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.