MICROBIAL
Welcome to Tally, USA! A small, obscure town that has everything you could need, but never had anything prestigous to boast about. However, almost all of the town’s citizens happily claim that Tally is the perect place to be! Which is odd, considering just a year ago, the town lost a chunk of the population due to many groups moving to bigger, better cities...
The town is home to the crash site of an alien organism, which is the source of small microbes that invade and alter people’s minds and bodies, though the extent has yet to be documented because of how recent this is. Despite this threatening concept, everyone in Tally is infected and totally okay with it. Even if they’re losing their touch on humanity. Even if they’re losing control of their own thoughts.
Cameron is the only person in Tally who has resisted the microbes. Everyone else has accepted their new life; Cameron refuses to let her humanity get taken away. Of course, the hivemind that has formed (from a combination everyone in Tally and the instincts encoded into the microbes) don’t really like that. Cameron is fighting, quite literally, against the entire town for her own free will. She’s not giving in on her own accord, no matter how many times Garrett and Nadia try to convince her or Eve tries to force her. She knows that in a way she has lost— she did get infected, and the whole town is linked to the back of her mind, but she refuses to transform. She knows any sign of weakness will just make it easier for her to crack under the growing pressure. But she’s recently been learning how to use these newfound transformations to her advantage…
MEET THE CHARACTERS
NADIA SHARIQ
ROBIN
THE SOURCE
Crashed down in summer 202X, The Source of the microbes is a confusing thing to everyone in Tally, to say the least. Sure, they’ve all been infected by its microbes, and their minds are all linked through it. But otherwise… no one knows where it came from (other than outer space), its goals, how it survives, or if its part of a larger species. (These are all things Eve is trying to study.) It is able to kind of communicate using the hivemind made out of the town, and through instincts that the infected feel. But only Cameron knows its true nature and its personality— and boy, is it inconsistent. One minute, it helps Cameron make sense of how her body has changed, and then the next it is attempting to invade her mind and control her body. She hates it so much, and is determined to get rid of the source once and for all.
On the opposite end, Garrett has a strong connection to it; claiming that it is “cool”, and he blindly follows whatever it and the hivemind says to do. He even relocated it to an attic above a local bookstore, letting its cells spread into Tally’s sky through roof windows. He sits with it, talks to it, and has spruced up the attic into a ‘second home’ of sorts. Why he is so attached to it, he won’t say; he claims it is because it “needs enrichment”, but Cameron begs to differ.
HISTORY
Microbial is the newest of my three main stories, which I started officially in October 2022! But the beginning concept of it started in September 2022, actually- the whole concept of the microbe apocalypse came from an AU I made with the characters in Outcast Chaos, but I liked the idea enough to want to elaborate on it. It's not a one-to-one transfer from the AU, the characters and their roles are a lot different, but the idea is close enough. Microbial is a lot different from my other two stories, yet similar way; there's certainly fun sci-fi shenanigans going on, but it's not quite as important as what happens with the characters. All my stories are character based for sure, but this is unique in that it's a love / relationship drama type story alongside everything else. Microbial is very different from my other stories in that sense. In general, I just find this to be a story that is very fun to write thanks to the differences its story and characters have from what I "usually" write about!
Since it's my newest story, I've posted a lot about it on my Tumblr; seems like I've got a little bit of a following thanks to it, and I appreciate the interest! Though to be honest, it's not really my priority right now, as much as I love these goobers. I'm still planning things out and figuring out what I want the beginning middle of the story to really be, though I do have the ending figured out for sure. And sometimes I'm more mentally ill over the original AU than of the actual story sometimes...