InsaneJournal

The Premise.

Pandemic. It’s a word that has made its mark in the history of the world more than once. There was a typhoid fever outbreak in Athens, Greece around 430 BC that destroyed a quarter of the population over the course of four years. The Antonine Plague struck the Near East between 165 and 180 BC, killing up to five million people during its campaign. The Bubonic Plague has appeared in the world twice, the first spanning a remarkable 169 years total between 541 and 750 AD and killing over 10,000 people a day during its height. The second began in the 1300s and was more popularly known as the Black Death. It came back with a vengeance this time taking 20 to 30 million Europeans in six years.

Despite the advancements of modern technology, it still wasn’t enough. A new virus would make its mark upon the world, one which would devastate the very nature of humanity.

Highly Pathogenic Virus of Type X, which would later come to be known as the Pandora virus, mutated at a faster rate than could be predicted by even the most sophisticated of computers. Moving from host-to-host in the animal kingdom first, it genetically recombined over and over again. These genetic mutations allowed the virus to spread easily from one species to another. It killed wild birds at first, birds that migrated long distances and were able to carry the virus with them. Afterwards, livestock became infected: chickens, cows, swine — none of them were immune to the virus and they too were dying, but not before the virus made contact with the human population in April 2007.

Its first human victim occurred on the fateful day of April 12, 2007.

HPVX manifested itself as a mere cold complete with enough coughing and sneezing to release the virus into the air, thus infecting the next five, ten, even fifteen people. Those infected were only alive long enough to spread the virus after its short two-hour incubation period before they succumbed to the lethal effects of HPVX three to five hours after that. The hour or two before death was marked with a lethal fever, though the victims would complain of being deathly cold. Aside from their complaints of the cold and reports of severe headaches, little else information could be provided by most victims. They would fall silent and unaware of their surroundings as their bodies were wracked with uncontrollable shivering and some stronger full-body spasms. Death came afterwards, swift but painful.

Most deaths occurred in hospitals where the victims gathered with the futile hope that they could be given some medicine to ease their symptoms. There were some who were too ill to even travel to medical centers and they chose to stay at home under the comfort of blankets and cold medicine, but it was useless. The first week of the virus did not yield much attention from the world. Most news agencies had reported it as a variant strain of the flu and had said that it was under control. The truth, however, revealed itself when the death toll continued to rise.

It was in the third week of the viral outbreak when it induced mass hysteria. The public dubbed it with the popular name of “Pandora virus” due to its devastating effects upon the world, referring to it as “PV” for short. People were dying at an rate unseen for centuries, a rate even worse than ever before in history. People flooed into hospitals for a vaccine, but the vaccines prepared to counter the virus had no effect. Governments alerted their citizens of the deadly virus, shutting down mass transportation between cities. Transportation to other countries ended as air travel was banned, though a number of cargo ships continued with careful permission and some sea travel went on illegally. During the fifth week of the Pandora virus, all human travel was suspended in hopes of preventing further spread of Pandora. Eventually, people could no longer seek out hospitals for the sheer number of corpses already inside.

Numerous countries convinced themselves that such a virus was man-made. Nations took up arms against one another. The first bomb was launched during the early earliest hours of a Tuesday morning on May 29, 2007. It heralded the start of the war. No infantry was used as most of the armies had been wiped out. It was a war involving distance and nuclear weapons littering the surface of the planet with large plots of destruction. None of the world’s citizens even had time to react. Before anyone knew it, whole cities were ravaged in the blink of an eye. Rumble laid where buildings once stood. The largest of the cities across the world went down first, and people fled from the foremost targets in order to seek safety in non-human inhabited areas.

Soldiers lined up all around cities in a number of domineering countries to keep those areas still standing in check. Citizens seen acting out in some countries were gunned down, infected people shot where they stood. People were too busy attempting to survive that riots did not even have time to begin. Those that did ended because hours later no bodies were left standing to continue the protests. All methods of travel during this time were nearly impossible. Only small groups of people could successfully travel, and those that wished to survive avoided all cities, military bases, and human-occupied areas. These were danger zones. There was no time to rest for those traveling for safe country.

On the Wednesday evening of August 8, 2007, the war finally came to an end. For a little over two months, the planet suffered unimaginable destruction from the nuclear war. For almost four months, the spread of the Pandora virus took care of the rest. Napalm had consumed the land, and whoever wasn’t killed by PV was left to suffer at the hands of famine and nuclear radiation. Some would survive. Some wouldn't.

War revealed a terrible secret to humanity, though. They were not alone. Other creatures inhabited this planet along with them. Praeternaturals, they were — supernatural beings born out of myths and fairy tales and believed to be nothing more than bedtime stories. They were not stories, though. They were very, very real. They had lived in hiding for thousands of years, lingering in the shadows out of fear and precaution. Now, they were among the few that could survive the devastation in the world. They were the few that could provide the earth with a new future.

The Oracle, known by name as Euryale, received visions of the Pandora virus and the war. She passed word of it to the leaders of all praeternaturals, and so they had time to prepare for the preordained onslaught. Several months before the virus took its first victims, praeternaturals created safe havens around the world in areas that were uninhabited by men. They gathered supplies and constructed buildings and magical barriers for their new homes in order to protect themselves against the upcoming slaughter. Once the first of the havens known as Elysium was completed in April 2007, it immediately took in humans and praeternaturals alike from all across the globe. The other nine havens quickly followed suit. They provided stability in a world full of chaos. The survival of every species was at stake now, and the future of the earth was in the hands of the havens.

Dependant upon a “back-to-basics” approach with hands-on work and the help of magic, these communities decided to put no value on the idea of currency and return to the simple methods of making their own goods for the people with the occasional barter and trade amongst others. There were no cars anymore, no need for gas, and no need for buses, trains, and planes. Travel went back to horses. Since the havens were very large in size, typically the expanse of a small country or slightly larger, horses made a reasonable method of travel. Winged horses known as pegasi and the tough-to-train eagle and horse hybrids called hippogriffs were also available for faster travel by flight.

Head Councils with reliable members were established for each haven to ensure a sense of order and structure. The councils have maintained connections with each other from far away as the conditions of the outside world heavily restrict travel between havens. Within these safe havens, however, life has a means of continuing on once more. Without them, there would simply be no way to survive at all.

But peace is a fragile thing to maintain. Only six months after the end of the war, two of the ten havens have fallen silent. All communication has ceased between the other havens and those in Australia and the Bahamas. The councils do not know what has caused this, but Elysium has sent envoys to the haven in the Bahamas in order to discover what has befallen them there and send reports back home. Hopefully, the truth will be known soon.

Welcome to Elysium, the first of the havens. We hope you enjoy your new home.