Editing Setting:Nutopia/Factions (section)

==Basker Cults==
They vary from dog to horse in size. Their physical forms share few constants from place to place, some heavily muscled monstrosities with slavering sets of split jaws built for guard duty, others are spindly, frighteningly quick and agile beasts that roar across open ground and tackle their prey. Baskers (After Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles) are a phenomenon that has its roots in the run up to the Fall, but they've taken on forms and roles their original creators could scarcely have dreamed of.

As genetic hybridization and modification became commonplace, corporations looked to predator species to develop chimeric organisms for combat and security purposes. The first company to create a viable specimen was Brazilian-based Fereira Biodiversity, and footage of the first public demo of Basker-1 is now legendary. A grey, leathery body, weighing in at almost half a ton, but moving with a surprising agility and ferocity. Its genotype was never made public, even after the patent expired, but subsequent analysis showed there was Komodo dragon DNA in it, along with bear, wolf, cheetah and a variety of different species including zebrafish. It secreted a paralytic contact poison and had jaws that could tear a power-armored soldier in half. But the power and ferocity wasn't what set the Basker models apart from other, more mundane chimerics.

Fereira introduced a unique feature into the organisms it developed. Every Basker could be programmed with a hard-wired safeguard imprint. The safeguard stimulus could be anything: a particular combination of sounds, colors, shapes, odors or even personal features of the owner (a popular Basker model in rural Colombia could only be directed and commanded by prepubescent children). The safeguard stimulus was kept secret, in order to surprise would-be intruders, and was priced according to specificity; the more particular the safeguard, the higher the cost. Impressed by the popularity of Fereira chimeras, other biotech companies followed suit. Weimuller, however, weren't content with just adopting a competitor's modus operandi; they decided to improve upon it, creating the Huntsmen: Biomercs with pheromone implants that could exercise precise control over packs of Baskers.

Huntsmen divisions, like Weimuller's famous Werwolf Gruppe and Armacor's Cerberus Corps, were top-of-the line PMC's. The Huntsmen, equipped with advanced imprinting techniques and behavioral regulators, used the Baskers' full potential. They could command chimeras to track or shadow individual targets, to sniff out chemical trails and locate vehicles or bombs, to flank, surround and ambush opponents. Utilizing the powerful instinctual cunning of these constructed predators, Huntsmen could operate with more precision and efficiency than any drone operator teams.

Following the Fall, the role of Baskers changed. The designs and formulas for Basker creation, including Fereira's revolutionary process for transcoding homeobox sequences, were leaked onto the Infosphere during the Post-Fall chaos, many suspect by disgruntled project managers. The Aegis-aligned anarchist group "Ciudade Libertade" took responsibility for releasing the Basker designs and producing the first non-corporate chimeric organism, the "Free Dog", a watchhound construct popular in many South American settlements. The public-domain status of hybridization tools meant that everyone were free to tinker with Basker designs, and the fall of the corporations meant that many military or security Baskers were now free to roam the countryside in feral packs. Some Huntsmen followed, going native in jungles or forests around the globe.