Vegis could “talk” to the animals by taking advantage of the connection. It was like a very primitive version of the messages Vegis could send to Boreal and Mitra. Mitra began to tell Vegis when they were outside so they could talk in person since talking through their minds took a lot of effort compared to a normal conversation. It was also a precaution because she noticed that when she talks to Boreal with it, the Elder seems to know what was said. Mitra would occasionally complain about something to Boreal through the connection and it would be rectified within the day to week depending on the complexity of the issue.
This made Mitra and Boreal try their best to stay away from them as they didn’t know how deep the Elder could dig into their heads. This was in vain however since the Elders would somehow appear near them at the most random of times. Vegis got to see the Elder that way since they once showed up when Vegis was talking to Mitra during his walk. For some reason, they wore a suit of armor at all times so Vegis never got to see any of their features but they towered over Vegis and Mitra. Vegis was originally 2 meters tall, only a bit taller than the average person these days, and is now roughly 210 cm. Mitra is about 226 cm. The Elder in their armor was easily over 260 cm but was likely in the 250s. Their voice was distorted, likely a feature of the armor, and grated in Vegis’s ears when they first talked to each other.
V1-3 did most of the work when it came to testing the Corruption. Their more normal bodies allowed them to fit into the room. Vegis would be locked into a room while they work and Mitra or Boreal would be brought to the house to allow the clones to go down. They no longer allowed them to go into the house since they wanted to make sure almost nothing goes into and out of the house. A second home was constructed in a short time for Vegis to live in since the old house could no longer be used by him. V4 wasn’t allowed to do much since it was basically a large dog that didn’t have hands. Vegis would ride it once in a while to stretch its legs but there wasn’t much that it could do.
That was until one day, during one of the many runs around the property V4 did to situate its boredom, it started to feel the connection to the other animals. The other clones couldn’t do this, and whenever they used connections Vegis had, it was through Vegis directly interfering to allow them. Somehow, V4 gained the ability to connect to animals like how Vegis is, and under Vegis’s directions, developed this ability to fluently communicate with them. This allowed Vegis to send animals to explore areas he wasn’t allowed to go in. Most of them were just places that the others were studying to understand the barrier Vegis talked about, however, there were a couple of places that piqued his interest.
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The first one was a small hut that was made from materials that Vegis did not recognize other than the branding that was on it. The burning star logo Sol Cimex branded a piece of the building. The animals couldn’t get near it since when they got near it, they would feel as though their skin was boiling off of their bodies. Another location the interested Vegis was a small river that bordered the new facility and the Elder’s compound. It wasn’t originally forbidden but one day, when Vegis got near it, he collapsed as his body stiffened from electricity that flooded him. It seemed they managed to reactivate the nanites inside of him. The last thing Vegis couldn’t go to was a small hole that was nearby the roads into the Elder’s compound. It was about 20 cm in radius but one couldn’t see the bottom of it. He managed to convince a gecko-like animal to go into the hole. It never came back. This stopped Vegis from sending others into areas with unknown dangers since he doesn’t like the idea of them dying because of a task he gave them.
About 20 scientists were transferred to Oceania and taken to Vegis’s facility. They strapped the clones inside the old house with cameras so they could monitor the Corruption while they did the test. The home was surrounded in a force field to keep everything inside and the scientist would spend most of the time using the clones to do the experiments while they stayed in a monitoring building that was set up the week they arrived. Some of the scientists who had connections to the Elder were allowed to study Vegis under the guise of studying how the Corruption contact affects humans but it was more likely that they were trying to figure out what Vegis was. It seems they were giving some information from the Elder but was also told that there was not much of a record on what Vegis was.
The first round of testing happened just after Vegis was quarantined to see what he was capable of. Vegis had incredible strength for his size and could rival humans in midrange power armor without actively enhancing his strength with mana. The only humans who held more power in their body were the size of small vehicles and were more machine than man. The drawback to all this power and strength was his weight and density. Vegis was now close to five hundred kgs and would sink immediately when he went into water. The more they studied Vegis’s body, the more confused they became. They managed to find Vegis’s medical files from the system, both the pre-metamorphosis and post-metamorphosis, and this just confused them more. Vegis had grown way too much since the last time he was measured and his body composition had also changed in the years that came and gone. They were now finding a large concentration of rare MEMs (Mana Enriched Metals) in his system that were never made outside of small special situations.
