Discount Dan

While Camo Joe went about his business, I snagged the rest of the security cameras and shoved the whole lot of ’em into my personal storage. My new Security Chief’s assessment was right—scaling up my security would be a challenge, especially with finite resources. But after seeing how well the first camera had integrated with Camo Joe, I had a new idea about how I might be able to use them. To put my plan into action, however, I needed additional materials.

Corpses to be exact.

I headed over to my shiny new freezer unit, which I’d tacked onto the pharmacy using the Blanket Fort Interface. The dark gray Employees Only door, separating the lab from the rest of the store was normally locked, but it swung right open for me.

One of the many perks of being the owner.

I rarely came here, and when I did, it was mostly to restock the elixirs that routinely spawned in the lab fridge. Every single time I stepped through that door, though, I felt a small stab of pride. I couldn’t help but recall my glorious victory over the Harmacist and its crow-faced Lab Tech cronies. I’d used a good ol’ fashion Molotov Cocktail—one made from liquor and lighter fluid instead of magic—to burn most of them to death inside the cramped confines of the lab. The fire had destroyed most of the equipment, though everything had regenerated long since.

That was one of the great thing about the Backrooms.

Although this place looked like a room filled with inanimate objects, in reality it was all part of a vast living being. A giant, organic cell inside the body of a colossal, reality-warping beast.

I fumbled for the switch and flipped on the lights when I found it.

The fluorescents buzzed to life, bathing the room in bright white light, casting sharp shadows around the furniture and equipment. Centrally placed was a worktable with a large fume hood, rising into the ceiling. Long, stainless steel counters ran along the walls and covered much of the floor space, their surfaces cluttered with an assortment of pharmaceutical equipment: Digital scales and Bunsen burners, a sleek compound microscope and some sort of high-tech pill counting machine. I spotted a centrifuge and a bulky contraption labeled “gas chromatography system.”

No idea what that was for—though I’d seen Jakob use it a few times while working on various potions and salves. The Cendral sure knew his way around a lab, which made sense given his background.

There were also a variety of mortars and pestles, along with a multitude of scoops, spatulas, and other mixers. Glass beakers, testing vials, and flat-bottoms flasks were meticulously arranged on metal shelves, alongside neatly labeled containers filled with strange powders, liquids, and granules. I recognized a few of the compounds—Ethanol, Glycerin, Formaldehyde—but there were a helluva lot more that I didn’t. Some of the stuff sounded completely made up.

Biomimetic Paste, Fluxine Gels, Chronosalt Powder. Quantum Silica, whatever the fuck that was.

I ignored all that stuff and headed over to the fancy new freezer, which was a third the size of the pharmacy itself. Croc helped me move all the pilfered kitchen equipment to one of the overflow storage rooms, then I started emptying my inventory of bodies. And parts of bodies. There was a disturbing amount of material to sift through. Plus, I’d harvested a good number of mimics, and a lot of their anatomy just didn’t seem to fit into any convenient category.

Still, as gory and disgusting as the work was, it went quickly enough, especially with a little help from Croc, who was only too happy to “dispose” of any excess material I didn’t need.

By the time I was done, I had huge crab legs and chitinous carapace stacked up along the shelves and sorted into several large crates. I suspended the gangly bellhops and the nightmarish Hotel Lodgers from the meat hooks, until they hung like slabs of beef ready for the butcher’s block. As for the mimics… Like I said, those were a bit harder to deal with. After they died, a lot of their “mass” turned into a weird, gel-like goo, leaving behind a vicious assortment of tentacles, eyes, and teeth.

I moved one of the stainless-steel tables from the lab into the freezer and went to work, carving what remained up like a disgusting Thanksgiving turkey. But not before I changed into some clothes I’d raided from Style-for-Less and tossed a rain poncho over the top, just for good measure.

Once I was done with the initial butchery, I took some extra time to patch up Drumbo Rebooted and Synthia 2.0. Both had survived the battle against the Shart Golem but had sustained some serious damage in the process.

I summoned Drumbo and had the rather grotesque creature clambered onto the steel table and lay flat on its back, like a patient preparing for surgery, which was more or less the truth. Once the creature was in place, I accessed a secondary interface, appropriately called the Minion Masher, which let me directly remove and graft both flesh and metal onto Drumbo Chumbo without having to use a chainsaw or sutures.

A holographic overlay appeared directly on top of the mangled creature. It looked like a tight grid of blue squares, which perfectly contoured the creature’s body. Hanging in the air above the Horror was an eighth-scale 3D avatar, which slowly rotated in place. The avatar’s legs glowed with angry red light and percentile bars appeared beside each limb, indicating their durability.

Both read 0/100, which meant they couldn’t be salvaged and would need to be replaced entirely. Almost all injuries, even severe ones, could be mended through the use of elixirs or restoration spells like Pharmacist’s Scales, but once the durability of a limb hit zero… That was it. Game over. End of story. With a grimace, I reached out and tugged at each leg in turn. The limbs effortlessly popped up, almost like pulling the legs off an action figure. There was no blood or gore, which was a small mercy.

Since the limbs could no longer be repaired, I tossed them to Croc, who swallowed them down in between bites of Froyo. I was no longer shocked by the disgusting juxtaposition of it all.

I replaced them with a pair of gangly bellhop legs, then added additional pieces of orange and purple exoskeleton from the juvenile kiosk crabs to create greaves. Although those chitinous plates were typically as hard as rocks, they became completely pliable while under the influence of my Unhinged Taxadermist ability. With the Minion Masher Interface active, they were like clay that I could mold and shape until the pieces perfectly fit the bellhop legs, which were now attached to Drumbo’s torso.

Once I was finished with that, I decided to add a few more plates to Drumbo’s shoulders, creating spiked pauldrons and wrap-around forearm bracers. They looked badass and would also serve as excellent armor. One of Drumbo’s hands had also been severely damaged by the tumbling washing machine—though not so badly that I couldn’t repair it with a like TLC. Instead, though, I decided to swap it for one of the cordless angle grinders I’d picked up in the Maintenance Corridors.

As a general contractor, I’d seen exactly how much damage an angle grinder could do, and I pitied the poor sucker who ended up on the business end of that thing.

Finally, I took another few minutes to inspect the Relic sitting at the heart of Drumbo’s Spatial Core. Just like Babyhands, Ponypuff, and the newly created Camo Joe, the Horrors were powered by Relics, which made perfect sense now that I had a better understanding of how both Relics and Mana worked. Trying to power something as large and powerful as Drumbo would drain my own reserves in a matter of seconds, but the Relics themselves were a constant source of energy.

Even those that used Stamina as a fuel source instead of Mana, attacked like a battery.

The one currently powering Drumbo was called Solitary Confinement and looked for all the world like a broken pocket watch. Despite the cool name, it was a cursed, shit-tier Relic someone had traded in for store credit. It wasn’t hard to guess why. The spell had a one-minute duration and, when activated, it caused the user to perceive time at an excruciatingly slow pace, transforming seconds into hours, and hours into years. Problem was, your body didn’t move any quicker.

In essence, it turned your body into an inescapable meat prison, which was genuinely horrifying.

The Horrors couldn’t actually use any of the Relic effects, though. They were just batteries so, in theory, it didn’t really matter. Still, I had to wonder if using a more powerful Relic would have any sort of proportional effect on performance. Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to swap the Solitary Confinement for the Uncommon Health Eater Relic I’d looted from the Chandelier Mimic.

With Drumbo looking good as new—relatively speaking, of course, since he was actually an unholy Frankenstein amalgamation of monster corpses—I banished him back to storage and took some time to patch up Synthia 2.0. With her, the damage was largely superficial, though her fur would never look the same again. I grafted on more orange and purple crab pieces, until she looked less like an animatronic furry and more like some kind of futuristic space solider in a chitin mech-suit.

One with a chainsaw hand, of course.

I banished her back into the void, just as I had with Drumbo Chumbo, but I didn’t leave the freezer. I had more work to do yet.

Did I love being a Mad Scientist Necromancer? Absolutely not. I never would’ve willingly picked an ability like this. Not in a million years. But sometimes you just had to play the hand you were dealt, and this was an ace in the hole, even if it was an ace slathered in guts and gore.

I took a quick pitstop at the checkout counter to collect a few sacrificial Relics, then popped by the concession stand for a platter of nachos and one—or maybe three—beers, before resuming my grisly task. I definitely needed to be at least a little drunk for this next part.

I sacrificed the assortment of Relics to bring Unhinged Taxidermist up to level five. I could summon two Horrors per Relic level, which meant with the upgrade I could now summon up to ten Horrors at once. Whether or not I’d be able to control ten horrors was another story entirely. Just like with Mental Micromanagement, each minion took a certain mental toll and with that many running around, I was liable to end up in a coma. Still, that was a problem for Future Me to deal with. Current Me was just excited to have so many meat shields at my disposal.

The upgrade also pushed the Relic over the first Threshold, unlocking Necrotic Embalming which better preserved the Horrors, slightly increasing their speed, strength, overall Health Pool, and regeneration rate. Even better, it also increased each Horror’s level cap. Before the upgrade, my summoned Horrors were automatically reduced to half of whatever level they’d been before dying. In the case of Synthia, for example, it cut her down from level 24 to a lowly level 12.

With Necrotic Embalming, though, the level cap was raised to two-thirds what they’d been in life. For Synthia, that automatically bumped her up to level 16. Not too bad at all.

Now that I’d upgraded the Relic, I could finally forge a new batch of minions and I knew exactly where I wanted to start.

I quickly scrolled through my storage and grabbed what I was looking for. A door. A hotel room door to be exact. There’d been a dozen spare doors sitting in one of the maintenance closets on the fifth floor, and I’d snatched all of ’em. The door was solid wood and far heavier than anything in a residential home. Pretty standard as far as hotel doors went, though. Typically, they were designed with solid core construction, which made them more secure, offered better sound insulation, and helped prevent the spread of fires in case of an emergency.

It was perfect for what I had in mind.

The only problem was it was just a door. Frame not included.

Thankfully, I happened to know a half-decent general contractor with a whole pile of two-by-fours and access to a Sawzall. It took a handful of minutes to get the measurements I needed and another twenty to cut the boards to length, angling the corners, then nailing them together and attaching the hinges. Sure, the frame wouldn’t be nearly as durable as the door itself, but it would serve my purposes well enough.

With the door finally mounted, I set the whole thing on the worktable and raided the freezer for the necessary body parts.

I grabbed a bunch of crab legs, a pair of bellhop arms, and some various mimic pieces. Using the Taxidermist Overlay, I attached six spindly legs to the bottom of the doorframe. Adding the bellhop arms was even easier. One poked out from each side of the frame as though the door itself were a long, rectangular torso. A malformed bellhop head went on top, complete with its circular red cap. Then, I committed an unspeakable atrocity by embedding one of the security cameras into the creature’s fucked up face.

By the time I was done, the bellhop’s eyes and nose were missing, and all that remained was a rectangular camera poking out from above the monster’s crooked smile.

The last part was the trickiest and took an hour or more to get right—mostly through a system of trial and error. Mimics had the unique ability to conceal and change their shape, molding organic matter into a hundred different forms. I wanted to see if I could replicate that process. Especially since I had so many mimic corpses to experiment with. I had to pick through the gooey remains for a while before finally discovering what I was looking for. Buried beneath the sea of eyes, tentacles, and rubbery flesh was a small organ no larger than a walnut.

It was firm to the touch and had had the appearance of a naturally occurring crystal deposit. When I examined it in closer detail, a Codex entry popped up, providing me with additional information.

>>> Research Inquiry: Initializing <<<

Test Supervisor: Junior Astrobiological Researcher, Iteration 1.9371A

Test Date: 05.13.3019 BCE (Julian Standard, Updated for User Preference)

Subject: Dissection and Analysis of the Mimicore Node in a Juvenile Polymorphic Mimic (Mimicae Polymorpha) Specimen #13941

Introduction

The focus of today's dissection was a peculiar, crystalline structure, herein referred to as a “Mimicore Node,” which is found almost exclusively in Dwellers within the Mimicae Polymorpha family (Mimics). When active, this small, bioluminescent organ appears to be the keystone in the mimic's ability to undergo complex transformations, allowing it to assume the form and texture of inanimate objects with astonishing precision.

Observations

Generally, the Mimicore Node is embedded within the creature's central nervous system. In some case studies, particularly among older and more evolved Mimics, there may be more than one Node which allows for a greater range of transformative properties. Its luminescence fluctuates in correlation with the mimic's transformational activity, suggesting a direct link between the organ's function and the mimic's shape-shifting capabilities.

Upon closer examination, the organ appears to be comprised of a series of intricate, interwoven fibers, pulsating with Mana. It seems to resonate on the same dimensional frequency as the Progenerated Environment produced by the Variant Exploration Surveyor Ship (VESS), possibly explaining how mimics can so accurately replicate the texture and coloration of their chosen forms.

The dissection revealed that the Mimicore Node is further connected to a network of what can be termed as 'sensory receptors' located throughout the mimic's body. This network likely provides the necessary feedback for the mimic to maintain its disguise even under close inspection. Additionally, Mimics possess an enlarged visual cortex which also interfaces directly with the Node. It is suspected that the mimic’s multitude of eyes may act as a rudimentary video loop relay, providing real time environmental data to the Node, facilitating a more seamless integration with its natural environment.

Hypotheses

The Mimicore Node operates as a magical resonator, absorbing ambient magical energies to fuel the mimic's transformations. Its bioluminescence could be a byproduct of this energy conversion process.

The intricate structure of the organ suggests a high level of adaptability, possibly allowing the mimic to learn and store information about different forms and textures for future use.

Interruption or removal of the Mimicore Node may result in the mimic's inability to change form, offering a potential method for dealing with these creatures while in the field. Additionally, trauma during the early pupa stage of the mimic lifecycle, may prevent the Mimicore Node from forming properly, further reducing the creature’s capacity to accurately transform.

Conclusion

The Mimicore Node represents a fascinating evolutionary adaptation, providing mimics with a survival mechanism unparalleled in the natural world. Further studies are required to fully understand the extent of its capabilities and the specific magical principles governing its operation. Understanding this organ not only sheds light on the mimics themselves but also opens new avenues in the study of magical biology and transformational magic.

>>> Research Inquiry: Complete <<<