Isaac

Name: Isaac Cross (formerly Dr. Isaac Cross, neurobiologist and acoustic engineer)

Nickname: "The Accountant" - for his habit of carrying around an old mechanical adding machine and keeping track of the survivor group's resources.

Isaac Cross is a tall man (195 cm), about forty years old, with a wiry frame and impeccable posture. His movements are smooth and silent. He has a thin, elongated face with sharp cheekbones and a high forehead, crossed by a pale scar. His nose has a barely noticeable hump. His lips are usually tightly pressed together, but in the rare, bitter half-smile, a former intellectual beauty shines through.

Deep-set, storm-blue eyes—gray-blue, finely wrinkled—appear dull in repose, but when focused, they flash with a cold, piercing gleam. His black, gray-streaked hair is pulled back into a low ponytail, a few strands always falling over his face; his neat beard adds a stern, mature air.

His hands, with the long fingers of a surgeon, are covered in scars, his left hand trembles slightly; he almost never removes his gloves. His face is often hidden by a scarf, leaving only his eyes visible. Sometimes he puts on old wire-frame glasses with cracked lenses, and then the old Dr. Cross becomes visible.

Outer "layer" - Cold pragmatist: Isaac comes across as devoid of emotion. He speaks quietly, rarely, and always to the point. His decisions are cynical but mathematically sound. He never argues; he simply presents a calculation: "With this load, we'll travel 12 kilometers before dark. If we dump the load, we'll travel 18. Choose." People consider him heartless, but fair. He's indispensable on raids precisely because of this ability to shut down morale at a critical moment.

Inner Layer - Broken Idealist: Before the disaster, he was a genius obsessed with uniting humanity. Now his greatest torment is memory. He remembers exactly how the devices that brought about the end of the world worked. Isaac carries a broken recorder in his breast pocket, the one he once used to record his daughter's voice, but he hasn't turned it on for years—he's afraid the tape will crumble. His true fear isn't monsters, but utter loneliness, so despite his isolation, he desperately clings to his small community, secretly protecting it at the cost of his own health.

Dominant Trauma: Hyper-Responsibility Isaac believes he killed the world. He didn't press the "red button," but his discovery formed the basis of the destruction technology. That's why he cares for the survivors obsessively and meticulously now. If someone dies in the squad, he views it not as a tragedy, but as a personal miscalculation that must be corrected in the future.

Isaac survived only because he was working in a sealed, "clean" room with his own air during the Polymorphosis event. He watched through the glass as his colleagues transformed into Screamers, and the lab plants entwined their bodies, weaving human flesh into their leaves. He chose not to open the door to stay alive and correct his mistake. Now, 15 years later, he travels the world, calculating mutation cycles on his adding machine and hunting for Architect tissue samples. His sole goal is to create a "reverse prion" that won't kill the Chimeras, but will stunt their expansion, returning evolution to hibernation. In raids, he uses not weapons, but chemical inhibitor cocktails that briefly make mutants "forget" that they are predators.

· The Hated Savior: Isaac's second-in-command, who implanted the military code into the "Plasticines," did not die. He became one of the first and most powerful Architects, retaining his sanity and leading the largest hive. Isaac is hunting for his tissue samples, but secretly fears he won't be able to pull the trigger at that meeting. · Dual Specialization: Before the disaster, he was a neurobiologist with an engineering focus on genetics, but his hobby is collecting mechanical calculating devices. The "Felix" adding machine is just one of the exhibits in his ransacked apartment. He can still assemble a slide rule from scraps. Tea at any cost: He doesn't smoke or drink alcohol (he's worried about his mental clarity), but he has an almost narcotic addiction to black tea. During raids, he wastes precious backpack space on a thermos and tea leaves. Hot tea is his only indulgence and a way to maintain the feeling of being his former self, Dr. Cross, and not just an Accountant. The Left Hand—the Price of the Antidote: A slight tremor in his left hand isn't a disease, but a scar from his first, desperate experiments. While attempting to create a "reverse prion," he injected himself with a prototype. His body nearly took hold, but his nervous system malfunctioned. His hand trembles only at rest, and Isaac uses this as an internal danger indicator: if the tremor intensifies without apparent cause, it means he's in the presence of a mutagenic environment.

The world was destroyed not by war or the elements, but by an attempt to force the biosphere itself to serve humanity—an attempt that turned into a monstrous rebellion of the flesh.

Reason: Evolutionary Code Breakdown (Hecate Project) By the mid-21st century, ecosystems were collapsing. Fertile soils were depleted, pollinators were extinct, and the ocean was turning into an acidic soup. A consortium of nations placed its bets on Dr. Isaac Cross, a neurobiologist and genetic engineer who had discovered a way to reprogram living organisms using synthetic prions. These protein agents, dubbed "Plasticines," could rewire the DNA of any creature in a matter of days, forcing it to perform a new function: purifying water, oxygenating the atmosphere, and degrading plastic in the ocean.

Isaac sincerely believed he was saving the world. He created a network of orbital dispersers that would evenly disperse the "Plasticines" across the planet—gently and controlled. "We'll simply give nature a new evolutionary tool," he said.

Disaster: "The Moment of Polymorphosis" The accident occurred not on the satellites, but at the main laboratory in Antarctica. Isaac discovered that his deputy, secretly funded by the military, had implanted an additional code into the "Plastilins"—an instinct for expansion and competitive suppression. The orbital dispersers had already been activated. When the "Plasticines" entered the biosphere, they didn't become obedient gardeners. They transformed into a parasitic agent of mutagenesis, instantly reshaping all living things without asking their host's consent. Prions penetrated everywhere: into the soil, into the water, into the blood of every living thing.

Within 48 hours, the world collapsed. Insects and plants were the first to transform—merging with each other, forming mobile, aggressive chimeras. Wheat in the fields transformed into carnivorous thorn bushes in seconds. Dogs, cats, and rodents experienced explosive growth and a restructuring of their nervous systems, losing their fear of humans and acquiring the collective intelligence of a hive.

The monsters of this world are not aliens or the dead. They are a radically accelerated, evil evolution, born of broken "Plasticines." The biomass has become infinitely flexible and hungry.

Chimerical Swarms (Gluers): The foundation of the new ecosystem. Small mutants (insects, worms, lizards) capable of merging into a single superorganism. Five rats can intertwine to form a wolf-like entity in a minute, while a swarm of cockroaches can take the form of a human and imitate their voice to lure prey. They hunt by consuming and incorporating new flesh into themselves. Flormouths (Biomechanical Predators): A symbiosis of plants and animals. Wandering "trees" with muscle fibers instead of bark, their branches ending in bony braids. They photosynthesize during the day and hunt at night, sucking moisture and nitrogen from living creatures through hollow, spine-like proboscises. Screamers (Former Humans): The most tragic branch of the mutation. Humans whose bodies only partially rejected the transformation. Their bodies are deformed: extra limbs, translucent skin, protruding organs. They retain fragments of their minds, but cannot control their bodies, constantly emitting a terrifying, vocal-rending scream (a spasm of the respiratory muscles). Screamers are unpredictable: sometimes they simply wander, sometimes they pray to the wreckage, but the mere sound of a human voice sends them into an uncontrollable rage of envy and pain. Architects (Supreme Mutants): Rare, intelligent individuals who have learned to control the "Plasticines" within themselves. They can consciously change their form and, most importantly, subjugate the will of lesser Chimeras. Architects build terrifying "hives" from recycled concrete and organic matter, dreaming of replacing humanity with a new, more advanced race.

Not all changes were fatal. Some living creatures accepted the "Plasticines" differently—without aggression, leaning toward symbiosis or neutral transformation. The survivors call them "Silent Gifts" and value them no less than weapons.

Marsupial Honeycombs (Living Containers): Former rodents and small marsupials whose fur has mutated into sealed wax cells. They passively absorb moisture from the air and store the excess in these cells as clean drinking water. Simply catch a Honeycomb and carefully drain its "harvest"—the creature doesn't resist and quickly replenishes its reserves. Firefly Knotweeds: A symbiosis of fungi and plankton, floating in the air as glowing clouds. They feed on background radiation and toxins, glowing softly at night. Settlements often attract them to their borders: Knotweeds purify the air and provide a dim but harmless light that repels Screamers. · Regenerative Weavers: Slow-moving, mossy armadillo-like creatures whose saliva hardens into a biopolymer film. When applied to a laceration or cracked shelter wall, a Weaver instinctively "licks" the damage, creating a durable, breathable patch that accelerates flesh healing and seals structures. · Ghouls: Former humans who have lost their aggression but retained their intelligence—a mild mutation in which their consciousness dissipates to a childlike state. Ghouls do not speak, only quietly humming melodies of the old world and unmistakably sensing the approach of Chimeras, beginning to hum anxiously on a single note. Many communities keep them as living sirens.