Lusus Naturae

Chapter 1: Prologue: The worst that could happen

Lusus Naturae (ˈLuːsʊs Næˈtʊəriː)

A freak, mutant, or monster. Also called: Lusus.

[Latin: 'Freak of Nature']

Prologue: What's the Worst that could Happen?

January 2nd, 2010. Fukushima, Japan. Somewhere in the mountains, 01:25...

As the car drove through the mountainous highway, Kirigaya Minetaka couldn't help but sent a small smile towards the half-asleep form of his wife, their baby daughter in her arms.

Midori had been trying to make little Suguha fall asleep for a couple hours now, so it was only natural that she was feeling so tired. After all, taking your 8+ months old baby in a travel 2 prefectures away from your home wasn't exactly the best, easiest or brightest of ideas, but the woman was simply too paranoid to leave her at home with Minetaka's father.

At the same time, though, Midori had really wanted to spend New Year's Eve with her parents, as this would be the first one the old couple went through after the death of his wife's sister and her husband in that accident months ago, something that had deeply shocked everyone.

Putting the grim thoughts out of his mind, Minetaka took a deep breath and steeled himself, ready to keep driving for at least a couple hours more. They would need to drive for the entirety of next day and probably need to stop at least 3 times before arriving back to Kawagoe.

Meanwhile, quite a distance away from there...and under the earth, things weren't going exactly well for someone else.

(Primary Containment Facility has been breached. Emergency Systems failing. Warning, for the sake of the environment, all specimens must be destroyed...)

If there had been any human down there, in the strange and organic-looking 'factory', they would have been unable to understand a thing of what was being repeated endlessly through the audio systems. Even so, for the tall and strange creature that was running through the burning and exploding area, it was like a mantra of insanity, its 6 lower limbs carrying it through the breaking rooms and collapsing hallways as fast as it could, pushing eye-like buttons and turning down limb-like levers in every single place he went through, its 6 red eyes reflecting panic.

He had screwed up beyond all belief, and now he had to hurry if he wanted to stop a potential Extinction Level Event from happening in this Fate-forsaken planet. After all, if even one of the experiments that he had been taking care of down there made it to the surface, it could spell catastrophe for the hairless apes that were the dominant species of 'Earth', and honestly, after almost 60 of their years watching over them killing each other in stupid wars, inventing television, creating works of art, their pathetic attempts at interplanetary travel, writing masterpieces and slowly killing their planet's atmosphere, he had kind of grown fond of them. It was like a live-action series, only everything was real and he got to see it without direct consequences.

...come to think of it, why had they stationed him to make such dangerous experiments in an inhabited planet like this? Yeah, the resources he could discreetly get from the surface helped, but still, his people should have thinking twice before doing secret operations on a planet where...

The creature's train of thought was interrupted when a triple-secured door blocked his way, his clawed 'hands' quickly working at overdrive to input the codes and open it. This was it, the last, and arguably most dangerous, of the specimens he had been tasked with developing and looking over. Every single other one had been already destroyed, but he couldn't risk 'X-K0940' getting to the surface. Even without an actual Programmed Protocol, that thing's abilities would be deadly enough to doom at least the entire country his lab was under at that moment.