The Story of Exo

In the fog‑shrouded crossroads where the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans meet, a perpetual storm coils across the sea—sheets of rain that sting like gravel and lightning that spiderwebs the clouds. Most captains strike their sails and steer away, branding the spot cursed on every chart they carry.

Yet legends insist that anyone who threads the storm's eye meets an eerie calm: a basalt‑ringed island draped in triple‑canopy rainforest, peaks that puncture the heavens, and swamps aglow with bioluminescent tides. Few breach the squall; fewer still return. Those who do swear thunder rises from inside the jungle and waterfalls drop so far they erase the horizon.

When EXO Corporation located the island by satellite anomaly, their board smelled the opportunity of the century. A fleet of autonomous drill‑ships elbowed aside the mists, laying anchor against basalt cliffs while drones cut landing pads into the canopy.

They christened the isle Site Æ‑113, but employees soon coined a simpler tag: Exo—"the place outside everything." Billion‑dollar contracts poured in to fabricate a self‑contained research citadel: carbon‑fiber skyways, mag‑rail cargo lines, and the crown jewel—The Helix Spire, a 200‑meter laboratory threaded with gene‑sequencing lasers.

Survey drones pinged enormous heat signatures deep inside the valley basins. The first insertion team lost three exo‑frames before realizing the impossible: dinosaurs—species thought vanished for 65 million years—thrived in secluded biomes.

Omniraptos packs skulked beneath banyan buttress roots, while Ceratosaurus and Carnotaurus prowled the tidal flats. Herds of Stegosaurus clashed tail‑spikes in fern glades; Triceratops and Maiasaura rumbled across the floodplains. Migrating caravans of Tenontosaurus browsed the valley margins, Deinosuchus lurked in every shadowed channel, and the apex T. rex roared from the cloud‑draped ridges.

The island wasn't just prehistoric—it was an evolutionary knot, a living laboratory where time's arrow had jammed. EXO Corp saw more than scientific wonder; they saw patents. Genomes rewritten for pharma, bio‑weapons, even designer pets for trillionaires. Construction doubled overnight.

Under Dr. Aurelia Ozymandias—"Dr. Ozy" to interns—EXO launched Project MELD: splice prime dinosaur DNA with exotic alleles to create augmented subspecies. Early successes were cosmetic—iridescent scales, luminescent frills. Investors smiled; tourism subsidiaries drafted theme‑park mock‑ups.

The Test Tubes

To streamline field trials, engineers built Test Tubes—hand‑held injectors loading billions of CRISPR nanites. One push, one pulse of ultraviolet light, and a subject's genome rewrote itself in vivo. Rangers turned the procedure into a competitive ritual: beat a reflex‑puzzle mini‑game on the Tube's holo‑screen, and the algorithm promised optimal gene integration. Soon, these tubes became the island's most valuable commodity—traded, hoarded, and fought over like liquid gold.

Then an intern mis‑filed two vials.

On a monsoon‑drowned night, a juvenile Tyrannosaurus received an unvetted cocktail. Security cams later showed the creature convulsing under emerald flashes. By morning, containment glass lay in molten ribbons. The animal—now nicknamed "Verdigris"—stood taller, hide charcoal‑black, veins glowing neon green. Acidic ooze dripped from its jaws, sizzling through titanium grates. Wherever Verdigris bit, cells metastasized in seconds, warping flesh into chemoluminescent tumors.

Once a brilliant geneticist devoted to conservation, Dr. Ozy's ambitions darkened when military contractors whispered of billion-dollar weapons contracts. An immortal dinosaur—imagine the applications. Soldiers that couldn't die. Living tanks that regenerated from any wound.

Obsessed with her vision of weaponized evolution, she pushed for an apex prototype: a dinosaur that could not die, a showcase to secure military backing and make her the richest scientist alive. She introduced a retro‑viral symbiote engineered to hyper‑regenerate tissue. In isolation chambers it worked—until it didn't.

The symbiote mutated, hijacking the host's nervous system and overriding instinct with a singular directive: spread. Within 48 hours, bitten subjects reanimated—no pulse, yet shambling with feral purpose. Staff called them Night‑Wrought. The island's AI sirens coined a simpler tag: Zombies.

Dr. Ozy's greed had unleashed something far worse than death—undeath that spread like wildfire. The good doctor who once saved species had doomed an entire island.

Each sunset, storm clouds bruise the sky and Verdigris's howl reverberates across the valleys. Survivors soon noticed a pattern—the outbreaks peaked every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, as if tied to some forgotten lab protocol or containment schedule that still runs on autopilot. Gates groan open—sometimes by sabotage, sometimes by sheer force—and Zombies flood the biomes. Raptors sprout fungus‑laced talons; stegosaurs drag half‑rotted tails, eyes glowing chartreuse. Dawn's first light triggers a metabolic collapse; the infected crumble to dormant husks until darkness loops the cycle anew.

The Helix Spire lies in ruins, but its automated forges still churn Test Tubes that wash ashore or surface in mud‑slides—power in a syringe for any brave (or reckless) enough to use them. These tubes have become the island's currency, its addiction, its promise of survival. Each one a gamble: will you gain strength, or lose yourself to mutation?

Welcome, Subject. Whether you were marooned here or answered Exo's clandestine recruitment ping, survival demands adaptation. Hunt for Tubes, trade them for ET tokens at abandoned lab terminals, store your strongest mutations as dino cards, and gather allies before the sun bleeds out. But beware—kill your own kind and you'll become rogue prey, hunted by all.

Because when Verdigris roars and Dr. Ozy's Zombies rise, the only law left on the island is evolve… or be eaten.