Archive - Downwarp

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• Big Active
• Rookery
• Darkunder
  • Lab + Forge

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.

Before a Curious Red Door

Almost lost amidst the rubble and broken-down buildings is a small, red door set into a nondescript, red frame.  It... doesn't appear to lead into a building of any sort, but it's obviously there for a purpose.  The wall surrounding the door-frame is untouched by the graffiti and decay that sinks its claws into everything here, but there is only -one- wall.  With a [door], and a flickering neon sign that says 'Welcome', cycling between several different languages.
 
From here, one may go through the mysterious [door], or back out to the [square].

The Heliquary

Now that's curious.  Outside, there is only one wall, and one wall does not a building make.  Inside, though... there are four walls, and those four walls undoubtedly enclose a deep, narrow space.  The centre of the floor is sunken slightly, two wide steps leading down into the plush carpeted 'pit'.  The whole  room is done up in shades of red and black and gold, evoking a heavy Asian air.  Paper lanterns hung here and there provide only a candle's brightness more light than is necessary to see; just enough light for one to use to avoid the low tables and heavily-cushioned brocade chaises, arranged in threes and fours around the room.

Dragon-wrapped columns hold up the arched ceiling, faceted-gem eyes glittering in the dim light.  A heavy aroma hangs in the air -- smoky, sweet and intoxicating, nearly overwhelming.  Ashtrays and sets of curious brass instruments are laid out neatly on each table, and a few of the tables support ornate glass and brass-filigree hookahs, some with as many as twelve long, flexible smoking tubes.  In the shadows along the wall, shifting forms can occasionally be seen.  Presumably they're servants or attendants, ready to see to a visitor's whim and need.  Near the back of the comfortable lowered floor, there is a low desk flanked by two chaises, a tiny island of business.  It seems to be reserved for someone in particular.

From here, one may go back [outside], into the [lab] or into Helix's [office].

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.

The Scrapyard

This isn't a yard so much as it's a jumble, a pile, a collection, a tumble of vehicles. From the nearby Ballard Memorial Freeway slants a slapdash-built ramp of welded steel plates and shaky-looking struts. It might have been an exit ramp, were it not for a section of the Freeway itself heavily slanted at the beginning of the ramp; most exits don't tend to take up an entire ten lanes of traffic and divert them straight down. The ramp of course leads to a widely varied pile--cars, hovertanks, personal starhoppers, laserbikes, all the variety that tends to instantiate half-ruined on the Freeway; now diverted to rest in heaps in the yard. Opposite the Freeway, a three-story parking structure is similarly modded with a maze-like series of ramps and the occasional anti-grav conveyor, spilling out more half-broken hulks.

The middle of the yard is relatively clear, with only a few smaller heaps of parts scattered about. To one side is a large square industrial building; next to it is a very large vehicle compactor, seemingly big enough to hold anything in the yard. The building itself has several garage doors, showing off a few bays with vehicles in various stages of salvage inside. Opposite these is a squat pentagonal platform up on heavily-reinforced girders, consisting of a smaller dome-like structure surrounded by thick cables, and five poles topped with steel globes at each vertex. There doesn’t seem to be any way into or out of the dome.

From the yard, a smaller ramp meanders back up to the Freeway, this one probably an actual exit at one point. Another door, usually open, leads into the Garage, with a flickering holosign above it proclaiming 'Scraps'.

Exits: <Up> to the Freeway, <In> to the Garage

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.

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 vertical travel in the center. Steam suffused with orange light billows up from below as you peer over the brim. A deep rhythmic 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.

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>]

Graffiti Look-trap (in Forest)

Spirals and glowing sigils loop haphazardly across the outer surface of the cargo container. Arcane symbols mix with standard Gridshaman circuitlore. Since the appearance of the Tree several cycles ago, it seems to have become a major shrine to the Gridshaman Spark principle. Fizzing electromechanical contraptions of brass and steel, Leyden jars, conductive sculptures, and other shiny totems are set in a loose circle around the base of the bolt. That's funny, one of the diagrams on the wall of the container looks almost like it signifies a <trapdoor>. 

Root Zero

Down beneath the forest lies the roots of the great tree of light above. This, then is where the bolt struck, or grew from, or however the method of creation. A chamber caught in one moment of time, a captured storm in the process of pulling itself to pieces. It is incongruous to the usually entropic nature of the Warp, that this one moment of dissembly should be halted. 

What can be divined from the scattered fragments of the room was that it might have once been a laboratory. There are no shadows. Tendrils of light pour out from the base of the bolt and infiltrate tables and equipment all around, melting them to slag. The lower loops of the ringed forest above can be seen in the ceiling, their roots entwined with other heaps of former equipment. Strangely, a huge diagram is drawn around the entire complex, symbols and letters chalked into a five-pointed star within a circle. The protective glyph is centered on the tree itself. 

If one can endure the intense light and heat at the core of the lightning's base, one might see a curious device of glass and bronze, infused with silvery liquid glowing as hot as the sun. And above it...the faintest suggestion of shade lost in light...a body, a face, hands outstretched....it flickers and is gone again. 

The only discernible way out is back <up> through the trapdoor. 

Riverbank, Vents, Staircase

The foundations of two tall brick apartment buildings, decrepid and abandoned-looking, enclose a dark alleyway, lit only by a sodium lamp on either end. Large rectangular steel vents, painted in a dark green, nod solemnly in their silent procession, lined up down the center of the alley. They're belching steam into the air and making the alley very hot. Condensation pools on the ground and drips off the walls, and you can smell the mildew growing everywhere. There's one vent whose protective grate looks a bit loose. It looks like you could pry it loose and <climb> in, if you wanted to.

Down at the far end of the alley, through the bars of a wrought iron fence, you can see the river below as well as the other shore. The other end of the alley is blocked off by a wall of rubble.

However, there's a gap in the fence where you can go <down> to a wharf below. If this doesn't tempt you, you can climb <up> a ladder to the freeway above.

Beyond the dark strap of the freeway, Big Active looms.

Steam Room

This room is extremely hot, steam gushing through like a wind tunnel, escaping through vents above. At one end of the tunnel are huge rotating turbines that push the steam through this underground tunnel. At the other end, a sloped concrete wall, providing no escape.

The only two exits are through one of the vents (someone has graciously placed a ladder which you can use to climb <out>) and a door near the turbines, which is locked and impenetrable.

Downwharf

You're standing on a pier that thrusts itself rudely out into the waters of the river. On either side of the pier are three levels of moorings built into I-beam scaffolding, with metal and wood staircases between these levels at regular intervals. Along the center of the wharf are converted warehouses, most of them lying empty and dark but some show light through the windows and project the hissing flicker of neon light.

At the far end, set on tracks which fit over the highest moorings, a collosal skeletal crane waits for cargo to arrive, its two arms folded into themselves and its vulture-head shaped cabin is darkened and unused.

Smokestacks billow in the distance, and the orange light of the sky can be seen reflecting off the towers across the river.

At the stem of the wharf, a staircase winds itself <up> between the buildings on the riverbank.

There seems to be an empty lot, signposted <lot 1>. The door is open. It's waiting for someone to come and claim it.

Trailer Park Hall

Welcome to the Trailer Park!  What was apparently a beat-up RV with oversized Bigfoot tires, tracks, and a jet engine on the outside is remarkably clean and well-kept on the inside.  On the wall, a dataplate shows the picture of a little catgirl (who couldn't be more than fifteen) reading off a list of possible destinations here,  the Dropsocket Lounge (<DL>) straight ahead, the Observatory (<Ob>) towards the front of the vehicle, the Engine (<Eng>) to your left and down the stairs,  Solipsis Corridor (<SC>) to your right, the Tir na Nog (<TN>) up the stairs, and the Rooftop Revelry (<RR>) up the ladder. 
 
Regardless of the shine inside, reality here is broken- this area need not exist within the boundaries of normal space and time.  What happens here may or may not happen within the rest of the Mess, and reality is much more fluid here than anywhere else.  What might walk in a shiny new cat-droid might stroll out a sex-crazed hyena, only to walk in as a cat-droid a moment later.  Check your plots at the door, as well as your need to perform- let the lion sleep with the lamb, and above all, have a really good time.

Dropsocket Lounge

This place has a definite Downwarp influence, from the bar fashioned out of carved chrome half-bumpers, to the candy colored seats that appear to have been removed from the various wrecks that inhabit the Ballard.  The floor tiles are the roofs of many vehicles of many different shades, and the walls are lined with headlights, repurposed to flash in color, sequence, and at random timing.  The centerpiece of this room is something of a mix between sculpture and fantasy, and is apparently a teepee set around a roaring fire pit, with just enough room to let the light and heat through for those that like it.  Nearby is what purports to be a dance floor and stage, for production pieces or random jamming.  The ceiling far above is constructed from worked metal sheets, the kind found as hull plating on industrial sized battlecruisers.  As for the less physical, musical tastes here vary between bleepy android tekno to synthgoth to rageboy to happycore, at the whim of the users.  

If this isn't quite to your tastes, there's other areas leading back from the <hall> to places perhaps more convenient to you.

Note: Everything is true.  Even the false things.  If there's a feeling of laid back, sort of mixed IC and OOC atmosphere here... well, that's part of it.  Basically, it's an attempt at a place just to chill out and be with others, completely nonrigid, nonstatic, and everything and anything goes in this place.  Take it as you will.  :)