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, 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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citylogs2023-06-01 12:00 am
Gebura | Library of Ruina
graveyard
fortunes
statue garden!!!
still, he keeps up his usual easygoing demeanor upon greeting his fellow librarian with a casual wave of his hand - and a shrug of his shoulders at her question. ]
Nah, all out. Honestly, I've been wanting one lately... [ it's been a while. ] You just got here?
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Still, Gebura shrugs, lightly. ]
Without a warning. I can't say I like the looks of any of this. Low-grade Fixer or not, you can probably also tell there's something off with this whole place too, can't you?
[ She says it with a trace of dryness in her tone. ]
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[ roland wouldn't say he's stressed, just... confused about their circumstances. not to mention a tad concerned? they got books to stack at the library, if you know what i mean.
anyway, whether or not he detects that wry tone in her voice just now, he doesn't pay too much mind on it. ]
But even a lowly resident in the Backstreets can tell something's wrong here. City orientation? Sounds more like we got whisked away for some fucked-up experiment in another Wing, if you ask me.
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Could be entirely possible, though why it only seems to be just us... no, putting that aside for a second, I don't like the idea that we could be pulled from the Library in the first place. [ Roland aside as a Normal Human Being With Absolutely Nothing Going On With Him Probably, Gebura had been under the impression that she couldn't really exit. ]
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Mm, I agree. I don't think we'd gotten enough books to break us all out of the Library yet, either. And even then, this place doesn't look familiar to any places I've been before.
[ you know, as a guy who excels in gathering intel. naturally. ]
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Which means either some Wing found a way to put us in an entirely different place that isn't the City or it's some kind of controlled dream. I can't imagine Angela just letting them take her... assistant without having something to say about it.
[ A sigh. ]
Either way, too little information on my end. Any intel you've managed to pick up?
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[ and ngl, roland feels like he's gonna have a fit too. but he has to stay calm, at least in front of gebura. they were already going to achieve a threat level that's even higher than star of the city, only for this detour to happen? now he's wondering if the head is finally getting involved...
but for now, he gotta provide intel like his job description told him to do. ]
Checked the subway map earlier. This City has no divide between Nests and Backstreets — if they even existed here. It's pretty small too, around the size of an Wing. Not even walled in either, but I don't think we can just waltz our way out here that easily.
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[ Thanks for doing all the info-gathering, Perfectly Normal Info-Gathering Friend. ]
... Either way, if they wanted to take people from the Library, they would have been better off stealing Netzach and Chesed. At least they'd be considered less of a threat. [ Gebura, that's mean. ] Unless their aim was to weaken the Library's defenses by bringing us here instead.
[ Then again. Binah's still there. ]
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fortunes!
they have drawn closer as the tall, red-haired woman reads her fortune aloud, and they can't help but laugh at it (something which audibly sounds like a bell-like chime, though anyone hearing could get the sense of what it is meant to be). what terrible advice... can you even call something like that a fortune?
though once the stranger's intentions get a little more violent — )
< Wait! Wait wait waitwaitwait!! > ( the meaning of the rapid-fire tic-tic-ticing forms naturally in her mind. and dante might be a lithe, thin-limbed string bean, but still they impose themself between gebura and the machine, holding their hands out placatingly. )
< There's no reason to break anything!! It's just for fun, right? >
( though they had personally seen some incredible things that J Corp's Singularity could do with manifesting literal, actual luck, they... sincerely doubt something like this little automaton had power like that. )
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Gebura isn't surprised by much these days, but the sight of a gangly beanpole of a person trying to be a windmill of peace between her and the machine does give her pause. Briefly. She's not as baffled as she could be, given how used she is to people who have had this sort of procedure done, but all the same, hearing the ticking and immediately understanding it is... strange.
Her eyes narrow, slightly. ]
Where I'm from, things like this are hardly all that innocent. You want to take responsibility when this thing causes problems later down the line?
[ Okay. Possibly true but also maybe she's just grumpy and this thing isn't going to cause an uprising or explode-- ]
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( it's a moderately brave thing for them to say in the moment, but as soon as dante manages to tick-tock it out, they immediately begin to second-guess themself. though they are far more familiar with another Color Fixer than her, gebura is still an imposing and thoroughly frightening person to stand against it. now that dante thinks about it... her glaring down at them does give them the same kind of stomach-churning dread as when vergilius looks at them with eyes glowing red with disdain —
thinking about that essentially causes them to wither under her gaze in real time, shoulders drooping. they take maybe a half-step back, increasingly nervous. )
< I - If it gives us any further reason to suspect it, then fine, but for now — it's best to err on the side of caution, right? >
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What a delightful ray of sunshine she is. ]
There's caution and then there's blind optimism.
[ Is the only thing she'll say to that, without really budging, but she's not moving to attack the machine, either. ]
But let's get one thing straight, Clock. I don't take action if I'm not prepared to take responsibility for what comes next. Question me again and I'll prove it.
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though, really, it's not something they try to think about too often. they do want to recover their head and their memories, of course, but they are also dimly aware that... the person that they are with them is likely going to be a very different person than they are without them. does that mean that regaining them will, in a way, be like a death to who they are now?
oh... existential dread! so they try not to think about it.
they get the sense without the shadow of a doubt that she speaks her own truth. so they fall silent for a moment, cowed, and then nod their head with a quiet, metallic clinking sound. )
< I understand. >
( they fall silent again, thinking about what they had overheard her say that had instigated this whole miniature confrontation. they do think... maybe she overreacted a little, but it was a pretty ridiculous advice to give someone? )
< Anyways... That "fortune" just sounded like the type of platitudes people give out when someone is going through a hard time. Not exactly helpful, and maybe even a little annoying, but... it doesn't seem particularly dangerous? >
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And the clock person seems sensible enough to accept it, so after a moment, Gebura breathes a sigh that's less exasperated--enough to be almost conversational, for her. ]
I don't do well with things being condescending at me. [ Understatement. ] There's something I don't trust about the method, too. You get an answer from it yet?
[ It's bullshit, Dante!! ]
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< Um... No, I haven't. >
( they had just walked in when gebura had been receiving her fortune. they look warily at the "fortune teller," wondering if it was really the so-called proprietor of the establishment... or was it just a stand-in for a real, actual person? given how utterly abandoned this city has been thus far, that seems like wishful thinking. )
< Do you think I should try...? > ( the slow, tentative way they tick that question seems to indicate the thought of doing that makes them nervous. ) < What do you do - do you just ask it directly? >
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statue garden
These statues, their facades choked with ivy… Weir’s compelled to grasp and tear them away, to reveal faces with nearly familiar features beneath, rough and uncaring in every gesture. It’s easy work for calloused hands, having long pocketed his gloves due to his inability to interact with the strange device he was handed while wearing them. (His phone. He means his phone.)
A bundle of ivy’s ripped away, and the face of a woman with hawklike features and sharp eyes threatens to stare down her nose at him, and he inhales, frowning—
You got a light?
He turns his head to look at Gebura, brow hardened and slanted. Eyes flick down to the cigarette, then back up again.]
You want to smoke at a time like this?
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There's a time and a place for anger, but not now. ]
I've been in worse situations, if that's what you mean. I don't think the statues are going to care much.
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He’s tired of being yanked here and there at the whim of something he doesn’t understand. Anyone who doesn’t feel similarly is just inane, Weir thinks, and he makes that clear in the gaze he cuts in her direction.
But fine. A light. He steps away from the vines and gestures her closer.]
So have I. [Been in worse situations. Technically. Probably.] And yet I’ve still a day or two more in me before I start giving into old vices.
[Whether or not she draws closer, he flicks his wrist and a… very tiny flame dances at his fingertip. There’s your light. He frowns down at it, displeased at its... size.]
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... Well, that's weird. She kind of just glances down at his fingertip but, after a short pause, gives herself a little half-shrug and touches the tip of her cigarette to the baby flame. Hey, a light's a light. ]
There's no real harm done to me, at this point. Not what you expected?
[ That frown is pretty obvious. ]
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"At this point." He wonders if he could pick apart those three words, but he tends to the question instead.]
No. [Since it is obvious.] What sort of flame was that? Put out by a passing breeze if one blew past. [Pathetic, really.] You don't feel it? Like we've been... dulled down.
[Nerfed, as the kids might say.]
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But it's not like I ever had the ability to just set parts of myself on fire without it being a problem. [ As in, normal people would just go up in flames and die horribly? That'd probably be her. ] How'd you even do that in the first place?
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It’s basic magic. If you can even call it that. I use it as a light source, and not much else.
[But if she doesn’t feel any different, then why did he get the short end of the stick? So much of his mind feels quieter (a good thing), so much of his prior abilities feel distant (likely not so good.)]
Best it’s good for now, apparently, is giving strangers a light. …You really don’t feel any different?
graveyard
--No, on a second glance, it's just Netzach, sleeping against the stone like it's a perfectly normal spot to take a nap. He really can pass out anywhere, evidently.]
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[ Gebura closes her eyes very briefly, then reaches down to grab his collar and give him a light (for her) shake. Well, maybe it's encouraging that she's not the only Patron Librarian here, but at the same time-- ]
Now's not really the time or the place to nap, Netzach.