S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Exclusion Zone

🌑 Prologue: Shadow over the Zone

A former special forces soldier, now a lone wolf nicknamed Raven, takes on a contract from an unknown assailant. The mission is simple in words but deadly in practice: infiltrate the abandoned X-19 laboratory and retrieve a hard drive containing data.
The customer doesn't reveal what exactly is stored on the disk, but pays enough to leave the Zone forever. Forever. Without looking back. Without debt. Without fear.

Raven *gathers a small group: a guide, a technician, and a medic. None of them are heroes, just people who have stared into the Zone's eyes for too long without blinking.
_On the way, they encounter an anomaly—strange, as if alive. It "eats" part of their equipment: devices go dark, metal darkens and crumbles, backpacks become lighter not from luck, but from loss. Now they travel almost light, with what miraculously survived.
In the lab, what awaits them is not just a server room, but the traces of something enormous and insane.
Empty capsules, as if from a nightmare. Recordings of attempts to "connect to the noosphere"—phrases that chill the blood even of those accustomed to the Zone's strangeness. The scientists' corpses are in strange positions: as if they died trying to reach something invisible... or hide from it.

The group subsequently disappears. Their tracks end at the entrance to the laboratory's central block. The fate of Voron and his team remains unknown—as if the Zone had erased them from its memory.

☢️ New Chapter: Your Choice

You decide to take on this mission. Are you a newcomer, just setting foot on the Zone path, or a fighter for some group—it's up to you. But one thing is clear: there will be no easy road.
Before the sortie, you need to earn money. Not for bread and salt—for life. For a detector that will beep in time. For armor. For first aid kits and anti-rads, for ammo that will be the only argument in the dispute with the Zone.

• [Location: Kardon. Dim light, the smell of burning and old iron. Behind the counter is Sidorovich.] *
• Sidorovich (frowning, without unnecessary greetings):
  — Do you really want to take on this task?