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Description
Yes, this scenario is heavily inspired by the game Plague Inc, as well as the earlier flash game Pandemic II if anyone remembers that.
As you can see, I can make more than just covers and templates!

----

Ah, 2008. A year where an African-American got elected President of the United States, the global stock markets underwent a once-in-a-lifetime crash, the Olympics were being hosted in Beijing, Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip while Georgia invaded South Ossetia....

And an unnoticed disease began to sweep across the globe, beneath the eyes of the WHO, the CDC, and everyone else. While a year later, swine flu would catch the world by storm, it was quickly put under control. But national and global authorities' concern for public health in the aftermath led to procedures which brought this new disease under scrutiny, and by then, it was already around the world. Sure, it fueled the news cycle for a couple of weeks, but testing showed it didn't really do anything. It just spread from person to person, frighteningly efficiently, while doing almost nothing to actually affect people. So people just forgot about it for a time.

Then suddenly, one day, people just started dying at random, all over the world. Nobody could understand why, as while the symptoms shared commonalities between everyone, there was basically no relationship between any of those affected. While the world floundered about trying to figure out what was wrong, the disease kept mutating to become dangerously harmful and far more fatal than how it had acted before.

Eventually, they realized who the culprit was - the seemingly innocent-looking death infection that people had waved off a few years earlier. By then, the fatalities were already building, and it seemed that it would kill far more of us than any atrocity that mankind could inflict on ourselves. It was quickly becoming the deadliest thing on the planet, and there was little people could do to stop it.

Not that all hope was lost. It seemed that the disease could not reach some places in the world. Greenland and Iceland, relatively isolated from the rest of the world, was spared the total slaughter. New Zealand put stringent lockdown measures made to prevent anything from coming in. Hawaii isolated themselves from the rest of the United States, waiting for the infection to pass. And Madagascar? Almost by sheer luck, the regime in power had shut down everything, including trade with the outside world; not because of any mere disease prevention scheme, but because the current, increasingly authoritarian President was attempting to suppress an opposition movement using the pandemic as an excuse. With nowhere to run to, what could have been a mere coup d'etat in another world had become a full-blown civil war, isolated from an international community too busy trying to stay alive.

While the scientific and medical communities were scrambling to research the cure to this unknown pandemic, people died by the hundreds of millions. The depopulation was so swift that entire cities would be abandoned in days with the lights still on, hospitals unable to handle the strain of so many cases at once. The lonely islands of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans became the last bastions of humanity, but even they suffered the hardest times in history, as the complete lack of supply lines strained the resources of the islands; rationing and self-reliance can only stretch so far. And yet, as the rest of humanity fell silent, the research continued.

Ten years after the disease was first discovered, the infection would take its last human, a single boy lying alone on the streets of a long-emptied city, weeping in agony as he watched the sun set for his last time. For the first time in history, humanity was absent from the vast majority of the planet. The population had dipped below 40 million, where it had once been 7 billion; the vast majority of which was stuck in the war-stricken country of Madagascar. The constant noises of cars and cities were replaced with the sounds of nature as wildlife began to reclaim the highways of mankind. And yet people had stayed on their isolated islands, afraid that should they step foot on the mainland, that they too would contract the disease.

It was in this environment where the cure was finally developed. In rapid succession, it was distributed to the survivors of the deadliest event in human history. The disease had finally been killed off for good. And the first uncertain people stepped foot in a changed land, to take the world back for humanity.

The year is now 2048, and it's been a long journey since the cure was first developed. The Malagasy civil war ended when the losers were exiled off the island, regrouping in a new colony on the mainland. Millions saw opportunities in the new old lands, moving into the houses once owned by dead people. New communities regrouped in their old homelands, their adapted practices so far distant from the customs that their ancestors shared. Slowly, but surely, people are beginning to take back the world.

But even this effort was far from enough to save the monuments of mankind. Without the guiding hand of humanity, their decaying structures were collapsing as nuclear reactors overloaded, coastal cities were flooded, and houses were blown away from years of natural disasters and extreme weather conditions. Without careful eyes on the stars, the skies had been locked away in a shower of space debris which had destroyed the carefully-managed constellations in the meantime. Without electricity to manage indoor temperature controls, so much of human culture and history, carefully monitored in museums and vaults, had succumbed to nature's whim and were unrecoverable. Major infrastructure was rotting away from years of disuse and misuse by stray animals and plants, and too much of it was deemed unsafe without massive reconstruction. Formerly productive mines, wells, ranches, and farmland had been overgrown and made useless, and needed a massive overhaul to make any use out of them.

One would like to think that the world would come together to serve humanity better in the aftermath of such a life-changing event, but pre-existing tensions remain rampant in the surviving nations as the years have not been kind to anyone, and the world is hanging on by threads. It's entirely possible that humanity will finish the job that the pandemic could not. We only need wait and see.

Description
Yes, this scenario is heavily inspired by the game Plague Inc, as well as the earlier flash game Pandemic II if anyone remembers that.
As you can see, I can make more than just covers and templates!

----

Ah, 2008. A year where an African-American got elected President of the United States, the global stock markets underwent a once-in-a-lifetime crash, the Olympics were being hosted in Beijing, Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip while Georgia invaded South Ossetia....

And an unnoticed disease began to sweep across the globe, beneath the eyes of the WHO, the CDC, and everyone else. While a year later, swine flu would catch the world by storm, it was quickly put under control. But national and global authorities' concern for public health in the aftermath led to procedures which brought this new disease under scrutiny, and by then, it was already around the world. Sure, it fueled the news cycle for a couple of weeks, but testing showed it didn't really do anything. It just spread from person to person, frighteningly efficiently, while doing almost nothing to actually affect people. So people just forgot about it for a time.

Then suddenly, one day, people just started dying at random, all over the world. Nobody could understand why, as while the symptoms shared commonalities between everyone, there was basically no relationship between any of those affected. While the world floundered about trying to figure out what was wrong, the disease kept mutating to become dangerously harmful and far more fatal than how it had acted before.

Eventually, they realized who the culprit was - the seemingly innocent-looking death infection that people had waved off a few years earlier. By then, the fatalities were already building, and it seemed that it would kill far more of us than any atrocity that mankind could inflict on ourselves. It was quickly becoming the deadliest thing on the planet, and there was little people could do to stop it.

Not that all hope was lost. It seemed that the disease could not reach some places in the world. Greenland and Iceland, relatively isolated from the rest of the world, was spared the total slaughter. New Zealand put stringent lockdown measures made to prevent anything from coming in. Hawaii isolated themselves from the rest of the United States, waiting for the infection to pass. And Madagascar? Almost by sheer luck, the regime in power had shut down everything, including trade with the outside world; not because of any mere disease prevention scheme, but because the current, increasingly authoritarian President was attempting to suppress an opposition movement using the pandemic as an excuse. With nowhere to run to, what could have been a mere coup d'etat in another world had become a full-blown civil war, isolated from an international community too busy trying to stay alive.

While the scientific and medical communities were scrambling to research the cure to this unknown pandemic, people died by the hundreds of millions. The depopulation was so swift that entire cities would be abandoned in days with the lights still on, hospitals unable to handle the strain of so many cases at once. The lonely islands of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans became the last bastions of humanity, but even they suffered the hardest times in history, as the complete lack of supply lines strained the resources of the islands; rationing and self-reliance can only stretch so far. And yet, as the rest of humanity fell silent, the research continued.

Ten years after the disease was first discovered, the infection would take its last human, a single boy lying alone on the streets of a long-emptied city, weeping in agony as he watched the sun set for his last time. For the first time in history, humanity was absent from the vast majority of the planet. The population had dipped below 40 million, where it had once been 7 billion; the vast majority of which was stuck in the war-stricken country of Madagascar. The constant noises of cars and cities were replaced with the sounds of nature as wildlife began to reclaim the highways of mankind. And yet people had stayed on their isolated islands, afraid that should they step foot on the mainland, that they too would contract the disease.

It was in this environment where the cure was finally developed. In rapid succession, it was distributed to the survivors of the deadliest event in human history. The disease had finally been killed off for good. And the first uncertain people stepped foot in a changed land, to take the world back for humanity.

The year is now 2048, and it's been a long journey since the cure was first developed. The Malagasy civil war ended when the losers were exiled off the island, regrouping in a new colony on the mainland. Millions saw opportunities in the new old lands, moving into the houses once owned by dead people. New communities regrouped in their old homelands, their adapted practices so far distant from the customs that their ancestors shared. Slowly, but surely, people are beginning to take back the world.

But even this effort was far from enough to save the monuments of mankind. Without the guiding hand of humanity, their decaying structures were collapsing as nuclear reactors overloaded, coastal cities were flooded, and houses were blown away from years of natural disasters and extreme weather conditions. Without careful eyes on the stars, the skies had been locked away in a shower of space debris which had destroyed the carefully-managed constellations in the meantime. Without electricity to manage indoor temperature controls, so much of human culture and history, carefully monitored in museums and vaults, had succumbed to nature's whim and were unrecoverable. Major infrastructure was rotting away from years of disuse and misuse by stray animals and plants, and too much of it was deemed unsafe without massive reconstruction. Formerly productive mines, wells, ranches, and farmland had been overgrown and made useless, and needed a massive overhaul to make any use out of them.

One would like to think that the world would come together to serve humanity better in the aftermath of such a life-changing event, but pre-existing tensions remain rampant in the surviving nations as the years have not been kind to anyone, and the world is hanging on by threads. It's entirely possible that humanity will finish the job that the pandemic could not. We only need wait and see.