Once upon a time, Leprechauns, those jolly little folk, used to be plentiful, but sadly there are not very many these days, simply because few people even believe in them anymore.
With the advancement of human technology and science, people became more grounded in what they COULD see and understand, and not what they COULDN'T, and that included Leprechauns. So one-by-one, they simply started fading away because no one thought they actually existed.
However, this story isn't about their extinction, but how they made a comeback in the biggest way possible! It all started with a lady leprechaun named Mother Clover. She had fair skin with freckles, bright green eyes, waist-length curly bright orange hair, and pointed ears about three inches in length each. She looked about thirty, but was actually three-hundred years old, as leprechauns tend to age much slower than humans do. She was dressed in a lovely green dress with a dark green sash around her waist, knee-high white socks with green stripes, black shoes with golden buckles, and wore a green top-hat with a black belt around it that had a golden buckle. This hat she wore belonged to her recently-deceased husband, who could not hold onto the mortal world any longer with so much disbelief. She stood at only one foot tall, and most people thought she was just a pointy-eared midget.
She'd been gathering ingredients for the last six months. It took some doing, and she had to bargain and haggle with some humans, but she felt it was well worth it for what she intended to use them for.
These ingredients were as follows (but not limited to): one dehydrated unicorn horn, one left-over grilled haggis, three gold coins, the hair of an Irish setter, tears of a banshee (she'd been saving them for the last fifty years for just such an emergency), a clean horseshoe, and a basket full of freashly-picked four-leaf clovers. All of these and more she gently placed into a pot of boiling goat's milk aged a week in advance, for she knew she had to get the timing just right.
As she stirred all the ingredients together until they were well-blended, she took one last item out of her bag: a single penny that she had found abandoned in the streets just before she'd left town, and therefor considered "lucky". So with silent words she whispered to the penny as part of the incantation, she then kissed it (making a mental note to herself to wash her mouth out afterwards), and with her right thumb, flipped it into the boiling mixture. The reaction was instant, and a green shockwave went out from it, and spread over the entire world. She smiled. "The deed is done." she said to herself "Now all I need do is be patient, an' wait a wee bit. Gotta keep the faith."
So that is how the people of the world all became leprechauns that St. Patrick's day. This not only changed the people, giving them pointy ears and making them no taller than a foot, but also made all their clothes shrink with them, and turn green even if they were not wearing any green clothes. It also gave them all Irish accents, and made them all happy and jolly. They were (most of them) scared at first, but the leprechaun giddiness took over soon enough, causing them all to laugh at themselves. Building also changed, making them a fusion of magic and technology, and making them just the right sizes for their smaller inhabitants.
So who does this story focus on first as everyone in the world becomes leprechauns?