Comet Chasers: Theme and Mood

The truth is out there.

Any hunter could tell you that there's more to the world than just humanity. Vampires, devils, and witches all prey on mankind. Werewolves and mechanical... things... pretend to be human. Golems and immortals, faeries and nightmares made flesh, madboys and spirits and mummies and God knows what else... the world is *packed* with things that aren't human.

But there's more than just that.

Any scientist could tell you that there's more to the Universe than just Earth. A tiny planet, one of eight orbiting an unremarkable star. An unremarkable star, so far from everything else in its galactic arm that it receives light from stars that have long since died. An ordinary galactic arm, in a normal spiral galaxy. *We go 'round every two hundred million years...* And given just how *small* Earth is, and how perfectly ordinary, the odds are very much against intelligent life never having originated anywhere else.

They walk among us.

For reasons no hunter can guess at (well, that's not quite true. Hunters have a *lot* of guesses, and none of them suggest anything good.), aliens hide among mankind. They push secret agendas, and talk about some kind of vast interstellar Empire. They pass as sleeper agents, living ordinary lives until... what?. They give in to their inhuman urges, dominance displays and taboo acts that threaten society itself.

## Theme: Uncanny Valley

Aliens are inhuman in a way that not even spirits can match. A spirit, well, you expect a spirit to be a bit strange. An alien, on the other hand, well, an alien wears human skin... but doesn't act human. Its super-science is built out of parts bought at the local electronics store... but even when it does things that are theoretically possible according to current physics, taking the toy to bits reveals that it has no components that should be able to do that. Its goals make some sense according to human logic... until it goes about them in a completely bizarre way; or else its actions are typical human behavior... toward a goal incomprehensible to any human being.

Hunters who regularly deal with aliens find that they begin acting strangely as well. Beyond the effects of the Code, getting into an alien mindset leaves marks. Hunters find that they go from expecting aliens to act like people to expecting people to act like aliens. They start seeing a strange intelligence behind everything that happens around them. Everything starts feeling different: where an alien can ignore a human's normal conceptual blocks, a hunter can follow... at the cost of developing that alien's own blocks.

## Mood: Beyond the Known Realms

A hunter facing an alien has a unique challenge: that of understanding the Enemy. Sure, that isn't exactly unique in itself: countering a vampire's moves requires that you figure out what those moves are, catching a Slasher means that you have to figure out what drives a Slasher, and you can't foil a Beast without knowing what Beasts can and can't do. But it's much harder when you're dealing with an alien. Vampires, Beasts, mad scientists, and Slashers were all once human, and still think along human lines. Demons and Frankenstiens were never human, but have reasons to act human. Spirits are incredibly weird, but there's a fundamental and very simple pattern to what they want and how they get it. But aliens... aliens are as complex as a human being, and what they want can be as simple or complicated as it is for humans, but their thought processes don't even approach the way humans think... and worse, even expert alien hunters can't get used to it, because they don't even approach the way *other aliens* think!