Venoms call

By: Khalid Posted on: August 24, 2005

Taken from the research journal of Khalid Yusef.

Lord Piridon,

After 40 some odd years of research, luck and trial and error I have finally managed to extract the secrets from the Loki venom with the help of Paine and your fellow chaos lord, Buul. I believe that ultimately this research will lead to a new and interesting weapon to use on the mortal masses.

To understand the difference between Loki and other venoms one first has to understand how venom works in general. Most venoms fall in to two distinct categories, ones that affect the blood such as syctherus or Notechis and ones that affect the nervous system and muscles such as curare and Camus. Occasionally you'll find one that falls in between those ranges such as Voyria which affects blood, muscles, organs and synapses. Now, for the important part! All venoms contain a set amount of amino acids and digestive enzymes that allows each venom to accomplish its task. For a simple example: Curare, let's say its makeup is: ABCDE with each letter standing for a different amino acid or enzyme and its that EXACT makeup that allows the venom to work. if you added something or took something away the venom could either be greatly diminished or completely ineffective. Loki on the other hand after careful examination contains EVERY known amino and enzyme and in NO set formation. Its basically an ineffective "soup" until it hits the bloodstream of the prey.

With the help of the Chaos Lord Buul and his highly trained medical staff the secrets eventually began to flow. Using Vials of Loki and dissecting ophidian venom glands to procure enough knowledge to start the process, we found The secret to how Loki works is in three mystery chemicals that were finally identified and their effects found out some 10 years after the soup finding. It would appear that the rumors surrounding Loki are true, it does indeed carry the element of chaos with it. Three to be exact. After testing every substance we could find in the chaos realm itself we could find no exact match, However we were able to find similar substances with similar effects. In my best educated guess I would have to say this venom was in fact engineered rather than a product of natural evolution. how and why it ended up in the prime material plane remains yet another unsolved mystery. But I Digress. After extensive testing the purpose of each of the three chemicals was ascertained. The first of the three was also the simplest, its job is simply to react with blood to trigger the second chemical. The second chemical and the most important for future use as a weapon has a mutational or warping effect. In the case of the Loki venom its job is to warp/mutate the soup to produce known venom strings from the amino acid and enzyme soup which explains its highly random and diverse effects. Now for the kicker, the third chemicals sole purpose is as an inhibitor on the second (leading to my second hunch that its engineered and not natural after all why would it need an inhibiting agent?), we played around with this a bit on a few live mhun subjects using refined or altered Loki venom. when removed completely the second chemical dubbed "Eris' gift" goes completely berserk often times creating effects unheard of and that we couldn't even begin to recreate on our own. In one of the most gruesome Loki tests the third mhun subject was reduced to a pool of organic goo in the space of around 15 minutes. it seemed a most excruciating way to die. A shame it cant be reliably reproduced. The other four fared no better and were subsequently "put down" due to noise considerations.

Separating these three chemicals out turned out to be a bit easier than originally thought. Lord Buul came up with the idea of spinning the vials to separate out its components. he has a most amusing little contraption for just such purposes however I was not allowed to touch it or even get close to it so I have no idea how to make one of my own. the three chemicals are somewhat more dense and heavier than the rest of the Loki components and will eventually settle to the bottom as 3 distinct wafer thin layers of viscous ooze. we currently have a stock of 5 vials of chemical one, 2 vials of chemical 2 and 2 vials of Eris' gift. discrepancies in numbers is the natural result of testing and the fact the chemical one has no real application at this point. while this may seem like a large amount of effort for little payoff I must remind you that it only takes a minute amount of Eris' gift to get the job done.

I believe we have something very important here! However since I lack the resources needed and Lord Buul took back the space I was using for one of his own personal projects I also write to ask for help. I'm going to need more assistant's, Paine has been helping me so far but im going to need much more help for the live subject portions. If you could send me perhaps a dozen or more of your more "specialized" servant's it would greatly help the cause. In addition to these servants im going to need facilities in which to conduct the experiments where noise and screaming or the occasional escaped subject will go unnoticed. thus I also request access to your financial reserves to build a two story underground medical lab beneath the dunes of the mhojave. once these are complete I can properly turn my attention to creating either a biological weapon or at the very least a tool to twist the existing masses and who knows we may inadvertantly create something completely unexpected tinkering around with life like this.

Your loyal servant,
the Sandstalker.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:
- due to sheer numbers mhuns and humans would make the best and easiest to obtain test subjects. however I intend to gather at least a few of every other race for testing purposes.

- Pineal gland harvesting has been stepped up as Servelan's research may prove to be useful in the next step. however its all speculation at this point as to its usefulness