SCREAM Cuisine / SCREAM

To relate the history of SCREAM as an organization, it must first be made known the story of a remote town in the middle of planet Hurston’s badlands, Woestyn.

Woestyn began construction for the purpose of housing miners and their families, however due to a scan showing an unusually high amount of natural radiation in the area, Hurston Dynamics abandoned the town midway through being built, and repurposed it as a chemical waste disposal site. Partly due to it’s remote nature and lack of jurisdiction, Woestyn effectively became an anarchy, attracting social pariahs, technophobes, fugitives at large, ascetics, men and women so stricken with poverty as to be unable to afford the tenements of Lorville, in short, predominantly undesirables. Lacking the infrastructure other Hurston Dynamics company towns utilized, the populace enjoyed, if nothing else, an archaic rural lifestyle of days long lost. Most inhabitants of Woestyn lived reclusively; only briefly, if at all, interacting with the few merchants that frequented Woestyn to trade simple rations. Those who couldn’t afford to trade survived off the decaying local flora, primarily the various species of cacti, or stole from those who could. That being said, Woestyn maintained relative stability, it’s population not by any means thriving, but altogether content. Now, Hurston Dynamics was not ignorant to fact their land was being squatted on, they were simply entirely indifferent, despite the fact Woestyn was becoming exponentially more radioactive and hazardous a place to live. After all, they owned the planet, it’s not like they were liable to get sued. It is due to this callous indifference that the inhabitants of Woestyn, unbeknownst to them, absorbed radioactive waste, ate radioactive cacti, drank from radioactive oases, bred radioactive children, and slowly but surely mutated several genetic defects; loss of hair, blindness, missing fingers, extra fingers, brittle bones, and most notably being born with large segments of skin missing; until they resembled a separate race of ghoul-like humanoids, at which point merchants stopped trading and new outcasts stopped coming, further increasing their seclusion from the rest of humanity, but in turn sparking a sort of familial bond amongst the mutated commune.

At this point Woestyn had been forgotten by Hurston Dynamics, all records of the territory lost within the vast sea of data HD collected annually. Eventually, however, and to the detriment of the people of Woestyn, rumors started to circulate that there existed a cult of cannibalistic grotesques that maimed and ate alive unlucky nomads that traveled the Hurston wastes; these rumors became so prevalent among the people of Hurston that it began to cripple it’s economy, miners would be too scared to work in the mineral-rich caves, merchants, off put by the idea of being devoured by desert barbarians, became scarce. The price for several men to lead and protect a supply caravan dramatically rose and due to all these inconveniences, Hurston Dynamics, concerned for their citizens’ safety as they are, decided to investigate these rumors in order to put it’s laborers at ease and stabilize it’s slumping economy.

This investigation resulted in HD rediscovering the abandoned population of Woestyn, confirming the reports of cannibalism, and realizing their catastrophic mistake in allowing such crimes against humanity to happen, under their supposedly watchful eye. This left them with two choices:
1. Admit their mistake in letting a new race of repulsive barely-recognizable-as-human cannibals to evolve as a direct result of their negligence in proper chemical waste dumping protocol, undermining their authority and possibly going down as the most severe blunder of any corporation ever, or
2. Erase all evidence of wrongdoing, deny any credibility to the various circulating rumors, and get rid of the boogeymen living in Woestyn.
It’s fairly obvious that Hurston Dynamics, interested only in profit and it’s image as a brand, went with the latter.

Lying to and obscuring the truth from the rest of the verse would be trivial, but now HD’s biggest problem was how to discretely get rid of each and every single skinless freak in Woestyn, a confidential genocide. Their first attempt involved disposing massive amounts of radioactive waste, (far more than average and more than any biological organism could withstand), around Woestyn. This proved unfruitful, as the humanoids had developed a natural resistance to radioactivity due to their prolonged exposure to it. For their second attempt, they simply paid some mercenaries to exterminate every inhabitant of Woestyn, practical and infallible, right? No. The mercenaries were never heard from again. At this point, Hurston Dynamics classified this as a significant liability, one that needed to be solved promptly; at any cost.

And so came about “Operation Gomorrah”, in which HD would feign that they were testing a new experimental weapon in the abandoned wastes of Hurston, when in fact what they really would be doing is dropping specially manufactured pseudo-hydrogen bombs comprised of several of their most destructive missiles, and where they would be testing this weapon wouldn’t be the lifeless Hurston desert, but, as you may have guessed, the humble town of Woestyn. At first glance, this plan appeared to have succeeded, decimating the humble settlement and leaving nearly hundreds of charred bodies behind. Nevertheless, there was one major discrepancy: the body count numbered several less than what Hurston Dynamics had estimated to be living in Woestyn, enough to imply some of the residents miraculously survived. Regardless, it was decided to equate this to a numerical error, and “Operation Gomorrah” was a considered a success. Rumors died down, scared miners went back to work, and Hurston largely forgot about the cannibal scourge that once terrorized their wastes, and the missing bodies were never found.

We, being those fabled cannibals, know that those few of us who survived did so thanks to the underground housing some of us employed, that kept our shelter cool on the hottest days and whose entrance could easily be hidden as a safety precaution. With our home destroyed, we became nomads, we stuck together and eventually formed SCREAM, a sort of brand for our condition and a syndicate dedicated to pursuing our passion- consumption and the culinary arts.

And there you have it, the history of SCREAM and it’s members. We offer this information as a courtesy, so that you know exactly who is once more terrorizing the citizens of the verse, exactly who will one day hold dominion over humans, and exactly who makes the best soufflés. All we ask in return is that when we cross paths, you try to relax. We like our meat tender.