Everyone loves spiders. Everyone loves clowns. What happens when we decide to make everyone happy and combine them? Something even Halcyonians want nothing to do with. And that was the plan all along.
Creature
The Halcyon Clown Spider is a recently discovered arachnid. It’s the size of a large tarantula, with a hard, almost crablike shell, much less hair, and a disturbingly-patterned carapace. Overall, clown spiders are snow white. They also have blue, red, black, and yellow markings that resemble nothing more than a clown’s face. The overall appearance is that of a severed clown’s head that grew spider legs and fangs. Multiple strains have been documented, all with subtle differences in their patterns.
Their carapaces are extremely tough, with hard outer surfaces resembling crabs or ants more than tarantulas. This relative lack of hair also makes attacks more likely to slide off harmlessly rather than sticking in the hair and penetrating. A clown spider’s legs more closely resemble bone than the hairy legs of a tarantula; while merely a side effect of their coloration and lack of thick hair, the effect is still quite creepy. Clown spiders are powerful jumpers and have been seen leaping from trees to ambush their prey. Once they land on a victim, they use all eight legs to hang on while biting repeatedly.
Clown spider venom is highly necrotic, causing irreparable damage to the flesh of their victims as it pre-digests them. Small prey is often dissolved almost entirely, while larger victims are usually left as bare skeletons. Abdominal wounds to large animals – humans included – are usually fatal. The necrosis starts dissolving their intestines, releasing gut flora, leading to sepsis and death. Even if a human survives the initial attack, a bad clown spider bite often results in amputation from severe tissue damage.
Once clown spiders are discovered in an area, the usual response involves automatic shotguns, flamethrowers, and incendiary grenades. While their shells are tough, clown spiders aren’t fireproof and a burning clown spider makes a very satisfying popping sound when the water in its body boils off enough to rupture the shell.
Doctor Maurice Bibeau
Doctor Maurice Bibeau is a geneticist originally from Ariete. He has a doctorate in genetic engineering and made a small fortune back home in that field. Most of his work was in treating genetic diseases and relatively benign gene modifications to make people less susceptible to disease. At the end of the day he was considered an above average applied scientist doing useful if relatively unremarkable work.
Like most people on Ariete, he lost family in the war. Also like a large number of them, he’s not thrilled at how things ended. If it had been up to him, he would have sent every single rebel and all their sympathizers to the mines in chains to spend the rest of their lives doing back-breaking labor. Maurice was denied this desire by two things: the government opted for deportation and extermination instead, and he wasn’t born yet.
So he’s settling for the next best thing: grotesque revenge. Dr. Bibeau engineered the clown spider using a strain of tarantula that had survived on Halcyon after the first colony fell apart, adding genes from scorpions, molluscs, and a few other species from Halcyon, Ariete, and a few other places, as well as some sequences he invented from the ground up.
If asked, he will explain his motivations honestly. He’s quite literally unleashing these monsters because he’s a royal jerk and doesn’t care who knows it as long as it doesn’t interfere with his plans.
The Island of Doctor Bibeau
Doctor Bibeau’s island is legally owned by Bibeau Engineering, a corporation registered in Chirkport. There’s nothing terribly suspicious or interesting about this; it costs a few hundred dollars to register a corporation, and islands way out in the middle of nowhere are pretty cheap. People and corporations buy their own islands all the time for any number of purposes, and nobody particularly cares what they get up to when they’re out in the middle of nowhere. The entire legal end of his operation cost less than a car.
The laboratory complex covers a few acres on the northeast part of the island. It has helipads, a basic dock for small watercraft, a main laboratory building, Dr. Bibeau’s house, living quarters for the other scientists, mercenary barracks, and a breeding facility with spawning chambers and holding pens for his spider swarms.
Most of the inhabitants simply don’t care much about what’s beyond the area they cleared for the laboratory complex. As such, the island is largely uninhabited and unexplored aside from occasional halfhearted “survey patrols” by bored mercenaries.
Dr. Bibeau’s private security force consists of two platoons of air-mobile mercenary riflemen. Said riflemen have Alliance-standard equipment and armor. They’re armed primarily with laser rifles and their sensors and armor are noticeably more powerful and stronger than locally-produced gear. Unless a party is very well equipped, these mercenaries will have a significant tech advantage.
Their transport helicopters carry two four-man squads each, and have basic fire-support and self-defense armaments. These four transports are backed up by two helicopter gunships. For work on the island itself, the security team has four jeeps. Each jeep has a light laser and RPG launcher in a small turret on the cab and seating for four passengers in the open rear area.
Spiders are grown in the spawning chambers. Their life cycle is much like that of any other spider, with the adults mating, females laying clusters of eggs, and the eggs erupting into swarms of tiny baby spiders. Most of the time, he collects the egg sacs and has them dropped in remote areas of Halcyon to see what happens. Some sacs get eaten before they hatch, some hatch and spread. If the former happens, he simply drops another few sacs nearby when he gets the chance; clown spiders are nothing if not prolific when well fed, and he feeds his breeders quite well.
If he wants full-grown spiders to distribute into an area, he has an egg sac put into a holding pen with plenty of food. After a short growth period, Bibeau’s handlers typically gas the latest crop of spiders and put them in transport tubes to keep them from causing trouble. Once there are enough spiders in transport tubes, he sends a crew out to dump them where needed. Depending on the crew and mission parameters, spiders may be released at ground level or dumped out of a helicopter at treetop level.
Because the mercenaries’ helicopters incorporate visual and auditory stealth systems, people unfortunate enough to be in an active drop zone have occasionally reported flying clown spiders. It’s an easy enough mistake to make when a bored helicopter crew decides it would be funny to dump a few hundred clown spiders directly onto a group of random Halcyonians.
Even if the PCs go in, kill Dr. Bibeau, destroy the laboratory complex, and burn the island to the bare soil, the clown spiders will not be removed from Halcyon. He and his crews have spread them far and wide enough that they have established breeding populations in sites across the planet.
The clown spiders are here to stay.