Towards the end of the first Ape War, a Gorilla spaceship was shot down and crashed in eastern Tanzania. The area around the crash site was irradiated when the containment field on the fusion engines failed, mutating a Tanzanian Ringtailed Lemur (L. Catta Tanganyika) and her two unborn children. She didn’t survive long after the birth of her offspring, but the girl and boy grew quickly into fierce and cunning defenders of their troop’s patch of scrubland.
After human victory in the Ape War, the people of central Africa feared a return to European colonial rule now that the grudgingly called-upon armies of Europe were concentrated in the region. Still recovering from several years of being brutally dominated by the Ape armies, the African people were determined not to trade a hairy oppressor for a White one, and joined together into the United Peoples of Central Africa. They “encouraged” the armies of England, France, and Germany to get the hell out posthaste, and it was while covering the British retreat eastward to the Zanzibar staging areas that an SAS Jungle Unit came across an area filled with booby traps and defended by seemingly normal lemurs who appeared to have been trained in the use of improvised weapons.
Staff Sergeant Brianna Sunderland-Smith discovered that the lemur troop was being led by a young mutated sister and brother team who were ready to unflinchingly attack her heavily armed special forces unit with sharpened sticks and a bow, until she barked at them in her Sergeant’s Voice; lemurs are matriarchal, and a large, powerful, dominating female was assumed to be in charge of whatever she was yelling at. Ssgt Sunderland-Smith was impressed not only with their ferocity, but also their ability to take orders and quickly learn human language; she adopted them as her unit’s “children” and named them Reginald and Ursula after her great-grandparents, who also had severe expressions and piercing stares. Reginald showed startling proficiency with a purloined Webley revolver, and Ursula was a right terror with a pair of Fairbairn-Sykes commando daggers.
The two were mustered into a new regiment formed after the war, comprised mostly of Monkey, Ape, and Prosimian people; the “Simian Rifles” regiment was later instrumental in preventing the Orang People’s Army from capturing the entire Malay Peninsula during the second Ape War.
From my Adorable Creatures universe, which grew out of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness RPG campaign from the late ‘80s. It’s set in the early 21st Century of a world where WWIII happened in 1995, and wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone had expected. It was still terrible, hundreds of millions of people died, but it turned out that the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapon stockpiles… were fake. Politicians in the great powers had requisitioned trillions of dollars for defense spending over the decades, but had spent it on the same things politicians throughout history have spent taxpayer dollars on: ale and whores. Missile silos were top secret party caves for top military brass, with endless beer and nachos; nuclear missile submarines were underwater casinos for the rich and not-so-famous; strategic bombers were kitted out for Mile High Club joyrides for wealthy campaign donors; many of the real missiles and bombs had warheads made of carboard and aluminum foil and filled with sand. Enough warheads were real that most of the world’s major cities got at least one airburst, and national capitals and financial centers were targeted for big enough saturation attacks that they were destroyed, but by Day Two it was obvious that civilization had been wrecked but hadn’t completely collapsed.In the aftermath of The Bomb, the whole world learned what Japan had known since 1945: All Radiation Is Mutagenic. Many humans began developing bioenergetic powers and became superheroes and/or supervillains… and many began mutating into animal-like forms. Millions of animals worldwide also began mutating, growing into larger, more bipedal versions of themselves, with functional hands and human-level (or greater) intelligence. These Beast Folk were common enough that most of the world’s nations, both surviving and newly formed, were quickly forced to acknowledge them as citizens to prevent mass uprisings.