Enemies and Bosses

The stages of transformation:

The first stage will start out innocuously enough but introduce unease and then unequivocal panic in the building. The stricken will appear to become near comatose, lose all sense of their whereabouts and goings on, stare stupidly into the distance – or at each other or in the mirror or at the player - mumble, walk into walls. Then they will begin getting energized, spastic, frenzied, then they will turn violent and giddy, towards each other some, but mostly towards the unaffected, a la 28 days later, but uncoordinated and often un-focused in their atatcks. They will be savage for some time.

The second stage will begin with another calm before the storm. The stricken will slow down, lose their velocity, eventually many will lay down and begin to moan or have fits, some will appear to have died.   A brief period of calm ensues, during which a lot of drama can take place amongst the uninfected population, the emergency response, and the character and his story line. And then a physical transformation will begin to manifest in the fallen horde. 

Their “inhabitants” will begin to rifle through the assortment of human physical characteristics and capabilities, mutating their hosts, pushing them to extremes with both effectively deadly and grotesquely absurd results. The former involving near-superhuman size, strength, speed, and other enhanced faculties, while the latter will involve exercises in mutation that result in evolutionary failure: too fat, thin, big, small to be more than a nuisance or a fixed-location menace. Of those that are mobile, the coordination of the attacks and the level of cooperation and communication amongst the horde will increase ever so slightly. They will begin to show signs of pack hunting.

The third stage will involve more mutations. But this time the things from the other dimension will bring humans' shared evolutionary origins with the earth's other lifeforms to bear by drawing upon the assortment of genetic artifacts within human DNA and manifesting a variety of human-animal hybrids. Again, some of the beastly concoctions function better than others, and what's more, of those that prove to be effective killing machines, the tendency to hunt in a coordinated manner - in communicating packs – has come to full, deadly fruition. 

In the fourth stage the horde will transform again, this time into a collection of the attributes that have proven most effective at decimating the human population of the building. They will now also have a hive mind. What one knows and/or sees, all know and/or see. They also begin speaking in disjointed and rudimentary manner – first mimicking the sounds of others, then expressing themselves, which, as if it wasn't disturbing enough, is made all the more so by the hive-mind factor. At the end of this stage, some of them begin to display what seems like the ability to read minds.

The next stage is the final stage. The horde halts it's attack and converges somewhere to facilitate the production of the organic gateway.