This story is based on two series. Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber's "The Mutant Season" and The World of Xanth by Piers Anthony.
Disclaimer: With the exception ofthe protagonist and a few members of her family, I don't own the rights to the aforementioned books. I am just glad that they have created such wonderful worlds for us readers to explore.
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Prologue
What does THE FLY, THE CHRYSALIS and THE MARVEL UNIVERSE have in common? Other than the fact that all three were products of the human imagination. If your answer is mutants, you have deduced the theme of this story. Ah, yes, the mutants. The outsiders. The secret changed ones. Hidden away from the "normal" society, surviving on their skill at slight of hand, as medicine men or women and as thieves. Theologists had argued that mutants have been present as early as the Fifteenth Century. Some even say that they could have been a sub-group of the Gypsies.
In the late Seventies and Eighties, the more liberal of the mutants covertly observed the reaction they have on "normal" society. They were young and optimistic and believed that given time the normals would come to accept them. The normals reacted alright. But not what the young mutants had expected. They were regarded at best as sideshow freaks and at worst, a disease that was to be avoided at all costs. The mutants persevered and for a time the normals seemed to be tolerating them. It was not until the Nineties that the mutants emerged into the public light and demanded equality. For the first time in mutant history their tightly knitted group was divided. The older, traditional mutants felt that the time was not right to re-integrate themselves to the other society. The younger ones, encouraged by the tolerance most of the normals had shown toward them, pushed for the motion to rejoin the rest of the Human Race. The traditionists just shook their heads and said that the younger Generation were courting disaster. But no one had foreseen the violence that will come with such idealistic dreams…