World building: Humans and their past

The Beginning

Now that you've all been introduced to a handful of my main characters, I'd like to take my next few blogs to try and cover some lore and details about the world that these characters will be set in. 

 

Present Day:

  Before I get into the past, I'd like to set up what the present will look and feel like, since that's when the story will primarily take place. Everything else is to build up to the present day and make it feel real and interesting and unique. 

 Firstly, present day will be much like our own modern world, but more fantastical. Imagine something akin to "Steven Universe", or "Adventure Time". It would be like a mix of the two, taking inspiration from Adventure Time's many different creatures and characters of different species and 'elements,' but being set in a more realistic world such as Steven Universe. Modern technology and modern problems but with a dash of magic if you will.  

 Without going too much into detail quite yet, this is the basic premise of the present day. Nothing too crazy! 

 Not yet at least. 

The Past:

 Now, talking about the past is where things get just a little bit complicated, so I hope you'll bear with me as I try to explain!

 In the past, before they could become so advanced as they are now, humans were the main form of truly sentient life. They grew, adapted, and evolved to become better and stronger, until they became the dominating force. At one point, however, something... changed. Humans, as they continued to grow as a species, started coming across strange happenings. 

 

 Phenomenon that they couldn't understand. A man with the strength of a hundred men, a woman who seemed to conjure items at random around her, children who wielded flames... 

 It was horrifying, to say the least. In the early years of these phenomenon, people who showed signs of any kind of strangeness was out-casted at best, and trialed at worst. 

 Trial's almost always ended in death. 

 These trials and fear lasted hundreds of years, until humanity became advanced enough to think to research these phenomena. Finally, people's fear's were put to rest. 

They deemed it Magic

 There was now a name put to the happenings, and slowly, people's fear begun to come to a slow. Trial's gradually stopped, and then were banned all together for cruelty and murder without cause. After all, it's not like even the people back then knew what they possessed, nor anything harmful they could even attempt with it. That's just how fear works. 

 And with that, research skyrocketed, along with the acceptance of this strange new 'magic' people were being born with. To this day, no one knows where or how it came to be. Scientists believe that it has something to do with the brain they just can't possibly understand, while other's think it to be from a divine being, a higher power bestowing them with a gift, but no one can be sure. 

Magic became commonplace. Within each household typically there was at least one magic user, and as the years went by, the number of magic users in the world increased, as well as their ability to hone their magic. Schools integrated it into the curriculum, as did jobs, entertainment, everything.

Truly, it was a widespread phenomenon, and it was rapidly transforming into a positive one at that. So much so, that...

It started to change them.

For better, and for worse.