The Boy Who Burned the World-05

Maximillian Reinhardt, as Lord Cygnus of the Abyss, instantly became an international figure in the media and therefore in popular culture across the planet. Despite the pressures of governments and private opposition groups, a strong and growing number of people became attracted to Cygnus and erected fan sites and pages and groups of varying degrees of seriousness and sophistication devoted to their adoration of him. Maximillian, in public, criticized this as being the madness of the crowd in action. As Lord Cygnus, he encouraged it through more and more destructive spectacle. But now Chester Lame resurrected his old self.

Using his former name as an alias, and using manipulated photos of his old life, he resurrected Chester Lame as an online persona. By way of this persona, he quickly usurped control of the most influential groups and began exploiting them. He also began filtering their membership, seeking both useful idiots and useful agents, by sharing the most basic teachings and urging them to make videos of them using these powers. This caused a global eruption of copycats, most of them tragically short in their operations as they either botched the casting of their purloined powers or got killed attempting to make use of what little they knew.

The global Establishments freaked out at this development. The super-soldiers activated proved sufficient for most of the copycats encountered, but against Lord Cygnus himself they were woefully inadequate- save as expendable fodder to measure Cygnus's abilities, and that presumed that Cygnus did not hold back to conceal his true power. Once they learned that some online fan groups disseminated actual magical teachings that worked, they dropped the hammer, and that provoked a counter-attack from the free speech and civil liberties sectors which resulted in a legal shitstorm in all countries- and therefore ended up in super-national bodies like the United Nations when differing national and regional legal fights threatened to create an unworkable patchwork of policies.

However, the proof posted by the Cygnus Cult (as the emerging dominant online group came to become) of the teachings working--over and over and over again--drew in such an explosion of interest (and attendant increase in both accidents and ego-driven attempts at villainy) that it became impossible for the global Establishment to maintain the illusion of a free and open world culture being assaulted by an insane supervillain any longer. The world-wide police state, already lying dormant and operating quietly in the background, emerged overnight via the imposition of some variation of the Enabling Acts and with it ended all pretense that the planet was not already a global plutocratic oligarchy with competing factions vying for total domination. To combat the menace, the governments of the world imposed a total lockdown on the population and spied on all media tracking of all sorts without shame.

The populations of the world, even the most brainwashed and oppressed, would not stand for this and revolted. As Cygnus, he used his online "fan" to incite these populations to revolt. He exposed their secrets, with evidence, and though the Establishment wielded their full media and martial might to combat this threat it was not enough. Once the Cygnus Cultists began openly assaulting riot police from ambush, revolution broke out all over the planet and no more double-talk would be had. Global civil war had taken its place, and the people the world fractured instantaneously into their component natural nations. The world, no matter what, could no longer be preserved.