Werebeasts

## Werebeast Lore

The origin of werebeasts is shrouded in mystery, but there is a common legend as to how they came about. Long ago there was a powerful tribe of Orcs, harboring a mad Shaman. This man was a very proficient alchemist, one of the best in the world at the time. What made him mad was his infatuation with the idea of being able to transition between an Orc and animal, similar to what the Lashuns can do. It wasn’t that the idea itself was a bad one, but he was willing to go to great lengths to achieve such a power.

As he researched the topic, it came to he was only just scratching the surface and that he would need to start experimenting in order to keep moving forward. As mentioned before, he was willing to go to extremes, and he did just that. When his first concoction was finally developed, he decided that his subjects would be his own people. The justification in his head being that he’d be able to give them better lives. But of course, the only thing he actually cared about was obtaining the power for himself. Now he just needed a subject.

The village wasn’t small by any means. To be exact, it had a population nearing a hundred people, including men, women and children. Out of everyone he could have chosen, he decided on his wife. His wife was the only one other than himself that knew about his research. Weighing his options, if he had opted to experiment on someone other than her and something went wrong, his wife would have been able to figure it out. Now his wife was a morally upstanding citizen, and he didn’t want to risk being exposed and later executed. So in the end, she was the best candidate.

He slipped the contents of the potion into her drink and simply observed what happened to her. The effects seemed to not be instantaneous, as for the first day she acted as normal as always. As for the second and third days. However, on the fourth day she succumbed to what at first, appeared to be an illness. She lost the ability to move around as her muscles were breaking themselves down. Her bones began to contort, and her mental well being drastically lowered each passing day.

As the Orc observed these horrid mutations, he began to wonder what exactly went wrong. It wasn’t until she finally died after 2 weeks of agony, and her body decomposed to the point where nothing but bone remained that he noticed something. Looking at her physical appearance he had the idea that her skeletal structure had been horribly deformed. But when he actually looked at the skeleton itself, he realized that it had actually began to morph into one that can only be described as a humanoid wolf.

It was then that he knew he was heading in the right direction, and continued his studies. Soon he developed a new potion, and would one again need a test subject. This time opting to go with his daughter. That way he could say that the ‘unknown illness’ that had affected his wife had been contagious and spread to his daughter. She was also very young, only six years of age, who would do anything her father asked without a second thought. With that, he gave her the potion and observed the rest.

Much like her mother, she was fine the first few days. But eventually she succumbed to the effects of the potion and fell ill. Once again her muscles deteriorated, her bones contorted and her mental capacity took a nosedive. However, she didn’t die in 2 weeks time. She survived for the third, fourth and fifth as well. All the while, physical changes kept happening. Her bones continued to contort, eventually changing her once normal shaped skull into that of a wolves. Patches of fur would appear all across her body, and even her teeth even began to sharpen. However, her mental health did not improve. In fact, it got so worse that she may as well have been brain dead. After six weeks time, her organs failed her, and she finally died.

These two failed attempts did not deter the Orc, in fact in only served to motivate him further. And so he began to research it again, developing potion after potion, each one made slightly different than the other in order to find the perfect one. In order to gather the necessary test subjects, he purposefully polluted the village’s water supply with a poison that wouldn't kill the villagers, but it would make them feel quite sick. Having acted as the village doctor for so long, he knew that eventually the villagers would come for him to help.

And they did just that. This allowed him to distribute the concoctions he made freely, to every villager. It went just as expected, a subject would suffer detrimental damage, including but not limited to mental and physical deterioration, deformed bone structure and heavily shortened lifespans, all of which were irreversible. Being the last one left, he would leave his village, seek refuge in another and begin his experiments again. It is said that this Orc went through a dozen villages, all of a rather large size, before something interesting happened.

For weeks, even months, one of his subjects remained completely normal. He suffered no physical changes, no mental deterioration and no bone deformation. He carried on as if the potion had no effect on him. Then there came a day when two of the villagers were to have a trial by combat. As is with Orcish tradition, the two villagers battled to the death, and they both ended up killing each other. Witnessing this bloodshed, the subject immediately began to undergo rapid physical changes. His muscles expanded, his bones lengthened, his teeth turned to fangs and fur covered his entire body. The alchemist had finally done it, he had created a concoction that could allow a person to morph into a humanoid beast.

It was much larger than the average person, about the same size as a transformed Beast Lashun. Although unlike Beast Lashuns, this thing was much more feral. All of a sudden it began to slaughter the remaining villagers, and the more people it killed, the stronger it grew. The beast was completely driven by bloodlust, even killing it’s former family without any signs of hesitation. The alchemist hid himself away in order to avoid being killed. After it had slaughtering everyone, it’s bloodlust died down and it transformed back into an Orc. It was then when the alchemist seized the man and kept him as a captive for further research. He eventually came to make more concoctions, ones that turned you into felines, canines (Now known as Hunters) or larger beasts such as bears, crocodiles, boars, etc. (Now known as Behemoths) The alchemist ended up being killed by one of his subjects, and the creatures escaped.

Although his research was lost, the disease was not, as the beasts were able to produce offspring, creating bloodlines that remain to this day. Upon capturing and researching some of these creatures, it was determined that what triggers their transformation is witnessing death. What was more interesting was the body of said creatures. In their base form, they are just as vulnerable as everyone else, but once transformed, their bodies developed certain traits. Behemoths were larger and much slower than Hunters, but their hide offered much more protection over them compared to Hunters. As these creatures grow stronger, they get more control over their bloodlust and some can the strongest can change between each form at will.

To go into a bit more detail, the cells of werebeasts are phenomenal. The diseased cells rapidly duplicate themselves in a matter of seconds in order to achieve the transformed state. Not only that,but when a werebeast reverts, these same diseased cells begin to rapidly destroy themselves. This makes diferentiating a werebeast from a normal person almost completely impossible, as from the outside and to an extent, the inside, they look just like anybody else. A truly fascinating ability, it's almost like the cells are in a constant state of limbo.