Locations

[The Mist]

The City



It would be as absurd to attempt to describe the City in its entirety with a few words as it would be to try to encompass the magnificence of the whole world in a single page of text. Maybe even more so, as the City is several worlds collapsed into one.

Nobody can agree about how big the City truly is, how many people it is home to. It spans from the coastline to somewhere deep within the land, growing a bit more every day as new buildings are built, expanded, elevated, as its infrastructures reach ever forward, as it absorbs what used to be distant suburbs into its core.

It is globalized and diverse all at once, in the same place, at the same time. You can find a genuine one thousand years old Arabic style palace between two concrete blocks of new, cheap, terrible apartments. A functional pig farm in the middle of a modern business district full of shiny skyscrapers. A pristine beach not far from the industrial port, preserved from pollution by accommodating currents. The City has legacy, history at every corner, and little in guise of urban planning.

You can find everything in the City as long as you look hard enough for it. Actually everything. Because more than anything, the City is just plain weird.

Of course, every city has its oddities, its little things that make no sense until very deep in the history of the place. This one however goes beyond that. Taken on its own, each weirdness can be explained. All together? Absolutely not. You just cannot have authentic Sumerian and Aztec ruins next to each other. And yet, in the City, you can.

If not for the Mist, its inhabitants would be perpetually astonished by how little sense things make. Or maybe not. Because the true magic of the City is the magic of any city: People just get used to anything really fast.

Locations

While the City is basically infinite, the story of the game will be focused only around a handful locations, listed below, grouped by districts for convenience's sake.

Improvised locations

In addition to the locations already listed, players can freely improvise new locations for their threads to take place in. Need a hot dog stand for a casual talk, a derelict church for its ambiance, a gym for a bit of training? Just make them up as you go.

In such cases though, please specify in your post the location's district, and provide a short description (even better with an illustration) so they can eventually be added to the official list. It's one of the many ways you can contribute to the City becoming more interesting for everyone.

Art

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L3gBNr

[The Mist]

The Jobsite

Business district



The Jobsite claims it employs every single citizen of the City. This is obviously an exaggeration. But not by that much.

Not only do you have the emblematic salarypeople, the white collars working from within the air-conditioned open-spaces of glass walled skyscrapers, ants within their terrariums.

But all around them dance cohorts of people laboring to keep these dens of crystal and concrete clean and functional, expand then with new floors or new buildings altogether, bees of the honeycomb.

And that's not even counting the multitude providing the previous with food, transport, relaxation, and all the other many services they require to get through their days.

As a consequence, from dawn to dusk, the Jobsite is a constant frenzy, crawling with people at all time. At night, it's almost desert, almost quiet. Almost. But never fully asleep. There's always some urgent work in need to be done.

Locations

"Any Time Any Day" canteen



If you're a blue-collar and working in the area, chances are that you're taking at least one of your daily meals at ATAD. It's cheap, it fills the belly right, the staff is nice, and there's always enough space for one more customer even at rush hour. Menu changes everyday, you don't get to pick, and it's often fish based.

In this economy, ATAD welcomes more and more poor white-collars. Also, in the dark of the night, when most other restaurants are closed, it's not unusual to meet there people that otherwise would never mingle with manual laborers, or even stranger citizens of the City.

Chaos Kitchen



Hidden on an intermediary floor of one of the glass buildings is a teambuilding experiment gone wild: A small, fully equipped restaurant designed to allow employees of a certain company to cook meals for each others, with a complex rotating schedule of cooks and customers.

Except it never happened because the company went bankrupt before that.

However the facility built from it has remained and is still supplied with fresh ingredients every day to this day, through the magic of some bank account lost to a clerical error in the chaos of the collapse, food provided by a financial ghost.

Manna from heaven from those who know of it, attracting quite the eclectic crowd. Some poor, some not so much, some freeloaders that just come, eat, and go, some who take upon themselves to do the cooking, the serving, the cleaning. Who's there or not, doing what, at which time, is ever changing, every day's a surprise. Sometimes you get raw potato for dinner, sometimes you get a chef dish, sometimes you improvise yourself chef to feed your fellows.

Le Doux Mensonge



A high-end restaurant, only accessible to the wealthiest and their guests. Its promise: Make you forget, for the time of a meal, that you are in the City. Through a mix of old school trompe-l'œil modern holographic screens, practical props and subtle play on light, it takes the customers elsewhere, to a better place, with pure air, a bright sun unhindered by smog and tall buildings, colorful and lively animals.

As a consequence, the restaurant has no actual window, and is one of the gloomiest place to be in the morning, when the system is off, labyrinth of machines with their bellies opened wide for maintenance under the harsh electrical light.

Luca Insigne's Office (and Waiting Room)



Luca's office is exactly what you would expect of an accountant office. It has a desk, a computer, and shelves and shelves full of binders.

His waiting room is likewise boring. A few seats, a few magazines... And Rifts as far as the eyes can see. Luca has a lot of customers, and about all of them are tied to one myth or the other. This sometimes makes for unexpected, somewhat awkward, encounters between powers-that-be, for the better or for the worst.

Art

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4bAKYL
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xJ2AlY
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XnPP9R
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ze4831
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RLVdE

[The Mist]

The Weeds

Resident district (poor)



Decades ago, the Weeds were just yet another apartment block, cubes of concrete big enough to host thousands of cheap flats. Not even worthy of a name or nickname, but a letter and a number on administrative maps.

Then, one morning, its inhabitants woke up, opened their blinds, and realized the whole district was covered in weeds.

It hadn't actually happen overnight. There had been wild plants growing willy-nilly in the cracks for as long as people can remember. But nothing special, just the usual poorly maintained neighborhood. At one point, there were maybe a bit more than previously. But still nothing worrisome. A few weeks later, they had kept on multiplying. But it wasn't that big of a deal yet. And so on until, eventually, a point was reached where the truth couldn't be dismissed anymore: The place had been overrun by the green.

Officially the blame's been put on an especially resistant parasitic species of ivy. There are other theories. People usually don't care so much about the why or the how nearly as much as they do with the most important question of how to live with it.

Because these few extra plants did nothing to solve the district's issue with overpopulation. While a few inhabitants did leave, they were shortly replaced by newcomers. People need a place to live and rent here is cheap.

And, on the plus side, this forced cohabitation with nature actually did wonders to improve thermal insulation. Which tells more about how bad a place it was before the green than it does about this ambiguous gift of nature.

Locations

The skatepark



The cool spot for cool kids to hang out. There are always some persons around, at any time of the day or night, talking, smoking, adding or updating graffiti, playing soccer on the concrete, even skating sometimes.

The place is strangely safe, far much than it has any right to be, with no real incident in living memory, at worst a few small altercations between different bands.


The jungle



Then: A wasteground, an unbuilt piece of land already used as a dump before the invention of electricity, and likely a quarry at some point in the past before that.

Now: A small patch of wilderness within the City. Not likely to be confused with an actual jungle, for lack of tropical temperature, exotic animals (unless stray cats turned feral count as such), or simply because, even at its deepest point, one just has to raise their eyes to see the City's buildings poking out atop the green covered rocks (or pile of petrified rubbish).

In practice, it's not that different from a standard park, and mostly used as such by the residents of the district. There are even paths that have been walked enough to become as good as engineered dirt roads.

Just, whereas a park is a human made and human controlled ecosystem, the Jungle evolves on its own, sometimes in surprising ways.


The punching grounds



The Weeds have their fair share of competent gyms and dojos, cobbled together from abandoned rooms through the determination of teachers and the craftiness of students. Combat sports have kept their mystique around there, that idea it's possible to overcome anything, including being born in poverty, through the prowess of a body honed with training and sacrifices.

And, to pay the bills, their practitioners put up fights as colorful and choreographed as wrestling. A harmless tourist attraction, happening on the same ground that saw extremely violent fights between gangs not that long ago. Things change. The City remembers.

Art

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JlNQgz
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JlmODD
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3oDy0A
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nvXRe

[The Mist]

Titan Hill

Residential district (rich)



Once upon a time, there was a small mountain range to the west of the City. It did next to nothing to slow down the City's expansion.

At first, it was a glorified wasteland on the map, an empty spot forcing roads to bend instead of following a straight line toward the horizon. A minor inconvenience, quickly fully surrounded by asphalt and concrete, already physically inside the City.

Then, bit by bit, the mountains themselves were conquered. Tunnels were dug. Flanks were flattened. The peaks went hollow, their inner self turned into roads, railways, storage areas, parking lots, shopping malls. Platforms were carved out of their surface, and majestic houses rose upon them, tied together by a myriad of stairs, flowery parks, and semisecret underground elevators and passageways.

Eventually, there were no more mountains. Only the City. Titan Hill was born.


Locations

The Gateway of Progress



The main artery of Titan Hill. An extremely long walkway, going from one side of the mountain to the other, mostly underground, directly connected to every subway station, every commerce, every neighborhood of the Hill.

People rarely if ever walk its full length, often just rushing through a minuscule section of it as they switch metro lines. However, due to the very individualistic nature of the Hill, if you're trying to reach a specific, isolated mansion from the subway or one of the public parking lots, it's not uncommon to be in for quite the stroll along the gateway. As a lot of the cleaning staff know firsthand.

Like everything in the Hill, the gateway displays wealth and power to an oppressive degree, adorned with multiple grandiloquent statues and frescoes, some dating from even before the passage completion, some brand new or even still in the making, some whose age and origin are a mystery.


The Colossal Bazaar



The hollow core of a mountain, turned into a mall the size of a more normal city. In places, the ceiling of the artificial cavern is so high it's easy to forget all of this is underground.

It would be vain to even try to list all the shops available here. Basically, if it's a product that can be sold, it is sold somewhere around there. Not only does it host all the mundane commodities, like that fast food chain that's also everywhere else, or movie theaters screening the usual blockbusters. But, if you search long enough, it's also possible to find the latest technologies, the oldest antiques, legal, illegal, anything in between. It's a temple to Mammon where enough money can get you absolutely anything. Even things you did not know you needed.


The Mausoleseum



An ancient subterranean mausoleum, having remained untouched for millennia deep within the mountain, retrofit into a private cabinet of curiosities not even a year after its accidental discovery during an excavation. The building would then go through many owners, purposes and rearrangements before finally turning into the public museum of today.

Entrance is free. Visitors often keep to the Nacre Gallery, where are displayed the most famous pieces. But the museum is way, way bigger than that, with collections about all periods and places to be found in its many aisles.

There's also history to be found in its very walls, and the weirdest legends go around about what happened in this location through the years since its original construction.

The original tomb is still there, deep within its foundations, in the parts of the building public isn't allowed in. An exact copy of the room is however accessible to ordinary visitors, in the Fertile Crescent section of the museum.

Art

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OoKkEk
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/LJGoK
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/044eyV
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/o29QZB