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The Naked City Never Sleeps (Adventure, Slice of Life, Sci Fi, Post-Apocalyptic, Paranormal, Horror, Mystery)

MsBloom

Moonchild
Joined
Jul 24, 2020
Location
Northern Europe
The Naked City never sleeps.

This is an idea I developed some time ago, inspired by a roleplay on a different site, that I ever so often feel I want to get off the ground. It is far from a finished concept and I would love all kinds of worldbuilding input. It is a very open-ended idea that can include anything from urban exploration themes to mystical crime investigations or cataclysmic events needing to be averted. It can be inhabited by almost all and any kind of supernatural creatures but humanoid are preferred. I also imagine it as the kind of world where the common races from high fantasy concepts have evolved and developed side by side. Imagine the Elves never leaving Middle-Earth and then fast forward to our time. It is also inspired by H P Lovecraft and his wonderfully bizarre creatures and concepts. Of course those types of creatures would not walk among the general population unless they do so in some form of disguise. There will presumably also be a more or less substantial amount of inspiration drawn from the novel Picnic by the Roadside by the brothers Strugatskij.

Basically what I am looking to set up are any kind of story from awkward and unlikely romances to weird and bizarre serial murders, to paranormal events, super villains rising up (some of which might be inspired by Batman's enemies. I do like the super villains of Gotham City). Who knows, there could even be haunted houses, doors inside abandoned warehouses through which you can't return, at least not the way you entered, little mysteries to be solved, and so on and so forth.

Looking for collaborators who would like to build this world and tell the story of The Naked City with me. It can run stories in parallel threads that doesn't have to cross over but may do so. Characters can be either specific for one particular story or more general to appear in more than one story. Like for instance my own main character.
Jane Marie, Jamie (Abbreviation of Jane Marie from before she could speak properly), was born to a junkie prostitute on the very day the earth had its first officially confirmed encounter with an extra terrestrial civilisation. Something Jamie herself has occasionally resorted to whenever she was living on the streets, along with pick pocketing and petty theft.

She was assigned female at birth but shortly before puberty her body began to show signs of male body parts. Despite this she still kept referring to herself as a girl and used the pronouns she and her.

The ability to camouflage herself against any surface and remain unseen by human eyes, as long as she kept perfectly still, first manifested itself on the same day she had her first and only period. The nightmares that didn't have the decency to remain dreams began shortly after. Soon after that she also developed telepathic abilities, heightened agility and a highly evolved intuition.

Drowning had always scared Jane Marie ever since she was a little girl and her mother had left her alone in the bath while she took care of a client. She couldn't have been more than four at the time and she had fallen asleep in the bath, too scared of what her mother would do if she disturbed her while she was working. She had been under water for a while before the client had found her when he went to the bathroom to piss. He had lifted her up and shaken her until she woke up and then he had pissed into the cold bath water. Before he had left he had smiled at her, ruffled her hair and said that there might come a day when she would curse him for saving her life. She couldn't honestly say that he cursed him for it but the way her life had turned out he was right. It might perhaps have been better if he had allowed her to drown that night.

She was removed from her mother's care at the age of six after several complaints among which one came from the above mentioned client of her mother's. Since there was no determinable father or grand parents Jamie ended up in the foster care system, a damaged child that lashed out against everyone that tried to help her or care for her as well as offering the male staff members sexual favours to get anything from cookies to cigarettes, alcohol or other drugs.




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But first a bit about myself:
I am recently 30+ pansexual non-binary person Assigned Female at Birth

I try to be active on a daily basis, sometimes several times per day, but at times real life gets in the way, be it work, birthdays, booty calls, or mental health issues, (I do have a few of those), and when that happens I may not be very active despite being online. If this happens please be patient and give it a few days before sending me a reminder, or ask how I'm doing. Usually these things don't last very long.

I play male or female but my preference is non-binary. My female characters as usually quite masculine and vice versa. While I prefer Nb x M,F or NB I have no issues playing any other pairings. It can be fun to switch things up a bit from time to time. I also have no issues playing in Taboo pairings as long as the pairing is consensual.

I prefer modern settings but I do like to dabble in fantasy, post-apocalyptic, sci fi and historical settings as well.

Usually I prefer Slice of Life roleplays but a little adventure, or horror is always fun to play with.

I usually don't go for fandoms unless it is to use a particular backdrop to a roleplay. For instance. I have no issues playing a sci fi scenario in a Star Trek setting, but please leave the Enterprise, Voyager and Discovery as well as any canon crew out of it, or at least keep them in minor roles.

All my characters are original characters and I prefer to play against original characters as well.

For examples of my writing see my other request thread.

A few basic rules:
#1 Respect my limits and don't kink-shame me and I will do the same.
#2 I only roleplay on BMR so don't ask for discord, skype or any other means of communication.
#3 Real life genders are irrelevant to me and should be to you as well.
#4 In character you should not feel guilty for the actions, words or thoughts of your YC.
#5 Talk to me. I do like to keep an OoC conversation going on the side.
#6 Don't guilt me OoC for the actions, words or thoughts of MC and I won't guilt you OoC for the actions, words or thoughts of YC


Now for the basic idea:

At night all kinds of creatures, Human, Non-Human as well as all kinds of cross-breeds between the two, between sundown and sunrise the city belongs to them, as does the underground, the vast labyrinth of tunnels where one can move from one end of the city to the other without being seen by the surface dwellers.

The city used to have a name once upon a long time ago but No one truly remember it. Even the police call themselves the Naked City Police Department (NCPD), and the fire fighters and ambulating first responders go by the name of Naked City Fire Department (NCFD).

No one even knows how old the city actually is. Some say the island on which it is built was first settled in ancient times by a tribe of native people drawn to the location due to its magical and mystical properties. No one knows why they disappeared without a trace some centuries later but when they disappeared of the face of the Earth they left nothing behind but an abandoned stone temple. Even today it is said that the largest church of the Naked City, Saint Dymphna' Cathedral, stand upon the ruins of this temple.

Some say that if you delve deep enough into the tunnels below The Naked City (The subway system for instance) you enter into a system of caves and hollows from long before the Cambrian period, the early days of life on Earth. Perhaps these caves and hollows are natural geological formations, perhaps not. Perhaps they are the remains of some primordial beast's lair … Perhaps not.

Some speculate that it was said beast the original settlers worshipped at the altar they left behind.

Some goes on to say that the first settlers on the island built an entire city in those caves after they disappeared from the surface, to be closer to their deity, yet no one seems to have seen it or know its location. Assuming this underground city still exists, if it ever did, could it perhaps still be inhabited by descendants of those who are rumoured to have built it?

The presence of The Zone allows for some rather Sci Fi technology, as far as the inhabitants of the city has deciphered the use of artefacts found there.



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Locations for exploration:

The Cathedral of Saint Dympha must have been magnificently impressive in its time, Built in the style of Byzantine architecture it suggests both an impressive age and influence from the Eastern Mediterranean region.

While still in use Sunday mornings between around 10am – 1pm it is mostly a vast empty space within the city center. Its walls are covered with intricate mosaics, some of which are rumoured to be secret panels into secret rooms and compartments.

Below the ground floor there is a large crypt with stone-coffins that may contain historical dignitaries of the city from before the city forgot its name. Below the crypt are catacombs containing ancient relics and possibly a library full of ancient and forbidden books. Who can say why these books have been hidden away, maybe they contain dark magic spells or alchemical secrets, meta-scientific notes to unlock strange and immense powers.

The Old Mansion that sits alone on a hill in the middle of Greenfield Park, overlooking Lake Mirkwater as it is commonly known, is rumoured to be haunted by both the living and the dead. Many street kids have made some kind of home there but they never talk about it with people they do not trust to keep the secret of how.

It was built in 1901, by Charles Thomas Hopkins who at the time was the city's mayor and his twenty years younger wife Mary Claire, in all white marble. At the end of the same year Mary Claire gave birth to twin boys who died before their first birthday, drowned by their wet nurse after she herself had lost twin sons at birth. She then slit her throat and was found in the bronze bathtub clutching the dead babies by Mary Claire who never got over the shock and threw herself from the attic window directly after her sons had been buried.

Stricken by this tragedy Charles Thomas Hopkins sold the mansion to Meat-Industry magnate Jasper Gordon, a tenacious bachelor and sworn misogynist, who, a decade later, was found to have murdered at least ninety-seven young women and buried them in the basement.

After this the mansion was unoccupied for nearly a quarter of a Century before it was bought by Bryce Fletcher-O'Brien Chief Psychiatrist of the newly opened Wonderland Sanatorium where his main task would be to contain the son of the former owner. Only five years later, having made no progress with his patient, he resigned and took up oil-painting. Over the next quarter of a Century he filled the upper floor of the house with one monumental canvas after another, all leaning towards nightmarish surrealism, much of which he claimed in his will was inspired by his sessions with Christopher Barkley. In his diary Bryce Fletcher-O'Brien claims to have trapped the malevolent spirit of Christopher Barkley within his own nightmares in those paintings.

Some claim they have seen shadows move within the paintings. His daughter, Alice Fletcher-O'Brien, even claimed to have seen her father's patient lurking in dark corners of more than one painting shortly before hanging herself in the same basement where Jasper Gordon had buried his victims.

After his sister's suicide Rupert Fletcher-O'Brien sealed the house and only a few days before his death in 1968 he stipulated in an addition to his will that the mansion should never again be inhabited but also never to be demolished. The house is now officially owned by his grand daughter Dr. Elizabeth O'Brien MD, specialising in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, and recently appointed Chief Psychiatrist at Wonderland Sanatorium.

Today the once impressive mansion is surrounded by a large industrial zone to the East and by the slums known as The Shallows to the West. It is also listed as being the most haunted house known to the world and as such an alluring mystery for many to solve, or simply to explore.

It was not always a Sanatorium. It was built in 1912 as a residence for industrial tycoon Simon Barkley, who had made most of his fortune not through his clothes factories but through illegal imports and exports, and his beautiful but feeble-minded wife and second cousin Sara.

Their one and only child Christopher was born a year later.

After the sexually motivated murder of Alice Liddell, at the hands of Christopher Barkley, his mother committed suicide by hanging and his father sold his business and left the country after having donated the house, along with the vast majority of his capital, to the city on condition that it be turned into a sanatorium where his murderous son was to receive treatment from Psychiatrist Bryce Fletcher-O'Brien while being confined to a room in the attic, guarded by specially trained nurses who would also act as prison guards.

Clean sheet, or clean slate, empty page, unwritten fate.

The Tabula Rasa is a dirty motel with windows so covered in pollution and dust that daylight never truly entered. What used to be wallpaper hung in stripes off the walls and the carpets were covered in mould.

The hotel sits right on the edge of ann area known only as The Shallows a part of The Naked City where people who doesn't want to be found go to disappear. It is a labyrinth of wooden platforms through a marsh-like landscape of polluted and murky water lined with dilapidated shacks into which most of the people living in the city hesitated to venture and even fewer came back from. There were creatures living in The Shallows that most people wouldn't be able to conjure up in their worst nightmares.

A prison for the criminally insane. (more to be added later)

Loosely based on the sci fi novel Picnic by the Roadside by the Brothers Strugatskij byt 20 years after the event.
For further informatiion:
It was the twentieth anniversary of the extra terrestrial visit that had laid waste a number of remote locations around the Earth and without having made any attempts at making contact with the Human civilisation, left again leaving behind them zones where the laws of physics had been altered by either their technology or by biological remains the same way Humans might leave remains behind after a picnic by the roadside. The event as it was commonly known. The visit and the debris left behind has made The Zones (as the affected areas are called) mostly uninhabitable by humans. It was also Jamie's twentieth birthday. She'd been born at a free clinic run by nuns from the cloister attached to the Cathedral of St Dymphna.

For the most part it had been a life of misery and abuse that might have broken anyone, and Jamie was broken for sure but she was also a survivor. After her mother had died of an overdose she had bounced around the foster care system and suffered verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so many foster parents she had lost count before ending up in an orphanage run by the very same nuns that had delivered her into this bleak molested world. It was after having run away from the orphanage she had begun to exhibit special powers, the ability to camouflage herself against any surface being the first but she had also developed a telepathic ability and a level of agility that would make an Olympic gymnast look like a blind, clumsy child wrapped in pillows on rollerskates. She also had a heightened intuition and often dreamt of things that later happened just as she had dreamt them.

It was also after having run away from the orphanage that she met Red Schuhart who saw a talent for travelling into The Zone that surrounded the city that had once known it's name but abandoned and for all intents and purposes forgotten it after the event. She was twelve at the time and unlike all other men she had met Red did not abuse her in any way, physically, verbally or sexually, all he wanted from her was her talent for getting past gravitational anomalies, flesh-eating brawn and other such dangers that made The Zone a place most sane people stayed clear of to get to the treasures it held, like for instance the needles that began to spin if you put the tip against a magnetic surface, and they didn't stop spinning until you physically removed the tip from the magnetic surface making them a source of infinite energy, a solution to the age old problem of the Perpetuum Mobile. Trained and guided by her mentor Jamie made a fortune for Red and he paid her quite well for it.

When Red was presumed dead three years later after failing to return from a solo raid into The Zone just North of the city, in search of the mythical Golden Orb that was rumoured to be able to grant wishes, Jamie continued taking missions into The Zone for a while but eventually she stopped because after Red everyone was simply taking advantage of her abilities and talents without paying her nearly enough for her to make a living from it. She began drinking more and more to keep away the nightmares that didn't have the decency to remain nightmares and to numb the memories of the abuse she had been put through, both in her childhood and in the years after Red's presumed death. She also got into other drugs. She began smoking Marijuana and taking a wide variety of pills regularly. Having spent all the money Red had paid her in less than two months she was basically back to living on the streets, had it not been for the manager of the Tabula Rasa Hotel letting her stay in one of the smaller rooms in the attic in exchange for certain favours.

The sun had only just risen above the horizon and the pinks and yellows had faded into a greyish blue. Jamie took one last drag on her cigarette and crushed it against the concrete floor of the roof and headed back down to barely habitable room to start the celebration with whatever alcohol or drugs she still had left when her phone indicated the arrival of a new message. It was from Monkey, Red's, mutated daughter one of the first children born to a Stalker, as those who made a living by retrieving objects form The Zone were called. She said she had new information about treasure in the deeper parts of The Zone that was for the most part unexplored. The first message was shortly followed by a second message containing a birthday greeting from Monkey.

---

What I am looking for here is someone to partner up with Jamie on one last raid into the Zone looking for the fabled Golden Orb.

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Question. Is this set in the same universe as "Picnic By The Roadside" but has all these other things added-on to it? Or is the universe pretty much entirely original, but the Zones from the novel are part of it? Also, if the entirety of Naked City is surrounded by a Zone, how do people enter and leave? Or don't they?
 
Question. Is this set in the same universe as "Picnic By The Roadside" but has all these other things added-on to it? Or is the universe pretty much entirely original, but the Zones from the novel are part of it?

The version of Picnic by the Roadside currently being played by myself and @Sheena-Tiger is a part of the Naked City universe but other than that and of course the fact that nothing is entirely original in this day and age the rest of the setting is original. Of course one might recognise certain aspects of it from other stories or universes. For instance I sense a rather obvious connection between the Naked City and a Gotham City without it's nocturnal Dark Knight. Other's (perhaps more well read in the horror genre than most) will sense inspiration from H P Lovecraft.

Also, if the entirety of Naked City is surrounded by a Zone, how do people enter and leave? Or don't they?

This is a more interesting question. I have not imagined it as the entire city is surrounded by a zone but it is an interesting idea. No one gets in and no one gets out.
 
Well perhaps it is difficult to enter and leave, but not impossible. For example, the effects of one portion of the Zone only extend to a certain altitude, so people could still arrive by air. Or there could be tunnels underneath another portion or two, where the effects only penetrate into the earth a certain depth. The possibilities are varied, but every method could have an obstacle. Only the rich can afford to fly out, for example, or the tunnels are regularly blocked off by gangs or corrupt officials.

Also, the name "Naked City" reminds me a great deal of "Night City", from Cyberpunk fame.
 
Well perhaps it is difficult to enter and leave, but not impossible. For example, the effects of one portion of the Zone only extend to a certain altitude, so people could still arrive by air. Or there could be tunnels underneath another portion or two, where the effects only penetrate into the earth a certain depth. The possibilities are varied, but every method could have an obstacle. Only the rich can afford to fly out, for example, or the tunnels are regularly blocked off by gangs or corrupt officials.

These are all good ideas. I do mention tunnels, or rather a system of caverns, that run deep underneath the city, possibly left by some primordial beast so even if there are gangs or corrupt officials blocking the entrances to these tunnels, the tunnels themselves might be fairly dangerous because, who knows what might lurk down there.

Were you considering a storyline involving some sort of smuggling ring, maybe setting up two factions against one another for control of the safest route into the city?

Also, the name "Naked City" reminds me a great deal of "Night City", from Cyberpunk fame.

The name actually refers to an old police series set in New York from the late fifties and early sixties called the Naked City which actually featured a very young Christopher Walken in the last season.
 
I was actually thinking something else entirely, but to be clear, I meant highway tunnels that are meant to allow cars to drive underground. I shall discuss details of my character via our existing PM thread once I wake up in the morning
 
@MsBloom not particularly. I'm open to anything. Considering I play m x m in general, I'd say throw me where Gilly is.
I'll have to come up with a character concept and browse what's already in play.
 
@emDash Most of what's in play has been abandoned. One of the players has even terminated their account here.

Gilly could of course be available for more or less any setting within the Naked City and any type of story.
 
@MsBloom then I'm happy to play in whatever setting would suit and you're keen to write.
I could make a character to head into The Zone with Jamie and he can meet Gilly through their friendship/relationship?
 
I could make a character to head into The Zone with Jamie and he can meet Gilly through their friendship/relationship?

Or your character could be Jamie's fence who buys whatever she can bring back from the zone and meet Gilly through her that way.
 
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