| Introduction
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xxxxxA disease unleashed by an escaped Promethean labrat swept New York -- and then the world -- leaving hordes of hungry undead in its wake.
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| History
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xxxxxIn October 2013, following a breakout from Prometheus labs, HAMMER attempted to reclaim one of the escaped labrats -- a mutant known as Vector who has the ability to store and manipulate pathogens. In his panic during the unsuccessful attempt to recapture him, Vector released a pathogen never before seen. The disease's initial presentation showed symptoms quite similar to flu, leading its initial spread to be largely overlooked as a particularly severe start to flu season.
xxxxxBy the time anyone noticed the particularly unusual presentation of the disease, it was already widespread throughout the New York area. After the initial flu-like symptoms, subjects began displaying altered cognition, with particular difficulties surrounding speech. Additionally, they displayed heightened anger and aggression, wit violent outbursts common. The disease progressed quickly in many cases, killing its victims sometimes within days.
xxxxxVictims who died while carrying the disease reanimated, mindless except for a relentless severe aggression and drive to consume flesh. New York and surrounding areas were quarantined, with the city under martial law and soldiers in the streets attempting to battle the hordes of undead spreading through it. Though aid workers set up shelters all around the city with military protection and food being airdropped in, the zombie-congested streets as well as the fact that mutants were barred from these shelters after a couple particularly lethal mishaps involving over-aggressive or reanimated mutants meant that many did not have access to the shelters.
xxxxxFatalities from the disease itself as well as from the undead were further complicated by fatalities from starvation and normal violence, with the city experiencing an extreme food shortage outside of the designated safe shelters. A treatment was eventually formulated by a team at the Mendel Clinic that slowed the progress of the disease in living patients. A cure was soon to follow.
xxxxxIn the end about a tenth of New York's population died during the crisis, with the death toll outside of New York City adding tens of thousands more to this count -- despite the quarantine, the disease did spread worldwide, though its spread only blossomed after the treatment was discovered, which mitigated the plague elsewhere, leaving the disease manageable and no other individual place ravaged as hard as the New York area.
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| Involved Characters
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- Team responsible for pinpointing the disease transmission, and then creating the treatment and cure:
- Patients Zero -- first infected patients in the outbreak:
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| Errata
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- The zombie disease has not been eradicated. It is still a very real and present danger worldwide, and given its initial innocent presentation, even with a cure people are still dying of it -- though in FAR reduced numbers, with no great danger of a mass-outbreak recurrence; still, the disease is alive and out there and still heavily carried in New York so feel free to get sick/know people who've gotten sick etc.
- Though zombies are rare, they still crop up here and there in isolated incidents, so feel free to (sparingly) throw one into a scene if you need some action.
- There are two medications relating to the zombie disease currently on the market.
- The treatment will NOT cure you and will only prolong the inevitable -- without the cure the disease is 100% fatal, though the treatment medication can delay this for a long while. People taking the treatment (which is cheap and easily administered as an intramuscular injection -- think like a flu shot in the arm) will have much reduced symptoms though they are still contagious.
- The cure will cure the disease completely. It is a more involved process, a combined therapy involving an initial round of IV medication that will take a few hours of lying in bed attached to an IV, and /then/ follow-up shots (much like the first) every twelve hours for the next two days. The cure is a good deal more expensive, both in terms of the price of medication itself and because of the fact most people aren't equipped to administer their own IV medications, so it will generally involve the related hospital fees.
- Both medications have some side effects though these are less terrible than dying and coming back as a zombie. Soreness in the injection sites, body aches, mild fever and nausea, all more severe with the actual cure than with the treatment though it clears up in ~24hours.
- The disease itself is spread verbally, transmitted by hearing and then repeating certain trigger words spoken by an infected person. A short list of words KNOWN to be infected has been widely circulated, and with the disease still very much extant and likely to be for the forseeable future, it is highly recommended that people eradicate these words from their vocabulary. This is NOT a comprehensive list of infected words, though -- with nobody certain what a comprehensive list is (and, in fact, the infected words-list in a permanent state of flux) many people have elected to simply avoid speaking English as much as possible.
- The ICly known list of words that were originally infected is:
- City
- Night
- Sorry
- Water
- Weird
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| TP Contacts
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xxxxxHive and Shane were co-GMs for this TP; any questions about the disease itself, the zombies, or the aftermath can be directed to them, through @mail preferably or by paging Shane.
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| Infected
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| Status
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Completed
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| Type
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Zombies
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| Risk-Level
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High
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| Dates
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Fall 2013
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| Location
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New York
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| Affected Factions
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All
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| TP GMs
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Hive, Shane
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