Sure, Dark Lament has its share of Necanthropes going crazy or rogue, but if entire projects backfire in some spectacular fashion, it is always Karma who end up in the line of fire.
Does really just the biogenetics department have such a bad track record while the Ebb users can do no wrong?
Where are they, the Dark Lament equivalents to the artificial lifeforms reproducing uncontrollably, to the soul-eating rotting killer cyborgs, or the psychotic blind dog monsters?
We went looking for them:
Heartseeker Suit
The Heartseeker was designed as an upgraded version of the standard Deathsuit with improved passive protection. The intent was to achieve parity in damage resistance with ultra-heavy armours and advanced Karma creations such as the Vevaphon. At the core of the new suit’s capabilities lay a suite of pre-formulated glyphs which were not so much to absorb the energy of blows as to channel it away from vital areas, transforming what would be deep penetrating wounds to superficial trauma.
Laboratory experiments were promising and initial batches of the Heartseeker were distributed for field testing and as rewards to loyal operatives.
Based on casualties sustained, the suits’ field performance, while not catastrophic, fell short of expectations and the tests were quietly cancelled. To save face in light of the first anouncements, the Heartseeker was released to the market as a limited production version but the great media campaign was abandoned.
The main parameter that had been used to determine the Heartseekers performance was the number of combat fatalities in the test group. Due to the nature of operative missions, the reasons for any such deaths could often not be ascertained and thus were not fully analysed. The actual flaw in the Heartseeker went unnoticed.
Indeed, the energy redistribution matrix worked as intended, preventing grievous injury to the wearer. At least until Flux was fed into the suit. Then, the activated matrix would suddenly unload, causing the concentrated damage it had previously helped to avoid.
A Heartseeker Suit is identical to a standard Deathsuit with the following exceptions:
The wearer of the Heartseeker does not take wounds from penetrating hits.
A tally of the number of times the wearer has been hit should be kept. As soon as a Protect ability with an associated Flux cost is activated (e.g., restoring lost ID to the suit or increasing its PV), the wearer immediately suffers one wound per hit ever taken by the Heartseeker.
A Heartseeker Suit costs 2,350c.