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It all started long ago, in a galaxy far, far away....
Well, no that's not quite right. The story of these special hyenas begins in Africa, sometime in our future...
* * *
Contrary to the words of T. S. Eliot, our world ended not with a whimper but with a resounding bang. Full-scale nuclear war broke out. No one knows who started the war, or if it is truly over, but the devastation in many places was near-total.
The savannahs of Africa were barely scratched by the initial blasts, but the winds and rain brought deadly radiation with them. Animals died by the thousands, but many struggled on. The hyenas were one of the species that survived; by sheer luck, tenacity, or a combination of both.
In time the land began to recover. As long as animals did not stray too far into the dead zones, they could eat and drink without too much risk.
One young female hyena forgot about this crucial rule. Wounded in a hunt and seperated from her pack, she wandered far from the fringes of the "clean" lands. Though she quickly came to realize that she was doomed, she forged on for the sake of the cubs growing in her belly. After several days of walking, she came upon a tiny pool of tainted water. The terrible pain of her thirst overcame her good sense and she drank deeply from the poisonous waters.
Before the hyena died, she gave birth to two very special female cubs. Though they looked as ordinary as their mother, something within them was ... different. They drank from the pool without harm, and set off. However special they were, it was quite lucky for them that they came upon a small pack the very next morning.
The mother hyena who adopted them might have been quite suspicious of strange cubs in normal times, but these times were far from normal. Her own cubs had been poisoned less than a week ago, sneaking meat from a poisoned carcass. The grieving mother took the two little orphans under her paw and treated them as her own.
In those days the hyenas, hunter-scavengers as they were, were one of the species hardest hit by the radiation. Packs were small and scruffy. Radiation deaths were all too common, but there was no time to mourn fallen family members. To survive, the packs had to keep moving, constantly on the lookout for healthy prey.
Much to the pack's surprise, the two adopted hyenas both grew tall and strong. They never suffered from tainted food or water, thriving on even suspicious meat. They both rose in rank quickly, eventually coming to share the clan between them. The cubs they threw inherited their remarkable gifts of health, strength, and incredible intelligence... though they also inherited a few other things, as well.
This peculiar new breed of spotted hyena quickly came to dominate their little corner of Africa. With their large size and beautiful pelts, they might have once made a splendid target for poachers... but few men travel through the hyenas' lands these days, and those that do have a healthy respect for the strange carnivores.
Incredibly resilient and intelligent, the new hyenas are well-equipped to handle whatever their dangerous new life has to throw at them. But life in the wastelands will never be easy, and a misstep in these lands could be fatal... or worse.
Intruders in the Wastelands
Though the war was generations ago -- about half a century in human terms -- the land still bears its scars. Temperatures dropped drastically following the initial blasts, as pollution was released into the air. In the extreme north and south, animals and people were frozen in their tracks. Much of Europe, Asia, and Canada are now locked beneath glaciers. Sea levels worldwide have dropped, and many new islands and land bridges have formed around the coasts.
Isolated in their kingdom, the hyenas have prospered and survived relatively untouched. The climactic shift hasn't affected them or their prey. The human superpowers have been annhiliated. Although few places in Africa were main targets during the war, with the infrastructure cut out from beneath them the AIDS pandemic raged unchecked. With the world depopulated, no humans have bothered the animals of the wastelands in time beyond memory.
That is beginning to change. Desperate animals and people from the frozen north and poisoned south have begun to trickle into the untouched savannahs. The formation of land bridges allows more and more to cross into Africa. The hyenas' territory is protected by miles of dead zone, but gradually the foreign animals and people are daring to cross. Predators that haven't been sighted in years -- lions, leopards, and crocodiles, to name a few -- are popping up around the borders of the hyenas' territory. There are no human settlements on the savannahs yet, but trader caravans have been observed passing through. What these changes mean for the future remains a mystery.
