Titan Station Church of Unitology: chapel of the faithful on the Sprawl

The Titan Station Church of Unitology was a chapel devoted to Unitology on Titan Station, the orbital city better known as the Sprawl. Housed within the Cassini Towers apartment complex in the station's Public Sector, it served the faith's most devoted followers until the Necromorph outbreak of 2511, when its congregation died by its own hand, its halls filled with the risen dead, and Isaac Clarke was forced through its depths to a meeting with Daina Le Guin that proved to be a trap.

A chapel above the Sprawl#

The Church stood in the district residents called the Upright City, the upper half of Titan Station's Public Sector, alongside the Titan Memorial Medical Center, the waste disposal area, the Concourse, and the Cassini Towers themselves. It was the Towers that housed the chapel and gave it its threshold. In the open space between the complex's two apartment wings stood statuary dedicated to the faith, a large Marker statue and three masked Unitologist figures, and behind those three figures lay an entrance to the Church. The complex around it was inhabited mostly by Unitologists, with residence reserved for the higher ranks of the Church, so that the chapel sat at the center of the faith's most privileged enclave on the station.

The building was more than a hall of worship. It contained a funerary wing, and it was fitted with its own security shields and terminals, defenses that would matter in the disaster to come. By the time Isaac Clarke arrived at its doors, the approach through Cassini Towers was covered in graffiti and littered with the bodies of those who had committed ritual suicide according to their faith.

The final congregation#

Many devoted Unitologists were worshiping in the Church at the moment the Necromorph outbreak began. The faithful of the surrounding Towers had, to some extent, been aware of the plans to sabotage Titan Station, and their suicide rituals began even before the outbreak started. When the creatures came, several of the worshipers killed themselves, many in front of the Church and others inside it, believing death would carry them toward Convergence. Their bodies did not lie still. The dead of the congregation were turned into Necromorphs, and the chapel built to celebrate death everlasting became a nest of it.

The clergy shared the fate of their flock. Slashers raised from the bodies of Unitologist clergy walked the Church's halls and were found nowhere else on the station. These creatures were far less altered than the common kind. The monk's robe remained almost entirely intact, torn only along the legs, and the hood still shadowed a face stripped to exposed muscle. The dead man's arms stayed frozen in a Unitologist prayer gesture, and the creature's blades sprouted from its back, so that the risen clergy seemed to advance on their victims still at prayer.

Refuge in the first hours#

The Church figured in the outbreak's opening hours as well as its later horrors. The engineer Franco Delille, crossing the station under covert orders from Daina Le Guin, was driven with the security officer Sarah Andarsyn into the ventilation system by the appearance of more Necromorphs, and the vents carried the pair into the Titan Station Church of Unitology. There Franco repaired the Church's security shields and terminals and managed to restore the lighting in Sector 45 before pressing on toward the man he knew only as Target zero. Even overrun, the chapel's defenses could still be made to hold.

The horrors within#

When Isaac Clarke later passed through the Church, it held dangers beyond the risen congregation. It was within its halls that he first faced Stalkers, Necromorphs that hunted by flanking and group tactics, approaching slowly and quietly to avoid discovery before charging their prey. The creatures struck in the chapel's chambers, including the funerary wing, turning the building's own architecture into cover for their ambushes.

Deeper in, a Tripod unlike any other on the station made its lair. Formed from multiple corpses around a primary host who had been a woman, with an infant's body and limbs grown out of its tentacle, the creature pounced on Isaac from above and knocked him to the ground, then dragged him across the floor while lashing at him with its bladed tongue. Isaac fought free, and the wounded creature released him and retreated into the Church's darkness.

Daina Le Guin's trap#

Isaac had come to the Church because Daina Le Guin led him there. Contacting him after his escape from the Titan Memorial Medical Center, she promised to cure the Marker induced dementia that was killing him and warned that Hans Tiedemann wanted him dead for his connection to the Site 12 Marker. She guided him from the hospital to Cassini Towers, and as he travelled deeper and deeper into the Church, Isaac began to suspect her intentions and hesitated, believing the Church to be a dangerous place. Daina, unhappy with his wavering, reminded him that she had lost a brother saving him and insisted that her plan would work. She directed him to a safe room in the complex and waited.

Isaac's instincts proved correct. When he reached the rendezvous point, two of Daina's men apprehended him, and she revealed that the cure was a ruse to lure him to her. Daina was a high ranking Unitologist who had orchestrated the outbreak on Titan Station, and the Church meant to use Isaac's knowledge to build new Red Markers. Her plan died with her. An EarthGov gunship attacked, killing Le Guin and her associates while Isaac escaped. His flight from the Church brought him against an enormous Necromorph known as the Tormentor, a creature composed of multiple corpses, which he destroyed by firing on an explosive canister jarred loose from the gunship's ruptured hull.

Destruction#

The Church did not outlast the station that housed it. When Isaac Clarke destroyed the Site 12 Marker at the heart of the Sprawl, Titan Station exploded, and the Titan Station Church of Unitology was destroyed along with the Cassini Towers and the district its faith had crowned.