The year is 1973, and Vernon is one of the lucky ones.

He's still alive, which is more than many others with his... affliction... can say. It's some kind of debilitating magic plague or something, and it's been catching people in their late teens. The symptoms vary wildly, but the 'debilitating' part mostly doesn't. It can be losing all of their senses, or feeling like they're on fire, or vomiting themselves to death, and those are the nicer ones. The worse ones are the ones that drive them nuts, cause them to lash out and try to kill their family, or act like they're not real, or run off into the woods or into traffic or, if everyone is very fortunate, in the unlucky case of madness, off a bridge where at least their insanity won't hurt anyone else.

His is just... as far as he can tell, it's clumsiness. Debilitating clumsiness, a lack of coordination, but not a complete loss of movement. He has less grace than most toddlers, limbs twitching in odd directions whenever he tries to move any of them at all, incapable of standing, let alone walking. Importantly, it's hit his hands and fingers more than anything else, so while anything with actual dexterity is far beyond him, he can stubbornly flail himself at things and eventually his flailing can get somewhere. He can crawl, to the bathroom, and then to the tub, and after about an hour of painstaking, frustrating flailing, he can turn it on. He can, with more frustration, manage to drink. While the affliction's taken his ability to speak in anything more than grunts and groans, he can still manage to drink without drowning himself. That's something. More than most get, he's pretty sure.

He's heard on the radio that this is a temporary affliction, whatever it is. That people with it get better after a week. That they make it out after... changed... stronger and faster and strangely colored and with literal fucking magic. He's aware that there's an executive order from the president that people with this affliction should be - what was the terminology used? Eh, he's too hungry to remember the specifics. Given over to the government, is the idea. Put under protection of the state. A couple of them have come back out of the other end, televised and radio broadcasted as True Patriots of America, the new heroes of the United States. Most of them seem to disappear, though.

That's been happening a lot, lately.