With Heart of the Swarm visibly on the horizon, it seems that Blizzard is going into full-on tease mode. The evidence? Today, a "secret" web portal appeared, hidden in the StarCraft 2 section of the Blizzard website. Though Project Blackstone requires a password to enter, looking at the source code of the page reveals a series of digits that clever users decoded into "Y7_$0>0k_3<$m". Upon entering this code, gamers will be taken to an email exchange between two existing characters from the StarCraft 2 comic-and-book universe, Dr. Helek Branamoor and Dr. Talen Ayers.

Reading the first (and, currently, only) email chain reveals that Branamoor has just forcibly recruited a highly qualified team of scientists to exercise top-secret Dominion research projects regarding the Zerg. While Ayers is the only one who has responded so far - and negatively - there's already more than enough information on display to set the tone for what may follow.

At the bottom of  Dr. Branamoor's response to Talen Ayers, he states what can only be interpreted as Project Blackstone's mission goal: to utilize the healing factors of Zerg genetics, and apply them directly to the soldiers of the dominion. It's easy to imagine the many ways these kinds of experiments can go wrong - what with infesting things being where Zerg come on strong - but until more emails are posted, it's an open guessing-game. It's expected that the last of the emails will be revealed close to the launch of Heart of the Swarm, which lies just over a month away.

Whether or not the details revealed by Project Blackstone will tie-in to the beginning time-frame of Heart of the Swarm, or perhaps explain the development of a new unit or two, remains to be seen. Regardless, it's probably a good idea to keep track of Project Blackstone - after all, you never know what can happen if you miss an important email.

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm releases March 12, 2013, for PC and Mac.

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Source: PCGamesN, Project Blackstone