A TRAIN COMES INTO THE STATION.
You wake up on a train.
Your phone is buzzing. It's in your pocket, in your hand, on the seat next to you. It's a normal phone, and you're on a normal train car. One of the lights flickers, a little further down. The world is very quiet. It feels like you're right where you're meant to be. On the phone's surface is a white screen and the words—
WELCOME TO THE CITY. BEGIN ORIENTATION?
▶ NO
Please take a moment to complete your orientation.
Once you're finished, the subway doors slide open to let you out onto the train platform. To your right, the platform continues on and eventually ends; to the left is a set of stairs that will lead you up into the station itself. The platform is quiet, clean, empty—there's no one else around, and the only sounds you can hear are your own footsteps, your own breaths, and the occasional faraway sound of a creaking pipe or rush of air. The train you disembarked will stay there as long as you do, its doors still open, until you finally decide to venture up into this new locale.
As you make your way up the stairs to your left, you find yourself in the belly of City Hall station. The station is large, a sprawling underground mini-metropolis of corridors and storefronts. Here, you may find others like you, freshly-arrived city residents from other realms (or even your own). There is also a subway map, which will give you an idea of the layout of the neighborhood, and ticketing machines, which can currently only be used to buy tickets to a handful of stations located on lines 1, 2, and 9.
If you're hungry or in need of any kind of supplies, there are plenty of storefronts inside the subway station as well—snack stands, convenience stores, restaurants, clothing stores, a pharmacy, and a variety of empty shops that may or may not have ever been in use. Everything is unlocked, and you can take whatever you need.
Characters may stay on the train platform indefinitely, and may re-board and re-disembark from the subway as many times as they like, but the train will not depart nor will the doors close. Once they go up the stairs into the train station, they may hear the train doors closing and the train departing. Another train will not arrive, no matter how long the character waits. Only once they come up the stairs into the station itself may characters encounter their fellow newly-arrived residents and take advantage of what the city has to offer.
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WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
The station is located in the city center. It has three major exits that lead to areas of interest in the district, but there are several other smaller exits that lead in other directions around the neighborhood. You are welcome to use any of them, but may find the north, southwest, and east exits to be the most welcoming.
TO THE NORTH
The northern entrance to the station leads up into the sunlight and puts you out in a brickwork plaza. There's a modest building in front of you, three or four stories of stone with a welcoming facade. There's a sign above the entryway—it says City Hall. You may be tempted to explore, if you're interested in learning more about the city and how it functions, but prepare to find yourself disappointed—the folders in the records rooms are full of empty, blank sheets of paper, and the logbooks and balance sheets are similarly devoid of information.
Immediately to the southwest of City Hall, you will find a small building that houses the tourist information kiosk. It looks welcoming, with an inviting glass facade and a sign above the entryway announcing it as the "TOURIST CENTER." It's a humble building with a receptionist's desk on the back wall opposite the entrance, empty magazine shelves lining the side walls, and a few spinning brochure racks full of blank pamphlets. Anyone is welcome to peruse the tourist literature, though they won't offer much information, being primarily filled with pictures of the surrounding area—City Hall, the park, a statue garden, and the surprisingly heavily-featured cemetery. There are a few sentences sprinkled throughout about basic offerings of the city, such as apartment complexes and office buildings, as well as a few maps with the same limited scope as the larger version on the wall behind the receptionist's desk.
The main feature of the tourist center is the interactive kiosk installed dead in the center, right in the middle of a few rows of uncomfortable chairs that fill the small room. It's noticeably in the way of any would-be foot traffic through the tourist center, and something about the technology seems a little more modern than the computer behind the desk or the landline phone on the wall. The kiosk is a tall silver rectangle, about average adult height, and the upper half is a screen welcoming visitors to touch it to activate the kiosk. If you were to touch it, the screen would come to life with simple dialogue inviting visitors to ask it their questions.
However, residents should note that the kiosk is only programmed to assist with exploration within the available areas of the city. It may not be able to answer every question, and tampering with the kiosk may result in unreliable or inaccurate answers!
TO THE SOUTHWEST
The western exit of the station takes you up into a city park, lush and green with a very light fog still hanging about the trees. There are lampposts on the walkways and benches where you could rest, and plenty of flora, although you can neither see nor hear any signs of animal life. You walk the paths that meander idly through the verdant grass and you feel a sense of peace, some of your unease about this place easing into a pleasant calm. The air smells fresh, like it's recently rained, and you'll find the grass ever so slightly damp should you decide to take a seat.
As you make your way deeper into the park, the trees grow denser and the smell of soil and plant life grows stronger. This is the older part of the park, very nearly a forest, with ivy climbing the trunks of the trees and plants and shrubs growing riotously around their bases. As you turn a corner, you find yourself first in the statue garden, although the statues are harder to see now, choked as they are with ivy. There are many statues, some partially obscured, some fully—very few of them still stand free of the vines and clinging roots. (It doesn't feel quite as peaceful here.) If a statue's face looks a little bit familiar, you may not want to look at it too long.
Continue down the path and you will find yourself in a graveyard, one that seems centuries old. Most of the headstones are worn away by time and covered in moss, rendering them impossible to read. The few that are free of moss are blank, or bear only suggestions of names too faint to be understood. (Was that the name of—no, it couldn't have been. Could it?) Many of the headstones stand at an angle or are toppled over completely, having been subjected to either strong winds or the roots of the trees that grow up from some of the graves, spreading branches toward the sky.
TO THE EAST
The final exit of the station, to the east, puts you out on a quiet surface street. Are you hungry? Or are you paralyzed by choice? There are plenty of restaurants, offering options of almost any food you can imagine. You could try a convenience store—it's well stocked, and the items there seem free for the taking. How about a restaurant? There's no one to take your order, but when you look in the kitchen, there's something on the stove, and it's just what you've been craving. Imagine that.
A few blocks down, you come in through the lobby of a tall building and find yourself in a corporate office. The fluorescent lights are steady and unforgiving, and the cubicles and offices are empty. There are a few pieces of paper on desks, a few folders left in organizers, but everything is perfectly blank. Despite how empty and quiet the office is, it nonetheless gives you the feeling that just a few minutes ago, this place was bustling with workers going about their daily business.
You enter another building and find yourself in the lobby of an apartment complex—finally, a place to rest. The first door you try opens easily into a completely empty living room, freshly vacuumed but without a single piece of furniture. It's a nice apartment, quiet, but with a little too much echo for your taste, maybe. Still, and perhaps oddly, you have no trouble envisioning what life here would be like.
The second door you open leads to an apartment that feels lived-in. Why does it feel lived-in? It's fully furnished with items that seem to go together perfectly, true, but the feeling is more than that—the room feels like someone was just here, maybe standing right in the kitchen only moments before you swung the door open. The air is a perfectly comfortable temperature, and it somehow smells like home despite that you've never once set foot here before. The refrigerator is stocked, and the cabinets are full of spices and flatware and kitchen utensils.
As you look around the living room, you find that there are pictures in frames on the walls and some of the flat surfaces—a seascape, a field, a shot of a city park bench. In each of the photos there's something just slightly wrong with the angle, as though the photographer were aiming for a subject that can no longer be seen.
Characters are welcome to explore the district around the City Hall subway station to their heart's content. The City Hall building itself contains several floors of offices and file rooms, but none of them contain any particularly interesting information. Nonetheless, characters may wish to team up with other newcomers and try to find some hints about the nature of the city. They can also spend a while in the park, the statue garden, or the graveyard. In the blocks surrounding the station there are plenty of options for food and housing, as well as office buildings, storefronts, and alleyways to look around. There are no workers in any of the buildings, and there does not seem to be an honor system for payment, nor any consequences for taking food from the stores or setting up camp in an apartment or office building.
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SO A TURKEY WALKS INTO A BOWLING ALLEY...
There's a bowling alley open in the newly-accessible district, and you're invited to come test your mettle!
Walking into the lobby, you're struck by a peculiar combination of scents—shoe polish, floor wax, pretzels and nachos, and something pungent and a little oily. On the wall behind the desk is a shelf full of pair after pair of shoes, in every size you could possibly imagine, and there's a low rack filled with brightly-colored, heavy bowling balls that are ready for the taking. You can also hear the low hum of machinery and the rattle of pins being reset every time someone knocks them down, the bowling alley a well-oiled machine despite the fact that no one seems to be manning it.
You can bowl alone, start a match play (1-v-1), or bowl as a team, but you'll quickly find that bowling is much more fun (and somehow easier) when you're playing with others. Maybe it's because being around other people raises your spirits, but you feel more confident when you step up to bowl, and you find that when you're playing as part of a team, the bowling ball travels faster and in a straighter line, and you seem to be making strikes and spares with much greater frequency. Teamwork really does make the dream work!
If you occasionally see what you think might be the shadow of someone passing behind the machinery at the far end of the lane, don't worry about it—that's probably just your imagination.
If you stop by the bowling alley at night, you will find the place totally transformed. There's a disco ball hanging from the ceiling and brightly-colored lights flashing and dancing around the floor and walls. Any white parts of your clothing glow a delightful blueish color, and you find that you're illuminated in all kinds of interesting shades by the blacklight bulbs glowing in the ceiling. This is cosmic bowling, truly not for the faint of heart!
When you've finished bowling, you may want to stop by the snack area for a pretzel or hot dog, a soda, or—if you're there for cosmic bowling—maybe even a more adult beverage from the food counter on the far end of the building.
There isn't anything especially spooky about the bowling alley—except, of course, being forced to wear shoes that have been worn by a hundred strangers before. Characters are welcome to find their shoe size, grab a bowling ball, and go to town! Characters who come during the day will encounter a normal bowling alley, but they can always come back at night to get the full cosmic bowling experience. There will always be shoes in their sizes, the pins will reset themselves, and the balls will always be returned. Just be careful, those ball chutes can crush your fingers if you're not careful!
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WILDCARD.
The city is by no means small, and there are plenty of things for you to see. There's no rush in exploring, so feel free to take your time looking around and peering into various nooks and crannies and alleyways—and don't worry, you're not very likely to find anything peering back.
If none of the above prompts appeal, feel free to check out the Locations and Maps pages and write your own freestyle prompt using one or many of the available locations.
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citycenter) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2023-07-01 11:00 am
no subject
it is a little funny to hear daniel's half of the conversation spoken in the tinny mechanical voice of his phone, but the joke at least parses as a joke. heine snorts. ] What, you don't like the cardio?
[ that's a funny too, although heine's sense of humor is drier than the sahara. maybe that's why the siri jokes work for him.
once he can actually see, and feels reasonably sure based on outward appearances that daniel isn't going to drop dead once they start walking, heine straightens up so they can continue. it's sort of a toss-up whether trying to converse will be a good distraction or a bad one, but heine figures he'll give it a try: ] What's it like where you're from? This seem familiar?
no subject
It's bearable, especially considering how often enough he's pushed himself while hurt before. (Most of the time when he was younger, but-- still.)
And.. honestly, even if Daniel can't express it very well right now, the talking helps. Not the talking on his part, considering his lack of an ability to do so, but just Heine talking at him is kind of nice. Especially when what Daniel notices most as they make their way over through the street is how quiet everything is.
Way too quiet for such a big city.
It makes him relieved to have company. Company that's willing to converse, even. Heine may have seemed a little rough around the edges earlier, but Daniel thinks he doesn't seem like such a bad guy after all. ]
It's not unfamiliar.
[ He'd probably be a little more elaborate if he wasn't conversing purely through writing things out as he walks.. But he's trying to convey the most important sentiments anyway. ]
It looks like cities I know.
Except no city I have ever seen is this empty.
no subject
although to be fair, that's disconcerting to heine too. ] Huh. [ he's not about to show his hand enough to admit that this is the second time in his life he's seen the sky, though. he just files the information away. ]
Yeah, that part. [ the emptiness, he means. ] Still coming up with theories on what's behind that.
[ so far he's got "mass abduction," "everyone became immortal and dipped," and "everyone was murdered and the blood was magically cleaned up," none of which are particularly compelling as theories go. sue him, it's not like heine has much to work with. ]
Funny, never thought I'd miss what car horns sound like.
[ the pharmacy's just ahead, partway down the block between a convenience store and what appears to be a thai restaurant. heine leads them there, glad that the door opens with a cheerful 'ding!' and saves him the trouble of having to break in. ]
no subject
The sentiment he does express is entirely echoed, though. That Daniel also has no idea what could be behind this, and that it's easy to miss the hustle and bustle of the city when you're walking somewhere so quiet. It shows in the way he frowns - half-worried, and half-thoughtful.
Even as they walk into the pharmacy. Because Daniel looks around in there while standing at the entrance, and..
.. well, it sure is just as quiet here, huh. ]
Is there no one working here? [ The phone's robotic voice reads aloud. ]
no subject
[ which means there's no one to object to the fact that he heads straight to the back of the pharmacy and vaults his way over the counter directly back into the shelves where all the drugs are kept. he leaves daniel to collect bandages, etc from the front—that seems like the easier task, plus there are chairs out there. ]
Good news is we don't need cash for anything. [ thank god for that, too, because heine is broke.
he rifles through some pill bottles—ofloxacin, penicillin. ] You a percocet type or an oxycodone type?
[ heine has a poor grasp on brand name drugs, but he knows drugs, especially the type people pay good money for on the black market. turns out that when you agree to take "any job nobody else wants," that involves a lot of drug money. ]
no subject
On the other hand, maybe they don't really have much of a choice after being dumped into this strangely empty city. After all, even aside from this pharmacy conundrum, how are they going to eat anything otherwise? Heine is right to want to do things this way.
Still doesn't mean Daniel feels great as he wanders the aisles in the front, looking for the simple stuff-- and listening to Heine calling from where the counter is. Daniel needs a faint moment to think, but then he turns up the volume of his phone so it's a little more audible, even now they're further apart. ]
Just some aspirin should be fine.
[ .. Daniel definitely looks like he needs something stronger than an aspirin. In fact, the options Heine are listing would be way better.
But this is Daniel, and he's apparently committed to underplaying his own status at all times to the point that he'd even reject actual painkillers that'd help... ]
no subject
Uh-huh. Oxy it is, then. [ aspirin, for the dude who needed a breather after a single flight of stairs? heine puts the percocet back where he found it, more or less, and then comes back out from behind the desk—through the door, this time, since it opens from the inside.
he hands the bottle over to daniel. ] You don't need me to tell you it's dumb to pretend all you need is aspirin when what you really want is a horse tranq, right?
[ either shit's about to get real, in which case daniel will need the stronger stuff, or it's not, in which case they have at least enough time for him to take care of his injuries. ]
Don't take it all at once.
no subject
Because there's so many reasons he shouldn't. He's fine, for one - he's fine, clearly fine enough - and maybe someone else might need it more. Or if he does take them, he's not sure he feels comfortable taking something so strong in a place he still doesn't understand, still doesn't trust.
There's some shame too in looking weak in front of someone younger. Someone who shouldn't have to worry about him, even if it's in Heine's own gruff sort of way.
But even though Daniel opens his mouth - knowing fully well sound won't come out anyway - and then closes it, he gives up without protest, just taking the bottle from Heine.
For a moment it looks like the man is left speechless, but then he puts the bandaids and other things he was gathering down on a shelf for a moment, just so he can write on the phone again. ]
Not exactly the first impression I wanted to give off.
[ You know, like a broken old man.
Even if that's very much what he is right now. ]
no subject
heine doesn't know frailty, but he does know injury, and he also knows that in a world of brutal practicality it's better to treat what you can and not let it make you weaker. ]
Eh. [ heine shrugs, snags a package of generic brand necco wafers from the shelf. elite pharmacy snack of my childhood. ] Impressions are overrated. You just gotta survive.
[ and here daniel is, alive! surviving! who gives a shit about the rest. ]
no subject
By focusing on someone other than himself. ]
You sound like you are used to that. [ The phone says after he types it in, and Daniel starts gathering the pills Heine handed him and the supplies he himself grabbed to shove them into his pockets. The one upside of having arrived in this place in the tracksuit he was wearing rather than his usual suits - bigger pockets. He can stow it all away.
He seems to think for a moment though, stopping in the middle of that action, to grab the phone again and to add: ]
Not to get too personal. [ Heine seems kind of like a private person, anyway. Or maybe the type who just stows away a lot underneath a more nonchalant attitude. ] Just wondering if you are going to be alright here with whatever is going on.
[ Says the guy who looks like he got hit by a truck.. BUT.. LOOK. When you're as much of a Dad as Daniel, it's really hard to fully surpress the urge to fuss over the people around you who are younger than you, no matter your current state, or the fact you're stuck in the same crappy situation.
At least Daniel's eyes look sympathetic, rather than looking down on Heine. This is clearly just a fussy old man. ]
no subject
[ of course, heine can't say for certain what awaits the other residents back in their respective worlds of origin. there are probably some with worse circumstances than heine's, and also probably some with better. "surviving" probably looks different for everyone. but for him, the fact that he's here and, as far he knows, alive is proof of his survival, at least for now.
the fussy old guy look in daniel's eyes reminds heine of mihai. ]
I'm gonna be fine. This is—easy, so far. Compared to what I'm coming from, anyway. [ at least here there are no swords to skewer him and no armies of genetically engineered supersoldiers poised to stage a forcible takeover of the entire city! that heine knows of, anyway. he's not going to say that part aloud in case it jixnes something. ] Are you?
no subject
On the other hand, he was so busy focusing on Heine's answer, nodding as he takes it in - believing that Heine is capable of dealing with this if he says so, at least, though a little worried at the same time about what that implies about the place Heine comes from.. - that Daniel just.. didn't think Heine might ask him the same.
It causes the man to look kind of awkward for a moment, probably answering that question for him without words. Even if it's not the answer he wants to give.
Because what he writes out is the total opposite, as indicated when the phone reads out: ]
Yes. I'll be fine. This should heal just fine if I just rest. [ M.. aybe..
Hopefully..
But what's the alternative? Especially since he won't find out there's even doctors here at all until later. ]
I suppose it's just a matter of hoping nothing more dangerous will appear in this strange place, right?