LOCATION: UNKNOWN GALLENTE SPACE

It is often said space is like the deep ocean. The weightlessness can make you queasy. Your inability to move in any direction induces panic. There is no oxygen to breathe. There is no “up”. It is easy to panic in the ocean. It is almost a certainty to panic in space. Cold, dark, harsh, unforgiving, space will take your life far more quickly than the ocean.

The ocean is powerful. Gravity, tides, currents all contributing to massive and raw displays of power. The oceans form the landscapes of planets. They can give life. They can completely obliterate it.

Space is even more far reaching in its strength. Stars implode. Planets are crushed. Black holes that devour all within their grasp. Nebulae that can leave you lost forever.

It is difficult with mere words to truly impress upon someone the weight of space; the import of it. It is not to be trifled with. Unlike the ocean, you do not casually swim in space. You do not bathe in it. You treat space as the most unforgiving lover you have ever known, for that is what she is to some, a lover.

Admist a dense cluster of asteroids, suspended in space far from any nearby planets, rests a bunker, carved and built into the very foundations of one of these larger rocks. It slowly spins, controlled by forces of the universe, serving as a very hidden, and very secret, base of operations for a group that dreams of changing the universe as we know it. Yet they seek more than change, for being an agent of change can bring great and wonderful positives to the future. No, this group seeks more than change. They seek control; power; dominance.

Within the darkly lit bunker, in a deeper level so cold that heating units constantly pump out warm air to make it liveable, a man, a former shadow of his self, stands in a dank, poorly lit room. His body trembles and sweats at the same time, his hair matted against his forehead. His clothing clings to his body, emanating the stench of uncleanliness of both mind and body.

This man, whom must remain nameless for now, has stood in this room for nearly a week. He will not eat. He will not sleep. His slow and shallow breathing almost a catatonic state. He is consumed, and conflicted. A pure, untainted hatred eats at him from the inside, like an insatiable disease; unstoppable, unslowable, incurable. His superiors, with concern, attempted to treat him, to move him to the medcenter, to rescue him from himself. His response was that of a cornered animal. He viciously attacked his own, tearing at them with feral savagry. Now, those same superiors have written him off, unfit for duty, and yet still he remains, not a single soul daring to remove him.

“I had you,” he thinks to himself, “Yet you got away.” He is lost amidst the caverns of his mind. He is blinded to the reality unfolding around him, stuck in that one single thought, that critical moment that changed the course of his entire existence. “I had you, yet you got away.”

His heartrate rapidly increases, his breathing becoming laboured and heavy. His chest feels pressured, a great weight against it. Yet he feels clarity for the first time in a long while. His broken mind grasps at it, holding onto this lifeline lest it slip through his fingers, and he fall back into the murky abyss, lost even to himself. A dark epiphany has finally revealed its ugly truth to his demented psyche.

“I am coming for you, Roc Wieler.”