359: Frontier

ENTRY 359: Frontier

"The truth has always been out there. We just have to go find it."
- William Scully

There is a rumor in the Firewall network, passed from ego to ego, the stories sometimes growing in the telling. The ultimate failsafe, if all else goes wrong - a colony on an exoplanet, a final refuge where transhumanity can retreat, should the inconceivable happen again. Not to make a final stand, but to walk through and bury the gates behind them, to close the door on the solar system for good - because transhumanity is bigger than Earth, more important than sentimental attachment to the sun that birthed it. Survival, at any cost.

There is a truth to the rumor, though it is stranger than any of the stories make it out to be. When gatecrashing began in earnest, Firewall stumbled upon a single set of coordinates that all of the known gates had in common. They found there a near-Earth compatible world with over two dozen active gate devices, a hub in the gate network. The first gatecrashers dubbed the exoplanet Frontier. If not for what else they found there, perhaps Firewall would have let it become the new home for transhumanity.

Frontier is an uninhabited world - but it was not always so. The gate complex stands in the midst of a vast prairie-type landscape, a broad sea of grass on a continent the size of Australia. Massive, far-separated pylons dominate the landscape surrounding the gate complex, geothermal-powered terraforming stations that spew out nanites to shape the land, water, and air to something else. Estimates suggest they have been running at least two hundred Earth years. Yet there are no signs of habitation, no structures at all besides the gates and the pylons - except overhead.

Hanging above the planet are the remains of a stellar empire built by an extraterrestrial race. Broken rings, cracked cylinders, and dying satellites circle the world in a belt of space trash, and every night is marked by the burning debris as decaying orbits bring the detritus falling back to the surface. Samples recovered are, relative to Earth technology, primitive - spacecraft and habitats built by a society with four arms and four-fingered hands that counted in hexidecimal and had barely mastered the transistor, but in such profusion that they represent hundreds of years of sustained exploration and colonization of space...using technology equivalent to the first Earth astronauts.

Cleary, these alien astronauts did not build the gates. Equally obvious, whatever race did build the gate complex and terraformers on Frontier, they never moved in. Some Firewall xenoarchaeologists suggest that there was a glitch in the terraform software, and that the nanoswarms removed or cannibalized any structures for raw materials. Others suggest that the terraforming was abandoned when it became clear that the planet was inhabitated...or they simply hadn't moved in yet. Until the mystery is resolved, Firewall has kept a low-impact presence on Frontier. There are still protocols in place for transhumanity to retreat here in the event of an extinction event, and storehouses of raw materials, information, and technology have been established in preparation of such an event, but until such time as the mystery of what happened is resolved, Frontier is not acceptable as a colony site...not yet.

Using Frontier

A mystery, wrapped in an engima, through an artificial wormhole. Frontier may represent the great hope of transhumanity - or the most direct threat to its existence. Even if answers to what happened to the two races whose technological remains have been found on the planet can be found, there is no guarantee that transhumanity will like the them. There's a strong possibility, though few even at Firewall will admit this, that the sudden intrusion of the gate complex led more or less directly to the downfall or disappearance of a race that had obviously been space-capable for longer than transhumanity. If this is the case, Firewall needs to know. The only question is - are the player characters game to explore this Frontier?

Seed

• Firewall has manufactured an emergency shutdown test at Extropia, which will leave the Pandora Gate "sealed" for several hours - long enough for them to run an evacuation drill and see if their current protocols are sufficient for moving a substantial population of transhumans and associated equipment through the gate to Frontier. The PCs are assigned roles to assist, and move through the gate with the others as part of the mock-evacuation. However, something goes wrong - the sudden appearance of so many transhumans on Frontier appears to have activated several of the pylons on the other side, and caused the gates to temporarily lock. Cut off from home and with no obvious chain of command and potential immenient threat, what will the PCs do?

358: Honour Stitch

ENTRY 358: Honour Stitch

"Jaeger Heinrich saved this habitat. We honor him by making him a part of us - through him, we live; through us, part of him will continue to live."
- Surgeon General, Opening Invocation

While a romantic concept, for the most part transhumanity hasn't attached substantial emotional attachment to organ donars since about the time transplant surgery became reliably survivable. Despite the imaginations and fears of writers and the superstitious, the hands of murderers do not influence the receiver beyond the grave, much less their bone marrow or tendons. Today, only the most superstitious or bigoted attach any particular importance to the donor as long as it's a match - and with the popularity and availability of cloned organs, even those points are mostly moot.

There are exceptions. In the Brittany A.V. scumbarge, a scarcity of clonal technology means that organ harvesting is much more common, and by local regulation transplant organs are individually tagged so that they and their donor histories are visible in augmented reality for medtechs. In the neo-Islamic community on Proteus, where clans and corporate holdings overlap strongly, adopted family members are only accepted if they share some of the blood and flesh of the clan - new members marrying in typically swap kidneys if their blood types are compatible. However, the most prominent of these romantic traditions is the Honour Stitch - most popular among the Mercurials and in the Jovian Republic.

The Honour Stitch are organs and, less commonly, personal augmentations harvested from the most lauded heroes of the habitats and societies. Most, though not all, of the transhuman donors died in combat, sometimes in conflicts predating the Fall, and the organs are genefixed and universal donor-compatible. The transhumans chosen to carried an Honour Stitch - named for the notable scar purposefully left by the surgery - are selected based on demonstrated service in the spirit of the individual whom the donated organ or augmentation came from. Most Mercurials and Jovians consider an Honour Stitch the highest commendation that a living transhuman can receive, and the stitchbearers are accorded considerable status in their communities, and those who prove unworthy of carrying an Honour Stitch soon find themselves relieved of it...without anesthetic, and often without being sewn up afterwards.

Mechanics

In place of a typical Rep award of 5 points or more, a character may be offered an Honour Stitch. This is an implanted donor organ or personal augmentation of a fallen hero - no, the PC doesn't get to pick which one. An Honour Stitch is worth double the original Rep award, but only applies if the PC is is in the biomorph with the Honour Stitch - if they resleeve without taking the Honour Stitch with them, the Rep bonus is lost. Likewise, if the Honour Stitch is ever destroyed, the Rep bonus is also lost.

Using Honour Stitch

Most Rep rewards are just a couple of points added on to a statistic. Honour Stitches are a way to make such a reward more visceral and material, and can combine a Rep award with a minor personal augmentation like a drug gland or cyberclaws. However, given the restrictions on resleeving, this option is probably best for Jovians or other characters that don't resleeve frequently.

Seed

• Stitchbearer Marshall Yul Nagoya was a hero of the Jovian Republic who served the state well before defecting - and worse, taking with him an Honour Stitch: the Eyes of Jules (cybereyes that provide Enhanced Vision, Nanovision, and a complementary Oracles nanoinfection). The PCs are hired to get them back, no matter how.

357: Cupella

ENTRY 357: Cupella

"Enforcer and cleaner. Affiliate of the Pax Familiae. Suspected in 18 fatal industrial accidents in the Morningstar Constellation. Reputation: Solid. Trademark: Uncommunicative. Nickname: Cat Mother."
- Stellar Intelligence, At a Glance: Cupella

The swarmoid that answers to the name Cupella is a high-functioning autistic assassin, believed by most crime analysts to have been built off a highly-pruned fork of a former member of Pax Familiae. Most reports give their M.O. as extremely indirect - rather than engage targets directly, Cupella typically arranges accidents using custom-built or modified equipment, often designed to minimize other loss of life, though the swarmoid doesn't appear to care much for "property damage" so long as the egos can be resleeved. Primarily a solo asset, coworkers of Pax Familiae report that Cupella never speaks or communicates in any way, and the only vocalization or response they give off is a kind of purring noise when happy.

When not "on the job," Cupella is believed to retreat to specially-prepared living quarters where the swarmoid can interact with their eight pet smart cats and indulge in repeated use of narcoalgorithms provided for by handlers in Pax Familiae. Each of these felines is an uplift in its own right, often with numerous augmentations, and help to care and protect for their beloved 'Cat Mother.' Some analysts go so far as to believe that it is the cats that accept and plan all of Cupella's missions, though the evidence for this is slim and somewhat conflicting.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
11	12	10	20	12	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	40	8	80	30	6	45

Morph: Swarmoid

Skills: Animal Handling (Cats) 30, Art: Found Art 25, Beam Weapons 20, Climbing 22, Demolitions 24, Disguise 18, Free Fall 18, Flight 18, Fray (Full Defense) 20, Hardware: Armorer 20, Hardware: Electronics 20, Hardware: Industrial 24, Interests: Crime Scene Investigation 14, Interests: Felines 24, Interfacing 16, Language: Native Italian 84, Language: English 84, Networking: Criminal 23, Profession: Cleaner 30, Protocol 15, Scrounging 14, Spray Weapons 20 

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Carapace Armor, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Mnemonic Augmentation, Skillwires, Swarm Composition

Traits: Addiction (Narcoalgorithms, Moderate), Animal Empathy, Mental Derangement (Autistic)

Using Cupella

How do you fight an accident? Cupella is an NPC that isn't designed for the PCs to interact with directly; the swarmoid strikes from unexpected directions, using things most PCs wouldn't consider a weapon or acting at a scale beyond general conception. A regular assassin might use a sniper rifle with special targeting software and smart ammunition to get the target's cortical stack; Cupella is likely to have a "water main" break and soak the target in nanite disassembler, or line the street with monowire and herd the target into a trap using controlled explosives. Aiding and abetting Cupella in these projects are the eight smart cats, who typically scout out the scene ahead of time and keep track of potential problems like the NPCs, sometimes ingratiating themselves into the target or the PC's lives before the hit goes down. The gamemaster may also choose for the smart cats to be the actual "brains" behind the operation, with Cupella as just a harmless figure being manipulated by their cats.

356: The Mind Parasitoids

ENTRY 356: The Mind Parasitoids

"Oh my ghost, it's adorable!"
- Fan Wong, gatecrasher

On the exoplanet they evolved, the mind parasitoids are the highest form of life. Xenobiologists believe that the hot-pink invertebrates faced unusual competition in their path to dominance over their primeval swamps, likely facing all manner of close relatives parasitoids in competition for resources - most especially host animals - and were forced to develop multiple methods of influencing and altering the behavior of their hosts, and a degree of social organization similar to Terran insects in scale and complexity, actively "farming" certain hosts for food substances and directing other hosts to build dam-nests to create pools for the mind parasitoids to breed in. As near as researchers can tell, at least a thousand years before transhumanity opened the Pandora Gate to their homeworld, the mind parasitoids had spread to every habitable corner of their globe, and stood unchallenged as the nonsentient lords and masters of their world.

To the mind parasitoids, transhumanity must have seemed a frustrating prey. Their skin lacked the chemical gateways that the invertebrates' venom had evolved to pass through the skin and into the nervous system, and their anatomy and biochemistry were very different from the mammaloids that roamed their home exoplanet. All the careful tricks of nature that had made the mind parasitoids absolute in their environment utterly failed them against transhumanity. Worst for them, with their great big eyes and hot pink dermis, transhumans considered them almost irresistibly cute.

While xenobiologists are continuing their studies just to make sure that there's nothing harmful in the mind parasitoid's biology or biochemistry to transhumanity, the gatecrashers that discovered their unnamed homeworld are already planning the media blitz and crunching the numbers on the pet trade, with early responses from focus-groups being very positive.

Seeds

• A synth researcher outside the loop of the mind parasitoid main group suspects that the critter's cuteness is more than skin deep - and that the extraterrestrials harbor a bacteria similar to Toxoplasma gondii that is warping transhuman biomorphs to show more affection to the alien brain slugs and possibly spread the infection. The truth is more alarming - the mind parasitoids have a low-level psi power that accomplishes the same thing.
• Scientists working on "accessories" for mind parasitoid pet owners have designed an interface patch augmentation which can allow the alien invertebrate's native abilities to function on cats, rats...even transhuman biomorphs. Live tests are being run on the exoplanet to see how the mind slugs and their hosts adapt, with the PCs brought in for security. The results are frightening as the transhuman-hosts start building things...and become outright dangerous when the PCs notice a transhuman-host installing an "interface patch" and mind parasitoid on an unwilling researcher!
• The pet approvals have come through and a bounty has gone up for mind parasitoids - the player characters are sent out with a quota for 1,000 healthy specimens, with a bonus for more. All they have to do is brave the dangers of an alien swamp and a semi-sentient hive of hot-pink alien slugs.

355: K-Mach

ENTRY 355: K-Mach

"Three tons of armor and myomer fibers, driven by high-performance atomic batteries guaranteed to last thirty years and survive a point-blank shot from a railgun. Armed with an integrated particle beam rifle, 360-degree field of vision with overlapping lidar, radar, and t-ray emitters. Integral on-board AGI to assist with targeting and multitasking. You probably think you're a bunch of bad asses, don't you? Well let me assure you that your kriegmaschines are only the bare minimum equipment you need to survive against warbots and hunter-killers."
- Marshall Rideck

Before Reapers and Furies became the go-to combat morphs of transhumanity, the battlefields crawled with massive, deceptively fast humanoid mecha, most notably the popular kriegsmaschine (K-Mach) design. The K-Mach represented a transitional stage between biomorph-operated powered exoskeleton vehicles and resleeving directly into combat craft; while the military had long used teleoperated drones for a variety of combat tasks, the transition from a primarily biomorph-based armed force to a mobile tactical mechanized force was problematic and exacerbated by the logistical complexities of the Fall. While most military R&D had focused on egos directly integrated into and controlling traditional vehicles like tanks, aircraft, and orbital weapons platforms, transhumanity needed a morph that resleeved egos could adapt to quickly. The compromise was a three-meter tall, three-ton mobile weapons platform that could run, jump, and shoot like a trained soldier, but was armored like a combat vehicle and with integrated weapons that could easily be swapped out in mobile resupply centers. The K-Machs brought the fight to the enemy, sometimes going toe-to-toe with the often much more heavily armed warbots.

After the war, most of the K-Machs were retired or decommissioned and converted to civilian interests. While powerful, K-Machs were expensive to make and maintain, and most transhumans prefer the much smaller and cheaper Reapers. However, used K-Machs still retain a certain value - especially modified ones or those that took place in important battles, and some veterans like to keep theirs around, even if it's just in storage most of the time.

K-Mach Stats

K-Mach are synthmorphs.

Enhancements: 360-Degree Vision, Access Jacks, Anti-Glare, Basic Mesh Inserts, Chem Sniffer, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Cybersword (retractable Blade, 2d10 + 6 DV), Electrical Sense, Enhanced Vision, Heavy Combat Armor, Lidar, Magnetic Vision, Mnemonic Augmentation, Pneumatic Limbs, Radar, Reflex Booster, Structural Enhancement, T-Ray Emitter, Weapon Mount (articulated, 2)

Mobility System: Bipedal Walker (4/20)
Aptitude Maximum: 30 (REF and SOM 40)

Durability: 60 (w/Structural Enhancement)

Wound Threshold: 16 (w/Structural Enhancement)

Speed Modifier: +1 (Reflex Booster)
CP Cost: 110

Credit Cost: Expensive (minimum 125,000)

Traits: +10 REF (+20 with Reflex Booster), +20 SOM, Armor 20/20, Comes equipped with 1 integral weapon in weapon mount (Particle Beam Rifle, Plasma Rifle, Pulser, Railgun Machine Gun, Seeker Rifle, or Torch), Large Morph

354: Bioreactor 12

ENTRY 354: Bioreactor 12

"I'm calling it, give the order to pull back."

"Ma'am - you can't do that."

"I just did. We're closing the Zone, lieutenant. No one in, nothing out."

"But ma'am, this technology..."

"Is going to be buried under dust. If I had my way I'd throw asteroids at it for a thousand years. Now you will obey my order, or else."

"Or else wha-"

<blaster crackle>

"Anyone else want to be a statistic?"

- excerpt from When Gods Quake, Mesh dramatization of the Final Battle of the Zone (AF 7)

TITANs technology was advanced and often ugly, but not inscrutable. During the Fall the transhuman forces did capture, utilize, and reverse-engineer pieces of it, and most morphs and spacecraft today incorporate design elements, material science, or software that ultimately have their origin in the conflict. Other technology was placed under unofficial interdict, a pact of tacit agreements and bizarre cooperation between different authorities to impede and impound any research involving certain categories of TITANs tech; while no one authority or group of interests could police all transhuman research to make sure no-one would develop those terrible weapons again, they could at least bury what remained in the Zone on Mars where no one could get it. Still, every now and again someone would dig something up, or an area of research would veer a little too close to a forbidden topic, and then the offending corp or researcher would find their budget slashed, their resources re-aligned, their research archived and the archives lost...

Bioreactor 12 (codename: WAR WOMB) was, according to Firewall intelligence, the last such device the TITANs brought online in the Zone, though there are no records of it being operational during the final conflict. Believed to be initially developed from colony ship designs from old Earth, the bioreactor spliced together limited sets of DNA from asyncs and force-grew the resulting clones, installing low-sapience AGIs in their cyberbrains to create a disposable army of supersoldiers with a selection of sleights. When the artillery barrages gave way to corridor-by-corridor fighting, these proto-exsurgents pumped out by the bioreactors were a nasty surprise that delayed final victory by weeks; only the lack of raw materials kept the TITAN's from pumping out enough async puppet-soldiers to overwhelm the front line and make an effective counterattack, but one by one the bioreactors fell - all except for Bioreactor 12, kept miraculously intact after the final siege.

The basics of the bioreactor technology are rather well-known - there are few habitats that don't have the technology for cloning and resleeving, it is the experience of the brutal async close combat that brought about the mutual decision by the Jovian Republic, Lunar-LaGrange Alliance, and Planetary Consortium to not develop equivalent technology - partially because it would mean tampering with the Exsurgent Virus, and partially because if any single group developed the technology, the others would be locked into a race to develop their own bioreactor capability, spurring military brinkmanship that transhumanity can ill afford. So Bioreactor 12 sits in the Zone, by its very existence possessing the deadly potential to spark yet another conflict. The shadow of the TITANs still falls over transhumanity's future.

Mechanics

To function, a bioreactor needs to be equipped with a sufficient power source and a steady supply of raw hydrocarbons, which nanite stacks break down into acceptable organic compounds for the cloning process. The asyncs are equivalent to Ultimate Mercs (see Eclipse Phase) with Psi (Level 2), Psi Assault 50, Sense 50, and typically 4-5 sleights of the gamemaster's choosing.

Using Bioreactor 12

Bioreactor 12 isn't your typical MacGuffin, because by itself the technology is not unique, irreplaceable, or irreducible - while current transhuman tech might struggle to achieve the ability to selectively create asyncs and chose the sleights they'll have at the moment, the underlying principles of genetic manipulation, forced growth cloning, augmentation, and resleeving are all fairly well understood. The danger of Bioreactor 12 is not that the tech exists, but that it might be used - the powers that be in the Solar system are afraid of a cold war developing where each side attempts to create armies of async assassins and commandos, and if such research ever hits the production stage then it's only a matter of time before the really nasty TITANs tech starts coming in to play. So preventing the spread of bioreactor research amounts to an elaborate gentleman's game, where none of the major players want that particular option to come into play - but because it's secret, not everybody has gotten the memo, and Firewall and the other agencies are constantly at work to keep it under control. Some far-thinking transhumans worry that transhumanity is stunting its own growth by not pursuing these technologies, but so far the censors have won out, stifling the research before it leads to additional conflict.

Seed

• Strange heat signatures have been recorded in the Zone, and silent alarms are going off: every sign is that Bioreactor 12 has just gone online, and production could start at any moment. No one outside the Zone knows if this is a timed delay, a resurgence of the TITANs, an espionage mission into bioreactor tech that went wrong, or just some nutter that broke through the perimeter and managed to turn it on. Whatever the case, military forces are quietly aligning around the Zone and tensions are running high; the PCs are asked to sneak into the Zone and ascertain the situation before the powers-that-be declare it time for a full military strike. As a mark of trust, the PCs are given a sat-beacon that can call down a tungsten rod from an orbital weapons platform on its own position - of course, with a radius of destruction of 500 meters, the PCs had better be ready to run or resleeve if they have to use it.

353: Junyo

ENTRY 353: Junyo

"People are a sometimes food."
- Long Pig Monster

Cloned meat farms, resleeving, recycling corpses for their elements as a regular process - cannibalism hasn't been this easy and accepted a practice among transhumanity since the Pleistocene. With the removal of bodily death as a major concern, transhumans eating other transhumans has lost a lot of its moral force on most habitats, allowing plenty of transhumans to engage in the practice of tasting human flesh (cloned or real) perfectly legally. For example in Nova York, Takonashi 2.0 serves human sashimi culled from fetal clones; and in the Jovian Republic elite military orders partake in ritual feasting on enemy hearts. The surprising thing to most sociologists is that given the opportunity to engage in a formerly taboo activity, most...don't. The novelty of chomping down on a recognizable-as-human-limb wears off fairly quick, leaving the customer to worry about prion disease, cost, and taste.

Prion disease is a danger when consuming any protein source, though transhumans eating transhumans represents a considerably higher risk of transmission and transmissible degenerative diseases like kuru are known to persist in transhumanity. Price is a greater concern; "natural" human flesh is generally more expensive than forced-growth clones which is generally more expensive than edible shaped "meat" constructs built up with human muscle tissue; fat, bile, blood, and bone marrow are available for gourmands, and represents a minor side-industry for "scraps" in the medical cloning industry. Taste is the major issue - transhumans, as a rule, don't taste particularly better than pork or veal. There's no special flavor to the meat, and "natural" transhuman flesh in particular is typically chock-full of pollutants, stress chemicals, drugs, and augmentations that sour the taste. So while transhumanity has accepted that they can use each other as food, there are few popular restaurant chains based on the concept (and of those, only Fried Fingers is interplanetary), and most transhumans that do care to indulge prefer going out to a restaurant with certified prion-sniffers and rated chefs than trying to take home a steak or rump roast and figure out how to cook it in their quarters without violating the fire/heat source safety protocols.

Junyo is an assistant chef specializing in the preparation of transhuman meat. He first got his taste of it on the Jenny Greenteeth, a scum barge known for its food riots and rolling brownouts in AF 2, 4, 5, and 7, but unlike his peers he turned that into a passion for cooking, moved to Nova York, and enrolled in culinary school. For now he works for Takonashi 2.0 in Nova York, employed as a "guest chef" appearing at other restaurants in the solar system and preparing special meals for clientele, though he still dreams of getting enough favors and connections to one day open his own place - perhaps with an attached butcher shop.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
14	16	15	20	12	20	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	40	8	80	40	8	60

Morph: Nova Crab

Skills: Academics: Anatomy 30, Academics: History (Cannibalism) 50, Art: Cooking 50, Blades 25, Free Fall (Microgravity) 18, Interests: Butchery 24, Interests: Cannibalism Cooking Styles 34, Interests: Cloning 25, Interfacing 16, Language: Native Malay 90, Language: English 85, Networking: Media 20, Networking: Science 11, Perception (Taste) 60, Profession: Chef 30, Protocol 25, Unarmed Combat (Claws) 35

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Carapace Armor, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Enhanced Respiration, Enhanced Smell, Enhanced Taste, Gills, Mnemonic Augmentation, Oxygen Reserve, Puppet Sock, Temperature Tolerance, Vacuum Sealing

Traits: Addiction (Human flesh, Moderate), Armor (11/11), Mental Derangement (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder)

Using Junyo

The selling point for cannibalism is that it is taboo, and lacking the taboo element cannibalism in science fiction is usually a bit of exploitative shock (cf. Long Pig in Transmetropolitan or Soylent Green), and after that is generally just a minor (occasionally blackly comedic) background element. Horror tends to go the other way, hyping up on the visceral and bloody violation implied by historical cannibalism, which is restricted either to extreme hunger or psychosis. Eclipse Phase as a game of science fiction and horror can go either way as needed - eating a cloned ancephelous baby ("human veal") that appears on a porcelain plate and comes with a 400-credit bottle of wine or a couple of kids noshing on original recipe deep-fried hands from Fried Fingers are exploitative but probably background noise; a group of starving astronauts breaking open the cryogenic tubes to eat the sleeping colonists in their slowship or an exsurgent creature cracking a victim's skull and slurping out their living brain are scenes designed to evoke the horror of the setting.

Junyo can swing either way as the gamemaster needs. As a transhuman deep in the food industry of processing, serving, and selling transhuman meat, Junyo can be the mouthpiece of the science fiction practicality behind the practice; on the other hand as someone that probably had to gut and eat a friend more than once and now engaged in an industry where his powerful claws clip through transhuman flesh and limbs every day, he might just be psychotic and feeding his personal addiction. In either depiction, Junyo tends to be highly devoted to both his job and an advocate of consuming transhuman flesh - he doesn't play down the disadvantages, but is more than willing to highlight that the general distaste towards transhuman flesh is based off of antiquated moral codes, dying religions, and poor preparation - and is willing to underline the last bit by preparing small appetizers for the player characters (a great excuse to break out the game snacks).