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.
JUMP TO TOP ↑ | ↓ JUMP TO COMMENTS
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.
JUMP TO TOP ↑ | ↓ JUMP TO COMMENTS
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!
JUMP TO TOP ↑ | ↓ JUMP TO COMMENTS
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.
JUMP TO TOP ↑
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
citycenter) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2023-07-01 11:00 am
Elisa Maza || Gargoyles
[Elisa jolted awake from the buzzing. What was going on? This wasn't one of the subway cars for New York and this was't the mobile phone she had. Orintation? What orintation? She was getting more and more confused the longer she was awake. She quickly pulled herself up and looked around the train car for a moment before it came to a stop. She didn't fall or stumble. She didn't take the subway much anymore, but she was still used to it.
She stepped off of the train and pulled her jacket around her as she glanced around. Was this some sort of trick by Xanatos? Couldn't be. She would have remembered being grabbed and drugged by a goon of his. This was something totally different. This train station definitly wasn't in any part of New York. She went up the stairs and continued to look around.]
City Hall
[What kind of City Hall didn't have any information in it?! Elisa was even more confused as she dug through the files that she could find. Everything was blank. What happened to cause all of this? Did they just not keep any records at all? She sighed and fought the temptation to kick one of the filing cabnits before she headed out.]
What is wrong with this city?
Apartments
[Elisa didn't like the idea of breaking and entering, but she needed to figure out what was going on. She carefully tried a door and it was open.]
Hello? Anyone there?
[She got no answer. Frowning she moved onto the next, continuing on for a few more apartments. Not a single person. This wasn't good at all. All of the apartments looked like someone had lived there and just stepped out for a few minutes.]
I don't like this at all.
Wildcard!
Want something else? Fell free to send me a dm!
city hall
[Daan cannot fault the woman, though. After all, walking into City Hall with the expectation to find even a sliver of information is only logical, and something he'd done as well.
Yet, he looks more mildly annoyed than immediately concerned.]
I was hoping for even a name for this city and we can't even manage that. Perplexing, to say the least.
no subject
[Now that surprised her. She looked over at the man, her hands loose at her sides.]
What about you? Got a name or are you nameless as well?
[She's not happy about her lack of finding anything.]
no subject
[Her quippy question earns a brief cold smile before it swiftly fades. Well, it's not one someone else to know exact circumstances of his name, so he doesn't hold it against her.
Really, if anything, she's very quickly reminding him of a certain reporter. So he responds airily.]
How rude to not introduce yourself first, but very well. Call me Daan. And you, miss...?
no subject
[She pulled a badge out from her jacket to show him.]
Not that jurisdiction matters here. I'm just trying to figure things out.
no subject
[If anything, this is beneficial. He's met a variety of people in the army -- earnest soldiers, selfish men, people who reveled in chaos and battle, cowards -- but for the moment, he thinks he's fine with taking a small gamble and believe that she is truly interested in trying to solve all of this.]
I'm afraid I very likely know as much as you do, but if I can be of assistance I will do what I can to make your work a bit easier.
no subject
[This was quite the case. And she had absolutely no information to go off of, besides the face that she woke up on a random train.]
no subject
I've heard a variety of theories, but at the end of the day we have nothing concrete yet. Only what we lack, and how limited we are in exploration proper.
no subject
[The more information she knew about this place the better. She could at least start piecing things together. She was going to need a notepad so that she could keep notes about things so that she could try and figure this place out.]
no subject
And you, Detective?
haven't seen gargoyles in ages! [APARTMENTS]
Who are you? I have a weapon.
Would you believe I've also played from Darkwing Duck and SWAT Kats?
Detective Elisa Maza, NYPD.
[She pulled out her badge and held it up for him to see.]
I'm just trying to figure out what in the world is going on here.
[Her badge was probably a lot older than he was used to seeing.]
YES!!!
Everyone is trying to figure out what's going on here. [He straightens up, studying the badge she's holding before looking at her again.]
Connor. I was a special investigator attached to the Detroit Police Department. [He finally puts the lamp down.] A pleasure to meet you, Detective, even in these circumstances.
no subject
Detroit PD? That's interesting. Its nice meeting you as well, Connor.
[There's a small pause.]
Is there anything that you can tell me besides this place having absolutely no records of anything?
no subject
I don't have a badge to show you to confirm my identity, I'm sorry.
[Truth be told, he was never given a badge, as he was never an official member of the DPD. Elisa doesn't need to know that. He shakes his head, sighing and finally putting the lamp down near his feet.]
There isn't much to tell. I woke up on the train with a device and a lot of unanswered questions. No one knows why we were brought here, no one knows what's going on or who's behind this. Food, clothing, and accommodations- they're all here, free for the taking, and replenished regularly by unseen forces. Oh, and there aren't any animals at all, not even insects. I don't understand how there can be plant life without insects accompanying it, but I guess that's just another of the mysteries of this place.
[He shrugs, not sure what to tell her.]
If you saw any apartments that you like, you might as well claim it for yourself.
city hall
No such luck. All Robby found while at a desk was a whole lot of nothing--nothing he was really going to poke around. Just a woman coming out from one of the back rooms, and he looks up, hears her talking to herself. ]
Nothing?
[ So says her tone and everything, but it's a way of confirmation, and making his own presence known. ]
no subject
[It was strange and she had seen some strange things before.]
no subject
[ He looks down now at a book on the desk on the other side of raised counter between him and it, and-- you know what, he'll hoist himself up onto the side, so he can reach down and pick it up.
Let's take a look. ]
no subject
[She watches as he picks up the book.]
no subject
...Okay, so it's gotta be a game. [ He's not sure, but--he wants to make sense of this. The words don't sound right (why should they?), but: ] Someone's doing this on purpose. This can't be a real city.
no subject
[It would be easier to get rid of her over say Goliath, but that was a different story.]
no subject
Does emptying out a real city make as much sense as making up a real one? [ He spreads out his hands. ] Both are crazy, yeah.
[ But which one seems more likely out of two crazy options? ]
no subject
[She shook her head a bit.]
I'm Detective Elisa Maza, NYPD.
no subject
Robby, [ he decides to answer back. ] I'm from LA. No one's got a reason to pick me up and take me anywhere.
[ A detective? Maybe. He moves the logbook from off his lap, slipping down off from the counter. ]
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
apartments
[ Lan Xichen is also looking around the apartments, but with less intent to explore and more to, well, maintain. He's taken it upon himself to clean and manage some of the rooms in the building that haven't been chosen by visitors for their personal housing because he worries that they might fall into neglect. True, nothing so far has indicated that, but he wants to be sure that if anyone does return, the rooms will be in good shape for their arrival.
When Elisa calls out, he's approaching from behind her in the hallway. ]
Ah, were you looking for someone? I think we all arrived alone, but it's possible to meet up in this city.