It was chaos hidden under a thin veneer of control. No one knew what had caused it, but people across the city had abruptly fallen into what appeared to be comas. For fear of it being the result of some sort of contagious disease, Destiny City had been cut off from the rest of the world. The hospital was overflowing with patients and you could see the confusion and fear in people’s faces as they tried to help one another and figure out what was going on.

Amidst all these troubles, many overlooked one group’s need for help. With so many asleep, animals across Destiny City had lost their providers. For some – feral animals, animals with outdoors access – this didn’t present too much of a problem, but some animals had no way to feed themselves with out human help. Such was the case with the animals in the Destiny City Animal Shelter.

Rose already did some volunteer work with the animal shelter, so when the need to do something useful struck her, she made her way there. As she suspected they were severely understaffed and needed all the help she could get. The animals could tell that something was wrong and many were acting differently as a result – acting frightened or aggressively – which only made matters worse. Having more hands-on experience then many of the remaining workers, Rose was working with the most cats that were being difficult. It was a pretty thankless task.

“ Ouch! For cryin’ out loud, I just want to change your litter.”

Rose was currently trying to restrain an angry black tomcat, which required that she practically sit on him so she’d have an available hand to change his box. For her effort he had thus far rewarded her with a couple of scratches to her thighs.