Asher’s stunt had sent the entire planet into a panic, just as Nymphadora had predicted.

People were more likely to notice that something was off, well, more off than the usual ridiculousness of flying cars, invisible people, and talking plants. Reports of strange people that never slept, roving groups of cannibals that drank blood, and people staring at each other for minutes at a time became a daily occurrence.

The government told everyone that they were all hoaxes, they were at a loss and would find whatever group of astrals were playing horrible tricks on the world at large.

Privately, they were at a loss.

No one in government was going to come on television and say, Well yes, we are finally starting to have a functioning government after being a former colony controlled by aliens from another universe for two centuries, but now it seems that demons are real and want to eat your children.

Cue the commercial about cheese.

All the monsters big and small, skinny and large, scaly, feathered, in the sea, air or ground were restless as the government started coming up with excuses to cover up that there was another problem to stave off mass panic. They started to feed a narrative to the public that the Regal Empire was trying to split the planet into nations again to make them weak and the many freak accidents were scare tactics.

There was nothing left to stave off because mass panic was well underway.

In the last week of November, the planet of Paradis was invaded, in its capital of Atlaan, by the Regal Empire. Thousands died, thousands were never found, and a Defense Program base was almost destroyed, the second one attacked within two and a half years.

Now anyone who looked too different was an Empire spy!

Your neighbors, your teachers, they were all out to get you!

The meatsuits were keeping their eyes out for anything that wasn’t quite right. But no one knew what that bar was anymore when most office buildings had a landing pad on the rooftop for employees that flew into work and their baristas made their coffee in 2 seconds heating it up with their laser-powered eyes.

Most of the creatures of the night had become creatures of the day if physically possible, the existence of astrals allowing them to blend in, sometimes even using their supernatural abilities in public without people noticing.

The less humanoid they looked, the less likely they were to blend in, but for those that did, it was a welcome change, albeit a strange one once the Empire came and left. But with no bar to place on what was normal one had to be made.

So, a caucus of well-meaning meatsuits in their sharp suits, red or blue power ties, and wearing designer watches introduced a bill that passed quickly and enforced the collection of DNA for all registered persons in their locality.

If anyone had too much Ionadian blood inside of them, they were clearly an Empire spy!

Of course, the sweet irony of it all was that most of the people who were in the caucus, who wrote the bill, were descendants of the colonizers themselves, descendants of the viceroyalty that decided to stay after the civil war because they didn’t want to give up their land, slaves employees, and parking spaces.

People were being rounded up, native-born Earthians, legal and illegal immigrants, and people who were never DNA tested but didn’t look quite right. Hysteria was riled up again because people knew, some were still alive when it happened to remember the mass executions.

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When the Empire came, they killed various groups, many of them at random, and the citizens of Earth did not understand why those certain groups over others. The first group, most of the nobility of various nations, was a logical choice, so no Earthian would unite under the banner of a ‘born leader’.

The second was horrific.

The Empire had learned of various different races and ethnicities that referred to themselves as those blessed by God. They were next.

The third, and most confusing was the last group.

It was people with freckles.

No one on Earth had anything against people with freckles when the Empire arrived. It was hard for them to brainwash friends and neighbors to turn over their freckled friends because there were people of all religions and ethnicities who had them. There was no singular race or creed that was excluded from the executions, so the Empire had to create possibly the strangest propaganda machine in existence.

Two hundred years later, no one on Earth knew why, but there were few people with freckles left, and they were seen as subhuman, filthy freckled freaks.

The first people to be hauled off again once the random DNA testing was proven to be useless were whatever freckled people freaks, they could find, and it wasn’t a lot.

Or people with moles.

Or people with beauty marks.

The United Territories and the Nation States of Earth were under the most turmoil it had been in a century all because Asher decided to do something without thinking of the consequences, and every single day that passed the worse it became.

Soon calls for war against the Empire were being shouted from the streets.

Freckled spies were in their midst! Empyrean Ionadians were stealing their women and burning their crops! Poisoning their water supply! Eating a slice of bread and not tying the bag when they were done! So many lies were told because the war hawks circled above, money to be made in the dying corporate-military-prison industry.

With fewer wars under a singular government, there was less demand for soldiers, less crime with a higher standard of living, and fewer prisons. The screams for war and the death of the other made stockholders everywhere salivate and foam at the mouth, choking on their own spittle.

The government had dug a hole, and there was no way out.

The Empire was not setting up discord and strife on Earth, because they had been doing it fine, quite exceptionally, all on their own since the inception of time itself. Earth was a part of the Galactic Union, but they did not want to start a war, a proxy war, maybe, but to take responsibility and fight a war on their own soil.

How silly!

With the Warhawks, now war vultures, circling the politicians in the hole from above, waiting for them to die, the politicians learned how to kill two birds with one stone.

Carlos and his small, silly little group were not the only ones looking to find ways to end their curses. The government monitored all of them, they monitored everyone, so after another very subtle propaganda message, the government fed stories to news networks everywhere.

That there were a group of terrorist astrals posing as Empyrean spies to topple the Earthian government, and that they were angry because they all had the worst side effects from their abilities, making their bodies grotesque.

Military enrollment skyrocketed, the hysteria of the past few months increased the crime rate, then the prison rate and profits were to be made, the machine roaring back to life, the beauty of subversive imagery on mass media, and political pandering.

A small army was created to fight the ‘terrorist astrals’, which were monsters the government wanted to get rid of, and no one questioned it, because what was there to question? The government would never lie to its people because it wanted what was best.

However, what was best was never best for the citizens.

Carlos Alvarez had a fake identity to make his life easier, as all other monsters did, and one day, he opened the mail of his alias, which somehow nobody noticed was Pablo Escobar, and was told to come down to the local police station for questioning involving acts of terrorism.

Mimi, Kalei, and all the other monsters that had human IDs received the same letters, and Carlos knew that this was the beginning of something that could not end well.

As the planet of Paradis was attacked, Earth was as well, all on its own.