✘ setting

and lead us not into sickness, but deliver us from evil

SETTING

WARNING

THIS POST CONTAINS MONDO SPOILERS.
(Yeah, I know. It's weird for me to say that, too.)
{If you want more basic info on Rey, go here.}

PROJECT SERAPHIM takes place in the middle of the twenty-second century. But it began with a man who was born on November 30th, 1770.

It began in a village called Hartlone Hollow. Leland Cleary, an intellectually prodigal professor who hailed from a simple Irish community, was trying to breakdown a cure for typhus, during a time in which an epidemic had been going around. The disease had already claimed his twin son and daughter -- Fergus and Fiona -- and then threatened the life of his wife, Shea. Unknown to him, Leland was born with a strain of “immortal” cells (much later in history, they will be known as the Cleary cells).

Eventually, Leland ventured out in a fever. He stumbled upon a foreign compound near a hazel tree, way off in the outskirts of the village. He had no idea what it was at the time, as the concept of material from another world was completely unheard of. Still, he took the substance. His wife was on the near verge of death. He worked with the substance in solitude. He barely saw her.

She died. Leland waited patiently to reunite with his family, only to recover from what turned out to be a terrible flu. He lived.

Many years went on. Leland continued to work on the compound, giving little of a shit about his own health. His friend, Garrett Tremond, expressed concern for Leland’s mental state. As Leland closed in on a breakthrough with the compound, he fell ill once again, this time carrying the same symptoms of the plague that had taken the rest of Hartlone Hollow. In his desperation to survive in order to invent a “panacea”, Leland attempted to test the results on himself. The panacea proved to be a painful process that proceeded for several months. He kept records in a series of leather journals.

Just when the disease nearly took him, Leland miraculously recovered after six months of unbearable agony as a result of his impeccable immune system. He later discovered that not only had he just invented his panacea, but the key to rewriting the human gene sequence entirely with this alien compound. The panacea was, however, stolen by Garrett Tremond, who took the cure for his own dying child, Charlotte.

The effects left something to be desired.

Unlike himself, the child began to twist into something else. Leland himself tried to put the creature out of its misery, but Garrett stopped him, trying to protect his own daughter. A crazed little Charlotte bit his ear off. With her father disabled, Leland killed the child by drowning her in the river while Garrett plunged into a catatonic state. Leland would discover that when an infected child made contact with something alive, it would begin to infect that organism like a virus, and Garrett Tremond’s body acted as a carrier.

Out of the seeds of good intentions, an unnatural disease was born.

Leland tried what he could to contain the mutation, but as it turned out, several of those affected by the panacea could not be easily killed. Charlotte had not even fully died after the drowning.

While the panacea began to rapidly spread throughout Hartlone Hollow, Leland experimented on the few infected individual children that created the Orphans. When the entire village became compromised, Leland burned Hartlone Hollow to the ground, successfully killing most of the villagers. Leland stayed to deal with the remaining locals, murdering his own friends, neighbors, and acquaintances that he had grown up with.

After his research with the Orphans and the panacea run him into dead ends, Leland decided to euthanize his friend. He smothered Garrett with a pillow, and abandoned his hometown now in ruins.

As centuries went on, Leland learned that he never aged, and he never got sick again. He took on a number of aliases (all of them with the initials of L.C.). While the world around him waged on in its own battles, Leland worked to contain the unknown virus from further festering humankind, inevitable as it might have been.

By the 1900s, Leland learned how to heal other people, as well as regenerate himself in the event that he lost any limbs. While he tried to figure out how to revive the dead, this much his powers are limited to. Instead, he worked on trying to preserve and recreate life.

( what a dark mistake all my life has been. )

( when the levee breaks. )