Riverside Slums Surrounded by the damp smell of the river, the buildings are all looming dead factories, broody warehouses, and frantic neon-limned clubs. Between these blocky modern-day castles are rickety constructs of junk and throwaway wood, stinking hovels made and fought over by the least fortunate of mankind. Here drift the people who were perhaps not human before the Change, and those who are bound to the form of more objectable species.
Downtown Warren Antique stores, booksellers, and coffee shops -- fancy clothes and chic home decorations. Downtown was once this place, of sumptuous, understated opulence, old, old buildings, and twisted narrow streets. The streets are the same, and the buildings, but the stores are struggling against the failing economy, and the opulence has taken the bitter edge of desperation. The slums across the river gaze hungrily at this new territory, and nibble at the bridges which separate the two worlds.
Corporate Towers Beyond downtown, surrounded by shops and boutiques, are the corporate towers; steel and glass monoliths at the heart of the City, filled with the buzzing of a thousand workers and businessmen. A few now stand half-empty, their inhabitants driven out by trauma and economic crisis.
0
0
Urban Grid Residential blocks of three-story brick-faced buildings; sprawling chain-stores built on the bones of older structures; the rare open space of a park; the City isn't just skyscrapers and shanties, after all. Here the diversity of its architecture and neighborhoods can be explored.
Suburbia Beyond the City is suburbia; two-story houses with clipped green lawns and swing-sets in the backyard. In these picturesque homes there are Dads who goes to work in the City and Moms who stay home to look after the kids, who go to the high-quality local school -- there once was, anyway. Now, there is a tension between the family members, conflicting instincts and conflicting opinions about the Change. Some families, once middle-class wealthy, now struggle to make ends meet; and their lawns grow ragged with weeds and brown spots.
0
0
Farmland Rows of corn and wheat; plots of tomatoes and squash; fields of potatoes and soybeans -- it is this land which feeds the city, and here that the worlds of animal and human slide against each other. Fox-humans who were once simple foxes raid chicken coops, to the fear and loathing of the chicken-people farmers; exotic predators prey upon captive livestock; livestock is no longer what it once was, herds now dotted with zebra-cows and snake-goats. Beyond the tame land is the forest, and prairie, and desert -- land gone wild and inhuman, and through which travelers rarely come.
Grassland A last few farms send out tendrils of civilization; and then it is no longer human land. Here, where the grass waves long and gold and endless below a blank cloudless sky, the animals work out the details of their new behavior, their new instincts; here, the environment works to equalize itself, to balance predator and prey, herbivore and herbage.
0
0
Forest Lodges and resort town molder among the trees, foundations buckled by roots and roofs rotted and worn by weather and falling branches. Streets are torn apart by the same forces, and everywhere vegetation moves to conquer the land. Animals exotic and native (and sometimes both) slink among the undergrowth, searching out the patches which most resemble their natural homes. For in this forest, all sorts have blended together; mighty pine woods and thick deciduous copses, coexisting -- and sorting themselves into order in an oddly regular way.
0
0
Bayou At the base of the mountains, there is a swamp, edges tattered by human attempts to drain it away; yet this wetland is not so easily overtaken, and already that land has gone soggy, and the young trees foolish enough to have taken root there rotted away. Here there are a thousand hidden things, and a thousand hiding places, and everywhere between the colorful and strident life of the swamp: bugs and birds and reptiles, otters, perhaps even a stray and puzzled river-dolphin.
0
0
Ocean There are chunks from the reefs and waste in the water, and the coastline is haggard with refuse; but in the deep there are large things, old things, which are bemused by the new limbs they have grown, but game to try them out -- and odder things still. From the smallest anchovy to the blue whales, the creatures of the ocean have changed; and not a few find dry land suddenly appealing.
![[ ]](http://s1.images.proboards.com/off.gif)
![[Search This Board]](http://s1.images.proboards.com/search2.gif)
![[New Thread]](http://s1.images.proboards.com/buttons/newthread.gif)
