Day 756

They called it the cure to cancer and for sixty five years we used it, only knowing that it cured us and nothing more. Scientists of all sorts were so eager to vouch for it and declare it a modern miracle backed up with countless jargon and other nonsense.

The odd case of someone with terminal or malicious cancer taking too much of the drug came to light, their bodies found smothered under thick slabs of their own flesh, distorted in colour by the sheer rate that it had grown in so little time.

One case that was well noticed by the public involved a nameless Jane Doe who had been seen by multiple cameras, behaving perfectly normally, for all that could be gathered from this and the few people who claimed to have spoken to her. Her body was discovered the following morning when her downstairs neighbour heard a series of loud thuds and screams coming from her apartment. Much like other cases her body was a disfigured mass of flesh that had crushed the rest of her in a matter of minutes.

Since the panic that this caused more and more cases are coming up. The drug producing companies of course are claiming that these people are using the medication wrong and this is their own fault rather than it being any kind of side effect that we hadn't been warned about before or had developed as the body's natural response to a new series of chemicals suddenly being introduced.

It's getting to the point where people who haven't been taking the drug at all are being found dead under their own suddenly-gained mass, always with some kind of flesh wound (usually a scratch or sore) buried beneath their mounds of skin.

As of yet nobody has successfully been treated for Rapid Onset Skin Expansion (ROSE for short) though the first few cases are being monitored in strict lab conditions, albeit not on purpose at first. From the footage released by an unknown whistle-blower, a technician with stage 2 ovarian cancer was seen to collapse while cleaning equipment and within three hours quadruple in size, her original skin underneath bruising and rupturing as the skin cells replicated at near impossible speeds.

This footage was hardly the first of its kind, countless people have filmed strangers or loved ones succumbing to ROSE, helpless to do anything else. The only difference with this footage was that its conditions allowed for it to be studied closer, from multiple camera angles and even from the small sensors dotted about the lab itself.

There is no cure for this, at least not one they're telling the public. There have been no news conferences, no new drug releases and no official response from the companies in question. Even the government has been "at conference" for three months now, safely locked away from us all or possibly ROSE-dead. They've left the country in the dark, metaphorically and physically.