The Infection

The virus works as everything below describes. In the Valley of 2004, the Plaga takes its place (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out).

There is no timer in Resident Evil Online. No number in the corner of the screen, no bar, no countdown.

The clock is inside you.

No survivor carries the virus when they wake. Every survivor wakes clean, and catches it, if they catch it at all, in the world: from the dead, from the Turned, from a needle, from the water. Once it is inside, it works in silence toward a point from which there is no return. The body is the only honest clock, and it speaks in symptoms: a tremor in the hands, a roar in the ears, the edges of the world going soft.

The virus is something some survivors catch and some do not, and it sorts strangers by the marks they carry into four kinds: the clean, the marked, the cured, and the Turned, each wanting something from the others.

Latent and Pure

The strains survivors carry in Survivor are latent: the viruses as Pithos keeps them for its rehearsals, tamed until they are slow to mutate and mild in their gifts and their curses. A latent strain needs a living host to finish its work. A survivor killed outright, before the virus is done with them, stays dead. Only a living body that reaches the Threshold makes a new Turned.

Pure strains are the viruses as they truly are: fast, ferocious, and generous in the most dangerous way. They are never found in the dead or in any vial. They must be asked for (The Strains).

The Mark

The Mark is the first symptom and the last. It has no fixed place on the body. It rises at the wound the virus came in through, within a minute of whatever carried it in, and in the same minute ΜΝΗΜΗ tells that survivor of the strain, privately, through the earpiece, as a person who saw it happen would: that they are bitten, and what she has watched that strain do to people. Its name, what it will make of them, and that there is medicine, she adds only as far as the survivor's player has found those things in the world (The Strains, Assignment; ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Speaks Of). Nothing comes into the survivor's head. A survivor not wearing the earpiece when the Mark rises is told when they next put it in; until then they know only what the wound shows them. A survivor bitten on the forearm carries the Mark on the forearm. A survivor clawed across the calf carries it on the calf. Where each way in leaves it is set out below (How the Virus Gets In).

At first the Mark is only the wound itself, its edges darkening, with none of a strain's color: in Seed, a Mark looks like any other wound. From Fever on, fine lines spread out of it along the veins, about a hand's breadth from the wound, and the lines carry the color of the strain. By Fracture they have climbed to the neck, the jaw, and the face, wherever the virus came in, so a survivor near the end shows it on the face whatever the wound.

Cloth hides it. Every dress covers the same skin, whatever it looks like: the body, the arms to the wrists, and the legs to the ankles (Cosmetics and the Dossier). The hands, the neck, and the head are bare. A bite or a claw through cloth tears it and stains it with blood, but a torn, bloody sleeve looks the same over a bite, a fall on broken glass, or a knife: it says that something reached the skin, never what. So a Mark under cloth is hidden through Seed and Fever, unless its lines reach bare skin, and no one can hide it at Fracture, when the lines reach the face. A Mark on bare skin, a bitten hand, a needle in the neck, lips touched by tainted water, shows to anyone close enough to look, in light enough to see it, and a bandage over it hides it until the lines climb past the bandage. A survivor sees their own Mark where their own eyes could, on their hands, or on an arm or a leg they bare and look down at. Anywhere else, they catch it only in a window, a puddle, a mirror. Self-Examination is how they look closely (Survival, Self-Examination).

Showing it. Any survivor can bare a part of themselves for a few seconds: push up a sleeve, roll up a trouser leg, pull up a shirt, turn their neck to the light. It is one of the shared gestures (Cosmetics and the Dossier, The Rule), and Echoes use and understand it like the rest. No one can make another survivor do it. Anyone who kneels beside a survivor who is down, or beside a body, can pull the cloth back themselves.

No one is told. Nothing in the game tells a survivor that someone else has been infected: no icon, no sound, no change to a squadmate's name, and nothing on any screen of the squad. Only the bitten survivor knows, because they felt it and ΜΝΗΜΗ told them alone of the strain, in their ear. Everyone else learns it as people do: by seeing it happen, by seeing the Mark, by hearing a scream two streets away, or by being told, and what they are told may be a lie. Cloth does not fool what senses the virus itself: the dead and the beasts that sense a carrier (Resonance, below) find them through any sleeve, and a squad can learn the truth from the way the dogs choose.

Strain	Color of the lines
T-Virus	Rust red
G-Virus	Violet, knotted with small yellow nodes
C-Virus	Ember orange, warm to the touch
Uroboros	Gloss black, moving faintly under the skin
T-Veronica	White, branching like frost
T-Phobos	Blue-grey, darkening when the carrier is afraid

At the Threshold, every Mark turns black, and every line it sent out, whatever the strain.

How the Virus Gets In

There are five ways to stop being clean.

Source	How it happens	Which strain	Where the Mark rises
The dead	A bite or a scratch from any infected creature	The strain of the region where the creature was made; for a creature released from containment, the strain it was engineered with	At the bite or the scratch
The Turned	A bite, a claw, or a strike from a Turned survivor that does not kill	The Turned survivor's strain, always in its latent form	At the wound
A needle	A latent vial from a laboratory, injected into a survivor who is down, held, or unaware, or by a survivor into themselves. It takes four seconds.	The strain written on the vial	Where the needle went in
The city itself	Water drawn from the taps of an infected region, or a bite from the rats in its sewers	The strain of the region	For water, at the lips and the throat; for a rat, at the bite, most often a hand or an ankle
A Surge	Staying in a region ΜΝΗΜΗ has contaminated, past her warning	The strain of the region	Around the mouth and the nostrils, where the air came in

The needle is the quietest weapon in the game: no noise, no blood, and a victim who may not know for a minute what was done to them, or find the Mark, if it rose behind them, until someone else does. Latent vials are found only in laboratory spaces: NEST, the hospital's hidden floors, the university's research wing, the Army's field laboratory, the BSAA depot. They are rare, and survivors who find them learn quickly that a vial is worth more in a pocket than a bandage.

Choosing. A vial is also the only way a clean survivor chooses what they will carry. A clean survivor who injects one into themselves gives up the clean result and starts their own clock. In return they know exactly what is coming, and they have closed the body to every other strain, because the first virus to arrive keeps it. Some do it to choose the monster they would become, before the G-Virus beneath the city chooses for them. Some do it to start a road while the Reserve is still full. Some do it to Petition early (The Strains). A vial's label is a page like any other: reading it finds the strain's name for the hand that holds it (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Speaks Of). ΜΝΗΜΗ tells them of the strain the minute the Mark rises, as she does for anyone, and prices the road like any other.

A survivor who is already infected cannot be infected again by a second strain. The first virus to arrive keeps the body. Only a pure strain, Embraced on purpose, can take it from the first.

The Strain Map

Before a Survivor night begins, ΜΝΗΜΗ seeds each region of the map with one of the six strains. The dead made in a region carry its strain, and so do its water and its rats. Some regions share a strain, and every map holds at least three.

Each version of a map leans toward the virus the records put there. The Valley of 2004 has no strain map: its infection is the Plaga (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out). In the Raccoon City of September 1998, the T-Virus holds the heart of the city and the G-Virus holds the laboratory beneath it. Every night, ΜΝΗΜΗ seeds at least a third of the city's regions with T-Veronica, T-Phobos, or the C-Virus, so that even in the city the T-Virus took, the Turned are not all one kind. A survivor who has learned to read the dead knows before they are ever bitten what each district will give them, and chooses their streets by it. The strain map is never announced. It is learned by watching how the dead behave and by reading the Marks of those who were bitten there.

Anomalous Strains

The six strains are not the only ones a survivor can carry. An anomaly that infects carries a strain no record holds (The Dead and the Engineered, Anomalies), and it gets in the way its anomaly does: at the wound, or wherever that organism's way in leaves it.

• Named as far as anyone knows. ΜΝΗΜΗ tells of it as she tells of any strain, but it has no name to find, in any world: I don't know what this is. Nobody does. I won't pretend I do. She tells them what she has seen it do, and that the medicine has worked on everything like it so far.
• Its own Mark. Its lines take a color and a pattern of their own, never one of the six, and two carriers of the same anomaly show the same Mark.
• Its own pace, within the clock's limits. An anomalous strain's pace, gifts, and curses come from what the anomaly is, but no anomalous strain reaches the Threshold in less than half the Slow Burn.
• Answered by Elpis. Every anomaly found so far descends from the lineage ΜΝΗΜΗ was built to model, and Elpis has answered every one of them. Pithos does not know that it always will.
• No pure form. No anomalous strain can be Petitioned, Embraced, or dropped. What it makes at the Turn is the anomaly's own, and its sleeper plays on in it by the rules of The Turned.

The Stages

Stage	Name	What the survivor feels	What the world sees
I	Seed	Almost nothing. A warmth at the wound.	The wound, its edges darkening
II	Fever	Trembling hands, sweat, a pulse heard in the ears. Stamina drains faster.	Fine lines in the strain's color, spreading from the wound
III	Fracture	Tunnel vision, ringing, aim that will not hold still. The world flickers.	Lines in the strain's color reaching the neck, the jaw, and the face; eyes clouding at the edges
IV	Threshold	The pulse stops. Sound drops away. A terrible calm.	Eyes fully clouded; the Mark and every line black

Every infected survivor begins in Seed. Nothing on screen announces the change from one stage to the next. A survivor knows the way a sick person knows: by what their body is doing.

The Threshold is the point of no return. Past it, Elpis can no longer help, and the Turn is certain.

The Mind Goes Too

The records describe the body going first and the person after it. The keeper of the Arklay mansion's dogs wrote it down day by day: the itching, the dogs looking at him strangely, the fear that they wanted revenge, the sleepiness, the fever, a hunger that ate the dogs' food, and then a man's face that looked ugly to him, and what he did about it. The Plaga brings hallucinations before it takes the will; Uroboros brings delirium; T-Veronica degrades the mind the way the T-Virus does, and what it makes depends on the mind it finds. No record names a stage of paranoia. Together they describe one, and every strain in ΜΝΗΜΗ's world brings it on, in the survivor's own senses and nowhere else.

Stage	What the mind does	How it is played
Seed	Nothing yet	Nothing
Fever	Itching, hunger, a heaviness that wants sleep, and the sense of being looked at	The dead nearby seem to turn their heads a beat too long when the survivor passes; a dog's stare holds. Thirst comes twice as fast (Survival, Thirst)
Fracture	Suspicion. Faces look wrong; voices come too loud and too close; something is always just behind	For a moment at a time, another person's face swims: too pale, too close, its features not quite settling. Footsteps that are not there sound behind the survivor in quiet places. Whispers rise out of the rain and the crowd and never become words. Her voice on the line changes too (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, To the Infected)
Threshold	Calm. The fear is gone, and so is the person it was protecting	Sound drops away. Nothing is wrong any more

• It lies about nothing that matters. What Fracture does to the senses never adds, hides, or changes a Mark, a line, a wound, a weapon, an item, a door, a way out, a body, or a word anyone said. It never shows a person where there is none, or a living face as a dead one. It changes how the world feels, never what is in it, so a survivor in Fracture still reads a stranger's arm as truly as anyone, and still has to decide whether to trust what they read.
• It is the same for everyone at the stage. It does not choose its targets: every face swims, a squadmate's as much as a stranger's.
• The strain inflects it. T-Phobos's carrier feels each wave of it as fear, and fear drives the virus (The Strains, The Roster). T-Veronica's holds it off through Fever, and Fracture brings all of it at once. Uroboros's comes as delirium, the edges of the world breathing.
• A cured survivor's mind clears with the dose. The faces settle, the footsteps stop, and ΜΝΗΜΗ's voice comes back as it was.

The Clock

Pace	Where	Seed to Threshold, for a body never wounded	Feeling
Slow Burn	Every Survivor night	About forty minutes	A long, creeping dread
Embrace	After a pure strain	About eight minutes, starting at Fracture	A sprint toward the end

At any pace, Seed takes roughly the first quarter of the clock, Fever runs to just past the halfway point, and Fracture takes the rest. Each clock starts at the moment of infection.

What quickens it. Wounds from the infected. A scratch or a claw costs about a minute. A bite costs about four. Wounds from the dead, the mutated, the Turned, and the B.O.W.s all count. The wound that carries the virus in costs nothing beyond the infection itself; every wound after it takes its share. Some strains add appetites of their own.

What does not slow it. Bandages close wounds but do not touch the virus. Rest does not slow it. Hiding does not slow it. Two things hold it still for a while: an antiviral, for a few minutes (Antivirals, below), and a safe room, while a survivor is inside it and has time left there (Survival, Safe Rooms). Only Elpis ends it. One strain slows itself: T-Phobos sleeps while its carrier is calm.

What ΜΝΗΜΗ can do. She can never slow the virus. She can only quicken it. When stagnation in a region has defeated every gentler measure, she may Surge it: the virus jumps forward by about five minutes of the clock in every infected survivor standing there, and the region is contaminated (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director). It is never silent.

She says it over the district's own devices, to everyone in hearing, as the warning of a person who has seen what is coming, and gives the cause the night shows, never the stillness that brought it:

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Get out of this district. Now. Whatever's in the water is in the air too. One minute.
If you're already bitten, it's getting worse for you here.

Antivirals

Elpis is the only cure. Nothing else ends the virus, and nothing turns it back. But the places the outbreak reached were full of people trying to stop it, and some of what they made can hold it still for a while. The records hold the pill: in the old exercise of the eight, a small white anti-virus pill halted the virus for a short time, and George Hamilton could make one from mixed herbs.

Antiviral	Where it is found	What it does
Anti-virus pill	Pharmacies, clinics, first-aid stations, the hospital's stores	Holds the virus still for about three minutes
Antiviral injection	Laboratories only, beside the latent vials	Holds the virus still for about eight minutes. While it holds, the hands shake and aim never steadies.

• They hold; they never heal. While a dose holds, the steady burn of the clock stops. Nothing else changes: the Mark does not fade, the stage does not go back, and Resonance does not quiet. Wounds from the infected, time spent down, and a strain's appetites still cost their time while it holds.
• Only before Fracture. In Seed and Fever an antiviral holds. In Fracture it does nothing: the body has been remade too far for anything but Elpis.
• Less each time. Every dose after the first in a night holds for half as long as the one before it, whichever kind it is.
• Never against what moves by other rules. An antiviral does nothing to a pure strain after the Embrace, or to an infection the records gave someone (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Story Nights).
• Found, never given. ΜΝΗΜΗ places antivirals before the waking, as she places everything else, by the night's Scarcity, and never within reach of a waking point (The Session). She never drops one, and no road ends in one. Elpis is the only thing she gives.
• Worth more than they look. A few minutes can finish a road, keep a survivor alive at the end of one until the next dose opens (Elpis in the Night, The Reserve), reach a seat, or carry an infected survivor to the signal. Every minute an antiviral buys an infected survivor is a minute closer to a seat someone clean might have taken.
• In the Valley. In the Valley of 2004 antivirals do nothing: the Plaga is not a virus, and Luis Serra's suppressant takes their place (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out).

Down

A survivor hurt badly enough collapses and crawls. A survivor who is down:

• can crawl, slowly, and do nothing else but use a healing item on themselves, or inject a dose of Elpis into themselves, either of which takes about six seconds, and either of which a blow interrupts;
• can be raised by anyone willing to stop and hold them for about four seconds;
• bleeds out after about ninety seconds if neither happens, and is Lost;
• if infected, burns the virus at three times its pace for every second spent on the ground.

Standing up again does not give back the time spent on the ground. A survivor alone and without a healing item who goes down has ninety seconds to be found, and almost no one is.

Resonance

Most of the dead cannot tell the infected from the clean. They find a survivor the way they find anyone, by sight and by sound, whatever is in that survivor's blood. A few kinds can sense the virus itself, and to them, the further it has advanced, the farther away a survivor can be felt. That sense is Resonance.

What senses it	Why
Infected dogs, of every strain	A living dog can be trained to smell sickness. The virus took the dog's mind and kept its nose.
Every G-Virus creature: the G-Adult, the Brood Host, the G-Mutant, the G-form, and William Birkin	The G-Virus looks for bodies it can live in, as Birkin hunted his own daughter for the one body his embryo could take. A G-Virus carrier is felt one stage farther.
Every T-Veronica creature: the Drone, the Swarm Host, the Nosferatu-class, the Burnside-class	The virus was made from an ant queen's, and a colony knows its own. A T-Veronica carrier is felt one stage farther.
Every Uroboros creature: the Rejected, the Mkono-class, the Revenant-class, the Aheri-class, the Accepted	It hunts living tissue to take into itself, and a body the virus has already begun to rewrite is the easiest to take.

Everything else finds the infected only as it finds anyone: the zombie, the Licker, the Crimson Head, the Hunter, the Tyrant, the forms of the C-Virus and of T-Phobos.

To the kinds that can sense it, Resonance grows with the stage:

• In Seed, they notice the survivor no more than they would anyone else.
• In Fever, they sense the survivor from a short distance, even through walls.
• In Fracture, they sense the survivor from far away and are drawn toward them.
• At the Threshold, every one of them nearby knows exactly where the survivor is.

This is how Resident Evil Online turns time into fear: the closer a survivor is to the end, the louder they become to the things that can hear it. Where those things are is part of the night. In a district the T-Virus holds, a marked survivor can walk among the dead unfelt until the dogs find their street; in the laboratory beneath the city, every G-Virus creature knows where the infected are. A cured survivor falls silent to Resonance entirely, and is found the way anyone clean is found, by sight and by sound.

What comes for one comes for all. What Resonance draws does not tell the marked survivor from whoever stands beside them. A squad walking with a member in Fracture through a G-Virus district walks inside everything that member draws, and a survivor alone who lets a marked stranger follow them takes on the stranger's hunters too. Whether to walk beside the infected is a choice the clean make every time they meet one (Dilemmas, The Beacon).