Mortal+/Overview

"I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia, and I meant every one."
- David Lynch

 The city of Philadelphia is home to over one and a half million individual souls. The region as a whole houses twice again that figure. It's a mammoth amount of humanity relative to the land that contains them, all crammed together in a region full of urban sprawl, dotted with clustered suburbs, and peppered with curious expanses of green space. The city's supernatural denizens no doubt fancy the city to be their own. Vampires have their Princes, the Changelings anoint their crowns, werewolves name their alphas, and the Mages appoint their Hierarchs; but they all pay property taxes to the City of Philadelphia's Treasury Department.

 The mortals of Philadelphia are incorrectly viewed by some as the battlefield, or sometimes as chess pieces to be maneuvered across the board in cynical games of one-upsmanship with brutal rules and esoteric prizes going to the victor. In truth, they are the beach obstacles and tank trenches of that metaphorical field. They are in the way. They have lives and desires all their own, drives and impulses impossible for even the most dedicated of sociologist to predict. This is a city that once threw batteries at Santa Claus, a city where they grease the light posts when they anticipate a mob forming, a city where visiting sports fans wipe off their face paint and hide their jerseys to avoid getting rolled into a gutter and tossed into a dumpster.

 Philadelphia will strip a car with a Cowboys bumper sticker down to its roll cage in twenty minutes. What do you imagine it would do if they knew the shadows contained creatures bent on controlling the course of history?

 The creatures of the night aren't in charge. They're surrounded.