Here’s this week’s setting sample, for the second setting that comes with the core game, The Strain.
The Impact
It’s the day after tomorrow. For all intents and purposes, it’s an ordinary day. People go to work, shop, eat. Global warming, poverty and armed conflict continue to grip the world. The world’s leaders continue to debate, make deals and perpetuate the status quo. No one predicts what will happen next.
It starts small. A light is visible in the night, somewhere above Russia. It grows brighter as dawn nears the region, until a star remains visible in the early morning light. NASA and other organizations investigate, and find that an asteroid is heading on a collision course for Earth. The world’s governments scramble for a solution. Some propose hitting it with nuclear missiles, but the world’s scientists claim that doing so wouldn’t stop it. Mass evacuations are suggested, but no one knows where it will land, and so they are scrapped. Finally, the world realizes that it’s too late to do anything. It watches with held breath as the inevitable nears.
The Asteroid enters the atmosphere at 6:15 Coordinated Universal Time, and the whole sky lights up. In a matter of minutes it breaks apart, careening toward the ground. The majority of the asteroid hits the Pacific Ocean. Within hours, tsunamis hit both the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia. Massive casualties ensue. A large chunk hits the middle east, turning vast stretches of desert into glass and wiping out entire cities. Another, much smaller, piece hits Australia.
Emergency and aid forces are mobilized to help the affected regions, but the damage is simply too extensive. Major cities receive some aid, but there are too many casualties across too wide a region. Millions die in the first 24 hours. Fires, famine and disease claim untold thousands more over th following weeks. Despite the damage, the world lets out a collective sigh of relief. It’s over. They’ve survived.
But this is only the beginning. The asteroid was carrying something within it, an alien lifeform unlike anything known to science. During the asteroid’s descent through the atmosphere, the virus was spread far and wide. High altitude jetstreams spread it further, until it covered the entire planet.
The first reported cases came from aid workers in the west coast of the USA. They claimed people there were coming down with some unknown disease that mutated its host in strange and unpredictable ways. However, with so few resources spread so thinly, no one paid much attention to them. Then came the first reported case outside of an impact region. It came from a hospital in Amsterdam, where an entire wing was stricken with a disease that accelerated hair growth and caused bone protrusions on the fingertips and toes. Within hours, similar reports were coming in from across the globe. Quarantine measures were established swiftly, but it was far too late.
In the following days, the virus began to settle out of the upper atmosphere, and more people were infected. Cases started flooding in from around the world of strange mutations. The symptoms came on swiftly and without warning. People would be fine one minute, then start transforming. Within an hour their body was altered completely. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the mutations the disease caused. Some people gained fur, others tails, some gills and other still claws and fangs.
What was worse, the disease had effects on the mind as well. People transformed by it gained instincts and urges, some extremely powerful. Most of these were of a sexual nature, driving them to mate and reproduce almost non-stop. Unprepared, many people lost themselves to their new drives, resorting to animal behaviour and losing all of their higher mental functioning. Some people were able to resist the urges and retain themselves, but they were in the minority.
Society began to fall apart. Hospitals couldn’t begin to deal with the sheer numbers of infected, not that any known medication had an effect on the disease. Social structures and institutions broke down quickly, as the people who were supposed to run them went wild and abandoned their jobs. Feral mutants prowled the streets, jumping and mating with anyone they could find. Within a few months, most of society had collapsed. Governments shut down, and economies ground to a halt. A few places managed to maintain some semblance of order and stability, but they were few and far between. The rest of the world went dark, and remains so to this day.
