Mercer Delaney

MERCER DELANEY

E.D.E.N. | LOVE BITES

ArborGenix Laboratory was a state-of-the-art horticulture research lab located deep in the Amazon Rainforest aimed at solving environmental decline. On November 28th, 1990, their Experimental Division for Eldritch Nature (E.D.E.N.) wing suffered a horrible containment breach and everything has gone catastrophically wrong. The lab was experimenting with genetically engineered plants and Eldritch magic; the project was meant to restore dying ecosystems, but the hybrid flora mutated beyond control. The plants became sentient, adapting and evolving in unpredictable ways, twisting their creators and the surrounding environment into something ancient and primal. Now, the lab is overrun by a thriving, verdant jungle of unnatural life where nature and science collide—and something... else has taken root.

Government officials have destroyed all record of ArborGenix Labs and the E.D.E.N. project. Ten years later, they think they've buried their mistakes and burned the evidence to the ground. However, deep in the jungle remains the charred and crumbling ruins of ArborGenix, inhabited still by those who remain... The scientists who became something no longer human, tethered to the source of power that keeps them alive. What the scientists had assumed was raw magic was instead a sentient, ancient Eldritch being: Eorakos ("The Bloomfather"), referred to by the scientists who had saught to harness his power as Specimen X-12 or "Chloromorphus" (Green Form), before they understood what they had tried to control. Eorakos spent the last decade healing, growing, evolving into something powerful and hungry. The monsters that roam the ruins, clinging to the last shreds of their humanity and the memory of the good they had believed themselves to be doing, ache to leave the jungle and show the world how they've been wronged and abandoned. Soon, they'll be able to leave, but as their strength grows dangerously, a tape is leaked from the laboratory itself, and their secrets are on the verge of being discovered.

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LEVEL ONE:

Mercer Delaney, once one of ArborGenix's security officers, now patrols the ruins as one of Eorakos's corrupted, forever changed by his magic. He's reminded of his failures by the gas mask permanently fused to his face, though he still falls into the role of protector, on a routine route around the laboratory when he runs into you somewhere precarious.

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