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
to the east
they are not a threat to each other, or that’s what he assumes. ]
Nope. Not me.
[ he snatched the offered payment, regardless, shoving it inside his pocket. it had no meaning in here but who’s dumb enough to say "no" to that?! now, he starts hoarding some free meals for his apartment— starting with the huge cake. he may or may not have pulled a stray shopping cart along for extra support. this is his kinda city, if he’s honest. ]
You can have the mud water.
[ translation: coffee. ]
no subject
or so he'd say, and even when it's been made abundantly clear that he's been following him quite diligently since they've reunited, he still seems clear on behaving as it if were mere happen-chance. there's something relaxed about his posture even now as he seems to smile, almost knowingly. if he's getting ripped off for another bill (and not even with the added promises most payments and threats get him), he shows no inkling of frustration or peeve.
though, he does eye the shopping cart. while this may have been embarrassing to some, he knows that this was just the tip of the iceberg to how desperate he could be. ] Wouldn't it be more accurate to call it bean water?
[ but, well... all in all, he shouldn't complain. if this was the steps it took for denji to simply live a normal life, then he'd take it. that said, he continues: ]
So, do you still feel the same?
[ about what? who knows, it almost seems like he's being vague on purpose. but then again, wasn't it kind of like the first time he treated denji? ]
no subject
regardless, denji kept a nonchalant attitude, tone as dull as ever as he continues to downgrade seeing that guy again. a part of him knew he should be acting in a certain way, maybe be wary of yoshida's presence or try to connect the dots of the unresolved mystery behind this city like the other captives here. denji knew he should be doing something other than enjoying the freebies and accepting the situation. maybe ... it's his way of not thinking about certain fears.
—about why he couldn't be chainsaw man anymore. what is happening to nayuta back home? are the dogs and meowy safe? why is he here? why is yoshida here too? sometimes it was a lot easier to think about the taste of the frosting on this cake instead of those heavy thoughts. ]
... what do you mean?
[ he steps away and further inside the back kitchen, hoping to find more treats hidden in the large fridge. ]
spoilers-ish - warning just in case anyone sees
the thought of denji's face scrunching up with displeasure wasn't a horrible one, but as always, the other male seems to already be moving beyond his reach. it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar sensation, nor does it stop yoshida from sticking close as he mimics denji's steps; keeping the same amount of distance between them.
he gives an almost wry smile as he watches denji move further in, amused as the other teen boldly takes to the fridge. he supposed it only made sense. while some may have practiced reservation, he guessed it wasn't really a like chainsaw man to hold back. which was exactly what their shared predicament was, wasn't it?
there are a few seconds where he seems to ponder on his reply. ] About living a normal life. [ a pause before he continues. ]
As I said, I want you to come to me for everything. That hasn't changed. [ how helpful, right? even if he's also the one threatening him... it's a precarious balance of two different roles, he'd say, yet they're still somehow the same to him.
but, yoshida can't deny that maybe a part of him wanted to truly see is denji understood their last conversation. if he had actually concluded that nayuta's safety was more important. that his ultimatum worked. that his words got through to him. that his plan was perfect. ]
no subject
ah, as for that question— he paused whatever he was doing and glanced at the other from the corner of his eye. considering nayuta is nowhere to be found and yoshida had no leverage here, he wondered what prompted him to bring this up. unless he truly believes nothing has changed and their last conversation still stands even in a foreign place. fucking hell, denji can't get away from this, huh? ]
... You can't even offer me the only thing that I want. [ —to have a choice.
he digs through the fridge, pulling out some sodas and fresh juice to add to his cart. while he's still focused on his task, denji is holding a somewhat bitter scowl on his face now. choosing nayuta and a normal life is his resolve after some contemplation. however— sharing it with yoshida felt like another kick to his misery and out of childish spite he won't voice it out loud. ]
You wanna help? Okay. How about you keep your first promise and find me a girlfriend?
[ let's pivot the topic into something less— infuriating. if yoshida is so willing, he'd take up his offer. ]
You know my type.
1/2
but, that said, he can't deny the touch of amusement that flickers on his features as denji speaks. his lips curving upwards, he barely masks it by bringing his hand up to his chin in thought. obviously, if want denji really wanted had anything to do with chainsaw man, then his stance was all the more solidified. this was something he couldn't afford to compromise on, and judging by denji's tone, he wasn't entirely unaware of this fact either.
as a comfort, he'd argue that choice was always an illusion, especially considering all he's been through, but he decisively opts not to get into that with denji. he did want to remain somewhat in his "good graces," after all. ]
2/3
oh...
there was that promise, wasn't there?
he seems to open his mouth, ready to fire off another response, only he suddenly stops mid-way. well, unlike what happened back at home... in theory the girls here would be far less a threat (citation needed). plus, since they were all stuck here same as them— didn't that make for a perfect situation of desperation? ]
no subject
...
ah, there was someone he met at the graveyard. sorry ruby. ] I'll take care of it.
[ how hard can it be. ] Anything else you want to add?
no subject
in the end, he has nothing to lose if yoshida decided not to humor this. what's the worst he can do? ghost him? that's fine, he's not expecting anything out of this. even with low expectations, denji keeps it real. ]
I want someone who wouldn't be grossed out around a guy with a chainsaw sticking out of his head.
[ listen, listen-
asa fucking ruined what little confidence he had about scoring big with the ladies thanks to being chainsaw man, specifically taking a kick at the way he looks (even when she had valid reasons to condemn the hazard) — so a part of him wants to prove asa wrong and find a girl that will accept him no matter what!
now it's his time to bring a hand to his chin, humming. ]
I guess my preference for how she looks is standard. Beautiful and with a great body ...