Burnouts are former Humans mutated by toxic industrial waste on the planet Stygia.
Burnouts
Overview[]
Originally a Human colony, Stygia was home to a resort city residing thousands. However, in order to cut costs, the corporations responsible for the city utilised convicted criminals as a cheap workforce to build and maintain it. Eventually, the convicts rebelled and started sabotaging the city's infrastructure, including the environmental shields protecting the residents from Stygia's dangerous ecosystem. Desperate to escape the rampaging convicts, the people of Stygia fled to the underground, only to become trapped with the toxic byproduct of the city's systems and industry. While the convicts reorganised into a tribal horde known as the Skulls, the citizens of Stygia were mutated by the waste and became another horde of skinless, bloodthirsty mutants known as the Creeps. However, others mutated more dramatically and instead became the Burnouts.
Unlike the Creeps, who maintain enough of a semblance of humanity to utilise firearms and coordinate in what is effectively a gang war against the Skulls, the Burnouts are entirely feral. Resembling blackened humanoids with skull-like faces and orange blood, Burnouts are highly resistant to gunfire and can withstand a considerable volume of bullets with no significant harm. However, they also have a random assortment of orange cysts dotted around their bodies, which represent their weakness. Damage towards these cysts is enough to utterly destroy the Burnout, ripping it apart and dissolving whatever remains.
Muta-Burnout
There exists a sub-species of Burnout referred to as Muta-Burnouts. These are much larger and strogner than Standard Burnouts and lack the weakness of cysts to exploit. Only three have been documented and were killed by circumstantial means, particularly by a helicoper roter, a vat of toxic waste and exposed electrified machinery.
History[]
After the colonists of Stygia became the Creeps and Burnouts, as well as the convict workforce becoming the Skulls, the Confederation sent troops to reclaim Stygia. While the gangs and mutants provided them with little threat, they were ultimately driven back by the Burnouts. Some time later, the Confederation returned to Stygia, now equipped with a DNA bomb designed to purge all life from the planet. However, this plan was hindered when the Ulysses, the ship carrying the bomb, was attacked by pirates. The pirates were unaware of the Ulysses' mission, but recognised the ship as that of General Earl Serrano. Former soldiers of the Confederation, the pirates defected after discovering that Serrano had been sending them to assassinate civilians with evidence of government corruption, under the guise that they were terrorists and the like. Seeking revenge for the deception, the pirates critically damaged the Ulysses and bought it down on Stygia, only to crash-land themselves.
The only two survivors of the crash fought their way through the Skulls and Creeps for some time before establishing a fragile truce with a Confederacy soldier who surivived the crash. As they searched for a way off Stygia, all whilst fighting through hordes of the planet's violent denizens, they encountered the Burnouts in the remains of an abandoned shopping centre. They continued to encounter more Burnouts as they proceeded through the ruins, but were tricked by Serrano into activating the DNA bomb in the Ulysses' wreckage, believing that it was already active and that they were disarming it. The survivors barely escaped Stygia in one of the ship's escape pods as the DNA bomb detonated. All life on Stygia, including the Burnouts, were destroyed as the detonation wave spread across the globe.