Belbe - Body Composition

The Monitor put the slender corpse on his examining table. A chemical spray removed the creature's hair. The Phyrexian precisely measured every critical dimension of the body with calipers, then carefully laid a square of flowsheet over the corpse's head. At the Monitor's command, the tiny machines in the flowsheet crawled over the cold skin, conforming themselves to every contour. When they were done, he had a perfect mold of the dead girl's face.

Monitor 8391 passed on the corpse to the Necrometric Unit 725 for further processing. Body fluids were drained. The blood was contaminated by poison and therefore useless. A substitute would have to be used. The flesh was carefully stripped off and sent to culture vats so the corpse's tissues could be preserved for eventual reuse. The sterilized, polished bones were sent back to the Monitor, who applied his meticulous skills to them once more, measuring them to the finest calibration of his instruments. These figures were forwarded to the engine controlling the mighty apparatus of Processing Mill 44.

The rollers and stamping presses of the factory began to churn. Bars of duralumin and steel were fed into the machinery, which formed a hard, metal skeleton identical to the one measured by the Monitor. Each bone was copied, right down to the individual metacarpals of the hands and phalanges of the feet. The girl had once broken her right arm, and the calcified break was mirrored in the new duralumin humerus.

Jointed and joined, the sparkling new skeleton was sealed in a sterile copper shell to shield it from the everpresent oil rain of the Fourth Sphere. Gremlins loaded the shell into a pneumatic tube and sent it whistling away to the culture vats. Organs and tissues were re-fitted to the gleaming bones, along with certain mechanical improvements added by Phyrexian engineers. The crude and wasteful processes of eating and sleeping were eliminated by filling the body's veins with Phyrexian glistening oil in lieu of ordinary blood. The new body would have six times the speed and strength of the purely organic creature it was based on. It would be resistant to heat and cold, and its senses would surpass those of any elf or human. As a final touch, the mold made by Monitor 8391 was used to restore the old face to the new creation.

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Nemesis, Prologue