Barasyte: Prologue

Barasyte: Prologue

Where there is water, there is life.

Or so the adage goes. But chances are, in the great expanse of the universe and the cosmos, if water exists somewhere, there is a good chance there are organisms that rely on the essential building block of H20, much as humans do.

No one knows exactly when the Palaematids, or PALs, arrived, but my colleagues and I hypothesize that their arrival date was some time before the first several cases were discovered in North America two years ago. Their name is derived from the Palaemonetes paludosus species, familiarly known as the Ghost Shrimp, a nearly transparent crustacean found in the Southeast United States. However, the PAL's body is completely transparent, gelatinous, and very light. Where one side of its body is similar to a shrimp, the "tail" side has a fleshy appendage instead, almost shaped like an umbrella. The appendage provides adequate wind resistance to prevent rapid descent. When folded flat against its body, a PAL in the larval stage meaures approximately 4mm thick in diameter and 18mm long. Combined with the fact that the body of the PAL is nigh-indestructible (more details on this in a later entry) we suspect the PAL arrived through our atmosphere in some kind of delivery device (a small meteor, perhaps?) that burned up in the atmosphere and scattered an untold number of PALs across the western hemisphere, before the parasites propagated themselves across the globe.

An unsettling discovery was also made by the team: as long as they have access to water, the PALs can survive for several weeks without a host, leading us to believe our "patient zero" received his PAL from the ocean

during a visit to some body of water (most likely the beach, considering the case location).

However, it is just as likely that the PAL in this instance traveled upstream through a sewer drainage pipe, much like how some parasites in other parts of the world can travel quickly through a urine stream into an unsuspecting host merely answering the call of the wild. From the sewage pipe, the PAL could have traveled through untold miles of sewer tunnels before dwelling in the domicile of the victim.

As our team coordinates with the global scientific community at large to curb this growing threat, I will continue to document and record my findings for posterity's sake, on this invasive creature and the anomaly of its transmutative properties within adult male hosts. Mutations, which, could very well spell disaster and possibly the annihilation of the human race.

Signing off,

- Dr. Erin Grafis, Lead Researcher, Office of Infectious Diseases and Invasive Pathogens, Department of Defense, Fort Detrick, Maryland.