Quoted By:
You emerge from another mirror in a perfectly dark room, one that stinks of mildew, must, dust, and decay. Withdrawing a lighter from your breast pocket, you illuminate the space with a small flame. You're in the stall of an office bathroom, where you placed the full length mirror you just emerged from. But the tile is cracked, the toilet is shattered, and everything is covered in graffiti and mold in equal measure.
This place used to be an office a couple hundred years ago, you're up on the fourth floor. But it, and everything else around, was abandoned when rising sea levels sunk parts of Charleston and flooded the rest in the years between 2030 and 2060. The redevelopment projects here and across North America kick-started the Reconstruction War - one part corporate feeding frenzy, one part terrorist militia panic, and one part death rattle from the old Republic government. The latter of these didn't make it to the other side. Some of the militia members and radicals survived, but their organizations were mostly broken, or at least pushed underground. Literally, in the case of Charleston, where corporations like Traepac and Yamamori built massive pylons, walls, and columns, creating the foundation for an entirely new city above the water-logged ruins of the old. Plenty of the old buildings are still standing, from colonial housing blocks to highrises and hotels flung up in the 1990's, though so many others have collapsed from water damage and decay. This is the sunless wreckage many now call <span class="mu-s">Old Charlie</span>, or more derisively, the undercity.
Degenerates, deviants, and the destitute swarm down here like vermin, living on scraps and scavenge, catching pollution-riddle crustaceans, or maybe hunting raccoons and foxes nesting in the ruins. Plenty of them tele-commute to surface jobs, or traffick in drugs and other dirty work. This is also, infamously, the main bulk of the territory claimed by Karloff and his followers. There <span class="mu-i">are</span> vampires, witches, and even spirits living up in Charleston proper. But it's not easy being a modern monster. Corporate enforcement all over the world heavily relies on drone surveillance, facial recognition, thermal and ultraviolet scanners, digital seismographs, audio databasing, and even gait analysis depending on the exact locale. So if you're, let's say, an animate corpse, for example, (un)life becomes complicated very quickly. So the supernatural population has been gradually trimmed down to size. The safest place for them to dwell, to feed, and to congregate is this enormous, metropolis sized grave. To your mind, a fitting home for the rejects. They're the past. You're the present, and the future.
You smile to yourself in the mirror as you think that thought.
>Cont'd
