The ''Rage'' virus

Subject: The ''Rage'' virus Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:58 pm

The "Rage" Virus

Skin Walkers don't get sick from regular dog diseases, but they get their own. The worse sickness among them is simply known as Rage. This is their form of extreme rabies. It infects the body through bite or any saliva to bloodstream contact. The incubation period varies, some showing symptoms as soon as they have the virus, others laying dormant for a period before they get sick. They are still contagious within twenty-four hours of a bite though, regardless of whether or not they show symptoms right away. So there are carriers. Once Rage starts to surface, they will run a fever and have flu-like symptoms first. Next, they will show anxiety and mood instability, their mood very unstable as it swings from extremes of sadness and and hopelessness to fury. Their blood will be darkened by this point. After that, the whites of their eyes will darken until they are black, resulting from slight internal bleeds in the eye and the fact that the blood will be entirely black now. At this stage, they begin to become paranoid and will often hear or see things that aren't there. Their sense of reasoning will slip and they'll begin to think in ways that make no sense to anyone. They'll often grow a sense of coldness or thrill in the face of other's suffering at this point. This is when they'll begin to look more sickly and complain about being unbearably hungry and thirsty. Their skin around their eyes will dry and crack, resulting in slight bleeding of the thick, ink-like, black blood that courses through their veins, staining their fur and looking like they have deep cracks under and sometimes above their eyes.

There are then two final paths that this can go down. One, the infected will completely lose their grip on reality and will go entirely insane, their brains fried by a mixture of an incredibly high fever and this strange virus. They'll become completely and unrelentingly aggressive, only trying to lash out and cause as much death and damage as they can until their brain finally gives out, at which point they'll seize and die. Two, their fever will subside, but their infection will not. They will be just cunning enough to keep their wits, skills, and sometimes even speech, but feel no sense of attachment or remorse. They are essentially sociopathic and their only drive is to eat, hunt, kill, claim territory, and spread their virus. They'll begin to collaborate with other infected, forming mega-packs, and hunt everything, including their own kind. If it moves, it'll be killed. While not all of them cannibalize their own kind, some do, but they all eat everything else. Their presence decimates whatever land it is found in as they kill or infect everything, wiping out entire populations. Both of these states cause them to have an incredible pain tolerance, making them quite persistent.

The virus has no cure and no vaccine, but it can be slowed down by extreme cold. The virus spreads and grows within the bloodstream, replicating itself like bacteria. If it is exposed to harsh cold of a dangerously low body temperature, then it slows it's growth and thus slows the progression of the illness. This is not a cure though, as it will continue as normal if the body is brought back to an acceptable temperature. More likely than not, the person would die from cold long before it would stop the virus.

Some are immune to the virus and some have a high resistance. The difference is, one never gets sick and the other does, but reacts differently. The ones with high resistance can get infected and show a variety of the physical signs, but never get to the final stage, or they can progress extremely slowly, taking up to a year to actually reach their final stage of the virus. In the ones that never express the final stage, the virus ceases to be contagious and also ceases to cause them constant symptoms, but remains inside them and often very visible. Their blood will remain black, as will their eyes, a clear marker that they are, in fact, still infected. Some will never show symptoms beyond that again, while others will face reoccurring bouts of illness, mood swings, paranoia, or any combination of the three. No matter what their situation is though, they are often feared, ostracized, or hunted because of the dormant virus inside them or because they are often mistaken for a contagious, recent infected.