🎄⛄🔔The Grand Kiwi Farms Secret Santa Showcase Thread🔔⛄🎄 - Come post, come comment, come see!

In the first launch, in the first station, when the vermin first scittered. He chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace. And with boiling blood he scoured the steel scaffolding, the metal innards, seeking vengeance against the long tailed beasts that threatened his home. And those that taste the bite of his fury, knew him...
The station filed it under "Vermin Control".
The shipping manifest called it a "Biomass Mitigation Asset".
However, the people who lived here, thirteen thousand souls sealed into a torus of alloyed steel, hurdling through space at 20 thousand light years a second, called him, "RODENTMANCER."

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On Hyrux 12, mice were a systems problem, they arrived the same way all life did; clinging to the margins, riding in the blindspots, slipping between protocols and seals. The infestation of mice meant chewed insulation wires, gnawed coolant lines, soft supplies stolen for nests, and in those nests they multiplied. Aside from the destruction they wreaked for the maintenance crew, every gram of mouse was a gram unaccounted for. A gram that could push a system past its limit, blow a fuse, clog a filter, or die in the wrong place, and seed a fungus or a mold that could thrive in the lungs of thousands.

THe people of the station saw natural selection on a hyper scale. Within months, no mouse living would near a trap; poisons once effective were soon ignored, some of the vile vermin even seeming to enjoy the intoxicating effects that nibbling just a bit gave them. Sonic deterrents drove the technicians from their stations while the mice hummed along.
So, the station made a choice, one they would never write down, would only speak of in hushed tones, a choice they hoped would never be discussed or seen. They sent for a man, long mitigated to the "solitary deck", whose hands were faster than the errors that birthed the problems. They called for Eli Manner.
Once an ordinary man, it was during the first onboarding of passengers that this being would embark on a years-long journey through the stars. He, like many, stayed in the lower decks, and lived a rather reasonable life.

However, that reasonable life shattered one fateful shift, deep in the bowels of the lower decks where the hum of life support systems lulled him into comfort as he worked. He was a hull technician, a grease-monkey who patched leaks as rerouted power conduits, content with the day in and day out work of welding and re-wiring. The mice were just a nuisance then, scampering shadows in the vents, pilfering crumbs from his meager rations. He swatted at them idly, set crude traps from the scrap metal he had laying around, and thought not much more of it.
One night, however, it started. Maybe it was the moonshine Eli brewed in his little hidey hole, maybe it was the fumes from the welds, maybe it was the coolant that has been leaking since last week, slowly building up in his blood, and in his brain, maybe it was all three. The faint chewing and gnashing of mouse teeth echoed through the station like laughter on this particular night. Eli tried to ignore it, as one does in the void, he had heard of SPACE MADNESS like anyone else, the isolation and lack of sun wasn't good for anyone after all.
But then, on that very night, came the incident in sector G7, during a routine pressure check. He suited up in the dim glow of the emergency lights, stepped into the airlock, and pressed the button. Then, there was a hiss. The seal had failed, not a horrible breach, but a slow hiss of atmosphere bleeding out into the void. Eli traced it, slowly, calmly, to a cluster of wires, insulation stripped bare by tiny teeth, sparking and shorting the valve controls.

As he reached out to them to attempt a quick fix, they sparked again, and the airlock flung open. The air rushed out around him, his eyes strained against their sockets, as his feet left the floor, and he began to be pulled into the void, with a frantic flailing of his arm, he clung to the airlock controls, and yanked his body forward, slamming the emergency lever down and lowering the emergency door.

Lungs burning, he survived. His wife however, did not. In his med-bay haze, as nanites knit his frostbitten fingers, he learned what had happened to Mara. Another crew member informed him that the failure had cascaded, and the woman he'd shared his life with, had been in the adjacent compartment at the time, performing a check of a coolant line that had been leaking since last week. She was sucked into the void before she had a chance to scream, and floated there, just outside the station, caught in its gravity, to this very day. On some nights, you can see her, face twisted into contorted horror.
Grief turned into rage. A slow boil in the recycled air. Eli saw them everywhere now: the mice. They were no longer pests to him, they were invaders, saboteurs, murderers. A PLAGUE. Engineered by the demonic cosmos to unravel humanity's fragile grip on the stars.

He forsake sleep and sustenance. He fashioned weapons from the scraps of his trade, electrified prods that fried fur and bone, vacuum traps that sucked the life from entire nests, chemical lures laced with neurotoxins that made them twitch and convulse in agony before the end.
It wasn't enough, the mice adapted, as they always did, growing bolder, their beady eyes gleaming with what Eli KNEW was mockery.

One night, cornered in a maintenance crawlspace, he faced a swarm - hundreds maybe. Their whiskers twitching in unison, like a hive mind. He crushed them by the dozen, hands slick with blood and viscera, but in his frenzy, a vision seized him, one of the hoards of the cosmos, laughing, mocking, chanting "NO MATTER HOW MANY YOU SLAY, SHE WILL NEVER COME BACK TO YOU."
Eli was reborn in this moment. No longer a man: A Eradicator, A Slayer. THE RODENTMANCER.

He constructed himself a dark mask, to absorb the light and augment his vision, to allow him to see his PREY in the dark. His body became a canvas of scars from the constant battle of attrition. Rodents leap and dug their teeth into his body, only for him to laugh and bring his grinning teeth around their body, biting down on them like a blood filled grape.
Whispers spread among the crew, of someone, something, scurrying in the vents, much larger than the mice they had grown accustomed to. Leaving nothing but a trail of viscera and blood.

He spoke to no one, needed no one, he knew only the hunt, the endless purge. The station's overseers turned a blind eye at first, after all, the mice were dealt with, the maintenance crew's jobs lightened, the unaccounted for grams of mass in the station ceased, but alas... all good things must come to an end... at least for a time.
Once the vermin were gone, all of them, every single one, Eli became feral, uncontrollable, and so, they locked him up, on the solitary deck.
Word spread among the fleet, and so, in hushed tones, in back room deals, he would be moved, from station to station, to rip and tear, until the job was done.

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