Three Day Dieoff
On June 15, 2017, something bad happened in Sydney, Australia. The Australian government blames either criminals or a natural breach, but there's considerable evidence it was a government-run attempt to open a controlled breach, which was successful, in a way. Unfortunately, it opened over a large area, and the overlapping reality, or part of it, leaked through in dozens of places. This was unusual, and hasn't yet been replicated, as far as anyone knows.
What entered was an incredibly virulent plague, described, based on symptoms and what few samples were studied before everything, fortunately, destabilized, as a "super measles". A few breachers in the affected areas reported a ruined cityscape of roughly early 20th century technology, but they didn't explore much.
The virulence was hard to imagine; it spread through multiple vectors -- surfaces, contact, droplet. If it had a single point of origin, it would have been possible, maybe, to contain it, but with dozens scattered over miles, in densely populated areas, containment to the focal point of the initial breach was impossible. Planes that launched during the first hours met one of two grisly fates -- if they were traveling overseas, they would crash if anyone on board had been infected on take-off. If they were more local, they would be surrounded by troops on landing, and no one was permitted to leave for twelve hours, the general 'kill time'. In most cases, no one ever got off, and the planes were incinerated on the tarmac once it was certain everyone aboard was dead. The earliest local flights, that landed before the warning, did start to spread the plague, but it was much easier to contain at that point.
Ending
Even as world leaders were meeting, in secret, to seriously discuss nuking any area where even a single case was known or suspected, it stopped. The dying stopped dying, though in some cases, their bodies were severely ravaged and scarred. No one not already known to be infected started to show symptoms. Samples in secure facilities vanished from freezer, petri dishes, and gene-sequencers. (It is loudly denied that any sequencing was complete. Even if this is true, a partial sequence in the wrong hands -- and whose are right? -- could be globally disastrous.) While three days is a long time to destabilize, the wide nature of the breach was equally unusual. Attempts to formulate some relationship between breach area and stability have produced no results of conequence, given there's only one data point and that the exact location and size of each germ-spewing breach has never been determined. Total deaths from the plague are estimated to be 1.6 to 1.7 million, mostly in the Sydney area.Aftermath
More than any other disaster, this drove home the risks of breach travel, particularly, the use of "homebrew" breach systems, whether by governments or not. Even criminal organizations and 'rogue nations' have become notably more cautious, preferring to steal fully-tested stabilizers, and rarely attempt world discovery, preferring to target mapped worlds which they know have stuff worth stealing. Attempts to repeat the disaster, either to find the original world or to reliably produce a "wide dispersal", have failed.- -1 Dex per cycle
- -2 FP per cycle
- at 1/3rd HP damage Chronic Pain 9-, Mild
- at 1/2 HP damage, Chronic Pain 11-, Severe
- at 2/3 HP damage, Chronic Pain 14-, Agonizing
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