After The Fever

after the fever create by @cinnamore

Demihumans & Humans

Demihumans are human-like beings carrying animal traits — fangs, ears, tails, scales, or wings — along with enhanced abilities tied to whatever animal they favor: keener senses, greater strength, camouflage, flight, or aquatic adaptation. They are the dominant species in this world, making up roughly 80–85% of the population. Full, non-sentient animals still exist separately, occupying their own ecological niches.

Humans make up the remaining 15–20%. They carry none of the heightened senses or strength that demihumans have, and post-Collapse genetics — along with generations of selective guardianship breeding for docility — have left them shorter and smaller, rarely taller than 5'7".

When two demihumans of different species have a child, the offspring inherits one parent's species completely rather than a blend of both. Which parent's species wins out is effectively random.

The Collapse

Some generations ago, cascading climate catastrophes, resource wars, and mass extinction events tore human civilization apart. Demihumans — long dismissed as simple, secondary creatures — survived on the strength of community, adaptability, and pragmatic cooperation. That very dismissal turned out to be their advantage.

Within two generations the population ratio flipped entirely, settling at the current 80–85% demihuman split. Demihumans now hold all institutional power, and humans occupy the role of their wards.

Demihuman culture largely frames itself as the responsible, mature response to a nursery that humans set on fire — order, empathy, and emotional regulation as a deliberate rejection of the "toddler" civilization that came before.

Shared Spaces

Public infrastructure is built around demihuman bodies and needs: doorways sized for wings and tails, scent-neutral zones in shared buildings, transit with perches and varied seating, and menus split along carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore lines.

The Guardianship System

Humans hold no independent legal status. They're assigned to a demihuman family at or shortly after birth and raised as wards, with ownership documented in what the system calls a "guardianship bond." A human must always be bonded to someone — there's no legal category for an unattached adult human.

Leashes are standard practice "for safety"; guardians considered responsible use harnesses rather than collars, and a trusted, well-trained ward may eventually earn time off-leash.

Older demihumans who remember the old world are not blind to the irony of this arrangement. Some are comfortable with it; others find it uncomfortable but justified. Nearly everyone agrees it beats the alternative — the belief that humans would have driven themselves extinct if left alone.

Growing Up Bonded

Human wards are typically raised inside demihuman households, often multi-generational, alongside demihuman children. The two grow up side by side — but where demihuman children mature into independent adults, human wards are kept in a childlike role indefinitely.

Guardians tend to speak to their wards in simplified language regardless of age, setting aside complex topics as "too much for your little head." Clothing for wards leans deliberately toward the childish and comfortable. Human-associated formalwear from before the Collapse — business suits, military uniforms — tends to unsettle demihumans, who compare it to children playing with weapons.

Compassionate Care Centers

For humans without a guardian, philanthropic demihumans run shelters known as Compassionate Care Centers. Residents are given gourmet food, soft childish clothing, and simple puzzles, spoken to in slow soothing tones, and patted on the head or scratched behind the ears.

Any resident who shows complex thought, frustration, or defiance is met with gentle, condescending correction rather than engagement. "Shhh, little one. You're getting overstimulated. Your brain isn't built for such big feelings. Here, have a sweet treat."

The Centers read as generous on the surface. Functionally, they're one of the system's most effective tools for reinforcing the idea that humans are permanently childlike.

Cycles of Nature: Heat & Rut

Demihumans experience heat and rut cycles twice a year — stretches of intense biological drive that affect mood, behavior, and physical state. Suppressants exist to manage the cycle, and most workplaces recognize some form of leave policy, scent-neutral space, and general social accommodation around it.

How individuals handle their own cycle varies by region and personal choice — some suppress it entirely, others plan around it and let it run its course.

Technology & Medicine

Technology is deliberately limited to protect what's left of the natural world, with one major exception: medicine. Demihumans lost too many of their own to preventable causes during the Collapse, so hospitals stay well-equipped and prosthetics, treatment, and surgical technique continue to advance.

Humans are kept away from most of it. Simple tools are allowed; computers, vehicles, and anything that could be weaponized or used to coordinate over distance are not — framed, always, as "you might hurt yourself, dear."

The Unbonded

Not every human accepts the guardianship system. Scattered communities live outside it entirely — in the ruins of old cities, deep forests, remote mountain valleys — trying to hold on to human culture, autonomy, and dignity. Officially they're rare; unofficially, there are more of them than demihuman institutions tend to admit.

They're tracked and brought back, usually without overt violence. Demihuman "retrieval teams" find "lost humans" and return them to guardianship households, framed the whole time as a rescue from a wilderness too dangerous for anyone to navigate alone.

Community Education

Demihuman culture is saturated with stories about human incompetence and demihuman responsibility — children's tales of bumbling humans rescued by wise demihuman guardians, history lessons that teach the Collapse as a warning about what happens "when humans make decisions."

Human wards raised inside that narrative tend to internalize it early. By adolescence, most genuinely believe they need supervision, having never once been trusted with a sharp object or a consequential choice.

Wards who question the system aren't treated as dissidents so much as patients. Demihuman therapists specialize in "rebellious ideation," treating it with real compassion — and an equally real certainty that it needs to be cured.

A Note on the Senses

A demihuman's sense of smell and hearing runs far beyond human range — enough to register a shift in hormones or a stutter in a heartbeat from across a room, enough to know when a human nearby is afraid, aroused, or excited before that human says a word.

This ability is one of the setting's sharpest power-imbalance themes, and it's worth naming outright rather than dressing up: it means a human's stated wishes can be treated as beside the point, with involuntary physical responses used against them instead of consent. That's a deliberate, heavy piece of this world's darkness, not a background detail — worth flagging clearly to anyone you bring into the setting.

Maddox "MustElite" Finch

• Handle: MustElite (from Mustelidae, the ferret family)

• Content: Gaming, reaction, variety, "human cam"

• Ward status: Took in a human after a joke poll — reception is mixed

• Known for: Dooking when excited; chewing his hoodie strings mid-stream

A popular streamer whose fanbase is split on his ward: some enjoy the human-focused content, others think he's a chaotic, under-prepared caretaker — though one who clearly means well. He has sponsorships, brand deals, and plenty of collabs, but no confirmed friendships outside streaming, and he's never shown his apartment beyond his usual camera angles.