Rorschach Study #2, A Scarab (with notes)

...an excerpt from the notes of Dr @nyarlathotep, manuscripts found in a hidden cache beneath the cellar of a deserted house:

"I have spent most of my time as a scholar of ancient cultures and artifacts. I have done expeditions deep in the deserts and the forsaken ruins found there. But, in my heart, there has always been a fascination of all things crypto-biological. I have spent a great part of my life (and risked it, as well!) researching the far frozen reaches of Antarctica and the lifeforms that reigned there in eons past.

Just recently, from various shady sources, I gathered all the pieces of a long-forgotten puzzle. It was an old alchemical recipe, a formula that attacked the biological synthesis of an insect and mutated it in the most profound ways. Under the faint light of a gas lamp I spent days and nights experimenting, recording my findings and keeping notes about future attempts and variations to the eldritch potion. I was witnessing a mystical effect taking place, the insect subjects becoming dormant, almost dead, and then... their bodies changing, mutating beyond any rational expectation; every attempt had different results, and still I cannot say with certainty which combination of ingredients has what effects. But, beyond any question, life & death of those...

[the manuscript is destroyed here, the notes cannot be made out]

... the insect subject was again alive, I rushed it in the designated frame to take a picture of it. I had to hurry because, as previous tests had shown, after a short period of time, the bodies break down, their external armor and internal organs liquefying, becoming a mass of small writhing appendages feeling hastily around them for a moment, just before these too disintegrate into fine golden dust."

The pictures are from undeveloped slides found alongside the manuscripts, and are reproduced here for the sole purpose of informing the readers.