Distant, regular beats throb through the soft corridors and twisted flesh mazes of Microcosmica, impossible to ever shut out completely. The beat vibrates through a visitor’s bones. The sound is like a normal world’s a vast wilderness of fluid-filled cavities, blood vessels, bile ducts, bone, mucus, and fiber.
Visiting Microcosmica is like being immersed in the center of a sloshing, salty sea of viscous particles, all of which are alive. Some are indeed ravenous bacteria with a keen interest in the appearance of intruders whose chemical makeup marks them as different and, potentially, as food. That goes double for the especially aggressive leukocytes that congregate like police to any scene of violence, regardless of whether intruders were fighting off aggressive bacteria, cutting through a cavity wall to access a larger arterial, attempting to repair vessels or other cell structures of Microcosmica, or merely looking for somewhere to escape.
Luckily for first-time translators, the narrative inherent to Microcosmica’s creation involves scientific investigators who prepared their own visit by creating life support systems, including various bases, protective gear, and conveyances that resemble submarines. Otherwise, a recursor appearing unprepared in a random portion of Microcosmica would quickly suffocate in the airless environment, even as a host of hungry bacteria congregate using chemotaxis to vector in on the newcomer.
The foci that player characters can choose in Microcosmica—as well as any foci that are dragged into the recursion—are modified by the recursion’s context, as appropriate. Foci that are shared with Earth are almost exactly the same. But if a recursor selects Conducts Weird Science, for example, the kind of science she studies is likely to be biological in nature.
Leaving Microcosmica can be lethal if a traveler exits by any means other than translation. Translation ensures that the recursor appears in the target recursion (or on Earth) at her normal size. But someone who translates into Microcosmica and then leaves via an inapposite gate appears in the new recursion bacterially sized, which limits her ability to interact with anything except other bacteria (assuming the new recursion even has any). The only sure way to regain one’s proper dimension and mass is to translate to yet another recursion, which will reset the traveler.
More important, when leaving the recursion via translation, the recursor should be sure to translate out from Nereus One or another artificial habitat able to support human life. Otherwise, if she ever translates back, she will return to the same location she translated away from, and find herself floating without equipment and protection in the smothering, fluid-filled cavities of Microcosmica.
Finally, entering Microcosmica through inapposite means would be disastrous. Thankfully, the nature of the recursion tends to prevent inapposite gates and other forms of inapposite travel.
It’s hard to know exactly where you are in Microcosmica, even if using scientific equipment available in Nereus One. By convention, two major directions are commonly used: toward the extremities (“extremis”), or toward the heart (“heartward”). Given the complexity of the recursion’s structure, which is not particularly close to a real human’s anatomy, it’s difficult to be more precise. Organs of various kinds are sometimes found duplicated, larger or smaller than would be expected, or never found at all, such as is the case for the brain of Microcosmica. Of course, for people the size of bacteria, the recursion is vast, and exploration may one day discover the truth.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. The general rule is that fixed tissue is Microcosmica terrain, but free-roaming cells are usually bacterial in nature and are normal parts of the environment. In sum, the bacteria make something called the microbiome, the community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that populates the recursion (of course, to recursors, microorganisms aren’t particularly “micro”). Add the immune response that Microcosmica sometimes mounts, which floods an area with an aggressive swarm of various kinds of white blood cells (including basophils, eosinophils, lymphocytes, and more), and any particular location can go from crowded to swarming quickly.
Lysis is the dissolution of a cell, usually due to a rupture.
Typical bacterium: level 2; tolerates harsh environments; bite inflicts 3 points of damage; explosively lyses when reduced to 0 health, inflicting 1 point of damage to creatures in immediate range
Basophil: level 3; bite injects anticoagulant that deals damage every round until the victim makes a recovery roll or uses other healing
Eosinophil: level 5; when damaged, splits into two level 3 eosinophils that can’t split further
Lymphocyte: level 4; bite deals damage and injects a cell-dissolving enzyme that moves the victim one step down the damage track on a failed Might defense roll
Arteries are relatively easy to find in Microcosmica. They are the preferred way for recursors in protective gear or some kind of bioaquatic submersible to get around, at least for those moving extremis. If they’re moving heartward, veins are preferred—the recursors don’t travel nearly as fast, but they don’t need to attempt to pierce tissues.
Regardless of the location, it usually has nough liquid matrix for a recursor (or bioaquatic submersible) to move about in cavities and layers. Most tissue layers that impose a barrier can be pierced merely by spending a round or two applying pressure, and the hole created heals itself within a few days (though this risks drawing an immune response from white blood cells).
Bioaquatic submersible: level 4; Armor 4; moves up to a long distance each round; can carry eight travelers plus a pilot in a life-supporting environment; carries two spare dive suits
Dive suit: level 3; provides Armor 1 plus air and warmth in an aqueous environment; includes suit lights, radio, and tools for collecting samples
Microcosmica contains several sites that recursors will want to visit, especially those with a scientific bent.
The stainless-steel-and-glass science base known as Nereus One is anchored to the side of a tissue wall deep within Microcosmica. The base is essentially a massive sphere striped with encircling glass viewports. Opaque metal bands are interspersed with the translucent viewports. Given that the metallic portions of the base are painted with a yellow non.bioactive coating, base researchers sometimes affectionately call it the “Bumblebee.”
The base contains several different sections, including a science level where most experiments are run, a galley for preparing and eating food, crew living quarters, a main observation deck, a sick bay for storing medicine and treating hurt crew, a nuclear power plant and associated engine room, a bridge for when the base is detached and moving, an equipment room with spare dive suits and two bioaquatic submersibles, and a torpedo bay.
ImmuneSuppres: Researchers take daily shots of a drug called ImmuneSuppres. This red-colored fluid keeps bad reactions from the quantum miniaturization process at bay. Recursors who stay more than a day in Microcosmica are subject to the same bad reactions, since they’ve taken on the same context as the researchers. PCs who do not take daily injections of ImmuneSuppres notice a discoloration and swelling in their skin. If left untreated, PCs begin moving down the damage track after a few days. NPCs left untreated die and degrade into so much rotting goo.
From five to twenty researchers inhabit Nereus One. When present in the base, the scientists are busy with exacting and obscure experiments on the science level. These experiments involve teasing out eclectic signals from tissue assays on samples collected from distant parts of Microcosmica. When scientists are not in the base, they’re out gathering samples, running other tests in the field, or simply gone. In the latter case, they’re absent—according to the narrative of the recursion—because they’ve been reassigned or otherwise retrieved by the university department they work for.
Any scientists the PCs are likely to meet on Nereus One do not have the spark, so they react as if the characters are new researchers assigned to the base. If the scientists are quizzed about where they come from, where they go when they’re reassigned, and what kind of creature they’ve been nanosized and inserted into, most become incredulous, annoyed, or possibly confused by such stupid questions. As is true in any similar situation, continually rubbing the nose of a recursion native in the oddity of his existence could eventually kindle the spark in an NPC.
Three researchers stand out from the pack.
Dr. Garner is a hardworking scientist with little time for chit-chat. He stays apprised of the other scientists’ progress during a daily briefing held on the main observation deck (the widest level at the sphere’s midpoint). Dr. Garner has a despondent air, and if pressed, he describes his sadness over how the other Nereus research bases were decommissioned and now float in other parts of the research organism, empty and mothballed. They were decommissioned after Nereus Five was lost with all crew under mysterious circumstances. The university pulled back its support, focusing only on Nereus One. In all, Garner says there are seven bases similar to the Bumblebee. If anything could rouse Dr. Garner from the status quo, it would be the opportunity to discover what happened to Nereus Five.
Dr. Reggie Garner: level 3; short-range harpoon gun inflicts 4 points of damage
Dr. Rodrigues hasn’t grasped the fact that her “home” doesn’t actually exist, and that the span of her entire experience, despite vague memories suggesting otherwise, is confined to her time in Nereus One. However, she is one of the few human NPC natives in Microcosmica with the spark. Subconsciously, she fears being recalled and reassigned, because she rightly worries that it could mean the end of her existence. Dr. Rodrigues also suspects some sort of foul play was involved in the loss of Nereus Five, possibly related to the actions of a secret agent of a foreign state. She found documents in the trash file of a computer that indicated that illicit biological research was being conducted on Nereus Five, but she wasn’t able to determine any more details.
Dr. Helen Rodrigues: level 4; health 18; short-range harpoon gun inflicts 4 points of damage
Calvin works for a foreign state (within the context of the narrative) and keeps tabs on everything going on in Nereus One. He reports back to his handler via illicit calls from the radio room once every few days. Calvin knows that actions of his state led to the loss of Nereus Five, but he doesn’t know exactly what went down. If an expedition is mounted to find it, he’ll be the first volunteer to go in case he needs to ensure that its secrets are kept—even if that means killing everyone else on the expedition.
Calvin Meyers: level 5; Armor 1; long-range hydraulic pistol inflicts 6 points of damage
This supposedly mothballed research base actually has one secret, active researcher aboard: Shumala-shamash, a recursor from Ruk. She discovered the recursion by accident and realized that it was a treasure trove of potential biological secrets, accessible from a unique perspective that not even the superscience of Ruk could duplicate. If her experiments pan out, she hopes to sell the fruit of her labors to the highest bidder in her home recursion, which would likely be a toss-up between the Karum and Zal.
If Shumala-shamash is discovered, she claims to be an ordinary researcher named Sylvia Collins. However, if she recognizes the PCs as fellow recursors, she panics and attacks them in what she considers self-defense.
Shumala-shamash: level 5; health 25; Armor 2; long-range bioelectric attack inflicts 5 points of damage on all creatures within immediate range of each other; carries two cyphers
The fate of Nereus Five was sealed when base researchers tried to engineer intelligence into a component of Microcosmica that was fifty times smaller (on average) than a bacterium-sized creature: a virus. In truth, the experiments were not authorized. The chief researcher was secretly a double agent working for an enemy state, which hoped to create a virus capable of selectively targeting victims back in the “real world.”
What they got instead was a nightmare: a contiguous mass of writhing flesh made of all the former researchers on the station. The fused creature mimics intelligence, though it may not actually be intelligent. Luckily for the surrounding tissues of Microcosmica, the blob hasn’t quite mimicked intelligence well enough to escape from the lockdown the last few survivors managed to put the station under. Knowing that later investigators who found Nereus Five would risk spreading contamination, they also disengaged the anchor failsafes and set the base adrift in Microcosmica. It’s now a plague ship, one that virulently infects, transforms, and absorbs any who find it and risk coming aboard.
Nereus Five fused creature: level 7, Speed defense as level 5; can fission off level 3 humanoid servitors; can engulf up to two creatures in immediate range as one action
The stomach cavity discovered by researchers is only a day’s travel from Nereus One by submersible. The cavity stretches away in all directions, and its floor is flooded with an acid a couple of magnitudes stronger than the acid of a normal human stomach, which is hard on dive suits, submersibles, and everything else. The researchers are interested in discovering how the cavity lining can both produce the acid and remain protected from its effects.
Staphylococcus aureus: level 4; tolerates harsh environments; bite inflicts 5 points of damage; explosively lyses when reduced to 0 health, inflicting 2 points of damage to creatures in immediate range
Data sentinel: level 4, knowledge tasks as level 7; health 18; Armor 2; long-range energy attack inflicts 4 points of damage
This mythical organ, if it exists, would presumably be something like the god of Microcosmica, though possibly one largely unconscious of the processes that go on within its confines. Or so say some researchers. These same scientists theorize that harnessing the brainpower of Microcosmica from a miniaturized state might be possible, and in so doing, they could increase the linked intelligence a thousandfold, possibly launching it into a posthuman state. Other researchers call this belief ludicrous, pointing to the fact that the brain has yet to be discovered.
The heart is one of the main sources of life in Microcosmica, and its continual beating is always present in the recursion, even aboard one of the research stations. Getting close to the heart is as difficult as it would be for an astronaut to get close to the sun—the beat is so loud that it overwhelms all baffles in submersibles and dive suits, and it renders the researcher unconscious. More than one submersible has been lost by venturing too close to the heart.
Level: 1d6+1
Form: A 4-foot-long (1 m) metallic rod with a barbed propulsive head
Effect: The DNA injector is used like a cattle prod.
When its business end is applied to a living target (possibly in a melee attack), it injects a potent cocktail of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, and other promoters that have an immediate as well as a long-term effect on the target.
The immediate effect paralyzes the target for up to one minute, after which the target has no memory of that time period. The secondary effect could be any one of the following, depending on the nature of the DNA injector (each injector has only one kind of secondary effect).
Calm: The target’s aggressive tendencies are damped down for up to twelve hours, during which time the target responds to attacks but never initiates them.
Aggression: The target’s aggressive tendencies are increased for up to twelve hours, during which time the target attacks almost anything it encounters.
Transformation: The target transforms into a leukocyte over a twelve-hour period. A fully transformed recursor loses all memory of his former existence, but a successful translation before the transformation is complete salvages those memories (and resets the recursor’s form to fit the context of the new recursion).
Depletion: 1 in 1d20
Level: 1d6+1
Form: A 4-foot-long (1 m) metallic rod with a barbed propulsive head
Effect: The DNA sampler is used like a cattle prod. When its business end is applied to a living target (possibly in a melee attack), it removes a sample of the target’s tissue and analyzes it. A readout shows what, if any, special abilities the target possesses. If the wielder wishes, she can then use the DNA sampler on herself and gain one of the special abilities from the last creature sampled. A transferred ability lasts for one minute. Sampling and transferring each require a depletion roll.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20