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Gardens 0710 — The City At The Bottom Of The Top Of The
Mountain
At the lowest point of the inverted mountain, a utopia for no one breaks
through the snow. It is always well lit, and despite the snow, paths are
kept clear making navigation just a matter of not getting overwhelmed
and lost. The interlocking buildings are tightly packed, painted gentle
colors, and accessible by stairs, elevators, and gondola lifts that dot
the landscape. The architecture is reminiscent of 1970s retrofuturism in
our world.
Within the buildings, an automated world buzzes and hums away. Every
room is kept clean, aerated, and warm to allow for the comfort of any
wanderers who stumble in from the cold. What those wanderers ultimately
find is a world of plenty, hidden just behind small prices: buildings
are dedicated to floor-to-ceiling vending machines for nearly every good
imaginable, a land of vast automats. Rooms to sleep have a coin slot on
the door, and in the rooms are similarly coin operated machines for food
and drink and baths. The whole assemblage recognizes and enforces
ownership of space and objects to the purchasers and renters, never
erring.
This place functions as a city by TNU’s economic standards when looking
to buy, but is never subject to inflation, does not sell livestock, and
can only purchase goods from players under particular circumstances. The
rules of resentment are different here: the automation has little
objection to artifacts of chaos on an ideological level, but does
recognize when an object or action might cause it damage regardless of
the affiliation of those responsible.
There is no permanent population. Roll on the encounter table once per
week to see what entities are passing through.
Some notable locations:
A circular building, bright orange in color, serves as the repair hub of
the city. When any building is too damaged to repair itself internally,
a spherical orange drone (labelled “Repair Agent” in blocky text
followed by a number designation between 1 and 1000) is deployed,
extending suction-powered arms to carry new cables and tubes to the
damaged location and reassemble the damaged structures and repair
processes.
A series of greyish slablike structures near the outskirts of the city
can be paid to close their vault doors, at a cost of 10 coins a day. The
time remaining is displayed by a mechanical clock on each door. Two of
them are closed, each showing 1d1000 days remaining (roll separately).
The first is empty. The second contains a master assassin of the fire
cult, and the pay he received for his last job:
(as tomb IV in &treasure)
500 coins
700 coins worth of trade goods — 5 iron ingots (200), 2 baskets of of
shells (300), 4 tin ingots (180), 4 jars of honey (20)
Genealogical Tree of the Lavalle-Fontaine Royal Family
One of the only buildings to not be hooked up to the automated apparatus
of the city is a tower that seems to have been cut off from the rest. It
contains rows of housing rooms, identical to the rest found through the
city but unkempt, dusty, and without the automated amenities. Some of
the doors are destroyed. Graffiti and slash marks from swords line the
walls, and loamy dirt is strewn about the floor in some places. The
undisturbed marks of horse hooves can be found in a few of these patches
of soil. The city cannot reach the building to repair it: a moss coats
the cut wires and pipes that would connect it, and seems to baffle the
city’s ability to send out repair agents.
One of the few businesses that is not shielded from the weather is the
recycling pit. A huge unlit hole with a platform extending over it,
accessible by a catwalk surrounded by safety railings. Any metal dropped
into the hole will be payed for in freshly minted silver coins from a
change machine next to the catwalk entrance. Makes a horrible grinding
noise audible across the city every 1d6 days.
