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The Great European War didn't do nearly enough to alleviate population pressures in Europe and Asia. Although many people had perished during the conflict, a post-war population boom amended the damage dealt. The following Era of Good Feelings only exacerbated these hidden problems - hundreds of thousands of people moved from villages to cities in the span of a decade, cities which were already severely overcrowded. Protectionist governments across Europe were not too concerned with this, however, - many believed that the march of better medicine technology and private urban expansion will prevent any problems down the line. They actively shunned any "unnecessary" public spending in the name of a balanced budget, thus healthcare and public housing were almost universally underfunded. Other factors began to play a factor, too - thanks to a worldwide increase in prosperity, trade and interconnectivity between nations increased, and while this eased the spread of positive things like scientific ideas and culture, it also meant that things like germs had what basically amounted to a highway across the planet.

Which is exactly what happened.

Nobody knows where exactly it came from. Some say it made the trans-species jump across the wide modernized pig farms in Visegrad, which were built not far from major cities - they were constructed before widespread regeneration, after all. Others point to birds as the source, but say it's unable to tell the accurate location where the jump took place. Some more wacky theories speculate that it might be of extraterrestrial origin, having arrived to Earth on a meteorite, perhaps landing across multiple locations, a view which has almost universally been dismissed. Whatever may be it's origin, it popped up basically out of nowhere and began infecting thousands of people within weeks - sparing no country. Sparing no country, but still ending up named after a specific one - the one which reported the most on notable cases of the disease due to having s long tradition of the press, this creating a false image of having been hit extremely heavily when compared to other countries...

It was French Flu.

What was French Flu? In a sense, it was the normal version of the flu - already quite a notorious killer throughout history to begin with, especially in temperate climates - on steroids. Exceptionally contagious and quick to spread from host to host, and considerably more lethal than the standard version. One notable trait which should be mentioned is that unlike other diseases, it disproportionately affected young men and women, while, say, children and elders were left not slaughtered as much. Modern research suggests that it's because the French Flu caused an overreaction by the host's immune system, causing organ failure and death via cytokine storm. The flu started out in Europe in the fall of 1927 and almost immediately leaped across both the Atlantic and the Pacific - and it ravaged both the Old and the New Worlds for one and a half years. The tiny healthcare systems of the affected countries found it impossible to deal with even a fraction of the patients needed, and the social stratification spread across Europe meant that the upper classes often received reserved treatment while the poor were left to die in their homes or, at best, travelling tent "clinics" which could provide only soup and a shaggy bed. By 1929, when the flu would finally start to fade, it had affected upwards of 70 million people and killed almost half of that - rivaling the Black Death for being among the most lethal natural disasters in human history.


And that was only the beginning.

Faced with this serious crisis, the governments opted for a closed-off approach. Most of the nations across the world began to hastily close their borders to prevent further disease spread, and while it's tough to say just how much that helped, the negative effects of this option were obvious - the collapse of the fragile world economy built up after the Great European War. Throughout time, economies across the world has grown increasingly interconnected, and this sudden collapse in world trade and connectivity caused enormous material loss for all parties involved. Hundreds of stock markets plunged and thousands of industries went bankrupt across 1928 due to this combination of trade loss, mass hysteria and loss of manpower across the entire industrial spectrum. Everything that was built up and enjoyed during the Era of Good Feelings suddenly vanished, like this was the end of the world or something...

Stock markets weren't the only thing that plunged - people's trust in the government also did. Why was so little done to prevent the French Flu? Why isn't the government doing anything to help the poor? Why does this society have so much injustice, inequality and poverty, when the people at the top say that all of those things are about to be eradicated? Democracies across Europe and the Vespucias began to suffer a deep crisis. And not just because their democratically elected governments were weak, but also because their citizens could look over the border to see the example of a much more "competent" style of rule: countries like Lithuania, Britannia, Turkey and India suffered far less compared to, say, Visegrad or Germania. This was because they were closed off and dictatorial from the get go, so they had less of a problem preventing the spread of French Flu and subsequent economic collapse. Regions like Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East suffered less than the West in general - they were less urbanized and had less of a population problem, after all.

While Lithuania was among the countries less affected, the French Flu did take one very important casualty there, among others - a casualty which was about to change its fate forever.

But for now, the Era of Good Feelings is over. Within the last two years, the world had become almost unrecognizable. Perhaps the best quote to sum up the years that followed and directly stemmed directly from the chaos of the French Flu period were said by the Spanish writer and later politician Javier Becerra: