[Disclaimer: I own neither the Dead Space nor the Prototype franchises. All characters from both are property of Activision and Electronic Arts (EA)]

(Credit to Zevik on YouTube for providing an entertaining walkthrough to watch while I transcribe the settings in the base game to the fanfic- he's a lot of fun to watch. I highly recommend watching his content. And hopefully revealing one of my secrets to a great fanfic won't ruin my image in people's eyes.)

(And with the boring stuff out of the way... on with the show! *Cue maniacal laughter*)

Prologue

Deep in the heart of America, two government officials made a lengthy journey though a secret facility beneath the surface of the earth. Though the trek proved long and tedious, the trip was worth any amount of inconvenience. They went down corridors and eventually reached an elevator that led even further down into the bowels of the planet. Eventually it came to a stop and allowed the two officials to exit.

As they made the final stretch towards their destination, one of them asked the other, "So... is it true? Did we really capture it?"

The other replied, "I know, I know... I wouldn't have believed it on word of mouth alone. But it's the truth; the soldiers actually did their job for once. I guess Blackwatch is useful after all. Who would've guessed?"

Pausing to gather his thoughts for a moment, the second official then commented, "What I can't believe is that we've managed to keep it contained for this long. You would think it would have found a way to bust out, or kill a passing guard and steal their face."

The first official nodded and continued onwards with his associate. When they reached the doors leading to their target, they heard shouting going on from behind it. Both officials looked at each other and worriedly wondered if it was a bad time to enter. Their delayed decision became moot when a guard noticed them and activated a retinal scanner near the doors, which started the opening process.

Muttering under his breath, "Now or never...", the first official walked in with his partner and saw what happened behind the closed doors. The situation was not as bad as they imagined it to be; all of the reinforced walls and windows were still intact, and the creature fruitlessly bounced off of them to escape. It continually tried breaking free of the large containment room while the guards patrolling the area cautiously held their rifles close to their bodies.

One person thought the creature was about to break through the glass and held his rifle out with increasing fear. To his fortune, it simply bounced off again and landed onto the ground. He turned to see the two officials standing near the door and greeted both of them, explaining how the operation to acquire the target had gone.

"It was a- a mostly standard procedure", the man said, his voice rather shaky from thinking the subject would escape any moment. He continued, "All we needed to do was steal the creature's... sister? I know this thing thinks she's its sister, but... whatever. We kidnap her, lure the freak into a trap and contain it, and pretend we'll kill her to keep it in check. I'm not so sure how well that last part is working though- all that does is piss it off a lot."

"Will the structure hold well enough?", one of the officials asked. "We're hoping this facility turns into a place of research and progress, not that monster's playground."

The man shrugged and replied, "You'd need to talk with one of those scientists over in the other room about that. All I do is patrol this area and make sure everything doesn't go to Hell."

The two officials made their way to an adjacent room where a couple of scientists worked, whereupon one of them was summoned to detail the specs of the containment unit. She proceeded to explain that all of the walls had been reinforced and were as air-tight as possible. It meant that nothing, not even air, could find a way through. Biometric scanners and safety-locking mechanisms that required passwords once meant not even the monster's abilities would afford it an easy escape.

Impressed, the officials went around other parts of the facility and made sure everything remained in working order according to those supervising. Once they had deemed everything worked as intended, they left to inform their superiors of the current situation. Despite some hesitation on the part of more skittish members of that group, everyone voted in favor of keeping the facility in operation, regardless of the danger present with the aforementioned subject remaining there.

And so it was highly active for a time- workers worked on anything that need to be fixed or replaced, researchers researched DNA samples of the creature as carefully as they could to avoid contamination, and guards guarded the containment room in which it was being held. Weeks passed into months, months into a years, and years into nearly a full decade... at least that is how long time seemed to pass for the creature held inside.

The subject had no sense of time, lacking clocks of any kind, only vaguely aware of when the day turned into night, and even then, being so far removed from the surface made knowing even that nearly impossible. It screamed incessantly during some times and stayed completely silent on others. If the creature had the capacity to go insane, it just might have done so, but it could not; the memories and knowledge stored within its mind gave it a type of cognitive resilience that kept it just sane enough to know that it hated every second of confinement, even if it did not show it openly at certain points.

Eventually the monotony of not knowing what would happen in the future ended, but not in the way it hoped. There came a prelude to this from some excited shouting coming from a few scientists. They ran around the area a bit and assembled all of the important people in the building, as well as some officials that funded the whole facility.

The scientists introduced a large vial into a slot connected to one of the walls and a strange gas quickly filled up the entire chamber. It quickly overtook the entire space in said chamber and made it hard for the subject to concentrate. Escape was just as fruitless as it had been the first few thousand times, and eventually the creature's vision faded. It soon fell to the floor and could no longer stand.

It could not recall how long it had been unconscious, but it regained just a bit of it when voices spoke. All it could hear were snippets of a conversation, some parts saying, "How to cover this up... send it far away... that 'moon-harvest' idea...", but all of it soon disjointed until nothing but silence remained once more.

Eventually, the nothingness was replaced by a feeling of oppressive darkness, just above the lack of anything the creature had dealt with before. Suddenly the darkness had given way to a dull light, and an intense feeling of something the creature had not felt in ages- hunger. It was overwhelming, and the subject could do nothing to control itself any longer. Retaining none of the rationale it boasted before, the lack of having sustenance for so long reduced the creature into a raving mad monstrosity, lashing out wildly at anything that appeared humanoid.

A long time would pass before the creature could remember what it had done in a place it could not recall, and in between that time, many more things would happen. But the monster's journey would not truly begin until it finally stopped running, fell to the ground, and tried to stay sane as an intense cold took over. The last rational thing that it could remember before the second lapse in consciousness took it was a singular name... its own name.

Alex Mercer.