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Folie à Plusiers

Prologue à la Folie

Prologue to Insanity

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It started with one.

Patient Zero, retrieved from Washington D.C., United States of America. Alfred F. Jones was admitted by his college roommate at 13:08 on June 16th. Diagnosis: Delusional.

His roommate claims that his condition began little over a month ago, when Alfred had a personality switch; becoming louder, boisterous, and referring to himself simply as "America", or "The Hero", as well as becoming upset when his roommate refused to call him such.

He was admitted to MacFarlane's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington DC.

Four days later, a call was received from the Laurier Mental Institution, located in Ottawa, Canada. They had apparently received word of Alfred Jones, and were calling to report a similar case.

Matthew Williams was admitted by family, suffering from the same delusions as Patient Zero. He had gone from being outgoing and friendly, to calm, quiet, and all but invisible. He began calling himself "Canada" and murmuring constantly to an invisible person. His family claims that Matthew's names for this unknown hallucination range from "Kumashirou" to "Kilimanjaro".

We made a point of revealing this information to Alfred Jones, in part. One of the nurses sat down with him and told him briefly of a person called "Canada", making sure to avoid using Matthew Williams' name.

Much to our surprise, Alfred showed signs of confusion, before jumping up and exclaiming, "Canada? You found Mattie?"

The patient was, to our knowledge, previously unaware of Matthew Williams.

To date, we have been contacted about five similar cases, all but one from different countries around the world:

Lovino and Feliciano Vargas, from Rome, Italy. Romano is 23 years old, born on March 17th. Feliciano is 20 years old, also born on March 17th. Claiming to be "South Italy" and "North Italy", respectively. Also referring to themselves as "Romano" and "Veneziano."

Heracles Karpusi, from Athens, Greece. 27 years old, born on February 3rd. Claims to be "Greece".

Arthur Kirkland from London, England. 23 years old, birth date unregistered. Claims to be "England", "Great Britain", or "UK".

Wang Yao from Beijing, China. 23 years old, although he repeatedly claims to be over 4000. Born on October 10th. Claims to be "China".

Currently, all existing patients are being transferred to the same psychiatric ward as Alfred Jones in attempts of finding links in this mental condition. It stands to reason that even more patients could exist, and as such, all other patients of MacFarlane's Psychiatric Hospital have been transferred to nearby wards. Several psychiatrists and physicians are expressing interest in this case, which could possibly be the largest scale case of shared psychosis in history.

Also, all patients seem to show recognition of each other, without ever, to our knowledge, meeting them.

For now, this is being classified as a folie à plusiers, a shared delusion.

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*Thank you, Lycoris Calantha, for editing my stupid mistakes!