CAPTIVITY & STALKERIZATION

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CAPTIVITY​

Fueling the Combine's everlasting need for mundane labor, surrendering militants can expect a guaranteed seat in one of their conversion cells. Most often, surrendering is an agreement between triumphant combatants and the defeated. Combine forces will make little effort to subdue an armed target beyond a verbal call. Prisoners are processed, rigorously interrogated if value in their intelligence is seen, or if Civil Protection seeks to practice interrogation techniques upon low-value insurgents. Life is indifferent to an enslaved biotic, where one is occasionally toured to a location for an odd job, potentially harassed by the more human zealots in base, and fed scraps to prolong prisoners for their next and final life stage.

In short, the only way to get captured is through surrendering yourself. Perhaps your character will be creative enough to see a benefit to this. Alternatively, you may just be seeking a grim end to your character. The latter is addressed below.

STALKERIZATION​

Martyrs and cowards alike, these two archetypes line the prison blocks of Combine conversion sites. Prisoners are scheduled for periodical surgical alteration, which is more often crippling and built to specialize their recipients for a transformation into a highly specific technological operator, body and mind jury rigged into an eternal repairman. This is no short process, as inmates will have to juggle the aforementioned menial work while struggling with the anguish of their malformed bodies. Late-staged stalkers endure mind-slips, tell-tale signs of reaching a point with no recovery.

Characters that are put through this will have an indeterminate PK timer set on them. Alongside their routine work, they will be subjected to incremental, permanent trait changes that they are expected to roleplay out - especially if they break free. The longer one waits to break out, the less of their old character will remain. This is not easy to accomplish alone, so plan ahead.