Humans baffle and marginally terrify many people from Domus. Their facility for technology is the first thing that stood out when Domus refugees arrived on Earth. On Domus, you either changed yourself to reflect your environment (the way of Wild and Beast Kith) or you were in a constant process of imposing your will on the world (the Sun Singer and Night Walker way). At first, what humans did seemed like the latter. It was enormously surprising, to those few refugees, when human technology and its works didn’t go away when humans stopped paying attention to it. It wasn’t that they had to impose their will on the world, it was that their will actively and permanently changed the world around them.
This startling development was obscured at first due to the outbreak of horrific violence which erupted in the wake of the arrival of magic in the world, which looked an awful lot like the mass destruction of people, buildings, infrastructure, and items of technology through acts of will shaped like bullets and missiles. But in the intervening 20 years it has dawned on the refugees that a human can, say, set up a water wheel to run a small generator and keep it running and it will just keep doing that until natural wear and tear breaks it down. Even more confusingly, someone else can do the same thing and get the same result despite being a completely different person. Though some Domus refugees have gained an understanding of Earthly sciences and technology, for those who remember how things were on Domus this prompted more than a little culture shock in the early days. That there can be so many rules that remain true and that humans have just so many ways of categorising the world around them, so many ways and words of pinning it down, like an insect to a board, remains utterly alien to many of the refugees. In place of a world that was simply alive, the world of humans is one of intense understanding.
What also still bothers Domus folk is the way humans have taken to magic, even the ones who haven’t become warlocks. Not all of them have become magicians, just like not all of them know how to make a small generator that can be powered by a water wheel, but those who do frustratingly seem to be able to get good at it. They seem able to find rules for magic, stick to them, and make it sing in ways that would never have worked on Domus.
Even more annoyingly, they are making contributions to the field. Magic works differently here than it did on Domus; humans’ total lack of contact with magic prior to 2004 was certainly a disadvantage, but Domus refugees’ old assumptions about how magic is “meant” to work based on past experience was often just as much of a problem. The other genera are uncomfortable about admitting it, but a good many rituals were devised by humans, from a human perspective; the very idea of getting a more or less consistent result out of a defined set of actions is a human one. Domus magic was generally much more improvisational.
Persistently, the theory comes up that humanity must have had some contact with Domus in the dim and distant past. That would certainly explain how their lore and legends includes the idea of magic, as well as folkloric entities which map onto the genera of Domus to a startling extent, though a variable one. Sun Singers only lightly touch on human vampire legends; Wild Kith and Beast Kith resemble one interpretation of many that humans have come up with about fairies and therianthropes, whilst flatly contradicting others. The classic vampire myth, though, has the Night Walkers bang to rights, as even some Night Walkers begrudgingly admit.
And yet… “If you believe that, I’ve got proof of ancient contact between Domus and Earth I can sell you” has become a recurring joke for a reason. There’s just no evidence – none. Nothing which stands up either to scientific scrutiny or esoteric divination. Every time someone has declared they’ve stumbled on something it turns out to either be a greedy scam or a sad case of desperate self-deception.
One last thing about humans is that they seem tremendously sure of themselves. They might not fully understand what has happened to their world, but they know what they want out of it. Humans are well-represented among the ideologues of all factions, their firm sense of their identities as being firm constants under their control often nudging them into insisting on their interpretation and worldview when other genera might find themselves swayed by the influence of others.
It has been twenty years since any refugee has seen Domus – twenty years that they have been immersed in this world shaped by humans, in the wreckage of what humans built, and often out of necessity surrounded by humans. Some of the refugees question whether they remember Domus as it really was, or Domus as it has been reimagined to try and explain it to humans. “Magic”, “Nature”, “Beasts”, “Sun”, “Night”, “Moon”,“Planet”… Did any of those words really apply, or are they analogies used to explain things to humans often enough that that’s how the refugees now remember things? Magic is different here than it was on Domus; have the genera been transformed by the passage as well? Spend long enough with humans, they say, and you’ll question whether your prior life ever existed.
There is a theory among many magical and theological researchers, a theory that has little proof and is rarely talked about but is there all the same. That humans do have their own magic. That their magic is very simple and insidiously effective: collective human will permanently and completely reshapes reality. Whatever most humans believe is what becomes true and that you would have no way of knowing what reality was like before. Again, there is no support for said theory, and no one would ever genuinely announce that they believe it. But it is there. Unspoken.
For humans, Earth has become a strange place. In some ways intimately, achingly familiar, in others utterly alien. To be human is to know what came before and to see what came after. It is to know that this place that was once your home is a new world, an alien world, a world full of strangers, full of things that shouldn’t be here. It is to know that no matter how much you try, there is no way to reverse what has happened.
You are in a new world – but they are in your house.
You are in a new world and you can never go home again