[color=OrangeRed][h1][center][b]The Siberian Sickle[/b][/center][/h1][/color]

To those of you who found the interest check, I've changed and added a lot to the original idea, so be sure to read it! Newcomers, welcome! And please, don't hesitate to give feedback and reply!

[hider= Humble Beginnings]
It started with the Great Siberian Suffocation in 2045. A traveling technology salesman traveled to a remote village in Siberia to sell his wares, to find that a majority of the village’s population had died very suddenly. The remainder of the villagers were stuffed deep inside their homes, too traumatized to even step near the windows. They screamed and cried of a great evil that had overtaken the village, and made people suddenly drop one by one. Their breathing would stop very suddenly, for seemingly no reason, and they suffocated to death. Terrified with the circumstances, the superstitious Salesman fled from the village, bursting into a church during it’s mass the next day, reporting of the evil that had befallen the next village down the road. The flock of the church all prayed vigorously, and pled that God protect them should the evil move from its current dwelling and attack them.

Sadly, even God wasn't even able to save them when the evil came. First, it was a new visitor of town that had suddenly collapsed, suffocating as he sat at the bar. Those who didn’t flee the village in the next day, all hid in their houses, pleading and pleading that they be protected from what they thought was the Wrath of God. They had been good Christians, and Rapture seemed to be among them. They all went on to suffocate in their small homes.

The word of this Rapture quickly dispersed amongst remote villages, soon making it to the major cities of eastern Russia. Doctors and scientists of all kinds flocked to these remote villages to study the dead and living, while religious leaders warn against contact with it at all cost, calling it the beginning of the End, The Rapture.

Soon, reports come back that the villages were found to be completely dead, with the scientists and doctor’s dying quickly of the same fate, or suffering the complete loss of use of limbs. Russian Officials quarantined a large area of Siberian country that included the two aforementioned villages, announcing they were conducting an ‘official investigation’ of the deaths.

Things went without issue for a bit, until one day it was reported that something had suddenly killed off a large fraction of the workers centered around “Ground Zero” as some had come to call it. Before communications fell completely with Ground Zero workers, it was reported that most had died of suffocation, while others had loss use of many limbs, or died of other unknown complications.

Uncontained and unfightable, The Rapture quickly spread along Siberia, stalling once it got to the Urals. All it needed was one vector, a fleeing villager. He carried the Rapture with him to Eastern Russia, where it spread like wild fire. Some suffocated, some died of complications, and a large number of them arose again after death, the very primal parts of their brain again in use by some unknown evil.

It didn’t take long to realize the evil had gone airborne, quickly spreading to other European Countries.  Some were lucky enough to prepare with gasmasks and weapons, but it quickly overtook Europe, and then the world.
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[Hider=The Virus, Currently]
It is now 2047, a mere 2 years after the initial outbreak of what has now been called the Siberian Sickle, or The Rapture as some still call it. As advancements have come in fighting and studying the disease, it has been found that the virus attacks nerve tissue in the brain. From what can be gathered from its beginning, the initial strains of the virus hit their intended target of disabling the area of a person’s brain that allowed them to use their diaphragm and the brain’s regulation of it, meaning the host could no longer breathe and, therefore, died. As more and more people were infected, the virus mutated and evolved, first evolving to not only attack the breathing part of the brain, but the parts of the brain that allowed use of extremities, or parts that allowed the brain to regulate the operation of organ’s such as the liver, which led to blood poisoning and other complications.

The final, and perhaps most frightening current mutation was that of reanimation. Once the body was brain dead, not always fully dead, the virus could commandeer the control of nerve tissues, making dead bodies spasm and the likes, and then would soon reanimate the entire host, destroying memories and most instincts other than to attack and survive. The virus thrives simply to spread and infect, it appears.

Reanimates can be of any shape and condition. Since many, many cases of the virus involved attacking many different parts of the brain, many reanimates suffer from loss of any number of functions, such as seeing, hearing, use of the jaw, or even loss of both legs. Every case is different, leading to any large numbers of different and varied reanimates with different enhancements or disabilities.

Reanimates can be very easy or very difficult to combat, contact with them is almost never the same experience twice. They tend to travel in packs of no more than 8 at a time. The types of reanimates that form these packs vary almost exclusively on how fast they can move. Slow movers stick with slow movers, fast movers with fast and so on. They are extremely aggressive, and will use any function they still retain to try and infect as many of humans they can, until they can no longer operate. While headshots are usually the go-to to disable reanimates, they are not always necessary, as disabling operation of any and all limbs that enable movement will cause the subject to 'give up' in a sense, as in the virus will shut down and begin trying to regenerate limbs. While the virus is not yet, and may never be advanced and strong enough to regrow entire limbs, this will enable a large number of reanimates to be immobilized, to be executed at a later time with little danger.

It is unknown if those killed by the earlier strains of the disease can be reinfected by the new strains and reanimated. If so, it would mean the possibility of a large surge reanimates in perfect condition to combat current survivors and regulated government forces.

Machines have been developed to manually breathe for subjects that have been attacked by the Serbian Sickle, but they cannot protect against further attack of brain use, should the virus decide to keep attacking once the function of the diaphragm has been disabled.

The virus is also airborne, meaning that only cities with ArtAmos, or Artificial Atmospheres, have survived the disease. Major cities have remained, or new ones formed, around ArtAmos, with few being let out, and next to none being let in, as to risk the entry of the virus, which has happened to irresponsible ArtAmos in the past.

In most cases, it has been shown that the virus cannot survive in water and most foods, as it thrives in mostly muscle tissue, but with it's quick mutations, it is feared that it's need to multiply and live in mammalian bodies could possibly be evolved past. That being said, some weakened and dormant forms of the virus have survived in water, but they need only to be boiled out. Active, live samples almost exclusively thrive in raw meat, and cannot be cooked out, leading to major culling and burning of cattle. People have turned to diets that consist of mainly vegetables, and what small amount of canned food, especially canned meat, is left. Canned foods and bottled water have, quite unsurprisingly, become extremely valuable, with many canning facilities being repaired, attempts being made to bring them back to working order in order to make more food less susceptible to infection.
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[hider=Artificial Atmosphere Zones]
ArtAmos was a technology in prototype stage for future colonization of uninhabited planets, but it was either quickly put into use to protect against disease spread. Some were rushed to immediate use, with some failures, others waited a bit before the technology was refined to set up, in turn resulting in more deaths and less populated regions, a very controversial decision. Depending on the energy and resources available, ArtAmos can be in various sizes, holding more or less people. Whatever size they are, they are all very crowded.

Life in the ArtAmos is very varied. Since there is no longer one government to rule over the entire country, most ArtAmos are governed by their own internal officials, whether they be elected, totalitarian, aristocratic, or even in a few rare cases, oligarchies and monarchies. No matter what time for of government, however, they are all very fragile and sometimes tense and protested, and subject to internal conflict and scandal.

In most cases, regardless of government, the rich of the zones have the most access to things like clean food and water, and luxuries such clean bedding and furniture. Running water and electricity is available to all residents, however.  The poorer, less fortunate residents of the zones live closer to the edges of the zone, compared to the rich and powerful who live generally towards the center, or where ever the taller, more secure buildings are. The poor ones on the outer regions of zones are more subject to assault to the few bandits that still manage to survive outside of these zones, but even they aren't the largest threat. The largest, and most constant threat is the reanimates, who rule any zone outside of ArtAmos. They constantly attack and risk the health of ArtAmos, which is why it is so miraculous that the number of those that are surviving, have. Although, it is very possible that they could collapse at any point, very quickly and without much warning.

In most ArtAmos, the majority, or even the entirety of the land is urban cityscape, leading to obvious issues with maintaining a constant flow of food and potable water to the populous. Since infection of the water isn't as large of a problem as expected, water constraints can be a bit more rare than food constraints are. Next to no meat can be brought into the ArtAmos, since it is just about all infected with the Sickle virus, and not much agriculture can be done in those zones that are all urban areas. Some zones have demolished buildings and torn up paving and such to make room for agriculture, but this process can be long, dangerous, and even sometimes complete wastes of time since the land under these structures turns out to be near unusable. There are plans to establish an agriculture devoted ArtAmos, but it is unsure if it can even be done as it is unknown if the virus can survive in soil, or if the necessary amount of clean water can be be acquired to take on such a task. Connections between separate ArtAmos must also established for trade and shipments, another task that seems difficult to undertake.

[center][b][u]American ArtAmos Locations[/u][/b]
Los Angeles, California
Las Vegas, Nevada
Seattle,Washington
San Diego, California
Salt Lake City, Utah
Portland, Oregon
Tucson, Arizona
Austin, Texas
Fort Worth, Texas
Chicago, Illinois
St. Paul, Minnesota
Washington D.C
Miami, Florida
New York City, New York
Boston, Massachusetts

[u][b]Known Foreign ArtAmos[/b][/u]
Beijing, China
Paris, France
Mexico City, Mexico
Moscow, Russia
Berlin, Germany
Jerusalem, Israel
Tokyo, Japan
Others are thought to exist, but have not yet been made contact with.[/center]

[/hider]

You are now part of the CDC’s Disease Containment Squadron. You each wake up in the same room, restrained to a chair, free only to look around and observe the others. Some you recognize, some you don’t. You all have one thing in common: you all USED to be soldiers. You are no longer soldiers of a large government. You are the special military force of the Center for Disease Control, under control of solely the CDC and none other. A man, along with a few scientists, enters the grey, well lit room, in a white military-type outfit, except instead of being marked with ranks, he only wears the insignias of the CDC, some buttons containing the [url=http://blog.healthpowerforminorities.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CDC-logo-4inch.jpg]eagle and people[/url], some the [url=http://heroeswiki.com/images/thumb/0/0b/Cdc_logo.png/250px-Cdc_logo.png]circular logo[/url]. He looks like he’s not much older than any of you in the room, but you can tell by his presence that he wields a fair amount of power. As he stands at attention before the room, some of the scientists begin to place papers in each of the soldier’s laps.  It reads:

[h2][center][b]AMERICAN CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION[/b][/center][/h2]
[center][b]THIS IS LEGAL CLASSIFED PROPERTY OF THE AMERICAN CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION. ANY ATTEMPTS TO REPLICATE AND/OR DISTRIBUTE THIS MATERIAL TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS OR ENEMIES OF THE STATE WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE PUNISHMENT AND DISCIPLINARY ACTION.[/B][/CENTER]

On this paper, please fill all corresponding information in the correct boxes below to the best of your ability. When finished, please turn into your Commanding Officer immediately, or risk disciplinary action. Thank you, and welcome to the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

[b]Name:
Gender:
Role:
Weight:
Height:
Description of Appearence:[/b](Picture please, and words are welcome.)
[b]Preferred Callsign:
Former Military Enlistment:
Brief History and Background:
Other Items of Importance:[/b]

[center][b]THIS IS LEGAL CLASSIFED PROPERTY OF THE AMERICAN CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION. ANY ATTEMPTS TO REPLICATE AND/OR DISTRIBUTE THIS MATERIAL TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS OR ENEMIES OF THE STATE WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE PUNISHMENT AND DISCIPLINARY ACTION.[/B][/CENTER]
[b]All Applications are to be sent to me for approval.[/b]

The man in front of you, speaks up.

“Welcome to the hidden chapter of the CDC that the world doesn’t know about yet. Under my command, we will be more deadly, more intelligent, more powerful than any other military out. You men and women have been chosen to follow my command. I am Master Sergeant Prescott, and you will address me as such each and every time you speak to me, unless you use my Callsign. You will not ask what my full name is. You will not give me a nickname, other than my assigned callsign. You will not ask me how you got here. You will not ask me to leave. For the good of America and Humanity itself, you have been special chosen for your assorted skills and accolades. Do not worry of your past families or friends. They don’t not worry for you, as you should not worry for them. All will be fine, so long as you follow orders and stay alive, which I will do everything under my power to help you do. Again, welcome to what will be your finest hour of your life.”

Welcome to the rest of your life, grunts.

Just for reference, here is the standard armor set for a soldier, which you can tweak and decorate however you want in your appearance section, just nothing obviously over the top or that would compromise the respirator.

[hider= CDC Standard Issue Combat and Disease Protection Gear]
[img]http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2013/101/4/4/futuristic_soldier_concept_by_fonteart-d619yk8.jpg[/img]
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