Archive - Downwarp

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.

Ballard Freeway North

This stretch of the freeway looks much the same as any other: full of wrecks, soaked in oil and broken glass. Further north from here, however, a section of road seems to have been diverted. Just past an exit helpfully labeled as "52 - Secret Final Boss", the road just drops away entirely. Not in the usual way of a collapsed section of road; it looks like there's some kind of ramp just below the missing section. The other ten lanes of the freeway remain intact, and someone has even helpfully carved a hole in the median wall for anyone brave enough to actually drive the freeway. 
From up here, it's hard to tell what's down there but a huge pile of vehicles. Another ramp spirals down towards the ground from here, with a sign that might have once been legible, but has been spray-painted over with the words 'SCRAPYARD'. 
Exits: <Down> to the Scrapyard, <S>outh along the Freeway.

Concrete Jungle

The close-leaning walls in the alleyway are all but buried under chaotic masses of black wirestrands. Wires cross and recross fractal-coiling up the walls and rubble of fallen buildings like mechanistic ivy. Bulbs along the wires sprout television flowers all tuned to different stations, squawking at each other for attention with ancient hypnomercials and dramaverts. More than a quarter of the tubes are smashed into bits, shards still bursting audiovisual static in swept-together heaps. 
The end of the alley runs into a thicket of trees, wooden trunks jammed together in a wall covered in tiny sparkling leaves. Chinks in the trunk of one tree ooze pale gray ironsap, wound into whorls and loops apparently by magnetic fields. The trees themselves stretch high into the air, then seem to turn and dive back into the ground beyond. There is an overall deep background hum, cycling soft and loud, barely heard over the screen chatter. Something high and bright rises half-resolved just beyond the trees, flickering flourescent against the halogen-lit undersky. 
In the nearby rubble, a basement entrance provides a <tunnel> underneath the outer forest wall. The other end of the alley is lit orange-white by a column of <steam> rising from a rift in the ground.

Cyclotron Forest

Here the overgrown reaches of quasiorganic technology have choked the towers to dust. A clearing free of buildings except for a few wall-nubs visible in regular rows, the heaps of rubble appear to have been torn down by the encroaching vines, while the middle of the clearing bursts with a remnant of a well-forested city park. 
A wall of twisted trees arch impossibly high with spiraling trunks, then plunge back into the broken asphalt like a solar prominence following magnetic lines. The packed-together tree trunks seem to be wooden, but breaks in the bark reveal a dull gray ferro-metallic sap oozing out. Branches covering the highest arch-points wave agreen with leaves that, on closer inspection, are veined with tiny photo-voltaic cells. The looping trees seem to be lined up radiating from a central point, swirling magflux in tight vortices. A huge label-covered metallic container has been pushed into place in the locus of electromagnetic fields, skid marks still visible on the AluminoTurf. Small <totems> form a rough circle around the container, and neon-glowing symbolistic <graffiti> covers its sides. 
From a gaping hole in the top of the container spikes a massive lightning bolt ten, twelve stories into the air. Intensely blue-white at its thick base, it grows spiraling upward frozen in place, sending out smaller and smaller spikes until attenuating at its peak. The whole column of captured energy quivers and flickers in the storm of fields holding it in place. 
A slender line of concrete spirals down from the <Freeway> to land at one end of the park. Opposite the sleek lines of the megaroad, a cluster of buildings remain free from entropic pull of the vines. A curiously rebuilt <skyscraper> rises into the gloom next to a dilapidated old parking <garage>. A few meters away across the plain, there's a big, battered cargo container that seems to have been converted into a bar. Loud music and multicolored light spills from its open <hatch>. In the rubble of a nearby building, a <tunnel> leads underneath the outer ring of trees. 
[ Exits: <hatch>, <tunnel>, <freeway>, <skyscraper>]

Upper Shaft

The asphalt here is broken in spiderweb patterns that stretch up the sides of nearby buildings. Following one particularly large crack to where they all converge, you see a frozen vortex of metal spiraling from a pit in the ground. Steel rebar and pipelines that seem grown in place grasp hold of crumbling walls, slowly pulling inward towards the round hole in the middle of the street. An old steel powerline tower's framework nearby is distorted downward by the weight of a rusted machine reaching up towards the sky with lightning-flicker needle rods. Spindly 'trees' sprout from the concrete thickly all around, with clawlike branches holding remnants of partly shattered mirror-finish solar panes. Draped loosely over everything nearby are cables and hoses swaying gently in a breeze. 
The pit's edge is round but irregular, eroded away by the fingers of metal from below. A guardrail along the circumference twists and its inner surface is lined with overlapping plating, like a centipede's segmentation. Squeezed around the edge of the pit is a rusted spiral staircase leading <down>, and an electromagnetic field provides verticle travel in the center. Steam suffused with orange light billows up from below as you peer over the brim. A deep rythmic bass thumping can be felt more than heard somewhere beneath the ground. 
Downwarp's main <square> lies opposite the pit, with the signature towers of Big Active visible beyond rows of half-collapsed apartment buildings.