Borer

You’ve spawned as an alien brain parasite, a weak slug-like being who can wriggle through vents and ear canals alike, a cortical borer. While this sounds like a pretty bad situation, you come equipped with a number of abilities that can either enable you to struggle for dominance with your host, or co-exist with them in symbiosis. This can include granting them psychic powers, injecting their brain with chemicals, or taking over their bodies for periods of time. However, mindshielded people are almost completely immune to your powers and even normal hosts can struggle and resist effectively against you, so be careful!

=Communication Options= As an antagonist, you have access to the Antagonist Out Of Character chat (AOOC). When you spawn in as a borer, you should check into AOOC and find out whether the other players have decided upon a gimmick, as cortical borer heavily relies on various roleplay techniques that can easily be disturbed should a player decide to not follow the agreed-upon gimmick! This doesn’t mean you have to follow the consensus, but do try to stay polite and courteous of your fellow borers and their desires.

For more in-character options, you have access to a Cortical Link and a Cortical Hivemind. Using the Cortical Link enables you to speak psionically to others, through their own mouths repeating what you say. This can be done by prefacing your speech with. Meanwhile, the Cortical Hivemind allows you to speak silently to other borers in-character, warning them of potential dangers or giving them tips, similar to the revenant's riftspeak and the changeling hivemind. This can be done by prefacing your speech with. Finally, you can speak directly into the mind of your own host using an ability, which is located in the Borer tab in the top right of your screen.

=Being the Borer=

Physical Abilities
It’s important to remember that you’re here for a good time, not a long time, as you can be easily killed by just about anything with a good few whacks. Additionally, you have very few physical attacks worth anything. Your primary tools while not inside someone is to run, hide, and get inside a host. However, you can temporarily paralyze someone by attacking them, either from range or from up close, so that you can infest them! This does come with a cooldown, though.

Chemical Abilities
Borers naturally generate chemicals, which they can utilize to generate either chemical substances inside their hosts or change the brain chemistry of their host. In this section, we’ll be covering the first one. Borers can inject five units of several chemical compounds, both medicinal and otherwise, instantly into their host’s bloodstream in exchange for twenty of their own chemicals. Borers can inject the following:
 * Inaprovaline
 * Bicaridine
 * Kelotane
 * Dylovene
 * Hyperzine
 * Peridaxon
 * Mortaphenyl
 * Neurapan

Psychic Abilities
As a borer you are a fairly psionic entity given your interactions with the brain. You can paralyze others remotely and speak into their minds, as outlined above, but your prime ability is to awaken the psionic capacity of your host as well as improve their psionic faculties. This takes a large number of your chemicals, as you’re altering their brain chemistry.

Assuming Direct Control
This is the section where we talk about a borer’s abilities when they take control of their host’s body, consenting or otherwise. Borers can take over the bodies of others, hijacking their brain. This does disconnect you from the Cortical Hivemind, and the host remains conscious, albeit trapped in their own mind until they can muster the mental strength to regain control, which takes a matter of minutes. In order to try and keep control, you can utilize psionic torture on them to inflict agonizing pain. However, this is purely an RP effect and does not actually impact the timer should they choose to resist you.

Now, it sounds like there’s no reason you should ever take over the mind of a host without their consent, then, considering how it’s likely to wind up with you being murdered by a vengeful host. However, there is one key thing you can only do when in full control: reproduce. For 100 chemicals each, you can create a new borer, vomiting them up. This is very obvious, messy, and it often takes time for someone else to join as the borer, but it guarantees that even if you die or are removed, the round does not die with you.

Husking
So, your host died and you didn’t. Darn! At the same time, this allows you to do something very special. Namely, you can eat their brain, fuse with what remains of their nervous system, and rise from the dead! This can enable some cool roleplay. At the same time, it will trap you in their body, meaning you can no longer leave. This can often serve as a last resort for dealing with a troublesome host, or as the culmination of a round, with you fully replacing them. At the same time, don’t just go killing people because you want to take someone over that badly, among other reasons.

=Borers and You= So, you’ve just had something slimy climb into your ear, and now you’re hearing voices in your head, by choice or just by pure chance. Maybe one of your coworkers or friends has started acting strangely, talking about voices in their head and gaining psionic powers out of nowhere. Or, perhaps, you’re just hearing about brain slugs invading people’s minds via the radio!

As a host, in the event that you have your body taken over, you can resist in order to break the borer’s control over your body, if you feel that it fits the scene. The borer controls a lot of the mechanical interaction besides that, but as a borer host, you now have a lot of room for roleplay. Be horrified, be amazed, be worshipful, be whatever you want to be, but most of all: try to be interesting! Make sure to communicate with the borer in your head, though, to make sure you two are on the same page, both IC and OOC.

In general, remember, just as the Borers are supposed to make the round fun and challenging for you, you should try to do the same for them.