Anniversary Email 24

Please join me in wishing <NAME> a happy one year anniversary! The void between the stars is a nightmarish menagerie of vile and inscrutable creatures. In the inky vacuum of space, strange beings thrive and multiply. Entire civilizations are born and destroyed, ripped apart by their erstwhile neighbors. Humanity, for its part, has been loudly broadcasting its presence to the universe. Finally something has answered.

The beasts who intercepted our beacons are insectoid horrors with a face that is little more than a prehensile proboscis that serves to funnel sustenance into their gaping, fang filed mouth. A mouth that leaks a steady stream of briny ichor. The acrid discharge from their chitin has corroded every probe we have sent to communicate with them. It has been decided we need an emissary. We have chosen you.

Our unlicensed chirurgeons have been dispatched. Rather, less dispatched than freed from the shackles we keep them in to prevent them from hacking each other to bits in their crazed fury to craft new and terrifying forms. They have been driven mad by the things they have witnessed, and madder still by the grim tasks to which we have set them. On arrival, they will begin their vivisection, flensing flesh from bone, leaving you little more than a twitching pile of muscle and nutrient rich slurry in a rusting, steaming vat. From this point, their dark work begins.

Our bio technicians have been hard at work constructing a shell. I am told they have been using the word “monstrous” in a cavalier fashion. It is inside of this grim vessel where the remains of your body will be hooked by the aforementioned mad surgeons, in what I am told is an indescribably painful process. It has been compared to descending all 9 levels of Dante’s inferno and hiking back out again, while Valkyries spear you and stymie your every step. Those not busy with this task will turn on the remaining personnel in the facility, turning them inside out to harvest more biological mass to add to your bulk. This containment vessel will allow you to survive the rigors of space, along with giving you the appearance of these strange aliens, which will hopefully put them at ease. You will share their spiny legs. Their grasping pinschers. Their ruin of a face with wobbling eye stalks that stare, unblinking, into eternity. We have decided to call you <FIRST NAME> Grappling-Proboscis. In fact, we chose you solely so we could make that pun.

One final note. Should you chose to betray your tormentors, should you hope to ally yourself with these denizens of the void and bring ruin to our world, we will activate protocol ‘Bomb in your neck’. Do not worry, it is actually a bit of misnomer. You will not have a neck, it is simply attached to the remnants of your spinal column.