Analysis Team, Day 11:

The analysis team came back with some amazing results today. We may have finally discovered a way to bypass the larger creatures' unique defense systems. By taking an already infected host and introducing a small amount of dead or near dead blood cells from a larger specimen, treating it in a similar way to a vaccine, we appear to have inoculated the infected creature against the unique white blood cell of the larger creatures. Further testing has proven that these ‘vaccinated’ parasites have almost no degradation when live blood cells are introduced into the host.

At first we had assumed that the parasite had simply changed its DNA once again to fit its needs after being introduced to weakened blood cells from the larger creatures, but additional analysis into the parasite's makeup has almost completely disproved this hypothesis. After intense study the team concluded that there must be some other method of self preservation present in the parasite which allows it to react in such a way to dead cells but not to live ones at the moment of first introduction. Further tests after this conclusion have shown that newly infected hosts using the parasite which is now immune to the larger creatures’ blood have also exhibited the same immunity. Knowing this we took a look at the parasite’s blood during the vaccination process, since we can’t simply look at this thing under a microscope since any parasite taken from its host will die after a short amount of time we had to come up with another method. We decided on injecting microscopic cameras into the parasite along with the vaccine. This proved to be a wise choice, the parasite doesn’t exactly have a vascular system so blood is essentially just floating around in free space, oxidation coming primarily from the host’s cardiovascular system. Despite not having any vascular system of its own the parasite’s own white blood cells have an unusually quick response to new threats, from what we can tell, all the white blood cells present in the parasite clump around any new threats in an attempt to eliminate the threat, however in certain cases this isn’t exactly what happens. The parasitic cells seem to have a ‘contest’ of sorts to see which is the strongest. In the case of the weakened creature white blood cells the parasitic cells win out and begin to carry a sort of chemical marker that is then shared with other white blood cells which tells them to kill any of the creature cells that get introduced into the system. However, something remarkable happens when healthy cells are introduced. When the ‘contest’ is performed against healthy white blood cells from the larger creatures the parasitic cells ‘lose’ and then all become blood cells from the creatures which then kills the parasite and its host. These finding suggest that not only does the parasite have the ability to change its DNA on the whole, but rather it can change each individual cell’s DNA to suit its needs, in the case of white blood cells the parasite seems to look for whichever is strongest, regardless of if it’s detrimental to itself. The Implementation team is going to have a field day with this.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.