Morphs—that was the label they’d been given by the rest of humanity, the non-mutants of the world. Because society agreed as a whole that referring to these people as “mutants” was rude, immoral and inconsiderate of their unfortunate conditions. Morphs were mostly human, save for their mutated appearances and abilities. It wasn’t anything like that old comic series, “The X-Men”, or whatever. No, these people were mutated via radiation waves through a crack in the ozone layer. They didn’t get super powers like telekinesis, or super-speed, nothing of the sort. They were just…altered. Depending on one’s location during the occurrence, their DNA was spliced with whatever living creature they’d happened to be in contact with at the time. Over half of the Earth’s population had been affected by the incident, and at first, Morphs suffered a substantial amount of prejudice, discrimination, and violence. But, as time went on, the world evolved and adapted, learning to accept that these people were just that. People. Well, most of the world anyway.

Declan Chambers was a rare case. When the incident occurred, scientists came to understand that certain variations of splicings resulted in many fatalities. More specifically, people exposed to arachnid DNA; spiders, scorpions, things like that. Although, they also realized that there were a handful of cases of survivorship, people whose DNA didn’t immediately fight off the splicing, but rather accepted the mixture. People like Declan.

Now, here he is; once a prodigy of music, now an average college student just going through the motions. With only a handful of friends, Declan kept to himself more often than not. No matter what, he never removed the doctor’s mask that covered his mouth, especially not at school or in other public places. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings that day; he thought he was alone in the campus library when he removed the mask, to scratch an itch under his nose, but he was wrong.