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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citycenter) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2023-06-01 12:00 am
( graveyard )
He's not quite sure how he ends up at the cemetery, but he imagines it's because it manages to be one of the places that couldn't possibly disappoint him. Unlike the city hall where he had made a sporting attempt at gathering more information about where he had seemingly ended up, only to be met with endless blank pages. Pages and pages of nothing.
Aziraphale notices Crowley first, kicking up moss and dirt as he wanders around the area. There is an immediate and honestly fairly intense wave of relief at the sight of him, most of his sour mood quelled by the knowledge that he hadn't ended up here alone.
. . . Shouldn't he have felt him?
"Do you now?" he interjects from the entrance of the graveyard, folding his hands together. Behind him stands a large angel statue, its wings spreading out wide behind him.
"And what's your idea about all this?"
no subject
His grin might actually stretch wide enough to drop the top of his head off.
"Angel," he greets, clearing the distance between them with a few swift strides, arm around his shoulder as he beckons him towards the patch of graves.
"Good of you to put in an appearance. C'mere, have a look at this for me, will you, and tell me what you see."
It hasn't escaped him that he couldn't sense Aziraphale; not even in these close quarters. And it's not like he didn't put his feelers out for him! He's always been able to get a read on him, even half a galaxy away (not that he'd ever admit that, because it's probably some kind of weird that he does that).
He gestures -- well, flails a hand at the graves, eager to get his friend's read on things.
"...Weird, innit?"
no subject
Bright, bright, bright.
Aziraphale thinks it's a charming look on him, but it is a degree overwhelming. Particularly the arm around him and the abrupt way that Crowley guides him over. The freedom do even this much is still fresh for him, still novel and (quite!) exciting. This sort of thing didn't come to him as naturally as it did Crowley—which is a fascinating thought considering their natures—but he's grateful that one of them can seem to move without feeling weighted down by a mountain of boulders.
"I see this . . . debacle wasn't enough to dampen your spirits any," Aziraphale remarks with a small smile and a fond little huff. He's already forgotten about the empty books, instead looking out at the graves ahead of them.
He begins to speak, ready to give a proper answer to the question before it occurs to him that Crowley had failed to answer his initial question.
How sly!
Aziraphale turns his head, looking over at the demon beside him.
Then very matter-o-factly says, "I thought you said you have an idea."
no subject
"I do," he insists, gesturing (flailing) again at the tombstones. "Just look first though, tell me what you see. I promise I'm trying to do this all -"
A wave of his hand, like the flapping of a crow's wings.
"- sciency first, and not for dramatic effect."
He pauses.
"...Well, mostly not for dramatic effect."
no subject
Then he takes a second look at the graves. Mostly to confirm his already forming suspicions. Before him there are gravestone upon gravestone of old, familiar names. Names of some of the humans that Aziraphale had gotten the chance to know during his time on Earth. A scholar from Rome, a king that most only believe to be fiction, a young lady blacksmith who carried so much weight for her family, a famous author. . . None of which could truly be there.
Neither were some of them buried with a gravestone.
"Well," he begins, but then takes a pause. A part of him thinks that this is some kind of jest in poor taste, but most of today has felt like an upsetting joke. Why not humour this in all seriousness?
"This all appears to be very particular to the observer."
Because Crowley wouldn't be asking otherwise.
no subject
"Can't imagine why, but this whole place is an enigma wrapped in a whatsit."
His wide grin drops, a frown creasing his brow, his fingers drumming anxiously on Aziraphale's shoulder as the gears in his head turn.
"It's clearly meant to be unsettling, right? But the thing that gets me is that it's messing with our perception - usually that shouldn't be possible. Makes you think, doesn't it?"
He casts Aziraphale a sidelong glance.
"What else am I seeing that's different to what you're seeing and all that."
no subject
With a careful sweep, Aziraphale brushes the nervous fingers off of his coat shoulder before he could be transformed into an angel-sized worry stone. Briefly, he wonders if Crowley even knows he's doing it or if it's an automatic tic. Perhaps he should ask him once this all settles down.
Then a thought occurs to him.
Aziraphale gestures back towards the various gravestones.
"Do you see my grave?"
no subject
He likes the change. It settles something in him that feels like it's been twisting in on itself since before the dawn of creation.
The world is easier when he doesn't have to feel guilty about being in proximity of his friend.
"Your grave...?"
He looks.
"Of course not you're standing right here, why would you have a gra-"
He looks again.
"...Oh."
One grave for one discorporation.
That means Aziraphale is probably seeing at least a handful for Crowley. He swears, he just slept through his alarm when Vesuvius popped!
no subject
How far of a reach does the source behind this have?
That and how many graves bearing his name might appear before Crowley? The demon is certainly aware of the last time that Aziraphale had been forcefully discorporated, but not quite of the two other times that it had happened through the years. The first time hadn't been anything dramatic, more or less something of an "user error" as a modern person might say.
After all, it's complicated business cramming an entire angel into a vessel for extended stretches of time.
The second time had quite dramatic and a traumatising amount of paperwork.
Aziraphale presses the tips of his fingers against Crowley's upper arm.
"Do you see it?"
no subject
He swallows, and nods.
He doesn't like this kind of imagery or the thoughts it evokes and the fears it plays on. He'd gotten blind drunk in a London pub just to take the edge off his razor-sharp grief while waiting for the end of the world (and himself) at the mere inkling Aziraphale might have been gone.
It's not a pleasant memory, and all too sharp for its freshness. Give him a couple centuries and he'll maybe look back on it and laugh; how silly he was, not even considering that Aziraphale had just been discorporated. An embuggerance to be sure, but that was more about the waiting times and paperwork.
"You didn't tell me about the two other times."
Demons shouldn't have wobbly bottom lips. Apparently Crowley never got that memo.
no subject
Well, that is an important and rather crucial bit of information. Aziraphale thinks to put a pin in it because there's a bit more he wants to investigate, but he doesn't intend to breeze by the way that Crowley is looking at him now.
He lets his hand fall down Crowley's jacket sleeve, moving to instead to loosely wrap his fingers around the demon's. There is a slight tremble to the angel's fingers as he does so, obviously still nervous about initiating any kind of contact between the two of them.
"No, no! Of course not," Aziraphale answers him quickly, his tone light. He makes a dismissive gesture with his free hand before continuing on. "The first time was an unfortunate mishap. I practically exploded the entire thing."
Conveniently, he chooses not to mention how.
He lets out an annoyed huff of a breath and a makes a face. "Head Office couldn't stop making little quips about it either," he further explains. This is entirely true, but Aziraphale is also leaving out the part where many of the other angels also accidentally destroyed their first vessel as well.
It's no wonder early humans were so conflicted about what angels actually looked like.
"And I certainly wasn't going to tell you, my sworn adversary, that I blew up my own vessel. Can you imagine how insufferable you'd have been?"
Oh, he'd have to hear it from both ends. Absolutely not.
no subject
He doesn't think they've ever been adversaries at all, but you couldn't go saying those things aloud at the time.
"Not as insufferable as Gabriel, I'm sure."
He grins and adds; "The great bloody tit."
Because going even a few moments without spurring Gabriel's reputation after the archangel comes up in conversation is unthinkable now when he might have otherwise held his tongue. Not after he saw the evident glee on his face as he thought it was Aziraphale about to be cast into Hellfire.
Shut up and die already.
Millenia of loyalty, and that's all Aziraphale got; a dismissive wave off to non-existence.
Crowley had only ever been that livid once in his life, when he'd picked his broken form up from a crater that stank of sulfur, watching helplessly as falling angels streaked bright across a star-strewn sky.
He swings their joined hands idly, not really wanting to look at the graves, but instead focusing slightly to the left of the middlepoint of the horizon. Roughly. There's a lot of buildings in the way, but Crowley's eyes like to gravitate there when he'd prefer to keep the existential dread at bay.
"So the graves are messing with our heads. Good stuff. I'm sure that's not ominous at all."
no subject
There's just nothing that either of them can do about in the immediate. Whoever or whatever was at the helm of this really had them by the shorthairs. They were quite effectively trapped here, something was certainly going on with their (super)natural abilities, and they were pretty outclassed knowledge-wise.
No, no. There would be much to do to get to the bottom of this.
Which, maybe in the right circumstance, could be a little enjoyable. After all, it's been a long time since the two of them had a mystery to tackle. Aziraphale always did like the occasions where they had to put their heads together to untangle some human scandal or snafu. Particularly when it involved catty members of high society.
A pity this won't be anything like that.
However, most importantly, there's something he'd love to know.
"If I were to count, how many graves would bear one of your names?" Aziraphale asks the demon gently, glancing up at him from the corner of his eye.
Then, he adds, "While we're on the subject."
no subject
That was fun. Crowley was never going to get the hang of riding around on something with more legs than brain cells. He was very glad he wouldn't have to.
"I tell you, the internal combustion engine was a real ble- heavense- ...a real stroke of luck."
Crowley gently tugs his arm.
"C'mon, I saw some restaurants around. Let's get some lunch and, uh, not worry too much about this, yeah? We'll figure something out."
He flashes one of his winning smiles.
"You know we always do."
Eventually.