Quotes / The Unmasqued World

As the characters stagger through Manhattan, beaten, wounded and tired, a mere hour before the sun rises, they become aware of the crowds that have assembled just outside the CDC perimeter. They look at the characters, awestruck, and none of them speak; as the characters approach them, they hesitantly retreat, but only a step. And above them hang the big screens, showing what the coterie has just been through on CNN's continuous broadcast. They see themselves exhibiting their Disciplines, frantically using their vampiric Blood to beat the monster. They see Cyscek dying in their arms, turning to dust.

The characters have just broken the Masquerade.

—Vampire: The Masquerade — Gehenna

Things are never gonna be the same now. I mean, look at this. You got aliens. You got big green guys tearing down buildings. When I was a kid, I used to draw cowboys and Indians...

— Adrian Toomes / Vulture on his child's drawing of the Avengers, Spider-Man: Homecoming

Primordial Avatars seek out salvation in compatible Sleepers, and a new wave of Awakenings adds to the thousands already roused by the Storm. Every day, hundreds of people Awaken to their magical birthright; the Technocracy can't contain them all. Already strained by the growing Awakened population and pervasive spiritual activity, the weak pretense of terrorism disintegrates. Days after the first graves empty, the United States strips its sanctioning from the World Advisory Council. Other nations quickly follow suit. The ruse is over; these are the End Times.

—Mage: The Ascension — Ascension

We thought magic was impossible in our version of Earth until April 16, 1982. On that date, after centuries of hiding in the shadows, the Elders of the Dark finally realized their condition wasn't a curse; it was a marketable asset.
Versions of the following ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and a dozen other money-oriented publications around the world:
Power and an End to Aging
Cost: 10,000,000 US Dollars
Demonstrations and proof given to serious inquiries
Binding contracts to protect your interests
For further information, contact...

—All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

You can hush up a massacre in an office park or a hideous manifestation at the Albert Hall with DA-Notices and dark mutterings about terrorist attacks and hallucinogenic gas. But it's impossible to cover up airliners being shot down, an invading army rampaging through the suburbs of a major city, and a traffic jam of main battle tanks on the nation's motorways. Once the situation escalated to COBRA, the Cabinet Office emergency committee, and the government invoked Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty (calling support from NATO forces following an attack on a member nation), the mess in Leeds became the number one global rolling headline and still hasn't died down. It even beat out an eighty-meter-tall daikaiju that invaded the Yokahama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise theme park and duked it out with the Japanese Self-Defense Agency, as a result of the incursion at Puroland that I was sent to help deal with-

Nope, the events in Leeds aren't going back in the closet any time soon.

—The Delirium Brief

The video of the President’s death and subsequent transformation goes beyond viral online. However, no mainstream media sources report it, since they are all ultimately under the control of the Reptilian Conspiracy. Some social media sites and popular video services also move to take down and prevent the spread of the footage. But even the efforts of a global cabal aren’t enough to stop the news from spreading...

—"The Brotherhood of Babylon — Apocalypse," The End of the World: Alien Invasion

Down below the ship, on the night-side surface of a blue-brown-green ball of iron and dirt and water, there was a long, quiet moment as people came to realize what had happened, and soon cameras and telescopes and eyes and hearts pointed upwards.
There was a ship, now. A ship!
The proud, petty gods of earth and ocean and sky looked up into the night sky, and were humbled. The people looked up and were afraid and excited, and they wept and cheered. Governments and armies looked up and wondered if they ought to be palming old rusted keys and old red buttons. Scientists looked up, and then looked back down to the books they now needed to re-write. The insomniac beast of cable news, starving and slobbering, looked up and began to plan its feast, unaware that the ship could not be digested so easily. The internet shat itself, and so nothing much changed.
The Foundation looked up, and suffered the horrifying realization that they had just gotten sidelined, and on top of that they didn’t know what the procedure for reporting a spaceship-jacking was.
The ship, oblivious to this, waited.

— SCP Foundation, "Stealing Solidarity: Phase 4"

Cat's out of the bag doctor, no more secrets. Our highest priority now is safety.

—Admiral William Stenz, Godzilla (2014)

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