<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; </style><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>Please
tell me you have something...” the yazirian director of UPFBI
ordered as he strode into the forensic lab to confront the head
medical examiner, a dralasite currently in its female phase.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>I
do,” the dralasite doctor replied breathily, “but you aren't
going to like it.”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>Three
major terrorist incidents in the last ten days means I already don't
like it,” the director replied. “Talk to me!”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
doctor sighed. “At first I couldn't figure it out” She gestured
at several bodies laid out on examination tables under freeze fields.
“Initial examination indicated perfectly two normal humans, three
healthy yazirians, and an utterly ordinary vrusk. Then I got the tox
screens back from the lab. All six of them have really screwed up
hormone balances. Dopamine and seratonin levels or their equivalents
are nearly 125 percent of weighted norms. Oxytocin is up too, about
120 percent...”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
director struggled to remember his basic biochemistry. “So, they
were </i><span style="font-style: normal">really</span><i> happy to
be doing what they were doing?”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>That
would be understating it,” the doctor replied tiredly. “Levels
that high just don't occur naturally. We're talking two to three
times the levels expected from a normal pleasure response.”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>Drugs
then?” the director asked.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>First
thing I looked for,” the doctor replied, pulling up a set of test
results on her computer screen. The yazirian leaned over her
shoulder to follow along as she explained. “I tested for all the
normal stuff: stims, 'joyjuice', et cetera.” The doctor pointed
out the appropriate parts of the readout. “Nothing...until I
noticed this.” She indicated one result in particular. “Elevated
histamine levels.”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>Allergies?”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>Almost.
I checked for secondary signs of allergic reactions: sinus
irritation, and so forth, and came up empty. So I dug deeper.
Eventually, I did find foreign proteins, specifically pheromones.”
She paused to look back at her boss. “When I submitted the results
to the database for identification, I got red-flagged. I need a
higher authorization code to access the files.”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
director nodded and crossed the room to another access terminal. The
doctor watched as he submitted to retinal identification, voice-print
check, and entered a pincode into the terminal to release the
requested information. She turned back to the terminal, and, if it
were possible for her to do so, would have turned pale. As it was,
she lost partial control over her body configuration and it started
to droop.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>What
is it?” the director asked as he came back over. The dralasite
gestured at the screen without a word.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
yazirian looked where she was indicating and swore softly, “Void...”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
answer sat there on the screen in black and amber: 99.387 PROBABILITY
MATCH. SPECIES: SATHAR.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">“<i>I
want every note you and your labs have compiled and sealed within the
hour,” ordered the director. “Tell your people, not one </i><span style="font-style: normal">word</span><i>
of this to </i><span style="font-style: normal">any</span><i>one...”</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT"><i>The
dralasite nodded. She had been with the Bureau long enough to know
that if the worms were this organized, then they were in trouble...</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
<b>INTRODUCTION</b></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
The Alpha Dawn rules on sathar indicated that they used hypnotism to
control their hidden agents, and that anyone could succumb to their
will if exposed to their voice and presence. Of course that was in
the 80s, when hypnotism was suspected of being much more powerful
than it turned out to really be. Coming back to Star Frontiers after
a very long absence, it struck me how pat the answer was, and I found
it unsatisfying, so I set out to tinker with it.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
As I see it, the sathar can “hypnotize” with direct personal
contact, but I posit that it's a much more involved process than
simply speaking to the victim with the intent of controlling them.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
<b>THE PROCESS</b></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
Sathar needing to hypnotize someone for a single, simple purpose
(“Open this door.” “Forget you saw anything wrong here.”) can
rely on their natural “hypnotic” ability, which is a combination
of sub-aural harmonics produced by their vocal apparatus and a
naturally emitted pheromone that influences the victim so as to be
more suggestible in the first place. The victim needs to make a
check based on the average of their current Stamina and their
Personality score (their physical resistance to the pheromonal effect
plus their force of will).</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
When the sathar need a longer-term agent capable of more complex
actions they have to use stronger methods. Someone chosen to to be
used as a higher level agent is taken and subjected to extensive
conditioning in a controlled environment designed to amplify the
natural hypnotizing effect. They will constantly be in the presence
of sathar while being bombarded with visual and audio input (think
the “conversion” process from the 80s version of “V”) while
also being exposed to concentrated doses of sathar pheromones. The
subject must make a daily check as described above. For each two
days of conditioning, the check is at -5%. If after 3 weeks (about
30 days) the subject is still resistant, they will simply be killed.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
If the subject does succumb to the conditioning, the audio and
visual inputs are changed from harsher ones designed to break the
will of the subject to more “gentle” (read: more insidious) ones
designed to build the loyalty of the subject to his/her new
“friends”. This process will continue for another week. The end
result is an agent who will appear to be/act perfectly normally in
all respects, but whose loyalties are to the sathar cause.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
Such agents are assigned to a sathar “handler”, who will
establish a hidden base of operations to which the agent will be
required to report on a regular basis. There are several such bases
throughout the Frontier (more than the UPF suspects). This ensures
exposure to the pheromones continues, and reinforces the
conditioning. For each week the agent remains under sathar control,
an additional STA/PER check must be made at a cumulative -2% per
week. Failure of this check means that the conditioning has become
“set”, and any rehabilitation of the agent will require a regimen
of de-programing that will take at least as long as it took to turn
the subject in the first place.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
<b>IDENTIFYING A SATHAR AGENT<br /><br /></b>Individuals who have fallen
victim to "normal" sathar control sometimes display
behavioral cues, such as a distracted, vacant, or overly focused
affect while they are carrying out their assigned task. Such
cues are not always present, however. Upon release from the
control, confusion and agitation are common responses. Given
that their exposure to the means of control is short-term, there will
be few physiological traces.<br /><br />A "turned" agent will
appear perfectly normal under most circumstances. He/she will
laugh, cry, get angry, etc just as any other person would. They
may show very minor changes in behavior that an observant third party
might note, such as a change of handedness, or slight alterations to
established habits and interests. This, along with an
unexplained absence lasting more than a few days are the biggest cues
that a subject may be turned. The sathar of course work to mitigate
that by choosing victims who have no close family to miss them, or
for whom they are able to manufacture a convincing excuse such as a
vacation, business trip, or similar occurrence.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
Their conditioning only becomes evident in in the event of discovery,
a discovered agent will become almost psychotically violent, and
will either seek to conceal the discovery by killing the discoverer,
or (depending on the nature of their mission) will flee and attempt
to return to their sathar handler. This extreme reaction means that
a captured agent should be treated as a significant threat to both
themselves and others. A suicide watch is suggested for the
initial portion of incarceration or attempt at
de-programing.<br /><br />Physiological signs of agent conditioning
include severely elevated levels of dopamine, seratonin, and oxytocin
in the bloodstream. Also present in "freshly turned"
agents are an irritation of the lungs and elevated histamine levels
due to the high dosages of pheromone they have been exposed to.
The lung tissue irritation and allergic response lessen but do not
entirely vanish as their bodies become more acclimated.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
<b>THE FUTURE</b></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
Even more frightening (if the UPF ever finds out) are recent
developments in sathar genetic and bio-organic engineering. The
worms are on the cusp of developing a means by which specially
developed infant sathar can be biologically integrated into human,
yazirian, and vrusk hosts (dralasites are immune due to their
distributed neurological networks). The infant sathar would have
full control over the host, as well as access to their memories.
Removing the infant would require extremely sophisticated
neurosurgery that at best would have a small chance (5% for every 10
points of STA) of success without killing the host.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
A very few sathar scientists are working an even more sinister
program to create sathar hybrids, combining sathar dna with that of
other races to create physical copies of their forms, but with sathar
neurology and personalities. This research is being held back two
things: 1) the difficulty of combining vermiform DNA with mammalian,
insectoid, and amoeboid, and 2) the distaste for the idea on the part
of the majority of sathar, who feel it is demeaning for them to
assume the form of lesser species.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal" align="LEFT">
If either of those programs ever progresses the the point of full
viability, the sathar will become a threat to the UPF the likes of
which they have never seen.</p>
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