My Little Helminth Charger

So my beloved Volt Prime is infected with a horrible cyst on his neck, picked up from playing with an infected Mesa while killing robotic hyenas for parts of a new character, but it turns out that horrible infectious disease comes in handy for one thing – making a new type of pet. Kinda.

What you do is get yourself infected. Then you get yourself a Kubrow egg and an Incubator Power Core. You then drain the cyst into the Kubrow egg which sounds as gross as it… sounds. I only say that because when you select the option to drain your cyst into a literal dog egg, the screen fades to black and you hear all sorts of squelching noises. It’s gross. The cyst disappears from your neck, but nothing else appears different until your egg hatches. It takes twenty four hours (or 48 if you don’t have the upgrade segment for the Incubator). Of course, I left the game and came back the next day, not quite sure what I was looking at.

It’s a Charger. A Helminth Charger.

A squishy, pink Helminth Charger. Oh, and apparently it’s female.

As of writing, the Charger is almost completely unfinished. It’s sort of functional, but only just. It looks like a normal Charger, the standard Infested grunt made from some sort of poor, unlucky Grineer, with a differently coloured carapace depending on gender. There are plans to make the Charger into a proper infested dog thing, with various designs going around, that will eventually be designed to properly fit on the Kubrow skeleton. for now, the Helminth Charger is literally just a normal Charger on the Kubrow skeleton, with an essentially invisible head, barely really working. You can put Kubrow stuff on it, but I don’t really have any Kubrow stuff yet and none of it actually fits or anything. Because it’s a Charger and not a Kubrow.

But that doesn’t matter. I have a tiny, spastic, pink infested thing and it’s adorable. It runs around making weird noises at me. Actually, they’re standard Kubrow dog animations, but they’ve had a Charger model thrown onto them and now this little thing is running around my ship using them. Honestly, I was so amused by the fact that I had an ugly pink thing running around the ship thinking it was a dog hilarious.

Then I found out I can pet it, by pressing the quick-melee button (in my case, E). As much as I want. And it growls and whimpers as if it was a dog. It’s amazing. I love it. Turns out, I’m very easily amused.

There is an option to mature little Spasma and turn her into an adult Helminth Charger. But I see no need to do that. After all, it’s a little tiny Charger and I don’t really want it going around killing members of its own species. Same way I wouldn’t take a Kubrow to Earth or a Kavat to the Orokin Derelict or anything.

The only downside is that this doesn’t actually cure you from Nidus’s stupid cyst disease, or what I like to call the Purple Pimple of Doom. It just reverts it back to its invisible stage. The next day, despite having not used Volt Prime at all, putting him directly back in my Arsenal and swapping him out for normal Volt, I logged back in, checked Volt Prime and that damn black and pink cyst was back on his neck. Which means that Volt Prime is sitting in the arsenal, and Volt gets to go on solo missions, I guess. Apparently the real cure is ‘coming soon’. Great.

Doesn’t matter. I’ve now got a spastic little pink infested thing running around my ship. Yay!

Authors note: Over a year later, and Spasma is now a healthy adult Helminth Charger with its own proper look. Sadly I couldn’t keep my baby pink Infested Charger, it automatically got turned into the new model, and the only way to use the old model was to grow her up.