I’ve always wondered why there are more monsters and icky creepy crawlies in big cities like New York than in tucked away, sparsely populated areas out in the middle of nowhere.
After spending a few weeks off the beaten (and paved) path, I think I have my answer.
People in cities pay no attention to each other. They never make eye contact. They ignore strangers. Common courtesy, whatever that is, does not exist. The rules are different in tiny mountain towns and hollers and population nineteens across the country. They look. They say hello. They remember. They notice.
It’s easier to be different in a town of millions instead of a town of hundreds. In small towns, people know everyone’s extended family. They know where each other work, where they play, what they do, and where they go to church. Even if your nearest neighbor is miles away, someone always seems to notice you when you leave your house at midnight or do something unconventional in the privacy of your own 100+ acre backyard.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, you have more privacy in a crowd. In Manhattan or LA, residents deliberately turn a blind eye to the throngs around them. It’s a city survival method. Unfortunately, that is precisely what allows beasties to hide in plain sight.
And one more thing lest you think I forgot – there’s the little matter of supply and demand. If a monster’s food source walks on two legs and carries a social security card, there are so many more to choose from in a crowded city, and their absence is much more likely to go completely unnoticed. Maybe unnaturals dream of ‘getting away from it all’ just like we do – finding a small piece of paradise they can call their own that isn’t patrolled nightly by a famous Angel of Death (yours truly), but food would no longer be abundant and every victim would raise a rallying cry complete with torches and pitchforks. Given that choice, any creature with half a brain (along with extra limbs, spines, webbed feet, a tail, fur, or whatever physiological indicators that they aren’t human) would be smarter to stay in the City.
And it sure makes my job easier to track them down and eliminate them without traipsing all over the mountains and valleys of West Virginia trying to locate one rogue scarnathian.
