You will learn to fear the dark once more.
There's an entire world that exists beneath humanity's notice. A community of nations, alliances and races more weird and twisted then imagination has provided. And scarier in ways our imagination is incapable of produced. Vampires. Demons. Revenants and werewolves, gods and monsters. All of them are real, but for some reason they remain hidden. How? Why? Well, there's a very easy explanation for that altogether. Besides the fact we don't advertise, humanity itself is very, very good at being their own censor. They refuse to believe the evidence of their eyes and flee from anything that is unexplained in ways they call 'rational.' Because if they go around telling people, sooner or later they end up committed and locked away. Which is perfectly true. But what about the weirdos? Those who talk about sightings, the unexplained, the alien? Who attempt to explain what they've seen? People ignore them, because of fear and because we refuse to believe. And this is also true. Funny, isn't it? That humanity that prides itself upon scientific advancement and reasoning, can be so dead wrong about the world? Check your history, it happens all the time. People threatened to burn the notes of a certain crackpot who claimed the earth revolved around the sun. Germs? Didn't exist, until people saw it with their own eyes. The earth was flat at one point, till people sailed around for their own discovery and biologists who heard of wildmen in the mountains of Africa scoffed before someone slapped a mountain gorilla on their dissecting table and even that was iffy, when a Platypus was sent in the mail. We're a race perfectly willing to live in ignorance, because to admit otherwise would label us as crazy. We all have a ghost story in our family tree. We keep them quiet for our own reasons and the rest of us do the rest. But it all would have been impossible were it not for people on the level of the average human. And there are more people then there are persons in the world as it is now. It still seems impossible though. That creatures that slaughter and hunt humans would be ignored entirely, on a scale that people seem to regard them. Well, lets look at things in a different way shall we? I remember a wizard who explained it to me once, using statistics. It stuck in the head somewhat, after all this time. He began by telling me that at one point, more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found. That's out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. If you're around the age of thirty-eight since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your graduating class of eight hundred people, give or take are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are. Amazing, right? So where did they all go? He then followed up by saying that it was almost, a direct correlation to herd animal loss to large predators on the African Savannah. Like I said. It sticks in the mind. Welcome to my world. Mind your step. -L.