Jump 438: Black Bullet

Jump #438: Black Bullet
>Three of Swords (Sorrow): Tactless or hurtful words. Acting without consideration for the emotions of others.
>Location: Cairo
>Identity: Drop-In
>Rabbit (900)
>Dolphin (600)
>Mantis (0)
I could take them or leave them, but the three of these synergize nicely, I must say.

Really, there is a great deal I could say about Black Bullet. But quite frankly, when faced with the offer before entering the world proper... all I can say is no. No to both options. No to the false dichotomy. No to the whole bullshit of the setting.

Global spells are cast a lot sooner than I typically do them, when I get into this world. Health. Longetivity. Resistance to disease. Regeneration. Meteor attraction.

Wait, what?

Well, that doesn't really matter, what matters is that it struck the middle of the Pacific and caused the world to be covered by fluffy white clouds of water vapor for a few days. Not even any tidal waves, and a handy excuse for what changed in its wake.

The usual suite of spells is enough to make humanity more robust, while recognizing gastrea as an infection and treating it as such. It's not enough to kill creatures inflicted with the virus, no, but it does weaken them notably - and causes human carriers to slowly purge the virus from their system. Which means that anyone who had been born with the virus, as long as they aren't actively using it, will eventually be cured with time.

Scientists shat many a brick when they discovered this shift.

Strings were pulled for the players to come into position from that point forward - people who would have turned into monsters did not, although having the virus meant they seemed to suffer from the flu until it was eventually cured. The worse the infection, the more detrimental it was to their health, like any infection OUGHT to have been when the body can begin fighting it off. And instead of the apocalyptic nonsense that the setting typically had, instead initiators and cursed children were retrained and put to work, beginning to reclaim the Earth. If they trained and fought, they'd keep steady levels of erosion, even increasing if they fought too much - but if they were taken off the combat line, if they were given downtime, their erosion level would actually recede.

In the end, the cursed children were cured before the world could be fully reclaimed (about five years down the line to be precise). Not that this mattered - there was a concerted military effort underway and by the time I left the jump the world no longer had any traces of the gastrea virus.

I made sure of it personally.