s Botany Department. Samson stacked his notes carefully, though his handwriting was soaked with fatigue.
By 10 p.m., the three men had shed their gloves and coats and stepped out of the morgue, their shoes echoing down the empty hallways. They moved through the site’s vast laboratory complexes in silence, past lockers holding lesser anomalous objects, and toward the main elevator.
The lift carried them upward, its hum the only sound. When the doors opened, they emerged into the shell building, the false face of Site-034. Above ground, it was nothing more than a chemical production plant. The Authority had gone through the trouble of making its lie real: conveyor belts, supervisors in hard hats, workers clocking out for the night. A factory owned by a front company, Researched & Produced Chemicals Co.
The three men walked the factory’s fluorescent-lit corridors like ghosts. A few night-shift workers glanced at them, mistaking them for managers, but most didn’t look twice.
Outside, the cool air hit them. Thompson and Samson wordlessly climbed into the same car, its headlights sweeping across the lot before vanishing down the road.
Carlos lingered. He stood alone in the quiet parking lot, the incessant roar of machinery echoing behind him. The night sky was wide and indifferent above. He lit a cigarette, the flame briefly painting his face before fading back into shadow. He exhaled, watching the smoke twist upward until it dissolved into the darkness above.
Protection Division - Ohio (USA), Site-034, Decontamination & Observation Chamber 002 (1994)
Decontamination & Observation Chamber 002 was white. Not just painted white, but the kind of sterile and polished white that ate up shadows and left the mind nowhere to wander. Sgt. Henry Gillan sat on the edge of a narrow cot, dressed in thin gray scrubs the doctors had provided him after the scrubdown. His wrists still burned faintly from where the medical brushes had rasped his skin raw, scouring away whatever they thought might be clinging to him.
The Authority had various reactions when encountering a new anomaly. Site-034 through everything at the wall, especially since not much is known about the entity captured within the Eden's campsite. With all current evidence, Site-034 assumed a viral contagion had rapidly killed the cultist at the campsite. From there standard decontamination protocols followed. Gillan even remembered a priest from the Theology department casting blessings upon him just in case the anomaly was demonic in origin.
Somewhere behind a sealed bulkhead door, his gear was locked away in quarantine. His armor, helmet, rifle, even his dog tags bagged, tagged, and shoved into a hazmat bin until some lab rat decided it was safe to return. Without them, Gellan felt naked. Like they’d stripped away the only things that made him feel safe.
The flow of the air recyclers filled the silence. A faint chemical tang lingered in the air, a reminder that even the oxygen here was scrubbed and filtered. He tried counting the tiles on the ceiling, but after the fifth set of counting all 134 tiles, Gillan got bored. He tried to keep his body active by working out around the room. Push-ups, crunches, hand stands; After four hours of attempting different variations, he laid down back against the floor. Boredom's dull tendrils creeping back in. He allowed his thoughts to drift back to the end of that scene at the campsite.
The thing took the appearance of a young teenage girl, dead but not, surrounded by the bodies of numerous dead cultists and the body of agent P0-3 (Gamma). The sight of the dead team member panicked the team, but it did not bother him. The thing wrapped in the flesh of a child took a step toward the team, and the team responded with efficiency. Gunfire rang throughout the campsite as bullets ripped through the creature's flesh. It collapsed as the gunfire ceased.
The team approached the creature in unison and halted around a 3 meter distance. Sgt. Gillan and his men looked upon the body. Time began to move slowly as they observed the fallen creature. They waited for anything, a sign of movement, demanifestation; experience dictated that anything was possible within these moments. The Sargent signaled to one of his men, Henry Yurrick, a pale tall muscular slavic man.
"Contact command." Gillan gestured to the surrounding scene. "Tell them we got bodies and one confirmed hostile, all terminated. Tell them we need a clean up crew ASAP. Possibl-"
“Sarge!”
It was Smith, the rookie. His rifle trained on the creature. “It’s not dead!”
Gillan’s eyes snapped back to the supposed corpse of the creature only to see its wounds clotting with something green and covered in red ichor shift beneath its skin. Petals pushed out from where gun shot wounds tore flesh. Flowers of different colors were growing from the creatures body.
The men adjusted their aim, rifles aimed on the now twitching creature.
Then Gillan saw it. Not the creature, but one of the once presumed dead cultist. Barely alive, twitching in the dirt. It was the form of a young gaunt man with black balding hair. Roses had pushed through his eye sockets, soft red petals covered in ocular fluid where his gaze should have been. His chest rattled with shallow, bubbling breaths. Against their better judgment, Gillan and Yurrick approached, rifles low.
“Can you hear me?” Gillan asked.
The cultist cried out in pain. His raspy wails echoed throughout the clearing. A mixture of pained laughter and pained nonsensical murmurs made it clear to Gillan that the man had lost his mind. The man’s voice was ragged, broken, but clear enough: “The Beast calls. May the Wild Hunt embrace us all.”
His words collapsed into wet, choking coughs. He convulsed, chest heaving. A violent jolt arched the man's back and the crack of broken bones echoed out. The man began to vomit thorns, petals, mucus, and blood. The vile mixture flowed from the sides of his mouth and pooled back into his nostrils and throat until his body finally went limp. Roots pushed through his throat as he fell still.
Gillan and Yurrick staggered back.
“Call it in,” Gillan muttered, a ringing noise indicative of stress pulsed heavy in his ears. “Tell command we’ve got a possible viral agent.”
Gillan rolled onto his back in the chamber, staring at the ceiling, counting his breaths instead of the tiles. He told himself it was just standard protocol. Just protocol. But the longer he lay there, the more he swore he could feel something rooting deep in his lungs.
He forced the thought down. It wasn’t his first time in decontamination. Probably wouldn’t be his last. As an agent of the Authority who deals with the unknown on a daily basis, he had to get used to dealing with possible viral infection. Being stripped, scrubbed, locked in a box until some doctor gave the all clear. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the only thing that grew inside you was boredom.
And boredom was the real enemy here. It dulls the mind, stretchs every second into a minute, every minute into an hour. Gillan wished something would happen in this unchanging white room. Anything to break the weight of nothing.
He knew nothing would happen, so he allowed himself to think. That was the trick. Let the mind wander, keep it busy, or it would very well eat itself.
He thought of his past work. He remembers putting a bullet in an almost man-thing, its uncanny features that hid a mess of flesh and teeth. He remembered how the thing moved, twitching like a puppet on invisible strings. They’d put it down fast, but even as it fell, Gillan swore the thing’s glassy eyes were trying to imitate fear. The memory still made his stomach knot. He remembers the corpse was sent to Site-034 for examination within the Morgue.
Then there was Braxton. A nowhere town who's only notable occurence was a man who thought he’d reinvent the car engine with “magic water.” We'd gone in heavy, thinking we were dealing with techno-cultists or worse. Instead, we dragged out a wild-eyed mechanic in oil-stained overalls, shouting about “free energy for all” as the team zip-tied his hands. That one ended without blood, but it stuck with Gillan anyway.
Gillan remembered confiscating the man's schematics for new engines that utilized the "magic water". He had always loved working on vehicles. At times, he would daydream of another life where he was a mechanic. Looking at the man's schematics gave Gillan a headache. The engine's design appeared nonsensical at the time. At the time, Gillan thought the man was just a crazy old kook, but he only now considered that maybe the design was made to work around the water.
Gillan smirked. The ceiling blurred as he lost himself in the rhythm of the memories. The missions bled together; nights in the mud, gunfire in empty fields, the faces of things that shouldn’t exist. He let them cycle through his head like a deck of cards, shuffling one into another.
Hours slipped past without him noticing.
And still the chamber was white. And the tiles still amounted to 134. And still he waited.
Containment Division - Ohio (USA), Site-034 (1994)
Containment Specialist Elaine Mercer adjusted the clipboard under her arm as she and her assistant Daniel Park made their way down one of Site-034’s main corridors. The overhead fluorescents buzzed faintly, and the tile floors reflected their footsteps back at them in a sterile rhythm.
“Alright,” Elaine said, tapping the pen against her notes. “Permanent containment for the flower girl. I’m thinking reinforced polycarbonate for the viewing window, maybe we can get some guys from the Department of Occult Concerns to ward the chamber. Maybe negative pressure if it turns out she’s aerosolizing anything. Thoughts?”
Daniel blew out a long breath, rubbing his belly through the hem of his lab coat. “Thoughts? My thoughts are that I skipped lunch to do this walk, and now all I can think about is cheeseburgers. Double bacon, extra pickles. Oh, and yeah, yeah, the negative pressure sounds fine.”
Daniel was a short rotund man of Korean-American origins. Elaine had met him during an orientation for containment specialist within Site-034's cafeteria. Daniel had a tendency for humor in unwarranted situations. A quality that Elaine found endearing at times, but that time was not now.
Elaine gave him a look. Daniel grinned, unbothered.
“ Okay… containment, let’s be real. We currently know nothing about it? While I know your enthusiastic about the job, I think we should wait until we get to the temp chamber. Maybe read the experiment reports. Extrapolate from there.”
“Mhm. Fair point.” Elaine scribbled a note. “But, it doesn't hurt to brainstorm before we get there.”
Elaine was an eccentric woman. She was recruited at an early age by a recruiter at a local engineering college. Since then, working for the Authority had become her dream job. The opportunity to work with monsters and strange objects regularly, but to also handle cutting edge technologies and programs excited her. Like her father, she was an engineer at heart.
Elaine and Daniel passed a junction where two ASF patroled by, hands resting lightly on their holstered sidearms. One nodded in greeting; Elaine returned it absentmindedly. Behind them, a pair of junior researchers in pale lab coats were deep in debate about strange chemicals and their origins. The sounds of their conversations mingled in the hallway until the two groups were out of earshot again.
Site-034 was not a grand facility. Three hundred staff, give or take. Its not what the newer recruits pictured when they whispered about the Authority’s bigger sites. It wasn’t meant to be. Site-034 was a laboratory, a place to temporarily hold anomalies, and storage for lesser to Alpha classed anomalies.
Elaine always thought the site had the air of a college campus mixed with an airport terminal. Bulletin boards were cluttered with reminders of safety protocols, but also flyers for sports leagues and recreational activities. The cafeteria that somehow always smelled like burnt coffee.
“So,” Daniel said, his voice lowering as they passed a row of lesser anomalous object lockers. “What are you expecting the entity will be like? You think it'll be overly aggressive?”
Elaine exhaled. “Given the field reports from Papa-5? I'd expect it to be so.”
Daniel made a face. “I hate working with aggressive anomalies. Always feel like they'll break through the observation glass.”
She allowed herself the faintest smile. Together, the two of them walked on, toward Temporary Containment Wing C, where there assignment waited behind steel and polymer. Where they would work hours without end with their colleagues in the Research Division to come up with the perfect containment protocols that suited the anomaly.
At the completion of understanding the entity's capabilities, the creature would earn its new designation. RPC-550, codename: The Flower Child.
Administration Division - Nebraska (USA), Site-024, Administration Offices (1994)
Steve Knowles leaned back in his office chair, a large digital screen displaying a high rise view of the city of Columbus at night illuminated the room from behind him. His office was neat but not sterile, personal touches broke the monotony: framed photographs from his time as a site director, an expensive pen set, a glass decanter that hadn’t been touched in weeks. It was the kind of office that exuded control, it was what was expected of a Regional Director.
Site-034 Director, Thomas Specter, entered without knocking, a thick black folder tucked under a white prosthetic arm. A white translucent cover bore the designation RPC-550 in white.
“You look like hell.” Steve said, smirking as he set his pen down. Thomas was an old friend. He was a slim white male with blonde dyed hair. Long ago, the man standing in front of Director Knowles would sacrifice his own arm during a containment breach to save the director's life. Knowles would repay Specter's sacrifice and through his connections, Specter would receive the most advanced augmetic the local Biomechanical Modules could create.
Thomas dropped into the chair opposite him, exhaling. “Try running a site with four hundred people, three dozen active anomalies, and one dead girl that won’t stay dead. Then tell me how fresh you look Steve.”
Thomas slid the thick folder to Steve. He arched an eyebrow, grabbing the file and flipping it open. “Fair. Let’s see what you have here.”
The pages whispered as Steve scanned the reports. Photographs of floral growths spreading from corpses, autopsy notes, addendums, field transcripts from MST Papa-5, and containment proposals were all registered by Knowles’ eyes. Paragraph upon paragraphs were skimmed through until his eyes lingered on one phrase, mentioned only once during extraneous Papa-5 recordings: The Beast.
He tapped the word with his pen. The phrase cut through paragraphs of documentation. Regional Director Knowles and his colleagues had seen this phrase before, or at least variations.
Thomas nodded. “His name was Francis Collins Michael. Joined up with the Eden's Garden cult back in the 90s. Used his last breaths to reference something called “The Beast”. I think we may have a pattern leading to something big here”
Knowles activated his computer terminal and searched for a file under the tag “Beast”. A file appeared with various differing tags: The Beast, The Mother Beast, The Mother, La Madre con Corazon de Bestía, etc. The file had been compiled by various Regional Directors and personnel who noticed similar themes between various files within the RPC database. He opened it to reveal scattered notes clipped together, pulled from different sites and regions. Vague mentions across RPC files, reports from ACI Case Officers, rumors between agents in the field. A dozen threads, all tied to an unknown.
“It's the second mention of the entity in OPDIS.4,” Steve said. “I've searched the database for whatever this thing could be. I've found nothing. Either the Authority has no knowledge on what this pattern is, or I may not even have the clearance to access such a file.”
Thomas leaned forward. “So what’s the move?”
Steve set his pen down, folding his hands. For a moment, the room was quiet except for the muffled hum of foot traffic outside.
“I'll bring this up at the monthly Regional Directors Association Conference.” He tapped his desk, lips tightening “Hopefully, if we stir up enough of a fuss on the matter we could get the attention of the GDs.”
“Maybe they'll allocate resources into uncovering the mystery.” Regional Director Knowles paused for a moment. “If they haven't already.”
Thomas frowned. “You think they're already aware of the situation?”
“Maybe,” Steve interjected. “but if this Beast is real, if there’s an entity tying these anomalies together, it's better that the Authority be prepared to deal with its related phenomena.” He leaned back again, smirking faintly. “And if it’s nothing? Then we’ve wasted a few memos. I can live with that.”
Thomas chuckled. “Only you could make paranoia sound like a strategy.”
Steve gave him a look. “That’s why you work for me, Thomas. You worry about keeping the lights on at Site-034. I’ll worry about the big picture.”
The two men shared a quiet laugh, but the weight of the unknown lingered between them. The word Beast stared up from the paper in between blocks words, a reminder of something waiting to be found.