After the players discovered the still living but unresponsive body of Julius Corple, naked and attached to a room sized mass of glowing tissue, they took his keycard and left him to his fate. Using his keycard to open the door marked "Alien Weapons Division", they found a a short hallway, a locked door and a computer screen prompting them to enter a password. They still had not discovered what the password was, but my players rarely let little details like that stop them. Logan teleported to the other side of the door, only to find himself in another long hallway. An alarm started blaring and a deathbot (look for this fiendish robot in an upcoming Bestiary post) emerged from a hatch in the ceiling. The player of Logan's character had not two sessions earlier lost his previous character to a different deathbot, and indeed, the entire party very nearly died in that encounter. Finding himself alone and facing the four armed, grenade spewing monstrosity he teleported back out of there, and fast.
Fast Forward to the next session:
This time, Millard Filmore was in attendance, and he decided to use his telepathic abilities to make contact with the catatonic Julius Corple. With the curious party clustered around watching, Millard worked his magic. He instantly realized that he was in a little over his head (out of his head?). He found that he was actually making contact with two intelligences, that of Julius Corple and that of an immensely powerful alien intellect. Corple's mind had been nearly totally subsumed by the alien thought processes, and at first Millard could get hardly more than fragmentary thoughts. Millard reported to the rest of the party that the organic tissue behind the glass walls of the room was apparently a vast brain or organic computer. The party had learned about the existence of organic computers (essentially disembodied, artificially created alien brains that served the Oozyxphg for all their computing needs) earlier in their explorations, but they had never heard of one this large. Millard was concerned, because the alien thought processes being generated by the huge mass of tissues seemed to be "waking up", and he felt the alien mind begin to reach out and tentatively explore his own thoughts. Pulses of energy began to run through the massive alien brain in great, rhythmic waves. However, Millard bravely continued his efforts and began to establish a rapport with the mind of Julius Corple. Corple seemed confused and defensive, and a mental barrier, something that was causing Corple feelings of intense shame, was preventing Millard from making further headway. The rest of the party began to be alarmed as the intensity and frequency of the energy pulses running through the organic tissues surrounding them continued to pick up.
Meanwhile, Millard had finally made a breakthrough with Julius Corple. He had penetrated the wall of guilt and shame and discovered that Corple had caused the downfall of the military complex by secretly constructing this massive organic computer. He learned that at first, Corple had been able to control the alien intellect and used it make quick strides in understanding and reverse engineering Oozyxphg technology. Corple was the rising star of the resistance movement, and his breakthroughs seemed to signal a shift in the tide of battle against the Oozies. Unfortunately, Corple eventually lost control of his creation. The last time he connected himself to it, it overpowered his brain and left his body an empty shell. The room-sized brain reached out telepathically and made contact with the nearest Oozyxphgian organic computers. It coordinated an assault with the Oozies; first, it used its incredible mental powers to seize control of the men stationed in the main security control chamber in the hangar level. It had these possessed pawns release a deadly nerve gas throughout the complex, then disabled the nuclear power generators and physically cut the cables connecting the control chamber to the rest of the facility. Then, when most of the men in the facility were dead from the nerve toxin and the security systems were disabled, the Oozies opened a wormhole from their planet directly into the hangar level using the coordinates that the brain had given them. A massive alien cannon strafed the military vehicles, melting them into piles of twisted metal. Oozies in their robotic suits poured through the wormhole and within minutes the complex was abandoned by the resistance.
During this entire ordeal, Corple was conscious of everything the brain was doing but was powerless to stop it. The Oozies did not take the brain or any of the other Oozy technology sequestered in the base - they may have reasoned that it might have been trapped, or they might simply not have cared enough to bother. In any case, both the brain and Corple lay undisturbed for hundreds of years, sustained by the energy generated by the brain's "batteries" (small areas of wormhole generating tissue that linked up with a massive mat of tissue soaking in a nutrient rich solution on a far off alien world). Corple's body was kept alive by the brain, which needed to be connected to something to function (a safeguard that Corple had built in when he constructed it). Centuries trapped inside an alien mind with the weight of hundreds of deaths on his conscience had driven Corple quite mad, but the contact with Millard seemed to be doing him good as his thoughts had become more coherent and more distinct from the alien thought processes of the giant brain.
Once Millard had learned this history from Corple's disembodied mind, he asked Corple for the password to the Alien Weapon Division, telling him that it would help in the fight against the Oozies. Just then, the alien brain flexed its figurative muscles and attempted to possess Millard - I needed to roll a 3 or higher to succeed on the mental attack roll, but luckily for the party, I came up with a 2! Corple told Millard the password and the party yanked Corple's body free from the brain, ran up the ladder and dropped a bunch of grenades down to blow the brain to kingdom come.
Unfortunately for the party, around that time is when they began to run into the Warangutans and ended up fleeing the complex before they ever actually got into the Alien Weapons Division, so that tempting chestnut remains uncracked. The party took Corple's body (which seemed to be just as catatonic as ever and Millard was unable to establish any contact with his mind) to Skinny Butt and left it in the care of a skilled mutant healer.
Under the care of the healer, Corple eventually regained consciousness just as he began to show the symptoms of the FDF7 virus. He survived the virus but manifested quite a few mutations, including a second brain that grew out of the side of his head. He was last seen, after grabbing the deathly sick body of Laura Hazelton (a soldier from the complex who had survived to the present in cryostasis only to be revived by the party and succumb to the FDF7 virus), flying over the swamp in the direction of the military complex.
Once the party learns more about his present goals and activities, I will post more!
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