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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, 3, 4, 5, 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 center. 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.
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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I WANT TO BE SEEN CLEARLY, OR NOT AT ALL.
» DAY AFTER DAY IN THE ARTIST'S STUDIO…
When you step into the lobby of the museum, you find yourself faced with several options. Ahead of you, as well as to the right, are long hallways full of blank canvases, faceless statues, and pieces of art of varying skill levels created by fellow City residents. The hallways seem endless, but the lighting is warm and inviting, encouraging you to walk along their lengths and explore each of the canvases in search of some invisible treasure.
As you walk along the hallways lined by these empty frames, you begin to notice podiums standing at even intervals. They look like docent podiums, the kind where a museum guide might stand and store their guidebooks and informational materials. You decide to open one of the podiums, and are surprised to find that instead of a map of the museum and an explanation of the art, the podium is overflowing with various art supplies. There are watercolors and oil paints, acrylics and pastels, brushes and turpentine and palettes on which you can mix your shades.
Maybe you leave them there, or maybe you decide to create some art for yourself. These canvases just look so empty, after all, and deeply in need of a little color to brighten up the place. It doesn't seem all that likely that anyone will come around to punish you, either—and with that, you grab a handful of art supplies and make your way down to claim a canvas for your very own.
» …I DRAW A SECOND BODY, THEN A THIRD, AND SO ON.
Down the hallway to your left, however, is an exhibition room full of masterfully painted canvases, sculptures with faces, and even more abstract pieces of contemporary art. The walls are painted a warm, dark brown and the overhead lights draw attention to each of the pieces of artwork, leading your eyes around the room and encouraging you to gaze at each piece in turn. There are benches in the center of the room as well, cushioned ones that allow museumgoers to have a seat and spend a while contemplating the art they're observing.
As you continue around the room, examining each piece one by one, you begin to realize that some of these works of art look… familiar. Not familiar like you know who painted them, but familiar like you recognize the contents, or at least you recognize something about the setting or the circumstances depicted in the painting or sculpture. In fact, upon closer inspection, the common theme uniting all of the pieces of art becomes even clearer: these are all works of art that have to do with you.
There's a painting of the house where you spent your childhood, maybe, or a portrait of the woman who raised you. A sculpture depicting the person you've regarded as your rival for most of your life. There's the building where you went to school, or the jail where you were falsely imprisoned, or the ship that you spent months aboard before you ran aground. Each piece of art depicts some important moment in your life, whether positive or otherwise. Some are rendered in brilliant detail, while others are in an impressionist style, but it's clear that everything is somehow connected to you, in one way or another.
You look closely at each of the cards affixed to the walls next to the works of art. While each of the pieces has a title, the artist and year fields are blank—there's no way for you to know who created these pieces, but it must have been someone who knew you very, very well.
Before you know it, another museumgoer has entered the room. Maybe this is a little bit awkward now, letting someone else look so intently at all the most intimate moments of your life. Or maybe you find it exciting to finally be able to explain all of the happenings that made you who you are today. Either way, you find yourself compelled to give the newcomer a tour of the exhibit of you, and to explain to them the subject of each painting so that they might better understand how it ties in to the greater theme.
The art museum has been open since District 4 opened in November, but until now, the exhibit in the left wing of the museum has been closed to the public. It's open now, and full of beautiful works of art—paintings in different styles, sculptures, even more experimental and conceptual pieces—that all have to do with the theme of you. That's right, your character is the subject of this exhibition, and every piece of artwork in it features something that makes them who they are. They could depict landscapes of places that are significant to them, portraits of people who have influenced them throughout their lives, photographs of the worst things that have ever happened to them, or conceptual art depicting their mental state.
Upon entering the left wing, characters will feel the urge to stay there in the exhibition room and act as docent for their own exhibit. They will feel oddly compelled to explain at least two of the works of art in depth to any museum patrons who come through the exhibit, and only once they've given those two detailed explanations will they be able to leave the exhibit hall. The works of art can depict anything that was significant to the character, not only negative things but positive as well, and can be any style of art that the player wants to explore. Please feel free to be as creative as you want!
For characters who don't want to enter the exhibit hall at all, there is also the option to create art of their own. In the main and right wings, there are plenty of blank canvases all over the museum walls, and interspersed throughout the hallways are podiums containing various art supplies: watercolors, oil and acrylic paints, pastels, etc. Characters can make use of these mediums (or bring their own from home) to create works of art on the available blank canvases. These works of art will not be reset, unless a player chooses not to app, and starting the following day will have a museum card on the wall next to it indicating the title, artist, and medium of the artwork.
The title for this month's monthly prompt comes from "Bluest Nude," a poem by Ama Codjoe.
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WILDCARD.
The city is by no means small, and there are plenty of things for you to see. There are even some places that other residents have created! 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. We highly recommend checking out the Character-Run Locations as well - they might be great places for new characters to get started!
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citylogs2023-12-01 09:00 pm
no subject
In all truth, if anywhere on the star were to fall into kind of trouble needing sorting out, Pandaemonium would be the first to come to mind. A necessary facility as far as he's concerned, what with all the unique, fascinating creations interred there, but not a place for the faint-hearted. Not in the slightest.
"Glad to see Azem's successor is doing all within their power to live up to the original's expectations," he quips with the shake of his head and a smile. "And full glad am I to hear that you've found yourself some rest." His smile fades. "Though I'm not sure how I feel about it being interrupted."
To be torn from the Underworld so soon, ripped away from the very Cycle of souls to somewhere entirely new... Not impossible for those with a certain measure of power, but it leaves him uneasy all the same.
no subject
Especially considering that the Emissary bore a very real, very alive body. Even if it were diminished in a way. Unsurprising, considering what his people are capable of. Whatever force took him from the Sea of Souls clearly had designs of its own, and an Ancient in full might of its power would no doubt hinder such a thing.
He pulls himself from his musing to reach out and place a comforting hand on Hythlodaeus's arm. "Perhaps my rest was interrupted, but I am not Emet-Selch, overly attached to such things," he says with a teasing smile. "I shall take this as a second chance, odd installations of artwork or no. That I have friends to look into this mystery only serves to heighten my spirits further."
no subject
"An excellent point of view to take," he finally says once he recovers, fingers left curled beneath his bottom lip where he'd only half-bothered to conceal his grin. "And one I think you will enjoy all the more as you get to know our fellow trapped, er, fellows. Quite the variety of people here, you see. The circumstances may not be entirely ideal, but the I've been enjoying myself nonetheless."
no subject
Brightening at the mention of others, he takes to the information with obvious excitement. "No doubt we will find ourselves of a similar mindset. Have you met many of the others? If so, would you be willing to speak of them?" The thought of worlds beyond his own... well. Needless to say, Elidibus is interested.