Haley-2
"That which did not die, now lives to kill."
A Tail of Death
No, That's Not A Typo
On Baseline, in 1910, newspapers fretted over the possibility that the tail of the approaching Haley's Comet, through which Earth would pass, was full of poisonous gas that would doom us all. Clickbait long precedes clicking. Obviously, that didn't happen. But on Haley-2, it did, though not entirely as predicted.The comets tail was replete with gases, but as respectable scientists in both timelines noted, they were far too diffuse to affect life on Earth. But the countless organic spores, encapsulated to survive forever in vacuum, could and did reproduce at a terrifying rate once exposed to the rich, life-giving environment of Earth. By the time the comet had passed, dozens of previously unknown plagues had spread worldwide, from the Comet Fever to the Purple Plague.
Within a month, 95% percent of humanity was dead, and half of those remaining were transformed into degenerate creatures, warped in body and brain. Wheat fields were consumed by "Haley's Snow", a fungal parasite that floated in huge clouds like deadly dandelion seeds. The Pacific Northwest's redwoods became the Bloodwoods, so-called because the warped and twisted trees produced a thick, red sap that killed those who touched it, transforming them into fertilizer. No place on Earth was spared, and no pattern could be found to those few who had immunity: No race, gender, age, or faith was shown either favor or disfavor.
The year now is arguably 1928, or as the few survivors call it, 18 Post-Comet. There is no recovery, only survival. Small clusters of survivors huddle in whatever passes for a safe space, often skyscraper sub-basements, subway tunnels (if the entrances could be blocked), or military buildings. The threat they hide from is the life of a planet turned madly hostile; as a nameless writer stated in a fragmentary journal recovered from Indianapolis, "That which did not die, now lives to kill."
BREACH
The breach point opened in the remains of downtown Indianapolis, where it did not take long for the first-in team to be set upon by a swarm of shaggy, long-limbed humanoids with bone spikes growing randomly from their flesh, wielding nothing more advanced than an iron crowbar or a heavy rock. After defending themselves, the team found one of those they killed still wore a wedding ring, partially overgrown by mutated flesh, while another had a gold tooth, crushed out of shape by their twisted fangs but still firmly embedded in their jaw.They spent several house cautiously exploring, finding a page of a newspaper here, a scrawled note there, and pieced together some idea of what had happened. Determined to see if there were any survivors, or if this area was (they hoped) extremely atypical of the world at large (it was not), they established as secure a camp as they could.
The next morning, several showed symptoms of illness - skin discoloration in one, an eruption of boils in another, blood oozing from fingernails in a third, and so on. They disembarked for the breach point, signalling for contamination protocol.
Two died before a breach stabilizer engineer figured out how to temporarily reverse the stabilization effect of artificial breaches, allowing the invading spores to destabilize (see the Three Day Dieoff). The survivors' bodies were still severely damaged and unlikely to recover. What data has been gathered gave few hints of how to innoculate or combat the various spores; the world could seemingly only be safely explored via full hazmat gear.
Drones did capture imagery of seemingly non-mutated survivors close to the breach point, scavenging the ruins. While some argued this was a humanitarian crisis justifying intervention, their voices were drowned out by those noting what a world full of untreatable plagues could lead to, how little it would take to unleash them on Baseline, or even some other reality. The final decision was to erase all records of the frequency, except for an entry in the "Omega File".
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