Yep, Raptor was inspired by a harried researcher, one Dr. Sattler, taking an hour to destress (after thirty or so trying desperately to work out how to counteract XE037 (one 0) in a living/reanimated body), and catching that old dino flick “Cretaceous Land”.
[hr]
Folks, the more you clamor, the tougher it is for me to answer everything. I’m one of the folks who writes the lore, so let’s get things settled.
On blob as stem cells:
The Blob is one nether species. There are many.
It happens to be good at altering physical form and, with quite a lot of outside coaxing, mental state, but can’t do much about willpower: you’re OK being infested with the stuff until you die. Further, their senses aren’t very effective here on Earth (hence the need for zombies: those blob suits vastly improve the Blob’s senses!) and you need a lot of 'em in one spot to get goo tactical intelligence going.
Mycus is another species, and has mind-manip down much better (want some of my funberries?), but its mutagenic abilities are limited and it’s got very little localized ability to plan its development thanks to lack of intelligence in its mobile personnel, which is why it needs local guides.
Triffids are a third species, and they’re somewhat adapted to handle the Mycus. They work more on the physical taming and coercion side, and intraspecies competition is planned as they’re territorial on the Heart level. Triffids from one grove will, eventually, not be friendly to triffids from another.
Mi-go, flying polyps, hunting horrors, etc are all other species.
On mutagen dev:
Mutagens were in development for a fairly short while, true, and more to the point, they were never as appealing to the Pentagon/WH as teleportation, which sucked up most of the prestige, higher-powered staff, funding, test subjects, etc.
Given the literal appearance problems with mutants, they weren’t generally considered for outside application.
Alpha, being pretty close to the comic-book Super Soldier Serum (increase physical and mental attributes, no exotic anatomy or other external changes), was likely to be tested on actual, not “quote”, volunteers from The Troops in another month or two. If that worked out, it might well have gone viral throughout the government and the US have opted for bioroids and other such mutant personnel, on the general line Darkfirephoenix is thinking about. It’d have taken at least a year to get the public adequately prepared for federal mutants, I’d imagine, so literal USN/MC frogmen and such would be a long way off.
(Backlash: if The Troops are being born-and-bred for the task, which would likely be preferred to mutating folks with families, what would non-mutant personnel think? How about recruiting?)
But the Cataclysm put a stop to that.
Elf-A was a rush job the top (best, not most senior) researcher threw together as a fallback once they discovered XE037 was spreading outside the labs; that was borderline but not unknown. Xe proceeded to conduct human trials w/o even seeing approval, but xe could probably have gotten away with that. The trials had the full spectrum of effects Elf-A has, including irradiating the test subjects’ ward and rendering it permanently unusable. THAT was unacceptable. Research buried and the doc terminated.
Chimera was a somewhat better-approved attempt to create shock mutants; came up as the zeds started to make themselves known. Raptor, well, it’s dated five days after the bombs dropped for a reason.
There was no time to discover any sort of lead on a salamander mutation. I’m in favor of a Heat Lab (inverse of an Ice Lab) and it’s possible heat-adapted critters there could give rise to such a mutagen. But that’s not likely to actually get coded in the foreseeable future.
