In due time, around the day 281 of December, the World Health Organization released a thin, almost embarrassed-looking file on the new diseases spreading globally. Most of it read like rejected fanfiction, the kind that insists it’s speculative science while clearly just wanting to be cannon fodder for gory character designs, like zombie apocalypse AUs or infection AUs. Still, the implications were hard to laugh off.

Calling them diseases wasn’t even accurate. That word suggests a pathogen, a virus or bacteria with a name and a tentative lifecycle you can diagram. These had none of that. No clear vectors, no cultures to grow. Syndromes fit better, or emergent conditions. Things that happened to you, the way a coincidence happens. Still, mostly everyone who wasn’t a medical professional just called them diseases.

December Diseases.

Most were, thankfully, more stupid than dangerous. For example, the “Club Disease” involved prolonged exposure to black light, the kind used in clubs or cheap dorm rooms. After enough time, the cones in your eyes would invert their response entirely, flipping light and dark like a photo negative. People panicked until someone figured out the fix was literally the cause. Another controlled exposure to black light reset everything. Public advisories now mostly boil down to “don’t stare directly into weird light sources but if you do, do it twice!”

Another condition was the “Patchwork Disease.” Unlike vitiligo, which erases pigment in irregular, organic ways, this did the opposite. Melanin production didn’t shut down. It went feral. Pigment cells began overproducing, mutating, and compartmentalizing, dividing the skin into sharply bounded fields of color. Not gradients. Not natural transitions. Clean edges, straight lines, geometric curves that looked planned. Squares. Bands. Tessellations. It was pretty, and most people who got it didn’t really complain. They were the new trend, after all.

There was “Park Disease,” also called “Werewolf Syndrome,” far more dangerous than the first two. It drove people “feral” after long stretches of isolation in wildlife-heavy areas. The nickname “real-life werewolves” stuck, though the few documented cases mostly showed large humans on all fours, teeth bared, clothes torn, and hair matted. Honestly, I’d probably look the same if I were stuck in the forest with nothing but animals.

Then there was “Thermal Disease,” quickly dubbed “Heat Addiction” online. It did exactly what it sounded like: prolonged exposure to direct heat slowly eroded your resistance to cold and made you crave warmth more and more. Like any drug, the more you indulged, the deeper the dependency. Over time, your body lost all sensibility to heat until eventually, no matter how hot it got, all you felt was cold.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.