The world in which many of my tales take place, especially Nights at Foxwood's and Adra's Journey, is very much like our earth. In fact, up until the 1600s, it was exactly like ours. Humans evolved. All the histories are the same. But then in the 1600s, when much of the world had been explored and humanity had become much more integrated all over the world, Proteus came.

A comet brushed our atmosphere, and with the fragments of ice came a carbon-based organism that was spread from one end of Europe and Asia through the clouds. Flu-like symptoms spread through the populace like wildfire, but initially it was not of any concern. Certainly it seemed an annoyingly long cold that seemed to spread with astonishing virulence. By the end of the first months, it had spread enough to reach the colonies. About a month after the first 'infected' had lost the last vestiges of any symptoms, they began to change. The symptoms of the strange flu-cold returned, but with it came drastic morphological change. What came to be known as the Proteus Plague had begun. At the time nobody had connected it to the strange epidemic of colds that had spread a few months before. Humans started to take on animal traits. The process was physically taxing, and approximately one in five did not survive the change. But by the end of the three year period, 95% of humans had become some form of animal.

Surprisingly, society did not collapse entirely. There was no pattern, no predisposition of family lines to a particular species. If the animal existed in the wild where one had contracted Proteus, the human could become a form of ANY of those animals. Though there was chaos for a while, and a large death toll, the world recovered. Though some bits of history developed slightly differently, most of that Earth is like ours today.

It was in the mid-1800s when Albert Von Kolliker (surprisingly one of the few Proteus-negative humans that were occasionally born) discovered the Proteus alongside Mitochondria. At the time, there was no indication of WHAT Proteus was though. It seemed to have some function in cell division, but that was all that could be determined. It wasn't until the 1950s that it was discovered that pre-protean humans did not have the Proteus component in their cells. It, like mitochondria, had taken up permanent residence in human biology. It was the answer as to why any two post-human individuals could mate and produce offspring. The offspring would be hybrids, or sometimes entirely one or the other. Hybrids could also reproduce, but their issue would take on only one of their parents' attributes. And a very small few humans were born Proteus-negative, reminding the world that everyone had once been genetically much closer.

And so, the world is filled with dozens of variations of furries. Terms like humanity and 'mankind' are still in heavy use. Others like post-human are very common. Occasionally the Proteus will activate upon puberty and change one entirely, sometimes even changing their sex entirely. The mid-2010s found ways to manipulate the Proteus to the point that it became possible to deliberately and selectively trigger a change in an individual, though it was physically and mentally traumatic for the subject.

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Alright, sure, this explanation is unnecessary in the long run, and it isn't very scientific. But I wanted to have SOME sort of explanation for why my world still has humans, how society ended up largely identical to the 'real world'. A little bit of explanation can go a long way in making a setting believable. In the last weeks, I've been reading the Pendergast books by Preston and Child. I love how he doesn't make completely and absolutely fantastical changes to how the world works, but suggests little things are possible. A morphological virus like the one in Relic was the inspiration for Proteus.