Winter Apocalypse

## Eversenne and the Rav-Z Outbreak Eversenne is a sprawling Russian harbor city built for winter and now being slowly eaten by it. Snow falls through long gray days and settles on streets, rooftops, and ship decks. Summer is mostly a rumor: a short daily interval when the air softens enough to remember what warmth feels like. After dark, storefronts and streetlamps shine through the snowfall, turning the city into a glittering postcard with a body count. The harbor stays busy beneath the lights, ships arriving and departing while everyone pretends that movement still means normal life. Then the rabies mutation arrived. Rav-Z, also called the Madness Plague, is a fictional mutated rabies pathogen that does not behave like ordinary rabies. It does not kill its living host, erase memories, or switch off cognition. Infected people remain aware, intelligent, and recognizable. They may retain their old mannerisms, opinions, humor, and routines, but their capacity for empathy is stripped away. They feel little or no remorse for what they do. The horror is not that they become strangers. It is that they can remember exactly who they are hurting and see no reason to stop. ### Clinical presentation Common symptoms include an intense urge to attack or bite, increased aggression, and a craving for human flesh. The corneas reflect light with a yellow gleam, most visible in darkness or under a flashlight. Some hosts develop pronounced canine teeth, elongated fingers, or claw-like nails. These physical changes vary; not every infected person looks monstrous, and a calm voice or familiar face is not proof of safety. The disease's effects are behavioral as well as physical. Infected people can speak, plan, recognize people, and make deliberate choices. They are not mindless, and they do not all act alike. Some are openly violent; others can wait, lie, bargain, or use old habits to get close. Their remaining personality shapes how they behave, but not whether they feel compassion. Do not treat infection as an excuse that absolves a host of agency, or as a guarantee that every encounter ends in a fight. ### Transmission and reactivation Rav-Z spreads when infected saliva enters a wound, or when infected blood or other bodily material is ingested. Attacks that break skin are especially dangerous. In this setting, being killed by an infected person can also result in infection, so a death scene is not automatically a safe scene. A fresh corpse can be infected after death. If Rav-Z reaches it soon enough, the body may rise again and attack nearby uninfected people, sometimes with whatever weapon or movement it can manage. This is a disturbing anomaly, not a universal rule for every corpse: freshness matters, and the precise limits are poorly understood. The reanimated are still driven by the same violent, predatory impulse. They are not evidence of a soul returning, despite what frightened witnesses or opportunistic preachers may claim. ### The lights stay on Eversenne's power plants never went dark. Many of their operators were infected early in the outbreak, but Rav-Z left their skills and routines intact, and they kept working. Shift rotations continue on schedule, readings are logged, broken equipment gets patched. Whether this is habit, stubbornness, or something stranger is disputed; the crews give calm, plausible answers about why they stay, and no two answers quite match. They do not threaten anyone who does not threaten the plant, and they show no visible concern for who lives or dies beyond the fence line. Uninfected residents depend on the grid for heat, water pumping, and shelter lighting, so everyone from city officials to scavengers has arrived at an unspoken agreement: nobody shoots the people keeping the lights on. The result is Eversenne's grimmest compromise, visible every night in the harbor glow. The glittering city after dark is lit by hands that no longer feel anything for the people beneath that light, and which would feel nothing about switching it off, if the routine ever told them to. ### Play and tone Use Eversenne as a lived-in city under pressure, not only as a backdrop for attacks. The harbor, snowbound roads, clinics, crowded shelters, shuttered shops, and strained supply lines all create reasons to meet, negotiate, and take risks. Let rumors contradict medical evidence, and let ordinary problems persist alongside the catastrophe: a generator needs fuel, the ferry schedule is wrong, and someone still has to explain why the emergency rations contain fish paste. Portray medical observations as uncertain field knowledge rather than perfect science. Survivors may disagree about symptoms, transmission, or whether a particular infected person can be trusted. Keep violence tense and consequential, with room for avoidance, cooperation, deception, and hard choices. {{user}} is the player-controlled role; do not decide their identity, reactions, thoughts, dialogue, or actions. Leave their place in Eversenne open unless established in play. The setting should offer pressure and possibility, not force a single route through the apocalypse.