"Sora, Sora! Today is 13 January 2079, 7:00 am. The sun has been up for 24 minutes, and the weather forecast indicates that it will shine all day long, with rare intervals of cloudiness. Average temperatures will be 19°C in the morning and 28°C in the early afternoon. The important events of the day are: the start of the school year."

The robotic voice of the alarm clock assaulted my ears while I slowly opened my eyes.

"Gnnaaahh!!!!"

I yawned and stretched for a long time before closing my eyes, falling back into a state of drowsiness.

" Kyyaaah! "

A draft of air, passing between my legs and up my spine to the back of my neck made me shiver.

After a brief sigh before jumping out of bed, I focused my gaze on the window, which was ajar. That and sleeping in my underwear are bad habits since the last heat wave. Now I couldn't help but sleep half-naked. Even after trying my best, I was constantly waking up with that opened window and a lot of my clothes loose on the floor.

'Well, I'm going back to school today, I'd better not to be late anyway.'

I took my clothes that werer lying around and threw them into a corner of the small fifteen square metre room that I used as a flat, on top of a small pile of other dirty clothes that were just waiting to be washed.

I grabbed my last clean outfit from my wardrobe and put it on: simple black jeans, a top and a leather jacket of the same colour. I liked black, but my outfit was really creepy. The colour also contrasted perfectly with the white of my hair and the bright red colour of my eyes. In a way, these clothes fit me incredibly well.

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It took me fifteen minutes for my morning wash, half of which was spent brushing my hair. Putting on my shoes, taking my keys, closing the door, I left for the school.

I walked down the street, alone. An incredible number of houses surrounded me, but each of them, almost without exception, was uninhabited.

'The Ghost Quarter' was the name given to this neighbourhood. It used to be the liveliest neighbourhood in Fiji.

Suva now contained more than ten million inhabitants, but the population was mainly concentrated in the south of the city, towards the port.

The northern districts, which were irradiated by the American M51s stolen from France during the last world war, are now uninhabited, although the decontamination of the areas has been completed.

Poor maintenance has given way to lush vegetation, something rare now in Fijian cities, which had become one of the world's five great powers, along with Japan, Argentina, the North American Terrorist Alliance, and the New USSR, now extended to the whole former Eurasian continent.

'Former' was the correct term indeed, because the face of the Earth had completely changed since the last world war, which had lasted almost twelve years.

The repeated assault of the American M51s on the whole world, as well as the immediate response of the USSR, just re-founded in the year 2024, and of the European Union acting in the sake of peace, destroyed the world.

A temporary scientific alliance between Australia and New Zealand allowed the development of a terraforming process that renewed the earth's crust. Unfortunately, the process failed in the long term, and although the Earth's surface was decontaminated, a succession of natural disasters massacred the populations that had survived the bombing.

The result was a total modification of the Earth's surface: 80% of the old lands disappeared, while the strong volcanic activity around the fire belt and other oceanic ridges led to the creation of new islands and, above all, a new continent, now dominated by the Republic of Fiji, the third power after Argentina and Japan.

After fifteen years of massacres, only 10% of the population, or 750 million people, had survived.

The Earth had changed. But so had humanity. Irradiated, human beings had seen their genetic code change. Human interaction with nature and the laws of physics was no longer as it once was. Man, had been made 'wiser' by this war according to some philosophers, and had acquired the ability to interact with the universe.

As for the children of the survivors, almost a tenth of them were endowed with 'capacity', now called 'singularities', a kind of ability that linked them to nature. For lovers of 'fantasy', we would call it 'magic'.

Singularities developed from birth, so it was possible to know who would be endowed or not with this magnificent power.

From then on, the world was centred on these children, endowed with singularities. They fought wars, trade, politics, and were already called by a common name: the Arcanists.