HOME | DD
Dysharmonnia — The White Plague
Published: 2013-08-06 08:21:50 +0000 UTC; Views: 1351; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 1
Redirect to original
Description
Some time ago me and my rat were watching a documentary about the black plague... well we started watching together but later on I put her away since there were quite unpleasant sights for a rat.It surprised me that actually nobody actually knows what kind of a disease it really was. We presume it was a kind of the bubonic
plague but there is to solid evidence for that. In the 19th century the bubonic plague broke out in India when a doctor researched it, found a cure and decided that it could have been the same plague killing half of Europe in the middle ages. However there are numerous differences between the plague in India and the medieval plague, which leaves room for doubt. If it would be a different kind of plague, it would mean we have blamed rats for nothing (there is a theory that the plague could have spread only from human to human). Rats were the first to die from the bubonic plague, but there are no descriptions of massive rat deaths in middle ages.
So I came to think, what if rats would secretly plot against humanity and take revenge for the centuries of false condemnation? They look like little evil master minds sometimes
This took me much more time than I expected. I'm still experimenting, but now I can feel I am close to what I am trying to achieve. And hooray for overlay layers!
Related content
Comments: 6
Reminds me of a story one man wrote in his book titled "Rats". About relations, fights and war among rat civilization. (Can there be a rat civilization at all? *My rat nodded )
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
well, they do look a bit like evil geniuses 
didn't know you have a rat too
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
If we assumed it's the same illness ( or at least similar ) both in Medieval times and 19th century, I'd say it most likely mutated over the years. The people who survived the plague, had some sort of immunity against in the next epidemics ( I heard somewhere they broke out on a regular basis once every 10 or 20 years after the first one, although on much lesser scale, like ''Oh, hey, damn, it's the plague again, this is getting old'' ). Today, illnesses and viruses mutate much faster since we have antibiotics, but I wouldn't wonder if the little bugger did that over a few hundreds of years
I think rats might have simply been the ''carriers'' of the plague, nothing more. Maybe the first few generations died of it, but the others simply adjusted and just served as a taxi for the fleas. Wild rats have been known for their ability to adjust and hand down genetic information to their offspring, even if they are poisoned, they can adjust to it at an enermous speed, and the babies they produce ( assuming they survive and manage it ) might already be immune to the same poison 
Or maybe they didn't really care since rats weren't domesticated animals, and dead rats were probably lying on the streets in great amount anyway :shrugs: Nobody pays attention to it before it hits the humans, that's when hell breaks out
But yes, I can totally see rats wanting to take a revenge
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I just found it interesting to see the research about the spreading plague in one particular village - the victims that fell ill one after another (they were looking at some church papers that documented the deaths and when they had happened) were somehow related - relatives or neighbors for example, so the plague could have spread by the human contact - and being extremely contagious - it was enough to stand near the person.
So we can't eliminate that chance as well...
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
It might be an ancestor/form of the Pneumonic plague, then 
Which I had totally forgotten about, but people often tend to speak only about this one when talking about the plague in general, so I'm feeling a bit dumb here right now
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I thought it was common knowledge that fleas were the actual carriers with the 'black plague', and thanks to the poor housing and sudden close quarters of the time that both rats and humans had fleas, as well as any other animals in general. So rats weren't really to blame since everything had the buggers. I don't know much of the bubonic plague in India so I can't really comment on that one.
*shrugs* Interesting concept though.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0