5

Rufus Brooker, now significantly wealthier, is true to his word. He sends you the location of his alien, a refrigerated storeroom a short drive from his diner. You send out a team of agents to go and retrieve it.

And so your first look at a Surgeon comes in MetaHuman's laboratories. Electra and Claudette greet you as you descend to examine the creature, laid out on a laboratory table.

It is vaguely human-shaped and human-sized, but horrifically warped. From its face sprouts a great proboscis; its four fingers end in long, knife-like claws.

And, crazily, parts of it intermittently seem as if they're.…not there. Every few seconds, parts of its body disappear, then reappear. Nor are they merely invisible—when a part of its forearm fades from view, Claudette takes out a pen and passes it clean through the empty space. Just seconds later, that length of forearm reappears, wholly solid.

This, then, is one of the Surgeons that Anaru Katariki came to warn you about—and was killed for doing so. And it is dead. Yet it exists here, on Earth.

You have an unsettling feeling it did not come alone.

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