"Everything you know, they will take. Everyone you see, they will change. We are nothing to them but playthings, and they realize exactly what they created, before and this time, but they just don't care..."
The man stretched out his long appendage as he continued to softly ramble. His restraints had popped off long ago, during his sixth transformation when his forearm enlarged, before falling off entirely.
Lance sighed, irritation building. "Stop trying to avoid my questions. I'm only trying to help you, and those that we pulled out of that hell hole with you." He leaned in closely to the man, making direct eye contact as best as he could. "We might not be able to reverse whatever they did to you to cause this...Mutating. But we can at least catch them, and prevent them from doing this to anyone else."
The man groaned in pain as his spine twisted, and boney spears shot out of his back, piercing the chair he was sat in. He panted a few times, his fangs beginning to pierce his tounge. This was the epitome of hell for him, but he still managed to croak out a rough chuckle. "Catch them..." He repeated back in a hoarse tone. "You can't catch them. Shit...You can't even see them. If it were that easy, this never would have happened in the first place."
Lance swallowed back a gasp of surprise as the man's tail whipped around again. The sight of this man...this beast...Was enough to make even the most experienced agent vomit in disgust and fear. But Lance held back. He had to overlook the physical sight of this now unrecognizable mess of a human, and focus purely on his words, however difficult that was. "Could you elaborate, please?" He calmly asked the being, who's skin had begun to boil, causing painful, looking rough patches of leather to replace what was just seconds ago, soft skin. "Who are they?"
The man didn't reply at first, he was too preoccupied with groaning in agony. His chair was surrounded by dead limbs, bones, scales, even wings that had shot out of his sides. The constant twisting and breaking and stretching of his body was impossible to get used to, since he never had a chance to heal before another mutation would break out. It was an endless cycle of misery. "They-" He croaked out after a minute. "They are us."
Lance cocked his head to the side, his pen fell limply against his hand as he tried to set aside his ever growing frustration. "So...They are human? Is that what you mean?" His question yet again went unanswered as the man just screamed from another painful change. Lance sighed as his rubbed his eyes, he looked around for a moment, trying to give his spinning head a small break. The sight before him might as well have been a set on the Twilight Zone. They were sat in a small, concrete, room, with armed soldiers quietly surrounding them, their barrels constantly pointed at the mutating man. Behind them were bullet proof glass, with government officials and scientists crowding the other side, listening, taking notes, trying to find a reason why this was happening, and how. Lance sighed softly again, then turned his attention back to the sobbing man. "You're going to have to try to give me more detail. Something we can use to track these monsters down."
The man blinked, looking up at Lance with empty eyes. "You can't. They are everywhere. They are watching us. They are within us. We were modeled after them. There's nothing anyone can do." His voice was growing weaker at this point.
Lance finally broke. He slammed his fist down on the table between them, staring daggers at this...Thing. "STOP SAYING THAT. We've been here for what - almost an entire god damn day? And you still have given me absolutely no answer whatsoever." He fell back into his chair, forcing himself to regain his patience. "Now look, we pulled you out of a underground compound filled with women, children, and animals. All of which - well, at least those that were still alive anyway - were mutating at a rapid rate too, some even worse than you. You can't possibly convince me that whatever this is just started naturally happening for no reason without any sort of experimentation. And all of you just happened to be stuck underground for months on end without anyone else being involved? Please, just tell me what you know."
The man, whose face had now taken the shape of some sort of animal, began crying. "Man...All I know is that I woke up one day down there...There were others, but they weren't the ones causing this to happen. The ones who did never made themselves visible. They were just voices, they were saying that we had a lot of catching up to do." The man took a sharp breath before another arm began to slowly sprout out of a hole left by another, now long dead, appendage.
Lance wrote in his notebook what was told to him. He almost knew that what was being said had to have been nonsense created in this guy's mind out of trauma and shock, but this was the first time he actually started getting somewhere with him, perhaps bits of reality were in there. "So," He humored, "They told you that you had catching up to do...Are they from the future? Did they tell you they were God?"
The man shook his head weakly. "No...No none of that. They really didn't say much at all to us...They just talked." Lance scribbled more. "So did they say why you were going through this?" He questioned again.
"We heard them say that it's been too long since the first restart," The man was shaking now, trying to keep awake. "They...They said that we were outdated. That we needed to upgrade...That our group were concepts..." He started crying again, Lance kept quiet, listening intently. "T-They said that once they fix us, and get the code just right, they'll restart everything again, and upgrade the world, making a new one."
Lance shook his head for a moment, this was getting even more insane. "The...Code? You mean DNA...? What do you mean by, update the world?"
The man coughed up blood, probably the last bit that was in his body. He ignored Lance's question. "We're going to be better than before. They'll be able to do more with us once our bugs are worked out and Earth's graphics are updated. They'll even introduce new animals too...I remember them speaking of all these upgrades...That...That we will be more playable, and that everything was going to change, become new...That they were going to make something entirely different than before...We are in the Beta...We are the Beta, we are their game." The man's eyes were fading now, yet he kept his gaze fixed on Lance as he let out a final cough, and promptly disintegrated from existence.