the epic of morty (lob a blob)

newbie’s doomed timeline in Lobcorp from days 22-24 was an absolute masterwork. Under HGR’s expert advice in picking abnormalities, the Central Command department became a garbage fire beyond all compare.

As mentioned, on day 22, newbie got Express Train to Hell. On day 23, he got a cute girl wing of the facility: Queen of Hatred f/k/a Magical Girl, and Melting Love. SLIME TIME

Melting Love was an entire adventure. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out how to work with her without triggering a slime apocalypse. Progress was hampered by a couple of incorrect conclusions we drew early on: (1) When newbie sent Patient Zero (the employee who initially worked with Melting Love) back into the chamber, he transformed into a slime and Melting Love breached. (2) The same thing happened when newbie sent Patient Zero into the fallout shelter, i.e., the safest place on earth. From these incidents, we deduced that one could not send Patient Zero into the chamber twice and that he would inevitably transform over time. HGR eventually saved us from post hoc ergo propter hoc hell by informing us that both conclusions were incorrect. In both cases, the transformation was apparently triggered by the department’s infection rate reaching critical mass.

Meanwhile, Queen of Hatred kept breaching, Master Spark-ing the halls, and just generally making a nuisance of herself.

(also: choo choo!!)

On day 24, again by HGR’s advice, newbie got Blue Star. After a couple of attempts to work with it, the abnormality breached, teleported to the center of the facility, and started inexorably pulling newbie’s entire workforce into its core and instakilling them. newbie turned off the game.

In the end, Blue Star turned out to be the least problematic problem: it’s free farm if you respect its (extremely high) minimum stat thresholds. A lot of newbie’s high-stat employees were dead by that point, but “arrogant architect” Morty (16 days on the information team) carried the entire facility on his back, being both Patient Zero for Melting Slime and the one to farm Blue Star. All of newbie’s cancer abnormalities ended up synergizing:

• Queen of Hatred breached. Before she was suppressed, her lasers killed all the clerks in Central Command, thus removing all potential disease vectors.
• Melting Love infected Morty and gave him SP regeneration, which enabled him to work safely with Blue Star.
• For additional safety, newbie had an employee stationed in the hallway outside Express Train to Hell, and would time his work so that the train’s department-wide SP regen would proc during Morty’s Blue Star work sessions.

In this way, newbie was able to successfully farm Blue Star’s armor (blue starmor?). He was hoping to extend the day further to get Blue Star’s weapon and/or Melting Love’s gear. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out. To unlock the codex information for Portrait of Another World, newbie sent Morty in (thus lifelinking him to Destiny). He then sent Morty to try and avert a Silent Orchestra meltdown. We have one (1) worker in this facility. The lifelink damage would’ve killed Destiny, thus killing Morty (edit: not actually true), thus triggering a slime apocalypse, so newbie just ended the day and then yeeted the whole godforsaken timeline.

Back in the canonical day 21, Morty was just one employee among many, with no idea that the world once rested upon his shoulders. His superior Seoboregi had some fantastic Aleph-class armor. Where did that come from? Who knows. o7