>>17881596
Let's talk about the things that go bump in the night.*1 Wait no. That's a crap place to start. First, let's talk about otherworlds. We've all heard about parallel universes right? Well that theory is wrong but it's got a couple of good points. There ARE hundreds upon hundreds upon billions of universes but they're not all just slightly different due to whether a butterfly flapped it's wings or flew into the windscreen of a semi truck, they're all different, different people, places, languages all under a billion different skies. Oh of course there are similarities, if you keep rolling a dice you're likely to throw the same number more than once, that's how you know it's random. But they most definitely are not based on whether or not you wore the green scarf or the red scarf 20 years ago.

The other thing wrong with the theory is the word "parallel". Overlapping would be more accurate but even that doesn't begin to describe it. They're crammed together occupying the same space and time, rubbing against one another and shaping them. All flowing through each other, all the time, all at once in one big fucking mess. If there is a grand creator, and, judging by the mess, then they are probably the creator version of a three year old with ADHD, then our worlds are probably some forgot to five minute experiment shoved into that one drawer every guy has and at some point were going to bump into some random screws or some nail clippers.

>>17881599
Now let's talk about monsters. Go on, pull the sheets up over your head and check the doors to see if they're locked, do all the little rituals you do to keep yourself safe.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Are you done? Sure?
Okay, I'll continue.

Monsters AREN'T real. There, I said it, end of story, let's go home. The only trouble is, the body's of monsters ARE real. Remember what I said about worlds all crammed up together? Well when you cram stuff like that, even something like a whole universe, you get friction. And that friction rubs tiny tiny tiny little holes in the different worlds. And things slip through. Well not all of the time, only if there's another hole to slip through next to it. But things do slip through, not physical things in general but more sort of conceptual things. Things like ideas. Things like souls.

Of course I don't mean souls like we are taught about in Sunday school. Souls are more sort of a raw thingyness. They exist and do things and make things things. Your brain fires little electric pulses that give you a sense of you. And your genes tell your cells to grow a brain to do that. And your soul tells the universe that that is what should happen. Souls are kind of like life force. Except they aren't. It's not something you can explain very easily even if you had a whiteboard, paper, compasses and a dozen boxes of crayons. It's not something the human brain can process. But if you take a soul and leave it in a vacuum of NOTHING it will become SOMETHING. That's what they do. More or less.

>>17881604
And so, souls slip through the holes into the wrong worlds and they become something. Trouble is in the wrong worlds they don't have the right materials. Imagine you had blueprints for a house but instead of bricks a mortar you had cheese and custard. That would not go particularly well.*2 now imagine you didn't even have a blueprint, just the IDEA that you should make a house. That is what happens to souls that slip through. You end up with something desperately trying to exist where it shouldn't. Sometimes souls pick up on ideas such as "two legs, two arms, two eyes" but if you think how vague that is as a concept maybe you can understand why we end up with the monsters we do. Things with gaping maws and eyes that seem to sink into the arsehole of hell when you gaze into them. And that's not even the worst bit.

Simply put you can't "kill" monsters. It's like, well you know when you try to clean some dirt off a window? Then you realise it on the other side of the glass? It's kind of like that.

They're not part of the same world. Even if they enter our world they're not on our universes stock list so in a sense they don't exist. You can die in your world of course, so they can kill you but they can only die in theirs. It's something to do with souls as I tried to explain before and something described by some hook faced otherworld scholars*3 as the "window"*4 theory. Their souls aren't able to bounce back properly if you kill them in this world because the hole they came in through doesn't exist anymore, so they just sort of reanimate or hang around until a new space opens up and they can find a way back into existence. Its where the idea of vampires and immortals and undead come from.

>>17881607
Generally monster hunters just make do with destroying the body leaving the soul to float around on it's own. There are a few ways to do this. The first and most commonly used is destruction of the body. An example of this in popular culture would be cutting a zombies head off or setting stuff on fire. The other option is using something that is not present in the monsters world, such as silver or even uv rays which can sever the soul from the body.

One other important thing to note is that 90% of monsters aren't bad or evil. They're just really really fucking INSANE. Try to put yourself in their shoes for a moment, in your world everything is wrong. Yellow isn't yellow, green isn't green, they're seeing billions of colours they weren't built to comprehend, the smells are literally other worldly, the sun is a burning ball of fire in a toxic spill of a sky. Even the air they breathe scolds their throat. And then theres the body. They're trying to fit into a form they weren't built for, joints that bend backwards, eyes that can't see sound...

Well you get the picture more or less, that kind of thing would drive anyone insane, and these "monsters" are, at the end of the day, more or less, just normal people. Regular citizens who are lost and being tortured in ways worse than you could ever imagine.

So what can you do about them? How can you send them back to their own world or at least put them out of their misery? How would you figure out where you're even supposed to be sending the soul back too? Other worlds don't even exist in regular time and space let alone on google maps.

What the hell can anyone do?

>>17881609
*1 Or, more often, the things that screech like a cat choking on a baby penguin.
*2 But it would make an interesting installation in a modern art gallery and probably be worth several million dollars.
*3 The world of the hook faced scholars is very similar to our own except there cheese and custard houses are normal. They also invented instant ramen, an idea which slipped through into our world.
*4"Window" is a very rough translation, I have no idea how to type the actual word. How would you turn the sound mid morning sunlight makes when it bounces off thick green foliage and onto a ladybirds back into a word?