Nowhere

The ringed city of Nowhere exists in a state of constant motion-it is always exactly 14 miles away from you. This is achieved through a constant monitoring of your mind, and through the city’s great phase-wheels, which allow travel through solid matter or empty sky as though nothing was there. As such, Nowhere can only be reached by accident, stumbled upon in a period of drifting apathy so coercive as to keep the city itself still. Of course, in these states the last thing anyone wants to do is travel long distances, and so Nowhere remains protected.

Were it to be found, the city’s single street is easy to navigate. Every building in the city is located around it, and can be reached from it. The architecture varies in style and opulence as you arc around, from gothic cathedrals and grand facades to brutalist flats and crammed tenements. Every building, however, hosts but one inhabitant, each unique and marked by their domain-servants and custodians more than owners. A grand palace may hold a rotund and metallic figure, crown emerging from its head, while one claimed by disrepair may be watched by a skeletal jester, the last mocking survivor of the court that once schemed within.

The greatest folly of Nowhere can be seen in the roofs and cellars of almost any structure, where the remnants of great panels or drilling equipment remain. Once, they dreamed of expansion, of growth, of spacious parks and sunlit dreams. The plan was simple, to expand from a ring to a full sphere, a true city of the future reaching from the high heavens deep into the bowels of the Earth. At first, it worked beautifully, platforms surging outwards from the ring and caves burrowing below it, new lives sprouting from the houses that emerged. Catastrophe struck, however, when for just a moment, a phase wheel failed. Normally, this would cause at worst minor quakes, as auxiliary ones spun through time to shift them to safety. However, in this case, the momentary desynchronization was enough to cause a single panel to come loose from an old temple. As it fell, it dragged down another, which began a cascade as almost the entire city rained down and out of the 14 mile limit. Left stranded beyond the reach of the great anchors that tied it to this reality, the houses and their occupants drifted into dreams, isolated and terrified. Occasionally, one will stumble into Nowhere by blind luck as the city flees through realities to undo an unwanted boarding action from time. For you, this may manifest as a slight headache and an inability to remember why you came to where you were. For them, it was a struggle for survival, and for every person found during this desperate flight many more will have been lost

There are two main political movements in Nowhere that spawned out of the Collapse. The first, the more radical one, advocates for your death. They believe without you as a chain, the fourteen mile limit could be overcome and they could recover what was lost, and rebuild their third dimension with the protection of their technology. The second, more traditionalist, movement, advocates for your survival, on the belief that the death of you could cause some even more apocalyptic alteration, and possibly the city’s destruction altogether. Neither are right, of course. You are an insignificant part of this system, except as a mostly accurate marker for a fixed point. The city’s fear of your arrival is unfounded, the supposed crises that follow in your wake simply mundane events amplified by heightened awareness on their part and occasional clumsiness on yours. All you can do is wander onwards through your unknowing life, and pause only to mourn the deaths from your every lapse of purpose.