A world teetered the brink of destruction. A war raged, vicious and brutal, fought with both magic and technology - a strange mixture on each side. It seemed as if neither side could get ahead of the other, both of them equally matched. The initial reason for the fighting had long since been forgotten, as the two nations had been at war for so long - though each continued to create reasons with their own heartless cruelties towards the other side.
It seemed as if the war would go on forever.
Then something unexpected happened. Two brilliant mages created something to end the war - and the war did end. But not in the way that they had believed it would, in a horrific and terrifying way...
They created a virus. But it wasn't a virus that could be cured by conventional medicine, no; this virus was not of the body. It was a virus of the soul. It was more like a parasite then anything else, latching onto a victim's soul and slowly draining it of any spiritual energy until there was barely anything left - and the victim was hardly a person anymore.
The victim would be a mindless being, living only as it's instincts dictated - no higher thought, all emotions merely chemically created.
And the worse part? It was contagious. Once the virus had finished a victim, it would latch onto another soul...and distance did not even matter. The plane it existed in was not a physical one, and distance meant nothing to it - it was random, the way it traveled. It was a truly terrifying experience when the victim began to realize what was happening - and they always did, before they began to lose themselves.
The war had ended with a frantic need to destroy the virus - or at least find a way to protect the souls of those still uninfected. Mages from all over, from both nations, furiously tried to find a way to fix it: but it remained the same as ever.
There was a smaller group, though of no little power, that had a more unique idea. Distance meant nothing to the virus - on this plane of existence. They believed that they could save there people in one simple yet astonishingly difficult and perhaps impossible move: transfer everyone who was uninfected to another plane of existence. In other words, another universe.
This was no small task - yet they strived for it all the same. And with time, they began to grow closer to their goal. The virus was raging throughout their world, and the population was growing smaller and smaller...until finally, they found a way. That way was carefully hidden from everyone but those who would partake in the ritual.
Without a thought to what the people of the world would prefer, for these mages were arrogant in their success, they did what they believed necessary. But like the mages who had caused it, their results were not what they had expected. They had believed that everyone would simply go to the world they had chosen in their present forms, but it was not so. The mages, three of them, had retained their own form: they could easily have shifted worlds on their own.
But to take so many people with them - and for them to keep their forms as well - was an impossible task.
Unknowingly, while attempting to shift any who remained uninfected, they had simply ripped the souls from their bodies. Those souls likely would have been lost, if one the mages had not had the foresight to create a sort of reservoir of spiritual energy - and that was where the problems began.
This reservoir was not built to house souls, and when they entered it, it had trouble. The spiritual energy already there interacted with the power of the ritual, and things were pulled into it that were not only human souls - physical objects, animals, plants...merely the essence of them, but there all the same.
So finally, the mages were in the world they had chosen: Gaia. Now they faced the problem of how to restore the people they had dragged along and hidden in that reservoir.
The conclusion was simple. A soul that had not yet died, yet wasn't in a living body, would eventually begin to create a physical manifestation: so the Mages decided to help it along. They created a bundle of spiritual energy, and then reached out to the reservoir to pull a soul out, to see if it would work.
And it did, but in an unexpected manner. When all the souls and essences of various things had compiled together, it became impossible for the mages to tell what was what - and what they had pulled into the energy was not entirely human. It was a human soul and an animal, and what was created from the energy - a baby - was some strange mix of the two.
And this was how it all began.
Eventually, the mages realized they would need people to watch and care for these children. And so, they began to seek out possible guardians...
