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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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AND IN THE END, WE’RE ALL CHASING THE SAME THING.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Monthly prompt includes the potential for rotten food, food waste, insects, vomiting, claustrophobia/tight spaces, as well as the potential for violence, mutilation, or death. Please label potentially triggering content in subject headers and interact responsibly with threads!
District Five is now open, and with it comes the bright, blinding lights of a large diner, nestled comfortably within the buildings. Per the signage on the outside, plastered to the windows, this diner touts the 'best food in the City' with 'killer milkshakes' and 'divine burgers', and comes decorated with bright, luminescent stars made out of orange and yellow lightbulbs, which blink in and out to some unknown timer. Creatively, of course, the name of this establishment appears to be just DINER'S—though there's no indication of who 'Diner' might be or why this place belongs to them. Large, round windows show the inside, which appears to be styled after a typical old-fashioned diner: there's a red-and-white checkered floor, bright yellow tables and booths, and a large wrap-around counter that seems to frame a large kitchen beyond it.
The building looks reasonable, from the outside, but once you make it past the door—with its helpful, cheerful little clang of bells—the diner stretches out before you like an ocean. It looks much wider on the inside, as though someone has taken the whole floor plan and stretched it this way and that like Play-Doh. It doesn't really matter though, does it? Once inside, you find yourself absolutely famished, and decide to seat yourself somewhere comfortable: in a cozy booth, on a cozy stool, tucked into a cozy chair.
The food arrives as it does with any other restaurant in the city; no one is necessarily there to make it for you, but it arrives once you've either voiced your order out loud, or simply thought it to yourself. One moment the table is empty, you look away to the bright menu board above the kitchen doorway, and the next moment, there's a plate there, full of exactly what you ordered. Perfect! You dig into your food, enjoying the peppy atmosphere and bright colors.
Still, you're not quite satiated by that much food, so you order again. This time, the food shows up a little wrong, but hey, they're probably busy back there in the kitchen, right? The fries are a little soggy, maybe, or a little frozen; the burger is a little too pink on the inside, or the bun's got a bit of mold. You try to eat around it.
But more food isn't coming until you clear your plate! So you choke down that half-frozen meat patty and find yourself still hungry. The next plate comes, worse than the previous: something is squirming around under all that mayonnaise, nestled within the moldy lettuce. Perhaps there are maggots there, clamoring for space in your burger patty, or maybe it's that the salad is flecked with tiny little spots of dirt, the vegetables half-rotted. You try to get up from the table, but nothing is happening—you're rooted in the spot, unable to move. Are you going to have the stomach to clear this plate again?
The diner is a larger, more decorated restaurant than any of the others in the city. It's reminiscent of the old-fashioned sort of diners popular in America, with malt milkshakes and bold colors and things of that nature. On the outside, it looks the same size as any other restaurant, but the inside seems much larger, almost to an unsettling degree. Characters are welcome to walk around and can access all places in the diner, including the kitchen, the bathroom, etc. The diner is a permanent location.
Characters will feel compelled to sit down and eat a meal, however. Once they sit, they will be stuck in that seat for two hours unless they are able to clear three plates of increasingly disgusting food. Feel free to make up whatever sort of food you wish! If characters share their meals with another character, no matter what plate they're on, they will be able to get up from the table immediately after they clear that plate together. The food cannot be destroyed, and if it's thrown off the table, it will come back again—only worse.
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WE ALL END UP IN THIS SAME ROOM FOR A REASON.
After that meal, you definitely have a bone to pick with the chef. Unfortunately, there isn't any staff in this restaurant, not even when you go behind the counter and start exploring the kitchen. It looks like a typical restaurant kitchen, complete with multiple burners, a large walk-in refrigeration unit, and plenty of counter space; there are stacks of plates and bowls and glasses, bins of ingredients, and everything else you can imagine a diner of this magnitude needing. Even though there's no one physically in the kitchen, it still feels, eerily, as though everyone has just stepped outside for a smoke break, or simply haven't arrived yet for their shift.
Is it that, though, or is this diner simply haunted? As you explore, you find yourself feeling paranoid, as though someone might be watching you from behind the counter, under the cabinets, inside the sink basin. No matter where you look, there's no one else there, though: except the other residents of the City who might be unfortunate enough to be with you. As you walk past one of the large ovens, you feel a sudden rush of hot air, like the door is opening to draw you inside; as you move towards the counter for salad prep, you find a knife stuck in the wooden cutting board, and another, that falls from the ceiling right in front of you. If you had only been an inch closer...
Even the refrigeration unit can turn on you. If you find yourself inside of it, seeking out the source of all of those delicious—and not so delicious—hot dogs and burgers, the door might shut behind you, locking you inside. The further you walk inside of it, the longer it seems to get, as though there is simply no end to the shelves of produce and meat; the more you walk, the colder it gets. But don't worry! If you make it out of the large walk-in fridge, you can warm yourself up by the stovetops—which might just catch your clothes on fire!
Out of the kitchen, then, you decide to calm yourself with some tunes. In the corner, similar to the ice cream shop, is a large colorful jukebox, which creaks and groans with some unknown song you've never heard of. There's a small metal tray that juts out of the front of the machine, with a handwritten sign that says PAYMENT on it, written in red ink. You can put all sorts of things here—perhaps a coin from your home world, or a marble from one of the City arcades, a lock of human hair, a bloody tissue... Once the tray has been pushed in, and the jukebox accepts your payment, it will play a new song: something warm and cheery, perhaps something familiar you've been wanting to hear! Of course, this song only plays once—no matter what you do after, you cannot play another song. Everyone deserves a turn, right?
The kitchen will be full of perils that the player can impose upon their character. These perils are not necessarily life-threatening, but they could be if left unattended. Some of our examples include: knives falling from the ceiling, stoves turning up into large flames, being locked in the freezer, etc. Characters can be rescued by any other character, and will find themselves more encouraged to be heroic than usual; they will find themselves valuing the safety of others more than their own, when they're inside the diner kitchen.
There is no penalty for any death that may occur because of mishaps in the diner, unless another character is directly responsible for that death.
The jukebox in the dining part of the diner will only play spooky non-music unless a character inserts something into the payment tray. Please come up with anything you like that could be accepted, though the machine would prefer it to be something the player may not want to part with, or something that isn't necessarily a common form of payment. Characters can pay only once, and hear only one song of their choosing. Afterwards, the jukebox will go back to playing the spooky non-music until another character pays.
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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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citylogs2024-01-01 08:44 pm
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Here? Nah. The city in general, though... Nowhere else to live. We haven't found a way out of the place yet, but I'm pretty sure most of us think of ourselves as just temporary residents.
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[just- suddenly being here, outside of a place he shouldn't have been able to leave.]
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