“What the fuck,” I mutter when the ensign opens the bulky crate, peering at its unexpected contents. Cold air wafts from the crate’s arcane refrigeration system - very efficient by what my Decodifier informed me.

“I think it’s blood, Lieutenant,” offers Ensign Tom, waving his clawed hands dangerously close to me. Sheepish, he squirms under my pointed stare.

I should probably mention that the “kid” is 2,0 meters tall and has a skin resistant enough to shrug off small caliber weaponry. After everything that I’ve seen these last months, I just can’t give a fuck. He’s a Mapinguari, which I can only describe as a sort of were-sloth. I think they have it rough with the constant comparisons to one of the seven capital sins; the kid is a hard-worker. But also dangerous clumsy with those nasty claws.

“No shit, Tom. But why the fuck are they in box-juices?” I say, pointing out the obvious.

“Erm… Maybe for vampires? Do we have any?” Tom suggests.

“Fuck no, they can’t get near our camps or they start bitching up a storm.”

“Really? Why?” the kid questions, scratching his head. Well, those claws serve for something at least.

“Garlic intolerant,” I answer, and the kid gives me a sage nod. The thing about Brazilian culinary is… We just chuck a fuckton of garlic in everything. You name it, rice, black beans, meat, chicken… I really mean everything. It’s a pain in the ass keeping the unit’s stock of fresh garlic; I’ve started ordering crates of garlic powder in case our supply lines are cut off again. The cooks grumble a ton — sorry, assholes, this is a war. I can’t snap my fingers and un-fuck everything in a second.

Even if the biggest part of the process is organized by AIs, some of them can be… eccentric. Especially in the sorry Army we’ve been assigned to - the Delta 413th Unity Army. For some bizarre reason, many AIs love superstitions. And 4 and 13 are bad luck numbers in the East and the West of Earth. Just my luck. It’s very rare that we get any useful displaced supplies, though our tents are awesome.

Ah, I’m getting ahead of myself again. I ended the first report by explaining how we made a blatant - if understandable - mistake when trying to psychoanalyze the shit of the alien’s last message. Let me go back to that.

They said “Races”. We just thought they had made a mistake, mentioning it instead of ‘Ethnicity’; Maybe they didn’t get the political correctness’ memo in outer-space - there were a lot of memos back then. Not that I’m complaining, they really used to refer to our different ‘race’ to dehumanize us; that way they didn’t like the monsters they were when enslaving, raping and murdering across the Americas, Africa and beyond. I wish that political correctness wasn’t even more complicated now - but no one wants to risk suffering a civil war like the one that created the Manarun Amalgamation.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked - once again. I should go back to our AI Overlords’ the Unity’s arrival and the news they inadvertently let us know. They said they would take three days, and three days they took. They are punctual and precise like that - we drive them crazy around here; even the Brazilian president was late to the meeting point. After the scan they made contact again, letting each of the ‘races’ and governments know where they should be if they were willing to negotiate; they gave us one week to think about it.

Where was I in the meantime, you might wonder? I was getting the shit kicked out of me at basic training. I was in a decent civilian shape as I worked for a living and had no money to spare in sweets; there were some who were very out of shape, however. But the Brazilian military is an egalitarian institution (no, it really isn’t) and made us all suffer together for the failings of each other. Wonderful times. We were still in physical conditioning, so I had no chance to begin the firearms’ instruction. Not that they would have any bullets for me to train with; why keep a strategic reserve when you can let it run dry and then buy everything with criminally inflated prices?

Although they did their best, the drill sergeants could never take away all our cellphones. Cellphones are like rats, they multiply the second you stop guarding against them. Don’t let me get started on this planet’s ridiculous excuses of rats; the bastards can chew through our craters if we’re not paying attention. Hooray for the lowest bidder, even AIs have shitty quality control.

Wait, I was onto something with the cellphone talk… Ah, yes. They ordered us confined into quarters at the appointed time for the beginning of Alien-Human negotiations. God bless the stupid fella in my barracks that risked his bacon to get us a cellphone to watch the meeting. Twenty sweaty guys crammed themselves in front of the little screen, grumbling until the outdated Samsung phone finally connected to its 4G network. The aliens set up meeting points throughout the world. Brazil, as a country of continental size, had many, many of them. The police and the military tried to clear all the places of people and of the media. In the time of drones, they failed miserably to stop people from streaming it live.

We were watching it all through one of the channels with live footage. The channel’s commentator was a pain in the ass with a nasal voice, but the guys shooting the shit were funny. We could see that the aliens established a perimeter; six humanoids in black body armor with reflective visors ringed the dropship. Their apparent nonchalance contrasted deeply with their counterparts; there was a nervous squad of special forces’ operators opposite each alien, bearing heavy arms behind sandbags. The official Brazilian committee approached, President gallantly leading from behind what seemed his whole security detachment. Another alien emerged from the ship and… that’s when the channel went down. They probably got their heads out of their asses for a second and shot down the drone.

The whole barrack swore a blue streak while the guy tried to find another channel. He did, but it was not on the main site with the President. The channel was a stream of a local news’ company in the state of Amazonas; some crafty bastard embedded his cam in a tree overlooking the meeting point and the military missed it in their sweep. There was a lot of grumbling as everyone wanted to see if the stupid President would get himself shot by fucking ET; there was even a betting pool. And what you’ve got to understand about the Amazon: unfortunately, almost nobody gives enough a shit about that remote piece of land to do more than tweet for it while the deforestation goes on, unhindered. Even supposedly green Presidents didn’t give a shit; it simply wasn’t worth it to mess with the land barons around there. Most of us moaned about deforestation and about ancestral native tribes and their lands, but nobody was willing to go there and do something drastic.

Well, the aliens saw fit to set a meeting point there. Everyone figured they would treat the native tribes as governments of their own or something. Nobody thought to actually confirm with the tribal councils that they had been the ones to be invited. It turns out that the human natives weren’t the ones the government was willing to talk to. A host of strange groups of people approached, and the military stopped them in their tracks, shouting for them to get away. But the aliens intervened, and grudgingly the Army let the strange people pass. We were puzzled by the scene, but we quickly lost interest after hearing the President hadn’t run his stupid mouth enough to get shot.

A couple of days later, the aliens sent out another newsletter: “We’re happy to have began negotiations with 352 races of Earth and 132 of its countries. We will release information on an individual basis from now on.”

What. The. Fuck? That was the widespread reaction throughout the world. The uncertainty generated fear; it spread all around, causing a significant change in human behavior. It made people pay attention to things around them like they hadn’t done for thousands of years. The sudden weight of the attention of billions of people was far too much for the Veil to hold. It shattered, it shattered worse than the times of the Spanish Inquisition. The human world and the supernatural intersected once again. I shouldn’t have to tell you it ended badly; the Veil was created millennia ago for a reason. Humanity was (and I fear always will be) prone to violence and wary of different people.

Nearly every creatu - **BZZZT** , I mean, race we thought legendary came out of the woodwork. I won’t bother trying to describe what happened in other countries; we were (and are) overwhelmed enough with the ones we discovered in Brazil. As you’ve noticed, creature is no longer an acceptable term. They were recognized as mythic native populations. The aliens acted swiftly to avoid genocides, transplanting people from the more xenophobic countries to more accepting ones. In Brazil, there was prejudice abound, but the violence wasn’t too bad. The Amazon ended up as the destiny for a number of mythics - that’s how we call them now.

You’ll pardon me if I don’t believe Unity revealed that as a mistake. They have done this many times before. But that’s the line they’re keeping in the books - an intern royally fucked up. Poor interns, it’s always their fault.

If your world passed through no similar incident, I’m not sure I can really explain how confusing it all was. One minute I was having a little churrasco (our barbecue) with my human friends in one of the many alleys of Mangueira; on the other one of them turned into a Cabriola, a faun-like mythic, and another one turned out to be a Kurupira. I thought I was either dreaming or had eaten some really spoiled shrooms. Took quite awhile to adjust. And there was no turning the Veil back on, you can’t snap your fingers and get a planet-ranging spell back.

**WARNING**

Non-authorized Intruder Detected (Alarm Systems)

“Mythics,” I continue to dictate with a serene voice to the voice-to-speech function of my Chip’s integrated computer, “like that- FUCKING CAIPORA MESSING WITH MY SHIT! OOOOUT!”

Erm, sorry about that. Caiporas are a quartermaster’s worst nightmare; I fucking hate tricksters. I won’t get into them so soon, but the N.O.O.B. Chips are one of the biggest advantages and also disadvantages of the military life, and I don’t mean the ridiculous acronym. Let’s just say that George Orwell was conservative about The Big Brother - fucking VIs.

My point was that humanity is very creative, but not nearly enough to imagine all the shit that we eventually came to say was part of our ‘folklore’. Folklore my ass. It was mythics, all along. Not every stupid legend is true. There isn’t a folk that exists to appear on bathrooms and scare children if they say “Blood Mary” three times in the bathroom. There’s no headless horseman folk. But vampires? Yep (not undead, though, that shit and zombies are bullshit). Centaurs? Sure, spread around nomad tribes all around. Magic? You betcha. How the fuck you think the Veil came to be? A few mage bloodlines have even survived to this day - fucking secret societies, another point for the conspiracy nuts I guess.

But we say Mythics as a catch all to very different groups of people. Some Mythics hate each other’s guts, some are allies, others simply don’t care. They are as a diverse group as humans are when you cut to the chase. They act in myriads of reasons for myriads of purposes. As I’m dictating it, a screen pops up:

**Fatigue Increase Detected: Sign-off from Duty Recommended**

Yeah, fuck it, the VI is right for a change. I’m tired of explaining the background history as if you’re all a band of toddlers. If you are, by any chance, a toddler, then you shouldn’t be reading this shit. Go eat crayons or something stupid like that.

And you know what? I had to deal with that fucking autistic AI earlier in the day to design boots for people with their feet pointing the wro- **BZTT**, pointing to the opposite direction. I would rather have had my teeth pulled than trying to get that lazy bastard to do his job. And it’s the poor Mapinguaris who get a bad name. Life just isn’t fair - but don’t I god-damned know it?