#Drawlloween #Inktober 13 - Frankenstein

Males in the Darkhive are always trying to get on an even footing with the females. The fungal infection that impedes healing in males, and enhances it to regenerative levels in females is almost always something that technically inclined males believe that they can overcome with magic, science, dark pacts, or anything else they might have at their disposal.

The secretive men who conduct these experiments deliberately conceal their work, because the women who have gained new power in the Hive do not want to return to a role of subservience should males start to regain a physical strength that might once again lead them to dominance. Hidden laboratories may occasionally be found off less trodden passageways through the hive, their entrances barricaded with rubbish or overgrown with fungus and ferns. Such laboratories are filled with ancient scavenged technologies and mystic implements of the esoteric past, and cutting edge medical and scientific apparatuses, an unholy fusion of things that define reality, things that manipulate reality and things that should never have been a part of reality.  

On a few very rare occasions, the esoteric combination of technology and mysticism manages to overcome the infection, creating a male with the regenerative metabolism of a Darkhive female, but such lone males rarely last long when their secret it revealed.

Regardess of their strength and resilience, they are forced to live as second class citizens (like all of the other males in the complex), and if they are ever injured, they must flee their home because this will be an immediate indication of their enhanced status. If some powerful women ever suspect a male of having regenerative powers, they may deliberately injure him, knowing full well that if the male victim does not have such powers they even a small cut might prove a mortal injury. If the male is owned by a female, she will be amply compensated for the loss. If the male is independent, he will not be missed. On the other hand, if a male is ever revealed to have regenerative powers, he is often killed anyway... often burnt at the stake as a mutant heretic, hung drawn and quartered, or otherwise killed in a way that even a rapid regeneration won't bring him back. In some cases, a regenerative male is cast through one of the rare holes in the middle of a hive cell, if the drop started at the outer shells, the male often reaches terminal velocity before hitting the "Great Mid-shell Seas, or impacting on the land...if the drop started in the mid-shells, he ends up in the inner hive.

There are no known survivors of such a fall, but if you were subjected to a fall such as this due to suspicion of heresy, mutation, or regenerative powers, would you tell anyone?