There has always been magic. And magic has a life of its own. It comes and goes without our control. It flows through the world as it will.

This is how the world was Awakened.

Magical energy ran through the veins of the world like blood through humans. It changed her. And it changed her people.

And it came to pass that events shaped by magic began to alter history.

Earthquakes tore the earth apart. The Four Horse- men of the Apocalypse seemed to be riding across the world. Conquest, War, Famine, and Death raged unabated. The VITAS plague alone took almost a quarter of the world's population in the year 2010.

Then came 2011: the Year of Chaos.

Governments fell. Famine gripped the poor and stalked the wealthy. Nuclear power failed, causing massive radiation fallout. War peppered the world, toppling heads of state, creating new countries.

And then there were the children.

At first, they were called deformities. Then muta- tions. The superstitious called them changelings, and saw the Hand of God at play. Finally, science of- fered a label: UGE. Unexplained Genetic Expres- sion. Everywhere you looked the media ran stories about these babies, calling them elves and dwarfs. The age-old specter of prejudice had found new vic- tims.

At the end of 2011, the most dramatic event of the newly Awakened world occurred. The great worm, Ryumyo, rose from his long sleep inside Mt. Fuji. Thousands watched as the first dragon the techno- logical world had seen took to the sky. In dragon fashion he ignored humans. Humanity got its first close-up look at a dragon when Dunkelzahn con- sented to a series of trideo interviews. The ratings were fantastic and launched Dunkelzahn as an inter- national celebrity.

In 2014, The Native American Nations claimed responsibility for the eruption of Redondo Peak, This cataclysmic event buried nearby Los Alamos in volcanic ash. In a desperate measure to assert con- trol, the United States government sent federal agents in. to stop the NAN uprising. They were swept into oblivion by tornadoes resulting from the powerful shamanistic magic of the Great Ghost Dance.