What few outside the Midnight Cabaret realize is that nearly everyone in the show is a war refugee from some faraway magical realm, worlds overrun by evil. Despite leaving their conquered homes and taking human form, the enemies of these survivors sometimes send minions after them; perhaps to thwart future reprisals; perhaps to finish the job. The performers always look for signs of incursions by their old enemies as they travel around the troupe’s new home.

“When I recovered from nearly drowning in water, unchained otherworldly evil, and magical energy, there was a ghost at my side: Uncle Beau. As I huddled with everyone else in the reeking SuperDome, he slowly told me about how the storm took out more than just the levees, but the magical wards that had kept all kinds of evil locked up in this town. Now that evil was running wild all over the South, and as his heir, it was my job to find those old monsters wherever they hid, bring them back to their cages in New Orleans, and lock them up again.”

Lucian Dark can usually pass as fully Human, even though he’s really a hybrid of Human and one of the native lifeforms from the extra-dimensional realm of Susur. In medieval terms, Chiaroscuro is the progeny of an incubus and a witch.

In this state, he unconsciously assesses the known capabilities of his opponents, predicts their most likely moves, visualizes the consequences of his potential responses, and calculates his best possible course of action. His mind recalculates all the known variables in an ongoing battle from moment to moment.