Another fine Infinity Inc product!
Alpha Hybrids are the superscience creation of villain organization "Infinity Inc", which despite its name and its literature is not actually a corporation. It is a privately owned Evil Company of Evil Superscience, with goals that might sound lofty, but the biggest impact they have on the Tales of Justice world came when they created a mutate slave army in two parts. The "Alpha" part are humans combined with mammals; these were the first successful result from an expensive undertaking, so they were named after the financial concept of the active return on investment.
A Hybrid Series Alpha minion, as a generic concept, is a combination of selected mammalian DNA with a human template. They are expensive products to create. Many individuals may be created off a single blueprint. At an I.I. facility, the Alphas are typically housed in large groups, fed in a dedicated hall, but trained and maintained in concert with the Deltas.
(The prototype Hybrid Minion group had three Alphas, each housed in a separate cage, and one Delta. They escaped, located each other, and destroyed the facility in the process. Security analysis blamed the individual containment for this escape, rather than suggest that the whole super-powered-slaves idea was dumb.)
Most Alphas have some amount of the Regeneration Power installed. Some have one or two other superpowers, such as Force Field or a very small amount of Ice Production, but those tend to be the way in which a subject's latent psionic abilities are converted into something the company owner will approve. Simon Arkangel despises the idea of someone reading his mind, or putting thoughts into his head. He won't have it in any of his creations. Employees who do toy with psionic abilities tend to become test targets.
Alpha Names
The new identity of the freshly-created Hybrid Series minion was determined before the first treatment to implant segments of DNA into the chosen human template. Typically it was chosen before the living body was acquired; Acquisitions may only have a blueprint number to go with their search parameters, but the Physical and Behavioral Design personnel attached to the project have a clear picture already of what should result from their work. The new name is part of the behavioral programming, which in turn is founded in the physical design.
Alpha Hybrid names come in as many languages as do amorally brilliant scientists. They are all artistically named for descriptive traits of the Hybrid's animal side, imagined as a totemic symbol. The jaguar Hybrid named Viscere, for example, evoked the deepest, most instinctive sense of tightly-contained ferocity. Scusarzi, a highly experimental grey squirrel Hybrid, is a slight alteration of the Italian verb scusarsi, "to regret". (In fact, many Alpha names are deliberately given a slight misspelling, partially to make certain the Alpha name will not be translated when a brochure is processed into another language.) Alpha names may be a single word or a two-word phrase.
Prototypes were given names from American English and Français Canadien words associated with their species: Polaire (a Canadian Lynx, unfortunately discontinued early in the program), Puma, Feral, Timber Wolf, Chacal. When the Niagara Facility was lost, corporate policy changed to the current system.
Culture
Major language groups and dialects
- gesture code custom-designed visual pidgin created by Infinity Inc employees for use by and communication to all Hybrid Minions
@kummer_wolfe the Spoiler up top is illegible: white text on white background. Is this something you can easily fix?