Tia looked down at her hands. The skin between her fingers was weeping a clear sap. She’d stopped trying to wash it off. She looked at the others: Mendez, the farmer, now missing three fingers he’d hacked off after they sprouted tiny, toothy mouths. Little Whiskers, the colony’s tame megasloth, had grown a second, weeping eye on its flank. They’d had to put Whiskers down.
Then she jammed the thermo lance into the soft underbelly of the Nucleus—where the veins met the main trunk—and pulled the trigger. rimworld fleshmass nucleus
They found the Nucleus in a blasted crater where the old geothermal vent used to be. Tia looked down at her hands
As the sun set over the corpse of the Nucleus, the colony’s survivors began the long, limping walk back to their rust-stained home. The fleshmass would wither. The ground would heal. And tomorrow, they would plant something new in the ash. She looked at the others: Mendez, the farmer,
Tia “Stitch” Nguyen, the colony’s medic and de facto leader, knelt in the mud at the edge of what used to be their cornfield. Now, it was a heaving, carpet of pinkish-grey tissue, studded with twitching ocular nodes and pulsating bladders that dripped amber fluid. The fleshmass had arrived with the psychic drone—a low, humming wrongness that made teeth ache and dreams bleed.