In the small town of Silver Creek, GA, it was a normal evening.

Brenda “@PinkyBly” Bly was in her motel room going over the video she’d recorded one last time before uploading it. She’d already added in the sponsor package, but there was something in those few frames she recorded in the basement. The building wasn’t haunted, they never were, but why did she feel so uneasy when she scrubbed that footage? Shrugging, she cut it out and uploaded it, yet another urban legend soundly debunked. Still, until the next full moon, every dream was filled with the hungry, miasmic grasping of an undulating thing hunting her in that old hotel.

Laia Reeves was slumming it in a motel, as the hotel she booked had been closed for filming, waiting for the inevitable attack. She could sense them out there, waiting until she was alone, the redcaps and bogarts sent by the Family of Light, the cult she’d been born into and vowed to destroy. Impatient, she jumped down off the balcony and sent forth a pulse of energy, making sure that the Mundanes would look the other way as she charged towards the bloody-headed fey.

Marcia DuBois, RN, was a big woman, powerful and impressive in pretty much every way, from her voice to her faith to her very presence. She kept her small clinic running almost single-handedly as doctors and other staff came and went. It had the highest success rate of any clinic in Northeastern Georgia, and she personally kept it that way. Everyone she ministered to either got better or if, God forbid, nothing could be done, she helped ease them into whatever afterlife was waiting for them. Everyone said she was a miracle, but she just knew that she did her best and prayed as hard as she could for each and every one of her patients.

Ashley Goswani was just a kid, but they knew for a fact that they had a higher calling. Their family had done a favor for a minor deva generations ago, and its blessing manifested in them. They donned the supersuit that their sister Melody had made for them and, after having finished their homework, they glided out of their bedroom window on ethereal wings, on patrol. There was a ruckus at the motel, and they looked forward to stomping out any evildoers in their path.

Duc Tran worked for the State Department as a clerk, before he died, funneling data to where it needed to go. Afterwards, as a sanguinarian, he’s still enjoying government benefits doing the same job at the Para- and Extra-normal Services Task force. Having been notified by the post-corporeals in intelligence, he forwarded their alert on to the agent he felt most able to handle it.

Jennie Warner normally didn’t take jobs involving kids, but their parents had reason to be worried and she needed the money. She tracked the teens to the woods, where they had just been led in some weird dance by the West Silver Creek High’s head librarian. This may explain their change in behavior, and definitely ruled out the illicit drug hypothesis the parents had brought to her.

Forest Ranger Diego Fisher, Maj. USAF, (Ret.), had finished setting up his Mac to run the wards around his station when he got a new notice from PEST that there was an infestation of the undead at the edge of town. Grumbling about teenagers reading books they shouldn’t, he tromped out with his spectral scattergun and holy water grenades to put down the zombie squirrels. Again.

None of this is unusual. It’s happening in towns and cities across the globe all the time. This is the world as it is now. This is the way the world has always been. You just haven’t been Aware of it.

Magic comes from life. More specifically, magic comes from the interaction of souls and the material world, much as the movement of a magnet through a conductive coil creates electricity. Magic is less present in the modern world, not because of technology—mad science proves they are more than compatible—but because gathering too many humans together cancels out the magic each produces. Magic can be brought into densely populated cities, but it can’t thrive there, while the wilderness, open water, towns, and small cities where folklore, legends, and myths have grown for millenia, are still fertile fields for the arcane and divine. Those who aren’t Aware of the magical world, the Mundanes, aren’t wrong about what is happening. In fact, over 99% of what they see is correct, or as correct as it ever is. That last 1%, though, is hidden from them.

Brenda, Marcia, and Jennie are Mundanes slowly becoming Aware, which is odd, as none of them are wholly human. With her three-chambered heart, cool blood, and nictitating membranes, and other “medical anomalies”, Brenda is a typical saurian. Marcia doesn’t know that her strength and size, as well her skin’s greenish-gray cast, come from her orcish heritage. Jennie’s small stature and youthful appearance, despite her age, would never make her think that she was a gnome.

On the other hand, Laia covers the scars of her cropped ears with piercings, Ashley takes advantage of their extraversal gifts in cheerleading competitions, formerly human Duc loves the blood-pops he gets from the PEST commissary, and Diego’s dwarven hardiness aided him immensely in Afghanistan.

They all live among us and are us. Journey to ruins of lost civilizations under the Rub al-Khali or the deserts of Antarctica. Infiltrate conspiracies spanning centuries. Recover artifacts looted from the Hagia Sophia. Tame dragons awakened by climate change. Protect rusalka from Russia’s Committee for Unreal Security (KNB) or France’s Direction des Horreurs. Bring down billionaires who enslaved kobolds to mine gold. Hunt the elusive bunyips preying on Aboriginal villages. Spend a night fighting fey feeding on the dreams and despair of club kids and barflies.