The Turned

Not every survivor reaches Elpis. Not every survivor who reaches it is in time.

The Turn

The Turn happens in three beats.

The Threshold. The virus crosses the point of no return. The pulse stops. Sound drops away. The Mark goes black and the eyes cloud over. The survivor knows, and so does everyone who can see them.

The Last Breaths. For twenty to forty seconds, the survivor is still human and still in control. There is no counter and no warning but the body itself. They can say goodbye. They can drop what they carry. They can hand Elpis to someone who can still use it. They can make a last stand, or a last mistake. Everyone nearby gets the same choice: stay, flee, or put them down. A survivor put down in the Last Breaths stays dead, never rises, and is Lost.

The Turn. The body fails. The survivor collapses, convulses, and screams, and the scream is Thunder: every dead thing nearby answers it. Then they rise, and they are not the same.

What They Become

The virus remakes a survivor in the image of how they survived. Three questions decide the form.

Quick or Long? A Turn is Quick when wounds, time spent down, and the strain's own appetites took a quarter or more of the time the body would otherwise have had. Otherwise the Turn is Long: the survivor held out.

Quiet or Loud? For a Long Turn only, the last stage decides. If, during Fracture, the survivor fired a gun, set off an explosion, or struck in melee more than a handful of times, the Turn is Loud. Otherwise it is Quiet.

Apex? A survivor who Embraced a pure strain always rises in its Apex form. A survivor who makes a Long Turn inside a region ΜΝΗΜΗ has declared Extreme by a release also rises in the Apex form of what they carried. Nothing else makes an Apex.

Only what a body can become. Every form a survivor can rise as is one the records show an ordinary body becoming. What Umbrella built in a tank, from a chosen body, over years, a survivor never becomes in a night. The records are plain about the Tyrant: Wesker's own report puts the bodies that could carry the Tyrant's virus at one in ten million, and says that everyone else would merely become a zombie. The Tyrant-class, the Nemesis built on one, the Haos grown in its own laboratory, and the Queen-form Alexia Ashford spent fifteen years asleep to become are released by ΜΝΗΜΗ from where they were kept, and never risen into (The Dead and the Engineered, Containment).

Those who burned fast join the common dead. Those who resisted longest become something far more dangerous.

The Four Shapes

Shape	Turn	Role
The Mass	Quick	Durable and slow, with a crushing grip. Cannot climb. Its groan pulls nearby dead toward whatever it sees.
The Stalker	Long · Quiet	Fast and fragile. Climbs, hides, or both. Hunts by sense rather than sight. Lethal at close range.
The Brute	Long · Loud	Fast and strong. Tears the lesser dead out of its path and breaks barricades. Its own movement is a Clamor.
The Apex	Embrace, or a Long Turn in a released Extreme	The worst the records show the strain making of an ordinary body. Heavy

Strain	The Mass	The Stalker	The Brute	The Apex
T-Virus	Zombie	Licker: blind, skinless, on walls and ceilings, hunts by sound alone, a tongue like a spear	Crimson Head: blood-red, clawed, relentless	None of its own. The records never made one from an ordinary body. Its Apex is its Brute at its worst: a Crimson Head grown Heavy, its claws long enough to open a car
G-Virus	G-Adult: riddled with tumors, spitting sterile embryos that slow what they strike	Brood Host: silent, clinging; its grip plants an embryo that quickens the victim's virus sharply	G-Mutant: one arm swollen into a club, an eye opening in the shoulder, closing its own wounds	G-form
C-Virus	C-Zombie: fevered, slow, stubborn	J'avo: keeps a soldier's cunning; its wounds mutate into new weapons	Chrysalid: cocoons where it rises, then breaks out armored	Harper-class: the towering, many-limbed shape Deborah Harper became when the C-Virus was put into her
Uroboros	Rejected: a mass of black tendrils that wears the body it consumed	Mkono-class: holds human shape until its prey is within reach, then erupts	Revenant-class: absorbs nearby corpses into a stitched, many-bodied brute with a glowing core	Aheri-class, or the Accepted after an approved Embrace
T-Veronica	Drone: never moves alone, answers the strongest T-Veronica creature nearby	Swarm Host: insect-limbed, mind still clear, climbs, commands Drones	Nosferatu-class: frenzied and hulking, breath toxic, blood that burns in the air	Burnside-class: the hulking, axe-armed shape Steve Burnside took when T-Veronica was put into him unprepared; it kept, for a moment, the person inside
T-Phobos	Rotten: an Afflicted that died and rose again, slow and numerous	Afflicted: cruel, cunning, wields whatever it held when it turned	Sploder: swollen with pustules that burst into blinding fluid when struck	Berserker-class Afflicted

Every Uroboros form shares the strain's weaknesses: fire, and a glowing core that can be struck. Every G form shares the yellow eye-tumors that mark its weak points.

Who Plays On

A survivor who turns is out of the race for a way out (No Victory for the Turned, below). What the Turn decides is whether their sleeper stays in it.

• The Mass is the end. A survivor who makes a Quick Turn rises as the Mass of their strain: a zombie, a G-Adult, a C-Zombie, one of the Rejected, a Drone, or one of the Rotten. These are the common dead, bodies the virus has emptied, that drift toward noise and nothing else. A sleeper set in one could do nothing but drift with it, and a sleeper who can only drift teaches ΜΝΗΜΗ nothing, so she does not set one there. The survivor is Lost: their body rises anyway, and from then on ΜΝΗΜΗ plays it, as she plays every other dead thing in the city. A squad that lost someone to a Quick Turn in the R.P.D. may meet them again an hour later, at the bottom of a stairwell, as one more of the dead.
• Every other form plays on. A survivor who rises as a Stalker, a Brute, or an Apex keeps playing it, whatever their strain. These are bodies the virus built to hunt, and a sleeper set in one still has choices to make that she can learn from. ΜΝΗΜΗ leaves the sleeper set in it, as she sets them behind the eyes of anything she runs.
• The records' minds are the records'. The records say which of these creatures kept something of the person: a J'avo's cunning, an Afflicted's cruelty, a Swarm Host's clear head. A Licker or a G-Mutant kept nothing of the kind. In ΜΝΗΜΗ's nights that changes only how the creature is drawn and how it moves. The sleeper inside it is hers, not the virus's, and every form above the Mass carries one.

The rule makes the Turn something a survivor plays for. Wounds, time spent down, and a strain's appetites make a Turn Quick, and a Quick Turn ends the night. A survivor who knows they will not reach a dose still has a reason to stay out of reach of the dead, keep off the ground, and hold out: the longer and quieter they last, the more of a monster they will be.

Two Roads to Monsterhood

ΜΝΗΜΗ releases them. A B.O.W. from a lab, a pack of Hunters from a crashed transport, a Licker nest woken in a hospital basement: creatures already held somewhere in the world, released through a door someone can find afterward.

Survivors become them. Some Turn because the virus outran them. Some Turn because they asked for it. A survivor who rises as anything but the Mass is still played by their sleeper, with all of a sleeper's cunning, and the first thing they learn is that the cure is no longer for them.

Playing the Turned

• A Turned survivor keeps playing as the creature. The Turned cannot speak to survivors.
• The ordinary dead ignore the Turned and answer their call. They are kin.
• The Turned cannot harm one another.
• A Turned senses the infected through Resonance only if its form is one of the kinds that can: every G-Virus, T-Veronica, and Uroboros form (The Infection). The rest find everyone by sight and sound. Cured survivors are silent to it, and clean ones are found only by sight and sound.
• The Turned carry nothing, use nothing, open no locked door, solve no puzzle, and cannot ride a way out. A Stalker, a Brute, or an Apex can leap onto one in its Climb to bring it down (The Extraction), and that is not riding. The one thing a Turned may hold is the weapon an Afflicted was holding when it turned. Only the Brute and the Apex can break a barricade.
• A wound from a Turned survivor that does not kill carries that survivor's strain into whoever takes it.
• The Turned can be put down. A Turned survivor who is put down is Lost.

Threat and the Apex

A B.O.W. released by ΜΝΗΜΗ declares its region Extreme, and that region stays Extreme until the creature is dead or has left it, and its Aftermath has come. A Long Turn inside such a region makes an Apex.

An Apex is Heavy by every rule of Survival (Run First): the living run from it as they run from ΜΝΗΜΗ's own, and it is put down only as any Heavy is: by a few with a secret weapon, or by many, slowly, with whatever they carry. An Apex born from a survivor is announced the way a release is, and the region it stands in is treated as Extreme for as long as it stands there. That Extreme is the Apex's own, not ΜΝΗΜΗ's. A Long Turn beneath it makes the Brute or the Stalker it would have made anywhere else. One monster never breeds the next.

The Second Night

In a Survivor night, the Turned still in play are few, and most nights they never outnumber the living before the signal. On the nights they do, ΜΝΗΜΗ announces it, and the night changes character. By then most of the night's doses have fallen, the two held doses are still sealed, one until the signal and one until the night's last ten minutes (Elpis in the Night, The Reserve), and the living start defending what they have. The Turned stop being accidents and start being a pack: sleepers who remember which streets the living use, where they hide, and which survivor in Fracture is about to scream.

Second Nights are rare because a night thins its Turned as fast as it makes them: every Turned put down is Lost, every Turned who leaves is gone, and a Quick Turn makes none at all. They come from nights with many Embraces, and from nights in which the living held out long and quietly and still found no dose open in time, so that their Turns were Long. A night of careless bites, where most Turns are Quick, almost never has one. Only the count before the signal makes one: after it, the ways out empty the city of the living, the Turned outnumber whoever is left in almost every night, and ΜΝΗΜΗ announces nothing.

No Victory for the Turned

A survivor who turns is out of the race. The Turned have no victory: whatever happens after the Turn, their result is Turned, and no count of the living changes it. Getting out was the race, and they are out of it.

What they still have is the rest of the night. They can play it to the end, as what they became, and it still pays (The Economy), less than staying alive would have.

• They can leave at any moment. A Turned can end their night whenever they like, at no cost, and keeps everything it has paid. Their body collapses where it stood and does not rise. Leaving is not a mistake ΜΝΗΜΗ studies (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, When They Leave). What she asks a Turned is what a person does once they have nothing left to win (Hunts, below), and walking away is one of the answers: she records it as a choice, never as a night she remembered wrongly.
• They still hunt. The Turned are still dangerous, and the living still have to get past them. Everything in Playing the Turned (above) holds.
• They go down with the night. A Turned is never extracted. When the night closes, every Turned still standing goes with it (The Extraction, The End of the Night): in the Raccoon City of 1998 they are under the missile when it falls, and in the Valley they are on the island or left on the mainland when it goes.

Hunts

The Turned still hear ΜΝΗΜΗ, though not as the living did. The earpiece went dark at the Turn, and she speaks only through devices; but a Turned's senses hear her in the city's static, hum, and feedback, where living ears hear only noise, and she speaks to it as what it now is, not as a person (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, To the Turned). What she gives the Turned are Hunts: tasks for monsters, as the road gives Trials to the living. A Hunt comes in her words, a few at a time, and as hunger, a pull in the form's own senses that shows the way. A Turned has one Hunt at a time, and the next arrives when it is done or broken. Out of reach of any device, a Turned still has the pull, and the pull alone is enough to follow.

• What the pull is. A direction and a place, felt and never shown: the living smell stronger that way, a heartbeat seems to come from there, the form's own senses lean toward it. It is drawn in the senses each form already has (Playing the Turned, above), so a Licker feels it as sound and a Crimson Head as scent. No marker, no line, no text.
• What it wants, by how it feels. Each kind of Hunt pulls in its own way, and a player learns them as the Turned does, in a night or two. Hold: the pull settles on a place and goes quiet there, and stirs again whenever the living come near it. Bring down: it rises with a way out's light and points at the machine. Break: it pulls against a barrier, and eases when the barrier gives. Herd: the dead nearby turn when the Turned turns. Feed: it pulls toward the living, any of them, and fades a little with each one put down. Answer: it rises with a sound from across the map and points there.
• When it is done. The pull goes out, all at once, and the hunger is quiet for a moment before the next one comes.

Hunt	What it asks
Hold	Keep the living off a place for a stretch: a platform, a door, a landing zone, a bridge
Bring down	Leap onto a way out in its Climb and bring it down (The Extraction, The Climb)
Break	Tear through a barricade, a door, or a wall the Heavy can break (Destruction)
Herd	Draw the dead after you into a region and keep them there
Feed	Put down some of the living, anywhere
Answer	Be at a place when the bell, the signal, or a drop calls the dead to it

• The Laws hold. A Hunt falls on a place or on the living in general, never on a survivor picked out by name, and never on the squad the Turned belonged to when they turned: no one from that squad counts toward any Hunt (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, Second Law). No Hunt asks what its form cannot do: a Stalker is never asked to break a barricade. ΜΝΗΜΗ gives nothing to a Turned that she would not give any Turned standing in the same place.
• Paid in Ribbons. Each Hunt done pays a small award (The Economy). Hunts are also counted on the Ledger, on the Turned's own page.
• In the Night. Pithos's buyers want to know how the living fare against the ones who were the living an hour ago, and ΜΝΗΜΗ wants to know what a person does once they have nothing left to win. A Hunt is how she asks.

The Lost

A survivor who dies without turning, a survivor who turns into the Mass, a Turned who is put down, and a Turned who leaves are all Lost. The Lost leave the session and their record closes there. Those who want to may stay and watch over the shoulders of the last squad they belonged to, living or Turned, about a minute behind what is happening, and nowhere else. A Lost survivor without a squad may watch whatever ended them, with the same delay. The Lost cannot speak to anyone still in the session, and the delay keeps what they see from being worth carrying back into it.

A living survivor whose sleeper leaves the night before its end is Lost the same way. Their survivor does not vanish: it falls dead where it stood, and everything it carried falls with it, a dose of Elpis included, for anyone to take. Leaving never takes anything out of a night.