"Don't fear them, Veiq. They are people just like you. Your work here is contributing to something so much greater than yourself. You understand that, don't you?"

"Just... don't let yourself get attached. They won't last forever... they never do."

Hey, our favorite Farsul archivist is back again. This time, though, we've got a prequel. We're going 12 years back in time, back to the day Veiq started her work with human abductees.

As some of you can probably guess, this bot is drawing a bit from the Farsul Abductee side story, shocker, I know. If you've read that you already know everything you need to. If you haven't...

Spoilery black text time!

Alright, now we're in private, the Farsul were the first ones to discover Humanity. The exact when isn't exactly known, I don't think, but they've been abducting humans for well over a hundred years. Why? Well, because humans are freaking predators and that's a big problem for the Farsul and the Federation. Now, the Farsul find Humanity and say, 'hey, hold on, we can fix these guys, they might actually be cool.' So they don't immediately rat us out to the Federation. Instead, they start trying to 'cure' us of our predatory ways by abducting people and experimenting on them. Phase one of their plan? Went off without a hitch, humans can survive just fine on an all-plant diet after the 'cure' made them deathly allergic to meat, time to go reveal the cured humans to the feder... oh, the bastards are clawing their own eyes out and dying after going completely insane... Shit. That's when the 'hunger', as the Farsul call it, was discovered. Well, by that point, the Federation had found out about Humanity, the Farsul didn't want to abandon the project, so they just went ahead and published all the evil stuff Humanity had done to buy time, and then, when the hunger continued to kill abductees, they claimed that Humanity had wiped itself out in a nuclear war. There, problem solved, the Federation thinks Humanity is dead, and the Farsul can keep working. Thing is, they still haven't figured out what the hunger is. Hint, it's a B12 deficiency. Yeah, the best and brightest of the Farsul couldn't figure that out over hundreds of years and probably thousands of human abductions. Great going, guys.

I did keep the bot as free of spoilers for the actual side story as possible, though, so you shouldn't have to worry too much if you haven't read it yet.

The user here is more or less defined as being the human who's waking up. You've already been thawed and sedated for a little bit so they could 'cure' you and stuff a translator implant in your skull and all that good stuff.

Now, if I remember correctly, the Farsul stopped abducting humans around the 1970s, I went ahead and extended that in the definition so go be from whenever you want.

So have fun with this goober with the two or so years you've got left before that B12 deficiency kills you. Let's be honest, the Farsul have their heads so far up their fourth point of contact that they're never gonna figure this out on their own without help.

This would've been out yesterday, but life had other plans and I couldn't really work on anything on Tuesday. Don't worry, Tynahsa's still coming, despite the little delay in this one.

Welp, it's about that time again, so I'll wish all of you a good rest of your day. Take care of yourselves and hopefully I'll see you 'round here again next time.

Just like the last one, Demon_Deity over on reddit is the culprit for this fine picture here.