Many, many years ago everyone was strong and healthy. They ate a very varied diet, and especially loved fruit, vegetables, and fish. Everyone took daily exercise, and they enjoyed themselves playing and leaping about. The Earth was the healthiest place you could imagine, and it was clear that both adults and children were full of joy and good moods.
All that made the dark witches furious. They only ever wanted to do harm and make problems for people. The worst of all of these witches was Sourface; she was evil, and could be relied on to come up with the nastiest ideas. She suggested that all the witches combine their energies to invent a potion which would take away people's desire to live happily. So, one night, all the witches gathered down in the swampy forest and worked together on that evil spell. The spell was so powerful, and would need so much energy to cast, that when one of the witches got one of the words wrong, there was a huge explosion. So big was the explosion, that it completely destroyed the forest.
It turned all those evil witches into tiny little creatures, like germs, and left them trapped in a green liquid inside a small glass bottle, which lay lost in the swamp. There they were trapped for centuries, until one day a little boy found the bottle. Thinking it contained some kind of soft drink, he drank the lot. The evil, microscopic witches took advantage of this situation, and even though they were tiny and couldn't hurt anyone, they