Fish in a Barrel
An unspecified date, an unspecified time, an open stretch of the illimitable Pacific. Shortly before things change.
An albatross examines the waters below from a comfortable altitude of fifty meters, fluctuating as it lets thermals carry it along and gravity bring it down. It is more studious than usual, because it has been enlarged to an unusual size even for its kind, greatly increasing its possible range of prey as well as its appetite. The bird does not know how this happened, but it is aware of being a different size than when it last slept. Its wingspan has increased remarkably, a rather ambitious forty meters, with its body a full thirteen meters in length.
This is patently impossible in light of anatomy, biology, and basic physiscs. To put it simply, those laws have shattered as one. Explanations of this are difficult and prolix; they may be disposed with. Suffice to say that over the next few hours, things will become very, very different.
A flash of motion below. The bird has sighted prey. A moving object covered in small creatures is passing below it. It is a whale-watching boat, but the bird cannot be expected to know this. It adjusts the angle of its wings and proceeds to attack, cutting down toward the exposed boat and its rapidly hysterical occupants.
The first pass- easy. Its enormous bill, the size of the creatures swarming over the boat, plucks a morsel of food- much easier than catching fish mid-leap as they departed the water. It tilts its head back and the human vanishes down its gullet, encouraged by a quick forward jerk of its throat. There is a large cry from the other creatures, which simply encourages the albatross to return- this is easy nutrition, just the thing to fuel its vast body.
The second pass, the albatross overshoots the boat, as it jumps to life when the bird comes swooping in. With a cry of dismay it tries to turn, but it lacks skill in controlling the thermals with these new wings, and barrels right past. Several of the prey are moving into the boat, much to its dismay, and it banks around as soon as there's space. The clumsiness of an albatross on land is remarkable, but it has to try to keep its belly full. Its impact rocks the entire boat to the side, despite the sharp flaring of its wings to slow down; beating hurriedly at the warm surface air, the bird tries to find a spot on deck.
This is not an easy task, as several creatures are still milling about on the deck, stopping it from setting foot on anything solid. They don't stop it for long, though- the huge bird considers its new mass and lets itself drop on a fairly empty portion of the deck. It catches two humans under its feet anyway, an upper body and then two kicking legs protruding from between webbed toes. Incredible mass presses on them, suffocating and crushing. They both die in seconds, the first one in a mess of blood when the albatross flexes a clawed toe and impales it between the shoulders; the other suffers and strains until the bird's monumental mass turns it into a paste bound by a sack of skin.
The horribly muted gargles of pain, followed by fan-shaped streaks of blood from popped bodies, effectively spur the humans into action. They scurry this way and that, a stampede with no direction, all too aware of the fact that the albatross has landed just at the stairwell into the safety of the ship. Dozens try to leap overboard, awkwardly treading water and in many cases sinking into the waters, praying for aid to the last. The albatross screams in dismay at ear-shattering volume, but two humans remain on the deck, one grotesquely obese. The other is on her knees, pleading. It takes a plodding step forward, rears its head back, and plunges it down on the fat one.
The human's girth is too much for its beak to comfortably hold. It tries to mash him against its palate with its tongue, but the thin muscle lacks the strength, leaving the man wedged into the lower half of a slimy beak stinking of digestion. Frustrated, the bird darts its head forward to help ease him in, but it nearly chokes. To make matters worse, he's beginning to fight now, squirming and punching inside its beak. The infuriated bird shuffles forward, leaving streaks of blood behind, and flips its head upright, gravity funneling the fat man into its throat.
He can barely fit in its beak, and the bird instantly begins to choke. It can't vomit this mass back out- it knows it can only swallow the man or die. Striated bands of throat muscle cling and conform to the meal's surface, straining incredibly as they fight to force him down, his clothing soon plastered to his skin with a sticky layer of drool and mucus. His nostrils burn with the stink of stomach acids and half-digested chyme. Too shocked to struggle, he fights to block the sound of a titanic heart clamoring inside the bird's chest, spots appearing before his eyes in the blackness as the air thins out.
The albatross quivers as its own air runs out, struggling to draw breath past the meal choking off its windpipe. Its throat spasmodically ripples, gagging as it dutifully forces the fat human downward, his slippery coating barely easing the trip into its belly. Gravity and asyphyxiation race; and by a slim margin, its meal vanishes into its food-storing crop, twitching in its final throes. There it will stay, to be released into the churning stomach when the feast is over.
Its head lowers and regards the last human on deck, still on her knees. Vengeful, and more wise about choking itself, the albatross takes its next victim in a new fashion. Prayers are interrupted by a clacking of heavy beak mandibles; blunt, but with enough muscle behind them to shear off the human's left arm. No sooner does a streamer of blood peevishly spurt from the stump than the albatross clumsily maneuvers its beak again, hacking off flesh from one shoulder down to the abdomen, the beak ripping off a breast and skimming over ribs. The human yowls in wordless pain, cut off by a hard squeeze that removes the neck. Sections of the human vanish as the bird feeds, swallowing each chunk and holding it in the crop for later use.
Packed with enough nourishment to keep its body going, the albatross launches from the deck, slightly disappointed that the cries of floating humans have trailed off. It coasts along the thermals, altitude zigzagging as it finds and loses them in turn, planning to circle back in hopes the prey it just discovered will remain. Back on the boat, there are shrill cries as bold humans venture up and see the blood on the decks; those cries are very quickly silenced.
For the rules have just changed, even while the albatross was feeding. Trillions of joules of "exotic" energy- or as it will later be known, mana- are flooding into the world every second, through a process too esoteric to describe here. And oceans are exremely conductive.
Mana has strange effects.
The albatross has only been aloft again for two minutes before it discovers that more has changed than its size. It only discovers this when the thermals vanish below it, gravity quadrupling in an instant, sending the bird plummeting into the waves with a shriek. The fact that it is then devoured is surprising enough, given the bird's size, but being devoured by reality is a new twist altogether...
And the mana courses into the world, like heroin through a vein, a turmoil of activity followed by the barren dark.