Hyde Park looked like a festival built by a bureaucracy.
Tents sat in tidy rows with rope lanes between them. Portable screens hung from metal frames. Loudspeakers clicked and crackled, then settled into a calm voice calling numbers in a cadence that sounded almost medical.
People filled the grass in long queues that curled and doubled back. Parents held small slips of paper like they were entry tickets to a different life. Children swung their legs on the low fencing and stared at the tall men and women in grey uniforms who stood at each tent entrance.
The Unit did not smile for the cameras. They did not need to do anything to be noticed; their size was enough. They stood in pairs, broad through the shoulders, arms bare below rolled sleeves, hands relaxed but ready. The rifles stayed slung. The pistols stayed holstered. The message was simple. This was a public service, and it was also not a public debate.
BBC vans lined the curb. Cables snaked across the pavement and into the grass. A red light blinked on a camera that panned slowly over the crowd. The presenter kept her tone bright, as if describing a charity run rather than the first formal sorting of a new social class.
Behind her, a screen showed the same thing that appeared across the main cities of GAIA and across the Atlantic in the MACUSA zones and in the South Asian Confederation. A number. A queue, tents and uniformed figures holding wands or weapons. Witches and Wizards were already in the crowd. Waiting for their numbers to be called and 'miraculously' find that they were able to interact with Mana.
London watched itself live.
So did the rest of the world.
At the edge of Hyde Park, a group of protesters gathered behind police barriers. Placards rose and fell with angry hands. Some carried printed verses. Some carried wooden crosses. A few had loudspeakers and the confidence that came from believing the crowd would protect them.
They started with hymns.
It lasted ten minutes.
The first man who stepped over the barrier did it with the kind of courage that relied on other people doing the fighting. He shouted toward a Unit member at the tent mouth and waved a book over his head.
The Unit member did not move until the man got close.
Then the big hand reached out and caught him by the collar.
A short twist followed. A knee clipped the man's leg. He went down hard, face-first, and the sound of his chin against the ground travelled across in a way the microphones did not need to catch.
The man screamed. The crowd recoiled.
A second protester rushed in and tried to swing.
The Unit member stepped inside the punch and folded the arm with a clean motion. The crack was sharp. The man dropped, clutching himself, eyes wide with sudden comprehension.
Police moved in after that, batons out, voices loud. They did not arrest the Unit. They pulled the protesters back and told them to keep their distance or go home.
A BBC reporter watched the scene from a safe angle, lips pressed into a line that tried to stay professional and failed. The camera caught the expression anyway.
Later, a clip ran with a caption that could have been written by a bored sergeant. The presenter avoided the crude phrasing. The public did not. In pubs and living rooms, the summary turned into a short, ugly joke, 'fuck around and find aout'
The speakers called seventy-seven. The screen flashed it.
A family of three left the queue, clutching their paper, shoulders stiff with nerves. The father wore a work shirt with a stubborn crease. The mother held her handbag like a shield. The boy walked between them, eyes wide, trying not to look excited.
A camera crew followed.
Inside the first tent, a Unit member waited behind a table. Several wands lay on a cloth like surgical instruments. The Unit member nodded once to the parents, then crouched enough to meet the boy's eyes.
A large hand ruffled the boy's hair with a gentle touch that looked wrong on such a big man.
"Right then," the Unit member said, voice calm and clipped. "You will hold them one by one. Do not snap anything in half."
The father gave a nervous laugh that died quickly.
He reached for the first wand.
Nothing.
He moved down the line.
Nothing again.
The Unit member watched with the patience of a man counting coins.
The mother picked up the next wand. A faint glow pulsed at the tip, weak enough that the camera had to adjust focus to catch it.
Her eyes widened. Her fingers tightened around the wood.
The Unit member took it back with a careful motion, as if removing a hot object from an untrained hand.
The boy stepped forward.
He held the wands one by one and got varied reactions. The seventh, however, was different. The difference was simple. It was his own wand.
Light burst from the tip, bright and clean. The tent walls flashed with it. The camera lens flared. Outside, the crowd noise rose, a wave of voices reacting to a miracle that had been packaged into a procedure.
The mother clapped a hand over her mouth.
The father stared as if the boy had just grown a second head.
The Unit member smiled once, and it looked almost ordinary. "There we are."
The boy's shoulders lifted.
The Unit member placed a hand on the father's shoulder in a gesture that carried both sympathy and ownership of the moment. "Follow me, please."
He pointed them toward a second tent.
The camera stopped at the flap.
A sign hung there in plain black letters. Private assessment. No recording.
The presenter filled the gap with numbers.
One in five thousand. That was the combined result of all the other testing avenues.
That ratio spread across screens with the kind of cold comfort that felt like fairness because it was statistical. In London, someone did the maths for the viewers, and the number became a meme within hours.
Fourteen forty.
A city could count its future favourites.
People began to speak about compatible children the way they spoke about football prospects. A boy in Brixton. A girl in Croydon. Someone's nephew in Hackney. Names started to circulate before they even understood what was happening.
Corvus did not let that energy go to waste.
Talk shows began to host them.
Question Time shifted its panel format. Crossfire in America did the same. Studio lights fell on broad shoulders and calm faces. The presenters smiled too hard. Scientists sat in the audience with notebooks and small recorders, eager and frightened at once.
A Unit member sat in the BBC studio and held out a palm.
A glass rose from the table, spun slowly, then settled. A second glass joined it. A third followed. The audience held its breath as the glasses lifted higher, then higher again, until they hovered above the host's head like obedient planets. The host followed the scientists and the crowd. Everyone was hovering.
A man in the front row laughed, sharp and disbelieving. His wife slapped his arm and told him to shut up.
The Unit member glanced at the host, then at a heavy metal lump placed on the stage for effect. It looked like scrap from a shipyard. It had been measured and weighed before it was brought in, and a producer had probably signed forms to prove it was real.
The Unit member's hand rose.
The metal lifted.
The studio floor creaked under the shift in weight and attention. The audience made a sound that sat between applause and panic.
On the second lift, the lump moved across the stage as if it were a toy, then settled in a new position with a dull thud.
The host tried to speak and failed.
A protester interviewed outside the studio shouted into a microphone about devils and forbidden power. He quoted scripture. He spoke with the rigid certainty of a man who had never been asked to explain his beliefs to someone who could set a desk on fire by accident.
Inside the studio, the audience did not care.
They frowned at the protesters on the split screen. They called them backwards. They called them dangerous radicals.
A new line had been drawn.
On another week, Question Time booked a different sort of guest.
John Baines, an Oxford professor, specialist in Egyptian art, religion, and cultural history. Sat with his hands folded, face thoughtful, the posture of a man used to lecture halls and footnotes. Michael Grant, a prolific historian of Rome and Greece. Known for his work on ancient civilisations, leaned back in his chair with the mild impatience of someone who had spent his life correcting sloppy public myths.
Across from them, Countess Seraphine sat as if the studio chair were a throne that happened to have a microphone in front of it.
It was not hard to 'arrange' her past. She was introduced as a historian and a Mana user.
She allowed the title to stand. She would not play along if she did not like the idea.
Baines spoke first, careful as always. "We can agree that records of miracles exist. We can agree that people believed. What we cannot do is treat those accounts as evidence of an energy source that has only recently been observed."
Grant inclined his head, voice clipped and austere. "Mana may be newly named, but novelty does not confer antiquity. Our sources speak in myth; history does not bend to any myth's authority. Were it otherwise, Pantheos would stand as facts. We must draw the line; myths are not history."
Seraphine's mouth curved in a small, contemptuous smile.
The host leaned forward, hungry for a moment.
Seraphine let the silence stretch until the studio audience shifted.
"Dr Lasombra," the host prompted.
She looked at him like he was a polite inconvenience. "Recorded history is not truth. It is an agreement between men who write and men who fund."
Baines's brows drew together. Grant's jaw set.
Seraphine lifted a hand, and the gesture was graceful enough to seem harmless. "You date the pyramids to two thousand five hundred BCE because that is what your models tolerate. You dismiss the possibility of advanced civilisation before it because it offends your neat timeline."
Grant started to respond.
Seraphine cut him off with a glance that carried rank like a blade. "Göbekli Tepe exists. Your own dates place it at least nine thousand six hundred BCE. Some of your colleagues are older than twelve thousand. Yet you still speak as if progress began when your textbooks say it began."
Baines's voice stayed measured. "Göbekli Tepe is a ritual site, not proof of global advancement."
Seraphine's smile turned colder. "And your definition of advancement is shaped by what you are willing to accept."
In the audience, a young woman in the second row stared at Seraphine with an expression that looked too close to worship.
On TV, clips of Seraphine's face circulated faster than the words.
Beauty carried arguments further than evidence.
A cult, unnamed and unorganised, began in living rooms that same night.
--
Far from Hyde Park and studio lights, Corvus worked in quiet rhythm.
He returned to the frigate between runs into the Abydos caverns. He absorbed traits, processed mapped memories, and left again with the same calm that made his crew uneasy.
Elizaveta waited for him in his quarters.
The room smelled like her, and he found himself caring about it more than he should.
He settled on the edge of the bed and let the last absorption settle in his bones. Power sat under his skin like a second pulse.
Elizaveta watched him from the chair by the window, legs crossed, expression unreadable until her eyes landed on him and softened.
Corvus turned his head and held her gaze.
"If I were to leave this planet, this... dimension," he began.
He let the words land as they were, direct and heavy.
Elizaveta's glacial blue eyes locked onto his with a steadiness that never pretended she was fragile.
"Will you accompany me, my little wolf?"
Love lit her eyes before she gave him any answer.