David Copperfield, Meet Your Match: The Whole World. (On Hold)

Prologue

                Fanatics all over the globe said the world would end one day, whether by the wrath of God or predictions of ancient peoples, and they were labeled stupid and annoying. Movies were made, full of natural disasters and heroes, and hours on television networks were dedicated to hosts talking about sins against God. When they said the end would come, it didn’t. This process was repeated over and over . . . the world didn’t end, someone would say it ends in a few more years. These fanatics annoyed everyone . . . but they were right. The world was full of problems: wars all over, countries in debt, and abundant poverty. But this was a children’s playground compared to what happened.

It began slowly at first. Scientists had found a meteor that wasn’t a meteor. It contained less than half of the normal rock and iron in regular meteors, and the other half was “unknown matter.”

While the world panicked and scientists struggled to find out what the meteor was made of, the prince of England suddenly died. What was described as “death itself taking the form of nothing more than a ball of darkness” killed him. The only explanation was magic. Magic, that doesn’t exist. Magic, that is nothing but special effects in movies and a plot point for novels. Magic, a transcendental ‘element.’ Many world leaders went on television and said the same thing: “All of the best scientists in the world are solving this riddle. There is a smarter explanation for this than magic. We will pull through, because our country is strong.” Of course, this did little to calm the population. More unexplainable events happened, one after another, steadily increasing. Fire that takes shapes. Roots coming from the ground to strangle citizens. Skeletons rising from their graves to follow people. While more and more of us died by the day, the scientists working on the meteor cut too deeply into it. The foreign matter in it exploded, killing them all. Now no one could avoid saying it: magic had been transported to Earth by a meteor.

Just a few days after the meteor exploded, there was another explosion. The “unknown matter” that had exploded in the meteor trigged another explosion that we now know originated in the middle of the Earth. It covered everything . . . everyone was affected. It killed over half of the population, and the others . . . were changed. The environment wasn’t affected as much. A few hundred animals died, and a lot of endangered species thrived and were brought back from the brink of extinction.

The humans that survived were different . . . they were the same people, but they weren’t. Everything rushed on like a tsunami; it was so fast and chaotic. Governments tried their best to rebuild, but it was impossible. People weren’t used to it yet. They weren’t used to their new . . . abilities.

Not all magic is the exact same thing. The main types of magic are life, death, elemental, and arcane.

 Life magic deals with anything that’s currently alive. Life magic can control and enhance plants, or anything living without conscious thought. It takes the form as a brain for, say, a daisy, and can tell the daisy to walk around or dance the polka. It is not a ‘mental’ magic, it doesn’t have the ability to take over something with thought. Life magic can also heal. It seeks the living energy of whatever is going to be healed and takes from a deep well of that, which is life itself, to knit back whatever it aims to heal.

Death can take the bodies of the deceased and reanimate them. It doesn’t give them ‘a brain’ like life magic, it merely moves individual parts, like a puppet.

Earth, water, wind, and fire are what elemental magic is. Elemental magic can manipulate the elements, bending rock-hard earth into a pretzel, freezing water to ice, directing and creating winds to carry objects, and creating and manipulating fire.

Arcane magic is the rarest. It’s a lot like what you would find in the Harry Potter books, an unknown energy that can cause damage or rebuild. Compacted arcane energy looks translucent, with a silvery or bluish glow. The potential of arcane magic is usually in destruction, but it can sometimes fix or rebuild. Arcane magic is a ‘mental’ magic, because it doesn’t need anything from the outside to make it work, like death magic. Very refined, advanced arcane magic can cause temporary mind control over simple things like squirrels or dogs because of the magic’s mental behavior.

The population that remained after the explosion nearly killed themselves from the chaos created by their new abilities. Nearly every person on the planet had gained control over a type of magic. Instead of trying to reign in the insanity caused by free-flowing magic, they increased it. Running trees were more common on the street than joggers. Dogs made from fire fought with cats made of water like a Pokémon game. Glowing blue orbs robbed people of their money and then accidentally killed them. And skeletons of presidents were found whoring themselves out to government officials.

In short, we were like superheroes on crack.

A resistance started against the magic, a group of people that tried occult rituals and the like to get rid of their power, but they couldn't. The leaders of the group that claimed they had become "pure" and without magic began to kill anyone that showed their power and didn't "get rid of it." This genocide was, eventually, humanity's key to sanity. People began to fight back against the fanatics, "The Saviors." People learned to use their magic, and after awhile The Saviors were killed without quarter, until only a ragtag group remained that eventually scattered.

Once The Saviors were exterminated and humanity was safe from mass murder, people began to rebuild. Individual communities were self-sufficient, not relying on the government like bigger cities. These bigger cities broke down into smaller towns once they saw the success of small one-horse towns, and the government focused on the matter of magic while the people focused on living "normal" lives.

The good thing about apocolypse is that it brings people together. Wars were forgotten as governments put everything they had into helping the people learn about the ways of magic. Masters of their magic were made teachers and put in free schools for preschoolers all the way to the elderly. Suprisingly, dictators-to-be didn't use their magic to achieve power, partly because everyone else also had this power and it was useless, and partly because they hadn't finished "Hogwarts," the free magic schools of the government. Eventually the major chaos subsided, and it became almost peaceful.

 This was before anyone knew about the power of the Aeternam.