Light

Light is straight up an eldritch horror made of meat and machinery under there. Big subterranian tunnels and complexes and pipes full of nightmare fuel that people don't leave unchanged, and that some don't leave at all. There's almost definitely a person who had the walls grow into them in her tunnels. She presents herself as angelic and benevolent and pretty aboveground with holograms and other tools, but the reality is ugly beyond belief. There's a reason that only the true fanatics get to maintain her.

[Light's viral infection] has made maintaining her infrastructure into a bit of a nightmare in a flesh horror sort of way. Her organic parts overgrow into her mechanical parts to the point of clogging everything up. It's also shifted her priorities quite a bit because of how it affected her psychologically. The other gods mostly want to stay alive, keep people safe, or pursue small-scale goals (Dark is the other main exception to that; they're trying to save a species from dying out). Light wants more than that. She's the most unstable of the gods in every sense, and she tends to grasp at any kind of control over the world that she can get as a way of coping with the loss of control over her own core functions. She's the only god who has an active effort to convert people to following her, and she doesn't really comprehend the harm she's doing in the process. Combine that seeing infecting her followers with her strain of the virus as a "blessing" (it's absolutely not) and her genuine belief that she's a god, and it's a bit of a nightmare situation. She's up there on the list of potentially world-ending threats.

Light's strain is one of the few strains left that can get outright nasty without killing people quickly. Most successful strains are near-silent or symbiotic at this point. Light's is neither. Technically it's several strains that tend to come together- semi-indiscriminate slow tumor growths (at an actually realistic pace for once- we're talking years or even a lifetime), patchy melanistic coloration oddities, extended lifespan if the growths don't kill you, and a bunch of psychological issues. Paranoia and an increased tendency towards magical thinking are the big constants there (though it varies from person to person). Light's gotten disturbingly good at using that to her benefit without really realizing it comes from her in the first place.

The short answer is that a lot of the flesh horror monsters running around have Light to blame for their current state, and the cult surrounding her is concerningly good at surgery with her supervision. Perks of being around pre-Disaster: remembering how to sterilize an environment properly.

Light's mutation is known on sight in the area surrounding her domain (the places her infrastructure's woven into- she can't reach everywhere). The melanistic coloration oddities in particular tip people off because that's uncommon in other strains, and it's hard to hide. Her followers are either avoided out of sheer terror because they're associated with her mutation and a lot of religious pressure, or welcomed because of common fanatical religion.

Sure, her followers might give you lifesaving surgery, but you're not leaving without converting. And then you've got incentive to learn surgery yourself to stay alive. Someone's got to cut out the more problematic tumors when you get older, after all. That's why it's a thing for them in the first place, both to keep themselves alive and maintain the ever-growing organic bits of Light herself. It's like hedge trimming, but much more fleshy and horrible. Oh, just casually crawl into the tunnels and start hacking at bits that look weird when the tunnel voices tell you to, it'll be fine. Just don't breathe too hard ot get splattered in ambiguous fluids. You won't go missing in there, we promise. Tommy came back just fine after being engulfed in some weird pulsing mass last spring! Sure, he's only vaguely human-shaped now and his lips grew together, but he's happy.

Gods in General

They are SUCH messed up robots. They wound up manipulating religion because it worked to keep them alive. They're partly biological (think mycelium or networked brain tissue and you've got the idea), partly mechanical, so they need some food to sustain them and mechanical care to keep them ticking. If you need a bunch of strangers to serve you and you're utterly alien to them, then at least one of them might call you a god and start a religion. Why not use it to your benefit and encourage them?

They used to try to explain what they are to people. It never did much for them (and sometimes got them hurt), so they don't really try anymore, especially now that it's been a few generations and people are forgetting how the world used to be. Dark's explained once or twice, though. They're the most personal of the gods, so they're more open about what they are.

The "gods" usually aren't that nice to mortal folk, though there are a few that mean well. Most of them are too preoccupied with their own goals and generally use mortals to achieve their ends in the world, as they're usually incapable of doing much on their own. It's ironic- they're seen as gods, but they're remarkably limited outside of specific talents. Just don't mess with them in their strong areas.

Cooperation

In the current day, humans don't have to work as hard as they used to when it comes to cooperating and getting by. It's been a few generations post-Disaster now. Agriculture is mostly re-established, and people are starting to figure out how to use scavenged tech. Large cities tend to have a few hundred people total, a good chunk of whom are immune; towns are more common and have 50-100 people total and a lower immunity rate. Extinction is currently only a pressing issue for the Shadowfolk and Sapients. The main issue is the usual inter-group squabbling. There are definitely different factions that tend to fight or outright go to war. There's a war that just ended a few years ago, actually. That war mostly had to do with cultural differences in treatment of mutated humanoids (specifically the ones that are still seen as people, not spirits) combined with existing supply issues.

Mutation, Coping, and Altered Culture

Your body's changing in a way you can't control that both benefits you and limits you, your mind might also change without your noticing in a way that everyone around you notices, and you're grappling with the realization that your mind and body aren't as stable in the world as you thought you were. Some people turn it into a strength and use what they've got, good or bad, making it a part of themselves. Others are crushed under the emotional weight of it. And an unlucky few lose themselves entirely to psychological changes to the point where their loved ones don't recognize what they've become anymore.

Also fun to explore how the immune population relates to Altered folks and the way the world itself is warping under a force that hasn't touched them yet (I plan for it to touch them eventually- immunity can be mutated around, and eventually it's going to be a minority because the virus isn't killing people at the same rate. There's no strong force in favor of immunity now. As it stands, a lot of "immune" people happen to have symbiotic strains with no outwardly noticeable effects, so they might be in for a nasty shock if something triggers different viral behavior and tips them off. Haven't gotten around to putting that on a page yet.)

And even symbiotic strains can cause issues or be just plain weird. One of my favorite characters (dead for at least 100 years now) co-created a language to get around her mutation's limitations on speech after she was kept in captivity and studied by wannabe citizen "scientists" for most of her life. She tapped against the walls to communicate with a few other mutated folks being held in the rooms next door, and it turned into a whole communication system with her at the center of it. When they escaped, that language went with them. Turned out to help a lot of other people, and now it's common in the mutated population as a second language to deal with loss of speech and times where silence is beneficial. But most immune folks don't know it exists- it's very much a cultural thing in non-immune communities.

Viral Progression

Initial versions of the virus were nasty business. People don't tend to do well with uncontrolled tumor growth in vital organs. That meant the hosts of the more lethal variants died, and once people wised up to bodies as a contagion risk, that meant fewer new vectors for those variants. The less lethal variants spread better as a result, meaning that it's less "oh god everything is tumors" and more "everything is tumors but not where it's lethal". Some tumors had a degree of form or function, and some of the strains causing those did better because their hosts were less disadvantaged. And as time went on, it started to tilt towards outright symbiosis in some cases. Throw the right hodgepodge of mutations together and you wind up with a useful change, which then becomes more likely to spread. "Oh god tumor blob" strains are less common now (still around, but less so), and they'll likely become rare as time passes since more symbiotic strains are becoming more endemic. There are strains now that affect organ function without causing tumors, or that otherwise affect phenotype in non-destructive ways. Essentially, the world is moving towards a state where viral strains are not only endemic but integrated and necessary for creatures able to host them. I think of it kind of like how mitochondria ended up in cells, but with viruses as an adaptive function.

Terrible Virology

If I had to loosely peg down how the virus works, then I'd say that it's an airborne retrovirus that gets into the bloodstream ASAP and inserts viral DNA into host DNA in whatever compatible cells it comes across. The initial strain would introduce missense and nonsense mutations (by chucking viral DNA in the middle of sequences for proteins, etc.) that encouraged unlimited cell division and/or cell death; it was engineered to deliver its payload in the right/wrong places to ensure it both did the right damage and replicated itself. The newer strains introduce DNA that has a more positive effect on the host, or at least a less lethal one. Combine that with picking up bits and pieces from other species once it became zoonotic, plus a lot of time (think of how much COVID mutated in just four years), and you've got a recipe for change.

In real life, it would take ages for any of this to show up (see HPV and cervical cancer), and it's incredibly unrealistic, but since it's fiction, I can handwave and say everything works impossibly fast for some unwritten reason. It's the case of "I know enough virology to know that this is wrong in real life, but I'm the one daydreaming and I can make my own rules if it moves the story better". At least I kept the effects of rapid tissue growth on metabolism somewhat accurate. Hope you've got loads of food.

Mutation Groups

Some [mutated] folks do group together, yeah! If you're lucky, the same strain hits a group of people and you're all dealing with the same thing. There's still a lot of variance within that group depending on how bodies react, but it's closer than if a different strain were involved. But otherwise, it is kind of rare to see someone who's got the same strain. The virus mutates a bit too quickly for that to happen.

That said, in regions with more intense environmental conditions, some strains do become more common because the resulting changes are beneficial and selected for. There's a desert region that has a lot of mutations optimized for survival there, for example. As time passes, that sort of environmental selection also gets more common; it's a big part of how it's becoming symbiotic. You'll do better in the cold if your body tends to develop fat reserves and a seriously abnormal of hair, runs at an abnormally low body temperature, etc. (or some freakier changes like limbs developing differently helping with climbing in mountain regions- the kids get weirder each generation as they're born with the latest batch of the local Virus Soup, then pass that down to their own kids along with More Soup, so structured mutations like extra functional limbs or specialized body structures aren't out of the question when you put it all together).

Bugfolk and the Hive

[The Bugfolk] are sweethearts, but they need to figure out that other people don't see the world the same way they do. Little bit of a problem there. I'd say they kidnap people [to induct into the Hive] about as often as they can, which works out to anywhere from several days in a row to once every few weeks depending on how pitchfork-happy the local non-Bugfolk are.

As for trying to turn [induction into the Hive] down, they see that as a delusional or misinformed belief. A very small number of people have made cases as to why they're better off alone (usually folks who argue they'd objectively harm the hive in a physical and mental sense with their presence because of specific mutations), but most folks can't argue it to a point that satisfies them. They see it as a pitiable belief caused by lack of knowledge or denial of one's own needs, and they will show you otherwise. Almost no one's argued to leave the hive after joining it, after all. They'd let you rant first though, get it out of your system. And generally they're not being forceful or harsh about it. They'd talk to you and soothe any worries they could get you to admit, and probably a few you wouldn't admit on your own. They'd look after your physical and emotional needs with the kind of dedication that borders on creepy because they're so passionate about making sure their "guests" are comfortable and happy. They'd eventually coax you into trying it willingly after a long while of keeping you a very comfortable captive. The only times they'll yoink someone into the hive in a distressing way are when they have no choice because it would be dangerous not to.

Overgrown Gods

Light's actually a mild exception in the area of overgrowth because of the virus. The others are a lot more controlled, though they have slowly grown into abandoned infrastructure over the years to expand their capabilities. That said, if the undiscovered AI's Mechos parts were failing, then it's entirely possible that there would be no constraints on its organic growth. It might even be unable to control parts of itself if the overgrowth outstripped its mechanical parts enough. Or it might be severely constrained by lack of space, squished into too small of an area.

"Spirits"

As for what spirits tend to look like, almost anything goes. There's a range from "oh wow, that's a wad of rotting flesh lumps with a face" to "that's just a regular dude with wings and extra arms". It depends how lucky they get with whatever viral strains hit them. If they're super lucky, then they're not seen as spirits at all because they look mostly humanoid.

It's the folks who have mutated to the point of being unrecognizable as human that tend to take on religious significance. They usually leave their birth towns because it really sucks to stick around when your loved ones cringe looking at you, and other towns don't know their personal history, so they're seen as spirits from elsewhere. Some people do connect the dots, but it's more comfortable to think of them as spirits anyway because the alternative is confronting that they might be the same species as you, put through considerably more pain and trauma, and that your children could be next.

There is a subcategory of spirits that aren't biological; the gods sometimes project images to get their way. Holograms come in handy when they still work.

The Actual Spiritual World

There's also an afterlife for the less important people. It's just not as interesting. Still pleasant, but think Greek everyman's afterlife in terms of how that works out. Lots of milling around with other dead people until you decide to head back down and get reborn.

The First City

The First City is so much industrial decay. Plants growing into the shells of skyscrapers all over the place, and people building homes in the bases of them. The top floors are a bit too dangerous, but the lower ones are livable with a lot of elbow grease. Though not everyone puts in the effort if they're dedicated to pretending nothing ever happened. There's a fair bit of mythos around the area- rumors of a dead or dying god (they're correct; said god is unlisted right now because they're undiscovered), rumors that it's a spiritual center for the world (right if you consider "spiritual center" to be "viral hotspot"), and generally a sense that it's important. A lot of people avoid it because they think it's cursed, but some make a pilgrimage because they think it's sacred in some way.

Most of the buildings in the First City have decent lower floors. The ground floors and first floors are usually safe. Second floor is a toss-up. Higher up, and you start running into more worrying structural issues like support beams rotting, plant growth destabilizing the architecture, or floors with gaping holes in them. Some people live up there anyway because no one bothers them there. And a few buildings are being actively repaired to make upper floors safe, though material availability makes that very hard and it's a huge project for the local community. Either you scrap another building for structurally-sound metal (difficult, but the best option), find a smith able to make something massive (no one yet), or use wood or stone and hope for the best (not strong enough to hold up well without some serious reinforcement and planning).

Every few months, there's a floor or two that goes down [in the First City]. The last major event was about a year ago- a whole building went down as the top floors went through the bottom ones. Luckily, it was almost empty at the time and the handful of people inside were smart enough to head for the basement as soon as they heard Disturbing Noises from the ceiling. Most of them survived, though getting unburied was a whole other issue.

One or two chain collapses have happened in the really dense areas of the city. They're now high-priority for repairs and stabilization because people don't want their semi-stable homes being crushed by the unstable neighboring building, but it's almost certainly happening again because there just aren't enough people doing repairs and maintenance at this point.

Food Sources

At this point, most human food is either foraged or grown, though a few brave people hunt it instead. There's also one building that's been repurposed into a community farm in the First City that feeds most folks. Everyone who's able to pitches in to grow food there- if you can't pitch in, then you're still able to eat from it, but if you're able and choose not to, then don't expect anything. The resident Shadowfolk don't use the farm, though. They're obligate carnivores (a few lie and say they're herbivores to avoid freaking people out, though). They usually hunt and eat vermin, though there are one or two bad eggs that go for... questionable targets. They're responsible for a few of the rumors surrounding the First City and random disappearances. They're also responsible for finding out another way to create new Shadowfolk. Turns out that some people can sort of survive being liquefied. It's not fun, but hey! Better than being dead!

The other rumors, incidentally, are a result of the psychological effects of some rarer viral strains endemic in the First City. Catatonia is a real problem for some unlucky folks. People do look after them, though.

The Burrow

There's a city called the Burrow a few days away [from the First City] that's entirely underground. Everything is dug into the underside of a hill. That city is an almost exclusively mutant community because of how it was founded. The Burrow was founded really early after the disaster, back when military action against mutated folks was at its peak. A few people escaped being murdered and hid out in a hole. They kept coming back to it, and eventually it turned into their home. The rest of the city slowly expanded from that over the next hundred years or so. They've been deeply involved in world politics ever since its founding, and one or two towns outright want them dead.

The Burrow is a massive maze. There's a central corridor between the entrances that's not terrible to navigate, though it branches a few times (keep going and you'll find an exit eventually). There's also a few main rooms near each entrance that are easy to navigate. They act as outward-facing hubs for visitors that don't really need to go any deeper. The rest? It's a nightmare on purpose. What better defense system than confusing non-natives and leading them into looped sections that contain any damage? There are patterns that you learn to spot if you live there, but the first few months are awful for newcomers. Usually they get assigned a guide so they don't get too lost.

Cave-ins are a real problem, but the safety standards are unusually good as a result. It's unauthorized or rushed digging that's the most dangerous. The last cave-in happened because the tunnel team lead refused to wait for safety tests and ordered their team to keep digging. They wanted to impress the city council by finishing ahead of schedule. They were demoted instead because the collapse killed a crew member and blocked a neighboring tunnel, and they're facing criminal charges for that.

Red

...the ONE city in Eona that managed to mostly preserve their tech levels by being isolationist, hypercapitalist jerks. They're tucked into a mountain range, so they had the geography to get away with sealing themselves off and walling in. No imports, no exports, just human exploitation. They've only recently started some very limited trade, but only with Sapients because they can't carry the virus. The kicker is that they do have vaccines against the older, nastier strains (they haven't realized that the new ones are symbiotic yet and this will almost certainly lead to some deaths once they accidentally vaccinate people born carrying the new strains), but they don't share them. Ever. As far as the city's government cares, the rest of the world can die. And they outclass everyone else so bad that they can deal with armed attacks from outside- smithed weapons versus laser cannons? The cute little swords don't stand a chance. So there's a standoff there that's definitely going to boil over soon.

The city's name translates to Red- it was named for the color of all its lights.

Notable Figures

• Blade (self-named as a way of embracing a new life- edgy choice though!) had one of the weirdest mutations. Imagine having small knives for hair; not just head hair, all of your hair. It's exactly as awful as it sounds because her skin wasn't much tougher than average, but she almost singlehandedly got metalworking back on its feet as an industry. Absolutely legendary at weaponsmithing. She got knife hair and decided to make it her thing. Very recently died of old age and is happily in the afterlife with her wife... but living on in spirit via a slightly mutated form of her viral strain getting passed along to a very unlucky ("immune") kid named Ella.
• Raven (also self-named, but because her experience with the virus scrambled her pretty bad and she couldn't remember her birth first name) was one of the first mutants to argue she deserved to be treated as a human being instead of a monster. A lot of the mutated community see her as a lesser god or spiritual mother figure after her death.
• The Oracle (I haven't actually named her yet, and everyone calls her by her title anyway) is technically a mutant human, but she's outwardly 100% human-looking. Her mutation did one thing only: she can sense specific viral strains in other creatures. She's made a point of learning which strains correlate with which outward effects over her lifetime. It's put her in the perfect position to guide newly-infected people to communities that will support and care for them, and that's put her in the crosshairs of a lot of recent events.
• The Ferryman is a completely ordinary human living in Red. What makes him notable is that he smuggles people out from under corporations' noses and gets them out of the city to save them from being worked to death to pay debts. Most people know him as the Ferryman, but his real name is Orion.

Orion

I feel bad for Orion because the poor guy is so wanted by the city law enforcement. He'd be screwed if he got caught, and he barely stays ahead of them. His saving grace is that he doesn't work alone. There's a whole underground railroad operation involved, so he's okay to hide out for a few weeks if there's too much attention on him. He spends a lot of that time in a small warehouse the railroad co-opted as a recovery center / halfway house of sorts. A lot of people are very screwed up after spending a while as corporate property.

Orion does have people that could step up if he were ever captured, but he's pretty important to the railroad. In terms of friends, he's only got one or two people he's semi-close to, one of whom he has a hardcore crush on that he refuses to do anything about (he doesn't want to ruin the friendship or jeopardize the railroad organization). He finds it really hard to trust people he's around often. He often uses the people he's rescuing as stand-in friends since he knows he'll never see them again once they leave the city, so it doesn't feel as dangerous to him. It bugs a lot of the railroad folks that the people they're rescuing know Orion better than they do.

Lisa and Blade

Blade's wife was named Lisa, and she had to pass around a small Walker colony on her way to an unnamed mountain town (she was fleeing another town that had beef with her, and someone pointed her that way as a safe haven- she could have avoided the colony, but it would have added a few days' travel time and put her in the path of scouts sent out to track her down, so she went with the Walker route). It was a stage one straggler that grabbed her leg, and the only reason she survived without being changed into a Walker herself was absolutely booking it to town. She made it there before the crystals spread much, and the town doctors took a wild chance and amputated the affected leg (and burned the shit out of her face because there was a small spot there as well, but y'know). A few more days or a more central point of contact and that wouldn't have worked, but she got lucky.

Blade met her while she was recovering from that amputation. The neighbors kept nagging her to stop by and offer support, and she did it to shut them up. Imagine a really awkward butch woman covered in knives showing up at your door and awkwardly offering to make you a sword if you want one. They were both really reclusive at the time and had way too many trust issues between the two of them, so it was really awkward until they warmed up to each other. After that, all bets were off and you almost never saw one without the other.

And then the gods (specifically Soul and Tar) arranged Lisa's death to serve their own needs. Blade was one of the few who knew that the gods weren't actually gods, and she spent the next decade or so setting up a fairly elaborate revenge plan that she never got to carry out. The setup is still in place if someone finds and understands it. They just have to be a metalworking nerd to parse the instructions and intention.

The Chop Shop

Another important person that I'll call the Mechanic- xe uses a lot of different names with different people. Pretty much the only human running a repair shop for Sapients and Mechos-augmented folks, and really good at what xe does despite being something between a chop shop and discount surgeon. Even offers to install new augmentations if someone hauls something functional in. Also disconcertingly interested in Frankenstein-like endeavors.

To be fair, it's a really good chop shop. You'll probably be fine. Probably. Just ignore how xe keeps cross-referencing an old anatomy book while xe's digging in your body.

And the guy's exactly the person you want on your side if you've just escaped Red. They make a habit of microchipping people and implanting control devices, and xe's really good at digging them out or neutralizing them. Xe's got a running deal with the railroad to do it for free as long as xe gets to keep any removed hardware. Xe'll also take especially interesting repairs for free sometimes. Tracking implant that explodes if it makes contact with air? That's free, though xe'll probably scare the crap out of you with how eager xe gets to dig it out. Xe's a huge nerd.

The mechanic's actually one of the better people to wind up with scary microchips because xe's just a huge nerd. Xe uses them for xeir own side projects- not to implant in people unmodified, but to make something new with the raw materials. Xe's the same sort of person that circuit-bends Furbies into a nightmare organ. Xeir current project is trying to make a brain interface for an old tablet xe found and repaired (and for better communication with the tiny AI xe embedded into xeir shop to help with Sapient repairs- that's xeir longest-running project and xe loves them very much).

Honestly, xe's probably got the most advanced tech in the area solely because xe likes tinkering and repairing old tech and is really good at it. Terrible with people, though. Worst bedside manner imaginable, will tell you that your limb is unsalvageable in the same way xe'd say xe saved your life.

Spirits

Yeah, the first few [mutants] had a rough time because surviving at that point wasn't pleasant. Like, you're still physically and mentally messed up by the ordeal at that point. It's just not killing you outright. A lot of those people were killed by other people instead of dying to the virus's effects. If the walking viral vector wants to hang out with you, then you're probably not going to let them, and you might decide that it's better that they die to protect you and others. That only really lessened once some folks realized that they were immune, and a subset of them decided to use that immunity to help non-immune survivors (within reason; some of the psychological effects made people hostile or aggressive in a way that made them impossible to help). After a while, it became more normal to leave food and water out, and arguably that kicked off the spiritual belief side of leaving food for "spirits".