PBADownwarp

Subpages

• • Big Active
  • Rookery
  • Darkunder

Main Square

You stand on a platform of corrugated metal the size of a city block adorned with hazard stripes, rivets, and glass shards.  Sagging pipes and bundles of black wire crisscross the platform between crumbling buildings of dirty concrete and rusted metal, and broken machines, some the size of houses, are scattered randomly.
Looming above you is a massive skeleton of steel girders with half-completed walls and floors. Everything is covered with graffiti, but the designs are artful -- even civic-minded. A constant ripe gust rustles the trash under your feet, swirling paper chad, leaflets, and food wrappers over sleeping bodies covered in dingy tarps. Looks like there was a party last night.
Or maybe it's still night. The sky is orange-gray and impenetrable. The only lights come from sodium lamps and neon overhead; a distant 
thump and clack of machinery comes from there as well.
The closest building is an office <tower> of perhaps 120 stories, with two pyramid-shaped peaks. Its walls of gold-tinted glass are broken 
and stained.
Some distance away, there seems to be an elevated highway running across the metal plain. A rusty <stairway> leads up to it.
A few hundred meters away, orange-white steam billows from a <hole> in the asphalt, surrounded by decrepit buildings.
Nearby, surrounded by the rubble that was a building, is a <red door>. 
A flattened ovoid blob of liquid <mirror> floats here, lazily oozing in midair.

JG Ballard Memorial Freeway

You stand on a ribbon of cracked and broken asphalt, a boneyard of broken machines, the grave of a mad dream of speed.  The freeway's twenty crumbling lanes are littered with the metal carcasses of a myriad crashed and burned vehicles, the debris of some unthinkable catastrophe -- thousands of cars, trucks, motor vehicles of all kinds from a hundred ages and technologies; even, incomprehensibly, the enormous hulks of aircraft and spacecraft, their wings broken, silver skin gone dull with rust and age. Fragments of broken glass, plastic and metal litter the road, and various fuels and lubricants have run like blood from ruptured tanks and engines, pooling in the potholes in the blacktop, and sometimes reacting with one another -- which explains the occasional plumes of yellowish, acrid vapor.

The highway signs, bold white sans serif on dark green, are riddled with bullet holes. You still manage to make out most of the text, but instead of locations, strange slogans are printed, along with numbers for nonexistent exits. 6A - Put A Tiger In Your Tank. N32 - Better Living Through Chemistry. FF - The Ultimate Driving Machine. 12.5 - Quality Is Job One.