Introductions all around

Okay. So they say that the writer’s duty is to ensure the communication of ideas if he or she wants to be successful. That means knowing your audience. Since I don’t know my audience, I’m going to try to bring you as up to speed as possible in a very short time. I live in the hideous sprawl of New York City, which has hungrily co-opted a large portion of the tri-state area in recent decades. I also travel to the Astral Realm on the regular, too. I’ve done a lot and seen even more. As such, I am what you might call Cosmopolitan. I’m going to have to assume you are not. You might only have seen a Visral on television. If you’re from some backwoods shithole where only humans congregate, some of this is just going to seem alien to you.

Do try to keep up.

My name is Seth Shannon. I’m a Tuatha elf, the slender, pretty type of elf. My race and our cousins, the Fomorian elves, immigrated from the Astral Realm thousands of years ago, pulled in by the powerful summonings of ancient Celtic magics. The Fomorians are big bastards, hearty and sanguine. We get along, even if we don’t always see eye to eye.

We settled in the British Isles. We were celebrated as wondrous creatures, wise and powerful, attuned to the magical energies of the world. That was until the world started getting all organized with its religions. Then, we started looking an awful lot like abominations at worst or illegal immigrants at best. When we started coming over to America, there were lots of jobs, but “Elves need not apply.”

We are unnatural inhabitants, but there are some other races with more legitimate claims to the land, though don’t ever tell anyone I said that. There are the humans, who breed fast and spread their influence with a desperation that borders on admirable. They vary wildly from  group to group, but they all look alike to me. Some of them are light, some of them are dark, and there are a whole lot of them that think that means something. They are short-lived and deliciously decadent, trying so hard to make the rest of us forget that they came from monkeys. They lost their way with magics for many generations, trying to focus on developing technology, which they perceived to be their best chance at securing dominance over the other races. Magic of all types has come back into fashion in recent decades, and more of these apes than just the odd hermit or religious zealot have taken up wielding the arcane or sacred forces. They outnumber all of the other races combined, so the facilities and accommodations of the world tend to have a very speciesist bias in their favor. As an elf, this doesn’t often bother me, but that’s not true across the board.

There are also the Tsume. Apparently, their fossil records show that they developed from a species of Tiger that existed in Japan some time ago. They dominate the islands of Japan and have spread throughout much of Asia, with their second largest population center being in Indonesia. They are lithe, dangerous people that, well, if you’re into the exotic, are just damned sexy. If humans are shorter than elves, Tsume are shorter still. Humanoid (see? speciesist) felines, they have sharp teeth, nasty claws, long tails, and a variety of fur patterns that developed out of breeding preferences more than any real adaptive developments. They rose to a relatively peaceful co-dominance of their home regions with the humans, the latter tending to revere them as powerful warriors and allies rather than terrifying competition. While there are certainly a number of magic users in their history, they often tend to lean towards Focus as their preferred method of survival. So yeah. Lots of kitty ninjas. Go figure. Make no mistake though, there are many Devout Islamic and Hindu among them, so don’t go assuming that a race is a religion (or lack thereof).

I know from personal experience that the women of the species occasionally go into heat, and the result is pretty spectacular.

I guess next are the Visral. Big snake bastards. Somewhere along the way, snakes looked up and decided they wanted arms or something. And to be huge. So yeah. Huge snake bastards with arms. They call the Amazon their ancestral home, but they can now be found populating pretty much anywhere near the equator, though many enterprising individuals range into colder climates for work or for, you know, culture. (My journeys to the American South have perhaps left a bad taste in my mouth.) They tend to have a solid connection to magic, specifically a lot of Devout. Their cultural connection to the Astral Realm has always been pretty high, especially since so many of them were often worshipped among indigenous humans.

There are also the Ogres. Tallest and broadest of the races, they don’t look too far off from Fomorians (I guess I’m showing my own bias now). They tend to have olive to copperish complexions and pronounced lower tusks. They inhabited a lot of the Americas prior to the colonization. Oddly, they were also found during the colonization of Australia. They use this fact to claim that they have been around since Pangea, like the humans. Fossil records don’t really have a firm case to make yet, but I guess it’s a matter of time.

In the Americas, they were often in bloody competition with the Native Americans. They usually came out on top and were ready allies to the European conquerors. As such, they fared far better than the humans. Probably helped that they are very resistant to disease.

I guess last and least, as far as their stature goes, are the Al Radan. They look a lot like human kids, if they’d been bitten by radioactive meerkats. I guess they average around three and a half feet tall, brownish fur, and an affinity for creating underground complexes. They make their homes in the Middle East and North Eastern Africa, and are probably the most fit beings to inhabit the Sahara. The humans claim Jesus Christ was one of their own, but so do the Al Radan. When you see him on TV, he looks like a white human, but that’s the idea of Jesus made real(ish), rather than the specific dude who lived back then. Assuming he actually did.

They usually divide along cultural and religious lines, siding with sympathetic humans. You can find them in both the Mossad and the PLO, and they tend to be exceptional infiltration experts.

Race relations have never been great, but they have gotten a bit better in recent centuries. With the various groups all eventually realizing that the others weren’t going anywhere, people had to stop killing or enslaving each other if we didn’t want the whole thing to go tits up. Television helped. Seeing a nice Visral family on television or an Al Radan stand-up comedian started to make people realize that we’re all sentient and shit. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” and all that. There will always be racism and tribalism, I guess. Competition for resources will always exist, and if you’re going to share, you usually want to share with someone who looks like you. Such is life.

Okay. So magic. You probably know fuck-all about magic because only the most powerful of spirit or mind can even hope to wield such power, and for some reason, I doubt you are in my class. There are three types, broadly speaking; Focused, Arcane, and Devout.

The Focused use their inner strength of will to radically enhance their physical capabilities. Crazy strong and crazy fast, they are powerhouses. All of that mythic ninja shit you see in movies – that’s them. Jumping up to rooftops, kicking guys’ heads off, running on water, all of that shit is their schtick. I’ve literally seen a Focused Tsume drive her hand through a guy’s chest. Man, she was... well, I guess we’ll get to that later. Apparently, there are some rare few who can channel their Focus into enhancing their mental abilities. The corps go apeshit trying to recruit these bastards for upper management. Can’t say I envy them, because corporate head-hunting is a very literally cut-throat business. I know. I’ve done a few “recruitment drives” myself.

Arcane powers are for the studious types. Years of intense study can bring someone the understanding of the natural forces such that they can be bent or broken by the person who knows the right gestures and chants. Whether you call them mages, wizards, witches, or whatever, that’s them. They rely on their smarts and studies for their power.

Never had the patience for it.

And then there are the Devout. Like me. Sents who have aligned themselves with a god, bargaining for power to do their deity’s bidding and good (hah!) works in the Material Realm. Since the beginning of mass media, the gods have been bidding for more and more power by spreading their influence in our plane. They sit on their asses in the Astral Realm and are fed by our belief. The more followers, the more power. Religion has pretty much outed itself as a pyramid scheme, and it doesn’t matter. Proof has denied faith, so belief is now the currency of power over there. They feed some of it back to us, basically as advertisement. I murder people horribly in the name of the Nameless Ones, (without a touch of fucking irony, thank you very much), and their machinations are advanced while their reputation grows.

Belief is a funny thing. Like I said, mass media changed the game. Saturday morning cartoons ended up being unexpectedly powerful force. No one believes like kids do. All of a sudden, these spirits came into being and with the belief being poured into them every week, they got powerful. As their popularity waned, so did their powers, though. Over there, it’s not uncommon to see a beloved figure from your childhood fallen on hard times. Almost as soon as the trend was noticed, it started getting capitalized on, and no one knows how to do it better than the Japanese. In ATokyo, there is a vast palace ruled by a mouthless white kitten, whose name I dare not say. The cartoons with endless collectible creatures backfired, though. AJapan was quickly overrun by all of these rather volatile creatures. But, in typical enterprising fashion, hunting permits were issued and the populations were brought down to manageable levels.

If you’ve never tried snorting ground Pekemin dust, you really owe it to yourself to do so. You’re in for a fucking treat.

The Abrahamic religions hold the most sway, both here and there. I’m more of a grass roots campaigner, pulling for the little guy. Well, it’s not really little, or a guy in the strictest of terms. I actually follow a pantheon, but have one patron, which I guess is pretty standard. They are dark, and old, and really, really scary. And when I called them the Nameless Ones, I mean it. They have... identifiers of a sort, but not like anything else. You can’t say their names, you can only feel them. He that I serve, his name is like an oil spill in your soul. Like your own boot on the neck of a loved one. The knife in your heart that you know you deserve. He is all that is awful and filthy, a geyser of hate and shame exploding down your throat. It takes a pretty horrible person to be comfortable with this.

So... yeah. Nice to meet you.

My name is Seth, and I’m a fucking monster.