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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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WHO COUNTS THE MONEY UNDERNEATH THE BAR?
One average night on a normal city block somewhere in the city, spotlights burst to life to light up a windowless, five-story building. Several neon signs adorn the front, some with arrows and some with animated music notes, all proclaiming KARAOKE in their own variety of fonts and colors. For those who venture through the front doors, they'll find themselves transported into a lobby covered floor to ceiling in black-and-white checkers. Down the many hallways, up the stairs, and all around are private rooms with padded velvet doors, each with a porthole window at eye level for anyone interested in watching those who may already be inside.
This isn't your average basement-level dive with sticky floors, nor the common scene of a karaoke machine set up in the corner of a bar on Tuesday night. This is serious karaoke where each room has a wall dedicated to a television and sound system. Other than that one constant, however, every room is different from the last. This place not only specializes in private karaoke rooms, but it also themes each and every one individually. On the wall opposite the karaoke set up is some kind of seating—U-shaped couches, leather armchairs, cinema seats, an outcropping of foam rocks, or maybe chairs sculpted to look like giant hands. There is of course some kind of appropriate mood lighting, like maybe a disco ball or pulsing rainbow strobe lights.
There are themes that one might expect to see, things that are common for birthday parties (or upscale love hotels). One room is painted like the inside of a medieval castle with a turret in each corner and paintings of dragons flying in the sky beyond the walls; another room is is covered floor to ceiling in a jungle mural full of wildlife peeking out from between the leaves, real vines hanging down from the ceiling; one of the larger rooms has a jacuzzi sunken into the floor with detailed coral reef seating sculpted into the walls and an underwater scene swimming across the LED ceiling.
Perhaps most importantly, the music in the extensive catalog is REAL recognizable from a wide variety of worlds! You'll definitely recognize songs you sang as a child, or perhaps as an adult if you were an idol—the sky's the limit here and only here, so get in all that fun nostalgia. There is one problem, however, and that's the fact that you can't find a catalog of available songs…
Of course, it wouldn't be karaoke without alcohol. Back in the lobby and to your right, you'll find a room full of self-serve drink coolers, their clear doors displaying the various wares such as beers, canned cocktails, mini liquor bottles, and a wide range of other non-alcoholic beverages. There are several snack vending machines as well with individual buttons that will serve guests free bags of chips, chocolate bars, gummy candies, and more.
The majority of the rooms in the karaoke building are totally normal and non-threatening, ready for residents to come and have fun on their own or with a group of friends. Any theme can be assumed as long as it isn't based on a specific IP: generic space is fine, but not a specific Star Wars planet with characters pictured, and a topsy-turvy wonderland is fine as long as Alice isn't featured specifically.
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WHO RIDES THE WRECKING BALL INTO OUR GUITARS?
Of course, not all of the rooms are decorated with inviting themes. Perhaps one that you stumble across looks more like a bleak surgery theater than a place to get drunk and belt your heart out. Another room looks like a butcher's shop with cured meats hanging from the ceiling that looks hauntingly realistic, and not all from animals. Still more are perhaps just hauntingly dark rooms straight out of the past with faded photographs hanging askew on peeling wallpaper. These rooms are still stocked with all the right equipment for a night of singing off-key, but the settings are much more… eccentric.
There's one thing we forgot to mention—while there is music from all worlds to be found, not every room is stocked with a catalog of the tracks available. Be it one of the creepy rooms or a totally normal room, you may find yourselves randomly pushing buttons just to find something to sing to. Unfortunately, there's more than pop music and rock ballads available. Eerie chanting in unfamiliar languages may start pouring out of the speakers, or a cacophony of screams and wails in place of music. These ear-splitting tracks will draw someone's attention, and banging on the door won't cease until you open it only to find that the hallway beyond is empty.
Perhaps most terrifying of all, at least for the shy friends who tagged along to be an audience member, is the fact that the doors will remain locked until everyone inside has sung at least one song. No matter how flat or sharp or completely toneless you may be, you've got to sing your heart out in order to get let out.
As previously mentions, any theme can be found, including the creepy ones. Again, no recognizable media properties will be featured, so go for a generic serial killer room rather than Jason's specifically.
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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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citycenter) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2024-02-01 08:42 pm
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Presumably it happens less in America because they have such terrible public transport.
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Spoiler alert, Jessica: Texas do have trains.