Other Factions

Intermediate

Recruits with the requisite psychological and moral flexibility move on to the next level of training. Instructors sort the candidates and ship them to other training facilities. Breaking up strong groups at this stage increases the recruits’ reliance on their corporate masters and inures them to losing people.

This is where true First Team training begins. Recruits learn to use specialized equipment and receive classes on the stranger opponents they will face. The trainees work through difficult physical and mental challenges, while taking a cocktail of pharmaceutical supplements to make them stronger and more resilient, and to think and act faster. Every supplement is Wyrm-tainted and addictive.

Enticers (p. 130) deliver lectures on the company’s goals and the need for elite First Teams to defend Pentex from its foes. Under this influence the recruits train harder and consume more to reach their potential and make the company proud. The Enticers introduce the fomori concept as an evolutionary miracle, a level of dedication beyond all but the best Pentex employees. The Enticers speak dismissively of the possibility of side effects but bookend these with charismatic presentations on the advantages and desirability of becoming a fomor. Few recruits complete this aspect of the program without developing a burning desire to excel, improve and make Pentex proud.

From this point in the program the failure rate is less than one percent — a fact of great pride for Magadon Pharmaceuticals and First Team management. The most common failures are if a trainee is somehow immune to the final stages of indoctrination, or has a negative reaction to the drugs. Pentex still makes use of these failures. Medical washouts go to Magadon laboratories for research and analysis; free-thinkers are arrested by a fully-armed First Team in front of their fellow recruits. Shortly thereafter another Enticer solemly delivers details of some concocted treachery by the failed recruit. Pentex guides the recruits to decide an appropriate punishment for the traitor. The sentence is inevitably execution and the united trainees carry out the murder, further bonding them to one another and to the corporation.