The world began its morning the same way it had always done. The cities came alive with commuter noise, traffic lights flickering, and stores rolling open like any other weekday. But under all of it, beneath the polite greetings and the distant barking of street vendors, old tension was buried.
It had been about two hundred years since the "Irregulars" appearances were first documented.
Their emergence had been sudden with no warning. First, the global population went about its normality. Then, newborns began to enter the world, showing undeniable abilities that can only be called supernatural. Their abilities widely varied, with some only having subtle enhancements to terrifying anomalies that defied logic, physics, and medical explanation.
The first generation was small, a little less than one percent of the population.
But then their numbers grew.
Doctors recorded more births of the Irregulars each decade. By the beginning of the 24th century, Irregulars made up nearly twenty percent of the global population. As their numbers expanded, governments scrambled to define them.
Yes, they were humans, that much was undeniable. Yet something else lived beneath their skin, things that defied logic itself. They were both gifted or cursed, depending on which news network you watched. Some claimed they were the next natural step of evolution. Others insisted they were evidence of divine judgment. Some feared them, while others worshiped them. But most people tolerated them in the same strained way strangers tolerated one another on public transit; nicely, but never with complete trust.
But that wasn't all to the story; there was another half that was waiting to be revealed. Variants...
Unlike Irregulars, Variants were not human. They arrived without pattern, as Irregulars did. Manifestations of biological madness, creatures with supernatural abilities twisted into monstrosities. The first sighting had been small, dismissed as nothing more than urban legends.
But the more they appeared, the more evidence came to show that they were not.
Variants destroyed on instinct rather than intent. They didn't show any signs of reasoning, nor did they hesitate to destroy what was in their path. Wherever one might appear, nothing was safe: cities, forests, coastal towns. Every continent, nation, and military branch learned the same truth: Variants cannot be reasoned with, nor can they coexist with this world.
Eventually, the term Variant became unanimously synonymous with a disaster.
Emergency alerts used the word in the same way they used "tornado" or "chemical hazard."
Because of them, governments worldwide wanted more control over these Irregulars. Upon birth, they demanded that Irregulars be registered and that they be tracked and monitored to see if they were fit to be placed in society. Some governments required yearly appointments to gather more data on the origin of their power. After all, both groups shared sudden unnatural origins. Both wielded supernatural abilities. Although Irregulars lived, worked, studied, and voted alongside regular citizens, fear had a way of creating prejudice. Whenever a Variant attack claimed lives, people blamed Irregulars for their emergence in the world.
Some saw Irregulars as equals, like everyday people with their own uniqueness.
Others viewed them as nothing more than ticking time bombs ready to destroy the world.
Governments tried to stand in the middle as well, though their version of "middle" leaned one direction more heavily than the other.
But life went on.