Total Annihilation of the Original Universe

### Cause(s)

- Collateral damage caused by combat between the Seven Bearers of Unlimited Potential
- Finishing blow by Void via a Black Hole

### Outcome

- The destruction of Original Earth and the rest of the Universe
- Katie and The ChessMaster were the only survivors, having escaped annihilation by using the most forbidden Dimensional Magic as a desperate last resort

The Total Annihilation of the Original Universe is a crucial historical event that is only spoken of in whispers, and is not believed by most.

## Importance to Katie and Implications

Only Katie, her closest friends from the Astro Surveillance Team and her closest friends from the Harmony Freaks know about this. This is a traumatic event for Katie to remember, as she can easily be overwhelmed by the number of lives she feels responsible for not being able to save, and the loss of all the dear loved ones it entailed. Memories of this are exactly why Katie wants to remain as secret as possible, and to try hide the existence of Magic as a practice that can be learnt by anyone. Both Katie and even The ChessMaster are hiding a dangerous secret together.

## True Explanation

This event happened can be traced back to when Katie was a Human, as a part of an elite scientific team of 7 members - including her - who discovered a form of quasi-magic, which was Proto Magic. Proto Magic started to blur the lines between science and just pure nonsense being real. An example of Proto Magic is a Flame Gauntlet, which is a gauntlet that rapidly concentrates body temperature into a small point, and allows the user to perform several magical tricks by using very specific, special gestures. While it had a scientific component to it, there were mechanics going on in there that were not fully understood. Later on, these workings were traced back to the Critical Universal Loophole, a secret realization so shocking, and so immensely open to sheer abuse that the seven scientists agreed to keep it a secret from everyone - because if others found out, they would have a mess on their hands. None of them ever wanted to touch it again. Once they found out what they had discovered, they all simultaneously resigned from their position, a situation that baffled researchers worldwide - they had gotten so far to invent Proto Magic, but suddenly all resigned under different, mysterious excuses. In addition, all evidence of the Critical Universal Loophole in the research facility had been destroyed.

Despite this - despite the vow to never touch it again, each of the seven ex-scientists were guilty of covertly holding a copy of all the research they had found about the Critical Universal Loophole, and each of them separately continued their research about it while lying to each other about destroying the research - including Katie. They each discovered True Magic separately, by abusing of the Critical Universal Loophole to not only do feats previously thought to be impossible without the need of even Proto-Magical equipment, but also to continue growing in power. They each unlocked unlimited magical potential, and that is when they became the Seven Bearers of Unlimited Potential.

### Katie's Abuse of The Critical Universal Loophole

Initially, Katie simply researched the loophole, secretly growing in power and increasing her mental toughness and mental power to become more and more powerful. Over several weeks, the temptation grew to "maybe start using just a little magic" outside of her secret lab. She would do it covertly, such as going to a hospital to visit patients under the guise of a religious visit, and cure all the terminally ill patients when nobody was looking. She secretly felt happy that she gave them their life back, and felt special for knowing that news articles about the 'miracle' were written, when she knows it was she that did it.

As Katie began using this magic to travel the world, she became more and more burdened with the knowledge of how much suffering there is on the world. At some point, Katie gave in to the temptation completely, and started outright using the magic to benefit her family and adopted children. What event in particular caused this "event horizon" in her mind is unknown to this date.

The first feat she performed that arouse suspicion was that she privately cured one of her mentally retarded adopted children of the condition, and re-crafted their brain to be hyper-intelligent in capabilities - something that was completely unfathomable. Seeing him suddenly perform extremely well and suddenly become popular and loved brought her great enjoyment. She broadened the horizon when she started thinking of ways to improve other people's lives - for the sake of her own quiet enjoyment. She went around the world, targeting underdogs, the downtrodden and the incapable and turned the lives of several of thousands of people around - for one cost, which was adopting her values of empathy and love. This caused her to become suddenly well-connected, because the people who she helped later started becoming successful people who were inspired by her kindness. They each started giving her some very lucrative opportunities - and sometimes, even blatant donations running in the millions from previously hopeless, homeless people that became rich and famous by their enhanced intelligence and sudden competitive edge due to the indirect help from Katie. Eventually, she found out a way to protect herself from age, and did the same thing with her family. She had more riches and businesses than she knew what to do with, and started pooling this extra money into NGOs that she wanted to push her values onto the rest of the world.

However, her political connections and fame for being the most influential, kind person eventually started breeding suspicion from her ex-employers, who started suspecting that she is using Proto Magic to do all of this. They were half-correct; because she was using True Magic to pull this off. However, Katie was extremely intelligent and determined, and always managed to win the numerous court cases they started against her, because they had no evidence - and she hid it too well.

But more than anything, Katie acted with good intentions. Katie felt like she was righting the several wrongs she saw in the world, and her newfound ability to change people's lives for the better started changing her. Katie never thought of the small population of people who she had unintentionally ruined due to her intervention with underdogs - some major companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, and several people would lose their jobs. But she became fixated with helping the world become a utopia. She was becoming crazy with power.

This eventually started troubling Katie's Husband, who noticed she was spending hours on end in her secret lab researching magic and not spending enough time with the family. Katie felt extremely guilty about this. She instead chose to dampen this guilt by showering her husband with so much of her gained business riches and trying to distract him with vacations. Katie's love became different - it stopped being a love for her husband specifically, but rather, an unconditional love for all of humanity. To her, peace and order among all of humanity was an extremely noble cause that spending time with one specific person should come second to.

The restricted time and Katie's ever-rising political power began greatly frustrating her husband. One day, he broke up with her over a serious discussion alone at the dinner table. However, shockingly, Katie did not seem to mind, only being mildly disappointed in his decision, and accepting it without resistance. Something in her had changed and distorted weirdly, and she was okay with it. She confessed to him that she had a dream of a utopia - one where all "humans" will live in total peace and harmony, and that she would have been the one to do that. She offered him to be part of her dream, and that the door is always open. Katie told him that she has a new lover now, which is all of humanity - including him. All this greatly creeped out her husband, who was expecting her to change her mind or to be angry at him. And especially the way that she talked, referring to humanity as "humans", as if she no longer identified as one.

This was immediately shown to be the case - Katie visibly transformed in front of him, growing taller and bigger - she announced to him that she's on her way to be "Humanity's Best Mom", and there's no going back. That is when her Faux Freak Transformation occurred. This is unique in the sense that it was no unintentional, but rather, it was an intentional body-morphing spell cast by herself, and a permanent sealing of her ideas of unconditional love, empathy and science - whereas a normal Freak transformation is unintentional. Even though he broke up with her, she loved him anyway, and understood why he was frustrated - due to a certain sense of selfishness. The reality was that Katie was not spending enough time with him to make him feel like he is more special than the rest of the humanity. Katie understood that his frustrations stemmed from not feeling special anymore, but as this was a direct conflict with her cause that everyone is just as special to her, she accepted the break up graciously.

The transformation into a pink bat greatly shocked her ex-husband, and despite it being a harmless sight, he ran in terror because of the sheer freakishness of the whole situation. This was the moment where Katie completely lost her guilt and shame, and went public - dressing herself in a new padded white Howie coat to accommodate for her larger body, she showed her new face to the rest of the world, admitting to all the good things she had secretly been responsible for doing. She started getting more involved in political affairs, which was met with an initial total rejection. She was this animal-human hybrid, and others were too creeped out to take her as a serious politician. This greatly disappointed her, but she did not stop until she started swaying public opinion - even going as far to hire companies to host a successful pro-empathy and pro-Katie campaign. This succeeded, and despite starting to lose money to court cases due to her ex-employers finding out that she really was using the magic for her own benefit, she was making more from businesses than she was losing.

At one crucial point, another unknown event caused her to jump the gun about her plan to create a utopia. She started raising awareness of her extreme powers and started amassing a whole cult following of people who would accept her as the all-loving ruler of the world, and to give her the ability to override any decisions any political party makes, or make changes as she sees fit. This was highly illegal as it is technically a conquest of the entire world, although her fanatic following had grown unexpectedly large, and was growing virulently. She was arrested multiple times and let go through political contacts in the law enforcement sector, and eventually, she became virtually untouchable by the law. Some people were worried for their freedom, and started organizing groups to try kill Katie before she succeeds in managing to become ruler of the Earth. However, it was already too late - Katie's magical ability had grown too powerful, and she was able to withstand nuclear attacks, create temporary clones of herself, and become immune to death itself. Soon, after the whole world made an organized effort to kill Katie and saw that she was untouchable, they all surrendered and countries, one by one, began accepting her as Earth's ruler. Her moral influence had spread so deeply that regimes, governments and other political leaders would risk civil war and total collapse if they did not please the people by allowing Katie to force them to override any decision she sees unfit.

At that moment, there was no force powerful enough to contest her, and any further rebellions were quickly thwarted and reconditioned. Soon, most of the world was in love with her, and she felt that her dream of a utopia was finally becoming real. She created the Way of Harmony, a value system that is designed to have everyone get along, a system that rewards productivity, empathy and co-operation.

### Katie meets the ChessMaster

That is when Katie ended up meeting a newly transformed Chessmaster. Without even saying anything, they both immediately knew that they both lied about having destroyed all their knowledge of the Critical Universe Loophole - just from their appearance. The ChessMaster confessed to Katie that he loved what she was doing, as it is a situation that he couldn't even fathom happening before. He also confessed that he secretly had a part in both helping her as well as feeding fire into the civil war and revolts against her. He admitted that he has never had so much fun toying with "Humans", and it was all possible thanks to her challenging and crushing the status quo. Katie at that point realized that The ChessMaster too, had stopped identifying as human.

Due to the extraordinary circumstances, Katie and The ChessMaster became friends, despite being complete opposites - order and chaos. They started thinking that, in some sick sort of meta sense, pain and suffering had to exist for co-operation and goodness of the heart to exist - and that a fully dark, chaotic world will eventually breed kindness, whereas a fully ordered world will eventually breed chaos. If there was no such thing as mental retardation, she wouldn't have been able to turn the life of a mentally retarded child around to a successful one - she just wouldn't have had the opportunity to be kind and go through all the trouble of researching it in the first place. If there were only gangs and struggle for power, there will eventually be someone like Katie who rejects it all and is powerful enough to crush the chaos with overwhelming order, and history repeats itself. Katie was deeply troubled by this idea and wanted to reject it, but secretly felt like she could not deny its truth. Meanwhile, The ChessMaster thought of it as a fact of life.

### The Downfall at the hands of Void

Eventually, more and more of the Seven Bearers of Unlimited Potential started showing up, exerting their own influence - the other five scientists who were previously their colleagues started breaking into massive arguments and fights. The fights began to involve so much magical power, that Katie and The ChessMaster began to foresee that this will lead to the end of the world.

Fearing for the safety of the universe, Katie and The ChessMaster began to make visits to the five other scientists, who were now Freaks just like them. At some point, Void deemed the universe as unfit to exist. Void said that soon, he would end the world with a black hole, and began casting a great Universe Tier magical spell. Katie had seen this coming, since she had preemptively looked into Dimensional Magic in an attempt to create a backup plan. She toured the world, collecting as much scientific data about the state of the world as she could, and got a lot of help from The ChessMaster. However, it happened faster than she expected, and Katie was forced to cut their losses and create a basic personal dimensional that only had space for a mere fraction of the total knowledge that the human race has ever documented, and worse still, could only support 3 souls.

Katie felt like this was a terrible dilemma. She loved everyone equally, and didn't want to lose anyone. She had to decide quickly, and on the basis on who is most worth keeping. She chose The ChessMaster, and tried to find her ex-husband again. At that moment, she found that her ex-husband had suffered grievous injuries due to the increasing collateral damage of Void's magical spell, having been half-crushed by a column of her former house. Her husband only had time to tell her that he realized he was being selfish and he wished that he joined her on her journey to make wrongs right instead of leaving her. He told her that in the face of losing everything, he finally understood how noble Katie's cause was.

With not much time left as pieces of the Earth were beginning to warp and everyone's bodies were starting to compress, Katie quickly pocketed The ChessMaster and her own ex-husband in her own Lab Dimension in the nick of time. This set in motion the events of The Great Reset.