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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 WOULDN’T WANT THAT MEMORY EVEN IF I COULD.
District Six is now open, and with its proximity to the water, there's definitely going to be a lot for residents to find along the boardwalk. Much like the park carnival before, there are plenty of sights to see and activities to get involved in. Wandering along the boardwalk, there are plenty of stalls full of the usual kitschy knick-knacks and homemade artwork out for purchase, although there is no one tending these stalls, and no one there to name prices or haggle with, either. Rather, it feels as though everything here has been recently abandoned: stocks are full, goods look relatively new, and there is a lot to experience. The breeze feels good down here, and there's a sense of adventure to be had, so it's a great place to take a stroll with a friend, or simply go exploring alone.
Want a new piece of jewelry? There's plenty of handcrafted goods here, such as bracelets, necklaces, pendants and rings; these look like they've been worn by someone else: hand-me-downs, maybe, or another resident selling their wares? But in a city without currency, why would it matter? So maybe you try on a bracelet, or decide on a pretty new necklace--but once you put it on, you're stuck with it. In fact, it seems impossible to take off yourself. Yet the longer you wear it, the more you can feel your distinct you-ness draining right out of you, denying you the urgency to remove these pieces. Suddenly it doesn't seem to matter where you're going, or what you're doing, or why you're here. You slump onto a bench, lean over a railing, collapse right into the street--until someone else comes along and helps you take the jewelry off.
The artwork doesn't do much besides inspire a sense of dread in you, and all the flowers are real, bundled into pretty bouquets, but they're all blooms you've never seen before, cut from some unknown place. There are food stalls, places selling jams and fish and other goods, and while nothing seems to happen if you take them, it would definitely take a person with a strong resolve to go right into eating these things when you have no idea where they came from. However, it's the pottery and the homemade tea cups and glasses that are odd: you pick up a vase, and find it weighs a bit more than you would expect. Turning it upside down reveals its contents--there's an eyeball in there, or a handful of fingernails, or worse, something like blood, vomit, teeth, or even a wad of human hair. Are you sure you want to take that one home?
Down at the end of the boardwalk are a few rides: these are relatively small, compared to the sorts of rides that were in the carnival at the park months earlier, but they can still be a bit of fun for those that have the right attitude. There's a small carousel, which plays the same five bars of music, looped over and over on a loudspeaker; it never seems to come to a complete stop--guests have to jump up onto it when they want to ride it, and jump right off of it when they're done. There's also a large ferris wheel, positioned to give a wonderful view of the city and the water, which operates almost in the same fashion: the booths slow down significantly when they reach the bottom, but they never come to a complete stop. Once you're inside, however, there's nothing to see but a broad, expansive view of the horizon, no matter which window or which way you look out, that's hazy and blurred around the edges like a painting. The ride itself is rickety and old, and creaks as it crests at the top: sometimes it feels like you're stuck up there for far too long, despite the fact that the ride is constantly moving. Perhaps this meant to be something romantic, for those that are interested...
Feel free to imagine any kind of stall or booth that you might find at a boardwalk market. Any jewelry that a character puts on cannot be taken off themselves, and will require someone else to take it off for them. The longer that they wear the jewelry, the more they may become catatonic or lose their will to do anything, much like becoming a husk--or a mannequin. There are no ill effects of the artwork or any of the food. Pottery and ceramics with depth to them may contain surprises such as small human body parts, hair, blood, vomit, or anything that one would like to imagine.
The rides will not do anything or inspire anything nefarious in a character, but they are dangerous to get on and off. They may give a strange, distorted sense of time to the character(s). There is nothing to be seen in the ferris wheel that can't be seen by otherwise looking out at the city--characters will not get a hint of anything in the distance other than water and the city.
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IF I HAD TO DO IT ON MY OWN, I’D PASS.
Beyond the rides, there is also a small building that seems to operate as some sort of photo studio, to take commemorative photographs of your trip down to the boardwalk. Once inside, you find that there are plenty of small rooms with digital screens and digital cameras that walk you through the photography process, along with props, masks, headbands, and other fun things to use with your photography. The photographs immediately develop from a slot at the bottom of the screen, much like a strip of photographs from a photo booth. You're welcome to take pictures alone--but may find that once your photograph spits out of the machine, you're not actually alone in it. There could be shadows behind you, glowing eyes or dark shapes that shouldn't be there at all; if you take a picture with someone else, you'll find that the photograph is incredibly bright and well-defined, as though it's been run through a variety of beautiful filters. For those that want to decorate their photographs further, there is the ability to add digital stickers or write fun things onto the photographs before they're printed out, using the touch screens. Most of the stickers and digital fonts are normal; some of them depict hyper-realistic body parts, or write in what seems to be blood, and if you get stuck with them, there's no way to change them.
Outside of the rooms, where all the props are, there is also a large white box labeled "lost and found". Inside of this box, there are mountains of photographs that others must have discarded, either because they didn't like them or because they simply forgot. Of course, there are photographs of others that you might recognize from the City, or even photographs of others you might recognize from home; interestingly, there also appear to be photos of you in there, although you swear this is your first time visiting this photo studio. Some of the photographs seem to be of places in the City--some you might recognize, some might not be familiar at all. There are even photographs that depict your memories of home, from people who are important to you, to horrible--or positive--things that happened to you before you arrived in the City. There's simply too many photographs to go through, but they all give you a strange, uncanny sense of deja vu, though nothing terrible seems to happen if you take any of them home.
One final room in the studio seems to be an old dark room, with a few film cameras hanging off near the door as though they're encouraged to be used. The dark room has all the chemicals and tools needed to develop real photos--if you know how to do it, then maybe you should give it a try! Although there is a safe light in the dark room, it seems to flicker on and off, and more than that, sometimes it goes out entirely; it's hard to find the main light switch in the dark, and anyway, you wouldn't want to ruin any of the developing photographs, right? Even if you hurry towards the turning door of the dark room, it may be stuck--sometimes residents can get locked in there for hours, with neither side seeming to unlock and let them free.
The photo studio is something like the self-photo studio trend that's happening around the world. Characters are able to go into small rooms and use any kind of props that the player imagines, and take pictures that will print out from the digital machine. They can decorate these pictures before they print, sort of like purikura, with stickers and writing using their fingers on the touchscreen.
If the character is alone, then the picture that prints will be creepy and haunting in some way; players are welcome to make up whatever they wish. However, if the character is with at least one other character, then the picture will be almost absurdly pretty, like it's been run through an Instagram filter. Characters can take as many photos as they want. They are welcome to take these photos with them when they leave. Photos in the lost and found box can also be taken.
The dark room does not have any photographs hanging, or any sort of film left over in it. However, characters are welcome to use the film cameras and take pictures anywhere, of anything, and develop the film themselves if they know how. The film will regenerate once the camera is hung up again. There is nothing odd in these pictures, but the dark room itself can be a scary place, with the door randomly locking or the safe light randomly going out.
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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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citylogs2024-03-01 08:40 pm
TDM QUESTIONS.
As a reminder, TDM top-levels should only be posted by potential new characters. Existing characters are encouraged to tag in, but should not top level; however, players may use the TDM prompts for catch-alls in the log comm.
Please include your character's name and character's canon in the subject line of your top level. Happy TDMing!