( march event ) outbreak

[officialnotice]

EVENT: OUTBREAK

It must have been something you ate.

Some time between waking on the 22nd and the middle of the afternoon (for some of you, this basically equates to the same thing anyway) your stomach has chosen to rebel against you and whatever it was that you ate that displeased it so. The nausea creeps in slow and insidious in the beginning and then refuses to leave, followed closely on the heels by sharp abdominal pains and diarrhea.

It isn't enjoyable by any stretch of the imagination, but there's nothing particularly ominous about the symptoms either. The only thing to really do about food poisoning is ride out the bad bits and maybe take a good long hard look at some of your recent meal choices and adjust them accordingly to avoid having to go through this again any time soon. Except. Except that the symptoms haven't gone away by the next day, have instead been joined by a new set of them: a tingling or burning sensation scrawling up and down your arms and legs, sinking into the tips of your fingers and toes, and crawling up your throat to settle like a prickling, unsettling mask over your face.

It... probably wasn't something you ate. Especially since a lot of your neighbors appear to be suffering from the same symptoms as well now.

By the 24th, it's clear that the quiet town of Wayward Pines has a full on epidemic on their hands, as the symptoms continue to spread throughout the community and are joined rapidly by problems with dry mouth, shortness or breath, choking sensations, confused or slurred speech, and a loss of coordination. People are on edge, even suspicious, and the streets and shops slowly empty of people with each passing day, making it all the more obvious when someone chooses to cross the street rather than risk walking past you on the sidewalk. (They cross again about a block up to avoid someone on that side of the street as well, so it's probably not you specifically that the good people of Wayward Pines are avoiding.)

The hospital is doing the best that they can with the large scale of affected patients, but it isn't until the 25th that they manage to narrow in on the correlation between worsening symptoms and hydration. They put out a call for blood donors, flyers calling on people's civic duty appearing in everyone's mailboxes and pinned in the windows of the handful of businesses that are still open. If they're to have any hope of engineering a treatment for the outbreak, they're going to need blood, they say, and even if nobody has died from the illness yet, do you want to wait until they do?

(The flyer sounds like it was written by the same sort of person that would guilt you into giving your mother a call a little more often, you only have one after all, but it brings the donors in so whatever works I guess.)

People suffering from the disease are highly encouraged to come into the hospital for treatment if they haven't already, and a number at the bottom of the flyer even offers house calls for those who are already too far along to make it to the hospital under their own steam. If you're not up to donating blood, you might want to give that number a call. After all, you must be on death's door if you can't even do that much to help your neighbors in their time of need.

And while you're at it, why don't you call your mom too?

MOD NOTES

This is a catch-all for any and all threads pertaining to the outbreak!

PLEASE INCLUDE IN SUBJECT LINE: Character Name, date, location, and Open or Closed, to help keep things a bit more organized.

If you have any questions regarding this event, feel free to ask them here.

Comments

[smuttywitch]

[Rachel wants to ask more about the person she's gathering herbs for, since they aren't here for her to get a read on, but that comes too close to talking about the past and she's not dealing with the head honchos just for helping. So she settles on the standards. It'll help. It has to]

Well, that means you didn't. Any stories a guy tells about me, other guys remember. Cautionary tales. [she beams, just to try to shove back the worry as she puts the plants and honey powder into bundle of wax paper] You're going to have to pump Nyx, I've got a bad reputation to keep.

[if whatever's going on here is even trying a bit, it has to have given Nyx memories of her doing stupid crap. That's her.

She takes a deep breath, quickly scrawling directions and a price on the paper--man, she wants Ivy for this crap--beforeholding the packet out to him] Steep a spoonful of this in a cup of hot water for five minutes. Try to get her to drink it all, but if she can't it should still help. That should be enough for at least four cups.

[paragon]

[ She doesn't know him, or she'd know that's not true. But he suspects to say so would only come across as protesting too much, and something about her reminds him of a few of the USO girls he knew, who'd taken a similar sort of pride in their bad reputations. So it's probably not his place to say one way or the other.

So he just ducks his head to glance over the directions briefly before looking back at her. ]

She's tough, I think she'll manage. Thanks, Rachel.

[ And indeed he says it with unfeigned gratitude. ]

And, uh. How much for the ones for show? [ He tilts his head slightly back toward the front of the store, where the flowers are. ]