Sometime in the late 1980's in Seattle a strange event took place. Every child under the age of three within a mile of the city's center suddenly and inexplicably went into a coma. The city descended into a mild panic as thousands of children were rushed to municipal hospitals. The victims remained comatose for 24 hours before recovering. Those old enough to speak exhibited a complete memory loss of the previous day, but otherwise the children seemed unharmed. Despite its scale the incident received little media coverage. A few parents sought answers, but the origin of the attack remained a mystery. By the late 90's the Seattle incident was all but forgotten - another page in the obscure, untenable, and unexplained. Curiously, many of the families of the children have moved away from the northern city. When pressed, the parents admitted to feeling a strange "unease" living in Seattle after the attack.
For the children, life afterwards progressed as could be expected. They grew up, went to school, did their homework, made friends; some died. However, when they began approaching adolescence everything changed. They started experiencing terrifying and disturbingly realistic nightmares. Simultaneously, rashes of violent murders began occurring around the victims' new hometowns. The homicides baffled local investigators. The assailants left no witnesses, no clues, no messages - only the bloody remains of the victims.
This was only the beginning.
The first major incident occurred in the town of Redhaven, Iowa, at the local high school. There a student exhibited strange, uncontrollable, and extremely frightening powers. Several faculty members lost their lives to the attack. No one but a few of the students knew exactly what had happened.
There seemed to be a link between the manifestations and the student's emotional state. Whenever frightened, angered, or otherwise excited their darkest desires would take physical form, culminating with the transformation into a monstrous alter ego. When changed, the victims became savage, sadistic reflections of their repressed drives and emotions - practically invincible, able to manipulate mind and matter to a seemingly unlimited extent. And the more the students fought to hold back their animalistic sides, the stronger and more opposed their dark counterparts became.
Teenagers all over the United States and beyond began fully manifesting. It was only inevitable some would meet and learn of their strange camaraderie. A loose, worldwide network of communication was established between the victims of the Seattle attack. Its founders had three aims in mind: to find, contact, and protect other Seattle victims, to keep their condition a secret to the public, and to discover the origin of the Seattle incident. Several government organizations became aware of this brotherhood and its patrons, and an underground war soon erupted between these groups and the Seattle victims.
Reality now hangs by a thread. Power beyond imagining lies beneath the surface of the mundane world, seething, ready to erupt and consume everything sane and whole.
It cannot be fought.
It cannot be contained.
It cannot be mitigated.
It cannot be controlled.
It can only be accepted.