Why Are They Hiding?

If you've noticed, indestructible, omniscient, endlessly cruel abominations silently hunting down innocent humans is a recurring problem.

And no, that's not the bad news.

If you keep your ear to the ground, it's not that hard to notice. Monsters. Creatures. Cryptids. Demons. Lots of names, and that's just in English. They start getting their teeth into some poor sucker, and the poor son of a bitch can manage a few hundred blog posts and cryptic Facebook posts before the end. God bless the Information Age, I suppose.

There's a lot of them, and they're not even slightly similar to each other. Clawed, whispering, hairless creatures at the foot of your bed. Red faced, black bodied things who tear your sanity out of your head. Shapeshifting, government experiments who become the very thing they just chowed down on. A society of Jewish mermen, at the bottom of the sea. Memetic entities who spread with their sheer identity. Tall, well dressed fuckers with tentacles. Killers who'll stalk you for years, never aging, before they make their moves. Ghosts and spectres. Skinwalkers and Wendigos. Fuck, there's even evidence that just keeping somebody from sleeping long enough can turn you into one of those things.

Humanity is not the dominant lifeform on the planet, and we haven't been for a very, very long time.

None of them have any commonalities, costumes, or goals- unless you count hurting people, I guess. Except of course, for one.

They're hiding.

They'll appear to a limited amount of people, or one person, or a group sworn to secrecy. Invisible in a crowd, jumping them in a darkened alley, spirit in a dingy motel, just when you fall asleep- they're not interested in a fair fight.

But why?

Evolution isn't an idiot. Generally speaking, if a creature evolves with one particular skill or hunting strategy, it's because it works. If a being evolves with the skill to climb trees, it's because climbing is intrinsic to it's survival. If an animal evolves to have a fantastic sense of sound, it's because it needs to hear for it's predators. Hard skin if it can't dodge. Speed and maneuverability if it can't take a hit. Humanity itself managed to pull ahead from the crowd thanks to adaptability and stamina.

But why would these things possibly need to hide? We can't hurt them. We can't even slow them down. Bullets. Fire. Fists. They don't even care. If one of these things wanted to, they could butcher us wholesale. Mow through a crowd with their bare hands. Snap the insanity of an entire town just to watch us scream. Beat a baby to death with another baby on live TV. So why don't they? Why are they hiding?

Maybe it's not from us.

Maybe there's something bigger.

Maybe there are things out there we can't even see. Something sneakier then the monsters are. Fast and unseen, quiet and smart- or hell, maybe it only has one foot in this reality to begin with- that's managed to go this long without revealing itself to anyone. Or any of the creatures, for that matter. It's not as paranoid as it sounds. Humans, generally speaking, have never been the most observant. There's entire spectrums of visible light that we can't even see, and humans are generally considered to have that down. We might not even be able to find perceive them. It's the entities that would be difficult to hide from.

But, then again, they wouldn't have to hide from them, would they?

Something that can snap creatures in one hand, twist eldritch entities like pretzels, crush Whistling Men under foot, pull shades and spirits from out of their little rocks, swallow up memetic horrors wherever they're screaming- keeps their numbers down, after all. Stops them from raising too much of a fuss, or trying to come at us all at once, lest they let them know where they are. Maybe it's for food, or hell, maybe it's just for fun.

And what will happen if they run out of entities?

Maybe we're a lot lower on the food chain then we thought.

And maybe we should start hiding too.

Avery Strange