The Horror Of Coincidences

Sometimes inhabitants of the small and strange city of New Dallas would begin to see things that the silent guardians dubbed "particularities". These things weren't remarkably out of place but they were noticeable. They would catch the eye of the average person and they'd look at them for a second before something else caught their eye and they looked away. Eventually the people who noticed the particularities for just a moment or two would forget about them. Generally it happened in a flash, perhaps whenever someone who was too close took a quick selfie with the flash on or when someone left a store who had been there for hours when the sun's glare hit them just right, by the time the flash disappeared it had stolen with it the memory of the particularity. That was how these things would generally remain undetected but sometimes the person looking at them didn't look away. Instead they'd be drawn to the things they saw, hypnotized and drawn closer to whatever particular thing caught their eye in the first place. That would begin the process. 

The process was a particularly nasty safeguard that the silent guardians of New Dallas would execute without exception. It was a brutal process which involved the clever magic of the guardians who had gone and enchanted the particularities they were aware of so that they'd trap onlookers with powerful hypnotics which prevented them from leaving the vicinity of whatever particularity they had been unfortunate enough to look at and stupid enough to keep staring at beyond the allotted four full seconds. That was the margin of error before the magic took hold and trapped its victims. Whenever the magic was activated the guardians would feel their collective energy diminish and would rush to the scene to engage the second step in the process. 

To the rare individuals who had been able to witness the process but didn't have knowledge of the silent guardians, a secret organization that sought to protect New Dallas from all manner of supernatural threats and malicious extraterrestrial beings the process looked horrible. To them it involved a street or alley almost immediately being deserted aside from the person or people to whom the process would take place, and the dangerous looking guardians. When it occurred a single guardian would appear and with a cruel sort of ruthless efficiency, that many in New Dallas exclusively associated with contract killers, would use a bizarre looking knife and relentlessly stab the person who was undergoing the process. What the rare individuals who saw the process but didn't know of the guardians didn't know was that the process would save the lives of the victims of the particularities. It did however have the permanent side-effect of stripping its survivors of their sanity. It also left them permanently vulnerable to the particularities and to other supernatural entities which were masters at hiding in plain sight. That being said to fall victim to a particularity was far worse than losing one's sanity. Every victim of a particularity posed a threat to far more than the mind of a single individual. 

Particularities were brutal and bloodthirsty beings who lacked physical forms. They instead hid in plain sight posing as what looked like strange coincidences. A common disguise which was popular for particularities was to take the shape of a car that was parked immediately behind a car and replicate its exact make, model, year, color, and even license plate. In their collective experience that was one of the most reliable ways to trick humans into exploring and eventually getting trapped by them. When a particularity trapped a victim it would drive the victim insane for hours inside of what appeared to be a localized pocket dimension it spawned once a victim drew close enough and release them once it knew it had achieved its goal of mentally weakening its captured prey. It'd brutally strip them of their sanity and any sense of morality they might have once had. Afterwards it'd begin to whisper into the mind of its victim and tell them vile things. Those vile whispers would get worse and worse until the unhinged victim turned violent and rampaged until eventually someone or a group of people brought its rampage to a violent end. There were those who had survived such rampages and helped stop the victims of particularities who were unnerved by how the rampaging harbingers of death would be grateful to those who shot them and inflicted harm on them and how sincere their final words would be which were invariably some variation of "thank you" even as the berserkers were coughing blood or otherwise bleeding profusely. 

Particularities were alien beings who delighted in death and destruction. They particularly love appearing on our Earth where they have no power to directly cause death and destruction but instead play our own species against each other to do so. They dance in our despair and delight in our destruction. 

The particularities might look like coincidences but that was just a disguise. It was a disguise they used to get into the heads of those who'd explore coincidences. It is an alien and inexplicable awareness of particularities which leads many writers to describe coincidences as nonexistent. It's out of unconscious and unquestionable fear that we write away coincidences and attempt to rationalize them. But only the silent guardians have learned how to begin to fight particularities and even keep potential victims of them alive and only in the past year. That being said in the grand scheme of things particularities are only a nuisance compared to the greater dangers out there. They can only rely on the violent, base urges of individuals they've driven insane. There are far bigger threats out there than particularities who don't need to drive someone insane and can instead manifest themselves independently and powerfully without relying on the subjective of those tortured beyond their individual breaking points. 

There are mighty alien beings with inscrutable agendas who empower far more than madmen and who don't have the same needs as the particularities to exert their influence on others. Instead these beings empower a selected few from within poor and elevate them to unimaginable heights. They bring them up and give them nonsensical demands that must be obeyed or else they inflict impossible harm on entire cities, leveling neighborhoods and crippling entire counties just because a rags to riches woman didn't skin her 4th cat on the second Saturday of July. Or worse they instead demand the impossible from someone of good conscious, appearing in forms made up of nightmares and cloaked in sanguine robes, terrorizing a single individual and demanding that that person burn a town to the ground and if they can't or don't they're threatened with the death of every single person they've ever known or worse. These alien beings are the real reasons why the silent guardians quietly and humbly protect the inhabitants of New Dallas. Their impossible whims and wills bring about change and devastation on scales far grander than the particularities could ever do even in their own sadistic imaginations. But in New Dallas the terrors of alien beings have only just begun, and are not limited to the individual evils of the particularities and the enigmatic and vast alien beings who play with the poor and the noble hearted to bring about massive change. 

In time the fickle tales of New Dallas will begin to assemble, as will its silent guardians who consistently protect the city and those who call it home from threats far too powerful to be human. Only you can decide if you want to know the tales of New Dallas and if you are brave enough to learn more about what goes on in the technology advanced ruins of a once American city.

A/N: That last bit was a way for me to say that I like what I wrote here but I am eager to hear your thoughts. It's my way of signalling that this might be the start of something new but I want to hear your opinions before I try to make writing in this universe a common thing. It's my attempt at science-fiction and horror and it's out of my comfort zone but I wanted to see if those who read my works like it. If so I'll definitely make writing stories set in New Dallas a priority of mine when it comes to fictional writing. But I need to know what you think.