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Decay :tm: 11/28/21

TL;DR at the end.

the ooc HERE.

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There’s been plenty of stories, shows, and movies revolving around the undead. No one really thought they would ever have to run for their life after being chased by a ravenous human, out of its mind with rage and hunger. Yet, it had happened. All it took was the fusion of two parasites and some tainted meat…and the world became over run with dangerous beings that would hunt their own in order to satiate their hunger and drive to multiply.

The horsehair worm lays its eggs in water, and infects the host that way. Once inside the host, it takes a hold of the brain and lays dormant for several weeks. The larvae develop and hatch, compelling the victim to put itself in danger, or drown itself in a body of water in order to repeat the cycle. The usual host for this parasite is insects, though there had been cases of human infections.

Toxoplasma gondii is a brain parasite. It’s primary hosts are rats. This parasite causes rats to be attracted to cat urine, so the rats will run after cats. The cats will eat the rats, which will infect the cat, and the cat in turn infects it’s human. There were roughly 60,000 cases of Toxoplasma gondii infections in humans before the mutation took place.

Mad cow disease, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, causes hallucinations, stumbling, change in gait, and seizures. Before the mutation, it was not a violent prion disease, however with the mixture of Toxoplasma gondii and the horsehair worm, mad cow disease mutated and its host developed violent tendencies. It’s infection rate was phenomenal, first spreading through a small town in Texas.

An insect ingested by a rat was infected with horsehair worm larvae, and that rat, infected with Toxoplasma gondii, was eaten by a cat. This cat was a stray and infected other cats which in turn infected humans. As the cats spread the cross mutation of horsehair worm and Toxoplasma gondii, there was a recall for several thousand pounds of raw beef. This beef had been found to have been contaminated by mad cow disease. However, it was too late. Many humans had already ingested this beef, some of it undercooked. All it took was a coincidence, and a human that was infected with both the horsehair worm, and Toxoplasma gondii consumed some of the contaminated beef.

Within days, this human began to hallucinate, causing violent outbursts. All it took was a scratch or a bite, and the mutation of the three diseases spread and mutated further. Patient zero infected a total of twelve people. Those twelve people infected over one hundred and fifty people. Soon, the entire town was infected. It began to spread further than the town and eventually it showed up in the hospitals. The incubation period was found to be a matter of days, and as long as there was no cure for any of these diseases, it would continue to spread and mutate, getting more violent with each new host.

Soon there were people growling in the streets, attacking other humans and even animals. The mutated disease was now found in birds and dogs and continuing to spread. Within months, cases began to pop up in other countries and reports of zombie like humans popped up in the media. It took a year before they began to work on a cure, but by then more than half the human population had become infected. Prisons and jails were overrun with the sick, them being too violent to keep in hospitals. It was becoming impossible to contain.

After two years, and no cure or vaccine in sight, the world became full of violent humans, spreading their disease. The world fell into an apocalypse, with only one sixteenth of the human population left not afflicted with the disease. Humanity had fallen. These survivors were left to fend for themselves, and fight off the infected without getting infected as well.

You have been on your own and you’ve had it rough. You’ve heard of a safe haven in the North. You are making your way there, but it is becoming more apparent that you cannot survive on your own.