Wilbur Friske Theory *spoilers*

[Crabski]

Interesting read! I was reading the other thread you linked from to here, but I love your thought out ideas here. Until today, I had never made the connection that Spider-Eater might have been dragged away by Wilbur... brilliant.

While the recurrence of tongues being missing is certainly a interesting connection, I'm not sure how it directly connects Wilbur to Spider-Eater; didn't Spider-Eater cut off his own tongue? I think he wrote that he did; but even if not, it's evident that it happened a fair time before he gets attacked, since it's neatly lying on his shelf.

He says that his tongue started swelling as a result of some chemical in the bodies of the spiders. So maybe it's really the Tuurngait virus, passed to him through the spiders? Maybe the Tuurngait virus causes some strange repulsion to tongues: causing Spider-Eater's to overgrow and later prompt him to cut it off, and causing Wilbur to rip out the medical staff member's tongue on instinct?

You'll have to forgive my forgetfulness, as it's been quite some time since I played Black Plague. Wasn't the Tuurngait virus transforming people into something closer to its own kind? Changing their bodies and allowing them to communicate as a hivemind? So maybe the Tuurngait species doesn't have tongues, which is what caused all this strange behavior. As far as I remember, we don't ever see any tongues on the Infected (although I never looked long or close enough to be sure ).