Dark Sword Research Group

DSRG Insignia

The **Dark Sword Research Group** (**DSRG** for short) is a Soviet research and development team working on creating man-made Time Gates and teleportation. The team was founded at the start of the Cold War and conducted experiments on live human subjects which led to strange anomalies occurring around test sites. The group was investigated by the Sub-Continuum Force (SCF) due to the suspicion that their experiments were speeding up the rate of destruction to the Multiverse by straining the timeline.

## History

### Founding

As geopolitical tensions between Eastern and Western Blocs rose in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the DSRG as a specialized military research division responsible for investigating a hypothesized type of combat known as Dimensional Warfare. The concept was originally introduced by a senior Soviet scientist who fathered the program himself and rallied support from heads of state.

The clandestine operation brought in scientists, engineers, and researchers from all over the Soviet Union and its allies, as well as some defectors from western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Over the course of the first six years in operation, many strides were made towards pioneering this technology to a point that could be used on humans.

At the core of the project was an extremely rare radioactive element that possessed temporal attributes which could be harnessed for short range matter transport. This material (later named Epochium) was only able to achieve small feats of teleportation due to the extremely small amount of it that was available. This was the case until Red Army troops stationed in Vietnam discovered large shards forming near areas that appeared to naturally block radio signals. Finally the DSRG was able to increase the power throughput given to the warping process, and long distance matter warps were successfully achieved.

### Vietnam War

In the late 1950s the DSRG built several research and development facilities in South Vietnam due to the new discovery of Epochium shards in the region. In order to locate and collect these radioactive crystals, the DSRG designed and built the Soviet Radio Spectrum Analyzer (SRSA) as a tool for locating Epochium formation sites. With a much larger quantity of crystals and new research facilities built, the team only needed human subjects to test live matter warping on.

Vietnamese villagers living in poverty were regularly offered extremely small amounts of compensation for their families in exchange for their cooperation as test subjects. During the early stages of human testing, the DSRG suffered almost 100% casualties when a subject returned from the rift. Over several months of iterating and testing on humans, most people who came through were not dead on arrival. The people who returned alive were often in broken mental states or had severe physical damage to their organs that would lead to death in the future. It was at this point that the DSRG reallocated resources to finding a method of protecting warp victims from these temporal side effects.

A researcher who was personally picked by the DSRG senior scientist was Jozef Kharov, a bright engineer who showed promise for the future of the project. His team was tasked with the goal of finding a way to keep people who travelled through the rift safe during their jump. Kharov proposed creating suits that used the crystals to counteract rift damage, but was met with backlash from his older peers who saw the idea as naive and wasteful of resources. The biggest opposition to the idea was a fellow scientist named Dr. Alexander Petrov, who proposed a simpler solution of creating a serum that would be injected into subjects before warping that would harness the negative energy in the crystals. The idea seemed more conservative of the expensive element the project was built upon, and won favour by most of the DSRG team.

Kharov's team travelled from a DSRG facility in north eastern USSR to an island in the south pacific called Dominion of Muri, which had reports of aztec structures that emitted similar radio signatures to the Epochium shards and also made people who came near them ill. Kharov thought that these structures could be studied and used to build the suits he envisioned.

### Muri Occupation

While Soviet troops occupied parts of the island of Muri for navy cargo and refuelling purposes, Kharov's team along with a military platoon built a research base as a site to study the ancient structures found on the island from. Human trials in this area were proving far more successful with a much lower immediate mortality rate after warps, however more severe side effects were being encountered by subjects. Some of these men who warped would come out with glowing bloodshot eyes, aggressive primal tendencies, and severe burns to the skin.

The tests also caused strange anomalies to be reported in nearby towns in the form of blocked television signals, power outages, and property damage. Some locals were even reported missing, many of whom were not involved as subjects of the research facility. Even so, panic mounted among the public and local hunters and US Veterans who retired on the island brought it upon themselves to investigate what the Soviets were doing on the island. Their actions are the basis for Ghost Stories Episode 1: Blink.

## Goals

The DSRG's research on human teleportation technology was created to assist a greater plot that involved a coordinated attack on several NATO nation capitals. In one of the operation reports found by the SCF at the north eastern USSR radar station facility, the Soviets planned to warp thousands of troops to the capital buildings of each nation in "the blink of an eye".

> *"The Dark Sword Research Group is closer to achieving the goal we were founded upon now more than ever before. We have succeeded at transporting objects such as weapons and explosives through the rift, which can theoretically already be used to send weapons to sleeping agents abroad. If we can overcome this small challenge with live humans, it is only a matter of time before an army of hundreds—no, thousands of USSR troops arrive on the front door of the whitehouse, or buckingham palace in the blink of an eye! The era of dimensional warfare is almost upon us, and we at the DSRG shall guide it into reality. NATO shall be the first to realize the might of our great nation, and soon thereafter, the world will come to learn!" –темный меч - Operational Report to Moscow #31*
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The other goal for the program is to harness time warping capabilities for sending agents into the past to assassinate political opponents. The time warp technology does not yet exist, but if the matter warping device is completed, it will only be a matter of time before both are ready to use.