Chapter 2: The Lost and the Left Behind
Meet the main cast—ordinary people with no powers, no fortune, and no clear purpose.
Each is struggling to survive: ex-soldiers, former healthcare workers, activists, and street kids who have nowhere to go.
Despite their differences, they share one thing in common: they have lost everything.
The world had been dying for a long time. The people just hadn’t realized it until it was too late.
For every survivor who clawed their way through the chaos, there were hundreds who never had a chance. Some were lost in the early days of C-23, their bodies burned in mass graves or left to rot in the streets when the morgues overflowed. Others fell to the violence that came after the riots, the gang wars, the quiet, suffocating desperation of a city abandoned by those who were supposed to protect it.
But the worst fate wasn’t death. It was being left behind.
The Ghosts of Quarantine
The quarantine zones had been designed to contain the infected, but by the time the government collapsed, they had become something far worse… prisons without guards. The fences remained, but no one was watching the gates anymore. The people inside, those who hadn’t succumbed to the virus, were left to fend for themselves, trapped with the dead, the dying, and the desperate.
Most of them never made it out.
The ones who did were changed. Some carried the scars of starvation, sickness, and violence. Others had lost more than just their health—they had lost their humanity. They emerged from the ruins of the failed quarantine zones like ghosts, hollow eyed and dangerous, willing to do whatever it took to survive in a world that had already cast them aside.
The Orphans of the Collapse
Children were the first to be forgotten. When the world still had rules, there were safety nets; social services, foster care, shelters. But when the system crumbled, those nets snapped, and the smallest, most vulnerable lives fell through the cracks.
Some were lucky enough to find makeshift families, groups of survivors who took them in. Others were not so lucky. They wandered the streets in packs, scavenging, stealing, fighting for scraps. The gangs saw opportunity child soldiers, thieves, runners too small to be noticed and too hungry to refuse.
They called them “the Lost.”
And then there were the others. The ones who had watched their parents die. The ones who had been left behind in the chaos of an evacuation, trapped in homes no one ever returned to. Some of them still lived there, haunting the ruins like living ghosts, whispering to the shadows, waiting for someone to come back.
No one ever did.
The Fractured City
Seattle wasn’t a city anymore. It was a patchwork of warring territories, each ruled by a different force.
The Black Fangs – The strongest and most organized gang, running what was left of the drug trade. They controlled South Seattle with ruthless efficiency, deciding who got to live and who didn’t.
The Revenants – Survivors from the quarantine zones, driven mad by what they endured. They moved in packs, attacking settlements and vanishing into the night.
The National Guard Remnants – Soldiers who refused to abandon their posts, enforcing their own brand of law with military precision. They saw themselves as the last line of order, but their justice was often brutal.
The Market Lords – Those who controlled what little trade remained. They didn’t care about sides—only profit. If you had something to offer, they had something to sell.
And then, there were those who belonged nowhere.
The Vvaywards….
They were the ones who had no home, no allegiance. The ones who walked the line between order and chaos, survival and purpose. Some of them had been soldiers, criminals, medics, or just people who refused to let the world decide their fate.
They weren’t a rebellion. They weren’t a resistance. They were the last light in a city drowning in darkness.
And soon, the world would know their name.