citylogs | TDM: JUNE 2023

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TDM: JUNE 2023

TEST DRIVE MEME

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?

▶ YES
▶ 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 west of City Hall, you will find a small building that houses the tourist information kiosk. The kiosk is not currently operational, but you may want to remember its location...

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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A WASH, ANYONE?

The coin laundromat is tucked into the first floor of one of the tall apartment buildings. Soap is complimentary, and while the machines say that they cost a quarter per load, in reality they are fully operational without any money being exchanged at all. If you have any clothes that need a wash, perhaps items that have been dirtied by your explorations (or your travels before arriving in the city), you may want to take this opportunity to wash them for free.

From the soap dispenser, you can retrieve packets of detergent in different strengths. There's plenty of stock of for mild to moderate grime and for heavy-duty stains, but there are also a handful of packets with slightly less obvious purposes. For things remembered, says one. For unhappy accidents, says another. Feel free to use whichever seems most suited to your needs.

When your laundry cycle has ended, the buzzer sounds and the door pops open so the clothing can be retrieved. You grab a laundry basket and reach in to start pulling fabric out of the machine by the handful. But wait a second–the more clothing you retrieve, the less familiar the items seem, and by the time you've retrieved the last bundled sock from the depths of the dryer you're absolutely positive: These clothes don't belong to you.

You're sure that you put your own clothing into the machine, but these are someone else's clothes entirely. Did someone sneak in while you weren't paying attention and swap out your laundry? Or did you accidentally open up the wrong dryer to retrieve the wrong load? Maybe you'd better look around at whoever else is in the laundromat with you and have a go at trying to find the owner of these clothes.

Whether the characters have had their clothing swapped or simply opened the wrong machine to grab someone else's laundry is up to the player's imagination, but one thing's for sure: you have someone else's clothes in your basket. Maybe these are clothes that belong to another character in the laundromat, or maybe they're garments that belong to someone that character knew back home. Players are encouraged to mess around with the premise and use it to get to know other characters!

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COME ONE, COME ALL...

Have you ever noticed that flickering sign hanging in the window of that little building around the corner from the parking lot? The one that says PSYCHIC READINGS in bold neon lettering?

You step inside the shop and immediately smell a powerful combination of aromas: herbs, candles, incense, something spicy and warm underneath. It's a small space, cluttered with objects. A crystal ball covered in velvet sits in the center of a table, and there are tarot card sets and drawers full of dried herbs and flowers. On the shelves are various remedies with labels printed so neatly it's impossible to tell whether they're typed or handwritten. Headaches, or hemophilia, and also irascibility and fits of sighing. There are also jars full of less easily-identifiable contents, but a close examination may show you frog legs, fish eyes, rat tails. For some reason, it feels like sticking your hand in one of these jars might not be the best idea.

Toward the back of the shop is a glass case that holds the bust of a woman. As you approach, your movement triggers a light inside the case to illuminate the woman's face–or where her face would be, if she had one. The normal human features of her face are smoothed out until they barely resemble a face at all, with slightly hollowed divots for eyes and a faintly raised bump for a nose. The closer you get, though, the more strongly you feel that despite the absence of eyes, the woman is indeed watching you.

The lettering at the top of the case states FORTUNE TELLER, and a sign affixed to the front of the glass says, Ask for anything, but be careful what you wish for.

You form a question in your mind, then ask your question out loud. The woman shifts, straightening up, and you hear the faint whirring of clockwork and pneumatics moving inside her. She gathers her hands in front of her, cupping them like she's holding water, and strange light emanates from her palms, casting harsh illumination on the blank space where her face should be. Although she has no mouth with which to speak, you nonetheless hear a vaguely female voice intone, "Your fate has been read."

A paper slip emerges from a slot in the front of the case, your freshly-printed fortune, the ink barely dry.

Although the crystal ball will not actually show the future, characters with any kind of herbal knowledge may clock that the herbs and remedies in the drawers and shelves of the shop are legitimate. Characters can ask anything they want of the fortune teller, or make as many wishes as they like. They'll get as many fortune slips as correspond to the number of questions they ask. Players are encouraged to come up with whatever vaguely-accurate fortunes you think work for your character, but if you're low on ideas, you can always try an online Magic 8 Ball or fortune cookie generator.

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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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i. City Park

[ Absolutely nothing looks familiar. Xichen isn't sure how he ended up in the seat of the strange and uncomfortable carriage, but he can tell that is what it is. Where it brought him and why are a complete mystery, as is the device he was apparently left with, and without anyone there to provide answers, he has to choice but to leave the train and explore on his own. When he finally does climb the stairs and exit the terminal into the main station, he approaches the first person he sees. ]

Excuse me. I believe I am lost. Can you tell me what this is?

[ He holds up the phone he found with him. It was asking questions, but he doesn't know what to do with it now. And since he's stopped, he seems to notice the rows of shops lining the station halls. ]

Is... this city underground?

ii. Restaurants

[ The place is huge. It's not only a big area. The city's buildings stretch up taller than he's used to, with more shops and unfamiliar businesses than he's used to seeing in one place. It's a lot to take in, and Xichen wanders with confusion, overwhelmed by the experience. Eventually he ends up at a coffee shop just to catch his breath and take a moment to digest the information he has. It's a peaceful enough place, despite being empty, but the size is made more unnerving by the complete lack of life. ]

What happened here?

[ He's not asking anyone in particular, but speaking out loud is more grounding. It makes him feel less alone. ]

Could such a large place really be abandoned?

iii. Coin Laundromat

[ Lan Xichen is not good at laundry. He does his best to be reserved, gentle, and controlled, but all of his handwashing attempts have been a disaster. So a laundromat is a fascinating concept that would potentially solve a lot of his problems--except that he can't seem to figure the machines out. The instructions say to insert coins that he doesn't have and the detergent looks questionable, but the biggest issue he has is when he opens the door to a machine and there's simply nothing in there. It's an empty compartment, even though he's certain he was trying to use that machine. Xichen is going from door to door, opening each washer and checking inside, pulling out mismatched socks, t-shirts, prom dresses, and even someone's lace bra with increasing frustration. Finally, he can't take it anymore and clears his throat to address the nearest stranger. ]

I'm sorry to disturb you... I wonder if you could help me understand these- these holes. Where do our items go? Do you know how we can retrieve them?

Hum hum...

[ no, honestly, she's in the same fix. no matter how deep she's dug, she cannot find her jacket? and she needs that? all her merch is on it. why would she take any of it off... it needs to be cleaned too. the pile at her feet is nothing of his, at least, and don quixote's halfway into the washer running her hands over it.

at the question!!! she bangs her head on the way out to answer it. ]

Aoougughh uugh... Oohohh... A-Ahem! I am afraid to say I've not the faintest clue! Ehm, um... Th-Thou hasn't seen a long, dark jacket with many patches and pins placed upon it, have thee...?

[ she's barely holding it together lan xichen. ]

[ The question seems to put her in some distress, and Xichen immediately regrets asking her, apparently surprising her right in the middle of her own search. ]

Ah, are you all right?

[ Missing clothing aside, he's more concerned about that possible injury. Lan Xichen approaches quickly, reaching out to gingerly check her head for any visible gash or cut that she might have sustained through the run-in with the machine. ]

Maybe you should sit down? I haven't seen a jacket like that, but if you rest, I can help you find it.

N-Nay, I am fine... I hath had worse wounds in battle.

[ but they're usually quick and fatal, not so much the ringing in her head... there's no gash, but there is going to be a pretty nasty bump. it'll be fine. ]

It should be an easy find... The emblems of the Fixers are unmistakable. Which hath you looked into? I shall avoid those, and keep an eye out for-- what of thine is missing?

Perhaps, but you should still be careful. I don't think there are doctors here.

[ Minor or not, an injury could turn into something serious if left alone. If a small injury turned into a worse one, would anyone be able to help them? He's still not even sure what to make of the food, let alone anything else in the city. ]

I can look. So far I haven't seen anything adorned by jewelry or official markings. I've looked along this entire wall, but there were only strange items inside. I don't think they belong to anyone.

[ Or if they do, no one has claimed them. He feels just as lost as ever. ]

My outer robe. I shouldn't have set it down, but- It is white, with the mark of clouds.

[ There's no use complaining now. They just have to find their jackets. ]

[all appearances to the contrary, Lan Xichen is not alone inside this coffee shop. within one of the store rooms behind the counter, a ghost from his past is taking a thorough (but decidedly silent) inventory of just what food this place has on offer.

or at least that is what Jin Guangyao was doing, before he hears the door to the shop open. then he goes as still as a hare in tall grass, hardly breathing, his remaining hand falling to where his sword should have rested at his hip, only to clench into a tight fist upon remembering that it did not follow him to this place. he is in the midst of executing the necessary and ruthless mental calculus of determining what his odds are of overpowering this unknown interloper.

but then he hears Lan Xichen speak, and finds himself stepping out of the shadows of his hiding place, like iron drawn inexorably towards a lodestone.]

...Zewu-jun?

[he has come to stand in the doorway leading from the storeroom to the dining area, and hovers there with an expression of impossible hope and, yes, wretched fear writ plain across his face. in the dim light of the shop, there is still a bloom of red blood on Jin Guangyao's Lanling Jin robes directly above his heart, and a circle of blue-black bruising has flowered around his throat. he holds what remains of his sword arm out of view.]

[He freezes, startled at first by the sudden company he wasn't ready for, and then stunned numb by shock at recognizing the figure ahead of him. Standing at the entrance to the next door--one Lan Xichen has yet to investigate--is someone he knows without question. He would recognize Jin Guangyao even without his voice and the familiar robes, just by the footfalls and his frame, except Jin Guangyao absolutely cannot be there.

There's no way that he can be standing there.

His wide eyes dart quickly over the gold cloth, drawn on a panicked, desperate journey over to naturally fall on the terrible patch of dark red staining his torso. He finally seems to remember his body and shifts on his feet, drawing an audible breath to speak and only managing a confused syllable from the back of his throat. That snaps him out of his paralysis, and he seems to re-examine Jin Guangyao with more awareness.]

What are you doing here?

[He almost whispers that, like he's afraid of the answer.]

You- How could you manage to find this empty place?

[Jin Guangyao is similarly transfixed by the journey that Lan Xichen's eyes take as they assess the state of his body, though he reflexively flinches like a spooked deer when his remaining sworn brother shifts on his feet. how could he not? whatever powerful force ripped his body from Da-ge's grasp, mended his mortal wounds, and deposited him here in this desolate place, that same force evidently did not see fit to do him the kindness of erasing his memory of his last fraught moments. he remembers who delivered the blow that would have killed him, had Nie Mingjue's fierce corpse not seized hold of him, intent on finishing the job even in death.

the flush of rage and fury that he expects to follow does not arrive. he might have smiled bitterly at the thought under other circumstances. of course. of course he cannot sustain his anger at Lan Xichen. he could never hate him. he would forgive him anything.

that does not mean he isn't afraid of him.]

This lowly one awoke not far from here, [he answers carefully, stepping so as to keep the display counter between them--as if such a paltry barrier could keep the Gusu Lan's peerless First Jade from killing him, if he saw fit. he swallows and tries to marshal his composure, with limited success, forces his clenched fist to relax, but he has to ask the question. he has to know.]

Does Zewu-jun intend to kill me?

[He feels himself moving forward, pulled toward his friend despite reason and safety, but when Jin Guangyao flinches at his movements, Lan Xichen stops. The counter stays between them, more symbolic than practical, but Lan Xichen has always respected boundaries. Even now, when he feels least bound by his surroundings, he still holds his place on the invisible line formed by intention.

The words do still earn a vague frown. Lowly? He can't help but feel like that sounds insincere. Hadn't they already gone far beyond any performance of humility? The harsh revelation of bitterness, ambition, and even cold resentment had hurt more than anything else, but in the heat of that moment, it had all at least been exposed. Except his younger sworn brother was shrinking back in front of him now like a helpless captive, and in spite of his experience, Lan Xichen can feel himself losing his resolve.]

I should ask you that.

[It's slightly dry, as if he can't quite hold himself back from the remark. And then he regrets the tone, softening his voice.]

No, I- I have no intentions of anything. Whatever I could have wanted was taken and sealed against my will, and I don't know if I can remember it.

Lan Xichen | MDZS

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i. City Park

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i!

Hello again Miu!

Fancy seeing you here!

City Park

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