I was starting to get a little bored and was worried that my creatures were 1) too unthreatened and 2) that the game would be more interesting with hardship of some kind.
No, I didn’t set out to kill my creatures. I added bacteria.
Bacteria that I’d hoped wouldn’t attack so quickly. I was worried about Claire because of the Fever Toxin. It very quickly took hold in her body and in an instant, she was gone. She picked up Histamine B at the very end but I managed to put her in a safe corner of the terrarium before any other grendels could get sick. Viggo, I wasn’t especially worried about because Grendels have a natural immunity to certain Antigens and I think Antigen 5 is one of them. Not shown here is the Carbon Monoxide that was building up in his system as well. I removed his bacteria with a quick spray and those dangerous numbers started to lower again.
After all the excitement (and the unfortunate death of Claire) Viggo started to make a slow but full recovery from the Antigen. Macabre Desire, however, ended up dying not of disease, but of old age.
He was always hilarious to watch. He never did get the hang of drinking potions when he got angry but would always dance and yell about it instead. He’ll have his children to carry on his memory. Naturally, Thin Desire was next.
I was starting to feel a little depressed about this world by now. I deleted all the bacteria again and installed Macrobacteria instead, as was recommended to me by Grendel Man and ylukyun. Then I hatched another Amarok Grendel. Meet Bethany. She’ll be our new female.
I rushed to check on the norns since Scandalous Laborer seemed to be in pain. I checked on her to find Loving Wren slapping her in the top right corner of the world. The two of them and Lowly Adjustment all seemed to have gotten quite old.
Sour Drink, Five Cheese and Uptight Kettle all seemed to be clinging to youth pretty well, though. Five Cheese was probably the most relaxed of them all with those powerful Bondi genes to keep her chill.
I just let the game run for a while and did more maintenance on the ecosystems. I popped over to the Grendel Terrarium and found that Impartial Relation was now getting old. Then I got a death notice. Who died?
Sadly, I found Viggo dead in the grass.
I’m not sure what did him in. Was it his genes? Was it the result of fighting Antigen 5? A quick look at the Wiki tells me that Antigen 5 could have attacked any of his important systems. He’s a grendel and should be immune to it, though.
Was it a fatal, debiltating gene? I had no way of checking with broken software so I let the issue, and poor Viggo, rest. I may look into this more in the future.
Then Five Cheese got sick with Glycotoxin. It left her system as quickly as it had entered but now she was dealing with pain and looked very unhappy. Before long, though, she was back to normal again. She had macrobacteria floating around her, but she was happy again and there were no notices in the medical monitor. She recovered fully before long, but not without repeatedly telling me “me love mom”. My heart just broke a little again.
I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t sure what to expect or that I wasn’t excited! It’s a little difficult to imagine anything other than a Banshee grendel to come out of each of the eggs that I’d selected from Muco or that I wasn’t expecting them to be mutated or mixed. Generally, C3/DS doesn’t allow for that sort of thing.
I checked on Geese to make sure that she was alright and I found her walking back and forth in the grass with no direction. I asked her if she was angry and she very strongly said yes. It was time to break out the calm balm.