Read Missing at midnight | Tapas Web Community

Our world, this earth, has endured far longer than our brief species dares to imagine. Its true age is unknowable; its history, mostly lost to time. Yet one truth remains: humans have never been the sole inhabitants of this place. We share this terrain with creatures of fur and feather, with crawling things and the fathomless lives of the sea… and with beings far older, far stranger: Monsters.

That is the name we chose for them, though it is hardly accurate. They are simply not human. That is all. Some are gentle, some malevolent, and many exist in the grey, misunderstood spaces between. A few defy even the laws of the universe, if such laws truly exist. There are said to be thousands of kinds, perhaps ten thousand or more. The most familiar ones populate our stories: ghosts, demons, sirens, vampires, werewolves, the living dead, fair folk… and countless others whose forms and natures are far more complex.

Some beings walk among us, unnoticed, wrapped in human disguises so convincingly that no mortal eye could pierce them. And beyond the creatures themselves, there's something else threaded through the world: magic. Certain humans are born psychic; others discover gifts they never asked for; witches and other practitioners move quietly through our midst.

In the early days, humans and monsters lived in uneasy harmony. But it did not last. Humans, far more ruthless than the creatures they feared, began to hunt them out of curiosity, out of greed, out of that peculiar hunger to possess whatever they do not understand. When the monsters defended themselves, humans responded with fury. It is in human nature to strike first and then cry injustice when struck in return.

From this chaos, the first monster-hunting groups emerged. Laws followed shortly thereafter:

a permit needed either to hunt monsters, or to work under someone who held one;

a strict curfew; no one outdoors after ten at night, unless carrying a permit, because monsters were most active after dark;

permits for nearly everything nowadays, to such an extent that the authorities scarce bothered enforcing anything at all. So long as no one died, they turned away. Their duty eroded into apathy.

By 1993, however, something in the world had started to shift. Monsters that were once cautious, even afraid of human beings, were attacking innocents with a boldness never seen before. Scenes of violence erupted without sensible cause. A balance that had held for decades was starting to unravel.

In a small town in France, five teenagers decided they would not sit idle. Though far too young to legally obtain permits—France required one to be twenty-one—they formed an organization of their own:

O.M.B.R.E: Office des Manifestations, Bêtes et Réalités Étranges (S.H.A.D.O.W: Supernatural Hazards and Anomalous Division of Occult Work.)

They sought out incidents of the uncanny, accepted clandestine hires, and hunted any creature they encountered at a scene. All of it in secret. All of it at night, after school, leaving them exhausted by daybreak. Soon, a sixth member would join them, an unexpected addition; together, the small, illicit agency would find themselves drawn into a web of supernatural events far more intricate and far more hazardous than any of them could have foreseen.

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