Anyway here is the PerfectStalker’s explanation. Again. Because my old account got yeeted.
PerfectStalkerAU takes place in the city of Krat, where elegance and industry stand side by side with something quieter and far more dangerous. Unlike other versions of the story, the puppets here have not turned on their makers.
They serve exactly as they were built to: tireless workers, guards, and polished fixtures of daily life. On the surface, the city appears stable. People still fear the Petrification Disease, but fear has been folded neatly into routine, hidden beneath order, ceremony, and progress. Krat looks controlled.
That is precisely what makes it dangerous.
As illness and uncertainty tighten their grip on the city, the Alchemists rise under Simon Manus, offering not comfort, but an answer. Simon does not believe humanity can survive as it is. To him, the human body is weak, temporary, and unfinished. His solution is not healing, but transformation. Not symbolic change, not philosophy, but forced evolution through alchemical intervention.
From that belief comes the Master's Program, presented to newly graduated Stalkers as an honor reserved for the exceptional. Publicly, it is described as an advanced path, something noble, even aspirational—a chance to uncover one's "animal truth" and emerge stronger than before.
To the people of Krat, it sounds prestigious.
To young Stalkers, it sounds like destiny. In truth, it is human experimentation wrapped in ceremony.
Those chosen for the program are dosed in secret, the serum mixed into food and drink long before they understand what is happening to them. The trials that follow are framed as training, but they are not meant to sharpen skill. They exist to measure endurance, mutation, and collapse to see what the body becomes when pushed beyond its natural limits. Simon's obsession is simple: if animals, especially predators, represent the purest form of survival, then humanity must be remade in their image.
The results are inconsistent, and often catastrophic.
A handful of graduates survive the process well enough to be called successes.
Their bodies adapt. They emerge stronger, faster, and sharpened by instincts that no longer feel entirely human. These survivors are paraded as proof that the program works. The rest are buried beneath silence.
Some lose themselves completely. Predator-type failures are deemed too dangerous to keep alive and are executed at once. Others those considered less immediately useful, less impressive, less convenient are cast out into the city and left to wander its edges. The Alchemists continue to watch them from a distance, letting the public mistake them for monsters born of disease. No one is meant to know that they were once Stalkers. No one is meant to ask where the missing graduates went.
At the heart of all of it are Romeo and Carlo, two boys who enter the Master's Program together.
Romeo is assigned the Lion, and his body adapts almost perfectly. He becomes everything the Alchemists want the city to see: powerful, resilient, and commanding. He is held up as evidence that Simon's vision is not only possible, but necessary.
Carlo is assigned the Tiger, and his body does not accept what is being forced into it.
During the trials, Carlo loses control.
By the time the handlers restrain him, the verdict has already been made. Romeo can do nothing but watch as his closest friend is dragged toward death under the cold language of "failure."
And then, in the middle of the chaos, Romeo calls his name.
For one brief moment, Carlo stops fighting.
It is not a miracle, and it is not peace, but something in him answers. The violence breaks just enough for Romeo to understand the truth: Carlo is still there. Hurt, frightened, drowning perhaps-but still there.
Whatever was left of him surfaces too late.
That moment destroys whatever faith Romeo still had in the system. The Alchemists had called Carlo lost, but Romeo saw otherwise. From that day on, he abandons his place as a Stalker and turns against them completely. He moves through Krat's shadows as a vigilante, hunting the program that took Carlo from him while trying, whenever he can, to spare the feral victims the city has already written off as monsters. He fights because he knows they are still inside their suffering. He saw proof of it with his own eyes, and he cannot unknow it.
Elsewhere, another figure begins to notice the same pattern: the Legendary Stalker. She had graduated before Simon's influence reached this far and never entered the program herself. Disciplined, sharp, and impossible to mislead for long, she starts connecting disappearances to the creatures now surfacing in Krat's margins. Unlike Romeo, however, she does not believe what remains can be saved. To her, mercy is a risk the city cannot afford. She kills the ferals quickly, believing death is kinder than whatever life the Alchemists have left them. Though she stands against Simon and eventually crosses paths with Romeo as an ally, the two are divided by a question neither can surrender: whether mercy means saving someone, or ending their suffering before they can do more harm.
Carlo's death ruins Geppetto in a different way.
Simon had lured Carlo into the program by preying on the fracture between father and son, turning old wounds into leverage and calling it opportunity.
When Carlo dies, Geppetto's grief hardens into something colder. Romeo wants justice. The Legendary Stalker wants necessity. Geppetto wants revenge.
So, in the silence of his workshop, he builds P.
P’s modeled after a White Tiger an echo of what Carlo was meant to become, stripped of the suffering that destroyed him. No serum, no corruption, no loss of control. To the outside world, P’s a weapon. To Geppetto, he is something far more dangerous: revenge shaped into obedience, and grief remade into form.
P is sent into Krat with a single purpose to destroy the Alchemists.
When Romeo and P finally meet during a raid on an Alchemist facility, the encounter is violent from the start. Romeo is shaken by him immediately: the shape, the movement, the shadow of Carlo in the frame of something that is not Carlo at all. At first, he can barely stand to look at him. But P is not feral, and he is not a failure. As battle after battle forces them into the same path, hostility gives way to a reluctant alliance.
And at the center of it all stands P, caught between the beliefs of everyone who created, shaped, or tried to use him. Romeo fights to prove that what is broken can still be reached. The Legendary Stalker fights to protect the city, no matter the cost. Geppetto fights to punish the people who stole his son. P, meanwhile, is let to decide what he will become when every hand around him is trying to choose for him.
In the end, the story becomes a collision of philosophies: mercy, duty, vengeance, and choice.
PS: I draw Carlo alive sometimes as a stalker because Idk it's fun lol.
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