Red Tide

At around 11:30pm on 9/22/24, the Lillian Bay police department received numerous calls reporting a large, humanoid creature roaming through the greenbelt and heading northwest towards Starlight City. When police arrived to investigate, they found a towering monster with crimson skin that looked, quote, "As dye dispersing through water". The creature was soon detained by the local superhero group and was transferred to LEASHED for containment. As is tradition for the newspaper Starlit Sentential, the creature was given the name "Red Tide" in reference to the biological phenomenon.
FROM THE DESK OF DR. NOVEM: PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS AND THEORIES ON CASE 005.
DESCRIPTION: Case 005 identifies himself as a 17-year-old boy named Louis Benoit. When asked about the night he was found, Benoit explains that the last thing he remembers is looking for his younger brother in the storm when the strong winds pushed him into the lake. 
The epidermis of Case 005 is a mixture of standard stratum cells and photosynthetic cells containing the primary pigment chlorophyll ɑ and the accessory pigment phycobiliprotein. Early electrophoresis sequences of the photosynthetic cells suggest DNA similarities to the species Karenia brevis. 
It is unclear whether Case 005 can survive on photosynthesis alone; a basic test was run where Case 005 was sealed in a temporary cell constructed in the interior courtyard. The subject was given plenty of water and exposed to sunlight, but was denied food. After three days, the subject appeared sluggish, delirious, and was begging for food. 
Case 005 has made several unusually specific dietary requests such as unwashed mushrooms and raw radishes. 
THEORY 1A: ORIGIN. Months prior to the first sighting of the subject, Starlight  City had experienced a months-long drought; leading to a build-up of dinoflagelate blooms in the surrounding bayous. This bloom was amplified by the current full-swing El Nino event. The drought was brought to an end by Tropical Storm Andrea, which caused moderate flooding along Space City’s waterways. This flooding pushed the dinoflagellate blooms into Lillian Bay, which already had a sizeable bloom due to thermal pollution from the Tucker Generation Station. Rip currents from Andrea’s storm surge pulled the dinoflagellate bodies to the center of the bay where they were compacted into one, cohesive superbloom. Benoit was in the area when he was pulled into the bay by the storm surge and rip currents, which then pulled him into superbloom. The circumstances of the fusion of the bloom and Benoit are unclear, but the prevailing theory is this; radiation pollution from Tucker caused an error in the biochemical signals from the colony, instead of continuing to bind to each other, they bound to Benoit.

FROM THE DESK OF DR. MÍNE: CASE 005-T, CONDENSED
This report is a condensed version of findings from a set of experiments carried out by LEASHED.
The toxin excreted from 005's skin was determined to be a brevetoxin, which is a neurotoxin naturally produced by marine dinoflagellates. These toxins, when inhaled, absorbed through contact, or ingested can cause severe neurological symptoms including but not limited to; ataxia, paralysis, reversal of hot and cold or wet and dry sensations, slurred speech, headaches, fatigue, numbness in the limbs and face described as “thousands of ants crawling and biting all over”, hallucinations, partial or total blindness, temporary short-term memory loss, permanent short-term memory loss, motor weakness, seizures, unstable blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, coma, and death.
More peculiarly, a small handful of those infected by the subject’s brevetoxins have experienced severe psychosis. For notation, we refer to those infected as 005-A. Specific descriptions of their varied delusions can be found in the detailed report below but they all contained the following:

• 005-As believed that something was hurting them.
• 005-As believed that entering the nearest body of water would ‘cleanse’ them and relieve their symptoms.
• 005-As were adamant and oftentimes violent in their delusions, but some were cognizant enough to mask their symptoms to researchers, and then act on their delusion once released.
• After acting on their delusions, 005-As would not resurface unless they were physically forced to do so.