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
wrench is absolutely right that heine needs sunglasses—the genetic manipulation he'd been subjected to in his youth had cured him of his nystagmus and myopia, but years spent living functionally underground means his eyes aren't used to all this light, and it stings like hell when he looks up at the sky.
but—despite the smarting pain, he doesn't look away, because holy shit, that's sky. ]
Is that—real? [ what the Fuck.
okay, pull it together, heine. he blinks, rubs his eyes, tries to focus on wrench instead of... whatever the fuck is happening above them. he does not have time to think about how unbelievably freaky it is to have so much open space above him. ] Only 2029?
[ yes, that was his takeaway. "only" because that's, like, hundreds of years in heine's past, but the technology heine knows is absolutely nothing like what wrench is wearing like it's nothing. ] It's [ some absurdly futuristic year, never named in canon ] where... when I'm from.
[ somehow, fire magic bullshit is easier to wrap his mind around. ]
no subject
[ If none of this was real than everything was real, right? Some bullshit like that. Anyhow, he was just about to pick up his feet again when they got talking about the whole different timelines thing once more. Sounded like this guy was from far into the future. An 'aaah' filtered through his modulator as one or two things clicked into place. ] You really never seen any of this before? [ This coming with a generic handwave to... everything. But then... wait— his body stopped abruptly. Exclamation marks rang up on his display. ] Whoa, hold on did you say— [ a year that's absurdly long into the future. god bless vague timelines right? ] What's it like?
[ Did they win?? They probably didn't win. Please don't tell him its overwrought with capitalist pigs and data mining corporations... which is very probable. ]
no subject
2029 versus indeterminate distant future is—quite a gap. ] It's...
[ to be honest, the brief hesitation in the way heine starts to answer probably tells wrench that it's not great. ]
I don't know where you're from, but in [ the future europe country that heine's from (shoutout shirow miwa for naming the specific model of each of heine's guns but never giving us a year or a nation!) ] it's been... a couple hundred years since we ran out of arable land. Started having to build cities up and down instead of out.
So you get your haves up in the Above, under real sky, with real sun and vegetables and security and a government that works. [ he gestures vaguely upwards with one thumb, then gives an emphatic thumbs down. ] And then you got your Below. No sky, fake sun. Mob families run most of it and the corporations run the rest. Crime out of control, science out of control, violence everywhere, poverty everywhere.
[ three guesses where heine hails from and the first two don't count. maybe that explains his need to ask whether the sky is real—he's seen an honest to god blue sky only once before. ]
Never left the city, though. So I couldn't tell you how it is anywhere else.
no subject
Wrench had just been in London and while London was always fucked it was one of the more fucked "smart cities" out there. The more Heine describe what ~ the future ~ was like for him the more he could easily see how things back home could get to that point. He, too, would probably be lingering down below if he was in Heine's world and hell, maybe he was??? ]
Mm. [ Was what he first offered up as they shuffled through the empty streets. ] That all sounds familiar. Statistics back home say the streets have been safer than ever but that's because we're in such a police state that people get shot in the street by city officials just for looking suspicious. Crime is a fucking business. [ A pause ] I mean, it always was but you get what I'm saying here right? The gangs, the drugs, the violence, the human trafficking and slavery is all swept neatly under the cover by the very people who are supposed to keep these things from happening. No one is surprised. I could go on about the corruption but man I feel like you already can guess everything I'd say so why bother?
[ He sighed, brought up a hand ro rub at the back of his neck as he hung his head for a moment. Bummer, dude. ] Some people still fight, though. Little by little. Tiny victories.
no subject
he nods, grimacing a little. it all sounds too familiar. it's depressing but also somehow comforting to know that there are others who understand how fucked things can get. ]
We haven't had police or security in the Below for a long time, at least as long as I've been there. But from what I hear, up top there's always a paycheck for somebody even in the filthiest industries. [ therefore unsurprising to him, that the industries are allowed to persist. ] They started breeding fetish mutants yet, in 2029? That's apparently where the money is right now.
[ there are always people who try to fight, little by little. heine just doesn't think that's always enough. ]
cw: talk of slavery, sex trafficking & abuse
It sucked. Take the wins where you can and try to make them count for something, anything. Huge bummer that Heine knew this, too. Especially the whole mutant slaves thing. He would have brought up something about police but this took precedence by a landslide. It really made his blood boil; it actually made him stop again. All he could think of was Bloody Mary, that sick fuck. ] Not mutants, no, but sex trafficking is never an old business.
[ He sighed. ] Gang in London sold people. chopped up those who didn't obey to sell for parts.
same cws!
[ heine drags a hand over his face, then sighs. prostitution is legal, or at least overlooked by the eye of the law, but there are always people who want to take it by force, for whom the appeal is not in the act but in the violence.
he thinks of nill—the waif she had been when heine rescued her from her pimp. fourteen years old and already suffering at the hands of the highest bidder, a literal angel, her wings small and fluttering and expressing her emotions the way her voice couldn't. ]
I hope you don't get the mutants. [ there are restrictions on genetic manipulation now, sure, but the repercussions continue to echo.
is it fucked up to feel kinship over something like the inevitable collapse of civil society? ] I take it you're one of the ones fighting?
same cws...... lmfao
He shifted his weight. ] Yeah. As much as anyone can be. [ It was revenge that brought him back to Wrench but no one needed to know that. The larger part of it was shame, really. A lot of shame. More things for a never time. Wrench hadn't noticed how much he'd been emoting. Conflicting signals floating over his display as he was silent for a moment before nodding for them to continue. Wasn't far, the store. Like that really mattered but whatever. ]
Wasn't me who ended this particular piece of shit's terror though. I just helped to let the people she hurt return the favor. [ He flicked his gaze to Heine. ] Pretty gruesome, but. [ He shrugged. ] She deserved it. Better justice than behind the bars she could easily slip out of if you ask me.
wrench 🤝 heine, damn our worlds really suck, also new cw: suicidal ideation
until nill, that is—her existence a reminder that he still has the capacity to feel the stomach-churning nausea of witnessing deep injustice. that despite all of his best attempts to be otherwise, he is still alive. and that while heine can no longer bring himself to believe that he's capable of rescue or redemption he can at least defend what he needs to defend.
whether it's revenge or redemption that motivates wrench, to heine, what's more important is the action. ]
So you weren't holding the gun, but you pointed them in the right direction. [ sounds like an asssit to him. now that his eyes are mostly adjusted to the light, heine's content to keep walking too. ] Sometimes gruesome is what they deserve. There's the law, and then there's justice. Not always the same thing.
rip @ them, lmfao.
Hard to not let it all turn you into one of them, too. He thought about that a lot. Especially after Sabine had pointed it out. He thought about how violent he's become and how, honestly... it made him fucking giddy, god damn. It felt so fucking good to blow up Rempart's face, it felt so good. He should have finished the job. Man, it would have been easier. It would have been justice. ]
Gruesome was exactly what they fucking deserved. Wasn't my blood to draw, though. Not that time at least. It was theirs and they got it. [ He nodded, quietly. Fingers grabbing the door to pull it open. Another abandoned place. Like a department store after hours. People should be here. They just weren't. ] Would you believe it was a cop who helped covered it up? Eh, ex cop I think but still. Pretty fucking wild to think they actually protected the people instead of the system for once.
no subject
When we cleaned up the rings that bought and sold the hybrids, we would sometimes call the police after, tell 'em where to find the leftovers. [ he shoves his hands into his pockets and lifts his shoulders, then drops them. ] They always covered for us, too. Not because they gave a fuck, though—it was just less paperwork.
[ it was still a good thing, in the end, that the police didn't look too hard into heine and badou's misadventures in the below, taking down mob houses and shooting up prostitution rings. they might have been willing to turn a blind eye, but they also didn't do shit about it, either.
but here he goes—jaded, again. heine sighs. ] Fuck. Sorry. A win is a win.