Background story

[Admin Anomaly]

Background story

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Let's go back in time. Oh, not that far. Just around 2007 should do the trick. With more and more species going extinct across the world and countless more on the brink of extinction, animal conservationists were working frantically to save the few species they could. Among these people was Sam Covington. There was just a tiny little thing that set Sam apart from most other conservationists; he wasn't just a scientist but also a practitioner of real life magic and he wanted to combine his two fields to try and help. He figured that if he could find a way to transform common animals into rare and almost extinct ones, the problem would be solved.

Sort of.

With as a goal to create a virus that would latch on to animals, like rats, and force a connection to another animal that would lead to a creating a copy on the metaphysical plane, overwriting the rat's body and instincts and instead transforming the poor rat into another animal. This was just the first step, if this proved to be successful, he would then focus on trying to control the connection and what kind of animal they connected to. So, during the initial stage of Covington's experiments, the rats should be able to shift into any one kind of living species in the

Unfortunately, the combination of science and magic proved to be unstable and had some unforeseen consequences. For one, the rats didn't shift. The rats were perfectly content being their own ratty selves. And then one of them escaped, taking the virus out of the controlled environment and spreading it out in the world where it was free to mutate and change into something that could infect humans.

At first, it appeared to be 'just' a flu epidemic. A pretty big one that spread wide and far, with an estimated 40% infection rate and of all the infected, around 3% died. The casualties were usually the very young or the very old or those whose immune system were already otherwise severely compromised. Of all the infected, around 97% survived and roughly two-thirds of those began to present unique symptoms after they had recovered.

They began to shift. These people would shift into an animal form and shift back to their human form. Combined with that, they often gained increased strength, senses and healing abilities. They only have the ability to shift into one specific animal and individuals as young as three years of age have been documented as shifters. There have been no documented cases of ageing acceleration or deceleration, instead the animal form's age adapts to the human form's age.

So far, non-shifters remain torn about ways to respond. While there are plenty who simply shrug it of, there are also many more who experience unease. They worry about possibly being infected, about how contagious it might still be. There are also humans who believe shifters to be traitors, dangerous, untrustworthy and that they should not be a member of society. On the other side, there are also shift-fans, as they are called, who would love nothing more than to end up infected themselves or believe that there was some higher power involved and that shifters exist for some kind of higher reason.

In the meanwhile, Sam Covington appears to have disappeared. No one really knows if he's even still alive.

How this will end is anyone's guess.