Chapter One: Building Monsters
The year was 2126 AD when YGGDRASIL launched.
A digital frontier. A DMMO-RPG unlike anything the world had seen—limitless in scope, brutal in detail, free in every sense of the word. It didn't just give players the keys to the kingdom; it handed them the tools to build new kingdoms entirely.
Millions flocked to it. Adventurers, conquerors, artisans.
Me? I came to build nightmares.
I'm Isaac Hawkins—and I came to bring Alien back from the dead.
Not the chest-bursting action flicks, not the sanitized reboots. I'm talking about the raw, nerve-shredding horror of Ridley Scott's original vision. Corporate greed. Biological abominations. The perfect organism. Long dead in mainstream media, but YGGDRASIL? It gave me a lab.
What other game let you custom-build NPCs down to their neural response patterns? Not just skins and stats—but instincts, behaviors, even fear triggers. And players treated it like a toy.
I saw it for what it was: a crucible.
While others built anime idols and demon lords, I began drafting xenomorphs.
Facehuggers. Chestbursters. Drones. Queens.
But building the perfect predator wasn't a one-man job. I needed allies. Specialists. Fans who remembered the dark corridors of LV-426 and the unspoken terror of a creature that doesn't need eyes to hunt.
And so I formed a guild.
We called ourselves The Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
A nod to the cold-hearted megacorp that started it all—back when profits were worth more than human life. A perfect metaphor for what we were about to create.
Guild Requirements:
Your avatar had to be human—no elves, no orcs. We weren't spell-slingers; we were corporate scientists playing god.
You had to be obsessive. This wasn't just PvP—this was research.
And you had to know Alien inside and out. Every film. Every failed colony. Every scream in the dark.
From hundreds of applicants, we accepted only thirty.
We split into squads—each focusing on a different aspect of the Alien universe: xenomorph life cycles, Yautja incursions, synthetic infiltration, derelict ship recreations. We didn't just want to pay tribute. We wanted to simulate the nightmare.
Word got out fast.
Other nostalgia cults sprang up—Predator, The Thing, Dead Space. But they fizzled out. Ideas are cheap. Execution is hell. Most couldn't handle the complexity of bending a fantasy-based engine into science fiction horror.
We almost gave up too.
YGGDRASIL ran on mana, magic, and miracles. The Xenomorph doesn't care about any of that. It doesn't cast spells. It stalks. Bleeds acid. Evolves.
The mechanics just didn't support what we needed.
Until fate stepped in.
One of the devs—an Alien fan as rabid as us—noticed our work. He contacted us in secret. Said he wanted to help.
Weeks later, we were granted access to an internal build: a private development tool labeled simply as Bioform.
It was everything we needed. Advanced behavior trees. Organic evolution mechanics. Life cycle scripting. Acid blood triggers. Stealth AI. A hidden gift from a rogue developer.
We spent months refining it. Testing. Failing. Testing again.
And then—it lived.
Our xenos began to act on instinct. They hunted in packs. They ambushed. They dragged players into vent shafts and cocooned them for transformation.
We had created fear.
But we didn't expect what came next.
The dev—maybe caught up in the thrill—pushed it one step further. He introduced an unstable new Bioform strain. Something untested. A xeno-variant capable of adapting mid-battle, rewriting its genome, shrugging off elemental magic like it was wind.
It tore through everything.
Players screamed foul. Claimed we had hacked the system.
The dev team responded fast: new rules.
Bioform-based NPCs are banned from using magic.
No spells. No buffs. No cheats.
Only instinct. Mutation. Violence.
We welcomed it.
We weren't doing this to win.
We were doing it to resurrect fear.
Still, the player base demanded equal access. So, eventually, the Bioform tool was rolled out to everyone.
Most failed spectacularly. Their "xenos" were sluggish, clumsy—dead on arrival. They didn't understand that we didn't just use the system—we mastered it.
And so, years later, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation became legend.
We fought only when we had to—usually when world-class items were on the line. Even then, guilds would hesitate before challenging us. Because win or lose, everyone remembered the crawl of a xenomorph tail around their neck before the screen faded to black.
Only one guild stood as our equal: Ainz Ooal Gown—the rulers of the heteromorphic realm. Beings of undeath, monsters with minds like steel traps. Our battles were chaos and beauty.
Sometimes they won. Sometimes we did.
No one else dared come close.
Our guild base?
A nightmare made real.
A derelict industrial outpost orbiting a gas giant. All flickering lights, steam hissing through vents, labyrinthine corridors. From the outside: silent, abandoned. From within: a hive.
Most guilds built up. Towers. Fortresses.
We built down.
The docking bay on the first level was always open. Players thought that meant they could sneak in.
They never made it far.
The deeper they went, the worse it got. Narrow shafts. Motion trackers screaming. Drones in the dark. Egg chambers. Acid. Screams.
The real treasure was hidden on the top deck—in a sealed biocontainment lab. Survive the gauntlet, and maybe you'd reach it. But no one ever did.
We watched it all from a command bunker above. Five of us left by then. Observing. Studying. Releasing new iterations.
But time moved on.
The wars slowed. The hype faded. Players left. Some for other games. Some for real life.
Only five remained.
And now… only me.
Isaac Hawkins.
Founder of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
And the last man alive aboard the station.
As YGGDRASIL prepares to shut down, I'm not just logging off.
I'm sealing the airlocks.