Can I have some info on the viruses? What are they? What do they do?
OKAY YEAH! Lovely question, thank you for asking!
Okay, so basically, the viruses were created in a lab headed by Dr. Brian Wecht, PhD, as a goal of finding a definitive cure for things like depression, anxiety, and aggression without having to take pills every single day. Like, one-and-done kind of medicines. But first they had to isolate those traits so they could experiment on them and test different things that would fight those specific traits.
And there’s a bit of moral ambiguity behind it because they might have “borrowed” a couple of infants to insert these isolated traits into and experiment on. But they’ve decided it’s okay as long as you don’t think about it too much.
So Arin came first and they pretty much pegged down that aggression trait. But giving someone literally just one trait kind of fucks with the brain and all the experiments made the virus that was put into his body kind of take over and use this innocent little baby as a host. Despite this “setback” the lab still managed to create a cure for the infection that Arin was now spreading among the lab via basic skin-on-skin contact. But they also found that the cure wasn’t able to destroy the virus that had so quickly grown within their test subject. It could only incapacitate him for a while.
Barry was kind of an accident. They were trying to peg down the anxiety trait, but he developed into more of a heat-stroke type of virus and they couldn’t figure out how to fix the whole host-virus thing to start over. So they just created the cure like they did with Arin and disregarded him as a “failure” basically.
Then with Danny, they pegged down both anxiety and depression (because the two are very often linked). The same business happens with the whole host-virus thing and the doctors create a cure.
Brian names the viruses to try and connect to their humanity, to see if that can help them take back over their bodies or anything, but really, the experiments made it so the kids were too far gone. As they get older, little kid instincts start kicking in and they wanna run around and play and have fun, but there’s also a strong part of their brain that’s literally just screaming “infect, infect, infect” throughout their entire existence. Arin’s is the strongest because they put the biggest dose of virus in him without knowing what it would do, which is why he will almost never skip an infecting opportunity. Barry’s is actually the weakest because they fucked up his genes enough that the virus is like “I don’t know what to tell you man.”
And then Danny’s got this really exaggerated symptom of depression where he can really only focus on one thing and that one thing takes up ALL of his concentration. So he sees something that interests him and you have to literally shake him out of this trance to get him to focus on something else. He just gets fixated on things really easily.
And they can’t infect each other because it’s kind of like blood types. Like, you can’t have A blood type and B blood type in the same body because the body rejects it. You can’t have A-Virus and B-Virus in the same body, because the virus that’s already claimed that space will fuckin wreck the other virus’s shit. So them being in contact with each other is fine. But other people get such small doses through contact that you could have all three at once if you weren’t careful.
They were meant to stay contained in the lab, but that went to shit, so here they are!