City Folk Plague
by Undecisivepsycho
My entire town was barren. No villagers walked the unmarked paths, No flowers filled the spaces between the trees, no bugs roamed the habitat, not even the trees sprouted leaves. I couldn't understand it; I hadn't been gone more than a few weeks. Normally I would be greeted by surprise and asked if I had been vacationing, but clearly something had gone very wrong in the game. It couldn't have been that the villagers had moved because of my absence; their houses were still present and there weren't any weeds around to annoy them, but their doors all had a single sheet of paper tacked to them reading: "Quarantined."
I checked everywhere I could think of. All of the houses were inaccessible, the stores were empty, Nooks tables were on their sides and the Able Sisters' manikins were toppled over. I checked Town Hall last, hoping that maybe someone had survived whatever was going on here in Alagonia. A first I thought the mayor had managed to stay alive, I was just about to rush to him when I noticed his face frozen in permanent fear, and his flesh rotting and falling off around him. Everyone here was gone or dead.
Out of desperation I tried to take the bus to the city to see if everything had changed there as well, but Kapp'n must have suffered the same fate as all the others, as instead of the option to take the bus, I was given the choice to walk to the city.
Nothing was any better. The theater was destroyed, Graciegrace was charred on the inside, The Shampoodle was flooded, and Redd's looked like it had been raided before being abandoned. It all looked fine from the outside, minus the fountain crumbling, but inside each building was a terrible tale of destruction and panic. I couldn't stop asking myself; "What exactly happened here? And why, how did it start?"
I trekked back into town and began looking for clues, there had to be something that could tell me why I was suddenly all alone. I started with the museum, surprised to see all the critters I had caught managed to actually survive. I searched in the fossil rooms first, wondering if I had dug up something deadly, and I may have considering the strange particles of some chemical I found on certain sets of bone. After some how bagging up the samples I headed over to the aquarium section, figuring finding anything among fish was a long shot, but I had to make sure. I was mostly correct in thinking I wouldn't find much, any chemical that may have gotten in here would have dissolved, but I did find a scrap of paper hitching a ride on my puffer fish. Being careful not to hurt myself on the spiked fish I managed to nab the paper from the water. Most of the writing around the edge was blurred and only half there, suggesting it had originally been a letter, but the other fish must have nibbled most of it away, the only legible words here were "Help us, Please! The-".
At a loss for what the rest of the message could have been I made the last trip to the bug sanctuary, hoping a butterfly or beetle would be able to tell me what's been happening. I wasted no time in the sanctuary, each bug seemed to have some sort of dust coating that wasnt natural to any of them, though they didn't seem to have a problem having it there. I collected a few samples before I learned that, while not toxic to insects, it had quite a worrying affect on my own character, she looked woozy each time I collected a sample; it was as if she had been stung by a scorpion but was unable to blackout like normal.
After making one more sweep of the museum I went back to my own house with the results I had turned up so far, though they weren't much. It was getting late in the real world, I had to get some sleep for tomorrow, forcing me to save and quit earlier than I wished, but maybe in the morning the game would be fixed and everything would go back to normal. I was wrong.
I spent every waking moment I could to playing the now messed up game, only breaking away to take care of my basic needs or go to work to keep my apartment. My character was almost constantly in her house now, working on some machinery I managed to throw together in order to try and figure out what the chemical I had found was. On the 7th of playing I discovered something shocking; many of the characters that would come into town once a week were still alive, though they had changed drastically. The few living characters no longer carried their trademark wares, or pestered you about buying something. No, this time around they wore gas masks and protective suits as if the air was toxic and they would die from exposure. I was wary of them at first, but once I deemed them safe, I approached Saharah, hoping she could give me some answers.
When I approached the camel she was surprised and began speaking to me before I even had the chance to click on her. She looked distressed at first and was frantically asking why I wasn't in some sort of protective gear and "how had I managed to survive the outbreak?" Unfortunately I wasnt able to answer her, but I was given the option to ask "what outbreak? What happened here?"
Saharah seemed reluctant to go over the details at first, but with some subtle prompting I was able to convince her to tell me what exactly was going on. Apparently shortly after I had gone one my 4 week "vacation", another town had developed some sort of chemical virus and manage to spread it around to some of the cities that lay closest, including mine, to it before falling apart themselves at the hands of their own creation. The carpet selling camel hadn't a clue how the town had managed to engineer such a terrible virus, but she had seen first hand just how deadly it was to the infected towns. Soon all the towns people in the infected areas had fallen sick, eventually turning on one another in anger until the guards and the pelican twins were forced to contain them in their own homes. The containment wasn't meant to last forever, they figured they would be able to let the townspeople free once the outbreak had died down, but unfortunately it was the villagers that died first, answering why I was unable to get into any house except for my own. It had turned out that the characters that were equipped with flight were able to escape much of the horror, but the others such as Tortimer, the Able Sisters, Tom Nook, Copper, and Booker were unable to flea the infection. Those without protective suits died out one by one, the characters with such protection had been tasked with removing the bodies to ensure the plague wasn't spread to any other town, and Saharah was here only to take the last remaining deceased body.
After hearing the tale of my towns demise I was unable to really do anything, I stood there shocked and mortified at what had become of my beloved game. For a while I couldn't bear to turn on my console or even remove the disk. It was only until I few weeks afterward that I thought it was time to bury the so called "dead" and attempt to restart my life in a new town. Everything was fine until after I pressed 'A'. Rover wasn't there to greet me, I was only given the option to play the town. I wasn't being allowed to start over, make a new character, or even change the time any more. I tried taking out the disk and even erasing my consoles memory of the entire game, but the virus hadn't just destroyed my town, it had infected the game itself and made it virtually unplayable.