Thanks for the help, but I've since decided that it was fantasy. Supernatural is probably only ghosts etc, isn’t it?
Sorry that I couldn’t give a better explanation before, but my time at the library was almost up and I was about to get booted off the computer because of it. Anyway, here's the plot outline. It's still only a draft and could potentially change at any time. It's met with mixed comments from the few I've shown it to so far. I've also just recently changed a few things, so if something doesn't make any sense, call me out on it.
The year on Earth is 22?? (unsure of exact year. Probably the latter part of the century). Kyle Redfield, Europe’s stealthiest burglar, has been a thorn in the side of the police for over fifteen years. When a strange woman arrives at his door, bloodied and beaten, he feels a strange urge to take her in rather than send her to a hospital. As he nurses her back to health, he hacks into police files and finds no mention of the woman ever existing.
Demanding answers, Mala tells him that the worlds of magic and science used to be one, but split apart centuries before because of an unknown cataclysm/someone who wanted to separate them (haven’t decided). So far, so cliché. But don’t worry. I try to put an original spin on all clichés.
During the time they were separated, the magical world, Orlornu, faced a deadly danger and so the Circle was created, a ruling council with absolute power composed of a male and a female of every race: elf, nymph, troll, pixie, ogre, vampire and more. The Circle managed to save Orlornu from destruction, but the power they wielded began to corrupt them. Within a century, they had almost total control of Orlornu, but they wanted more.
Some of the rebels who refused the Circle’s rule attempted to fight back, but most fled through discovered rifts in reality and arrived on Earth in the early 20th century. Since then, the rebels have slowly tried to convince humans of the coming fight while the Circle’s minions hunted each of them down. While the rebel’s numbers were slowly whittled down to less than a hundred, the Circle’s power somehow continued to grow. Now, as their invasion force numbers into the millions, they have almost enough power to start to directly affect Earth and cause chaos throughout the planet: alter human minds on an immense scale to tie them up in massive, senseless wars; alter Earth’s geography to cause volcanic eruptions under major cities or even, if they so chose, burn away the atmosphere entirely.
Kyle refuses to believe her at first, thinking her to be a crazy woman who somehow escaped the government’s records. But when Mala is attacked by the ogre who caused her so much damage before, he starts to realise the truth of what she said. But will he be able to fight against the magic slowly polluting the world?
The answer is obviously yes as he’s the main character. I just nicked part of this off of a blurb I once wrote for it. It was riddled with clichés like that. Try this one: “If he wants to survive, he must fight for everything he believes in before it is destroyed by everything he doesn’t believe in.” Clichéd or what? Sounds like a B-movie.
But anyway, the magic is sort of undefined. If you want to do something, you can do it, as long as you have the power and the will to do it. It seems like a deux ex machine, but the Circle are the ones with the real power, not the good guys. All of the races have magic with the possible exception of vampires and the like. They might have something else. Cloaking and disguising spells are the easiest, which is how everyone moves around Earth without detection. Fire magic is the most commonly used as it’s one of the easiest things to summon and control.
This leads to the only way to detect a cloaked/disguised person: infrared (also the title of the series). Under an infrared detector, the person shows up as pure white because of the energy of the fire magic inside them. They can contain it inside them so that they don’t burn anyone they touch (though their skin always feels hot), but they can’t control it enough to appear as anything other than white on infrared. On a related note, exactly what temperature is white on an infrared scanner? Because I may need to change this slightly if it’s stupidly hot.
Yes, I know this sounds so dreadful that I should probably just give up now, but a) it sounds far, far better in my head and b) I just want to give it a try anyway. But any other helpful hints?