For years scientists had told us that nightmares were nothing more than the subconcious mind struggling to deal with our concious fears. The Boogeyman did not exist. There were no monsters in our closets or under our beds. The supernatural didn't exist, and all was safe and calm in our little worlds. We were secure, and nothing lurked in the shadows to snatch our lives away.

It's amazing how wrong humanity can be sometimes.

The Threshold caught us all by surprise. Overnight, billions of people changed. They became the things from our darkest of dreams. Demons, vampires, ghosts, werewolves. And as was their nature, they killed. By the time anyone knew what had happened, thousands upon thousands were dead all over the world. I think we might have been wiped away in a single knight, but the Threshold spawned the good as well as the bad. It took a demon much longer to kill even one stalwart winged angel than it did to kill a hundred unaware humans.

We fought back, of course. And we did fairly well for being caught with out pants down. We had the numbers, and the technology, and we drove them back. America did the best, really, since there was no time to forge alliances. Everyone just had to do what they could. And from among us began to emerge Talents, humans with abilities that fought on our side. Not many, but enough to hold our own for a few years.

Eventually we won, sort of. The creatures spawned from darkness no longer had an army to throw against us, no longer massed at our borders. Most of the planet was dead, although it wasn't the apocalypse most people had anticipated when it had begun. Human life went on, and in the last century or so things have settled down.

We're not alone in this world anymore, sure. The darkness still lurks. Now it's in our cities, our neighborhoods, our workplaces. Nobody knows who's human and who's not anymore. We've tried hunting them down, and it doesn't work. So, if they leave us alone, we leave them alone.

But there's still Thresholding. At puberty, certain people change. Some become Talents, some other demons or other nasties. In other cities, they're hunted and killed. Event he Talents, in some places. If it's weird, they kill it.

But not in Mythos, the greatest city in existance. Here we live and let live, we watch out for ourselves. We have police to deal with the really psycho ones. Here in Mythos, the things that go bump in the night pick off bums in the park for a quick meal. The guy you nod to on the street could be a greater demon. This is the only place in the world where we have real monsters, purebloods who were never human and never Thresholded.

It's a fun freakin' place.