OUTBREAK: ZERO is a semi post-apocalyptic pandemic roleplay set in the fictional city of Lethford, USA. Current season: Winter, 20/21.
March 2020. The world is in pandemonium as one month ago, GHNv-20 was confirmed, five months after the beginning of norovirus season. The number of the infected are in the higher hundred thousands, and the death toll is at an estimated 250,000, with about seventy percent of the rest of the population experiencing mild to moderate illnesses connected to the S. pyogenes bacteria.
The fear of the unknown has caused mass hysteria and panic.
In an attempt to provide a semblance of safety and control, military personnel patrol the streets, even here in Lethford City, and the police force is trying to keep up with the rising street violence, assault, and theft.
Welcome to OUTBREAK: zero. Will you survive?
HAYANA
SITE OWNER + HEAD ADMINISTRATOR
Hi! I'm Haya. I'm pretty much your girl for everything! If you have any questions regarding our plot, membergroups, etc. don't hesitate to ask me. I'm also in charge of coding, graphics, anything skin related, and advertising/affiliates.
GENERAL INQUIRIES
CODING
GRAPHICS
ADVERTISING
CHARACTERS
ADDI
ADMINISTRATOR
Hey! I'm Addi. Hit me up if you need help with anything. I'm always for plotting so don't be shy. I like coffee, booze, and working out. I'm back from a long hiatus the dead so if you need anything, best ask the others until I get back into the groove of things!
GENERAL INQUIRIES
APPLICATIONS
THREAD MODERATION
MEDIATOR
CHARACTERS
FINNLEY
GLOBAL MODERATOR
Hi hello! My name is Finnley, or Finn, call whichever and I'll be there for you (yes like the FRIENDS theme song). I am in charge of the claims and helping with miscellaneous things. Let me know if you have any questions!
GENERAL INQUIRIES
CLAIMS
DIRECTORY
CHARACTERS
STAFF NAME
OPEN MODERATOR POSITION
outbreak
/ˈaʊtbreɪk/ zero /ˈzɪərəʊ/
a sudden occurrence of something unwelcome, such as war or disease. number, no quantity or number; nought; the figure 0.
Emily sighed. Violence. Why did it always come down to violence? That was the nature of people, she supposed; when they came across something which they didn't understand, their first instinct was to hit it until it stood still for long enough for them to work out what was going on. Which was unfortunate for whoever the hell this bloke thought that he was, because Emily had absolutely no intention whatsoever of standing still. She had made a career out of being impossible to pin down; it was a skill which many government representatives appreciated in their public relations officers, and it was a skill which had won her a remarkable degree of respect from those who had been responsible for the teaching of her law course. That had always been an option, but she'd decided that she would enjoy herself more in the office than she would in the courtroom, and thus far, she had been proven correct in that opinion. She'd had fun. Of course, she had always been working towards an end goal, she had always had a view to the future, but at the same time, she had lived in the moment, which was easy to achieve in front of a room full of reporters when you never knew what the next question was going to be.
Dipping a hand into her inside pocket, the blonde extracted a lanyard with her own shiny new ID badge on it. She had, in point of fact, just stopped at the town hall to pick it up ready to start work the following Monday- which, she reflected, was probably going to turn out to be a stroke of luck. "Locke. Emily Locke," she quipped, waving it in his direction before tucking it away again. "They didn't tell you I was coming? That is a dreadful shock." Really, she would have expected better; the fact that someone was going to be moving into the house sounded like the sort of thing that the head of security might reasonably be expected to have known, but then again, the amount of time that she'd spent working with the higher echelons of just about any political system had led her to realise the total lack of administrative and logistical ability which was possessed by the people at the top. That was why they had so many millions of staff to do things for them.
"So, have I averted that dreadful fate?" The blonde raised an eyebrow. "Only, if you're going to be violently unpleasant, might I take those five minutes to go and change? This is one of my favourite suits." Good clothes, she had learned early in her career, paid well for themselves; they made you look professional, competent, the sort of person who could afford expensive suits, and once you had them on, people were suddenly falling over themselves to offer you the sort of salary that meant that you could. A good suit was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Despite the fact that her surroundings were still reasonably new to her, the blonde moved through its corridors and in particular down its staircases with confidence and with fluidity; she had the gift of making herself immediately at home in any location, and it had been a godsend to her throughout her career. She was young, she was educated, many might have taken that as evidence of worldly inexperience and incompetence, but the way in which Emily carried herself and the way in which she integrated herself into any set of circumstances in which she might find herself, had been incredibly useful to her while she was taking her first steps. These days, of course, she had a reputation which spoke for itself, and references which would have spoken for it had it been suddenly struck mute.
But confidence was key, always, and it had not taken her half so long to put that into practice as it had done to learn it in the first place. Many people, for example, would have faltered or stumbled when suddenly confronted with what she would, if pressed, admit was a fairly intimidating presence in the doorway of a home in which they had only just arrived. Emily, however, did no such thing. Continuing on her way down the stairs to demonstrate that she did not feel threatened- but doing so slowly in order to maintain her height advantage-, she raised one carefully shaped eyebrow at the suited figure in the hallway. It was a gesture which had taken her some time to perfect, but it had been well worth the effort for the subtly nuanced range of expressions which it had allowed her. For the moment, she was opting for one which occupied a space somewhere between condescension and amusement.
"Who's asking?" she enquired, returning a question of her own just to demonstrate that she wasn't about to roll over and beg whenever he whistled. "If you've come to help carry my bags, it's very sweet of you, but you're just too late. You could come and do some unpacking if you're feeling particularly altruistic, I suppose."
Emily had been under the impression that she was moving into a private home; it had not occurred to her that she would need to deal with aspirational Secret Service agents having the run of the property. It would be an irritation, she supposed, but not one which it would be impossible to live with, and in any case, she had no real choice. God only knew what was going on out there in the rest of the city- or perhaps he didn't, perhaps that particular piece of expertise rested in what a more sensitive person than Emily might have referred to as the Other Place- and though she was far from being a shrinking violet, the blonde was pragmatic above all else. There was no sense in putting herself in the way of trouble where it could so easily be avoided, although it occurred to her now to think that perhaps it was rather hypocritical of her to be carrying on in the way that she was at this precise moment with that philosophy in mind.
Anyway, this was where she needed to be. At the heart of things, as it were. Living with the Mayor, working in the Town Hall, she was in exactly the right place to carry on with her various plans, and the situation was one which she recognised that she had been fortunate to obtain; apart from anything else, she couldn't remember ever having lived in such luxury.
Taking a deep breath, the blonde stepped back and surveyed her things, set out neatly around the room, arranged on surfaces or packed into drawers, hung in closets or folded on shelves- yes, she had arrived, there was no doubt about that, and she didn't intend for any to arise. Now that she was here- which, in all fairness, had turned out to be rather easier than she had expected-, she was going to stay, and everyone was going to be very aware of her presence.
Being sidelined or blending into the background never had suited Emily very well, but then perhaps that was because she'd simply never had much experience of it.
The house was a grand one; in fact, it was probably a mansion, come to think of it. As a matter of fact, it was very similar to the house in which she and her parents had lived before what her mother always referred to as The Incident, as part of her ongoing quest to make her life sound more interesting than it had in fact been. But Emily had given up on feeling bitter; she'd spent some months trying it, and it hadn't got her very far, so she had decided that it was clearly time to try out some alternative methods. The one that she'd decided on was activity, and, since that was a pretty broad spectrum of possibilities, she would have to further subdivide, which left her with what she would, in the very vaguest of terms, probably have to class as being subterfuge.
Since there seemed to be nothing more that needed to be done to her room for the present, the blonde decided that it was probably about time to start investigating her wider surroundings. Finding her way around the house and introducing herself to the staff would seem to be a productive use of her time, and who knew? It might well be an important detail later on to know exactly where the mayor's home office was, always assuming that he had one and didn't in fact delegate anything that took him outside the nine to five working slot to someone else... which was always possible, she supposed. But one thing at a time, one thing at a time.
Venturing out into the corridor, she eyed up the two options and decided, on no particular basis, to head towards the stairs. The ground floor seemed to be a good place to start- it would all have to be uphill from there, after all.
Determined, ambitious, and somewhat unscrupulous when it comes to advancing her own aims, Emily inherits her political acumen from her mother and her sense of humour from her father, which makes it somewhat unfortunate that her father was the politician in the family. She knows exactly what she wants from life and isn't shy in how she goes about getting it, prepared to formulate all sorts of bold strategies and to carry them through if necessary. She is calculating by nature, ready to weight up the pros and cons of any decision before taking it; certainly, she is a proponent of the idea that one should look before one leaps, but having conducted a thorough survey of possibilities, she will not hesitate to make major decisions or life choices, even where they involve an almost complete change to her way of living. Concealment and manipulation are innate to her personality; making friends is something that she does easily but usually more scientifically than emotionally, on the basis of what they can offer her or perhaps simply because it makes her life easier to be friendly with someone than it does to be an enemy to them.
[attr="class","ozapptitle"]BIOGRAPHY
An only child, Emily grew up very close to her parents, frequently sitting in a corner of the office while one or the other of them worked, or listening to them explaining the complexities of their day's work over dinner, and so perhaps it was no surprise that she grew into a serious girl, her eyes always to the future and more occupied with what she would do when she left school for good than she was with what she would do when she got home that evening. It was a trait which might have meant that she had some trouble in making friends had she not been a skilled actress even then; she actively worked to engage with the people around her, which won her both friends and enemies in the usual course of things and by the time that she found herself in high school, she was one of the key characters in her year. All was going according to plan, until suddenly, all plans came off the rails.
At the time, she didn't really understand quite what was going on. Of course she read the newspaper articles, the website reports- though she had to do both away from home since her parents were doing their best to pretend that none of it was happening- but frankly, none of them seemed to know what was happening either; they simply kept repeating the few facts that they did know, and at such length that Emily sometimes felt like screaming as she read them. All that she really knew was that her father had lost his job, had lost the benefits which he had enjoyed for so many years, had been lucky not to be prosecuted for some obscure crime that not even he fully understood. It wasn't until much later, when Emily had gained her degrees in law and media studies, when her father had long since got himself appointed to a foreign posting in the Department of State, that she fully understood what had been going on, and even that was by dint of breaking into the filing cabinet he had left behind.
It made for interesting reading, there was no doubt about that. The schemes in which her father had become embroiled were complex and yet solid, well thought through; there should have been no possibility of anything going wrong. But go wrong they clearly had, and it took Emily many hours of research to discover why- but she realised, in the end, that she could lay the blame squarely at the feet of her dearly beloved uncle; a man who had made a critical mistake and had then sacrificed his own brother in order to save his skin.
Had she not been personally involved, Emily would probably have admired it as a masterly piece of work. But such theorising was irrelevant; she was personally involved, and that being the case, she couldn't admire it. Instead, she resented it; she resented the man for what he had done, perhaps for being more competent in doing it than her own father, but irrespective of that, she had decided that something would have to be done, and she would have to do it.
Quite what it was going to be, she had not yet decided, but it was apparent that being in the right city would be the right place to start, and so she packed up her things, put in her application to work in the Lethford city government's media department, and sent her uncle an email begging his hospitality. It would form a good basis to start from.
