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


    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    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


    ----------------------------


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