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MIXER: THE HOLLOW CITY (draft)
Jun. 8th, 2015 01:27 pmAboveground, the city shines. Giant screens flash and swirl; spotlights pulse for rooftop parties. There isn't a moment of darkness in the City of Light. Below, there's a different story.
THE CITY
The City (never called anything else, by its denizens) is a technological haven. Its business is the exchange of data, money, material - commerce at the speed of light.
The physical landscape of the city is ever-changing. Buildings regularly shift color, shape, and size with the help of microscopic construction nanites. Places are destroyed and remade in a matter of days. Leave it for a month, and the skyline might be almost unrecognizable. Every designer wants their building to be the most stylish, the most beautiful, and the result is a riot of conflicting styles, with the only real commonalities being the beautiful archways that host the rails most of the citizenry use for transportation.
The Net is something else, besides. The virtual capacity of this city is limitless, evolving ever past the demand for information storage and bandwidth. Nearly every citizen is surgically implanted with the latest in virtual reality technology (generally somewhere on the spine, for easy access to the nervous system) meaning that all they have to do is hook themselves to an access port to get online. And you can find anything online: virtual landscapes, text sites, libraries, simulations. It's all the Internet ever could be, and more.
The culture is overwhelmingly focused on the new and the innovative. Even people want to change with the newest inventions. The past is stored on a datacube; people want to be the future. A lot of hard labor is done by robotic servants, including growing food (in greenhouse towers) and recycling resources, so the labor that's left is what's best done by humans. Interestingly, this labor is usually translated into games; if someone wants to have beta-testers for a program, usually they'll compile the code into a game and translate the hunt for errors into something humans can do instinctively. Even being a good citizen is a game. Good deeds can reward you, and crime can involve points deducted from your total. Beyond that, the way to make points is to be a creative, making some kind of art.
Government isn't something the average citizen gives much of a thought to. If there is anyone in charge, they don't take the spotlight. (Some rumors hint that the "government" might just be one very thorough artificial intelligence. Others disagree.) Law enforcement is minimal and mostly involves the deduction of points. There is no prison, just elimination of someone's login privileges. People disappear sometimes. No one tends to worry: if someone disappears, odds are they just remade themselves and showed up somewhere else.
There's only one taboo, only one true danger, and that is magic. If you're caught studying or practicing any kind of magic, no one will ever see you again.
THE CAVERNS
Below the City, linked to it via a precarious few passages (through restaurant basements dug down too far, through crumbled holes in old utility tunnels), run the Caverns. This is where all of the surviving magic-wielders end up.
The powers among the Cavern-dwellers are of infinite variety: telepaths, plant-growers, simple magicians, deep sorcerers. There's even a sizable fraction that has no powers at all, but that just couldn't fit in with the ever-changing life aboveground. Independent thinkers, and people who prefer to live in the cold and the dark: in the real.
The landscape is dark and surreal. Glowing moss and lichen, fueled by the natural magic and the minerals in the stone, dimly lights narrow and rocky corridors. The caverns are a combination of natural and magic-made tunnels, which means that some are wandering and crumbling, some require squeezing through impossibly small holes, and some are regular and smooth. Cave-ins and minor rockslides are common, as the rock is honeycombed with passageways, and an unwary traveler could easily get trapped or slip down a new chasm.
Skittering bugs are the next step of the food chain, feeding off of the fungus. But what feeds off of the bugs lives deep in the caves, in rock pools and fast-flowing underground rivers. These alligators (nicknamed ghost gators for their pale color) are constantly hungry, swift-swimmers and swift-runners with mouths full of ever-growing grinding teeth. Their flesh is delicious, and a staple in a cave diet. But they would say the same of the humans they hunt. The youngest can be only a foot or two long; the eldest, slower but infinitely tougher, can be ten feet or even more.
The Caverns are governed by democracy. A Council of six, with overlapping terms, elected at large from anyone who comes in to vote. And ruled may not even be the right word; the Caverns are made up of so many independent groups, far-flung, some unimaginably deep, some shallow enough to hear the city construction through the rock walls. There is law, though, and justice, and it all takes place on Market Day.
The Market is held in central caverns, every few weeks. There, travelers from all around bring in all of the goods they have to trade. Hunters from below drag up alligator corpses and sell the meat. Black-market traders from above sell what they've managed to smuggle down. Some of the small communities make tools, or weave clothes. Magic-wielders will sell their services. The Council sits in judgment over all major crimes on Market Day, which generally involves thievery and murder, and justice is public and focused on order and restitution.
The people who live below are strong and rugged. Some are refugees from above; some have lived their entire lives in the dark. These days, they don't think much about rebelling against the city above. But, every once in a while, a demagogue comes along, and speaks to the Cavern-dwellers' need for freedom, and their yearning for sunlight.
[ NOTES:
- Feel free to toy with these concepts and modify them in minor ways to suit your characters. This is free and open for play, and not everything has to completely line up with everything else. Details are up to you!
- Try to clearly note your character and canon, and the role your character plays within this world: whether they believe themselves to be a part of it, or come in as an intruder, could be important to those who might tag you.
- With this post, the dressing room is open and free for play. ]
THE CITY
The City (never called anything else, by its denizens) is a technological haven. Its business is the exchange of data, money, material - commerce at the speed of light.
The physical landscape of the city is ever-changing. Buildings regularly shift color, shape, and size with the help of microscopic construction nanites. Places are destroyed and remade in a matter of days. Leave it for a month, and the skyline might be almost unrecognizable. Every designer wants their building to be the most stylish, the most beautiful, and the result is a riot of conflicting styles, with the only real commonalities being the beautiful archways that host the rails most of the citizenry use for transportation.
The Net is something else, besides. The virtual capacity of this city is limitless, evolving ever past the demand for information storage and bandwidth. Nearly every citizen is surgically implanted with the latest in virtual reality technology (generally somewhere on the spine, for easy access to the nervous system) meaning that all they have to do is hook themselves to an access port to get online. And you can find anything online: virtual landscapes, text sites, libraries, simulations. It's all the Internet ever could be, and more.
The culture is overwhelmingly focused on the new and the innovative. Even people want to change with the newest inventions. The past is stored on a datacube; people want to be the future. A lot of hard labor is done by robotic servants, including growing food (in greenhouse towers) and recycling resources, so the labor that's left is what's best done by humans. Interestingly, this labor is usually translated into games; if someone wants to have beta-testers for a program, usually they'll compile the code into a game and translate the hunt for errors into something humans can do instinctively. Even being a good citizen is a game. Good deeds can reward you, and crime can involve points deducted from your total. Beyond that, the way to make points is to be a creative, making some kind of art.
Government isn't something the average citizen gives much of a thought to. If there is anyone in charge, they don't take the spotlight. (Some rumors hint that the "government" might just be one very thorough artificial intelligence. Others disagree.) Law enforcement is minimal and mostly involves the deduction of points. There is no prison, just elimination of someone's login privileges. People disappear sometimes. No one tends to worry: if someone disappears, odds are they just remade themselves and showed up somewhere else.
There's only one taboo, only one true danger, and that is magic. If you're caught studying or practicing any kind of magic, no one will ever see you again.
THE CAVERNS
Below the City, linked to it via a precarious few passages (through restaurant basements dug down too far, through crumbled holes in old utility tunnels), run the Caverns. This is where all of the surviving magic-wielders end up.
The powers among the Cavern-dwellers are of infinite variety: telepaths, plant-growers, simple magicians, deep sorcerers. There's even a sizable fraction that has no powers at all, but that just couldn't fit in with the ever-changing life aboveground. Independent thinkers, and people who prefer to live in the cold and the dark: in the real.
The landscape is dark and surreal. Glowing moss and lichen, fueled by the natural magic and the minerals in the stone, dimly lights narrow and rocky corridors. The caverns are a combination of natural and magic-made tunnels, which means that some are wandering and crumbling, some require squeezing through impossibly small holes, and some are regular and smooth. Cave-ins and minor rockslides are common, as the rock is honeycombed with passageways, and an unwary traveler could easily get trapped or slip down a new chasm.
Skittering bugs are the next step of the food chain, feeding off of the fungus. But what feeds off of the bugs lives deep in the caves, in rock pools and fast-flowing underground rivers. These alligators (nicknamed ghost gators for their pale color) are constantly hungry, swift-swimmers and swift-runners with mouths full of ever-growing grinding teeth. Their flesh is delicious, and a staple in a cave diet. But they would say the same of the humans they hunt. The youngest can be only a foot or two long; the eldest, slower but infinitely tougher, can be ten feet or even more.
The Caverns are governed by democracy. A Council of six, with overlapping terms, elected at large from anyone who comes in to vote. And ruled may not even be the right word; the Caverns are made up of so many independent groups, far-flung, some unimaginably deep, some shallow enough to hear the city construction through the rock walls. There is law, though, and justice, and it all takes place on Market Day.
The Market is held in central caverns, every few weeks. There, travelers from all around bring in all of the goods they have to trade. Hunters from below drag up alligator corpses and sell the meat. Black-market traders from above sell what they've managed to smuggle down. Some of the small communities make tools, or weave clothes. Magic-wielders will sell their services. The Council sits in judgment over all major crimes on Market Day, which generally involves thievery and murder, and justice is public and focused on order and restitution.
The people who live below are strong and rugged. Some are refugees from above; some have lived their entire lives in the dark. These days, they don't think much about rebelling against the city above. But, every once in a while, a demagogue comes along, and speaks to the Cavern-dwellers' need for freedom, and their yearning for sunlight.
[ NOTES:
- Feel free to toy with these concepts and modify them in minor ways to suit your characters. This is free and open for play, and not everything has to completely line up with everything else. Details are up to you!
- Try to clearly note your character and canon, and the role your character plays within this world: whether they believe themselves to be a part of it, or come in as an intruder, could be important to those who might tag you.
- With this post, the dressing room is open and free for play. ]
