Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine. The breakaway factions were much more bizarre than ever before, but people had grown used to this, and their horror had lessened. Frankly antihuman clades like the Spectral Intelligents, the Lobsters, and the Blood Bathers were somehow incorporated into the repertoire of possibility and even made into jokes.