For millenia they have walked among us. Familiars, a religious sect of humans bred to be stronger, faster and smarter than their non-Familiar counterparts. Able to trace their lines to Ancient Minoa and beyond, they have their own traditions, their own religion and their own laws, and they believe that coming destruction of civilisation will leave them free to take over the world. But they are still human, and sometimes their traditions can send a Familiar mad.

On such occasions they are usually dealt with quickly and quietly; locked away in a Familiar run asylum or done away with in an 'accident'. But if they are clever, they can get away, start afresh. Maybe even develop a new race to combat the religious mania of their former friends, family and lovers. One man did, with the aid of the United State military and a team of dedicated scientists. He created transgenics, an army of super-soldiers created in test tubes from a mixture of human and animal DNA. Early experiments were largely unsuccessful, but successful enough to keep funding from drying up. By the end of the 20th century, the facility named Manticore was developing whole units of these child soldiers, training them to fight as soon as they could pay attention long enough. They were trying to reduce military casualties by sending in transgenic children trained in the art of warfare instead of humans.

What they didn't count on was the freewill of their young prodigies. Early in 2009, twelve of the transgenics from what was known as the X5 series managed to escape. Although they forcibly turned the remaining transgenics into good little soldiers, Manticore officials were never able to track down those twelve escapees, the so called best of the bunch. After an electromagnetic attack by terrorists known as the Pulse turned all the 1s and 0s into just plain 0s, effectively reducing America to a third world country, it just didn't seem plausible to continue the search. Manticore kept making it's child soldiers, and the twelve escapees kept watching their back, until there was such a time as they no longer could. Then they took the offensive to Manticore, blowing up the gene storage facility.

It was 2020 when they finally brought Manticore down for real, as much as they were able to anyway. Blowing up the main base, releasing transgenics into the world, they set about a new chain of events that led to a media frenzy. Human mobs would be set on transgenic target who just wanted to live free, and the tension was exascerbated by Familiars wanting to rid the world of this new threat to their society.

In 2021 transgenics went from being an urban myth, to a known reality. In the end, the transgenics settled on ground where humans couldn't safely tread, Seattle's Terminal City, otherwise known as Freak Nation.

It is now 2022, nearly a year after the transgenics set up their own city. Manticore's has for the last few months been moving its operations from US soil, closing the last two bases, and moving to a new mega base. Now run by Familiars, Manticore has moved to Canada, and is using transgenics to round up those that fled when the original facility was destroyed. Familiars are also engaged in this pursuit, as are humans, and there are transgenics across Seattle just trying to live their lives in a broken world that's gone Pollo Loco