Similis - There's no such thing as normal

Chapter 01 - No such thing as normal

Sitting on the bus to god-knows-where, Jen's mind went back over the conversation she had with her uncle less than 12 hours ago.

"Wait, so you're saying monsters are real?", she had looked at her uncle Ron like he had just escaped from the asylum.

"Well, at least they used to be. Still are, kind of. But we don't use that term anymore. The word is Similis and.."

"Similis, seriously? Sounds like an STD..." Jen interrupted. She was pacing around her room trying not to step on her stuff that had come flying out of her closets and shelves and was now lying around all across the floor.

"Sit down, Jen." Ron looked at her, deflated. "Please. I'll try to explain everything, but you need to try and believe what I'm telling you.

She had never seen him this serious before. Ron was the funny one in the family. The never-take-anything-serious one. The will-shuff-his-brother's-face-in-a-piece-of-cake-because-it's funny one. Right now he was none of that. Jen sat down next to him on the floor and leaned against her bed.

Ron took a deep breath and started talking.

"Millennia ago, there were in fact werewolves, vampires, ghouls, trolls, and also fey, magicians and elves basically everywhere on earth.

Some of them were pure evil. Those were the ones you still hear about in stories today. But most of them worked hard to lead a normal existence in peace with their neighbours.

They managed their different curses, powers and traits as best they could, locking themselves up during a full moon, living on animal blood, refusing to practice any black magic.

Over the centuries, as people of different blood lines mixed and mingled, these traits got weaker and weaker. So if you had a vampire in your family tree 50 generations ago, all you might be left with today was a bit of an iron deficiency. If it was a werewolf you might have a hard time sleeping around the time of a full moon..."

"Wait, are you saying we have vampires in our family?" she gave Ron a laugh of disbelief.

"No, we don't. Well we might, but if we do it's so far back that we wouldn't know."

"Ok so we're like what, normal humans? Fodder for the monsters?"

"Similis! And no, there's no such thing as "normal humans". In fact, there's no such thing as normal, which I'm sure you're aware of being a teenager in high school and all." he said, trying to make her smile. It didn't work.

Ron cleared his throat and continued. "Most people, what you would call "normal humans", actually carry with them the powers of the mind. In their strongest form, these allow a person to shape reality with their thoughts. Throughout history this has mostly been called magic, but has very little to do with wands or spells. Just mind over matter really.

However, the traits of the mind are more subtle than the strong powers of a dragon for example. They are much quicker to fade over generations, to a point where there wasn't much power left in most people even at the time when armies of goblins were still looting mediaeval castles for gold."

"Dragons?! Goblins?! Mind powers?! Now you're just making stuff up!"

"I wish I was," Ron sighed. "So, as I was saying, everyone is in fact Similis, we all have one or more people with some kind of power in our family trees. But for most, it's now down to such a low degree that you can't tell, and they would never know."

"Why wouldn't they know? Hell, if I could spit fire like a dragon I'd make sure everybody knew. Including my children, and grandchildren..."

"People just prefer being normal, I guess. It gives them a sense of order and control. A vampiric maternal ancestor is not something that people like to discuss at the dinner table. And so over the centuries, a lot of this knowledge was lost. And history turned to lore... and horrible Hollywood movies."

"But they still exist right? These powers? That's what's going on here right?"

"The vast majority has no more powers. But yes, there are still exceptions. Very much like a recessive hereditary gene only expressing itself after many generations. If the parents' genetic mix is just right, the child's ancestral Similis powers are amplified..."

Jen, as it turns out, had won this gigantic supernatural ancestral lottery. She looked out the window at the lights coming from a small row of shops. She absentmindedly scratched away at the skin on her thumb with her index finger. Fan-freakin-tastic! As if she didn't have enough to worry about.