Now, I think it is about time I explain a little more about the hood guys and what do they do

For starters, most people believe they are a sect since they all dress in the same clothes, kill themselves when they are captured, and all the members have low-level powers, which are usually look down and oppressed by society

Most cults are people easily gullible, with weak minds thanks to being oppressed that follow a rustles leader that doesn't care if they live or die as long as he gets a profit

If the hood guys don't look like a cult, I don't know what does

And that is how the hood guys group mascarade their true purpose

Most members of the hood guys are actually normal humans that the "hood guys" had experimented on so they could mimic powers

The experiments don't involve forcing a person to access the 4th dimension since every recorded experiment so far had ended in complete failure. Every single case ends with the person eventually becoming a calamity or simply disappearing from existence, every single one

Besides the extreme difficulty of forcing persons to access the 4th dimension, ending blowing up in your face didn't leave the best track record

Well, that didn't stop people from trying from time to time, and maybe some may have succeeded in some secret research facility, but the hood guys weren't trying to give powers that way

Instead, they took advantage of the knowledge they got from the 4th dimension to "improve" normal people

As you may or may not know, some people only get knowledge from the 4th dimension, but that knowledge is incredibly valuable

It usually focuses on one aspect only, but that knowledge is far more advanced than what we know today. They usually are prodigies in biomechanics, drugs, nanomachines research, algorithms, medicine, physics, etc

This allows then to make amazing stuff beyond what present technology can allow and in most cases, can be replicated under special circumstances

Well, most of them, since there are some that are able to use laws of the 4th dimension but only them and on the stuff they build

Still, people that had access to knowledge from the 4th were called thinkers, and could do amazing stuff, including giving "powers" to normal people

Kinda

And why is all this relevant to the hood guys?

The thing is, the hood guys is actually an association of thinkers, normal scientist and some investors. It's not an evil organisation or a government facility and I am not even sure how it started

All I know is that a group of thinkers gathered together and said "Hey, wanna do something completely f-ck up?" and the rest said yes

As for what kind of "improvement" they did, well....

There were the biomechanics(See game Deux ex: Human Evolution for reference), nanomachines(original Deux ex), chimeras(half human half beast), body enhancement by drugs or/and operations(captain America) and more

They also did psychological test and other types of research like cloning just for fun

Basically, it was a get together of mad scientist trying the limits without having to worry about stuff like the law

And they have been doing it for enough time to do a test batch(hood guys outside)

The poor guys had to follow the orders of a handler(boss guy in Sara's kidnapping) and if they were captured, they would get killed since they had a pill inside them that would make it look like a suicide

They also made them addicts of a special drug they made and only took those that passed a rigorous psychological analysis, so they had their bases cover

Nice place, right?

That is the kind of place Sara was at the time, or to be more exact, where she would be send

The hospital/school mix without windows was simply a test facility to see what experiment would the kid be more appropriate to do

They started testing the intelligence of the kids, followed by testing if they have powers

Which are the test that Sara already did, but what more was there?

Well, after that, Sara went to different rooms that tested her fitness, endurance, strength, agility, reflex, decision making and morals

All automatic and the worst part is that they never went back to the hallway. After testing if they had the potential, a new door opened, and then another and another etc. They had to proceed or wait, and they chose to proceed, hoping that it would be the last one

Even when one of the kids pee its pants, they didn't give him a change or something. He had to suck it up and continue to do the tests

It s-cked

I could tell you what the tests were about but it's not that complex

One had a giant running machine, other had a grip machine, one shoot rubber balls, other had you climb a climbing wall, and the last one let you stop the test if you killed a dog by pressing a button

F-ck up

By the way, Sara didn't kill the dog, and that was the last test anyway so it didn't matter actually(not that they knew it was the last)

By the end of it, they were completely exhausted and worn out, and since the last door actually had some comfortable chairs, all the kids just sit there

Relaxing for a minute in a comfortable chair made of leather and that vibrated

And before they notice, the sleeping gas slipping under their feet took effect, and the round of test finally came to a close for them

All that awaited them was human experimentation for who knows how long

And sadly, not all of them would make it

And I can't say for sure that Sara actually made it too

Seriously

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Note: Next chapter, narrator identity finally revealed. Thanks Neiden for the help :D , and yeah, big fan of Deux ex