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ACCESSING FILE: PERSONAL LOGS OF DR. T. WINDOLF
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17/09/57
Web of Corruption: Regarding the Transformation and Flight of Daniel Obrove; Or, Splice and Dice; Or, Sticky Situation; Or, Got 99 Problems and These Legs Are Several of Them
One hundred years ago, the burgeoning mining colony of Kudzu City was in a desperate predicament. As the city continued to expand, it seemed more and more abnormal beasts and monsters were drawn to it from the surrounding arid wastelands. At the time, the settlement had fewer empowered defenders than it did today. Even with their remarkable abilities, they were struggling to hold the monsters back.
Enter Dr. Thomas Windolf, a scientist obsessed with his pursuit of a basic, essential, metaphysical substance of living beings. Through collaboration with the superheroine Siphon, he was able to create a machine which mimicked her power to draw forth what he believed was the substance he had been seeking.
Essence for all intents and purposes seemed to be an organism’s intrinsic material, isolated from the body and reduced to a fluid form. The doctor and his team were afforded a new avenue for understanding life in the universe, and more importantly, they found a possible salvation for the struggling Kudzu City.
The researchers discovered that mixing and matching different essences with different bodies could give an individual new traits and abilities. The plan was to infuse human beings with the essence of the creatures from the badlands in order to enhance them. These hybrids could then support the heroes already allied with the city. Before they could begin, however, they needed human test subjects.
The first of these experimentees would be the man known as Daniel Obrove. Formerly a mail courier for the Kudzu City Postal Service, his life changed forever when his route lead him to cross paths with the scientists’ acquisition team. He was kidnapped, locked up, and then injected with the essence of a terrifying spider monster.
Things went well, at first. All things considered, living under the doctor’s care wasn’t as bad as delivering packages in a city constantly at risk of being smashed up by a rampaging creature. The doses of essence were initially painful, but over time Daniel’s tolerance for pain increased with his strength and speed.
Then came the ill effects--the vomiting, the double vision, the nagging
tug at the edge of Daniel’s consciousness. He believed that if he was allowed to follow the insistent whispers, maybe they would stop. The scientists couldn’t let him leave though, not when they were so close to understanding the full effects of monster’s essence on a person’s body. Maybe the final dose would cure Daniel of what ailed him; maybe he was merely “incomplete” without the final injection. With it, the sickness would subside and he could become fully realized as Kudzu City’s first monster-hybrid hero. Or perhaps his symptoms were his body rejecting such a large sample of foreign essence. If it killed him, then the scientists would know to not push things so far in the future. They would record their findings, dispose of the subject, move onto the next series of experiments. Business as usual.
Unfortunately, that sequence of events was disrupted when Daniel, driven by some strange instinct, wrapped himself in a web chrysalis. The creature that emerged possessed an unprecedented amount of strength, enough to break down his cell doors and move about the facility uninhibited as he desperately tried to follow the growing voices in his mind. Many of the researchers and staff were killed, including Dr. Windolf. When the metamorphosed Daniel Obrove stumbled out of the lab and into the city, it was a simple matter of scaling the buildings and working his way toward the badlands before any heroes could be alerted.
That was one hundred years ago. Since his escape, Daniel Obrove has been zig-zagging across the wastes outside of Kudzu City, avoiding detection and hibernating some decades at a time to try and escape the maddening voices in his head. The compulsion to move farther west was strong, but Daniel was torn between giving into the call and trying to preserve the scrap of humanity which bound him to his home. He couldn’t go back, but he wasn’t ready to go forward. Instead, he rested. Sleep was all Daniel could do to hold back the slow fracturing of his mind, to quell the crescendoing call of the wastes. Time would tell whether man or monster would triumph in the sad case of Daniel Obrove.
Appendix A; Or, A Mind Unwound; Or, The Anatomy of the Common Man-Spider; Or, Additional Information
Daniel Obrove was 22 years old at the time of his capture and transformation, and is therefore now 122 years old. The spider’s essence granted him a prevailing youthful appearance to go with his unnatural longevity, hard as it may be to tell under all the chitin and extra eyes.
Daniel Obrove was six feet tall at the time of his transformation, but obviously he can reach quite a bit taller now thanks to his horrible spider limbs. If something is too high up for him to reach, his legs and arms can adhere to most surfaces, or he can spin a web to assist his climb.
The image provided is Daniel at the moment of the cocoon’s hatching. The bloody, pulpy substance shown is the shredded remains of his lower human half. As Daniel slumbered in the pod, his legs fused together as the arachnid limbs and organs formed just beneath the skin. Eventually these structures grew and split the remaining sheath of skin apart. Unpleasant maybe, but Daniel was asleep through all of it. Now he only wishes he had remained that way.
In order to hibernate, Daniel Obrove creates a web cocoon similar to the one he first transformed in. Sleeping offers the benefit of shutting out the incessant whispers which trouble Daniel, and he is capable of remaining in stasis for decades at a time, so as far as he’s concerned staying asleep is a pretty good way to exist.
Since his escape, Daniel usually only emerges from his hibernation to feed. He is instinctively adept at spinning webs, but because he often rests in caves and other secluded areas, more often than not he has to hunt food himself. Feeding is accomplished by draining a creature of blood, liquefying its insides, or on the rare occasion, swallowing it whole. There are few human beings wandering the wastes outside of Kudzu City, but Daniel is immensely guilty for having to take
any life to sate his new body’s cravings. Which, of course, only contributes further to the gradual decomposition of his shattered psyche.
Daniel Obrove possesses an extended esophageal tract running through his human torso before ending at the stomach in his spider half. A “pseudo-stomach” sac-like organ is located along his esophagus under his human abdomen, for storage of prey when his true stomach is over capacity. The chitin plates covering his front lower half can stretch apart slightly if Daniel is required to house larger meals. Why anyone would want to know this, we aren’t sure. Hasn’t he suffered enough? Why are you asking such personal questions?
The pincers peeking out of Daniel Obrove’s mouth contain glands for two varieties of venom. One inflicts a paralyzing effect on his victims, while the other performs the pre-digestion of a meal’s insides, should Daniel be driven to that grisly route of feeding. The paralyzing venom also inflicts the same mental tug and hallucinatory whispers that Daniel experiences any time he is conscious, though only temporarily. If someone were somehow to survive an encounter with Daniel, his venom would not transform them into a spider monster like him. That’s completely absurd.
As more and more spider essence was introduced to Daniel Obrove’s body, he became capable of producing webs from his mouth. With his transformation, he can also make webs from the spinnerets located on his spider abdomen.
Daniel Obrove is not at risk of further physical transformations; he is not in danger of completely turning into a giant spider, at least not without further injections of spider-monster anima. The danger of encountering him comes from the fact that the trauma of his past and present experience has drastically deteriorated his mind. Though he is extremely guilty for having to take lives in order to feed, that won’t stop him from doing so in order to get back to hibernating as soon as possible.
Despite the disastrous results of that initial experiment, other scientists have continued Dr. Windolph’s work with...varying success. The machine and the research notes survived, and it was determined that merely using smaller doses could allow for a more stable hybrid transformation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Most times, the subject goes mad and either flees the city to follow the whispered call westward, or they remain and become a supervillain.
Kudzu City’s science community has an overall obsession with studying the creatures of the badlands, which has contributed largely to the rise of many of its supervillains. A researcher splices his essence with a monster’s or becomes transformed through some other folly, and then goes on to wreck up the city he or she once called home. The science organizations are very secretive about their operation, though, so most assume the villains simply come mostly out of nowhere.
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
The man-spider Daniel Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of blacksmith Danielle Obrove. He is not her former life, her blood relative, or a close acquaintance. He’s the Obrove if Obrove were a former mail courier cruelly twisted by Kudzu City’s mad science underbelly, while
the allomancer is Obrove in the form of a magical metalworker seeking to distract herself from her wife’s death!
More Obrove iterations can be found on their alt list,
here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!
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what day is it
i cant i cant i cant find my way out i cant i tried to ask for the way out but they
hurt me so i hurt them back
i need to go i cant stay i need to but i cant find the way out i need to go hes calling pulling pulling pulling i am we are unfinished i cant stay here anymore i need to go i cant
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