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
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He looks over towards the bowling game thoughtfully. "That would be mighty kind of ya. It seems there is little else to do in this town." He looks around again. "Some might call this a ghost town." There's a pause before he asks, "Is there more to do?"
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A ghost town seems an apt description for this place, Tessa thinks. Considering how every place in the city seems empty with a lingering sense that this city was only just very recently abandoned. Tessa has wondered, as she's explored, if this isn't a demon city, of a sort. She guesses not, considering the lack of demons. But one never knows.
"It certainly feels like a ghost town," she says. "Every area of this city seems haunted and empty. It's so strange."
She tilts her head as she considers his question. "I'm not sure. I've only just arrived myself. There's a park that makes for a fine walk if you've a mind for more green among all the concrete."
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"Well, then. That does seem to be tied up neatly, then." At least there will be some distraction.
"I have been through a ghost town or two, but this a much more modern sort of place. It is curious."
It is both a relief and a shame that she is just as new as he is. "I have seen it. It is eerie that there are no animal noises in that place as well." He looks back at the alley. "So how does this work?"
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She smiles at his comment about tying things up neat. "I like to think that I've gotten better at keeping things neat," she jokes. "Although I'm sure some corners of my flat back home would disagree." The mountains of books she keeps collecting, for one.
She nods. "I agree," she says. "I think the modernity of this city, and the fact that there is ample food and supplies available throughout the various stores, makes this all the more strange. If I had to guess, it seems like we've arrived just after the previous occupants abandoned this place."
When he asks after the bowling alley again, Tessa grins. She moves to hold open the door, gesturing him inside. "After you," she says. "First, we're going to want to find shoes. And then the actual bowling balls."
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There is a hint of something in his eyes at the mention that the food just being there seems to be all the more normal for this place. "It does appear to be that way, yes." He has quite a few questions, quite a lot of uncertainty, but it is perhaps better suited to someone who has been here a longer time than either of them.
Doc looks down at the cowboy boots that he is very clearly wearing and arches an eyebrow. "Are we not already wearing shoes?"
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This city might be strange, but Tessa can't pretend that she isn't grateful for this conversation. She has so many questions, and she knows she must remain wary, but, for now, just being able to laugh and explain bowling to a stranger she's just met feels like a sort of gift.
When he glances down at his cowboy boots, Tessa arches an eyebrow. "Nice boots," she says, wondering if those are authentic cowboy boots.
"We are indeed, wearing shoes," she says with a smile. "But we need a particular sort of shoe for bowling, so that we can walk and move around on the wood."
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They are. He was wearing them when he was down in the well those 130 years. Pointless to get new ones now. "Thank you."
But that is a curiosity. Particular shoes meant for wood. Well, there have likely been much stranger contraptions, but if he must, then he must. Lest some being that runs this place suddenly find reason to cause him harm. "Where do we find these shoes?"
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She nods over to what appears to be the desk with the shoes, though, of course, there is no one working at said desk. "See that counter over there? I believe we should be able to go behind it and find the right sizes. I usually get a size bigger than normal, myself. Gives your toes room to breathe."
She moves over to the counter, beginning to rummage through the available shoes. Good news, she thinks. They do seem to have every available size. She glances up at him a moment later.
"What size are you, would you say?"
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"And it is important to do that?" Give your toes room to breathe, he means. But he will also take her advice, following her over to the counter all the same.
"Well, I wear a size 10 shoe. Waverly took me once to a shoe store for slippers to wear in the house. I admit, I have not worn them." He would look sheepish, but it was not really important. Also since losing his hat, it may well be time to know his shoe size due to the possibility of losing his shoes now.
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"A size 10," she repats, shifting through the shoes to see if she can find that particular size. She tries not to think about how obviously worn all these pairs of shoes are, another sign of this ghost town city. Her eyes light up when she finally uncovers a pair of size 10 bowling shoes.
"Here," she says, handing them over to Doc. "Try these on and let me know if they fit."
For herself, Tessa finds a pair of size 9 shoes. As well as being tall, Tessa also happens to have large feet.
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"Much obliged." He tries the shoes on, standing to see how they feel. They are comfortable enough, but hardly his own shoes. "I believe they will do for however long this lasts." There's a pause. "Do these games last very long?"
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She watches as he tries on his shoes, pleased when they seem to fit him. She nods and puts on her own shoes. "Good," she says. "If you need to change shoes later, there are plenty back here for you to choose from."
At the question, she smiles. "It depends," she says after pausing a few moments to consider her answer. "on whether or not you enjoy the game. We can play as long or as short as you'd like."
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"That is reasonable enough." It at least is giving him something to do and that is better than the ever-lasting silence and discomfort. "Have you played often?" He walks a little closer to the lanes, studying the collection of large balls. "Are these part of it?"
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After she finishes putting on her own shoes, Tessa follows him to the lanes, watching as he studies the various balls available.
"Not as often as I'd like," she admits. "So this seems like a good oppurtunity, despite however strange this city might turn out to be." She flashes him a quick smile. "And yes, the balls are part of it. You pick up a ball and throw it down the lane, trying to knock over the pins at the end of it. If you hit all of the pins, it's considered a strike, and that's what gets you the most points."
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"I wager it's better to distract ourselves for a moment. And I will think of you if I find any answers to what I doubt is a short list." It seems to be the best way to go about it. "I even have my own..." He reaches in his pocket to show the phone. "Ah...tele...phone." Yes. At least he does not say 'telephone-y like he used to. Though, he still is struggling with the concept of such contraptions. Still, the Earps have been rather insistent about having one considering the dangerous situations in place.
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"Indeed," she says, "I think a distraction will at least let us be at ease, even if only for a moment. Sometimes, that one moment helps a great deal."
She smiles as he explains how he has his own telephone. The way he pronounces telephone makes her all the more suspicious that he is a man out of time.
"Telephones are quite useful are they not? Although part of me still enjoys writing letters as a means of communication. Much more personal." She allows this part of herself to slip out due to how kind the man seems. He is very pleasant company, and Tessa finds that she's especially grateful she ran into him.
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And he has been trying to figure it out alone, but it is complicated. "Waverly had promised to help me figure it out better, but I admit that we have been rather busy of late."
There is a smile at the mention of letters. "At least one need not try to understand the myriad of unusual faces when it is a letter. It has been some time since I have had reason to send one. I am told it is not in style these days."
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"Letter writing might no longer be in style, but I enjoy things that have fallen out of fashion," she says with a grin. "Especially when it comes to writing." She still remembers, even after all of these years, that dark time in her life when she was kidnapped by the Dark Sisters. Her being able to write those letters, really, more of a makeshift diary, was one of the only things that kept her grounded.
"And there's just something so satisfying about finishing a letter," she adds, tilting her head. "It's like you're putting part of yourself onto that page. Or pages."
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"Communication was never particularly speedy when I was...younger. "Now you can call someone on the telephone and know where they are." He still does not quite say telephone correctly, but at least he sounds less uncertain of how to say it.
"I had never thought of it in that way. Makes one seem a little more poetic. I am told that people collect other people's letters now. Especially historical ones."
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"It wasn't particularly fast when I was younger as well," she says, smiling and shaking her head. "I will say that I do appreciate the speed and frequency of communicating these days." Having witnessed the evolution of technology over the years, Tessa can appreciate how far humanity has come when it comes to invention.
She smiles at that. "I do love to read," she admits. "And I've always been fond of poetry, myself." She nods. "I will say, it's...quite the experience, seeing historical letters in museums."
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"Perhaps one day I will be less uncertain of such things. I spent-" He looks down, stopping himself from saying 'a long time down a well'. "A while out of touch with other humans." That is perhaps not that much better.
There's a small smile. "I do not read very much, admittedly. Well, not since school. It has been some time since someone came to me for such things anyway."
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"Sometimes technology works better for some people than it does for others," she says, "out of touch with other humans or otherwise." Tessa has her uses for technology when she needs it, of course. But she also has her magic, as well, and she's grateful for that as well. Sometimes magic is more reliable than technology, but, as a warlock, she is likely biased on that particular front.
"Ah, well, we must all have our faults," Tessa says, teasing with a flicker of a smile and a wink. "I suppose."
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"It seems rather easy when you have been using it for some time, yes." It does have some merit. Getting messages faster than others and being able to find oneself a way to places with the voice in the phone is very useful. Especially when nothing looks the way it used to. "I do very much like the use of vehicles. Wynonna got me my first car." He doesn't really realize how unusual that sounds for the time.
There is a smile at the jest. It is very few that actually feel comfortable enough to tease him. "Ah. Faults, I am afraid not being much of a reader is the least of my faults."
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He smiles, and she's glad to see it. She would hate for her teasing to cause offense. And she hasn't lately had much of a chance for jokes and such.
"The least? I dread to know what your other faults are then," she replies with another quirk of a smile.
It's nice, this. Just getting to talk and relax with someone. She's missed such companionship.
no subject
He breathes out his nose, an amused sound more than anything else. "Darlin', I can promise you would not wish to see the skeletons in my closet." He goes to tip his hat again, sighing slightly.
"I am not used to findin' myself without my hat. It seems I am at quite a loss."
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