The Wizards Are Coming; the Wizards are Coming!
Can you imagine — just for a moment — if there really was a "Wizarding World," how we "Muggles" would react if we found out about it for real? How bitterly angry we would be that they hadn't shared their secrets of, oh, say, magical healing with us, through all our long years of struggling with diseases like cancer, heart disease, and AIDS? How we would feel if they revealed themselves to us, and we found out that they could, for instance, move through space and time faster than the speed of light, and could turn back time (the Time Turner), and could live forever (the Sorcerer's Stone), and could recall loved ones from the dead for a chit-chat (the Resurrection Stone), but had never bothered to share those secrets with us, their neighbors, their friends, some of us their relatives?
How fantastically jealous we would be that they hadn't put their billions in Galleons into our struggling national and international economies? How fearful we would be of their ability to place Taboos on our everyday words, fling killing curses at us with their wands with a word — and take them past metal detectors because they’re made of wood — or Apparate into the Pentagon, Imperious the President or a Senator or two, or Stupefy our soldiers, or concoct a potion that enabled them to impersonate any of us, by simply and literally becoming us for a time? That they had access to creatures and monsters that could easily, if they got loose, cause a reign of terror and bloodshed within any given Muggle neighborhood? That they could cause explosions just by waving a wand? That they could re-animate the dead? That they could transfigure people, animals, and objects into other people, animals, and objects, and, once again, had never shared their powers with us — and that they did not want to share their powers with us. And what a crisis of faith it would be for our religious leaders — and what a strange invitation to our more adventurous psychopaths — when it was discovered that one could, in point of objective, observable fact, split one's soul into pieces? Or that there was objective, observable, quantifiable proof that the soul itself actually existed? Or that by using Legilimancy, they could open our minds and read our deepest thoughts, just by pointing their wands at us?
And, let me repeat this once more: That they had never once, in a thousand years or more, thought to share their knowledge, their power, their gifts with a struggling, starving, sick, poverty-stricken, and war-torn Muggle world. That they had been so selfish with their power as to conceal it from even the pages of history itself. That they had been so greedy with their power as to even occlude it from the minds of history’s greatest thinkers, messiahs, philosophers, prophets, and scientists. That they had abandoned us, time and again, in our most desperate hours of need, and had kept all to themselves the mysteries — and answers, and solutions to problems — provided by the powerful gift that was Magic. That they had never once conceded to help us, to be there for us, to lend us a helping hand, to reach out their wands and save us from tyranny, disease, famine, disaster, brutality, death, grief, torture, calamity, or extinction. Or even from ourselves. Not once did they act, not once did they reach out their wands to spare us any of the harm that history might have visited upon us. And yet here they stand, revealed to us now, and revealed is the fact that they have been there all along.
Can you imagine, just for a moment, how the Muggle world would perceive any one of these things — not to mention how it might see the "purebloods" and their metahuman version of species-wide racism! — and how it would react to any one of them, let alone all of them? All at once? All of them, revealed all at the same time, in one fell swoop to the world, when the walls between the Muggle World and the Wizarding World came crashing down one day, and the Wizards and Witches were revealed for who and what they really were —engineers of reality itself! Living gods, made flesh and blood, walking our streets, living amongst us. The panic would be uncontainable. There would be chaos everywhere.
What would the world be like when the dust finally settled? I would like to see a story where this happens. And yeah I know, "Mage: The Ascension" is a thing, but I'm talking about an actual novel-length piece of fiction set in a pre-established universe where previously, everything fit together neatly at the seams, and where we only saw things from the Wizarding perspective.