Shoreline Stories (Prologue)

"In the year 201█, the existence of sentient extrahuman species, more colloquially referred to as monsters, was officially declassified by the United Nations. Before this date, dozens of species of non-humans had existed without human knowledge for millennia, and because of the efforts of the formerly top-secret Extraspecies Interactions Divisions of intelligence agencies around the world, the existence of these species was protected. In this same year, governments across the world initiated the Cultural Exchange between Species Project, allowing extraspecies individuals to live with human homestays in order to cement relationships between humans and other species."
-Excerpt from A History of Non-Human Species and Their Interactions with Mankind, First Edition

Even though your family hadn't signed up for the Cultural Exchange project, you had seen plenty of monsters around your hometown after the bill was introduced. You bumped into them at the library every so often, and the guy you roomed with for your first year in college was dating an Inari (she never really liked you much, so you tried to stay out of her way and not piss her off).

But now, eight years after the Cultural Exchange project was initiated, monsters had almost completely integrated with human society. Host families were no longer needed, many monsters owned and operated their own businesses or worked for major companies, and some had even risen to celebrity as actors and musicians.

You are Anon, and you’re just over six months out of college. You’ve packed your things into your old van, found a job opening at a bookstore in a beach resort town called Sunset Harbor a few hours away from your home, scheduled an interview with the owner, and managed to find a person willing to rent out an affordable guest room to you (a rather large check that your generous grandmother gave you for Christmas certainly helped with the rent).

You’d visited Sunset Harbor a few times when you were younger, and the weeks spent there were some of the best of your life. Living in your favorite town in the country 24/7 instead of just for summer vacation sounds like a dream, and a perfect way to get away from the drab, claustrophobic concrete of the city and out into the salty beach air.

And though you didn’t know it at the time, you would make your best friends here in Sunset Harbor, and your life would take a turn for the better.